The earliest part of the season is always difficult from a blogger’s perspective. Games are being played and everyone’s watching and paying particularly close attention, but there’s just not enough baseball to draw any sort of conclusions at all. Everything is affected by the smallest of sample sizes, but it’s still hard to watch and keep your brain from jumping to conclusions.
Instead of pretending to draw any sort of conclusion here, I guess I’ll just say that one of the things that I really liked from the Pirates’ series against the Cubs last weekend was Pedro Alvarez. He didn’t do anything particularly special; he hit four singles in 13 at-bats, he struck out four times, and he drove in a few runs with nice timing on those singles. His best swing of the weekend was probably the flyout he hit against Matt Garza in yesterday’s fifth inning; he just missed getting all of it and had the wind been different he might have ended up with a three-run homer anyways.
But that’s kind of the point. He’s clearly not locked in the way Pedro Alvarez gets locked in when he’s hot, but he’s still managed to put the ball in play quite a bit. When I was in Bradenton, he was completely adrift at the plate and for much of last year, that was how he looked when he wasn’t 100% locked in. Thus far this year, he’s not quite in El Toro Mode, but he’s at least making contact and getting the ball in play.
Of course, it’s just three games. Of course, he hasn’t faced a left-handed starter yet. Of course, a .308/.308/.308 line is awful in the grand scheme of things (actually, my nightmare is that he hits .308/.308/.308 with like 95 RBIs this year and some people try to spin it as progress since he hit .300 and drove in a bunch of runs). But hey, it’s April 4th and I need to take something out of context. Tomorrow: Ronny Cedeno and opposite field base hits!
Bonus afternoon topic of discussion: when does Pedro hit his first homer? I say off of Kyle Lohse tonight.
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