Andruw Jones went 0 for 4 last night. This year, that’s newsworthy, which is a pretty remarkable occurrence given how bad Jones was last year. That 0 for 4 lowered his 2009 line to .370/.514/.778. This is a guy who had a .505 OPS last year. His OBP is currently higher than that.

Yes, it’s only 35 plate appearances, but it’s 35 amazingly good plate appearances. Jones has walked more times than he’s truck out, posting a 7/6 BB/K rate. He has seven extra base hits in nine games. Last year, he had 12 extra base hits in 75 games.

Jones was a walking disaster, out of shape and unable to play at a major league level. The Dodgers paid him to go away. For the most part, baseball gave up on him. Andruw’s out to prove them all wrong, and he’s off to an amazing start.

Even with the small sample, the 2008 version of Andruw Jones was simply not capable of this kind of performance. He didn’t have enough life in his bat to get around on fastballs, and the result was an enormous jump in his strikeout rate and groundball rate. Through the first few weeks of 2009, both of those are back towards his career norms, making 2008 look like a massive outlier.

He’s making contact again, but more importantly, he’s hitting the ball hard. The Dodgers have to be wondering where this was a year ago, because right now, Jones looks as good as he ever has. We talked about the potential for him to pull a Jermaine Dye and rebound in a big way… that looks more likely every day.

Talent doesn’t just evaporate. Jones earned his way to the majors at 19 because he was a remarkably gifted individual. Those abilities are still in there. Kudos to the Texas Rangers for giving him an opportunity to find them again.

As the Arizona Diamondbacks proved last year, you can’t win a division in April. They finished 20-8 after the first month of the season with a league best +56 run differential. They had a 5.5 game lead over the second place Dodgers and looked like the best team in baseball. Their young players were hitting, their starters were dominating, and their bullpen was keeping leads safe.

It would be the only month of the year where everything clicked, as they finished 82-80 and watched the Dodgers surge past them to take the NL West. The D’Backs were the best team in April, but it wasn’t enough to get them to the playoffs. There are just too many variables for a team to lock up a division in April.

A team can certainly lose a division in April, though. The “it’s still early” mantra doesn’t hold if you dig yourself a hole too large to overcome in five months. The 2009 Diamondbacks are pretty close to proving that.

They currently sit at 7-11, 5.5 games behind the first place Dodgers. They could take comfort in the fact that the Dodgers were able to overcome an equal hole last year, but the circumstances of their positions are not the same. The Dodgers played well last April, posting a +30 run differential that showed they were better than their 14-13 record in the first month of the year. The D’Backs have posted a -25 run differential, which suggests that they have earned their .389 winning percentage.

Adding injury to insult, the D’Backs are going to be without Brandon Webb for at least the next six weeks. His original diagnosis was “no problem”, which was then adjusted to “he’ll miss a start”, and now has become “won’t throw for three weeks at a minimum”. At this point, assuming that Webb will be able to return in June and pitch at ace-type levels is not a very good bet.

Webb is clearly Arizona’s best player, and subtracting him for six weeks and then projecting some level of reduced performance for the rest of the season necessitates that we change how well we expect Arizona to play over the remainder of the season. Before the season started, CHONE had Arizona as a 79 win team. Given their 7-11 start, we’d expect them to finish with 77 wins if CHONE’s opinion of their roster hadn’t changed at all from Opening Day.

It has, however, changed, thanks to Webb’s injury. Replacing one of the best pitchers in baseball with Yusmeiro Petit for even just six weeks will cost Arizona at least one win, and Webb’s diminished projection could cost them another in the second half of the season. So, an updated CHONE projection accounting for Webb’s injury would have the D’Backs finishing with about 75 wins.

CHONE didn’t like the Dodgers all that much before the season started, projecting them to finish with 82 wins. However, their strong start adds three wins to that projection, and even if we assume they will immediately regress to Opening Day CHONE expectations, they’d finish with 85 wins.

Arizona isn’t trying to make up a 5.5 game gap – they’re trying to make up a 10 game gap. They weren’t as good as the Dodgers before the season started when Webb was healthy, and they certainly aren’t as good now without him. When you add in the 5.5 game hole they’ve already dug themselves, and it’s extremely unlikely that the D’Backs will win the NL West this year.

They couldn’t win the division with quality play last April, but they very well could have lost it with their struggles this April.

We learned quite a bit last week, so we’ll go with an abbreviated intro and get right to the knowledge.

The Florida Marlins miss the Washington Nationals.

