On Monday, we talked a bit about Bryce Harper, and the fact that he is making a legitimate run at Mike Trout for the title of best player in baseball. Harper is somehow building off of last year’s dominant season, and at 23, he’s taking his remarkable performance up another level. But Harper isn’t the only 23 year old superstar playing near the beltway, and remarkably, he hasn’t even been the best player in the area this year. That title belongs to Manny Machado.

Through the first couple weeks of the season, Machado ranks second in the majors in batting average (.407), fourth in on-base percentage (.467), and second in slugging percentage (.796). This across-the-board dominance means that his .530 wOBA edges out Harper’s .526 wOBA for the top spot on the leaderboard, and Machado is the primary reason the Orioles are in first place in the AL East. While he has been overshadowed by the remarkable early-career success of Trout and Harper, and to some extent by Carlos Correa’s arrival last summer, it’s important to realize just how great Machado has become.

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If you look at the positional adjustments for Wins Above Replacement on our website, it looks like left and right field are equally valuable, and the second-easiest positions to play on the field. Generally, that seems about right — first base is where you put your slugger, and the corner-outfield spots is where you put your other sluggers.

And yet, if you look for bats that qualified for the batting title (and didn’t play catcher, the most platooned position on the field), you’ll find that there are fewer left fielders than any other position, and significantly so. Only 15 left fielders qualified last year. Even shortstop had 20 guys who reached that threshold. If you look at the Fans Scouting Report, left fielders were better defensively last year (overall and in almost every component) than they had been before in the life of the Report.

It seems that there’s a bit of a difference between left and right field, and in the types of players who are playing those positions. So I thought it made sense to ask the players what the difference actually was. It’s not as easy as putting the better arm in right field because he has a longer throw to third base.

Tim Leiper, Blue Jays first base coach: “The nuances for me… when the ball is hit directly at you, it’s learning how to open up toward the line. If you’re in right field and it’s a right-handed hitter, and he hits it directly at you, he probably stayed inside the ball and it’s going to slice to the line a little bit. Same thing with a left-handed hitter to left field. But I find that left-handed hitters actually have more slice to the ball than right-handed hitters. That’s probably because they’re right-hand dominant. The spin is different. I think the right-handed hitter’s balls have a lot more chance to stay true. I also think some outfielders maybe open up in one direction better than the other.”

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The Orioles have turned some heads with their excellent start to the year. Although they’ve lost their last two games, they’re still 7-2 and have one of the best records in baseball. Naturally, a team projected to finish last in their division doesn’t open the year with seven straight wins without help from some unlikely contributors. Perhaps none of those contributors has been more unlikely than their new outfielder, Joey Rickard. Rickard’s started all nine of Baltimore’s games thus far, and has gotten on base in every one of them. He’s slashing a smooth .306/.325/.472. With a strong spring, Rickard pried playing time away from Korean import Hyun-soo Kim, and he doesn’t appear to be looking back.

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Mark Trumbo is all about distance. The middle-of-the-order Oriole (and erstwhile Angel, D-Back and Mariner) has averaged 29 home runs in his four uninterrupted seasons. Many have been bombs. He has a 475-footer to his credit and 17 of last year’s 22 blasts carried 400 feet or more. His three this year have gone 412, 415 and 428, respectively.

One thing he’s not is a high-on-base guy. A notorious free-swinger, Trumbo has a career 6.5% walk rate and a .302 OBP to go with his .258 batting average and .460 slugging percentage. It’s not that he wouldn’t like to reach base at a healthier clip. His skill set is simply that of a slugger.

Trumbo — hitting .389/.421/.667 on the young season— talked about his game when Baltimore visited Fenway Park earlier this week.

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Trumbo on maturing as a hitter: “I’d like to think I’ve gotten better in a lot of areas. I’ve had one injury-plagued year (2014) — I played half a season — but I was still on pace to drive in over 100 runs. But as far as managing the count and picking spots — being an overall smarter hitter — I’m more advanced than I was my first two or three years in Anaheim.

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The way these things – meaning “baseball” – go, the Orioles probably won’t be undefeated for long. Baseball is all about losing. The best teams lose a lot. The worst teams lose a lot a lot. I’m not sure the Orioles are the latter of those things, but even if they’re the first a loss is coming, so we’d better get to this while we can.

Have you seen the standings? Jeff Sullivan examined them a couple days ago here at website Fangraphs dot com and, further, he examined the teams that have improved their chances of making the playoffs the most since the season began.

Now hold that thought because we’re going to come back to it. Remember the preseason? That’s the time we all pretend we know what’s going to happen and make predictions about the upcoming season. These predictions are stupid stupid stupid predictions that will always be wrong because predictions about baseball are always wrong. Anyway, if you examined (lots of examining!) those preseason predictions — specifically the ones concerning the American League Eastern Division — you would find many different permutations. You’d find people who predicted the Red Sox to win the division, others who predicted the Rays, and many others who predicted the Blue Jays. Some even predicted the Yankees. Did anyone pick the Orioles? I didn’t see anyone. The Orioles were the one team it seems nobody thought was going to do squat in the AL East this season. So, of course of course of course they’re 7-0 and in first place. Of course.

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It’s not easy to hit a home run to right field in Fenway Park. It’s actually quite difficult to hit a home run to right field in Fenway Park, even as home runs go. There’s a common misconception that Fenway yields a bunch of cheap dingers. By quantity, Fenway keeps itself reasonable. But it does claim one particular type of cheap dinger, the one where a hitter manages to wrap the ball around Pesky’s Pole. If you place the ball just right down the line, you can hit it 305 feet and take your four bases. It’s absurd when it happens, but so is the fact that we dedicate so much of our attention to the sport in the first place. Don’t tug on that absurdity thread, unless you’re prepared to question more than you’re used to.

Tuesday afternoon, I was watching the Orioles play the Red Sox, and J.J. Hardy slashed a liner to right that bounced off the top of the fence beside the pole. I thought to myself, “ehh, maybe that’s worth an article.” Shortly thereafter I left the house and didn’t think much about it. Imagine my surprise when I found out Hardy did it again, a few innings later. The batted ball itself was different, but the result was the same: Twice in one contest, the right-handed Hardy homered next to the pole. That’s a whole different level of absurd.

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The Orioles had to wait through a rainless rain delay, and then later through a more rainful rain delay, but in the end, they did walk off to victory over the Twins, on a Matt Wieters RBI single. Ordinarily you’d think the win was the most important thing. Every individual win matters — the Orioles’ playoff odds have now gone up — so it’s nice to have that to celebrate after a day that simply dragged on. It was a well-earned win, following a game that in no way went according to plan.

Yet for my taste, it’s not the win that’s most encouraging. One win is the result of one game. There was a positive sign in there that could mean something over another 30-odd games. There are questions everywhere in the Orioles’ rotation, and their Monday starter faced just six batters before rain forced him out, but Chris Tillman showed something before his appearance was over. He whiffed five of the six batters, but even more importantly, there’s significance in what he was pitching.

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The other day, in a spring-training game against the Braves, Miguel Gonzalez was basically pitching for his rotation slot. That might’ve been surprising enough, given how much Gonzalez has meant to the Orioles in the past, but he did have a rough 2015 and a rougher month of March. Anyhow, Gonzalez went five innings, allowing a run with no walks and four strikeouts. The results were solid, even if they could’ve been worse. Yet Gonzalez still got released. Something just wasn’t good enough, and the Orioles decided to go with other options.

Maybe “stunning” would be too strong, but the reality of Gonzalez getting released is unexpected. The Orioles are anything but deep in the rotation, and apparently Gonzalez’s former teammates are less than ecstatic. It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, given Gonzalez’s presence, but it seems to me there are three ways to think about this. One of them, I prefer over the others.

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I’m an optimistic player evaluator, and I recognize that. I try to see the good in what players can do, so I liked the Orioles’ idea of signing Hyun-soo Kim out of Korea. Now, Kim has not had a good spring training to this point, so he hasn’t made the best first impression. He also probably hasn’t made his last impression, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to see this headline from Ken Rosenthal:

This is something the Orioles have done before. A headline on Orioles.com says the team dismissed the report, but this post from Eduardo A. Encina makes it sound like Kim is indeed on the outside looking in. The Orioles might at least try to send Kim to the minors. In part, that’s because Kim hasn’t looked good, and he was hitless through his first 23 at-bats. Kim has to know he hasn’t yet been impressive. But there’s another factor — a surprising one — and that factor goes by the name of Joey Rickard. Rickard came to camp just hoping to make the roster, but based on the circumstances, he might become an outfield starter.

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From last Friday’s chat:

10:30
Denji: I’m expecting the average Orioles game to be a 7-5 loss where they hit 3 solo home runs and strike out 15 times. Could they threaten both HR and K team records?

10:32
Jeff Sullivan: They’re not going to hit 264 home runs.

Twist!

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