At 10-1, the Mets own the National League’s best record, but the bigger surprise relative to preseason expectations may be the Pirates, who after Thursday’s 6-1 victory over the Cubs are 9-3, are tied with the Diamondbacks for the league’s second-best record. After a 75-win 2017 campaign and then an offseason during which they dealt away Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen and pared their payroll to the majors’ fourth-smallest, the Bucs appeared destined to spend 2018 languishing with the other rebuilding teams. They may do so yet, but for the moment, their hot start is worth a closer look.

The 2017 Pirates were not much fun. They had just one month with a record above .500 (a 14-11 July), never got further than a game above .500, and finished 13th in the NL in scoring, with a lineup featuring just four players to produce a 100 wRC+ or better (McCutchen, Josh Bell, David Freese, and Josh Harrison) — and just two with a WAR of at least 2.0 (McCutchen and Harrison). Starling Marte drew an 80-game PED suspension, Jung Ho Kang missed the entire season after failing to secure a work visa in the wake of his third DUI conviction in South Korea, Francisco Cervelli was limited to 81 games by a variety of injuries, and Gregory Polanco regressed significantly (more on him momentarily).

On the other side of the ball, they were seventh in run prevention, but Cole looked more plow horse than thoroughbred, and while Jameson Taillon made an inspiring in-season return from testicular cancer, top pitching prospect Tyler Glasnow was pummeled for a 7.69 ERA and 6.30 FIP. Travis Sawchik has the gory details of the big picture.

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The New York Mets have the best record in baseball. The Mets, whose biggest free-agent signing was a player from last year’s 70-win team, are 10-1 on the season. The Mets, whose two biggest pitching acquisitions have compiled 2.1 totals innings so far this season, are 3.5 games up in their division and have already swept presumptive favorite Washington Nationals.

As Jeff Sullivan detailed earlier this week, no team has improved its playoff odds since the season began as much as the Mets. Winning 10 out of 11 games is certainly a surprising way to start. It would be surprising for any team — even the Astros have around just a 3% chance of winning 10 out of 11 games — but it isn’t all that surprising that the Mets are good right now. They should expect life to get tougher as the season goes on.

To provide a sense of how unlikely the Mets were to start 10-1, the graph below shows the odds of each win total from zero to 11 based on the assumption of the Mets as an 85-win team.

Eighty-seven times out of 100, the Mets end up with four to eight wins — with a one-in-120 shot at winning 10 games. I should also note that their schedule has been roughly neutral thus far, with the series against the Nationals balanced out by games against the Marlins. As for this version of the Mets, it might seem improbable after last year’s difficulties, but the Mets probably weren’t as bad in 2017 as their record ultimately suggested.

Consider a brief list of the factors that contributed to the Mets’ woes last year:

• A mere 30.1 innings from ace Noah Syndergaard, who was projected for 5.6 WAR.
• A mere 81 games from Yoenis Cespedes, who was projected for around three wins.
• Combined replacement-level production from the bottom of the rotation. Chris Flexen, Robert Gsellman, Matt Harvey, Steven Matz, Tommy Milone, Tyler Pill, Zack Wheeler, and Adam Wilk made 88 starts, put up a 6.12 ERA, and recorded -0.2 WAR.
• Despite good performances from Addison Reed and Jerry Blevins, one of the worst bullpens in baseball.
• Almost no production from the third-base position, which produced a 93 wRC+ and 0.6 WAR.

There are other factors, but those appear to be the main issues that caused the Mets to lose more than 90 games. We will look at what has changed or not changed in a bit, but first let’s consider that the Mets’ 70 wins might not have been a good representation of their talent level even with the issues above. The graph below shows team WAR in 2017 along with team wins from last year.

Notice first the very clear linear relationship. The more WAR a team accumulates, the more wins they get. If someone doesn’t believe in WAR, they are ignoring a very close relationship between WAR and wins. The relationship isn’t perfect, of course. Some teams (the ones above the trend line) outperformed their WAR totals, while others (below the line) underperformed them. Looking at the distance from the line can provide a sense of how much a team over- or under-achieved. The Mets show up as one of the biggest underachievers. The five teams with the closest WAR totals to the Mets — the Angels, Mariners, Marlins, Rockies, and Twins — won an average of 81 games last year, with the Marlins’ 77 wins representing the lowest figure. Even with the poor performances in the rotation and the bullpen, the Mets should have been better last season.

