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ShareThisJohnny Damon’s Part On Yankees Recent Winning Ways
One of the fun things about using Baseball-Reference.com's Player Index (PI) Batting Game Logs is the ability to use the "sum" feature. This is where you can sum any set of Game Log rows by clicking anywhere (not red or blue) on the first and last rows of the selection.
I know that Johnny Damon has been slumping lately - at least that what his batting average would suggest. And, Yankees fans want to know why Joe Torre is keeping him in the line-up...or, at the least, why Torre is batting him lead-off.
However, using the "sum" feature in PI's Batting Game Logs shows us that Johnny Damon, while not getting hits, has been getting on base for the Yankees over his last 17 games:
Johnny Damon batting from career game #1771 (Jun 28, 2007) to game #1787 (Jul 18, 2007) G PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB IBB SO HBP SH SF GDP SB CS BA OBP SLG OPS +---+---+---+---+---+--+--+--+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+--+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 17 79 62 12 12 1 0 0 3 16 0 5 0 0 1 0 4 1 .194 .354 .210 .564
Note his OBA of .354 here. Sure, that's not great - but, it doesn't stink. And, given the present other options, outside of Damon, it's Torre's best choice for DH (now) in his line-up. When you look at it this way, you can see that Johnny Damon has been adding some value to the Yankees line-up since New York ended their 7-game losing streak on June 28th.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 10:31 am and is filed under Game Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
July 19th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
When you expand the analysis to include the fact that the cost of using Damon as the DH is that it prevents him from being on the DL (which he should have been on in April when he was first injured) and finally getting healthy, it is apparent that Damon is not Torre's best choice for DH.
Shelley Duncan is the best choice, if a spot on the 40 man roster can be freed up. Of course, Torre would never use him so the point is as moot as Britton or Ramirez being regularly used members of the pen.
July 21st, 2007 at 3:09 pm
And Torre has used Duncan too.
Wonders never cease.