J.D. Drew’s start to the 2007 season has come nothing like was advertised upon the signing of his five year, seventy million dollar contract. After getting off to a good start in Boston, including a home run in his first game at Fenway Park and a nine game hit streak, going thirteen for his first thirty-one at bats, Drew’s next forty-two games have been among the worst in his career.

Coming to Boston, Drew was known as consistent professional hitter. He has rarely experienced extended slumps in his career. Thats why the last forty-two games, before last night’s breakout performance, are so hard to understand. Over that period, Drew hit a paltry .190 over 137 at bats, nearly .100 points of his career average of .284. Even more alarming is his lack of any signs of power slugging just .255 vs. a career slugging percentage of .504.

Looking over Drew’s career, he hasn’t had many such prolonged slumps. The only stretches of games that even come remotely close to what we have seen in Boston came in the 2005 season. In the only other slump that was as prolonged as this one in his career, Drew hit .247, yet still slugging .409 with six home runs over forty-three games between April 5th and May 26th.

Other seasons have seen deeper slumps over shorter periods of time, never lasting longer than about twenty-five games at a time, far fewer than the forty plus game stretch that has just come to pass. In 1999, Drew’s first full season in the big leagues with St. Louis, Drew started the season hitting .221 over his first twenty-six games, once again however slugging at a .442 pace. J.D. would go on to heat up over the next twenty-six games hitting .302 slugging .566 with seven home runs before finishing the season with the typical fade seen by young players.

The next year saw a similar weak twenty-four game stretch between late May through June where Drew hit .208, still slugging over .400. The rest of his season was more typical Drew and he ended up hitting .295 with a .479 slugging percentage. In 2001, Drew’s breakout season where he ended up hitting .323 with 27 home runs and a .613 slugging percentage he still had a similar twenty game stretch to start the season hitting just .214 with six home runs and a .536 slugging percentage. Once again, even in a slump the batting eye and power components of his game were still very much on display.

In 2002, Drew came back down to earth for most of the season hitting only .252 with a .429 slugging percentage. Even in that down year, he was fairly consistently down without a power outage like we have seen thus far in Boston.

That brings us to last night where J.D. Drew, for whatever reason, opened up the offense a little bit and gave Red Sox fans a little hope that their team’s investment wasn’t a total loss. Whether his two home runs and double are a sign of things to come are unknown, history shows us that a player of his caliber can’t be as bad as he has been thus far for much longer and there’s only one way to go from here; up.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS