It’s funny now to reflect on some of the things that were said over the offseason, when the Dodgers went through an almost complete roster overhaul. Granted, people have to say something, because that’s how this business works, but think of the concern expressed in some corners regarding the immediate future of the Dodgers’ offense. How were they going to make up for losing Matt Kemp? How were they going to make up for losing Hanley Ramirez? How were they going to make up for losing Dee Gordon? Two of those players, as it happens, have hit quite well this year. Hasn’t mattered to the Dodgers. After swapping so many different pieces around, the Dodgers became an early-season offensive juggernaut.

It is, of course, a big reason why the Dodgers have the second-best record in baseball, and the highest run differential. They’ve dealt with significant injuries on the pitching side, that have left them weakened, but the lineup has picked up the slack, despite some injuries of its own. The point isn’t just to say, hey, the Dodgers have hit pretty well. No, that wouldn’t be worthy of a post. The point of this is to explain to you the magnitude by which the Dodgers have out-performed everybody else. The state of things is ridiculous.

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A cursory examination of the WAR leaderboards for shortstops in 2015 shows a few surprising developments. At the very top, we have the nice blend of defensive and offensive aptitude in Zack Cozart, and the mainly defensive-minded duo of Brandon Crawford (who has surprised at the plate this year) and Andrelton Simmons. Then, where we might expect a name like Ian Desmond or Troy Tulowitzki, we instead have Marcus Semien.

It’s only May, so we’re still dealing with the usual parts of the game that suffer from small sample size issues when it comes to player comparison and valuation, like BABIP and defensive metrics. Still, there’s something about Semien being toward the top of the boards that warrants our attention: not only is the A’s shortstop there because of his offense, he’s there despite his defense.

On Sunday, we saw both the best and worst of him. Let’s start with defense. During the bottom of the second, Logan Morrison hit a routine one-hopper up the middle to Semien, who was shifted along with the rest of the infield. The outcome was one Athletics fans have wearily gotten used to:

That was the 24-year-old’s 9th error of the season, briefly tying him with Ian Desmond and Danny Santana for the league lead, that is until he moved into sole possession of first by making another on Monday (he made one last night too). If you don’t like errors, Semien sits at -1 runs by DRS, good for 20th in the majors.

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A little over a year ago, the Cleveland Indians locked up much of their future core, signing Jason Kipnis, Michael Brantley, and Yan Gomes to contract extensions. Kipnis received double the guarantees of his teammates after a great, five-win 2013 season, but last year the fortunes reversed, as Brantley and Gomes both had breakout years and Kipnis struggled. Kipnis got out of the gate slowly in 2015, as the hits were not falling, but a solid approach taking the ball the other way has the new Cleveland leadoff hitter’s production on the rise.

Last April, Kipnis performed well in the first month after signing his $52 million extension, posting a .234/.354/.394 line with a 120 wRC+ that could have been much higher if not for a .250 BABIP. At the end of that same month, though, Kipnis strained his oblique on a swing, forcing him to miss a month. He never got going in his return, hitting just .241/.299/.315 with a 77 wRC+ in 442 plate appearances over the rest of the season despite an acceptable .297 BABIP. Kipnis finished his lost season having produced roughly a win.

Determining the effect of Kipnis’s oblique injury on his production the rest of the season is a tricky proposition. The injury does not require surgery, varies in severity and does not have a set recovery time. Chris Davis and Ryan Braun suffered oblique injuries last season and neither player had a good season, but Joe Mauer played well, albeit without power, after hitting the disabled list for the same injury. Jason Kipnis played through his struggles last year, but he did admit in the spring that the injury gave him trouble.
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Justin Turner isn’t Babe Ruth — mostly because only Babe Ruth is Babe Ruth. Of late, however, Turner’s numbers have been Ruthian in nature. Consider: since the beginning of 2014, only two hitters in all of baseball have been better than Turner, pound for pound. Two hitters! All this after the Mets released him. Turns out, he met someone on the 2013 Mets that changed his life.

