Imagine you’re magically granted the power of time travel and that you use it to visit the days leading up to Opening Day 2016. Suddenly back in a world without daily regular-season baseball, you approach an unsuspecting baseball fan and tell them that you’re a time traveler with this bit of baseball information from mid-June: over the past 30 days, the Nationals have had the best offense in the National League.

The fan, presumably, would begin by chastising you for having wasted the gift of time travel on something so frivolous. Then, after gathering him- or herself, would likely respond with something like, “That Bryce Harper sure can rake, can’t he?” With the trap successfully set, you would then drop this bomb on them: “… and Bryce Harper posted a 77 wRC+ over those 30 days!”

Good job, time traveler. You successfully terrified an innocent person about the future without mentioning the name Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. But we seasoned veterans of the 2016 season are able to accept those facts as true. Over the past 30 days, Bryce Harper (.289 wOBA) and Ben Revere (.287 wOBA) have been equivalently awful for the Nationals and, yet, the team is on an offensive tear. As you might expect, it’s been necessary for a lot of different players to perform well in order to make up for Harper’s lack of production – Wilson Ramos and Daniel Murphy have hit well all season while Danny Espinosa and Jayson Werth have recently turned their early season struggles around – but the biggest contributor for the Nationals at the plate of late has been Anthony Rendon.

Through May 9th, Rendon had hit a dismal .211/.289/.297, a line which amounted to offensive production nearly 40% below league average. Coming off a disappointing and injury-plagued 2015 season, it was natural to start wondering whether the 2014 season which led to him finishing fifth place in MVP voting was a flash in the pan never to be seen again. But then, Rendon started hitting. He entered play last night with a .324/.411/.546 line since the cherry-picked date of May 9th. This offensive outburst has raised his full-season wRC+ to a perfectly respectable 107.

Although the May 9th dividing line is arbitrary, it does come close to splitting his season in half, with 142 of his plate appearance coming before this magical date and 128 coming after. Let’s keep using this convenient dividing line to help us take a look at a key change in Rendon’s approach — one which may help explain his recent offensive outburst.

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There’s a funny thing about this line of work. We have access to information, so much information, an increasing amount of information, and it allows us to break down almost every single aspect of player performance. Want to know how a pitcher’s fastball has moved? Easy. Want to know where a batter hits groundballs against sliders? No problem. Interested in where outfielders are positioned with a lefty spray hitter at the plate? That’s becoming possible. So much is possible. An incredible amount is possible. Yet we still don’t know anything about what’s most important. If a player is locked in, he stands a chance. If he’s preoccupied, because, say, he got in an argument, or he thinks he left the oven on, he’s probably going to struggle, for no visible reason. You’re worse at what you do when you’re distracted, or when you’re frustrated. There aren’t any numbers for that.

Michael Conforto is in a slump. It’s a bad one, too, and Conforto feels it, and it happens to be taking place when the Mets are somewhat desperate for offense. That doesn’t help the stress, and maybe stress is the real problem. In baseball terms, he could be pressing. There’s no way for us to analyze that. What we can say for sure: In April, Conforto was the second-most productive hitter in the game. Granted, he was behind only Aledmys Diaz, so, April is weird. But since then, the wRC+ has dropped to 42. He’s struck out almost a third of the time. He’s chasing. The Mets don’t think it’s anything mechanical, and they’re prepared to let Conforto play out of this. I assume, at some point, he will. That doesn’t help the slump today. Conforto still feels the weight of his responsibility.

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Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve taken a look at the 2016 contact management ability of ERA-qualifying starting pitchers in both leagues, utilizing granular batted-ball data. Now it’s the hitters’ turn. Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a position-by-position look at hitters’ contact quality, using exit speed, launch angle, and BIP type frequencies as our tools. Today, let’s look at each team’s primary first basemen and designated hitters.

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Everything Xander Bogaerts did well in his breakout season last year, he seems to be doing better this year. More power, more patience, more contact, and better defense — he’s basically equaled last year’s full-season WAR figure already, and there’s three-fifths of a season left to go. He’s leading the league right now!

Of course, WAR isn’t your traditional counting stat: Bogaerts could hypothetically put up negative wins going forward, were he to regress in one way or all of them. But since he gave us such a great preview last year, it’s tempting to believe in all of the improvements he’s made. He’s really the same guy, just a little better.

At the center of his improvement has been how hard he hits the ball, the angles (both vertical and horizontal) of those batted balls, and his defensive range. He didn’t think much had changed about those particilar variables when I asked him, though. Just a few minor tweaks.

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Just as a recap, here’s some things at which the Cubs have proven to be among the best this year. They’ve been among the best at getting fans to the stadium. They’ve been the best at not pitching to Bryce Harper. They’ve been the best at drawing walks (perhaps that we’ve ever seen), and they’ve been the best base-running team. Basically, they’ve looked like the perfect baseball team. Maybe this seems like overkill, all the Cubs posts already and another one here right now. Or maybe they’re just deserving of all these posts, on account of how dominant and unique they’ve been thus far. I’d argue the latter, but I know that’s not a unanimous opinion.

