Marcus Semien, Oakland Athletics
The shortstop position is blessed with a ton of talent in today’s game. Xander Bogaerts is a great example — while the Boston Red Sox continue spiraling out of playoff contention, he’s been crushing it and has already set new career highs in homers (25) and fWAR (5.3).
Someone who is on track to doing the same thing, though, is Marcus Semien. It’s just seems like it’s always hard to generate a bunch of headlines out in Oakland. Heading into the All-Star break, Semien was already on pace to set new single-season career highs based off a 114 wRC+ in 423 plate appearances. However, things have hit another level in 106 trips to the plate since the midsummer classic (prior to Wednesday’s game) — he’s the proud owner of a 168 wRC+ during that time.
He’s done this by cutting down on the ground balls and increasing his line-drive rate by nearly 10 percentage points, along with boosting his hard-hit rate by more than 14 percentage points.
Semien’s performance on line drives is rather similar to what he did last year (347 wRC+), but he’s cut down on his soft-hit rate (6.0% to 2.7%) and increasing his hard-hit rate there, too (44.8% to 62.2%). If that continues, one would imagine the results will easily surpass what was accomplished in 2018.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
