The Philadelphia Phillies will enter play on Tuesday with a 27-18 record, placing them a half game back in the National League East. An unheralded contributor to the Phillies' good start has been Cesar Hernandez, who might be the best second baseman most people don't know about.

Hernandez will celebrate his 28th birthday on Wednesday, and will do so while tying for the sixth-most Wins Above Replacement among second basemen since the start of the 2016 season. The folks ahead of him compose the who's who of the keystone: there's Jose Altuve and Robinson Cano, Brian Dozier and DJ LeMahieu, and old reliable, Ian Kinsler. (LeMahieu's Q Score deserves to be higher than it is, too -- Emcee Oppo-Field has two Gold Glove Awards, a pair of All-Star Games, and a batting title to his name.) Hernendez hasn't won any hardware or made it into the Midsummer Classic yet. That could change soon, however.

Over the course of his first three full seasons, Hernandez hit .288/.363/.390 while averaging five home runs and 17 stolen bases. Heretofore in 2018, he's batting .278/.391/.438 with six homers and nine steals in 11 tries. He's also sporting would-be career-bests in ISO and walk rate. The sample size remains small, but there's reason to think this is an in-progress breakout rather than a better-than-expected opening stretch.

Hernandez has always been an on-base machine, thanks to one of the league's most patient and disciplined approaches. He doesn't swing early or often, and he doesn't expand his zone. Whether or not he'll continue to walk more than his usual 10 percent (right now he's closer to 16 percent) could hinge on how much he retains of his budding power output. The switch-hitting Hernandez, who happens to be one of the game's fastest second basemen, could well set a new career-high in homers before the end of June. Put another way, his .160 ISO is nearly 70 points above his career mark entering the year.

There are a lot of issues with how launch angle and exit velocity are used in analysis, and a lot of questions about their predictive ability. Still, it's fair to use them in a descriptive manner, and right now Hernández is exhibiting a change in how he's striking the baseball. His 11-degree launch angle is a departure from his norm -- to the extent that the sum of his launch angles from the previous three seasons of the Statcast era was 7.9 degrees. Yes, the sum.

If Hernandez can continue to strike the ball with more authority, he would seem even better positioned to get ahead in counts and reach base, either on a walk or an extra-base hit. Once he gets on, he's a legitimate threat to steal or advance an extra base during the run of play. See the interplay there? See how Hernandez's athleticism and feel for the craft combine to make him a potent offensive player? To think that, while he isn't the best defender in the world, he's at minimum a tolerable second baseman who can make plays like this, too:

So much talk about the Phillies infield over the past few months has concerned the other players. How Carlos Santana's arrival will change the culture; how J.P. Crawford and Maikel Franco can prove they're part of the core; how Scott Kingery will fold in. Hernandez has outperformed them all, every one, by a healthy margin -- his 129 OPS+ is second on the Phils, behind Odubel Herrera; Santana has been the second-best hitter on the infield, at 100.

Hernandez is used to being overlooked, but a banal sin is a sin all the same. He's a good player -- one everyone should be familiar with, one who might be getting better.