The last few years in baseball has seen the proliferation of ever more granular statistics. These statistics – ones that tell us not just the results of any given plate appearances, but the process that got a player there in minute detail – have been a great boon to our understanding of the game.

Take the much-discussed "flyball revolution" that has seen players from A.J. Pollock to Yonder Alonso transform their games with a simple mantra: "Hit the ball in the air." This isn't a new idea. Babe Ruth fundamentally altered baseball forever with an uppercut swing designed to send the ball to the seats, but that idea turned into a revolution when statistics showing the value and frequency of flyballs for every hitter in baseball.

These statistics, more than your typical box score numbers, purport to quantify a player's skill set. If a player is putting up good box score numbers but the hard-hit rate or HR/FB ratio don't back it up, the assumption is that it won't last. On the other hand, if a player without much of a track record of elite production starts to produce, with the numbers to back it up, we're more likely to believe it. After all, the skill set supports it, right?

This is where we are with Justin Smoak. The former top prospect entered the season among the ranks of the irrelevant for Fantasy, with a career-high OPS of .768 standing as a middling outlier amid a career .223/.308/.392 triple-slash line. And it wasn't like he had just never had the opportunity; Smoak entered the season with nearly 2,900 plate appearances to his name, about as many as Yoenis Cespedes had.

However, Smoak is off to a rousing .288/.354/.564 start, with 12 homers in 181 plate appearances, just eight short of his career high. He has backed this production up with a career-low 18.2 percent strikeout rate, and sterling marks in whichever of the more granular numbers you want to sift through. He has a strong 23.7 percent line drive rate, a 42.7 percent hard-hit rate, and just an 8.3 percent swinging strike rate, all of which backs up his contact-heavy, power-driven results.

In fact over the past 10 seasons, only one players has even sported a line drive rate above 23.7 percent and a hard-hit rate over 42.7 percent: Miguel Cabrera, who did it twice in 2013 and 2014. A total of 115 have combined Smoak's current line-drive rate with his current swinging strike rate, and that group collectively hit .291 with a .360 on-base percentage, and only 19 even had a .200 ISO; Smoak's current .276 mark would be the second-highest of that group, behind only Mike Trout's 41-homer 2015 season.

So, Smoak is producing like an elite hitter, with an OPS north of .900 and a full-season pace of over 30 homers and 100 RBI. And, he has the peripherals to suggest he has the talent to back it up.

So Justin Smoak is an elite hitter now, right? Not necessarily.

While these peripheral stats may be attempting to measure true talent better than our more traditional stats, they are still more descriptive than predictive. That means they describe events that have already happened, but don't necessarily tell us much about what will happen. In Smoak's case, that means that his production so far isn't necessarily a fluke – it is backed up by the way he has hit the ball for the Blue Jays.

But it doesn't necessarily mean his skill set has changed this drastically. This could just be a hot streak, and he simply may not hit the ball this well moving forward. A good example from last season is someone like Colby Rasmus, who hit .263/.400/.579 with a 40.0 percent hard-hit rate last April. He hit just .191/.252/.297 from that point on as he struggled to hold down an everyday job.

It's possible we are seeing an improved version of Smoak, one who has made real improvements to his game and has tapped into some of that former top prospect magic. On the other hand, we've seen stretches like this from Smoak before, and none of those portended some dramatic change in his production moving forward:

That's not to say this one won't. But when given 181 plate appearances to judge vs. nearly 2,900, I'll still defer to the latter. The opportunity cost involved in adding Smoak is low, so I still recommended it. However, the opportunity cost in, say, trading for him, or even starting him for the next few weeks to ride the "hot hand" could be a bit higher. If Smoak regresses to his track record and you keep starting him, you could be leaving valuable production on the table.

Figuring out when a breakout is real is one of the toughest things about playing Fantasy baseball. When the cost to find out is low enough, there's no downside. Smoak has been at that level for a while. Once you actually have to start him, things get a bit tougher. Smoak certainly looks like a new hitter, but don't be surprised if his past catches up to him before long.