All The Singles Hitters

Dave Cameron looks at the strange career of Xander Bogaerts:

In his first 96 plate appearances of the year, Bogaerts has racked up 29 hits, but 26 of them have been singles. He has two doubles and a triple, but has yet to hit a ball out of the park, and so while he’s hitting .330, he’s slugging just .375. And even that might be overstate his 2017 power levels.

Bogaerts has 78 balls tracked by Statcast this year. Of the 133 players with 70+ tracked batted balls this year, Bogaerts ranks 127th in average exit velocity on balls in the air. Here are the six players who rank below him: Dee Gordon, Jorge Polanco, Erick Aybar, Jarrod Dyson, Billy Hamilton, Jose Peraza. Bogaerts is hitting the ball with the kind of authority that makes you something like an offensive zero. And even though he’s making more contact, it’s really hard to produce at a high level with this kind of contact.

Bogaerts, when coming up through the minors, was supposed to be a slugger. Cameron concludes:

Bogaerts probably won’t keep slapping the ball like he has in the first month of the season, and perhaps his experiment in making more contact will lead to a better balance of batted-ball authority along with a reduced strikeout rate. But while Bogearts remains a good player, he’s a very different good player than I ever expected him to become, and it remains a bit confusing to see a guy who was hyped as a slugger spend a month hitting like Dee Gordon.

If nothing else, the Red Sox should probably switch Bogaerts and Andrew Benintendi in the batting order. The way Bogaerts is hitting now works better as a table setter.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2p5RPaE