Over at ESPN yesterday, Jayson Stark posed the question of whether Matt Kemp’s amazing April performance is the best April in the history of the game. Stark decided to tackle the question by looking only at the players that had matched or beaten him in a group of categories that contained BA, OBP, and SLG, but also HR, XBH, R, and RBI. I have a great deal of respect for Stark and enjoy his work, but at the end of the column, I couldn’t help but wonder what happened if we got rid of the useless numbers and looked at ones that put things in a little more context.

So, using our custom leaderboard function and the monthly split feature, I went year-by-year from 1974 (the first year we have monthly split data) to 2012 and looked for players who had matched Kemp’s 20 batting runs in the season’s first month. Batting Runs is the offensive component of WAR, and it offers a few advantages – it’s park and league adjusted so that different slash lines from different eras can be put on an even playing field, and since it is a counting stat, it evens out months where there are differences in playing time. After all, if a player hit nearly as well as Kemp but did it in 20 more plate appearances, that’s a comparable performance, even if it falls just shy by looking at rate metrics.

Over the last 39 years, eight players have created 20 or more batting runs above average in the first month of the season.

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After getting swept by the Mariners at home last week, the Tigers decided to make some changes, and those changes including releasing Brandon Inge. The longtime Tiger played himself out of a job last year and failed to improve on his struggles while making the conversion to second base this season, so Detroit finally cut him loose. After clearing waivers, the A’s swooped in and signed him to a contract, and will install him as their third baseman after designating Luke Hughes (claimed on waivers to take the position just last week) for assignment to make room for Inge.

On one hand, it’s hard to imagine how Inge could actually represent any grade of upgrade for a Major League team at this point in his career. He hit .197/.265/.283 last year and was just 2 for 20 to begin the 2012 season. As a soon to be 35-year-old, he looks like his career is nearly finished. On the other hand, the A’s in-house options at third base might actually be even worse.

The team began the year with Josh Donaldson tabbed as the starter coming out of spring training. Donaldson is a 26-year-old who was a below average hitter in the PCL last year. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t able to hold the job for more than a few days, as Bob Melvin had him split time with utility infielder Eric Sogard. Sogard was bad, but Donaldson was worse, so he ended up back in Triple-A and the team claimed Luke Hughes on waivers from the Twins. Hughes played four games before he was DFA’d to make room for Inge.

Using the rest-of-season ZIPS projections, we can see the forecast for Inge and the two guys who he’s being called on to replace:

Inge: .285 wOBA
Donaldson: .277 wOBA
Hughes: .274 wOBA

Almost unbelievably, Inge is actually projected to outhit both incumbents, but of course the margin is so small that all three could really just be lumped into the same “awful hitter” category.

Inge used to be an elite defender at third base, but injuries have taken their toll on him, and he’s not what he used to be with the glove. Still, given the atrocious options the A’s had in house, signing him actually represents a small upgrade offensively, as hard as that actually is to believe.

Last Friday, I focused my weekly ESPN Insider column (which can also be read here on the site if you are a FanGraphs Plus subscriber) on the predictive power of a team getting off to a strong start in April. We know that at the individual level one month doesn’t mean much, but I wondered whether a dominating start to the season for an entire team might be more predictive of future success.

To do this, we looked at every team since 1974 that won at least 70 percent of their games in April (minimum 15 games), which gave us a sample of 45 teams. We then looked at how these teams performed from May through September to find out how predictive a strong team start actually was. I was pretty surprised at just how little it actually mattered.

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It’s April 26th, so it’s just too early to jump to any conclusions based on what has happened thus far in 2012. There are 140+ games still to go in the season, and as we’ve seen before, the standings at the end of April often don’t look like the standings at the end of September. Three weeks of baseball shouldn’t have changed our minds too much about what we believed to be true before the season began. That the Angels are 6-12, and that Albert Pujols has yet to hit a home run, should not lead us to believe that the Angels are a bad team or that Pujols run as an elite hitter has come to an end.

