Here are five of baseball’s unlikeliest leaders after four weeks – CBSSports.com

Four weeks into the season, we’re bound to see some surprising player performances. With the sample size of games in the books still relatively small, statistical leaderboards both well known and more obscure can leave us downright confused.

So let’s delve into a few of those weird leaderboards. Here are five players doing things you’d have never thought possible so far this year.

Walk rate: Odubel Herrera

In the midst of a disastrous 2015 season for the Phillies, Odubel Herrera emerged as a rare bright spot. The Venezuelan-born center fielder grabbed the starting center field job from day one last season, and looked good doing it. Buoyed by a lofty .387 batting average on balls in play, Herrera hit an impressive .297/.344/.418. He also showed good speed on the basepaths and played strong defense in center field, making him a better overall player by Wins Above Replacement than Starling Marte, Justin Upton, or Adrian Gonzalez.

Herrera did show one significant weakness, though, a drawback that’s particularly damning for a player with only moderate gap power: His batting eye was terrible. In his debut season, he struck out nearly five times more often than he walked, ranking 53rd among 65 batting title-qualified National League hitters with a lowly 5.3 percent walk rate.

He’s a totally different player this year. Herrera has hiked his walk rate nearly fourfold from last year’s level, to an eye-popping 20.7 percent. That’s the second-highest mark in the majors, trailing only perennial OBP fiend Paul Goldschmidt. More than just walks, Herrera’s plate discipline numbers have improved dramatically across the board. He’s swinging at far fewer pitches out of the zone, seeing fewer first pitches for strikes, swinging and missing far less often, and just swinging less often overall. He’s reached base in 24 of his first 26 games, and owns a phenomenal .450 on-base percentage, the fourth-highest mark in baseball.

We’ve come a long way in our understanding of walks over the past couple decades. The old line of thinking held that walks were largely a result of pitcher error, or of pitchers being scared to give in to more powerful hitters. We now understand that plate discipline is a real and valuable skill, and that hitters can use a strong batting eye both to draw walks, and to work themselves into hitters’ counts, at which point they can get fat pitches to hit.

Even viewed in that light, though, the early leaderboard of walk rate leaders is baffling. Four of the top 11 most prolific walkers in the majors have hit either one (Joe Mauer, Ben Zobrist, Christian Yelich) or zero (Francisco Cervelli) homers. Herrera does have two, but also just four total extra-base hits in 111 plate appearances. This might be partly due to Herrera trying to simplify his swing, or a sign that, even with occasional flashes of impressive pop, he’s simply not cut to put up bigger slugging percentages.

Mauer and Zobrist in particular have established themselves as reliable outliers, players who don’t hit for tons of power, but still control the zone so well that they can work their way on base very frequently. Even mentioning Herrera’s name in the same sentence as those two multi-time All-Stars speaks to what’s at stake if he can keep this walkathon going.

Exit velocity: Cameron Rupp

When it comes to statistical analysis, one of the easiest ways to innovate is to start measuring on-field events that were previously difficult or impossible to measure. For decades, we’ve gauged how hard pitchers throw, without bothering to look at how hard batters hit those pitches.

The advent of Statcast’s exit velocity stat addresses that issue, giving us insight into the force with which hitter connect with pitches. Near the top of this year’s list, you’ll find a bunch of names you’d expect — Miguel Cabrera, Josh Donaldson, and streaky but so far on fire Orioles slugger Mark Trumbo. You probably wouldn’t guess the No. 1 name on this list if you had 100 tries, though. That would be Phillies catcher Cameron Rupp.

Here’s one that might not be as predictive. At 6-foot-2, 260 pounds, Rupp certainly has the size and strength to be a dangerous power hitter. He slugged 63 extra-base hits over 198 games during his 2012 and 2013 seasons in the minors, and smacked a couple of titanic shots in his first exposure to semi-regular major league playing time last year.

But Rupp actually qualifies for two weird stats titles this season, posting a strikeout-to-walk rate of 19-to-zip over 58 plate appearances. Meanwhile, the guy Rupp was supposed to pass on the depth chart, 37-year-old Carlos Ruiz, is off to a totally unsustainable but still mind-blowing .341/.413/.634 start. As long as the Phillies stay relevant in the NL East standings and Rupp keeps swinging at air, it’s tough to see him getting enough reps to translate any exit velocity magic into exciting results.

High-leverage pitching: Brett Cecil

You can point to several factors that have caused the Jays’ disappointing start to the season. Last year’s powerful lineup going limp has been one of the biggest causes: Toronto’s collectively hitting .229, with three everyday players (Troy Tulowitzki, Russell Martin, and Ryan Goins) hitting well below the Mendoza line. Still, even when the Jays have flashed enough hitting and starting pitching to take late-inning leads, they’ve been let down by their bullpen at a catastrophic rate.

