After winning a world series five seasons later, looking back at a group so comically different can be a fun exercise for a nostalgic fanbase, but the real highlight from this storybook 101 loss season was a man who started on the bench, first baseman/outfielder Bryan LaHair

LaHair was a typical minor league lifer who tallied 195 career at-bats during two stints with the 2008 Seattle Mariners and 2011 Cubs. And, at 29 years old, his chances at ever landing a  full-time major league roster spot looked grim until the 2012 Cubs, a perfect combination of desperate for possible talent, willing to take a chance due to his previous year .331/.405/.664 line in AAA Iowa, and waiting for the emergence of top prospect Anthony Rizzo, gave him a look as the everyday first baseman.

He exceeded all possible expectations. During April, he put up an astounding .390/.471/.780 line with a 1.251 OPS, 5 homers and 8 doubles. Even though his May and June amounted to a less than stellar .243 batting average, he still managed .286/.364/.519 with a .883 OPS, 14 homers, 12 doubles, and a questionable all-star selection at the end of the first half.

His second half was a bit more believable. A .202/.29/.303 line, 2 homers, and a lot more late inning pinch hit appearances than starts. It also ended up being his last major league season.

Why is this relevant? A quick scroll down LaHair’s Baseball Reference page to the similar batters section reveals a very familiar name, Eric Thames.

The similarities don’t stop there.

Oddly enough, both Thames and LaHair played their 25 year old season in Seattle, and it was their last season before taking a multi-year hiatus from the big leagues.

Here are those seasons side-by-side

Now, in the years both have returned they’ve had breakout months of April, and here’s what those breakout seasons look like through their first 42 at-bats

Now, here is Lahair’s month by month progression.

This isn’t me insinuating Thames will have a drop off as similarly astronomical as Lahair. I’m also not saying he’ll continue he meteoric rise to MVP status. Instead, I  think there’s reason to believe he will continue to find moderate success for a few specific reasons: His handling of off-speed against righties, and general competence against left-handing pitching. However, there is also an alternate reality where his inability to hit fastballs and preform in clutch situations diminishes his role in the starting lineup.

We’ll start with the good.

Over his career, Lahair was plagued by left-handed pitching. In fact, over his 82 career at-bats against left handers, he only managed a measly 8 hits and struck out 37 times. In case you’re wondering, that’s a batting average of .098 and a strike out rate of 38 percent in all plate appearances against lefties.

He reached the peak of awful in 2012 where in 54 at-bats against lefties had 3 hits and struck out 50 precent of the time.

Thames, on the other hand, has a career .222 average against left-handed pitching and only strikes out 24 percent of the time. Not great but certainly much more tolerable than Lahair. Even better news, Thames has smoked left-handed pitching during the early part of this season. Entering Tuesday night against the Cubs, in his six at-bats against lefties, he’s got three hits and two of them are home runs (a solid Tuesday night means Thames is now six-for-nine against lefties). Some may bemoan the incredibly small sample size, but remember three hits is the exact number Lahair finished with throughout the entire 2012 season. He would’ve loved to have three hits by April 18th.

As for off-speed, against right handed pitching Lahair hit .157 against curve balls and struck out on 51 of the 385 he faced over his career. He was able to handle sporting a .286 average.

Thames has preformed much better against curveballs with a .273 average and even though he’s suffered against sliders still holds up a respectable .226.

Now, the bad.

Over his career, Eric Thames has faced 1121 fast balls, and not many of them have gone well. His .233 average against fastballs is his second worst average, following sliders, against any of the 6 pitches he’s seen over 100 times. Also, his .416 slugging percentage against fastballs is his third worst.

This was the most telling stat: Against power pitchers, Thames has a .191/.257/.419 line with a .679 OPS. Against Finesse pitches, .298/.347/.506 with a .854 OPS. Fastballs are a real issue.

For comparison’s sake, Lahair had a .265 average against fastballs, a .745 OPS against power pitching and .880 OPS against finesse pitching.

As for career clutch hitting, Thames has struggled:

As for Lahair:

Similarly bad, and at times better.

In summary, Thames is a great story and an incredible player to watch.

