We're almost through the second month of the Major League Baseball season, and we're beginning to see a clearer picture of which players are in for big years, and which ones aren't. Bryce Harper's been crushing the ball, as has Nelson Cruz, while some guys (I'm looking at you, Robinson Cano) just don't look like themselves.
There's now a glimpse of what the rest of the season looks like.
To help show which guys have been performing best, we can take a look at our in-house metric, nERD, which represents the number of runs contributed over a league-average batter per game (~27 plate appearances). Take a look at the current top 10 below.
| Rank | Player | nERD |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bryce Harper (RF/CF, WSH) | 6.69 |
| 2 | Nelson Cruz (RF/LF, SEA) | 5.16 |
| 3 | Paul Goldschmidt (1B, ARI) | 4.82 |
| 4 | Prince Fielder (1B, TEX) | 4.8 |
| 5 | Anthony Rizzo (1B, CHC) | 4.59 |
| 6 | Adrian Gonzalez (1B, LAD) | 4.52 |
| 7 | Josh Donaldson (3B, TOR) | 4.26 |
| 8 | Jason Kipnis (2B, CLE) | 4.07 |
| 9 | Miguel Cabrera (1B/3B, DET) | 3.99 |
| 10 | Lucas Duda (1B, NYM) | 3.74 |
Any disagreements? Let us know in the comments section below.