Is anyone on this team overachieving at the plate?

I think it's a fair question. We can throw Ryan Doumit out for now, because he's got too small of a sample size. That leaves us with only two viable candidates for the title of "team offensive over-achiever" at the moment, Jose Bautista and Xavier Nady.

We can start with Bautista. His hitting line is currently .275/.357/.432. That's honestly not a whole ton better than his PECOTA of .259/.338/.436. His stats as a leadoff hitter are slightly more impressive at .317/.404/.537, but he's only got 95 PAs from there, so it's hard to judge. We also have to remember he started last year really hot and slumped terribly in the second half. There is one area in which he's been pretty impressive this year. He's only struck out 38 times in 268 PAs, he struck out 110 times in 469 last year. That's a significant improvement and with his 29 walks, he's easily got one of the best batting eyes on the team this year. If he can keep this up, he's going to hit over 40 doubles this year and be a very good leadoff hitter for us. That's a big if though.

The other guy to talk about is Nady. We knew he could hit lefties and we knew he could hit outside of PNC Park. Since half of our games are at PNC Park and more than half are against right handed pitchers, that left us with a lot of unknown. So how's Nady doing? Against righties he's hitting .250/.305/.473. That slugging percentage is pretty encouraging, as his career line is .246/.296/.416. It's still great, but he does seem to be figuring things out a bit. A lot of this may be due to his recent hot streak, though. At PNC this year he's hitting .256/.330/.446. Again, not great but better than his .275/.321/.314 last year. His overall line of .283/.343/.503 is somewhat better than his PECOTA of .286/.340/.471, but again, he saw a huge dip in power in the second half last year (and not just when he came to Pittsburgh) and we can't count that out again this year.

Really looking at it, even the two guys that people like to point out as overachievers to this point in the year are just barely falling into that category. So how is it that nearly every single player on the team is either underperforming or just barely meeting expectations (if you go by preseason projections)? Are the projections too high? Or are Jeff Manto and Jim Tracy doing something so fundamentally wrong that they're screwing these hitters up beyond belief?