After starting the season 11-1 on the strength of six games against baseball’s worst franchise, the Marlins failed to win a single game this week once they were required to play actual major league franchises. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia both swept the Marlins, as Florida’s offense went into hybernation, posting a .218/.289/.330 line. Opening week sensation Emilio Bonaficio regressed to the mean faster than anyone could have expected, as the Pirates and Phillies held him to a pitiful .190 wOBA. Live by the BABIP, die by the BABIP.

The Boston Red Sox don’t need easy schedules to win a lot of games.

The anti-Marlins, the Red Sox proved that their early season struggles didn’t mean anything, as they went a perfect 6-0 this week to up their current winning streak to 10 games. They did it in impressive fashion, as well, beating the tar out of a decent Orioles team, thumping the Twins in Minneapolis, and then sweeping the Yankees over the weekend. Their offense was ridiculous – .338/.437/.612 over the six games they played. Essentially, they had a line-up of nine Albert Pujols‘ – it’s no wonder they won most of the games rather easily. Jason Varitek was their worst hitter, and he hit .200/.304/.500 for a .348 wOBA. When that’s your worst performance, you’re going to score a lot of runs.

Victor Marintez is back.

After a miserable 2008 season that saw him miss time with injuries and his power mysteriously disappear, Martinez is destroying the ball again. His season line stands at .397/.448/.654, and he’s already launched five home runs in 87 plate appearances – three more than he had all last season. His days as an everyday catcher are mostly behind him, as he’s splitting time between catcher and first base, but he’s showing that his bat will play even when he’s not catching. The Indians have had some problems in the early part of April, but Martinez is not one of them.

Albert Pujols is ridiculous.

Okay, maybe we already knew that, but if hitting .450 with three home runs wasn’t enough, Pujols also decided that he might as well lead the NL in steals. He stole three last week, just for the fun of it, tying him with Nyjer Morgan for most in the league in the last seven days. He’s posting a .489 wOBA, and if you’re wondering how the Cardinals have surged to first place despite some question marks on the pitching staff, just remember that the best player in baseball resides in Missouri. He could retire tomorrow and he’d be a Hall Of Famer. Pujols is just something else.

During the down years, the Rays often had just a single bright spot, and his name was Carl Crawford. He was the star toiling in obscurity, putting up +4.5 to +5.0 win seasons for three straight years on terrible teams. He combined electrifying speed with gap power and terrific defense, making him one of the game’s truly consistent five tool players.

However, while the Rays boomed last year, Crawford’s bat went bust, and it hasn’t recovered through the first several weeks of April. His power has gone south while he’s simultaneously making less contact, and that’s never a good combination. He still chases too many pitches out of the strike zone, but he could get away with it when he was punishing pitches over the plate.

While they’re certainly contenders again this year, and Crawford has plenty of time to rebound and return to previous form, I have to wonder if the Rays aren’t beginning to think that now might be a good time to explore trading their left fielder. After all, the organization isn’t really hurting for outfielders.

Ben Zobrist’s early season surge has pushed the planned Gabe Gross/Gabe Kapler platoon to the back burner. Zobrist showed some legitimate skills last summer, and his defense in the outfield has been much better than expected after making the transition from a poor defensive infielder. If Tampa feels that Zobrist can continue to make strides and play at a level worthy of regular playing time, the Gross/Kapler platoon is a ready-made Crawford replacement already on the roster.

The team isn’t hurting for depth beyond those guys, either. Matt Joyce, acquired in the Edwin Jackson trade, is hanging in Triple-A waiting for a chance to get back to the majors after an impressive rookie campaign. Behind him, 22-year-old top prospect Desmond Jennings is destroying the Double-A Southern League, and showing the tools that make him one of the most exciting young players in the minors. If Fernando Perez is able to return from injury, he’d add yet another outfield option.

The Rays are flush with outfielders to the point that they don’t have playing time for the talent they have on hand, much less the talent they have waiting for a promotion. Dealing Crawford might not seem like the most usual move for a team trying to win now, but it might be worth exploring the market to see if a deal is out there that makes sense. The marginal hit they’d take in replacing him could be significantly less than the improvement they’d be able to make elsewhere.

After watching an anemic offense struggle through the 2008 season, the A’s decided to make some upgrades to add a little thump to their line-up. They traded for Matt Holliday, then went out and signed Jason Giambi, Orlando Cabrera, and Nomar Garciaparra. The new pieces gave them balance and depth to their line-up, at least on paper.

