Early Season Slumps, Down Goes The Straw, and Hall of Fame Cases
Overreacting to early season statistics is almost a tradition. Managers do it. Sportswriters do it (remember how the Yankees were almost written off after their 1-4 start in 98?). Fans do it. Even us analytical types do it, even though we should and do know better. It's sometimes hard to look at your favorite player slugging .150 in mid-April and convince yourself that you really truly believe it's just the result of a small sample size.
So, without further ado, we will now take a look at the worst offensive starts of the year, ranked by OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage), and try to reassure everybody.
1. Mike Benjamin .110 OPS in 29 PAs - For those of you familiar with offensive winning percentage, Benjamin's offensive stats currently indicate that an average defensive/pitching team with 9 Benjamins in the lineup would have won 1 out of every 1000 games so far. Benjamin is a truly bad hitter, and will be again this year. His rise to the level of mediocrity at the plate last year was a fluke. I am, however, willing to wager quite a bit of coin that his OPS will rise.
2. Gary Gaetti .218 OPS in 28 PAs - A veteran hitter who I thought would go plop! a long time ago. He's old enough to watch carefully, but it's unlikely this reflects his new level of ability
3. Ron Gant .269 OPS in 35 PAs - Gant should find his power stroke sometime soon, if nothing else
4. Eric Davis .343 OPS in 30 PAs - Maybe he's tired from autographing copies of his book which, by the way, is a decent read. Trying to predict Eric Davis' career is something I stopped doing a long time ago, and I'm going to refrain from it here so as to avoid embarrasment
5. Ruben Rivera .357 OPS in 28 PAs - You know, the strong possibility exists that Rivera simply can't hit at this point; he's shown little evidence that he can recently and is still living off a lot of the early hype around him.
6. Johnny Damon .379 OPS in 33 PAs - The Royals are occupied with other rookies this year, and were hoping that the still young Damon would finally have his breakthrough year. It's not starting off that way.
7. Ben Grieve .388 OPS in 32 PAs - If you go back and include late last year, he''s been hitting poorly for a while. That said, he's such a good hitter that he'll surely snap back.
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