Major League Baseball

Early-season MLB stats can get absurd, which makes it fun

Published Apr. 13, 2022 4:57 p.m. ET

By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist

For baseball’s army of professional and amateur sabremetricians, fantasy experts and stat junkies, now is the time of year when everything is a little haywire.

The stats don’t lie in the majors, so the theory (and it’s a good theory) goes. Except for when they do.

Now, and for only a tiny little while longer, is when the glut of information that baseball bathes in largely counts for nothing. And it is also the precise time when, for those of us who enjoy a good piece of data but don’t hinge our existence on the turn of a decimal point, the numbers are by far the most fun.

For the earliest days of any MLB campaign are when the stat-leading tables look downright (and deliciously) silly. It is when batting averages resemble the charts from your nephew’s Little League, with absurdly improbable tallies and anomalies.

Ian Happ of the Chicago Cubs is batting .700, a glorious mini-spell punctuated by a nasty pitch to the knee, that, going off Tuesday’s evidence (2-for-3), didn’t slow him down any.

Cleveland’s Steven Kwan has made an incredible start to his MLB career, rattling up a .667 average going into Wednesday’s games, including a 5-for-5 explosion against the Kansas City Royals on Sunday.

His hitting proficiency, courtesy of an anecdote Kwan told to FOX Sports’ Jake Mintz, came about because he’d always cry if he struck out as a kid — and he didn’t want to cry anymore. Good plan.

Things settle down over time, of course — 162 games will do that to you. But this is the exciting window when you wonder how long these streaks can last. Were Kwan’s burst to have occurred midseason, it may have generated nothing more than a mention on the announcer’s game call. Instead, the 24-year-old left-handed slugger is the talk of baseball.

"Nobody knew that name heading into the season," FOX Sports MLB Analyst Ben Verlander told me via telephone. "Whether he ends up being an all-time great, or not, people will always remember and talk about what he’s doing right now."

Across the majors last season, only 15 players batted .300 or better. Heading into Wednesday there were 61 at that number or higher and daring to dream that it could last all year long. Every player who is swinging beautifully feels like it will persist, even though for most, it doesn’t.

Presently, .400 is the new .300, with 18 players having scaled that mark. But even .500 doesn’t get you a monopoly on bragging rights, as there are five guys who have reached it, including Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Wander Franco, with a league-leading 11 hits.

Kwan and Rays’ slugger Ji-Man Choi were in the .600 club, with Happ owning the ultimate flex, a development he probably didn’t see coming after recovering from offseason elbow surgery.

"It is fun to have the overreactions and start talking about what could be," Verlander added. "From the players’ side it is fun because starting hot makes all the difference in the world. On the other side, if you start badly it can get it your head and before you know it you’re really struggling."

It is "what if" time, even though you know the "what if" will never materialize. It is when we can tell you that if Franco continued like this, he would rack up 356 hits on the season and obliterate Ichiro Suzuki’s 2004 record of 262.

Or state, with full accuracy and no small trace of irony, that the Cubs’ Seiya Suzuki and the St. Louis Cardinals’ Nolan Arenado are both on a course to bash 121 home runs. Or that 18 pitchers will land an ERA of 0.00 if they keep this up.

It is enjoyable when players come out hot and it gets the season ticking nicely into its pre-summer rhythm. Baseball doesn’t transfix the nation in the same way that it once did, for there is such a glut of distractions now, but for the sports fan, it has a permanence to it that shouldn’t be discounted.

The big starts occasionally come from the big names. Albert Pujols was ridiculous in 2006, cracking 14 homers before April was done, a feat matched in 2019 by both Cody Bellinger and Christian Yelich.

Sometimes, it is the turn of the nobodies who instantly become somebodies.

Trevor Story is now a two-time All-Star with the Boston Red Sox, but in 2016, he was a Colorado Rockies rookie when he smashed six home runs in his first four career games. Not a bad way to say "hi."

Perhaps the beginning to this campaign is even more enjoyable because for so long the threat persisted that it wouldn’t happen at all, thanks to the standoff between owners and players that didn’t just go down to the wire, but stretched it to its max.

Baseball is back, there are smiles on faces and there is some good stuff happening.

The kind of storylines that occur in opening week don’t persist, because math says so. And math doesn’t lie, and stats don’t lie — if they’re given enough time to percolate. Ultimately, the grueling realities of baseball don’t lie either.

But — just saying — if they want to gently deceive us for a small while longer? That’s fine, too.

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.