Everyone’s darling from short season ball last year, Nick Longmire is off to a slow start to 2011.  Let’s take a look at both 2010 and 2011 season and see what is going on.  Sorry about the lateness of this post, I was tied up with the NFL actually deciding to have some football related activities this offseason in the person of the NFL draft.  But, back to Longmire after the jump.

By all accounts, Longmire had a great year in 2010, with a .394 wOBA and and .855 OPS.  He had a 13% line drive percentage and a .337 BABIP.  Both were around average for the New York Penn League.  So, he numbers certainly were not a mirage.  He also had 7 triples and 12 steals in 15 attempts.  And with his strikeouts outnumbering his walks, he looks a lot like someone we looked at yesterday – Alex Castellanos, but with less Ks and more OBP.

This season is a different story for Longmire with Quad Cities.  He’s not making as good contact this year with only a 6.7% line drive rate and an astonishingly low .205 BABIP.  His numbers are bound to bounce back some from his ugly .434 OPS, but unless he starts to make better contact, they won’t come back to his 2010 heights.  He has hit 60% ground balls, which will give you a very low average and a very low BABIP, even in the minors.

Nick Longmire had a great season in 2010 and some of his growing pains could be attributed to the bad and cold weather early in the season in Quad Cities.  But without a doubt, until he gets back to hitting the ball at the rates he did in 2010, his numbers will not get back to those levels.  Obviously, in only 67 plate appearances, his numbers come with a mighty “Small Sample Size” warning, but it still throws a bit of cold water on his scorching hot 2010.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2011 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Nick Longmire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.