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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels, and (most importantly) FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel* and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on any updated, midseason-type list will also be excluded from eligibility.

*Note: I’ve excluded Baseball America’s list this year not due to any complaints with their coverage, but simply because said list is now behind a paywall.

For those interested in learning how Fringe Five players have fared at the major-league level, this recent post offers that kind of information. The short answer: better than a reasonable person would have have expected. In the final analysis, though, the basic idea here is to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

*****Sandy Baez, RHP, Detroit (Profile)
The right-handed Baez appeared among the Five on a couple of occasions last year. Signed for just $49,000 out of the Dominican in 2011, Baez features arm speed atypical of such modest pedigree.

Nor is he necessarily what colleague Eric Longenhagen would characterize as an “arm-strength lottery ticket”: Baez exhibited sufficient polish last season to record one of the better strikeout- and walk-rate differentials at High-A last season. He then struck out nearly a third of the batters he faced in a late-season two-start stay with Double-A Erie.

Baez was assigned to the Eastern League to begin the 2018 season, as well, and was excellent in his debut against Reading, striking out 10 of 17 batters faced while walking just one (box). A second start — in this case, against Bowie (box) — was more modest (20 TBF, 3 K, 1 BB), but the overall result after a week is strong.

Here’s a sequence from Baez’s first start, featuring a breaking ball, a slightly more impressive breaking ball, and then a high fastball for the strikeout:

https://gfycat.com/DirectAncientChupacabra

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The Playoff Odds page looks different! The playoff-odds data and simulation method remains the same; however, we have revamped our reporting page to make it easier to understand and more powerful.

The most noticeable changes are the table layout and the mobile layout. We’ve tried to make it easier to understand what the columns mean for users who are new to the site. The goal of the mobile layout is to allow users to reach the most important information more quickly. Every column on the desktop page is viewable on the mobile layout by clicking the “Full” button.

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It’s probably nothing, right? It’s probably one of those things we only notice because it’s the start of the season, and there’s not enough signal yet to drown out the noise. You know how early statistics can be. Ryan Flaherty is batting .333. Gary Sanchez is batting .122. Every so often, Flaherty will bat .333, and every so often, Sanchez will bat .122, but most of the time we don’t care, because most of the time we don’t even know. That’s the beauty of baseball come July and August. The sheer size of the data samples prevents us from looking like idiots.

So, it’s probably nothing. I don’t want to alarm you. At the same time, I’m finding something hard not to notice. I have to at least raise this as a point of conversation. You’re familiar with Freddie Freeman. Amazing hitter. Best player on the Braves. For a month and a half to open last year, Freeman performed like a league MVP, before getting unfortunately hurt. There’s nothing weird about the fact that Freeman looks good again. Got a 208 wRC+. There is, however, something weird about this.

Now Freddie Freeman isn’t swinging. All right.

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The Mets are off to a great start. They have increased their playoff odds more than other club since Opening Day. The Mets always had significant potential, and downside — considerable error bars in either direction — given both the club’s talent and injury concerns.

Now a couple turns through the rotation, the Mets’ starters have generally pitched well and remain healthy. Michael Conforto, meanwhile, has made a remarkable return from his shoulder injury. The Mets are being rewarded early for electing to bolster this talented, but highly volatile, core with the signings of Jay Bruce, Todd Frazier, and Anthony Swarzak.

But the Mets could also be better.

This week, the club sent down their second-best hitter (217 wRC+) and position player to date (0.3) in Brandon Nimmo, ostensibly because there was no place to put him following the return of Conforto. The Mets have Yoenis Cespedes in left, Bruce in right, and a resurgent Adrian Gonzalez at first base. The Mets also have a quality reserve outfield option in Juan Lagares. Nimmo is blocked. But let’s hope he’s not sequestered in Las Vegas for too long. The Mets have sidelined one of the more intriguing players in the game.

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The Phillies wouldn’t have signed Jake Arrieta if they didn’t think they had some chance to win right away. Arrieta would improve that case himself, and his acquisition addressed what had been a thin pitching staff, but even a few months ago, the Phillies were expressing some cautious optimism. Aaron Nola, obviously, is incredibly good. The team was willing to dismiss Jerad Eickhoff’s rough 2017 as a consequence of injuries. And much of the organization was excited about Nick Pivetta. With Nola, Eickhoff, and Pivetta, the Phillies could dream on a rotation that could hold its own, even before Arrieta came along.

