With the start of the season finally (nearly) here, it's time for us stodgy old Fantasy analysts to trot out our annual reminders not to overreact to early-season play. When you're watching baseball on some random Thursday night game in the middle of June, you probably know well enough not to overreact to what you're seeing in one game or to an ugly series by one of your core hitters. And you know one bad start in June by one of your best pitchers isn't enough to scare you off of them.

But when it's the beginning of the season, it sure feels different. We can tell you not to overreact, but it's hard even for us -- when you watch your favorite breakout pitcher give up two first-inning homers or see your fifth-round hitter go hitless in his first five games, it's hard to stay level. We haven't watched baseball that matters in five months, so the natural inclination is to let recency bias take hold.

Plus, players work on their games all offseason, adding pitches, tweaking swings or changing their physicality to try to improve. Sometimes, a hot start to the season is the sign of something fundamentally changing in a player's game; sometimes, a slow start is a sign of a player starting to lose it. Not reacting early in the season can sometimes mean you miss out on one of those changes, and that can be just as costly as overreacting.

So, it's worth trying to figure out whether the first few weeks of the season really matter. In one sense, of course they matter -- those stats count just as much for your season-end totals in Roto, and those wins help you make the playoffs just as much in a H2H points league. But buying a player at the peak of a hot streak could mean you missed their best stretch and are going to be stuck with the regression period. And, because that hot stretch happened at the start of the season, you might be inclined to give them more rope than they deserve, because their overall numbers will be inflated by that hot start.

I took a look back at the last 10 seasons' worth of data for hitters to try to figure out if how they start the season can help predict how the rest of their seasons will go. Because that's what truly matters in this discussion.

I started by compiling all hitter stats from the first two weeks of the season for every season from 2010 through 2019 -- 2020 was such a strange season that it doesn't make sense to include it in this kind of analysis -- along with every player's rest-of-season production. I also grabbed each of those players' previous season numbers to serve as the baseline test -- career numbers would also work, but given that so much of Fantasy value is driven, rightly or wrongly, by what a player did in the previous season, it feels like a good way to establish the baseline production expectation.

Then, I compared players' OPS over their first two weeks to their previous season, grouping them by how much they over performed that baseline and then comparing their rest-of-season production to that baseline.

My assumption coming into this exercise was that the first two weeks wouldn't be especially predictive for rest-of-season production, that it will essentially look like any other random two-week stretch for the season. Two weeks is probably just too little amount of time for the signal to outweigh the noise.

Here's what the results look like:

Which pretty much backs up my assumption. There does appear to be a relationship between starting poorly or well, at least directionally -- players who over performed their baseline tended to over perform their previous season's OPS, while those who under performed tended to under-perform the rest of the season as well. All other things being equal, a player hitting better than expected in the first two weeks of the season is better than not.

But I'm not sure there's actually anything actionable here. The margins are relatively small -- we're talking about between 10 and 30 points of OPS nearly across the board, which is the kind of thing you wouldn't even notice if you watched every game of that player's season. It's not nothing, but there's nothing here that would really suggest a hot or slow start should change how you view a player.

Among players who over performed their previous season's baseline by between 10 and 30% in those first two weeks, only 55.3% actually over performed it the rest of the season.

A slow start does seem to be more predictive than a fast one, with 64.4% of those who under performed their baseline by 10 to 30% in the first two weeks ultimately under performing over the course of the season, but it's interesting to note that there isn't much difference between a sort of slow start and an extremely slow start -- 62.1% of players whose OPS the first two weeks was lower than 70% of their baseline finished under performed the rest of the season, actually a slightly better success rate for the less-slow starters. If there were truly predictive value here worth acting on, you would expect an especially slow start to portend future struggles better than a small slump, but that isn't what the data suggests, either.

What about those players who over perform early in the season? Well, it seems like there is even less of an impact -- the average OPS difference by each level ranges from .003 to 0.028 until you get to the very top, where there does appear to be some impact. Of the players who were at least 60% better than their baseline the first two weeks, all but one was better the rest of the season than they were their previous season, with an average OPS increase of .111 points -- a pretty significant number.

Of course, the problem there is the sample size -- we're only talking about 15 players, and in a handful of these cases, they were already very good hitters simply coming back from a down season -- guys like Nelson Cruz in 2010, Ryan Zimmerman in 2017, David Wright in 2012, Cody Bellinger in 2019. There were a few breakout cases, too but it's worth noting that Chase Utley in 2014 and Jeff Francoeur in 2009 just missed the cutoff for the 60% mark, and both saw their OPS dip 100 or more points from their baseline, so that could be as much about an arbitrary endpoint.

If a player does get off to an especially hot start, there could be some value in buying high, but that's mostly just if the market isn't buying said hot start. If you have to pay face value for that hot start, it probably isn't worth it.

But all in all, I think the data suggests there just isn't much reason to buy into early-season performance one way or another. There are exceptions -- especially on the pitching side with new pitches or velocity spikes -- but on the whole, early-season production is just as noisy as any other stretch of the season. Obviously, as the sample size behind a hot start grows, it's more likely to be real, but your preseason expectations for a player should still hold more weight than their in-season production for at least the first month or two of the season.

It can be hard to stay disciplined there, and for the fringe guys on your roster, you shouldn't be married to them if they get off to a slow start. Plus, for young players or guys without a large sample size, your opinion should be more malleable. But, on the whole, you should fade early-season noise. Just like us stodgy old Fantasy analysts have always told you.