On the morning of May 7, Mike Yastrzemski was hitting .273/.344/.345. Recently recovered from a bout with Covid, he returned to the lineup just in time for the team to lose the last three games of their stretch where they lost 7 of 8. The team had to turn it around, right? Yaz had to turn it around, right?
On the morning of May 7, Darin Ruf was hitting .188/.291/.208, and if you’re a math person, you know that’s an OPS of .499. He started out the year hitting into some rough luck, and then started hitting the ball badly, because if you’re gonna get bad results you might as well do it with a bad process. Ruf had played every day during that 1-7 run, and hadn’t done much to distinguish himself. He had to turn it around, right? If he didn’t, how would the team respond?
Friends, they both turned it around. Since then, Yastrzemski is hitting .316/.417/.605 and Ruf is hitting .423/.571/.654. The team is, not coincidentally, 8-3 in that stretch. Everyone is back! Everyone is good again. Let’s not look into this any more than that, because what conclusion could possibly be more satisfying than “Everyone is good again?”
Well, okay, maybe “Everyone is good again and also everybody reading this should look under their chair for a large pile of money.”
Don’t look under your chair, by the way. I didn’t put anything there. The logistics alone would have been very difficult.
With their recent hot streaks, Yastrzemski’s line is up to .290/.376/.452 on the year, and Ruf is at .240/.359/.306. Yaz’s line has become Actually Good, while Ruf’s improved from awful all the way to Not Unplayable. But what’s behind their improvements?
We’ll start with Ruf. He’s had a hard enough year, and I don’t want to make it worse through my massively influential newsletter, but the main driver of his hot streak is a high BABIP. Since May 7 (and not including yesterday’s game), his average on balls in play is .588, and since he won’t be able to keep that up in the long term, he’s probably not going to hit .423 for the rest of the year.
However! The good news for Ruf is that his overall BABIP for the year is in line with what he’s done the last couple years, so his performance over the season so far should be at least sustainable going forward. And that’s all come with the suspiciously deadened ball and shockingly low power numbers that might be due to said suspiciously deadened ball. The ball’s a little livelier now, though. Is it a coincidence that Darin Ruf’s bat is too?
Well, maybe a little. A normal baseball doesn’t directly lead to a BABIP near .600. But a lot of those balls he was hitting hard over the first week or so of the season were not leading to the success that’s coming with similar balls he’s hitting hard now. Ruf obviously won’t carry this success through the rest of the season, but it does look like he can carry some success, which is a whole lot more than he was doing in April.
Yastrzemski, on the other hand, has had a completely normal BABIP during his streak. He’s at .308, which is actually a little under his season average of .324. He’s walking a little more than he had earlier in the season, and he’s striking out more too, and it’s all working. Everything he’s doing is allowing him to hit the ball harder. His average exit velocities are much higher than they had been earlier in the year, and his overall numbers aren’t quite as video game ludicrous as Ruf’s.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that Mike Yastrzemski is likely to have the same offensive season that Bryce Harper did last year. We’ll file that under “unlikely.” But he’s showing gains in his ability to hit the ball hard, and keeping his peripherals right where he wants them to be. The numbers over this two week stretch are comparable to Harper’s entire season last year.
That’s a good way to think both about how good Mike Yastrzemski has been since May 7, and how good Bryce Harper was all of last year.
Having an MVP-level performance from Mike Yastrzemski would obviously be a huge win for the Giants. But just maintaining some of those gains for the rest of the season would work too. If some of what we’ve seen over the fortnight he’s been back on the roster holds up, and he hits like 2019-2020 Yaz instead of 2021 Yaz, the Giants have a lot of reason for optimism. Yaz was a good player last year in a down year offensively. Now he’s got a shot at being a great one this year. If you’re the Giants, you’ll take that.