Add new comment

Sometime in the '10 off-season Carp made the transition from a high OBP guy with moderate power to a slugger who goes to the plate looking for the one mistake he might get than then mashes it. He's now a stalker.
Good MLB'ers make that transistion.  Carp did it at age 23. 
Doc, do you have Spring Training #'s from '10?  would be interesting to see if Carp's new approach showed up in Arizona.  I'm assuming it did.
As a MiLB guy, Carp walked 90 points,  At AAA it was 80 pts.  In '11 he's "only" walking 60 pts.  And that number will go up as pitchers begin to nibble more and more.
Doc, you're dead right.  The homer from last night was on a ball well inside.  The catcher set up on the black and was moving his glove toward Carp to receive the pitch.  The ball was up a bit and tailing back toward the plate and Carpy lit it up.  He got his pitch.
When you can't make a mistake off the plate inside then you only have one place to go.  But unless your contro is that of Greg Maddux it is pretty dang hard to live on that outside black one inch stripe.  And we've seen Carp punish the outside mistake the other way, anyway.
Carp's swinging at just 2/3 of the pitches IN the strike zone (just over 1/3 outside). 50% of the pitches he sees he doesn't swing at. So he's not up there hacking.  He's waiting. When he gets the one he looking for he's not missing. Anybody know what he's hitting when he's ahead in the count?
Can he string seasons of .300+?  I don't know.  But with the transistion that he's made he's a whale of a player hitting .280.