Congratulations, Ender Inciarte

Yesterday, Ender Inciarte hit a home run. Two games before that, he hit a home run. The game before that, he hit two home runs. Four. That’s four home runs. Last season, Ender Inciarte hit three home runs.

Inciarte owns plenty of firsts now for SunTrust Park. I don’t care about that as much as I care about another first. Last season, there were 146 so-called “qualified” position players. The cutoff there is 502 plate appearances. I know that seems like a silly number, but, what do I care, I didn’t make it up. Looking at that group of position players for 2016, and for 2017, Inciarte has become the first of them to achieve a higher home-run total this year. I know it’s a lot easier for Ender Inciarte to top three than it is for Mark Trumbo to top 47, but maybe Trumbo shouldn’t have set so high a bar for himself.

When something like this happens, the automatic follow-up question is, “why?” Why the power surge? I don’t want to make too much of it yet. Four homers. But look at the Sunday homer. Or look at this earlier homer:

Check out the confident bat-drops! Since when does Inciarte know enough about hitting home runs to develop such a confident bat-drop?

Two times, Ender Inciarte has looked like a power hitter, so at the very least, this is something to keep your eye on moving forward. Inciarte doesn’t have a history of hitting for power. He’s got 17 career dingers to his name, to go with a .099 ISO. In this year’s tiny sample, Inciarte hasn’t cut down on his grounders. He has pulled the ball more, and he has swung more often, with less contact. The samples are so small I’m almost embarrassed to even be analyzing them, but let’s face it — if I didn’t look at the numbers, you were just going to click through and look at the same numbers. I’m saving you time. Maybe Ender Inciarte is up to something? Maybe he’s not, and he’s just made an unusual amount of great contact lately. But it’s easy to let your imagination get the best of you, given that Inciarte already runs and fields so damned well. Baseball’s so weird Inciarte might as well go deep 40 times.

Time will tell how much Inciarte will accomplish at the plate. Already, he’s accomplished one thing, thanks to having accomplished four things: He’s become the first qualified hitter from 2016 to reach a higher home-run total in 2017. Your turn, Jose Iglesias.





Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.

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strycal
7 years ago

The Shelby Miller Trade. The gift that keeps on giving.