Giants lefty Alex Hinshaw has come out of nowhere to post some impressive numbers in the majors.

You just never know.

That’s one of the great things about baseball.  You may know all 25 players on your favorite team but do you know all 25 players on each of the 30 teams in the Major Leagues?  It’s possible, you might know all 750 players who started the season in the big leagues.

But do you know the top prospects for all of the farm teams?  Again, you might know the top 300 prospects in the game.  And if you knew those 1,050 players when the season began, you might be feeling pretty confident you had all the bases covered.

But you didn’t.

OK, raise your hands if you know who Alex Hinshaw is.  Keep them raised if you knew who he was on April 1^st.  Hmm, not too many hands up out there.

However, don’t feel bad.  Hinshaw did not make the Giants out of Spring Training.  And he was not on Baseball America’s list of top 10 prospects for the Giants, either.  Hinshaw was such an unknown coming into the season he didn’t even make the list of prospects by Minor League maven John Sickels, who graded 34 players in the San Francisco farm system.

Yet, here he is in the Major Leagues with the Giants and the lefty reliever is putting up some nice numbers in his first exposure to Major League hitters.

Hinshaw has appeared in six games and faced 14 batters.  He has allowed just one hit and has fanned nine without allowing a walk.  That is a 0.231 WHIP - not too shabby for someone who was viewed (at best) as the team’s 35^th-best prospect coming into the season.

Obviously, he won’t keep up these numbers but the scouting report shows him with a fastball consistently in the 90s along with a knee-buckling curve, which makes him someone to keep tabs on.

If you had a dollar for every site that talks about baseball you would be a rich man.  Yet despite all of that virtual ink, Alex Hinshaw was a virtual unknown to over 99 percent of baseball fans coming into the season.

You just never know.