So far, it hasn’t worked. At all.

Holliday hsan’t quieted any of the concerns about how well he would hit away from Coors Field. He’s still the aggressive hitter he’s always been, but the ball just isn’t flying off the bat right now. A .109 ISO is not what the A’s had in mind. He’s certainly better than this, and the bat will come around, but Oakland needs it to happen sooner than later.

Holliday has looked like Babe Ruth compared to the three free agents the A’s signed, however. Giambi has a .270 wOBA, and he is yet to hit his first home run in his second tour of duty with the A’s. Cabrera is hitting .211/.277/.246 – even though they signed him for his defense, they weren’t expecting Rey Ordonez production at the plate. Nomar has been the worst of the bunch at .179/.200/.286, and as always, nagging injuries have kept him from being able to take the field regularly.

There’s no question that all four of these hitters will produce at higher levels than they have so far. However, the A’s need the corporate slump to end ASAP. They can’t win if they’re not scoring any runs, and the new guys are the ones who are supposed to be providing the thump.

Before Matt Stairs connected in the 8th inning for a solo home run to end Dave Bush’s no-hitter, I was trying to figure out how on earth Bush was getting hitters out. He wasn’t exactly dominating with raw stuff.

Take a look at some of the graphs from Dan Brooks Pitch F/x tool.

His fastest pitch of the day was 90.4 MPH. He threw a variety of fastballs, ranging from 86 to 90, averaging around 88 MPH. The algorithm identified another 21 pitches as change-ups, ranging from 81 to 86 MPH. Some of them were probably just fastballs with a little bit taken off, though. He also mixed in some cut fastball/slider type in the low to mid-80s, and topped it off with a big slow curve that averaged 68 MPH.

If I went to a high school game and saw a right-handed pitcher topping out at 90 without much sink and featuring a curve that hit 70 with some wind behind it, I’d assume that he had a pretty good chance of not getting drafted this summer. It’s just not the kind of stuff you expect to encounter in a major league starting pitcher, especially a righty.

To have that kind of stuff throwing a no-hitter at the defending World Champs is enough to make you fall out of your chair.

Bush is the kind of guy who thrives on throwing strikes, but he didn’t even really do that today. Check out this chart:

That’s not painting the corners and peppering the strike zone to get ahead of hitters. 45 of his 111 pitches were outside of the Pitch F/x strikezone (which isn’t perfectly accurate, of course). Most of the stuff in the strike zone is on the higher side, which helps explain the 10 flyouts. There’s just nothing there that indicates “tough to hit”.

Help me out, Brewers fans. How on earth was Dave Bush able to hold down a line-up with some pretty good left-handed bats while throwing high school velocity and locating it up in the strike zone?

Here’s a question – who is the worst team in the American League this year?

The Indians currently have the worst record at 5-10, but they have the highest wOBA of any team in baseball and a significant amount of talent. With a -5 run differential, they’re not even struggling that much out of the gates. I think we can safely disqualify them.

Both Oakland and Los Angeles are off to 5-9 starts, but they entered the seasons as the two teams picked to contend for the AL West division title. The Angels have been playing at less than full strength, while the A’s are waiting for their newly imported offense to start hitting. They might not be great teams, but they have plenty of reasons to think they won’t be among the league’s worst.

Tampa Bay is 6-9. They were in the World Series last year. They’re out.

Texas is 6-8 so far, and most people had them finishing last in the AL West. As always, the offense is good and the pitching is bad. But with an offense this good and a ton of young talent on the way (Derek Holland just arrived in the majors to lead the wave), it’s hard to see them finishing with less than 70 wins.

Minnesota? They’re 7-9 without Joe Mauer, and while they have the worst run differential in the league so far, adding an MVP-calilber catcher will help significantly.

Baltimore? 7-9 to start off, and like Texas, they can score but not pitch. However, like Texas, there’s just too many good players on the O’s to see them as truly awful, and Matt Wieters will eventually join the club.

Every other team in the AL is currently above .500. Kansas City and Seattle are good candidates to regress from unsustainable hot starts, but they each have wins in the bank that aren’t going to be taken away. Even if we expect them to play at their projected preseason levels, they’ve won enough games early on to add a couple of wins to our end-of-season expectations.

If there’s a truly bad team in the American League, I can’t find them. There are teams that are better than others, but it’s the National League that features all the turkeys this year. Right now, it looks like every team in the junior circuit will finish with 70+ wins.

