ah, juan encarnacion; my favorite player. at least we can say he's fairly consistent, which should make him easy to project. he's been so much discussed in these pages there's no need to rehash it all; read here or here or here or here if you want to refresh. among the very few things we haven't already said about this guy, allow me to note:
- baseball america once rated him the #15 prospect in all of baseball (in 1998), three spots ahead of rick ankiel and just behind miguel tejada and todd helton. lance berkman was #64 on the same list, david ortiz #84. whatever.
- encarnacion got his 1,000th career hit on august 19 last year against the dodgers' dj houlton; he got caught stealing a few pitches later.
- his last name would score 15 points in scrabble, which is only 1.364 points per letter. it should be noted, however, that even if proper nouns were allowed in scrabble, it would still be impossible to play "encarnacion"; it's 11 letters long, and there are only 7 letters in a scrabble rack, and there are no words contained internally within "encarnacion" that might be played first by another player and then added onto to form the full name . . . . altho since we're assuming that proper nouns are allowed i suppose somebody could play "carnac," the old johnny carson character, and then another player could come along and add "en" to the front and "ion" to the back to form "encarnacion" . . . .
just to change things up, let's add stolen bases to the list of projected stats. he swiped 19 bags as recently as 2003; career high is 33, when he was 23 years old. he's totaled only 11 over the last two seasons (in 20 attempts), but if he bats down in the order, in front of the 7-8-9 hitters, la russa may allow him to take a few chances. the playing-time factor shouldn't come into play here, as it did for our rolen and molinaprojections; we can safely assume 500 at-bats. so we'll need avg / obp / slg / hr / rbi / runs / sb; please don't look at previous posters' projections or at ZIPS / PECOTA etc etc until after you've posted your line. resources:
enarnacion's page at baseball reference
his three-year splits at espn.com
his davenport translations
and his stats over the last four years:
| avg | obp | slg | hr | rbi | r | sb | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2002 | .271 | .324 | .449 | 24 | 85 | 77 | 21 |
| 2003 | .270 | .313 | .446 | 19 | 94 | 80 | 19 |
| 2004 | .236 | .299 | .405 | 16 | 62 | 63 | 5 |
| 2005 | .287 | .349 | .447 | 16 | 76 | 59 | 6 |
we'll see what the results look like come monday.