Someone else’s life changed in 2013. This 35-year-old veteran outfielder with a little bit of power and a little bit of speed and a little bit of defense was coming off a down year and a suspension — circumstances which might otherwise be known as “the end of a career.” But he’d heard something about hitting he’d never heard before, and he’d spent the winter in Mexico putting his new philosophy to work. That year in New York, he was hitting for more power than he’d ever had before, and he was relevant once again. He thought he’d tell a red-headed backup infielder a little of what he’d learned.

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Billy Hamilton is the fastest player in baseball. He’s done some remarkable things on the field with his legs, including scoring on a pop-up that barely left the infield. He currently leads the majors in stolen bases with 17 thefts, and only 12 teams have stolen more bases this year than Hamilton has himself. His speed is a weapon, and when he gets on base, good things happen for the Cincinnati Reds.

But he isn’t getting on base very often. He’s currently hitting just .202 with a .259 on base percentage. That Hamilton has stolen 17 bases while only reaching via a hit or walk 35 times is a testament to just how fast he is, but while the Reds will take the stolen bases, what they really need is for Hamilton to simply reach first base more often. And there’s one very clear way for that to happen: he needs to get better at bunting.

From a quantity perspective, no one tries more often than Hamilton, as he put down his 10th bunt of the season in the first inning of last night’s contest with the Braves. However, it took him until that 10th attempt to get his first bunt hit of the year, and a less generous official scorer might have ruled it an E-5 after Alberto Callaspo mishandled his attempt to scoop it off the grass. Before last night, Hamilton both led the league in bunt attempts while also last in the league in bunt hits, which is not a combination you’d expect from the fastest guy in baseball.

On the one hand, you’d think that maybe Hamilton is just having trouble bunting his way on board because defenses expect him to try and are aggressively positioning their defense to defend against it, but the evidence suggests that this is just good old-fashioned lousy execution. For example, here are three of his previous attempts earlier this season.

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We’ve had fun, but this might be the last post I ever write about opposing pitchers trying to work Mike Trout upstairs with good heat. It’s not that I’m tired of it. I didn’t think I could ever grow tired of it. For me, it might’ve been the most interesting single thing in baseball, the game’s greatest player having such an obvious vulnerability. How often do we really get to talk about that kind of stuff? No, I’m not saying this because I’m tired of the subject. I’m saying this because it might not be a subject anymore.

I can’t imagine you need background. Everyone knows what was going on. Everyone saw what the Royals did to Mike Trout in last year’s ALDS. Trout’s strikeouts went up because teams realized they could throw him fastballs upstairs. OK, this, we’re all familiar with. It was probably unrealistic to expect Trout to make an adjustment last year on the fly. He’d need an offseason to work out how he wanted to respond. I think we’ve now seen his response. That glaring, obvious weakness? It’s completely disappeared.

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Let’s take a little stroll down the walk leaderboard, shall we? It’s not the most exciting leaderboard on the site, but every board can tell you something. In first we’ve got Joc Pederson. Hell of a rookie season underway. After that we’ve got Bryce Harper. Looks like he’s finally turning that corner. Carlos Santana, Kris Bryant, Matt Holliday — disciplined hitters, all of them. Alex Avila and Jose Bautista are no strangers to the free pass. And then there’s Carlos Peguero. Yes, that Carlos Peguero. If you don’t know him, you’re interested. If you do know him, you’re speechless.

For reference, before this year, Peguero had been in the majors for parts of four seasons. Spent the bulk of that time with the Mariners. He drew eight unintentional walks, in more than 200 trips to the plate. In this year’s early going, he’s batted about a third as much. Still a very small slice of playing time. He’s drawn a dozen unintentional walks. When seen before, Peguero gave off the impression he was clueless. Now he’s having excellent at-bats against Felix Hernandez and Sonny Gray. Also, he is impossibly strong.

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The number of innings a team’s bullpen throws over the course of the season has less to do with the performance of the bullpen than the performance of the starters. Teams with starters pitching deep into games rely less on relievers, leaving the bullpen well-rested and allowing the manager to leverage a team’s best relievers in more important situations. A great bullpen might cause a manager to pull his starter at the first sign of trouble, creating more innings for the bullpen, but for the most part, the starter will pitch as many innings as possible and the rest is left for the bullpen. Once the relievers are called upon, it is the manager’s job to divvy out appearances and prevent overuse. So far this season, the Boston and Tampa Bay rotations have put their bullpens in trouble and St. Louis also appear to be in danger of wearing out their core arms — points which I’ll address momentarily.

