2009 has become the season Lars Anderson seems to have lost his top prospect status for the Red Sox priligy. His power has all but disappeared and now it looks like his on base skills have vanished too strattera. He was expected to be the 2010 prospect we should all be salivating over, but that is no longer the case as we look for who that might be now. Here is a look at his numbers from last two years in the minors:
G R HR RBI SB AVG OBP SLG K% BB%
2008 A+ 77 58 13 50 0 .317 .408 .513 20.9% 13.1%
2008 AA 41 27 5 30 1 .316 .436 .526 32 zovirax online.3% 17.9%
2009 AA 119 50 9 51 2 .233 .328 .345 25.5% 12.4%
Perhaps Anderson and David Ortiz can discuss what happened in 2009 with each other, as Anderson's severe drop in power mimiced that of Ortiz' first half. His plate discipline, while still satisfactory overall, exhibited some deterioration as he failed to walk as much as last year at Double-A. If you look through his entire professional career, the 17.8% walk rate seems like the outlier, and not the norm. Lars' 12-13% should be what we expect him to produce.
His BABIP at Double-A last year was .435 and screamed for a regression, and this year he feel all the way down to .293. Oddly enough, we can consider this extremely low as he has never had a BABIP below .363 in any other season. BABIP is often a function of how well you hit the ball and we can currently use LD% as a crude gauge int your expected BABIP success rate. Anderson dismal 13% LD% actually says his BABIP was still above expected. What's going on?
Based on his batted ball data, we can surmise his swing mechanics have suffered. He has had a 54.3% ground ball rate across all minor league levels. This means he's very limited in how many balls he's putting in the air. Since your home run power is a factor of HR/FB%, hitters that tend to hit a large amount of groundballs miss the opportunity to crush fly balls out of the ball park. Some comparable major league players with this same type of groundball rate are Adam Jones and Hunter Pence. Both have a GB% over 50% and need to achieve at least a 16+% HR/FB to total more than 20 homers in a season. If the Red Sox still expect Anderson to follow the same path his previous comparable (Morneau) has, a drastic change in his GB% and FB% needs to start occuring. If you can't add any lift to the ball, or tend to continue to make poor contact and drive the ball into the ground, all the raw power (HR/FB%) is wasted.
Next year is huge for Anderson. While I don't think anything was drastically wrong with his contact and plate discipline, the key to his overall value lies in potential 35+ HR power; this is not something a low FB% hitter can achieve.
If he can restore his classic power stroke from previous years, he still could make the departure of Ortiz after 2010 that much easier to handle.