His surprising season is starting to hit a downturn. Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus wrote a great piece on him, and spurred me to take a deeper look.

The more I read in the fantasy community the more I am convinced that Joe is perhaps the best writer in the industry. It is not command of statistics nor is it great ability to conjure up flowery prose that separates him from the crowd, but great insight into the pertinent issues.

A case in point is his discussion of Jacoby Ellsbury, who has been the backbone of many a surprising fantasy team’s fast start. In the preseason a prominent fantasy analyst predicted that Ellsbury might hit 12-15 homeruns, over the general cavil of most other analysts. He was looking pretty after the first two months taking every opportunity to point it out, as Ellsbury played like a down ballot MVP candidate.

Ellsbury has a mere two home runs in his last 200 at-bats, with only 13 RBI. June has been a particular disaster, as in his last 30 days he has hit .245/.267/.327 for a Neifi-Perez like .594 OPS. His contact rates tell us the story, as he has a 92% figure in April, 86% in May and 80% in June.

Joe Sheehan opines that pitchers are challenging him, since they realize he has no pop and probably won’t hurt them. They may be right. His walk rate has dipped to 3%, which means that perhaps he is pressing, since he has shown a good eye previously and was at 13% in April and May.

There are a few competing problems here. The first is that we have a short sample size issue on two fronts. The naysayers can point to his recent struggles, but they are based on a short sample. His supporters have the same problem, as he has really only had 200 or so good at-bats in the majors.

The more astute analysts realized that his 2007 breakout was a mirage, with an xBA more than 50 points lower than his actual BA. Much like my recent comments on Asdrubal Cabrera, we had a weak powered slap hitter who greatly exceeded his contact and expected batting averages in a short sample debut, which really doesn’t tell us much about him.

It is very easy to fall into the trap of believing the short term is true. This is especially true where we are dealing with young players, for whom we can always chalk up a short term fluke as “development.”

Joe correctly points out that Ellsbury may be at a crossroads for the season. His minor league numbers never foretold the hitting performance that he has shown in the majors so far.  After all he had seven home runs in 2006 and only five in 2007 in the minors. Predicting 12-15 homers off of this is a hell of a limb, but the real issue is the process that went behind that prediction. What process could reasonably lead to that conclusion?

The point here is that we have to keep in mind that we are still in the area where we cannot say with any certainty just what type of player Ellsbury will be nor how good he actually is.  He may very well be Johnny Damon, but he may also be Cristian Guzman.