I think it has less to do with speed and more to do with location. Hard ground balls up the middle are much more likely to go for hits than those hit to either side of the infield, and Lewis hits a lot of those.

I’m all for Freddie’s becoming a premier leadoff man, but I think the chances of his doing so are perhaps one in ten, and almost certainly no better than one in five. He just flat-out strikes out too much. How many premier leadoff men do you know who strike out once every four at bats?

I don’t know that much about all this saberish stuff, but isn’t the fact that he is outperforming his career LD% a bad thing, if we’re assuming he will regress back to the mean for his minor league career? The fact that his 2008 BABIP/LD% has gone down is a product of his possibly flukey LD%, is it not?

I don’t see Freddie’s exceeding a .350 BABIP for very long. He barely exceeded it in the minors, and most hitters see a noticeable reductiong in the major leagues, with its better pitching, fielding and positioning.

It doesn’t really matter that he’s been playing it his whole life or that it’s his favorite sport etc etc. When people talk about the late start what they’re really saying is he wasn’t on the show circuits that the big time high school players are on full-time from the time they’re about 14, AND he wasn’t a year-round player in college, so relative to other people his age he had received much much less training and gone through many many fewer reps of the various baseball acts. So he was behind other players his age whether he liked the game more or not. Wendell Fairley represents something similar - he was a unanimous high school All American last year in virtually everybody’s list and his numbers were amazing. But he’s never been on the show circuit, he’s never received the advanced teaching that many of his peers had - thus the reputation for being raw and unskilled.

Or if I may, a personal anecdote. Growing up in a small central valley town, one of my best friends was from about the age of 5, a competitve swimmer who routinely won tons and tons of medals at the Skimmers meets around the valley. However, when at the age of 20 he finally decided he wanted to make competitive swimming a serious goal, he went to the University of Santa Barbara and told the swim coach he wanted to reach the Olympics. The coach told him he was starting too late in life to be really great. Now Richard had been swimming competitively since he was 5, but he should have started training for the Olympics at about 12 or 13. In the end he did go to two Olympics, but finished 4th both times and he told me that a lack of experience in international meets really did him the first time (spent too much energy on the heat—a rookie mistake, but he was a rookie. The LA Olympics were the first international meet he’d ever competed in).

Nate also a significant increase in his strikeouts the year before. Prior to his age 21 season in SJ, where he struck out every 3.8 ABs, he had K’d every 5.3 ABs in his age 20 season (split between the Sally and the Cal) and only every 7.3 ABs in his age 19 season (his first professional) which was actually less often than his K rate last year (7.0). Really he just had a one year spike in K rate no doubt the result of his longish swing meeting higher competition. He acted quite promptly to tighten up the swing and fix that particular problem. It’s not like he had a career-long K issue that he finally came to grips with (a la Ishikawa whose best season prior to this year was a K every 3.7 ABs—worse than Nate’s worst season).

But solid foundational player is certainly reasonable at this point.