2009 Profile: Jason Bartlett

Looking around the league, you may be surprised (shocked) to find Jason Bartlett hitting .376-29-6-23-12. He’s been a pleasant surprise at the shortstop this year, but only those who picked him up early seem to know about him. If he still happens to be available in your league, you should snap him up, and yesterday.

I’ve liked Bartlett as a hitter for some time. He is a good contact hitter with some speed, but never really capitalized on it for whatever reason. After being made the full-time starter in 2007 and turning in an unimpressive .265/.339/.361 performance, he was traded to Tampa Bay as part of the deal for Delmon Young. Give Andrew Friedman credit, Bartlett and Matt Garza have real building blocks for this contender. In addition to some very good range in the hole, Bartlett has been adding hitting to his game.

Despite his success this year, Bartlett doesn’t seem to have changed his approach at the plate much. He’s maintaining plate discipline, even though hurlers are throwing 63.2% first pitch strikes against him. He isn’t chasing bad pitches, and is boasting his best contact rate since 2006.

Can we trust his numbers to last? His ridiculous .417 BABIP won’t last, but even if you bring that back to his career .326 number, he’d still be hitting .313 for the year. The 29.6% line drives are also kind of ridiculous, so correcting that down to his lifetime 21.3% number still has him at .289. You average those numbers and get a sense of what he can do. As for the steals, he’s always been pretty aggressive on the basepaths, but this year he’s been on base a whole lot more (.420 OBP) and that has resulted in a lot of additional opportunities. Bartlett has a HR/FB rate of 13.6% this year, almost four times his lifetime rate of 3.5%. We can attribute some of that to his growth and maturity, but bringing that down to about 4.5% seems reasonable and would result in his hitting 4-5 more HR this season.