With another hit Tuesday night, Pedro Feliz has now hit safely in each of the five games he has played for the Cardinals and is batting .381 for his new club. Have the Birds on the Bat given wing to a late-career lift for the defensive specialist?

We thought it was curious when we looked up at the Busch Stadium scoreboard during Feliz’s second plate appearance of Sunday’s game to see his batting average listed at .556. We know it’s customary for players to have their stats reset when they change leagues, but for intraleague changes? Guess that posting a batting average of .229 would unfairly bias the fans against the newbie.

So is Feliz for real? Besides the 21 at-bats being a small sample size, let’s look at how Feliz has gotten on base:

Of his 22 plate appearances, Feliz has put the ball in play 19 times. Of those 19 times, he has, as Wee Willie Keeler supposedly said, "where they ain’t" eight times — a batting average on balls in play of .421. To put it mildly, he can’t keep that up — his career BABIP is .267, and the highest he has ever sustained over a qualified season was .292. But perhaps he’s actually hitting the ball well, and his BABIP isn’t telling the whole story, or at least could be discrediting him. Let’s look at the trajectories of his balls in play:

That breaks down as follows:

Since Feliz isn’t very fleet afoot, the fact that he’s getting a lot of hits on grounders almost certainly means that he’s finding holes — and/or that he’s hitting the ball hard, just on the ground. But when Feliz was in his prime– from 2003-2007, when he slugged .437 — he hit more ball in the air, averaging around 40%, which allowed him to hit more home runs. Being at Busch, a neutral-to-pitcher-friendly space, and slowing down physically, he needs to hit more line drives (easier said than done, of course). Or, given that power is likely no longer his offensive forte, he can at least improve his on-base percentage by walking more. He showed as recently as 2008 that he can draw walks — at a modest 7.1% compared with league average of around 8.7%. For now, however, despite his exciting start, it doesn’t appear that he’ll recover that skill, having walked just once in those 22 appearances.

The good news is that, though his batting should regress to the mean, so will his defense — which is to say that he should continue to play as well as he has with the leather. It’s why the Cardinals traded for him, after all. If he can occasionally contribute with the bat, as he has in these first five games, it’s icing on the cake, even if it is of the day-old variety.

This entry was posted by Pip on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 12:45 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.