Rowand's 2008 Performance and Implications for 2009

I've been searching for an explanation of Rowand's steep dropoff in production mid-season and was not ever able to locate one until now. At Baseball Analysts, Greg Rybarczyk of Hit Tracker has devised a rather complicated and sophisticated system for projecting how a player should hit in the next season, using his Hit Tracker data, and wrote about it there.

As luck would have it, he projected Aaron Rowand's 2008 projection based on his 2007 data and came to the conclusion that he was hitting what he should have been hitting until mid-season, when he had a right quadriceps injury on June 6th (an injury I've been looking for but didn't find until now).

Lo and behold, that does appear to be the tipping point of the season for him. After going 2 for 5 in the next game, with a double, that was the high point for his OPS. In his next 3 games including that 2 for 5, he hit .250/.308/.417/.725, and for the rest of June after June 6th, he hit .217/.261/.313/.574. He slowly recovered in July and August before apparently suffering another injury (relapse?) in September, hitting a sad .217/.286/.253/.539.

Meanwhile, his Hit Tracker projection was .373 OBP, .507 SLG, .880 OPS, 25 HR which in comparison with his pro-rated stats thru June 6th of .396 OBP, .526 SLG, .922 OPS, 23 HR, is pretty darn close, probably would have been on target based on his April batting line, which was also pretty darn close too, .366 OBP, .500 SLG, .866 OPS, 15 HR.

His May was elevated and if he had continued hitting like he did in April, his overall numbers would have drifted to around the projection. It was pretty spot on in this case, and is pretty close to what I was expecting from him pre-season, I thought that a low 800 OPS, in the .825-to .850 range was reasonable for him, but even .800 in CF would be good for a CF.

Injury Bugaboo

However, Aaron Rowand has been pretty injury prone his whole career. It is not like Durham, who was never on the DL, EVER, until he started taking a permanent annual spot on the DL with us (we probably should have let him go free agent instead of signing him to a two year deal and gotten the two draft picks for him, in that great 2007 draft; but we needed a hitter behind Bonds and he was economical). Rowand has been significantly injured in at least 3 of the past 5 seasons. The only consolation is that he has alternated healthy years with these injury years and 2009 he is due to be healthy or at least be able to play most games in the season, though Bochy has already said that he's going to rest Rowand more often in order to give Schierholtz more starts, as well as keep Rowand fresher.

If he can hit like the HT projection says he can (it is park adjusted), that would be a huge plus to our offense (and would have been in 2008) for 2009 with the additions of Sandoval and Renteria plus the maturation of Fred Lewis. If he can hit as well as the HT projection, he would boost our offense by around 0.14-0.16 runs per game, or about 24 runs, which adds about 2.5 wins to the team. That could push us from being around .500 to being over .500 in 2009.

Now, if he can only stay injury free...