By Blaidd Drwg
Or do they?
Remember back a few weeks ago when I posted about the Mariners spring training stats and why you should not get excited about them. Well, 3 weeks into the season, the Mariners are 14th in the AL in batting average, on-base percentage and slugging. Remember when Brandon Maurer made the team with a nifty 1.50 ERA in the desert? He is currently sporting a 9.94 ERA in the bigs. Exactly why you don’t get excited about spring stats.
Rob Neyer wrote an interesting article about this very subject concerning Red Sox prospect Jackie Bradley Jr. It is a good read, but he has a great piece of wisdom about baseball’s March numbers:
Spring-training statistics are a lot of fun, but they’re merely a snapshot in time, and they describe the random nature of raw performance statistics as much as they describe fundamental abilities.
Basically making an assumption about how a player will perform over a season is about as useful as pulling a random block of 60 at-bats to do the same.
* I know that is not the saying, but it makes my point so I am going with it
FlatbreadGarden 