Rod Barajas’ weird start
Rod Barajas leads the Mets with nine home runs. He is hitting .233 despite a .164 batting average on balls in play, a mark that likely reflects a little bit of misfortune and a whole, whole lot of fly balls.
Barajas swings hard. Not sure if you’ve noticed that yet. And he swings often.
To date, Barajas has only walked twice. He has a very respectable .823 OPS with a downright bizarre .253/.570 on-base/slugging split.
How bizarre (Ed. note: How bizarre! How bizarre!)? In the history of baseball, no one with enough bats to qualify for the batting title has ever finished a season with an OBP below .275 and a slugging above .550. In fact, no qualifier has ever finished with an OBP below .275 and a slugging above .500.
In fact, if you restore those first parameters and lower the plate-appearance minimum to 50 — arbitrary, no doubt — the search returns only two players: pitcher Don Drysdale in 1958 and Rod Barajas so far in 2010.
This is something I’ve covered before: If you’re swinging at a whole lot of the pitches you see and crushing a fair share of them, you’re not going to continue seeing a lot of good pitches to hit.
It seems like Barajas covers a whole lot of territory with his bat and can put some bad balls in play, but every hitter has his limit. Pitchers will eventually put enough balls in places Barajas can’t reach to either force him into a more patient approach or retire him at an even more frequent pace.
In other words, this won’t continue. Barajas will still hit home runs, but there’s almost no way he will maintain this pace. Of course, if you think Rod Barajas is going to hit 50 home runs this season you’re either heavily medicated or probably should be, so it’s probably silly to even bother explaining why he won’t keep up this pace.
Either way, Barajas has been awesome so far. For a discounted rate, he is providing all the power and staff-handling acumen the Mets could have hoped for from Bengie Molina. Plus, as noted, he has excellent taste in music and comes to the plate to “California Love” and “Low Rider.” So file Rod Barajas under cool.
Cool, and valuable, but not likely to keep hitting this many home runs. It should be interesting to monitor whether he can total more homers than walks this season, an accomplishment that should probably be named for Dave Kingman.
