Lance Berkman is off to a monster start to the 2011 season, hitting .406/.467/.781 for the Cardinals. He’s one of only a handful of players to already accumulate +2 WAR for the year, and he’s nearly matched his 2010 total in that regard. Whatever stories were getting written about his demise last year have been put on hold indefinitely, as Berkman is showing that he’s not even close to washed up at age 35.

In looking at his career batting line, I began to realize that Berkman has some Hall-Of-Fame marks in the rate statistics. His .297/.410/.549 mark over the last decade is good for a 146 wRC+, the same level of offensive performance that Mike Schmidt had over his career. Other players in that same mid-140s wRC+ range include Willie Stargell, Willie McCovey, Chipper Jones, Jim Thome, Eddie Matthews, and Ralph Kiner– lots of Hall-Of-Fame names in that area.

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April is over, and as expected, the Cleveland Indians have the best record in baseball. Okay, you’re right, not one single person on this planet expected that. ZIPS projected 71 wins for the Tribe, while the readership here at FanGraphs was a little more optimistic, penciling them in for 73 victories. They’re currently on pace for 114 wins, and would need to play .400 baseball the rest of the way in order for the crowd’s projection to come true.

It’s not just wins and losses, either. The Indians have the best run differential in baseball (+47) and they’re second in the majors in team WAR (+10.5), trailing only the offensive juggernaut in St. Louis. The Indians aren’t winning a bunch of nail-biters, but, instead, they’re pounding their opponents into submission. At 5.41 runs scored per game, they’re nearly keeping pace with the Yankees offense, and yet they’re simultaneously holding opponents to just 3.67 runs per game. Only Oakland and Anaheim are preventing runs at a better rate.

So, 27 games of excellent baseball later, we have to ask the obvious question: are the Indians for real?

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If you go to the leaderboards here on the site, you’ll see a whole bunch of familiar names that you’d expect to see doing well, a couple of interesting guys having rebound seasons, and Jack Hannahan. The Indians third baseman is mixed in with the likes of Alex Rodriguez and Troy Tulowitzki, and he’s doing it in a surprising manner.

Hannahan has always been a terrific defensive third baseman so it’s no surprise that he’s racking up the fielding value again, leading all third baseman in UZR. Most of his value has come at the plate, however, and from the one area – power hitting – where he hasn’t traditionally shown much ability. Hannahan already has four home runs this year, as many as he hit in all of 2009 when he racked up 301 plate appearances for the A’s and Mariners.

But, that’s not the most surprising thing. Hannahan is strong enough that a four home run binge over the course of a few weeks isn’t all that weird. It’s an outlier, and it’s the kind of thing you come to expect from small sample sizes in April. What you don’t expect, however, is this.

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Quick note – Frankie Piliere couldn’t make his regularly scheduled chat this week, but we’re making it up to you with our first ever NotGraphs chat at 2 pm eastern, featuring Carson Cistulli and Dayn Perry. You won’t want to miss that.

The newest awesome feature rolled out here on FanGraphs this morning – the ability to sort the leaderboards by rookie qualification, which opens up the door for a lot of exploration. Now you can easily check and see whether a Rookie Of The Year deserved his trophy, which seasons had the best crops of rookies (yes, last year was ridiculous, and now we can prove it), or compare rookie seasons from different years side by side.  That was one of the first things I did.

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If you google “Peter Bourjos” “can’t hit”, you’ll get 3,040 results. There aren’t actually that many articles about the inadequacies of Bourjos’ offensive abilities, but there are a lot of them. After the Angels called up Bourjos last year and installed him in center field, he did little to dispel the notion that he was a defensive wizard who wouldn’t be able to hit his weight – his 2010 UZR was off the charts (+34.7 UZR/150 in about half of a season), but his .273 wOBA was awful, just as had been expected based on the scouting reports. There just aren’t that many blazing fast leadoff types who can make the skillset work without patience or contact ability, and Bourjos hasn’t shown either as a professional.

