Pitchers tend to hold the upper hand to start the season, with batters warming up with the weather. But, some batters buck that trend and are hot to start the season, including some who do so on a regular basis. So, who are April’s heroes? Spoiler alert: they’re also the heroes in the other months of the season. More after the jump.

To illustrate the fortunes of pitchers and batters on a monthly basis, here are the results for the past 20 seasons (2004-23).

To identify the best hitters starting the season, we could also look at the Mar/Apr split, Except that, with the season now starting two to three weeks earlier than in pre-expansion days, that split would contain considerably more games in the recent past than in the 154-game season era. Thus, I’ve chosen to normalize those seasons by looking at player performance over their teams’ first 20 games of the season. Those 20 games occupy different weeks of the calendar in the 154 and 162 game eras but, as a warming climate has permitted progressively earlier season starts, the weather for those first 20 games in 2024 may not be that much different than for the first 20 games of 1924.

So, let’s first look at career performance over a team’s first 20 games of the season. Ideally, we could look at OPS+ as a metric of choice for offensive performance. Alas, that number is not available for specific chunks of games so OPS will be used instead. As you’ll see, I’ve chosen to focus on 1.000 OPS as a number indicating superior performance in any era, but obviously more so in lower offensive eras and less so in higher offensive eras. Thus, the lists you will see will tend to over-represent periods like 1925 to 1935, and 1995 to 2005, but under-represent periods like 1905 to 1915 and 1965 to 1975. To give you a very general idea of the impact on stats on players of those eras, here are some notable players who were in their primes during those eras, showing their actual and neutralized OPS.

So here are the top career OPS results for the first 20 games of the season, for 1901 to 2023, with a minimum 175 total bases over this portion of the season.

Admittedly, 175 TB is a low career threshold, but one that was chosen so as not to exclude some of the best players of the present day. That said, those currently active players will very likely see these career numbers decline once their careers have finished. Not surprisingly, there are only two players in the top 20 (three if you count Mantle) from the low offensive era of the 1960s and 1970s, and none from the dead ball era. Most surprising name in the top 20 (for me) would be Moises Alou, but more understandable given the offensive era he played in.

Looking at individual seasons yields this list of the best OPS scores over the first 20 games of the season, with a minimum 40 total bases over that period.

So, the top 20 shows a mix of a number of baseball’s all-time top offensive seasons with some other seasons that only began with a very hot start, including several from recent memory.

In all, 638 players turned in 1113 seasons with 40 TB and 1.000 OPS over their teams’ first 20 games of the season. On the premise that doing so once could be a fluke, and doing it twice might just be good luck, I’m going to focus on those players with three or more such seasons. That reduces the list considerably, to these 113 players.

The term qualifying season here refers to seasons with 40 TB and 1.000 OPS over a team’s first 20 games. Mostly all-time greats at the top of the table, mixed in with good to very good players in the lower reaches, and a few quirky names (but not Jamie Quirk) at the bottom. Dick Allen is notable with six seasons in a considerably shorter career than many of these players, and in a challenging offensive environment. At his current pace (3 of 6 qualifying seasons), Ronald Acuna Jr. could be challenging for the top of this table before his career is done.

These 113 players posted these results in their qualifying seasons.

As a reminder, Qualifying Seasons OPS denotes OPS over first 20 team games for all seasons with 40 TB and 1.000 OPS over that part of the season. In some cases, the Qualifying Seasons OPS and Career OPS numbers are relatively close, but not so close for some other players, including Harry Heilmann at the top of the list.

Looking at the same group of the players for the non-qualifying seasons of their careers yields this result.

So, the top 3 on this list, especially, came close to a 1.000 OPS over the first 20 team games of the season for all of the seasons of their careers (Other Seasons OPS) that they did not reach that level. Quite the accomplishment!

To close, we’ll crown the best early season hitters by combining their first 20 game OPS for their Qualifying Seasons (40 TB and 1.000 OPS) and for all of the other seasons of their careers. Just to be a little exotic, I’ll use a harmonic mean of these two OPS results rather than the arithmetic mean or average of the two numbers. What is a harmonic mean? Well, here is the formula.

Clear as mud? For our example, n = 2, signifying two variables, the Qualifying Seasons OPS (x₁) and Other Seasons OPS (x₂). The highest values for the harmonic mean will result from high values for both of these variables that are close together. That may be more readily appreciated by reformatting the above equation to the one below for our case of n = 2.

Thus, the harmonic mean will show us the players with the best and most consistent results for first 20 game OPS for all of the seasons of their careers. Here are those results.

So, the Splendid Splinter takes the top prize, followed closely by Big Mac and the Babe. Current stars Trout and Harper are in hot pursuit, though they will likely not be so close once their careers are finished.