At age 58, it’s probably too late for me to outgrow my infantile fascination with funny baseball names and numbers.

As all of us who care know, baseball stats only mean anything when taken in context and measured against norms, and they have a way of averaging out over the course of a whole year, or a career. But in the early going of a season, like now, they can be wonderfully skewed, either freakishly high or low, because …