Pedro Alvarez is, right now, a bad baseball player. Pedro Alvarez has spent most of his big league career as a bad baseball player. Try as they might, the Pirates cannot seem to make Pedro Alvarez into a good Major League baseball player. They really need him to be a good Major League baseball player, because the Pirates gave him a lot of money as the second overall pick in the 2008 draft. A lofty bonus and a Major League contract, too. It was all very un-Pirates and, of course, it hasn’t worked out.
So far in 2012, Pedro Alvarez owns one of the worst slash lines you could ever imagine: .108/.132/.270. He is 4-37 with one walk and two home runs. It is terrible. His .175 wOBA is an unsightly blight on the leaderboards of the world.
With the help of the newly-published linear weights (from Fangraphs) we can toy with numbers like weighted on-base average and make them our own. Using this knowledge, want to try and fix Pedro Alvarez. Not really fix him, but tinker with his numbers to bring them up to snuff.
Pedro Alvarez is so far behind the pack offensively, it is going to take a real jump start to get him back to league average. What kind of a jump start, you ask? How about consecutive home runs? Just start mashing taters until he gets to league average.
How many consecutive home runs would it take for Pedro Alvarez to become an average big league hitter? What about the best hitter in baseball? The results might shock you!
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