Man, dude has been raking recently. Another 5 RBIs with 2 HRs tonight. Was pretty worried about him considering the way he started off the season, but looks like he's got it back together. Hopefully more and more guys will start getting back to where they were last season.
2nd on the team in home runs and SLG (behind Springer). Tied for the team lead in RBIs with Correa. All while having ~70-100 less ABs than the main guys. OPS over the last 3 days is now over 1.000. He's tied for the majors lead in home runs in June (with Krush Davis and Nelson Cruz). Have we achieved peak Gattitude?
Awesome for Gattis. I think for the first time he has embraced the DH role in production. It seems he played better offensively in the past when he was getting regular games catching. With Stassi and McCann that is not the case any more. And he is performing like a DH should, mashing the baseball.
His career stats as a DH were abysmal. I never really bought into that being a thing until last season. The consistent results had pretty much swayed my opinion, despite there being no tangible reason why somebody should be so much worse. So naturally when he was a full time DH again, and was terrible, I had no optimism about him actually being productive this season. I knew he was better than sub-.600 OPS, but not actually any good. I'm thrilled that this power surge has kicked in. This is a guy who is right at 34 HR and 100 RBI per 650 PA, and has a career OPS of .782. He's not gonna maintain his current tear, but if he can just be at his career averages, it will be spectacular in beefing up middle of the lineup. Him and Kemp have been a huge reason why we have had the best offense in the AL over the last month.
Tried to tell folks to calm down. The Astros had a rough stretch in the schedule. Now our boys are going to clean up for a while. I expect nothing short of an historic run the next month or so. 7 in a row ain’t ****.
Kemp has been huge. Before, the bottom of the order was such a black hole I think it put a damper on the whole lineup. Guys like Correa and Gurriel probably thought they needed to hit it over the fence for us to have a shot at runs. Gattis has been on a tear, Marwin is actually hitting better, McCann is back, Kemp is awesome. And we have a creampuff schedule. I'm still cautiously pessimistic about the bottom of our order and would prefer we added at least one impact bat.
Any chance we can see Reed added somehow (not sure whose spot he'd take)? I think a strong lefty power bat is what we're missing, and he certainly deserves another chance. Next year, with Gattis and Marwin gone, he can do more DH and 1B while Yuli becomes more of a utility man (as Hinch seems to want).
The issue is we don't have a 12 game lead in June. That afforded us a lot of luxury last year. I don't really want to experiment with Reed over Gurriel or Gattis (the only two places he can play) while we are a half game back of the Mariners.
Luckily our schedule is easier for the next few weeks while the Mariners gets harder - they face the Red Sox tonight, so I'd expect us to be back in the lead over the next few days. My concern is that we haven't shown we can win a series against the Yankees or Red Sox yet this year.
