Witness his almost FIVE war 2014 when he OPS+'d 92...
Isn't the classic symptom of a hamate problem being sapped of power and batspeed? Wouldn't losing those two things be EXACTLY what caused the two issues Martin saw in 2015?
For a switch swinging contact hitter loss of power doesn't mean loss of homer runs... It means... Line drives turn into pop fly's... hmmm exactly what you pointed out...
Also for a contact player bat speed is his tool to fight against tough strike out pitches... again, hamate break -> makes it painful to swing fast and hard -> makes it hard for him to foul off K pitches -> hence the ballooning strike outs...
It seems reasonable to ME that with the injury fixed, that his 2013/2014 seasons should be the EXPECTATION... the median Martin going forward...
Why are we framing this as the expectation is that Martin is Zunino terrible with the bat and by some MIRICLE could MAYBE get back to being half the man he was before? Did Martin lose some magic secret sauce from 2013/2014? Were his first two years a mirage somehow? Deal with the devil? Why are they brushed aside like they didn’t happen or they don’t actually represent Martin today?
Like I said in the earlier thread, we should be starting from the position of: Martin is who he is (90ish with the bat, top 3 CF in the league with the glove), with a chance to have a down... OR UP season... The UP season for Martin ISN'T that he gets back to his norm... The UP season for Martin is that he has great BABIP luck in SafeCo, hits 295 instead of 270, hits a bunch of SafeCo wide open spaces doubles and OPS's 105/110 instead of 90 and all of a sudden we have a SIX win player on our hands...
It seems to me that SSI is getting WAY wrapped around the axel of an injury plagued, outlier season... Which is not the norm for SSI... I attribute this to the fact that the cost of acquiring Martin was a swift kick to the man region for a bunch of folks around here and so we can't see Martin clearly through the Bartender/PK tears... :)
Or I am completely wrong and you all can make fantastic amounts of fun at my idiocy when Martin Craters for the first half or 2016 and is out of baseball and working at a snow cone stand by 2017 :)