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You can make early season numbers say just about anything. Dee Gordon is hitting .409! That's probably not going to last. Bartolo Colon has a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 25! Also probably not going to last. So when you take a look at Mike Moustakas' outstanding .353/.421/.518 line, it's easy to write it off as a fluke of barely 100 April plate appearances. After all, Moustakas was a considerably below-average hitter in 2014, posting a 76 wRC+ (weighted runs created plus), 24 percent below average. And he was poor in 2013 (77), 2012 (90) and in a partial season in 2011 (84). Entering his fifth season in the bigs, he'd been nothing short of a bust for his entire career, considering his status as the No. 2 overall pick in 2007. And while hopeful Royals fans could point to his five postseason homers last year, that had also come in the same season as an embarrassing late-May demotion to the minor leagues. (He'd also had just a .259 OBP in October.) So now Moustakas is crushing the ball, and you're wondering what makes his early season display different than those of Gordon or Colon or even DJ LeMahieu, who's carrying a .406 average of his own. After all, Moustakas' .362 BABIP, or batting average on balls in play, is higher than usual and almost sure to come down, an easy indicator to point to. The answer isn't that Moustakas is suddenly this good, because he's not. It's that when you look deeper than his slash line, you see evidence of real, actual changes in his approach. If it seems like Mike Moustakas is a different hitter, that's because he is.
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