The Braves lost one All-Star s...

One way to explain the entertainment value of baseball’s rich regular season is to envision a very limited form of time travel.

Let’s say you — a person who knows the results of the baseball season so far and which players were chosen to start the 2023 MLB All-Star Game — return to January and inform Atlanta Braves fans that they will employ the National League’s top shortstop, despite Dansby Swanson’s departure in free agency. Then you watch as they formulate the most likely scenarios by which that will occur.

Guess No. 1 is probably “Vaughn Grissom, the 22-year-old who hit well in limited playing time in 2022, is the latest young Braves player to explode onto the scene.” This is the same franchise that employed the winner and runner-up in the 2022 NL Rookie of the Year race, after all.

Guess No. 2? “General manager Alex Anthopoulos swings a trade for a well-known major-league shortstop who immediately has a career year.” So the Sean Murphy story, just on repeat.

Guess No. 3 is Guess No. 1 but with “Braden Shewmake” subbed in for Grissom.

I’m fairly sure fans would’ve gone with “Carlos Correa has enough contracts foiled by physicals that the Braves eventually swoop in and sign him to a one-year deal” or denounced you, the time traveler, as a huckster before they came up with the real answer.

What’s more, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that the laundry is not incidental to the performance of the players wearing it. Taking the field in a Braves jersey — or a Tampa Bay Rays or a Los Angeles Dodgers jersey — is tantamount to saying, “Hey, pay attention. I might be different from the last time you saw me.” Certain colors come with the understanding that a lot of smart people are working behind the scenes to maximize the players donning them; others, such as the blue and orange of Seinfeld’s cherished Mets, denote at least the risk that players are walking the high wire of the major leagues with less support than they’re used to.

Not only are baseball fans still rooting for laundry, but also the laundry seems to have powers.

Those powers, of course, emanate from front-office executives and coaches, from the big-league dugout all the way down to complexes in Florida and Arizona and the Dominican Republic. Baseball is dripping with information and technology and ideas about how to utilize all of it to get better. The people who wield those tools exert untold influence on the final standings and leaderboards, even as players themselves absorb the teachings and execute the physical marvels.

Every MLB executive and coach has a line that hints at these complex, highly individualized processes that happen behind the curtain. When I asked Philadelphia Phillies GM Sam Fuld about squeezing the most out of players forced into unexpected action, he used the most common one: The Phillies are “always looking to put them in the best position to succeed.” The most consistent organizations develop reputations for doing just that.

When MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand ran an anonymous poll of baseball people about the current season in April, the Braves and Rays were the only two clubs that got more than one vote in the “best team” category. That seems accurate — they have the two best records right now — but the language used in responses was telling, in a corporate-consultant-speak kind of way. In voting for the Rays, one NL executive bestowed upon them a slightly different superlative: “Best roster management in baseball.”

Chad Mottola, the Rays hitting coach who has helped develop a parade of enviable talent, bristles at just how much credit gets transferred from the players to the nebulous aura of the organization, the fantasy-baseball-brain mode of fandom that glorifies mostly unseen general managers and front offices.

Up until their world-beating start this year, he said, the Rays were viewed as “a quirky team that has a bunch of gimmicks.” But with Wander Franco asserting superstardom, Yandy Diaz starting the All-Star Game at first base and ace Shane McClanahan a candidate to start the game on the mound for the second straight season, Mottola hopes that is changing.