Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning you’ll get a fresh, topical column to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.
There’s an old, long-debunked fallacy about aging curves with baseball players that more or less follows that 27 is the magical age when many players “break out” because they're at their physical peaks. Players generally peak in their late twenties, though the myth around the specific age of 27 tends to get people excited about talented players approaching that prophesied number.
One player cannot outweigh stringent statistical analysis, yet we’re nearly a month into the season and these two things are true: Byron Buxton is 27 years old, and Byron Buxton is absolutely raking.