However, I’m wondering if we’ve underestimated Bourjos’ offensive abilities to date. Yes, he’s an impatient hack who relies heavily on his speed, but when you look at the types of hits he actually does get, the Juan Pierre comparisons fall apart.

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Sometimes, rather than having a bunch of thoughts on topic, I find myself in a position of wanting to mention a few different things, but only have a brief snippet to say about them. Today is one of those days, so, we’re doing a notes-style column with some nuggets from the first month of the season.

Jeff Francoeur is off to a good start in Kansas City, and hitting coach Kevin Seitzer is giving credit to his new found plate discipline.

“The amazing part for me is how disciplined he has become when everyone said he couldn’t be,” Seitzer says.

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Among the most talked about story lines heading into the 2011 season, few generated as much interest as Jose Bautista’s attempt to follow up on his monstrous season from last year. The universal consensus was that he would take a step backward, as it was a given he wouldn’t hit 54 home runs again, but the question was just how far back would he go?  Perhaps it’s time to change the question.

Bautista’s ridiculous start to the season – he’s now hitting .359/.506/.750, good for a Major League best .533 wOBA after making just two outs over the course of the three games against the Rays this weekend – has effectively ended any legitimate speculation about whether Bautista’s season was an enormous outlier. He is still doing all of the things that made him so good last year, only now he’s proving that he can do it while hardly seeing any pitches in the strike zone, and his patience has upped his walk rate to elite levels as well.

So, instead of asking just how far Bautista will regress, perhaps the more relevant question now is whether or not Bautista is currently the best hitter in the American League. It’s a question that would have seemed ludicrous 12 months ago, but what Bautista has done since – and done consistently – while adjusting to a changing approach from opposing pitchers has made this a legitimate query.

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Almost exactly one year ago, the Philadelphia Phillies signed Ryan Howard to a five year contract extension that was, shall we say, not exactly well thought of. The Phillies already had their slugging first baseman under team control for the current season and an additional one, but chose to give him a long term deal that locked up his age 32-36 seasons anyway.

Little did we know that this extend-a-guy-who-doesn’t-need-an-extension idea was going to turn into a full fledged trend. The Rockies took it to another level over the winter, giving Troy Tulowitzki a six year deal that, combined with his current contract, will keep him in Colorado through 2020. While I thought that deal exposed the Rockies to a lot of risk, Tulowitzki is in the best-player-in-baseball conversation, and locking him up now did give them a chance to keep an elite player around – an option that might not have been possible had they waited for him to have another MVP type season or two.

Now, we have the Ryan Braun extension, which borrows some from each of the first two moves. Like Tulowitzki, the Brewers chose to sign Braun through 2020, despite the fact that he was already under contract through 2015. Like Howard, they locked up a big time power hitter’s age 32-36 seasons. Braun simply isn’t as good as Tulowitzki and he got nearly the same amount of money, so it’s easy to say that this extension for Milwaukee is worse than the deal Colorado made. But, is it worse than the roundly mocked deal that Philadelphia made?

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Last night, the commissioner’s office released a statement noting that the league would “appoint a representative to oversee all aspects of the business and the day-to-day operations of the (Los Angeles Dodgers) Club.” Essentially, Bud Selig was seizing control of the Dodgers “because of my deep concerns regarding the finances and operations of the Dodgers and to protect the best interests of the Club.”

As Jonah wrote last night, the last time Major League Baseball owned a franchise, it was an utter disaster. The way the Expos were ran during the time that the league had stewardship over them was an embarrassment, and highlights the problems that can arise in this kind of natural conflict-of-interest situation. With the other owners incentivized to not lose games to a property they had an ownership stake in, the Expos were essentially turned into baseball’s version of the Washington Generals.

But I have to believe that Selig learned some lessons from just how poorly that situation was handled, and he knows that he can’t make those same mistakes again. Additionally, Los Angeles is not Montreal, and with all respect to Jonah’s memories, the Dodgers are not the Expos. This is a storied franchise in the largest media market on the west coast – the problem won’t be finding a new owner, but rather picking from among the horde of people who will be interested in purchasing the team.

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