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Francisco Lindor rising, Stephen Strasburg falling in points leagues rankings

For points-league players, there's a sabermetric shortcut you can use to help estimate how well your hitters are doing thus far in the season in relation to the rest of the league. It's called "Runs Created per 27 Outs" (RC/27) and it's the "Orphan Black" of statistics. Essentially, RC/27 is an estimate of how many runs a team made up entirely of clones of an individual player would score in a game.

While the math involved in calculating RC/27 indeed gets quite "mathy," the basic gist of the equation is that players are rewarded for hits, total bases, walks and steals, while being penalized for strikeouts. Quicker than you can say Tatiana Maslany, you've got a fairly good estimator of players whose production so far in 2016 likely correlates to solid points-league performance.

Last season's list of top players in RC/27 reads like a points league "Who's Who," with Bryce Harper (10.13), Joey Votto (9.25) , Paul Goldschmidt (8.93), Mike Trout (8.38) , Miguel Cabrera (8.07), Josh Donaldson (7.64) and Andrew McCutchen (7.62) leading the way. While the sample size is still quite small, with a quick look at the current RC/27 leaderboard we can certainly see which of the players who are off to hot starts are contributing in all the right ways to portend a greater likelihood of points-league success.