However, April counts too, and it couldn’t have gone much worse for Anaheim than it did. Not only have they struggled out of the gates, but Texas has blitzed through the American League, and currently hold an 8 1/2 game lead over the Angels in the American League West. Even if we still believe that the Angels are capable of outplaying the Rangers over the rest of the season – and we should – the hole they have to dig out of has become so large that winning their division has become significantly less likely.

For instance, here’s a few examples of what it would take for the Angels to win the AL West by a margin of one game, with all of these scenarios needing to begin immediately:

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According to MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch, Michael Pineda has been diagnosed with an “anterior labral tear”, and surgery is set for May 1st. Compared to elbow surgery, which has become almost routine at this point, recoveries from shoulder problems have not gone nearly as well. Since we don’t know the extent of the tear, it is impossible to say that this is the worst case scenario for the Yankees, but it’s certainly not the news the team was hoping for.

Given that he’s having shoulder surgery next week, it’s probably safe to say that Pineda is done for the season. Even a minor procedure is going to put him on the shelf for months, and it’s not clear that there would be enough time left in the minor league season for him to build his arm strength back up to get back to where he would need to be to pitch in the Major Leagues. And, of course, this might not be a minor procedure.

Given that the Yankees parted with prized prospect Jesus Montero and an interesting young arm in Hector Noesi, this is definitely a setback for the franchise, but it’s worth noting that Jose Campos – the other arm received in the deal – has been extremely impressive for class-A Charleston and offers significant value to the franchise himself.

Pitchers are always a risky investment, and any time you pay a significant price for a young arm, you know that it could blow up on any given pitch. However, the consensus at the time of the deal is that it was a smart move for the Yankees to make, and an organization can’t entirely avoid acquiring pitchers simply due to a preference for risk avoidance. If you want a good pitching staff, you’re going to have to take some gambles on some young arms. The Yankees did, and in this case, it didn’t work. That doesn’t make it a bad idea, or a move that the Yankees front office should be criticized for making.

According to the San Diego Union Tribune, the Padres are currently considering adopting an adjustment in the dimensions of their home ballpark.

“We’re open-minded and we’re seriously considering it,” Padres interim CEO Tom Garfinkel said Tuesday.

“I do believe it is too extreme right now. It will still be a pitcher’s ballpark. But a hitter should be rewarded if he crushes it. And if a team is down 4-0, they should feel there is some hope. It’s just too extreme.”

Petco is, of course, well known as the best pitcher’s park in baseball, and especially so for right-handers who benefit from the amount of space in right-center field specifically. The 400 foot distance to right-center makes it the hardest place in baseball for a left-handed hitter to pull a home run. In fact, no stadium affects any other outcome as much as Petco deflates home runs by left-handed hitters. As Garfinkel notes, the park is just too extreme, especially in that specific area. Right-handed pull hitters can survive – which was part of the reason the Padres acquired Carlos Quentin – but left-handed pull hitters just have little chance of success in San Diego.

While it’s true that the park has given the team the ability to build up quality pitching staffs without expending too many resources on premium arms, the Padres ability to develop quality left-handed bats is severely compromised by the park they play in. Bringing in the fences in right-center field is probably in the best interest of the franchise.

Last night, the Tampa Bay Rays connected for four home runs against Ervin Santana. It was the fifth time this year that a pitcher has allowed 4+ home runs in a single outing – the other notable hurlers to get bombed are Clay Buchholz (5 vs NYY), Josh Beckett (5 vs DET), Tommy Hunter (4 vs TOR), and Yovanni Gallardo (4 vs STL). Even as we head towards the third straight Year of the Pitcher, there are still nights where quality pitchers just don’t locate very well and pay the price for it.

That’s what makes what the Washington Nationals are currently doing so amazing. You’ve probably noticed that their pitching has been very good and has propelled them to a 13-4 record, the best mark in the National League. What you may not have heard is that the Nationals have a chance of establishing a new standard for home run prevention in a given month.

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