Pivetta now has three 2018 starts under his belt, and the last two have been terrific. In fairness, we’re talking about a Marlins lineup that’s not at 100%, and a Reds lineup that’s even further from 100%. The competition has not been stiff. But Pivetta’s struck out 16 of 47 batters, without issuing one single walk. There’s improvement in the results, and even more important than that, there’s improvement in the process. As a rookie in 2017, Pivetta flashed a promising weapon. It would appear he’s now using it with more confidence. It’s time for the National League to get accustomed to seeing Nick Pivetta’s curveball.

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Baseball is enjoyable this time of year. It’s like catching up with a friend we haven’t seen in a while. We spend April trying to figure out what the game is — not as it is right now, I mean, but as it will be all season. We parse through small bits of over- and underperformance, endeavoring to sift signal from the noise. Shohei Ohtani has been great. That probably means something! Ryan Flaherty has also been good. We might expect that means less. The Dodgers will likely recover; the Padres likely won’t.

With any friend, part of learning the who of them is knowing what matters and what is mere flotsam; alma maters and disappointments, cities lived in. Sayings only our mothers use. It’s why it is so hard to make new friends as an adult: grown-ups have all these stories from way back, full of people we don’t know, doing all sorts of things. It’s a lot to learn.

And while baseball’s who shifts around and grows, changing with new players and seasons, there are bits that endure, memories of childhood and cut grass that constitute a more fixed personality. I thought I might look beyond April to other artifacts, stories from way back full of people. So, inspired by how little they change year to year, I made perhaps an odd choice — namely, of reading The Official Professional Rules of Baseball and The Official Baseball Rules (2018 Edition), to see what baseball tells us about itself.

Here are a few of the things I found.

Baseball allows for small moments of grace…
Sports inspire intense competition. It’s sort of the whole thing. Once play begins, teams are generally expected to press their advantage, however minute. It’s why managers challenge when an opposing runner comes of the bag for the briefest of instants. It’s annoying, and a bit fussy, but there might be an out hiding in there. Can’t just give up an out! Baseball knows this about itself, this impulse to be fastidious in the service of winning, but it also knows that we humans are prone to make mistakes. Managers have to wear those mistakes when they come in the fourth inning, but earlier, before the stakes are set, baseball allows its generals a bit of grace.

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In a game that will be remembered more for a bench-clearing seventh-inning brawl between the beasts of the AL East — we’ll get to that, you blood-lusting rubberneckers — Gary Sanchez scored some points with a few swings of the bat himself on Wednesday night against the Red Sox. While the early struggles of reigning NL MVP and Bronx newcomer Giancarlo Stanton have gotten more attention, it was the Yankees’ 25-year-old catcher who owned the dubious title not just as the team’s coldest hitter, but as the majors’ single worst batting title-qualified player in terms of both wRC+ and WAR. Whether it was the intimate confines of Fenway Park, the struggles of the Red Sox pitching staff, or the inevitability of positive regression, by the fourth inning of the Yankees’ 10-7 victory, Gary got his groove back, at least for one night. Sanchez clubbed two homers and added a double, driving in four runs and more than doubling his season totals in hits, homers, and RBI.

Sanchez, who last year led all major-league catchers with 33 homers and a 130 wRC+ while batting .278/.345/.531, began the 2018 season in a 2-for-36 skid. Through Tuesday, his positive contributions at the plate could be counted on Mordecai Brown’s pitching hand: an RBI double off the Blue Jays’ John Axford on Opening Day, a two-run homer off the Rays’ Blake Snell on April 4, and a hit-by-pitch against the Orioles’ Darren O’Day on April 5. He went 0-for-17 between the first two hits, and 0-for-15 between the latter one and Wednesday’s game. Since he hadn’t drawn a single walk, that hit-by-pitch juiced his batting line all the way to .056/.081/.167. That’s a -42 wRC+, which is something closer to an ASCII approximation of a smashed fly than it is a comprehensible comparison to league average. He entered Wednesday as one of eight qualifiers with a negative wRC+

Sanchez had some good company in this particularly decrepit Small Sample Theater: a guy who hit even more homers last year (Morrison), two of the game’s best defensive center fielders (Kiermaier and Buxton, who is apparently constitutionally incapable of hitting major-league pitching before May 1), a top prospect (Brinson), and so on.

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