In the preseason I expressed concern about Sizemore based on his declining skills as he made it though his purported growth years. So far there has been no reason for concern on the surface. Has he turned the corner?

The main cause for my concern about Sizemore, and admittedly I was pretty much a lone voice on this, was his declining skills as he made it through what should be years of growth:

Year  xBA  CT
2005 0.297 79%
2006 0.271 77%
2007 0.252 75%

Declining contact and expected batting averages through your mid twenties generally is an anomalous result for a budding star. Clearly though, based on his actual performance, Sizemore has ability but I thought his career was at a crossroads; continued erosion in his contact and expected batting average would result in him becoming a Rickie Weeks-like disappointment. In any event I thought that there were significant reliability questions that warranted not taking Sizemore with the early round pick necessary to get him.

My concerns appear at this point to have been unjustified. So far he has increased his contact rate to 81%, and a 6% increase is certainly not negligible. His increased contact has pushed his xBA up to .298, and in fact he has been unlucky to date with a .272 BABIP, whereas his figures for the last three years have been .334, .339 and .333 respectively.

However, his BABIP is undoubtedly also due to an erosion in his line drive rate, which is at a career low 16.2%.  As Andrew pointed out yesterday, a good rule of thumb is to add .120 to the line drive rate to get an estimated BABIP. This rule seems spot on here.  He has increased his fly ball rate to almost 50%, and that has been coupled with an increase in his infield fly/FB rate, which has ballooned to over 10%, yet another cause for his low BABIP. This seems to be just a fluke so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

Sizemore appears to have turned a corner. So does that mean you should have taken him early?

As we state in our Core Principles, evaluation of decisions must be made on the process not the results. No decision can be evaluated on what has occurred after the decision has been made. At the time of the draft we did not know what direction his 2008 season was going to take, and given that caution was clearly warranted. 

If you eschewed Sizemore, as I did, do not fret, you made a good decision.  Don’t fall into the trap of letting results influence how you evaluate whether your thought process was valid.  And he may yet fall back into his old ways.