Rod Barajas leads the Mets with nine home runs. He is hitting .233 despite a .164 batting average on balls in play, a mark that likely reflects a little bit of misfortune and a whole, whole lot of fly balls.
Barajas swings hard. Not sure if you’ve noticed that yet. And he swings often.
To date, Barajas has only walked twice. He has a very respectable .823 OPS with a downright bizarre .253/.570 on-base/slugging split.
How bizarre (Ed. note: How bizarre! How bizarre!)? In the history of baseball, no one with enough bats to qualify for the batting title has ever finished a season with an OBP below .275 and a slugging above .550. In fact, no qualifier has ever finished with an OBP below .275 and a slugging above .500.
In fact, if you restore those first parameters and lower the plate-appearance minimum to 50 — arbitrary, no doubt — the search returns only two players: pitcher Don Drysdale in 1958 and Rod Barajas so far in 2010.
This is something I’ve covered before: If you’re swinging at a whole lot of the pitches you see and crushing a fair share of them, you’re not going to continue seeing a lot of good pitches to hit.
It seems like Barajas covers a whole lot of territory with his bat and can put some bad balls in play, but every hitter has his limit. Pitchers will eventually put enough balls in places Barajas can’t reach to either force him into a more patient approach or retire him at an even more frequent pace.
In other words, this won’t continue. Barajas will still hit home runs, but there’s almost no way he will maintain this pace. Of course, if you think Rod Barajas is going to hit 50 home runs this season you’re either heavily medicated or probably should be, so it’s probably silly to even bother explaining why he won’t keep up this pace.
Either way, Barajas has been awesome so far. For a discounted rate, he is providing all the power and staff-handling acumen the Mets could have hoped for from Bengie Molina. Plus, as noted, he has excellent taste in music and comes to the plate to “California Love” and “Low Rider.” So file Rod Barajas under cool.
Cool, and valuable, but not likely to keep hitting this many home runs. It should be interesting to monitor whether he can total more homers than walks this season, an accomplishment that should probably be named for Dave Kingman.
Tedquarters 
He’s also probably the best manager we have.
Beat me to a comment to that end.
Rhetorically speaking, I’m sure it’s “How bizarre!” in that you’re not asking folks to assess the bizarre factor, you’re telling them you find the situation remarkably bizarre!
Well, “How bizarre?” was a rhetorical question, the parenthetical aside was a reference to the 1996 OMC hit of the same name.
Thats what Lastings Milledge thought last Thursday.
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew/post/Fireworks-send-Lastings-Milledge-into-an-ill-fat?urn=mlb,239558
Ted, as you know I’m not well versed on the advanced stats like BABIP. SO can you explain to me how a BA on balls in play can be lower than an overall batting average?
I’m thinking BA is hits/ABS, and BABIP is hits/balls in play, which must be wrong, since he couldnt put the all in play more often than he actually bats right?
Is this due to some large number of sac fly or something?
It’s not an easy thing to do, at all. BABIP is based on at-bats, so sacrifice flies and the like don’t count against him, but home runs don’t count as balls in play and nine of Barajas’ 20 hits are home runs. Basically, you have to hit lots of home runs without striking out all that much. There’s a good subscriber-only post on it on ESPN.com. There’s also a good fanpost on the subject at Beyond the Boxscore.
Oh ok, I get it, the main driver hear in this case is the HRs, which dont count as balls in play.
I have to agree with your analysis Ted… This won’t continue through the year. However, I think I speak for the entire fanbase when I say WE LOVE BARAJAS (thought about “we love Rod,” but that seemed… inappropriate)! Maybe it’s just the nightmares of Brian Schneider and co. from the last couple of seasons, but Barajas has been something of a revelation – at least he can hit the baseball really, really hard, something we Mets fans find charming.