Two stats to believe in this early on -- and one to forget

By Mike Petriello | 12:06 AM EDT

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As of Tuesday, most teams will have played approximately 10 games, which is both a lot – that’s 60% of an entire NFL season – and, more accurately, really not very much at all. Given the length of the Major League season, that’s barely more than 6% of the year. It’s so, so little. Each team’s top starter has maybe started twice thus far. Temperatures are cold. ABS is new. The Rays just played their first home game on Monday. Andy Pages is hitting .471. There’s so much more season to go.

Of course, accurately stating “you’d never really worry too much about a 10-game stretch in late May, so don’t worry too much about the season-opening stretch” doesn’t really reflect the way fans and players think about such things. A hot start can feel like everything. An early skid can seem like a disaster.

That's usually not true, but what can we take away that has some positive meaning? Or, from the other side: What can we safely ignore? Let’s take a look at a few of the interesting early-season metrics and see if any of them, over the last few years, actually looked anything like what they ended up being at the end of the season. Let’s find out, looking through April 10 of each of the past three seasons. (All stats entering play Monday night.)

1. Can you believe in: good or bad defense?

You’d think the answer to this should be “no, absolutely not, a week-plus of defense can’t tell you much,” given that it usually takes an entire season or more to really feel comfortable about fielding stats. (That’s for obvious reasons: defenders don’t get as many chances to shine as pitchers or batters do, and when they do, it only really matters on the difficult chances anyway, which are themselves tricky to define to everyone’s satisfaction.)

But, also, when Pete Crow-Armstrong, Patrick Bailey, Bobby Witt Jr., and Fernando Tatis Jr. are already showing very highly at the top of Statcast’s fielding metrics, it’s worth at least a look. Can a good or bad start in fielding predict what’s to come?

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Let’s stick with a team-level view for now, where you can see the Braves, Blue Jays, D-backs, Cardinals, and Dodgers are off to strong starts, while the Angels, Twins, Rays, and Royals are having a lot of trouble.

If the first week-plus were totally random, we’d expect to see absolutely no connection at all between the first 10 days and the rest of the season. That’s not exactly what happened here. Let’s look at the top 10 teams and bottom 10 teams, early on, through April 10, and see how they landed by the end of the season, for each of the last few years.

Final rank of Top 10 early fielding teams

Final rank of Bottom 10 early fielding teams

On average, the top 10 early teams finished with a strong rank by the end of the year. On average, the teams that got off to a bad start finished in the bottom half of the league, defensively, six months later. You can see the chart for 2024 here, if you want; there’s a noisy but clear connection between the first 6% of the season and the entirety of it. The others look like it.

There are exceptions, always. The 2023 Padres were not a good fielding team to start, but ended up top-5. Last year’s Rockies, who had been good defensively the previous two seasons, got off to a good start last year too, before everything fell apart. But in general, sure, there’s some signal here, even this early, at least at the extremes. There would sort of have to be if you can already see Tatis and Crow-Armstrong up there.

Likely good news for: teams we projected would be good, like the Blue Jays and D-backs

Likely bad news for: teams we projected would be weak, like the Angels, Royals, and Twins

2. Should you already worry about batting average with RISP (runners in scoring position)?

Trick question! This is never really meaningful, particularly if you remember this graph, which is a complete and utter mess:

You might even remember such things as “last year, the Mets were 25th in April and then in August had the best month any team had put together over the last decade.” After which, of course, 10 teams were better than they were in September. This is the sort of thing that can win a lot of games, but is almost never really a repeatable skill beyond the general overall strength of an offense, no matter how much people would like it to be.

If we repeat the same thing we just did for fielding, we’ll find some different results. Batting average by itself is noisy, and to cut it down to just times where runners are in scoring position – which eliminates about three-quarters of all plate appearances – makes it even noisier.

Final rank of Top 10 early BA-RISP teams

Final rank of Bottom 10 early BA-RISP teams

Maybe – maybe – you can get a little from that. But the better evaluation is “actually, this all ends up averaging to the middle of the pack anyway.” The examples end up being hilarious; 2023’s best team at this, the Orioles, were 23rd in the early going. In 2024, the Mets ended up being 9th overall after that awful start. Last year, three of the nine best BA/RISP teams early on ended up in the bottom six overall after the full season (Minnesota, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh). This year’s third-worst team, Toronto, was last year’s best team.

