The great frustration of April baseball is that it’s almost impossible to tell what’s real. If the Atlanta Braves win seven of their first eight games, does it mean that we should reevaluate how good they are? If the Yankees see three-fifths of their rotation join the disabled list before the season’s third week, should we quickly knock them back of the Red Sox? In both cases, probably not, but then it’s not hard to imagine an October in which we see the Braves hoisting a trophy in their locker room or bitter Yankees talking about how the season started off wrong and never quite got right. It’s not good to make too much of what happens during a short stretch of baseball, but neither is it good to treat the season’s first few weeks as if they’re entirely random and tell us nothing.

All of this brings us around to Jose Reyes. Watching him grow, watching baseball talent become baseball skill, has been the most delightful experience in New York baseball in the last two years. Take Friday’s 3–2 win over Washington. Reyes led off with a single on a 2–2 count, advanced on a ground out, took a base on a wild pitch, and scored on a second ground out. There’s nothing especially remarkable about this sequence, except the vast array of opportunities for out-making it would present most 23-year-old players. Waiting for the right pitch on the right count, twice taking bases on balls hit on the ground, and being able to tell the difference between the sort of wild pitch that will allow you to move to third and the sort that will get you pegged out there — a great deal of maturity went into that one, decisive run, and there’s no doubt it’s real.

Still, Reyes enters play today having already drawn eight walks on the year. For a player who drew 27 in 161 games just two years ago, it’s a remarkable achievement. Reyes is on pace to draw 118 walks, and while he almost certainly won’t reach that mark, you don’t have to attribute more significance to two weeks’ worth of baseball than they can bear to easily envision him drawing 75 free passes this year. That would be half again as many as he drew last year in a season in which he doubled the previous year’s total and would basically make the difference between his being a star player and his being an MVP-class player.

What’s fascinating about this is that Reyes hasn’t really changed his approach at the plate all that much during the last two years; he’s simply gotten better. So far this year, for instance, he’s seen 3.60 pitches a trip to the plate, a number almost freakishly consistent with what he did last year, when he saw 3.61 pitches a plate appearance, and the year before, when he saw 3.62. Statistically, there’s nearly no way to tell 2005 from 2007 in many areas when you look over Reyes’s pitch data at www.baseball-reference.com— the percentage of strikes he’s taken looking and the percentage at which he’s taken a hack, for instance, are virtually unchanged. The difference has come in two areas. First, pitchers have, in the few games played so far this year, been notably more reluctant to throw Reyes strikes — 57% of the pitches he’s seen this year have been strikes, as against 67% last year and 68% the year before. Second, in those at-bats when pitchers don’t want to throw one over the plate, Reyes hasn’t been helping them as much as he used to. The percentage of his at-bats that have resulted in a 2–0 or 3–0 count have risen dramatically.

Last year around this time, a similar evolution in Reyes’s game was notable — he started taking more first pitches, and thus ended up in fewer 0–1 counts. At the time, I thought it was a real improvement, and so it proved to be. I think that this year we’re seeing something similar. Every player is going to have a certain number of at-bats in which the pitcher, for whatever reason, isn’t going to give him anything to hit. Reyes is starting to learn how to identify those at-bats and that the best thing to do when he’s in the middle of one is to keep his bat on his shoulder. It’s something a lot of players, even a lot of very good ones, never master; the ones who do hit many fewer groundballs to second base on curveballs pitched half a foot off the plate.

For Mets opponents, the frightening thing isn’t just that Reyes is developing this sort of advanced approach at the plate, but that the same reason they don’t want to throw him a ball over the plate — he can belt it out of the park or flip it into the outfield — makes him all the more dangerous when those 3–0 counts turn into 3–1 counts. Another way to put this is that while we’re seeing now what Reyes can do with a refined approach to getting on base, we’re going to see over the next couple of years what happens when that approach is married to increasing strength as he naturally adds weight with age. Last year, Reyes hit 19 home runs. He was probably just getting started.

tmarchman@nysun.com