There’s not a soul out there that thought the 2017 Brewers would be as good as the 2017 Cubs. There’s not a soul out there that thinks the 2017 Brewers will be as good as the 2017 Cubs. And yet, the 2017 Brewers have been as good as the 2017 Cubs, at least by wins and losses, which are ultimately the only numbers that matter. The Cubs have three more wins than defeats. The Brewers can say the same of themselves. The Cubs have been billed as an active dynasty. The Brewers have been rebuilding. I’ll be damned. We’ll all be damned.

One key to understanding what’s going on: Before the start of the season, we ran our annual positional power rankings, and the Brewers rotation slotted in at 25th place. By actual WAR to this point, that same Brewers rotation ranks in seventh place. A certain amount of credit ought to go to Chase Anderson, who’s exceeding expectations. But he’s not exceeding them quite as much as Jimmy Nelson. In Nelson, it looks like the Brewers might have an ace.

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Sometimes baseball history requires an explanation. History is happening all of the time, and we try hard to point it out when it does. I don’t think requiring an explanation necessarily makes certain achievements any less remarkable, because context is important, and there are numbers that need adjustments. Like, it could take a while to convey just why last year’s Cubs defense was so amazing, but at the end, you’d understand how amazing it was. It just takes some mental digging and sorting.

Explanations, though, lose people. You’re left with a receptive audience, but the audience is smaller than it would’ve been, at the beginning. There’s baseball history of the sort that appeals to dorks, and there’s baseball history of the sort that appeals to everyone. That second kind is powerful. That second kind brings fans to their feet. Over the weekend, there was a standing ovation for Edinson Volquez. Tuesday evening, there was a standing ovation for Scooter Gennett. Scooter Gennett hit four home runs in a baseball game. That’s historic because he hit four home runs in a baseball game. That’s as simple as history’s ever going to get. And so Scooter Gennett has made himself unforgettable.

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Entering the 2017 season, Marcell Ozuna had been a roughly average offensive player over the course of his career and slightly better than that in the field. Per 600 plate appearances, that works out to something close to a three-win player. This year, Ozuna looks like he might reach 3.0 WAR by the All-Star break. He’s getting on base nearly 40% of the time and has powered up with 14 homers just a third of the way through the season. His switch from center field to left field doesn’t seem to have hurt his value.

There’s talk that Ozuna, whose salary is likely to increase through arbitration, could be a trade target. With two-plus seasons left of team control, it certainly looks like Ozuna is breaking out. That said, we’ve also seen this show before. Is this somehow different?

Back in 2014, Ozuna broke out for the first time. After a half-season of playing time the year before, Ozuna hit .269/.317/.455 and with good numbers in center field. The result: a four-win campaign. The following year, Ozuna was pretty close to average for a while, then slumped badly enough for the Marlins to send him to the minors and prevent him from becoming a super-2 arbitration player. Last year, Ozuna recorded solid numbers, hitting .266/.321/.452 and essentially matching his 2014 campaign. Unfortunately for Ozuna, the surge in offense over the last few seasons meant that his 116 wRC+ in 2014 was now just 105 last year. While hitting 5% better than average last year might not seem that great, we should remember that Ozuna broke out last year, too.

On May 20 of last season, I wrote a piece asking, “Is Marcell Ozuna Breaking Out?” At the time, Ozuna was hitting a lot like he is right now. Good power with a high BABIP has been Ozuna’s path to productive performance. Here are some relevant stats on Ozuna for this season and last season:

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The absence of Mike Trout, however unfortunate, has the possible effect of opening up the field for the American League’s MVP award. It’s also possible we’ll see a position player other than Trout lead the league in wins above replacement for the first time since 2011, when Jacoby Ellsbury posted a 9.4-win season. Trout still leads the league this season (3.3). Given that he could miss two months of time to injury, however, he could be hard pressed to finish ahead of his peers for a sixth consecutive campaign.

So that brings us to the No. 2 player on the American League leaderboard, Aaron Judge.

I received some questions about MVP odds during my Monday chat and Judge’s name came up. As impressive as Judge has been this season, including a 510-foot batting practice shot in Toronto…

… I sense there are questions, concerns about the league’s ability to punch back when it accumulates more scouting material against an inexperienced hitter who possesses both a long swing and unusual baseball body. Judge doesn’t yet have the same type of exposure to major-league pitching and defenses that other MVP candidates have. When pitchers began to refine their approach against him, will Judge be able to counter punch?

There’s already some evidence that a considerable slow down is imminent: Judge’s strikeout rate has been inching up.

While Judge deserves credit for his offseason work — including a swing adjustment that has resulted in dramatically improved bat-to-ball skills and allowed his raw power to translate into games — the forecasts call for merely a good player, not a great one. Our Depth Chart projections, which are a combination of Steamer and ZiPS with curated playing-time estimates, have Judge slashing .253/.338/.500 for the rest of the season, with 22 more homers and 2.2 wins.

