The Pastime

As anyone who’s read this site more often than once or twice in the past can tell you, I’m a fan of Dan Johnson. He not only plays for my favorite team, the A’s, but he also played at the University of Nebraska, which I attend and have been a fan of since I was conceived.

That being said, here’s something I’ve noticed about Dan Johnson. He’s really started to emerge from his slump that stretched back to the last two months of the 2005 season. Take a look at this handy chart from the good people at fangraphs:

[Green is ground ball %, red is line drive %, and blue is flyball %]

As you can clearly see, at some point in the last third of 2005, his line drive % fell throught the floor, his fly ball % went up, as did the ground ball percentage. Add that all together, and you have a ballplayer that’s not hitting very effectively.

His slump continued on into the 2006 campaign, until about the end of May. Suddenly, he returned to the form we were used to seeing in the minors, and at the beginning of te 2005 season.

The line drive percentage has shot way up. Fly ball percentage has declined noticeably, and he’s been hitting many more groundballs. For a player with Johnson’s skill set, the LD% is a good sign, but I’m a little worried about the FB and GB numbers. He’s a power hitter with little speed, so he should be hitting fly balls over the fences, not groundballs to the holes. He’s not going to beat out those throws from the deep infield.

It’s nevertheless encouraging, though. If he can stop beating some of those balls into the ground, he should be able to ride the wave of higher LD% to a decent season. The A’s have faced a lot of groundball specialists lately, though, such as Brandon Webb, Aaron Cook and Derek Lowe, so I’ll write off a small amount of the GB% to that.