2008 was a roller coaster ride of a rookie season for Kosuke Fukudome. He started off strong, hitting a game tying home run in the bottom of the 9th in his major league debut that endeared him to Cubs fans from the start. He hit .327/.436/.480 in April and rode that hot start to an All-Star game appearance.

The second half was not as kind, however. He hit just .217/.314/.326 after the All-Star game, pounding the ball into the ground and showing little power. He lost playing time after the team acquired Jim Edmonds, and was basically a reserve in September. His ability to hit for enough power to play regularly became a regular topic of discussion, and the team went out and signed Milton Bradley over the winter, pushing Fukodome into a center field platoon with Reed Johnson.

He didn’t exactly inspire hope and confidence that a rebound was coming with a poor performance in the World Baseball Classic, either. For a lot of Cubs fans, his second half collapse and struggles in the WBC were part of a trend that showed Fukodome simply wasn’t a very good hitter.

So much for that. Fukodome is hitting .357/.491/.714 in his first 55 plate appearances of the season. He has nine extra base hits in 12 games. To put that in perspective, he had 11 extra base hits after the all-star break last year. He’s almost matched that in two weeks of the 2009 season. Fukodome has excellent plate discipline, so when he’s hitting for power as well, he’s a very good player.

Sometimes, a slump is just a slump. Pitchers didn’t figure out Fukodome last year – he just had a bad couple of months. It happens. The Cubs still look like the best team in teh National League to me, and their center fielder is one of the reasons why.

Before the season started, most people had the San Diego Padres finishing somewhere near the bottom of the standings. Trade rumors swirled about star pitcher Jake Peavy all winter, and as the team went through a change in ownership, the organization seemed to be drifting about without a clear direction.

However, they’ve started the season strong, winning nine of their first 13 games. That, in and of itself, is pretty remarkable. What is really crazy about San Diego’s early season push, however, has been how they’ve done it with the worst hitter in baseball in the middle of their line-up.

Brian Giles is hitting .151/.211/.189 through his first 57 plate appearances. That’s a staggeringly bad .189 wOBA. Even taking Petco Park into account, Giles has been worth -6.5 runs with his bat so far this season.

You name it, Giles is failing at it. He’s generally a very good contact hitter – his K% is 15.1% this year. He usually can be counted on for some walks, even when the hits aren’t falling – he has a 7.0% BB%. He has solid gap power – his ISO is .038. Through the season’s first two weeks, he’s essentially hit like a pitcher, pounding balls into the ground when he does make contact and ending rallies with bad at-bats.

Giles is, of course, better than this. There’s no way his skills have declined so fast that he went from a +4.7 win player in 2008 to the worst player in baseball in 2009. He’s going to start hitting, with the only real question being when. That the Padres were able to go 9-4 while Giles was flailing around like a fish out of water bodes quite well for them.

I still don’t think they’re going to the playoffs, but in the face of a total flop from their best player, they’ve picked up the slack and gotten off to a strong start. Given the results of the first 13 games, they’re almost certainly better than most of us thought.

The Colorado Rockies have a crowded outfield. Even after trading away Matt Holliday, they are trying to find playing time for five outfielders, plus using Ian Stewart in the OF on occasion. So, it’s not a surprise that Matt Murton wasn’t able to crack their opening day roster, but he’s doing everything in his power to hit himself out of Triple-A.

In his first 50 PAs for Colorado Springs, Murton is hitting .409/.480/.636 with six extra base hits, five walks, and just one strikeout. He’s running a .510 wOBA and hitting like Nelson Cruz did last year when he was trying to shake the AAAA player label. Unlike Cruz, though, Murton has already shown that he can hit major league pitching.

Murton is 27-year-old. He has 1,002 major league plate appearances in his career, and he’s hit .288/.354/.438 over that span. That’s a .345 wOBA, which makes him an above average hitter. We shouldn’t be terribly surprised when an above average major league hitter gets sent to the PCL in his prime and promptly destroys the league.

The question, then, is why is Murton still in Triple-A? Even coming off a bad 2007 season, CHONE projects him to be exactly league average as a hitter and +7 as a corner outfielder. That combination would make him approximately a +1.5 win player if given regular playing time.

At the least, Murton should be a right-handed platoon caddy for a team that has a LH hitting OF that struggles against same handed pitchers. Or a defensive replacement/pinch hitter in the NL. There’s no way that there are 750 better baseball players on the planet that Murton.

He’s going to get another shot in the majors. He’s too good to be written off prematurely like this. Bet on a smart organization reaping the rewards when they bring Murton back to the majors.