The Pecan Park Eagle

Is George Springer on his way to leaping tall buildings in a single bound?

Our Phenom

The George Springer Era is here. After a Willie Mays like start that saw him “dozing fast  under Memdoza” and melting into the marsh of fatally harsher sub-.200 hitting, the kid suddenly lit his own fir and is now ascending up both the performance and fan expectation charts at the same. Through all games of 5/27/14  (36 games, 160 plate appearances, and 38 hits in 142 official times at bat. Prince George is now  hitting .268 with 8 home runs and 25 RBI. That production alone to projects to a 162 game season record of 171 hits, 36 HR, and 113 RBI.

Not bad. The downside is that his 49 strikeouts to date project to 221 “K”s over the full season – and that’s too much. Hopefully, Springer can learn to cut those down without losing too many homers from blind-pig-swings. When a guy strikeouts a lot, you have to figure that a number of his homers, large or small, came from wild swings that inadvertently made contact with the incoming baseball.

The guy has great speed ,good power, a good arm, super baseball instincts, and an apparent ability to learn, adjust, and improve. We need a longer look at how he holds up over time, but, even with his current high strikeout ratio, Springer, the Astros, and we fans still have much reason to be encouraged. I think he will perform even better once some of the other near-ready-if-not-already prospects join him on the production line. It’s a lot easier to tell a young high expectation player that it’s not all up to him than it is to get some of of the other young prospects a chance to shine in the same lineup, but the latter is far more convincing to a young guy that a club means what it says.

George Springer understands his potential value to the Astros. Otherwise, he might have jumped to sign that first mufti-year, multimillion dollar salary they waved under his nose at the end of spring training.  The kid is apparently smart with good financial advisers.

Let’s hope that George just relaxes and continues to learn and improve on his way to becoming (our expectation stated here) – “the greatest all around hitter and player in Houston Astros history.”

I would also be happier with fewer strikeouts.

So, the short line on good, bad, and beautiful. is simply  expressed:

The Good: George Springer started bad and moved to good. That line of progress is always preferable to the reverse course of “first he’s hot. – Then he’s not.”

The Bad: The current high strikeout ratio.

The Beautiful: George Springer looks like he really may blossom as a five-tool stud ballplayer. – Four homers in four straight games plays out as a harbinger of things to come,

Tags: George Springer

This entry was posted on May 28, 2014 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.