On Tuesday, I wrote about the surprisingly strong early play of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and whether it was time to talk about them as potential contenders, at least for a Wild Card spot. Of course, Arizona isn’t the only expected also-ran to be playing well. It’s May 25th, and the Milwaukee Brewers are in first place. But despite thinking the second-place Diamondbacks may have put themselves in a position where going for it could make sense, I don’t think the Brewers have yet played themselves into being a buyer.

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When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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The Brewers’ Jared Hughes is the type of pitcher who’s endangered.

When Hughes was one of the more effective relievers in baseball for the Pirates from 2013 to -15, he relied on one pitch — a sinker — that he threw time after time in the lower part of the strike zone. Over the last year-plus, however, two important trends in the game have conspired against Hughes. For starters, the strike zone shrunk for the first time in the PITCHf/x era last season, according to Jon Rogele’s research. Worse, it shrunk in one particular area, down, where Hughes likes to pitch. Jeff Sullivan found that the zone continued to contract in spring training. The other trend is that more and more hitters have gone in search of fly balls, adjusting their swing planes to become more effective at lifting pitches down in the zone.

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Let’s do some quick review! One stat we have on our pages shows up as IFFB%. This measures the rate of infield pop-ups per fly ball hit. You know this measure — this is the one where Joey Votto is a freak.

Another stat we have on our pages shows up as HR/FB. This measures the rate of home runs per fly ball hit. You also know this measure — this is the one where Aaron Judge is a freak. (And, seemingly, everybody else.)

Both of these numbers make sense to look at for individuals, and for teams. Let’s think about teams. In fact, let’s think about one specific team, that being the Milwaukee Brewers. This season, the Brewers have hit pop-ups on 6.2% of their fly balls. That’s the lowest rate for any team. Also, this season, the Brewers have hit home runs on 20.6% of their fly balls. That’s the highest rate for any team. The Brewers currently rank as the best by each measure. That means they rank No. 1.

We have this batted-ball data going back to 2002, which gives us 15 full individual seasons, and one partial one. Combining everything, here is a table of the 10 best offensive teams by average rank in these two stats.

In short, the Brewers are trying to be the first team in a decade and a half or so to be better than anyone else in terms of pop-ups and homers. The 2004 Yankees came tantalizingly close to dual No. 1s, but they were narrowly edged out in pop-ups by the Tigers. I’m sure the Yankees didn’t mind, and it’s not like this is the end goal of the whole Brewers organization, but this is, overall, a positive reflection of the lineup through to this point. Although they’ve swung and missed, this is how you make the most of fly balls.

As it happens, these Brewers are actually tied with the 2015 Giants for what would be the lowest pop-up rate in the whole window. And no team has previously reached even 17% home runs per fly ball; the Brewers are close to 21%. So, technically, they rank No. 1 in each category this season, and they also rank No. 1 in each category over all 15+ seasons. This is a remarkable partial achievement!

In closing, this year’s team with the worst average rank is the Red Sox, who are 27th by pop-ups and 29th by homers. No team has ever finished last in both categories. The closest was the 2014 Royals, who were worst in homers and second-worst in pop-ups. The 2014 Royals lost the World Series in seven games. Don’t accuse me of overselling.

PITTSBURGH – Baseball players are often late risers, working second-shift hours. As such, Eric Thames typically began his days in Changwon, South Korea, around 11 a.m. local time. He went through a series of stretching exercises in his apartment and then departed for lunch.

His home was about a mile from the ballpark in Changwon, a southeastern port city positioned on an inlet that flows to the East China Sea. For lunch, there were five of six American-style style restaurants nearby. There was a burger joint, Italian and Mexican restaurants. Web sites created by American expats documented all the options. He would eat alone, reading his Kindle or iPhone, skimming through articles. He would then walk, or travel by Onewheel skateboard, to Massan Stadium, the home of the NC Dinos. He would arrive early, and hit early, alone, for 30 or 40 minutes. Afterward, he would read more in the clubhouse as he tried to fill in the hours before first pitch.

During most of his time with the Dinos — owned by NCSoft, a South Korean video-game developer — Thames had only two American teammates and both had brought their families along with them. After home games, or on the road, Thames would often retire to his apartment or hotel room. For three years of his life, and of his professional career, Thames was often alone.

“I was so bored over there,” Thames told FanGraphs. “The language barrier was really tough. For me, it was a lot of time by myself. I didn’t speak any [Korean]. All the other American [players] had families and stuff, so they are with their kids. So I’m just online reading stuff, and I’m bored, and I’m pissed because I’m 0-for-15. ‘Let’s figure out what’s going on here.’ So I started looking up video.”

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Yes, ThamesGraphs is still in full force. I’ll write about someone else eventually.

