![]() This is a 23 year old who has figured out how to turn his physical talents into the kind of production that is nearly unprecedented in baseball history. But look at that past year line again that isn’t a fluke. ![]() He won’t get to face Atlanta’s pitching staff in half of his games, as he has so far. Harper can’t keep up his current levels of performance, of course. He’s even halfway to last season’s stolen base total, and he hasn’t been thrown out on the bases yet, so he’s apparently decided to add some baserunning value to his already stellar overall game. If Harper keeps hitting for this kind of power while sustaining these improved contact rates, he’s going to be an unstoppable offensive force, and run away with the NL MVP again. Taking into account the data from the first two weeks of 2016, though, the rest-of-season ZIPS/Steamer forecasts have Trout at +7.9 and Harper at +7.2, so in two weeks, Harper has cut the projected difference in half. Heading into the season, our combined ZIPS/Steamer projections had Trout at +8.7 WAR to +7.3 WAR for Harper, a 1.4 win gap. But even now, the gap might not be as large as you’d think. Of course, Trout’s had a couple of seasons at this level, and this is Harper’s first stretch of putting up +10 WAR over a year’s worth of games, so it’s probably fair to say that we don’t have enough evidence to suggest that Harper has passed Trout at this point. And a guy who appears to be getting better. That’s a +10 WAR season from a guy who isn’t getting any boost from the defensive metrics. That’s Joey Votto’s control of the strike zone married to Chris Davis’ power when Chris Davis is on a hot streak. Over the past 365 days, Harper has played in 153 games, so a little less than one full season. And even taking the longer view, what Harper is in the midst of doing is on par with Trout’s best years. As good as Harper was last year, it appears that we may not have seen the best of him yet. He doesn’t chase out of the zone like he used to, he’s not letting hittable strikes go by, and he’s making contact on almost every strike he swings at.Īnd he doesn’t appear to have sacrificed any power in making these improvements. As August Fagerstrom noted last week, Harper has stopped swinging through pitches in the zone, there’s basically no way to get him out anymore. But he’s managed to pair that increased selectivity with a very aggressive approach on pitches in the zone, so he’s not just standing there taking strikes and working the count. Note that Harper’s O-Swing rates have been trending down over the years, and through the first couple of weeks of 2016, he’s now swinging at pitches out of the zone at a rate that would make him one of the most selective hitters in baseball.
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