Let's not go NUTS

Nice job by the Cubs not blowing the rain-suspended game (Rocky Cherry, perhaps the first ever Cubs player to sound like an ice cream flavor, picked up his first major-league win), and great job by Marquis winning the second. To show you the value of April stats, Alfonso Soriano hit better than .500 in the three-game Pirates series and is now hitting .310, just a bit up from where he was a week ago. He also hit his first two Cub home runs. Ah, the value of filling your team with slow starters. Although, oddly, notorious slow starters Derrek Lee and Aramis Ramirez are both off to pretty good starts (Lee, currently hitting .415 and with a double in eight straight games).

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. Every season begins with an inevitable "how is team X achieving feat Y?" glut of stories, and this year is no different. The Brewers have started the season like a house on fire, standing at 18-9 after beating St. Louis yesterday and currently leading the Central by - this is not a misprint - five games over the Reds. (To show this is still a competitive division on the whole, note that the remaining five teams are bunched within three games of each other.)

Lest any Brewers fans start going nuts, though - and I'm sure they are - let's consider a few things.

Hey, remember last year?
Oh yeah, last year, when the Reds started 18-8 (that's where they stood on May 1, leading the division) and everyone started talking about Cincinnati's resurgence. As of May 1, 2006, the Reds led the majors in runs scored (155). They did only lead the Central by a game, but still: 18-8! Better even than the Brewers' record on May 1 of this year! So, uh, how'd that work out for Cincy?

Oh, they finished 80-82 and in third place. Now to be fair, they still had a shot at the playoffs until the last week or so, but that says more about the suck-job finish the Cardinals had than anything else. The Reds also ended up scoring 749 runs, which means that after averaging 5.96 rpg over the first month, the Reds averaged just 4.37 rpg the entire rest of the way. Meanwhile, they allowed 4.94 rpg over the course of the season. Whoops.

Maybe it's something about playing in Miller Park, since the Indians, who rather famously were forced to play there due to snow in Cleveland in mid-April, are the only other team in the majors right now who can match the Brewers' .667 winning percentage (the Indians, at 16-8, have done so in three fewer games). If these trends continue, both teams will win 108 games, so I think it's safe to say that they won't (last NL team to win that many: 1986 Mets). The Brewers' Pythagorean win-loss record right now is 15-12, so while they're a good team, we can suggest that they're probably overachieving a little bit. (The Cubs actually lead the NL Central in this stat, at 16-10; their currently 0-6 record in one-run games accounts for a lot of the reason they're actually 12-14, but the good news is that they're one of only five teams in baseball who have given up fewer than 100 runs through May 2.) The Brewers are also 14-7 against the Central so far; I doubt they'll continue to blow through the division at quite that rate, don't you?

Don't get me wrong - the Brewers have a good young team that finally seems to be living up to the "up-and-coming" tag they've gotten for three years now, and if it weren't for the fact that their fans desperately want to be rivals with the Cubs (guess what, Johnnies-come-lately? We've already got a divisional arch-rival and a locational arch-rival; we don't really need another one of either), I'd probably be rooting for them. But do we really think this team can possibly stay this hot - or even close to it? Right now their shortstop, J.J. Hardy, is hitting .306 with an OPS of .919. Prior to this season he was a sub-.250 career hitter and his best OPS+ (where 100 is league average) didn't crack 90. Granted, this is a limited sample size as he only had 500 career ABs before this year and he might just be breaking out, but I don't know. How about Geoff Jenkins with an OPS of nearly 1.000 so far? (Career average: .850.) Although really, so far this team has been more about doing everything okay than anything super-well (they rank in the top six in the NL in BA, OBP, SLG, and runs, but not in the top three in any of those). At least from a hitting perspective. Jeff Suppan's ERA so far is two runs below his career average; Chris Capuano's is more than a run below even his best prior season. Many of the Brewers' players are pretty young so it's hard to generalize - they could all be having their breakout season at the same time, and certainly the 2005 White Sox showed us what happens when four starting pitchers have career years all at once (the one thing that does scare me about the Brewers right now is that Ben Sheets, who should be the staff ace, is 2-2 with his highest ERA in four years, which may very well also not continue, but in a better way for him).

It'll be interesting to see how the division race shakes out, since every other team in the Central is currently under .500, and yet I doubt anyone believes the Brewers are very likely to be wire-to-wire winners. Maybe they end up like Detroit last year, another fairly unheralded team driven by decent hitting and outstanding pitching, but remember - that team didn't win its division, either.