You know the Thames story by now. You probably also know that a lot of it has been written against the Cincinnati Reds. The Brewers have played seven games against the Reds already, and in those seven games, Thames has launched 8 of his 11 home runs. He’s slugging 1.400 against them, and it’s easy to dismiss his early success as just mashing bad pitching. After all, the Reds just set the all-time record for home runs allowed last year, and their current staff is missing Anthony Desclafani, their best starting pitcher. We have the Reds projected as the worst rotation in baseball.

So since this comes up so often, I figure we might as well show what he’s doing against everyone else. Here’s Eric Thames‘ 2017 batting line if you eliminate the seven games against Cincinnati.

If Thames had been benched for all of the games against the Reds, he’d still rank 9th in MLB in wRC+. And, of course, that’s without taking away any results from anyone else because we deemed part of their competition too weak to include in the calculations.

Yes, Thames destroyed the Reds. He also destroyed the Cubs, Rockies, Cardinals, and Blue Jays. The 8 of 11 home runs is a nice headline stat, but the reality is that Thames has hit against good and bad pitching this year, and his numbers haven’t been that heavily inflated by facing weak pitching early. Facing the Reds a bunch has helped, but he’s doing work against everyone.

On Tuesday, I ran a poll, asking what you would pay Eric Thames now, given what he’s done to MLB pitching — and the Reds — over the first three weeks of the season. When asked what kind of annual salary you’d agree to under the same three year term that he signed this winter, a majority of the responders (56%) selected $11-$15 million per year. The weighted average of all the votes came out to just under $15 million, so the crowd estimated that a fair three-year contract for Thames now would be something like $45 million.

And while I think there are valid concerns about the lack of information we have concerning how Thames will adjust as the league adjusts to him, I still think that number is overly conservative. If I were tasked with crafting an offer for Thames at this point, and followed the same constraint that he was only accepting three year offers to put it on the same scale as the one he signed this winter, I’d offer him the Edwin Encarnacion deal: $60 million over three years.

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Those who witnessed Eric Thames play in South Korea aren’t so surprised about his exploits in the States this April. After all, he was dubbed “God” there while playing for the NC Dinos in the southeastern port of Changwon.

Over the last couple of weeks my colleagues at FanGraphs have written about the scary, scarier, and scariest feats and underlying performance metrics of Thames.

On Tuesday, FanGraphs editor Dave Cameron asked the people what they would now pay for Thames. (FWIW, I chose to pay Thames $11-15 million of my make-believe dollars per annum. You can still vote!)

Thames continued to mash Tuesday evening…

And Thames continues to be drug tested…

Even if the Reds’ staff remains mostly equivalent to KBO pitching — kidding (kind of)! — Thames has been Bonds-ian over the first few weeks of the season.

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Over the last few years, we’ve been called TroutGraphs more than a few times, because we write about Mike Trout a lot. Well, TroutGraphs might officially be taking a year off, because 2017 appears to be the year of ThamesGraphs. Yes, after we put his name in the headline of three posts and a podcast last week, I’m writing about him again today. Sorry, rest of baseball. We’ll get back to you all eventually.

Yesterday, Thames did Thames things, launching two more home runs and drawing two more walks, reaching base four of the five times he came to the plate. His season line is now at .373/.481/.910, and he’s now one home run away from having as many long balls this year as the Red Sox. At +1.8 WAR, Thames has already produced the entire season’s worth of value for which we projected him before the season started, and the consensus was that our projections were wildly optimistic. Apparently they weren’t optimistic enough.

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Sometimes baseball is good, and sometimes baseball is bad, but always, baseball is weird. It can be weird because a player gets hit by pitches in four plate appearances in a row. It can be weird because a game ends with a strikeout, and then everyone celebrates, and then the umpire decides the pitch the batter missed wasn’t actually missed after all, even though it clearly and totally was, and then the game awkwardly resumes and ends with a strikeout a second time. And it can be weird because a guy like Kyle Hendricks walks a guy like Tommy Milone on a number like four pitches. There’s always this undercurrent of weird, and from time to time it bursts to the surface like a baseball-y geyser.

Think about what we have here. This event just took place earlier Wednesday afternoon. Kyle Hendricks is the pitcher people have loved to compare to Greg Maddux. At times, the comparison hasn’t even seemed all that crazy, and Maddux could use a bucket of baseballs to go hummingbird hunting. Tommy Milone, meanwhile, is and will forever be Tommy Milone, and not only is Tommy Milone a pitcher, but he’s also a pitcher you might not have even realized was still pitching in the majors. He is! Although, this afternoon, he was both pitching and hitting. As a hitter, he walked on four pitches, against Kyle Hendricks. OK.

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