Sticking to more traditional stats for a second, the Jays are the first team since the dreadful, lame-duck 2004 Expos to start the season with an 0-9 record from its bullpen. This is just the fifth time in the past century that any bullpen has started its season at 0-9.

Brett Cecil has been responsible for a huge chunk of that carnage. Fangraphs breaks down pitcher performance into low, medium- and high-leverage situations, to give us a more nuanced view of results beyond wins and losses, saves and blown saves. Cecil this season has been, by a mile, the worst pitcher in the American League in high-leverage situations: Opponents are batting .526/.636/.886 (!!!) against him in those spots.

Paradoxically, I see this as good news. Bullpens can be incredibly volatile, with almost every reliever not named Mariano Rivera subject to blowup outings, which can annihilate weeks or months of strong performance due to the small sample sizes in play for pitchers called upon to get anywhere from one to four or five outs per time on the mound. Teams recognize this, and also recognize that most relievers are fungible. As a result, they run frequent shuttles back and forth from the minors, and demote struggling relief pitchers to lesser role, all the time.

So when it comes to Cecil (and a couple of other Jays relievers, including key offseason pickup Drew Storen), one of two things is likely to happen: Either Cecil and his underperforming pals will snap back to the much stronger performance levels they established earlier in their careers, or they’ll get replaced in high-leverage spots by other, better-performing arms (newly acquired Gavin Floyd and Jesse Chavez have both looked good so far).

Either way, the Jays and their bullpen are likely going to get a lot better in the relatively near future.

ERA vs. pitching-independent numbers: David Price

Fifteen years ago, a baseball researcher named Voros McCracken published an article at Baseball Prospectus, arguing that pitchers could control outcomes such as strikeouts and walks, but had essentially zero control over balls in play. “DIPS theory,” as it was called, helped inform years of follow-up research, which did a better job of separating run prevention into two distinct categories, pitching and defense.

One of the seminal stats that came out of that research was Fielding Independent Pitching, or FIP. Expected Fielding Independent Pitching (xFIP) takes the added step of arguing that pitchers’ home run-per-flyball rates are subject to so much variance that we should also neutralize them, to give us a better sense of those pitchers’ true skill. If we go xFIP and strip out the impact of defense, home run-per-flyball rate and other factors believed to be somewhat (or largely) beyond a pitcher’s control, the best starting pitcher in the American League this year is … David Price.

Now here’s the punchline: David Price also owns a 6.14 ERA, the third-worst mark in the American League. So which stat is a better predictor of his performance for the rest of the season?

I’m going with the nerdier stat. Price has allowed runs in droves due to almost certainly unsustainable circumstances. First, just 57.3 percent of the runners he’s put on base have failed to score this season; that’s the lowest mark in the entire junior circuit, and well below the league-average figures in the low 70s. Price is a former Cy Young winner and a capable major league veteran, so it’s unlikely that he suddenly became terrified to pitch with runners on base — opponents are batting .290/.361/.532 against him with runners on, and a bananas .371/.385/.686 against him with runners in scoring position.

And while subsequent research on topics such as hard-hit rates have reminded us that pitchers do indeed have at least some control over what happens to balls in play, Price’s career .288 BABIP points to his current .362 mark improving dramatically. (Though it might remain at least somewhat elevated if opponents keep roping hard line drives off him on the rare occasion when they do make contact.) Meanwhile, Price has struck out a terrific 30.6 percent of the batters he’s faced (second-best in the AL), further suggesting there’s nothing wrong with his stuff.

The analytically inclined Red Sox almost certainly aren’t worried about their new, $217 million investment. You shouldn’t be either.

Strikeout-to-walk rate: Bartolo Colon

One one hand, maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised about what Bartolo Colon has done so far this season. Despite his advanced age and, errr, ample carriage, Colon has been a strike-throwing machine in the past few years: You might be able to beat him, but he’s going to pepper the zone with strikes and make you hit his pitch.

Still, Colon has opened this season with 28 strikeouts against just three walks, giving him the second-best strikeout-to-walk rate among all National League starters. That sandwiches Colon between Clayton Kershaw and Noah Syndergaard, two outrageously talented pitchers.

We should probably chalk up a lot of Colon’s early-season success (including a 2.56 ERA and 2.82 FIP to go with that tremendous K/BB rate) to a cakewalk schedule. Five of Colon’s six opponents this year rank among the seven lowest-scoring offenses in baseball year-to-date (the Braves, Royals, Indians, and Phillies twice). He gets one more pushover (the Padres) in his next start, before embarking on a tough four-start stretch that sees him face the talented Dodgers and Nationals twice each.

Even with potential regression coming, though, you have to appreciate what’s happened so far this year: While strong, fit pitching prototypes like Kershaw and Syndergaard predictably mow down everyone in sight, a soon-to-be 43-year-old underdog is hanging right with them. Big Sexy will not be denied.