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You know the Eric Thames backstory by now. He failed to stick in his first stint in the majors, so he signed with the Korean Baseball Organization and put up absurd power numbers. The KBO, though, is very much a hitter's circuit (and also much less competitive than MLB), so the Brewers seemingly took a risk when they signed Thames, now age 30, to a $16 million pact. 

Well, at this writing Thames is batting .371/.482/.929 and leading the bigs in home runs, slugging, OPS, OPS+, total bases and runs scored. Yes, it's early, but that's an absurd start to the season. Thames' early bestowals plus his unusual back-story have led to some irresponsible speculation that Thames might be benefiting from performance-enhancing drugs (Cubs pitching coach Chris Bosio took the always weak passive-aggressive approach on this matter). 

Anyhow, Thames hit his 11th home run of 2017 on Tuesday, and after doing so he was subjected to his second random drug test of the still-young season. To hear the man himself tell it, that's just fine with him ... 

By way of reminder, plenty of players still get caught by the testing system -- good players, even. 

Also, it's worth circling back to Thames' time in Korea. Click through and read this Twitter thread ... 

Executive summary: Testing in KBO is more stringent than in MLB, and Thames passed all of those. Because of the larger list of banned substances in Korea, many current MLBers would likely get pinged over there. Thames, though, never did. 

As my colleague Mike Axisa wrote, Thames has drastically improved his plate discipline since his first stint in MLB, and that has been the driver of his success. Also, during his first two MLB seasons, he hit 21 out in 181 games despite some erratic playing time, so it's not as though he was absent any foundational power. 

Mostly, though, there's this ...

Until tests prove otherwise, maybe Eric Thames is just good?