How could this happen?? Fantasy Owners are well aware of his history of execrable performance, so I won’t repeat it here. Lets see what he has been up to this year:

2007: 1 HR 10 RBI 2 SB .325/.379/.461 in 169 PA. Perhaps the most amazing stat is his walk rate of 8%. It is typically around 5%. Moreover, BaseballHQ has his xBA at a solid .285, and he has an 87% contact rate. Is this genuine improvement?

At first glance it appears so. However, lets look a bit closer. He has a 37% hit rate and a .368 BABIP. These are unsustainable numbers. He has 50 hits in 169 PA, with 154 AB. At an 87% contact rate, that means he has put the ball in play 134 times, with 50 hits. But if we normalize his hit rate/BABIP to 30% or .300, he would have only 40 hits. So we have a difference of a mere ten hits. While significant in terms of his stats right now, ten hits should hardly negate years of terrible performance.

Moreover, he is hitting ground balls 61% of the time, far more than he has historically. In theory, once could look at this and say that he has changed his approach; he is finally taking advantage of his one skill, his speed. Ok, we will put that in the positive column for him, though I would not necessarily agree that he is actually doing that.

With regard to walk rate, he is at 8% with 14 walks. At a 5% rate, he would have about 8 walks. So we have a difference of 6 walks.

I find it hard to believe that Guzman will continue at his current pace. We have years of terrible performance weighed against 6 walks and ten hits, and a higher GB percentage. I will have to bet on the former rather than the latter.