Is this going to make fans of this year’s Reds, Jays, or Red Sox feel better, given that those three are off to a particularly wretched start here? Probably not. But it’s worth the reminder anyway. Detroit, for example, isn’t likely to keep hitting .361 with runners in scoring position. It essentially can’t be done.

Likely good news for: any team off to a bad start

Likely bad news for: any team off to a good start

If that feels like a cop-out of a takeaway, it is. This just doesn't matter right now.

3) The hitters who are blasting off

Like fastball velocity, which is meaningful almost immediately, bat speed is very real very quickly.

As you’d expect, when you can already see the usual sluggers atop the 2026 bat speed list. But while it’s very cool that Cam Smith, Tyler Stephenson, and Colt Keith are showing big bat speed increases from last year, let’s go a step further.

One of our favorite if lesser-used metrics is called blasts, which is essentially “how often do you square up the ball and with a fast swing.” It’s great to square up the ball – quality hitters like Steven Kwan, Mookie Betts, and Alex Bregman usually rate near the top here, even without elite bat speed. It’s also great to swing the bat really hard – this is where you’ll find Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Kyle Schwarber, though this usually comes with more whiffs. It’s really, really good to do both.

That’s easy to show, too. Over the last two seasons, blasted baseballs have a nearly 100% hard-hit rate and a .547/1.138 AVG/SLG, while non-blasted ones … don’t. (A 20% hard-hit rate, .246/.318 BA/SLG.) It’s very valuable, so you won’t be surprised that last year’s leaders for blasts-per-swing rate are the absolute kings of the sport.

We like blasts per swing over per contact here, because it accounts for making contact in the first place – and it didn’t escape our notice that around some expected stars, the top dozen also includes Jordan Walker, Christian Walker, Colt Keith, and Munetaka Murakami, all hitters who came into 2026 with some very large questions to answer. (And, also, the other Max Muncy – the A’s one.) It’s probably not great that Cal Raleigh and Isaac Paredes rate at the bottom here, is it?

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We only have two full seasons of data on this one, so we’ll need to be pretty cautious about drawing any real conclusions, other than pointing out what did happen the last two years. Since we’re doing it for batters instead of teams, let’s check out the top 20 and bottom 20 on April 10 of each season ..

2025 – top 20 hitters in blast rate on April 10

2025 – bottom 20 hitters in blast rate on April 10

Well, that seems like a big difference.

It helps when Ohtani, Judge, Soto, Schwarber, and the gang ranked highly in this right away, but it also shows you how quickly the best hitters can separate themselves from the pack. If you’d been looking here a year ago, you might have noticed the breakouts of Ben Rice, Jo Adell, and Maikel Garcia were starting to happen, too.

Among those who didn’t have good years? One was Tommy Edman, who was off to a great start before he injured his ankle, and one was Kyren Paris, an early-season sensation who fell back to earth quickly.

On the other hand, for the early non-blasters, the outcomes here were … well, much worse. A variety of light hitters in the early going either continued to do that all year, or found themselves out of the Majors before they could do much more damage. The best-case scenarios here were Jacob Wilson, who isn’t really a power hitter anyway, and Andy Pages, who found his stroke and managed to hit 27 homers. Bryson Stott, Ernie Clement, and Steven Kwan didn’t have bad seasons, but were only around league-average, too. (Yes, we know what Clement did in October.)

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What about 2024?

2024 – top 20 hitters in blast rate on April 10

2024 – bottom 20 hitters in blast rate on April 10

More of the same names on the good list – this is also where we found William Contreras and Riley Greene, who had very good years in 2024 – but the slow starters offered a little hope for Raleigh and Paredes this year, because overall this group finished as average hitters, and half of them did manage to get back to average or better seasons, led by Byron Buxton … and, believe it or not, Paredes.

It’s meaningful to be good, early – and maybe not fatal if you’re not.

Likely good news for: Believing in J. Walker’s breakout, C. Walker’s rebound, or Murakami’s adjustment
Likely bad news for: No one, really, because a player can easily turn it around, but it’s not great that Raleigh, Paredes, and Daulton Varsho are near the very bottom

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