First, let’s consider performance. In unsurprising fashion, the Kansas City Royals’ bullpen has produced the lowest ERA among all major-league bullpens in 2015. Their relief corps was a featured strength as the team made it to the World Series last year. From 2012 to 2014, the Royals bullpen WAR of 17.7 is more than two wins greater than the second-place Atlanta Braves, and the bullpen is off to a great start in 2015 (even if their 3.35 FIP does not quite match their sterling 1.56 ERA). The graph below shows every bullpen’s ERA and FIP, sorted by the former.

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Things are not going particular well in Colorado, and I’m not just talking about the fact that it snowed in May. The state’s baseball team has lost nine straight games, and new GM Jeff Bridich isn’t particularly pleased with the results he’s seen as of late.

“We have a good collection of players,” said Bridich, the first-year GM whose team is 11-17 and last in the National League West. “And at this point, meaning the last two weeks of the season, they’ve added up to a bad team. I don’t think there’s any other way you can look at it. That’s not saying anything shocking. The players know that.

“There are bad stretches that befall every team in a season, or most every team in a season. This is where we see what type of resolve our players have — if they take a look around that clubhouse and deal with reality as adults and say, ‘We’re going to make some changes and do things necessary to start winning games.

…

“I continue to believe in our guys, but when you have to make changes like we did with Tyler Matzek [who was sent down to Triple-A Albuquerque over the weekend], when it’s in the best interest of the team and the player, you go ahead and give somebody else an opportunity,” Bridich said.

Unfortunately for Bridich and the Rockies, swapping out every underperforming player is logistically impossible. They’re not going to bench Carlos Gonzalez, but he’s been their worst player this season, putting up -0.6 WAR in his first 101 plate appearances. They could start taking some playing time from Justin Morneau and give it to Wilin Rosario, but that doesn’t seem like an obvious upgrade, and Morneau was pretty good for the Rockies last year, so that would seem like an overreaction to a slow start. And if the team had better pitchers than Jorge de la Rosa or Kyle Kendrick hanging around, they wouldn’t have spent some of their free agent money to sign those guys in the first place; this is not an organization overflowing with quality arms.

So yes, the Rockies can do things like demote Tyler Matzek or swap out Daniel Descalso for a different utility infielder, but moving the deck chairs around isn’t going to stop the ship from sinking. While Bridich is right that the team does have some good players, they just don’t have enough of them, and when the team’s two highest profile players aren’t performing like superstars, the rest of the roster gets exposed. And that’s what has happened early on; Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez have been mediocre and terrible respectively, and there just isn’t enough around them to pick up the slack.

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Dillon Gee will miss at least the next couple of weeks with a torn groin, but the Mets aren’t likely to suffer too much in his absence. That’s because they have uber-prospect Noah Syndergaard in the fold, who will step in and replace Gee in the rotation. Syndergaard, 22, will make his major-league debut tonight against the Cubs and figures to hold down a spot in the Mets rotation for the foreseeable future. And if you believe the Steamer projections, Syndergaard might actually provide the Mets with a sizable upgrade over Gee.

Before his call up, Syndergaard was one of the very best pitching prospects in the minors. He placed 19th in our preseason top-200 list and was easily the highest rated prospect on the Mets. Other outlets gave him even higher praise, with Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com and Baseball America ranking him 9th, 10th and 11th, respectively.

Given his stuff, it’s not hard to see why he rated so highly. Syndergaard has a sizzling fastball that sits in the mid-to-high 90’s. He complements it with a curveball and changeup that are both average pitches right now, according to Kiley McDaniel, who anticipates both ticking up to above-average (55) in the near future.

Unsurprisingly, Syndergaard checks all of the boxes statistically, as well. My KATOH system, which considers his 2014 stats, absolutely adored the 6-foot-5 righty heading into the year. His projection of 11.5 WAR through age-28 was the 6th highest of any prospect. He ranked second among pitchers, trailing only Julio Urias.

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