With everything that went right in April for the Mets, who set a team record for wins in the first month of the season, the most encouraging development hasn’t received near the attention it deserves: Jose Reyes became a star last month.

Skepticism would be understandable. Reyes’s batting line of .250 AVG/.330 OBA/.380 SLG would not fit in on the back of Derek Jeter’s baseball card, even taking into account his league-leading 11 stolen bases. The most important number, though, isn’t Reyes’s batting average, his on-base average, or his slugging percentage; it isn’t even his impressive 21 runs. It’s that 80-point gap between his batting and on-base averages.

Reyes, still just 22 years old, walked 12 times in April, as opposed to last April, when he infamously didn’t walk once. That’s terrific. The really impressive number, though, is this: He found himself in a 1-0 count 44 times. Last season – all of last year – he worked a 1-0 count 49 times. That confirms what anyone who has eyes and watches Mets baseball could tell you, which is that Reyes’s walk totals aren’t a statistical fluke, but the result of a new, more disciplined approach.

There’s no particular secret here. Reyes has pretty much stopped swinging at the first pitch, which is a very good idea. When a hitter gives a pitcher the chance to hurt himself, he often will. When that hitter has great bat control, as Reyes and Mike Piazza – who almost never swings at the first pitch – do, there’s no reason whatever not to see if you can let the pitcher cause his own problems. So long as Reyes continues to maintain this approach, he’s going to be dominant.

As everyone knows, with his speed all Reyes needs to do is maintain a league average on-base average to be a great player; if he’s actually drawing walks in more than 10% of his plate appearances, he’s going to be an utterly devastating one. If he were hitting .300 – and hitters who lead the league in steals, walk 10% of the time, and walk as much as they strike out can be reasonably expected to hit .300 given enough at-bats to let things even out – his batting line would be, at the low end, .300/.380/.430. That would fit in quite comfortably with the numbers on the back of Derek Jeter’s baseball card.

As it happens, this is exactly the way I thought Reyes would develop. Last year, I wrote several articles counseling Mets fans to stop pulling their hair out over Reyes’s poor on-base average and look at the bigger picture. A straight statistical analysis, accounting for his age, minor league performance, low strikeout totals, and loss of playing time to an injury in 2004, indicated that he would eventually start doing this. And anyone who watched him play much last year and watched a lot of baseball should have seen more Barry Larkin or Roberto Alomar Jr. than Gary DiSarcina in the young shortstop.

The point here isn’t that I was right – as I say, it was obvious that Reyes was developing, and people with little use for statistics had much the same opinion I did. It’s that there’s more to a statistics based (or performance-based, if you prefer) approach to watching and thinking about baseball than just looking at a number like Reyes’s on-base average, noting that it’s below par, and then griping about how he needs to be evicted from the leadoff spot.

Context is everything in baseball. A .301 batting average can be below the league average, or it can lead the league. A great strikeout-to-walk ratio run up by a 21-year-old in Triple-A is a very different thing from one run up by a 24-year-old in Double-A, and one posted by a curveball pitcher is very different from one posted by a knuckleballer. Statistics are useless by themselves; their only value comes when they are put in the proper context.

In Reyes’s case, that was that he had forced his way into the majors at 20, something that’s incredibly rare historically and a powerful indicator of Hall of Fame level talent; that he missed time to injury; that he had the underlying skills associated with the kind of disciplined approach at the plate he needs in order to make the most of his talent; and that even at his worst, he was never lost or overmatched at the plate, but simply struggling.

The Mets’ decision, in a year in which they weren’t quite ready to win, to have him learn on the job, to surround him with veterans who spoke his language and maintained a successful approach to the game, and to bring in coaches who could teach him what he needed to learn rather than fret about whether a few more runs could theoretically be squeezed out of the lineup if he batted eighth or spent time in the minors, was obviously correct at the time and is paying off now.

There’s a lot to recommend an objective approach to baseball (or to anything and everything generally), but I hope we’re not at the point where we’re pointing at one or two numbers and calling that analysis because those numbers are on-base average or what have you, rather than runs batted in. There was every reason to expect this April out of Reyes, and there is now every reason to expect that every season. So long as he keeps laying off bad pitches and swinging at good ones, he’s going to develop into a truly great player, maybe as soon as this summer. It’s not an accident, and it’s because of, not in spite of, the way the Mets have handled him. This team has botched up more than its share of sure things over the years. It deserves the credit for handling this sure thing right.

tmarchman@nysun.com