David Ortiz has a six-game hitting streak. It’s modest as these things go -- he’s 7 for 25 with a double and a homer that someone described to me as a cheapie -- but .280 over six games is nothing to sneeze at when you’re having the kind of year Ortiz is.
Now comes someone -- specifically Will Moller at The Yankee Dollar blog -- suggesting that maybe Ortiz is about to turn the corner due to the fact that his BABIP is way, way lower than one would expect given how many line drives he’s hitting:
If Ortiz was .030 above or below his expected BABIP, I’d be inclined to view it as mostly statistical noise. .100 is absurd. He’s still making contact, and he’s putting balls in play, hard . . . A deeper analysis would probably uncover that Ortiz has a bigtime hole in his swing that didn’t exist before, that is being exploited by opposing pitchers. But it’s bizarre to see a player suddenly hitting a ton more line drives, walking less, and striking out more . . . Long story short: Big Papi is going to stop being the butt of so many jokes before the year is out.
I’m savvy enough to understand that flukey-strange BABIP numbers like that are often signs that bad luck is afoot, but going much further than that is above my pay grade. And the increased strikeouts/fewer walks Moller notices could be evidence that Papi is just being challenged way more than most players now, and that his guesses are simply getting slightly better.
It continues to strike me, however, that Ortiz can’t keep this April-May performance up forever and that some sort of improvement has to happen. Perhaps what Moller noticed here is evidence that that improvement is already occurring, even if we haven’t really seen it reflected in the box score as of yet.