Matt Martell is off today to jump into a much-deserved long weekend for Memorial Day. Emma Baccellieri has you covered in his stead.
There is a line that former ESPN writer Sam Miller used to say, in podcasts and in conversation, about when you could trust small-sample-size noise had disappeared from baseball statistics at the beginning of the season: The year had really started when Mike Trout was back on top of the leaderboards.
It was a joke, but then again, was it? For a few seasons, this seemed as reliable a measure as anything.