Friday, July 10, 2009

Is David Ortiz Back?

The first third of the season showed a brutally awful David Ortiz who after sixty games was batting .178 with no homers. He looked lost and he looked slow. It was so bad that it became almost a spectator sport to see how long the really bad could be. But watching Baseball Tonight on ESPN regularly, we have seen a resurgence of the Big Papi as he is hitting the ball for power more often and the analysts on ESPN's highlight show have talked about how Ortiz is again hitting the fastball. But is he all the way back?

The numbers show he is better, but then again, it's hard to be much worse than .178. But he has hardly been the David Ortiz of old either. For all the talk, he's still only batting .250 in his last ten games. He is slugging at a .555 clip for the ten games and that is a hearty number. But if he is suddenly "hot" again, that slugging isn't THAT hot. Not as hot as when he was slugging .621 for entire seasons in the not too distant past.

The good news is that Ortiz is striking out far less. His rate is 17% for the last ten games compared to the 25% for the year and 21% of his career. The bad news is that his walks are down. The last ten games pretty much mirror the rest of the season where he is striking out twice for every one walk (6 Ks and 3 Ws the last ten games). In the past, his ratio was always around one to one.

Ortiz is now at .731 for an OPS and it's a good bet that it could probably reach .800 by the end of the season. He is definitely better than he was earlier in the season, but he is not the David Ortiz of the past, despite his improvement.

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