Pablo Longoria Iii

Back in 2009, Pablo Sandoval wasn't just a portion of the Giants ...

But before that happened, Sandoval was again raking last April. He hit .368 in that wonderous month before the Great Crash with 3 home runs and a 10.3 walk rate. His OBP and slugging were .433 and .575 for an oustanding 1.008 OPS and .437 wOBA. But with a .382 average on balls in play (BABiP) for the month, perhaps he was getting a bit of good fortune as well. And, perhaps an omen to the remainder of his season, he’d already tapped into 6 double plays before May rolled around.

Which leads a lot of people to say: “Hey, Pablo was a smoldering hot-lava rock last April, too, is he just going to crash and burn like he did a year ago?” I won’t pretend to the know the answer to that question, but I can tell you there are signs – beyond the dead-horse waistline narrative – that are different from his numbers exactly one year ago.

This April, the Kung-Fu Panda is delivering his damage a bit differently. For one, he’s already hit  five home runs with over a week to go, when he only hit three through April last season. Because of this, he has an outstanding ISO of .276. It’s probably unrealistic to expect that to continue, but it’s nice anyway.

So how’s he done that? Well, so far, he has a 37 percent ground-ball rate compared to a 45.7 percent fly-ball rate. He’s essentially reversed his ground-ball rate – which is to say, that he’s doing exactly what Derek Jeter is not doing, i.e. hitting the ball in the air – with his fly-ball rate and on top of that, his fly balls are flying out of the park more often than ever. Currently, roughly 24 percent of his fly balls are leaving the yard.

So it’s no surprise that this season he’s only hit into one double play (h/t to Julian of Splashing Pumpkins ), considering he’s not hitting the ball on the ground nearly as often.

And the pitchers, from a pitch selection standpoint, appear to be throwing him the exact same pitches with the exact same frequency as they did a year ago. Thus far, Pablo has done the most damage on offspeed – which probably portends to some legitimate patience – and he’s been below average on fastballs. He raked fastballs in 2009, and last season he was just barely above average. So it’ll be interesting to see if those hurlers with live fastballs begin to attack Pablo primarily with fastballs. Also, whether or not they’ll have continued success doing so.

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