Milwaukee Brewers fans haven’t had much to get excited about this year. Their team’s 5-17 record is easily the worst in baseball, and with a BaseRuns differential of -45, it appears as though they’ve been about as bad as their record suggests. It’s unlikely the Brewers will continue to play this poorly, but it’s probably safe to say the they won’t be anywhere near the playoff race this fall. Our playoff odds calculator gives them a minuscule 1% of even making it into the Wild Card game.

The current iteration of the Brewers is pretty depressing — Adam Lind is literally their only player who’s hitting better than league-average. But despite their current struggles, Milwaukee has a few intriguing minor leaguers on the horizon, who represent beams of light for Brewers fans. One of those players is shortstop prospect Orlando Arcia. Kiley McDaniel deemed Arcia the Brewers best prospect over the winter, and the 20-year-old has lived up to that billing with a hot start to 2015.

Through 78 trips to the plate in Double-A Biloxi, Arcia’s hitting .409/.468/.545. This is obviously a very small sample of games, but still, a .409 batting average is pretty eye-popping. Arcia’s year-to-date numbers are almost certainly good enough to make us re-evaluate what we thought of him a month ago.

Arcia’s first month of the season has been impressive, but as with almost any player who hits over .400 in a small sample, luck’s played a role. His BABIP currently sits at .441, which is well beyond the “might be sustainable” range. This is especially true for Arcia, who’s been BABIPing in the .300 range since 2011.

Arcia may have gotten a lucky bounce or four this April, but those bounces don’t even come close to explaining all of his success. The other drivers of his offensive performance — his power output, walk rate, and especially his strikeout rate — have also been better than average. High BABIP notwithstanding, Arcia’s doing a lot of things right.

Doing things right at the plate isn’t particularly new for Arcia. He barely struck out last year too, which enabled him to hit .289/.346/.392 with a 113 wRC+ as a 19-year-old in High-A. In his two seasons prior to 2014, he also hit better than average: He posted a 103 wRC+ on the strength of a 60:66 strikeout to walk ratio.

Arcia’s 2014 campaign was solid, but it wasn’t enough to get KATOH super excited. Based on data from 2014, my projection system pegged him for 3.1 WAR through age-28, which made him the 154th rated prospect heading into the year. KATOH’s biggest concern with Arcia was his power, or lack thereof. Although he hit better than the league at a young age last year, he did so while hitting for very little power. With just four homers in 546 trips to the plate, his ISO was a measly .102.

To get a sense of what’s become of players similar to Arcia, let’s pull up some comps. Since Arcia’s 2015 campaign is just 20 games old, it probably makes most sense to start with his 2014 season, when he hit a relatively empty .289 in High-A.

To generate player comps in the past, I applied a filter to each individual metric, choosing the filters’ precision arbitrarily. But this time, rather than applying these somewhat-arbitrary filters, I decided to try something a little more scientific. Using Arcia’s league-adjusted stats and his age, I calculated the Mahalanobis distance between Arcia’s 2014 season, and every High-A season since 1990 in which a player recorded at least 400 plate appearances. Below, you’ll find the historical players were nearest and dearest to Arcia’s 2014 campaign by this methodology, ranked from most to least similar.

*Batters who have yet to play their age-28 seasons

This list is a bit of a mixed bag. Most of the players here made it to the big leagues, but many of them never made much of a big league impact. However, there are also some pretty big hits here, which are certainly cause for optimism. Edgardo Alfonzo, Shawn Green, Johnny Damon and Coco Crisp all went on to be stars after doing something similar to what Arcia did in A-Ball last year.

Of course, we’ve received some new data on Arcia since the 2014 season ended. Not a lot of new data, but data that’s too exciting to ignore. So, just for kicks, let’s see what who comes out of the Mahalanobis machine when I run Arcia’s small-sample 2015 numbers.