Can he get an all-star nomination? Absolutely! Can he win comeback player of the year? Potentially, and according to Bob Nigthengale of USA Today, he’ll get a $50,000 bonus if he does. Can he win MVP? Not a chance. Can he tank and find himself out of the league again in 2018? Sadly, yes. It will be a feeling out process all year for Thames, who will have to deal with plenty of ups and down and adjustments. The Brewers just have to hope he can moderately sustain his current success.

I assume that most everyone who reads this website is a Brewers fan, and I am not going to tell you to lose hope in Eric Thames.  You should, in fact, continue rooting for him with everything you have, because he is an amazing story and the baseball world is better off if he is good.  Regardless of whether he is ultimately successful, his big league tenure will tell us more than we previously knew about converting Korean stats to MLB projections.  But if he is good, we gain an amazing story of self-improvement and determination.  Baseball is a sport that at times seeks storylines; if Eric Thames is good, he provides with a great one.

At this point in the season, it’s hard to know if Thames is in fact good.  His hot start has been well-documented, but the numbers are truly staggering: entering Tuesday night’s game against the Cubs, a batting line of .405/.479/1.000, with an MLB-leading seven home runs.  His 1.491 OPS is over 100 points higher than second place Freddie Freeman’s, and his .503 TAv is nearly fifty points higher than Freeman’s as well.  If he keeps up some semblance of this performance, then the Brewers have a steal.

The key question there, obviously, is whether he will.  There are some excellent hitters at the top of the TAv leaderboard: Freeman, Bryce Harper, Daniel Murpher, Mike Trout, and Ryan Braun are all in the top twenty.  But Zack Cozart, Eugenio Suarez, and J.T. Realmuto are all in the top ten.  It is obviously far too early to know anything from the leaderboards.

Some of Thames’s peripheral stats are positive; his 10.4 percent walk rate is above league-average, and his swing rate at pitches out of the zone is the fourth-best in baseball (minimum 100 pitches seen).  Thames also places towards the top of Statcast’s exit velocity leaderboard, although I think it is fair to say that we are still unclear how exactly that correlates with success.  Overall, though, these numbers are similar to those being put up by some of baseball’s best hitters in the first two weeks of the season.

However, it is impossible to watch this and not think of Chris Shelton and Bryan LaHair.  In the first thirteen games of 2006, Shelton hit nine home runs and posted a 1.716 OPS for the Tigers.  In April of 2012, LaHair posted a 1.251 OPS for the Cubs and turned his .600 BABIP for that month into an All Star appearance.  Both Shelton and LaHair were first basemen who were not thought of very highly, and their hot streaks should remain cautionary tales.

If we’re looking for optimism, even Shelton’s incredible two weeks clearly seemed unsustainable.  His .577 BABIP was obviously a red flag, but his sixteen strikeouts and two walks should have set off alarms for everyone as well.  Thames, on the other hand, has a .417 BABIP and has eleven strikeouts to five walks.  The BABIP is high, as it would be for any hitter on this type of hot streak, but the strikeout and walk rates are certainly in the sustainable range for any power hitter; it isn’t as if Thames is just making incredible contact every time he swings.

Another key difference is that we had no reason to think that LaHair or Shelton or any of baseball’s other various one-month wonders would be any good.  Thames, though, may have fundamentally changed who he is as a baseball player during his time in Korea, and offseason analysis accounted for that unknown (PECOTA projects him for a .244 TAv, while ZiPS and Steamer each give him a wRC+ over 120).  If he truly improved his skills and wasn’t just feasting off sub-par pitching, then he may be on the path towards being a true star in the big leagues.  While we don’t know if that’s true, it is certainly a possibility.

I don’t know if Eric Thames is good.  From a long-term enjoyment perspective, I hope he is.  But in the short term?  I don’t really care.  He is a massive person with an engaging personality, and he has spent the last week hitting the ball very hard and very far.  That’s fun to watch.

Whether Thames is actually good is hugely relevant for the Brewers franchise both this season and going forward.  First base has been a black hole in recent years, and if Thames can solve that problem and provide a consistent bat in the middle of the lineup, then the club is in much better shape than we thought.  If he continues playing this way, then maybe the team can make a surprise push towards a wild card spot.

But at this moment, I think shrugging is an acceptable response.  He is playing very well, and because that is happening for a team we all watch and have some sort of emotional connection to, that makes us happy.  On April 18, that is enough.  It’s too early to really know whether any of this is truly sustainable, so I am focused on enjoying the show.