Either way, here comes another Cubs post! There’s another record they’re pursuing, but it’s not a particularly sexy record, nor is it one that necessarily indicates skill and skill only. Definitely some skill involved, but it’s the kind of record where you’re not too sure how to feel about it, or what, exactly, it means. Even right now, the Cubs are doing this thing, and I’m not totally sure what to make of it. That’s what this post is for!

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On Friday, I published a post projecting the players taken on day one of the draft. On Saturday, I did the same for the players taken on day two. And yesterday, I did the same for those players selected on day three. Over 1,200 players were drafted across 40 rounds in this year’s draft. But KATOH still managed to find a few mildly interesting players who weren’t selected. Below, you’ll find the seven draft-eligible but undrafted players with the best projections. As a reminder, this analysis covers the following conferences: AAC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big West, Pac 12 and SEC. I expect a few of these guys will sign as undrafted free agents in the coming weeks.

*****

Anthony Papio, RSr., OF, Maryland

Proj. WAR thru age-27: 1.0

Papio had a solid season as a redshirt senior. I should note that his projection is partly due to a quirk with my model. The Big 10 model includes a variable that makes it slightly less harsh on older players. But since Papio’s the rare 23-year-old college player, it perhaps credits him a bit more than it should. Still, an .800 OPS with some speed in the Big 10 ain’t bad.

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Let’s make one thing absolutely clear: The Royals don’t have an ace, not by major-league standards. By whichever measure you pick, the Royals have had one of the worst starting rotations in the game, and the closest thing they have to an ace starter is probably their group of pitchers who aren’t starters at all. Each and every game is almost like a race to the bullpen, and the Royals are aware of it. This is part design, and part bad luck.

It’s also part bad Yordano Ventura. For what we can term a variety of reasons, Ventura has yet to ascend to the performance level his repertoire would suggest. If any Royal were to blossom into a relative ace, you’d think Ventura would be the one. And he might still get there, but he’s not the guy presently on course. No, the guy emerging right now is Danny Duffy, and though Duffy isn’t the only respectable member of the staff, he’s become perhaps the most exciting. That is, if you find good pitching more exciting than brawls.

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There are a lot of really good Clayton Kershaw fun facts, and he seems to generate countless more every start. He’s the best there is, and the best always produce the best statistics. I think my favorite Kershaw fun fact for now, though, is this: in 2013, he allowed a .521 OPS. In 2014, he allowed a .521 OPS. In 2015, he allowed a .521 OPS. This year, he’s somehow even better, and that doesn’t make any sense, but this year is still going. The fun fact captures the years completed, and it teaches you everything you need to know about Kershaw in a matter of seconds. He’s impossible, and he’s impossibly consistent.

Over the past few weeks, spanning five starts, Matt Shoemaker has allowed a .516 OPS. He’s walked one of 144 batters, while striking out 48. Now, Clayton Kershaw, Matt Shoemaker ain’t. Through the season’s first six starts, Shoemaker had allowed more than a run per inning. He was horrible! Now he’s Kershaw. He’s not really Kershaw, but, it makes you wonder, what’s the significance of looking like Kershaw for such a stretch of time?

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If you woke up this morning, looked at the WAR Leaderboards for position players and saw Mike Trout, Jose Altuve, and Manny Machado near the top, you might have had an inclination that all is right with the world. After all, those three players are some of the very best in major-league baseball, and we would expect to see them at the top of the list. Of course, when you look closely at the leaderboard, it’s important to note that there are 171 qualified players. To regard the WAR marks as some sort of de facto ranking for all players would be foolish. For some players, defensive value has a large impact on their WAR total, and it’s important, when considering WAR values one-third of the way into the season, to consider the context in which those figures.

“Small sample size” is a phrase that’s invoked a lot throughout the season. At FanGraphs, we try to determine what might be a small-sample aberration from what could be a new talent level. Generally speaking, the bigger the sample size, the better — and this is especially true for defensive statistics, where we want to have a very big sample to determine a player’s talent level. Last year, I attempted to provide a warning on the reliability of defensive statistics. Now that the season has reached its third month, it’s appropriate to revisit that work.

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The Mets won’t get an opportunity to see their former prospect in person until early August, when they travel to Detroit. If Michael Fulmer is still running a scoreless innings streak by then, we’ll really have a story. For now, we have a neat anecdote, and an encouraging start to a career.

Fulmer, the Tigers’ rookie right-hander traded by the Mets in exchange for Yoenis Cespedes last year, hasn’t allowed a run in 28.1 innings. It’s a stretch of starts that’s gotten him compared (fairly or not*) to Jake Arrieta just nine games into his career. It’s a stretch of starts worthy of consideration, especially given Fulmer’s first four were nothing short of a disaster. Is the real Fulmer closer to those first four, closer to these recent five, or somewhere in between? What changed?

*Not.

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