Oh, Staplehead. After his exceptional start to his career last season, I figured we were in for a treat this year. No, I didn't expect him to continue his amazing pace (.347/.429/.639, for a beautiful 1.067 OPS, albeit in 18 games), but I hoped he'd show promise in his rookie season of a long, bright future at 1B.

Sigh. His line currently stands, at the end of August, as .217/.309/.320. He flirted with a batting average under the Mendoza line, and an OPS below .600 as recently as a week and a half ago, opening the Mariners series at .203/.299/.296. That's a lot of 2's, folks. Almost, dare I say it, Neifian. I decided to make my first FanPost on Daric Barton, to see if I could uncover what was going on. A word of warning: I'm no expert, by any means, but I thought I could at least try to cobble together some kind of statistical analysis.

The first very noticeable difference between last year and this season, small sample size notwithstanding, is his line drive percentage. At the end of last season, it was sitting at a comfortable 20.8%. For the vast majority of this year, his LD% has hovered at about 15%, currently sitting at 14.8%. His groundball and fly percentages have remained very comparable to 2007.

So what's changed? He's striking out more. A lot more. In 2007, his K% sat a little higher than 20%, coming to rest at the end of the season at 15.3%. Now? His strikeout percentage has sat at 25% almost the entire year. Interestingly enough, his amazing 2007 start in the big leagues had a very similar strikeout percentage to his career in Sacramento in 2006-07.

As for this season, his production has actually been dropping as the season went on. Aside from a small power surge in early June, as well as last week's Herculean by comparison performance, his OPS has essentially been falling the entire year. This graph shows his production throughout the year, tracked by game. Believe me, it's not pretty. (Click to see a bigger, actually readable version.)

One interesting thing to notice from the graph is that although his BB/K ratio has remained relatively constant throughout the year, his strikeout percentage and walk percentage has dropped fairly steadily since the beginning of July. His strikeout and walk percentages now stand at 23.5% and 11.4%, respectively. Good on dropping the strikeouts, bad on the walks, Daric.

I suppose the most disappointing thing about doing this analysis is that I hoped to find a glimmer of hope in this season, such as seeing a rise in line drive percentage or something of the sort. I haven't found any such thing. I'd love to get my hands on some pitches/plate appearance stats per game, but I haven't found a way to get the numbers, other than individually counting the pitches in MLB Gameday.

It has to be noted, however, that he just turned 23. He still has plenty of time to figure the big leagues out. I'm still optimistic that he'll start to put it together next year (in Sacramento, possibly?), but barring another magic September, I'm afraid we may have to wait a little longer than we had originally thought for the return of 2007 Daric.