*Batters who have yet to play their age-28 seasons

This list has similar demographics to the previous one. There are lots of big leaguers, but a bunch who never really hit for enough power to get anywhere, like Jeff Keppinger and Chris Getz. However, guys like Alberto Callaspo, Juan Pierre and Michael Brantley stand out as success stories.

Both KATOH and my lists of comps give us good reason to think Arcia has a big league career ahead of him. It may not be a particularly long or noteworthy career, but it will be a career. It’s relatively rare for a player who’s this far along as a 2o-year-old to not become a big leaguer.

But just how good Arcia will become will very much hinge on his power output. He’s hit 12% better than his league in his 335 minor league games, but he’s always done it while hitting for very little power. It’s generally a positive when a hitter posts nearly identical strikeout and walk rates, but even with tremendous plate discipline, it’s hard to get very far in the big leagues without throwing a bit of power into the mix. Just look at Chris Getz and Ruben Tejada.

Arcia’s just 20-years-old, so there’s plenty of time for the power to come around. In fact, many think it will. Kiley gave Arcia’s game power a 20 heading into the year, but gave it a future grade of 45. Essentially, he anticipates that Arcia’s could be a 15 homer guy if everything breaks right. Here’s what Kiley had to say about Arcia in his writeup of the Brewers organization.

There’s still plenty of room for Arcia to improve offensively, as the speed and defense are carrying his prospect status for now, but the tools are here for more impact at the plate. Arcia is a gap-to-gap, line drive type hitter, but his power started to show up more regularly in games last year and it continued this winter, where he hit 7 homers in 55 games in Venezuela. . . . Some in the organization think he’ll add a lot more muscle, while some think he may even get taller.

That sounds great and all, but we’ve heard this pitch about a lot of players over the years, and the power hasn’t always shown up. I’m still waiting for Sean Burroughs to break out with a 20 homer season. This isn’t a knock on Kiley or any of the other prospect analysts. Forecasting a minor leaguer’s big league trajectory is a tall order, and there will inevitably be droves of hitters who fall short of their projected upside. Sometimes big, strong players just never figure out how to hit for power in games.

But what about Arcia? Will the power ever come for him? Historically speaking, how common is it that players of his ilk grow into their power potential? To get something resembling an answer to these questions, let’s revisit the group of Arcia-like players I generated earlier based on his High-A stats. To generate a slightly more robust and useful sample, I considered the top 50 comps who were 28 or older in 2014.

Unsurprisingly, these hitters were about as punchless as Arcia. As a group, they had an ISO of .107 in A-Ball, and the majority had ISOs that were below their league’s average. Roughly half of these players — 24 out of 50 — managed to stick around for more than 500 plate appearances, but many of them hit for little or no power in the majors. Only 13 managed an ISO higher than .100 through age-28, and a mere four surpassed the .150 mark, which was a tick below league average up until a few years ago. In case you were wondering, those four were Shawn Green, Nate McLouth, Shin-Soo Choo and Edgardo Alfonzo.

Based purely on the data, Arcia seems like a long shot to add much power to his game. It’s fairly rare for a player of his archetype to develop in a way that involves hitting more than a handful of a year. This isn’t to say Arcia’s unlikely to develop into a good player. Power or no power, Arcia still has a whole slew of things going for him. He puts the ball in play and draws the occasional walk, which allows him to get on base at a decent clip. With 55 speed, he also runs better than most, and judging by his 74% stolen base success rate over this year and last, marries his speed solid instincts on the base paths. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he’s a solid defensive shortstop, which isn’t a common skill among players who also have offensive ability.

The power may or may not come around for Arcia, but either way, he’s still a pretty exciting prospect. And he gets more and more exciting with each multi-hit game; he’s already had 10 of them in his 20 games in Double-A. One of the great thing about prospects is that they can instill fans with hope, even when things get ugly at the big league level. And although he likely won’t make it to the show until 2016, Arcia’s minor league performance gives Brewers fans something to get excited about.