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I read a FiveThirtyEight article not too long ago from Michael Salfino, and it had the following headline:

Who Needs A DH? The NL Is Outhitting The AL, Somehow

Now, I’d never actually thought before to just look at league-by-league OPS. And, since that article was published, the point around which it was built has become untrue. Nevertheless, by OPS, the leagues are close. Courtesy of Baseball Reference, here’s how the leagues have compared over more than the past century:

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Not very long ago, Sam Dyson was a revelation. He was acquired quietly, but deliberately, and he played a major role in turning around what had been an unstable 2015 Rangers bullpen. Down the stretch in 2015, and then again throughout the year in 2016, Dyson pitched like one of the more valuable relievers around, providing the Rangers the luxury of riding his sinker to one- and two-run victorious margins. When one would try to explain the Rangers’ success, you’d have to talk about the relievers, and you couldn’t talk about all of them without talking about one of them in particular.

Not very long ago, Sam Dyson was designated for assignment. The Rangers ran out of patience, and although Dyson’s going to get another opportunity, it won’t be with Texas. The team won’t be getting much back. By WPA, already, Dyson has been worth what he was a season ago, only this time with a minus sign in front of it. At -3.45, Dyson owns the lowest WPA in the game. He’s been worse even than Francisco Rodriguez. WPA usually is not a very good analytical tool. It doesn’t always reflect the true totality of a player’s worth. Yet it’s sure had Dyson figured out.

The weird thing is how little has changed. I know that Dyson’s going to be moved any minute now, but the industry doesn’t know all that much more than we do. When it comes to trying to see Sam Dyson’s future, it’s simply a whole lot of guesswork.

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Much of the focus in this still young season has been on higher launch angles, the three true outcomes, and a handful of newly minted sluggers who have quickly made an impact on the game. This week, let’s take a look at the players who have done the most damage on contact this year, analyze how they’ve done it, and assess what might lie in store for them. First, we’ll look at the AL.

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This is now the third consecutive year in which I’ve written a post about the potential misuse of defensive metrics early in the season. We all want as large a sample size as possible to gather data and make sure what we are looking at is real. That is especially true with defensive statistics, which are reliable, but take longer than other stats to become so.

While the reminder is still a useful one, this year’s edition is a bit different. Past years have necessitated the publication of two posts on UZR outliers. This year, due to the lack of outliers at the moment, one post will be sufficient.

First, let’s begin with an excerpt from the UZR primer by Mitchel Lichtman:

Most of you are familiar with OPS, on base percentage plus slugging average. That is a very reliable metric even after one season of performance, or around 600 PA. In fact, the year-to-year correlation of OPS for full-time players, somewhat of a proxy for reliability, is almost .7. UZR, in contrast, depending on the position, has a year-to-year correlation of around .5. So a year of OPS data is roughly equivalent to a year and half to two years of UZR.

Last season, I identified 10 players whose defensive numbers one-third of the way into the season didn’t line up with their career numbers: six who were underperforming and four who were overperforming. The players in the table below were all at least six runs worse than their three-year averages from previous seasons. If they had kept that pace, they would have lost two WAR in one season just from defense alone. None of those six players kept that pace, and all improved their numbers over the course of the season.

The next table depicts the guys who appeared to be overperforming early on. If these players were to keep pace with their early-season exploits, the rest-of-season column would be double the one-third column. Brandon Crawford actually came fairly close to reaching that mark; nobody else did, however, as the other three put up worse numbers over the last two-thirds of the season than they had in its first third.

Just like with the underperfomers, all four of overperformers had recorded defensive marks six runs off their established levels. Replicating those figures over the rest of the season would have meant a two-win gain on defense alone. Again, no one accomplished that particular feat.

A funny thing happened when I ran the numbers for this season. There weren’t any outliers of a magnitude similar to last season or the season before. It’s possible you missed the announcement at the end of April, but there have been some changes made to UZR to help improve the metric.

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Corbin Burnes is carving up hitters. Recently promoted to Milwaukee’s Double-A affiliate, the Biloxi Shuckers, the 22-year-old right-hander boasts a 0.99 ERA, and he’s allowed just 37 hits in 63-and-two-thirds innings. The bulk of that dominance has come with the high-A Carolina Mudcats, with whom he spent the months of April and May.

Drafted by the Brewers last June out of St. Mary’s (California) College, Burnes is looking every bit a steal as a fourth-round selection. Plus stuff is a big reason, as is a take-no-prisoners attitude. Unlike a lot of young pitchers, Burnes doesn’t shy away from the power-pitcher label.

“I definitely consider myself a power pitcher,” Burnes told me before making what is thus far his lone Double-A start (which was truncated by weather). “I’ve got a power fastball and a pretty hard slider. The goal for us is to get a guy out in three pitches or less, but I’m not trying to feed the middle of the plate and let them hit it. For the most part, I’m out there trying to miss bats.”

He’s been missing a fair number of them. In 99.1 professional innings, the confident right-hander has punched out 101 batters. And when he has induced contact, he hasn’t been burdened by barrels. Burnes’s batting-average against as a pro is a flyweight .178.

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