Choo Choo

With the Indians falling out of the race early and trading Sabathia during the summer, there hasn’t been much focus on Cleveland during the second half of the season. Even when they won 10 games in a row, the general response across baseball was to yawn. So, it’s not that surprising that one of the hottest hitters in the American League is tearing the cover off the ball at Jacobs Field and no one is noticing.

What Shin-Soo Choo has done the last month deserves attention, though. He leads all major leaguers in WPA (2.21) over the last 30 days, thanks to a .376/.459/.706 showing over his last 85 at-bats. He’s racked up 17 extra base hits and 10 walks in the time frame, so it’s just a singles driven hot streak. Even his non-leveraged WPA/LI of 1.48 is among the best in the league. Choo’s just killing the ball right now.

Choo missed the first couple months of 2008 recovering from Tommy John surgery, and his inability to stay healthy on a consistent basis left him on the fringes of Cleveland’s outfield plans for the future. This performance, though, has thrust him right back into the spotlight, and barring another injury, you have to imagine he’ll go into 2009 with an inside track on a starting job in the Cleveland OF. Just 25 years of age, he’s showing both the patience and power that teased scouts when he was coming through the Mariners system. His strikeout rate remains high and he still can’t hit left-handed pitching, but he does enough other things to compensate for those flaws, even if he’s not quite this good.

His up-to-date Marcel projection has him as a .266/.355/.440 hitter going forward, though Marcel doesn’t know anything about his minor league career, and would likely be a bit more optimistic if it did. Even if he doesn’t take any more steps forward, an .800 OPS from a left-handed hitting corner OF is nothing to sneeze at, and there’s obviously room for a bit more growth over the next couple of years.

Meanwhile, Ben Broussard is basically out of baseball. I’d say that trade worked out fairly well for Cleveland.