All offseason long, baseball fans scribble down hypothetical lineup cards and depth charts, imagining which players will star for their favorite teams. Once you get past the household names, the exercise inevitably gets to players whose time, these hypothetical fans assure, is about to come. This is the year, it just has to be.
Two weeks into April does not a season make, but with actual games in the ledger now (each club has played at least 12 at time of publication), we can finally take our amateur assessments out of the realm of the imaginary and into the observable world. We have real games with real data to pore over now, and it’s our job to separate the stats that will inform the rest of the season from the noise.
