Harris has looked just plain lost lately.
A bit. He's gotten away from drawing walks. I think he is pressing. the obsession with the low batting average and his lack of playing time has drawn him out of his game. Open up his game log on B-R and take a look at 2 dates - 4/23 and 5/8. On 4/23, he had started 9 of 17 games. His BA was .188 ("$uck$!") but his OBP was .341 and his OPS was .810. I forget, I think there might have been a minor injury at that time, but in any event his starts started to disappear. He was still fairly effective at the plate, so by 5/8, after starting 3 out of 4 games, his OPS was still .749, with most of the drop coming out of OBP. his OPS against righties was even better, but i have not recalculated the splits (I was going to do it tonight). I recall a post I did around 5/2 on Ben's blog where Willie still had good numbers v. RHP, and I'll assume they did not get worse over the next week. Over the next 28 games, he started very sporadically (6 starts), stopped drawing walks (3 in 41 PAs) without improving his BA.
Basically, the playing time disappeared, which led to the numbers drop. What I want to look at is his numbers the past few years and whether they tended to get better when he had to fill in as a regular due to injuries. Anecdotally, I think that was the case last year. He started very slowly, but then ended up with his typical numbers when he played regularly. And by typical numebrs, I'm saying the .350+ OBP, .400+ SLG v. RHP he had over 1000 PAs between 2007 - 2009.
Oh, just to finish the thought -
