How worried or heartened should we be by the St. Louis Cardinals' early batting stats?

The St. Louis Cardinals have played eight games so far this year. That's 4.9% of the club's 162 slated games this season. Almost anything is possible statistically in a mere eight baseball games. The difference between early April and mid-June, however, is that a player's statistical line is blank slate at the start of April. How well or poorly he has hit in the last handful of games is there for all to see in his seasonal stat line. Hence the common refrain that early-April stats are by and large meaningless. This is at once true and false.

What do I mean by this? A player's great or poor performance in the season's opening games should not cause one to leap to any conclusions about how he will hit for the rest of the year. However, a bad or stupendous opening to a baseball season will likely have a small impact on the player's end-of-season statistical line. The ZiPS projections to illustrate my point.

I put together some charts of the Cardinals' primary position players. They show the player's 2015 batting line to date, his preseason 2015 ZiPS projection, his current Rest of Season ZiPS projection, and his updated ZiPS projections (which is based on the inputs that generated his preseason projection as well as his 2015 performance to date). They include the stats plate appearances (PA), strikeout rate (K%), walk rate (BB%), Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP), batting average (BA), on-base percentage (OBP), slugging percentage (SLG), Isolated Power (ISO), Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA), and Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+). I've ordered the individual player charts from largest decrease in ZiPS projected wOBA from preseason to updated ZiPS as of the morning of April 17, 2015.

Jason Heyward

Matt Adams

Jon Jay

Yadier Molina

Kolten Wong

Matt Holliday

Jhonny Peralta

Matt Carpenter

As fans it's understandable that we worry. We watch the games and see Molina hit many a grounder and hardly anything with authority, Adams looking lost, Carpenter locked in, or Holliday's singles barrage and wonder what they mean. ZiPS doesn't see the way a player looks while producing his stat line. All it sees is the stat line. This makes ZiPS at once more ignorant and more rational.

Eight games (i.e., 4.9%) into the season, the ZiPS Rest of Season (ZiPS R) and ZiPS Updated (ZiPS U) projections give us an idea of how worried we should be. For the most part, ZiPS R forecasts the Cardinals to be the same players stats-wise that it projected before opening day with a point or three added or subtracted here and there. However the slow or hot starts will have a negative or positive effect on the players' end-of-season stat lines.

The season is long and the bend of stat lines is typically toward a regression to something close to a player's preseason projections. There's not much to be overly enthusiastic or worried about today. Throughout the season, we'll touch base with the ZiPS R and ZiPS U projections to gauge the arc of a player's season to date against his expectations.

FanDuel:

SBN and FanDuel have an exclusive partnership for daily fantasy baseball this 2015 season and they're paying SBN writers like me to help promote it. If I were setting a FanDuel lineup for today (April 17, 2015), I'd pay whatever Max Scherzer costs because he's facing the lowly Phillies, who are batting .215/.281/.320 as a team so far this young season. Another expensive pitching option that may very well be worth the money is Corey Kluber. The reigning American League Cy Young winner is facing the Twins, who have posted a collective .221/.268/.316 line so far this year (even after rapping out 14 hits on Thursday and plating 8 runs against the Royals). On offense, I like Boston vs. Ubaldo Jimenez at Fenway. Which one? Pick a Sock, it doesn't much matter. Click here to play FanDuel.