So has Leon officially turned back into a pumpkin? His batting line over the past 30 games is .201/.279/.250
Obviously his early success was unsustainable, but that's a bit of a hard landing.
He's been terrible. He ain't passing the eye test, the simple numbers test, and then there's the batted ball profile.
First (per fangraphs) -- a .300 BABIP in September (his lowest of
any month by 60 points). Pretty fucking good for a guy who isn't cracking .600 on his OPS for the month. Then, there's the fact that he's hitting the ball hard a dismal 19.6% of the time (where he was sitting in the mid 30's the rest of the year, peaking at 37% in August). When JBJ had his bad August, he was still hitting the ball hard 30% of the time. Even A-Rod maintained a Hard% of 29% this year.
Remember that the zenith is soon-to-be-old friend David Ortiz, a scorching 46% for the year, and the nadir is old friend Jose Iglesias at a flaccid 18%.
Anyways, telling us a bit of what we already know: the decline has indeed been precipitous, and it doesn't look all that flukey. The only good news, really, is that at his worst, Leon is still hitting the ball harder than Iglesias has for his entire year. And, for that matter, at his worst, he's better than he was last year, where his hard% was 14% (!).
Far be it from me to conclude much from this -- I've stopped myself from looking at whether or not hes being pitched differently cause I ain't got time for that shit right now. I
am still encouraged by the 200-some-odd superhuman PAs Leon put together, and I think it's perfectly normal for a guy who's made a major transformation in his batted ball profile and hitting style to turn back to pumpkintude at least for a while. Whether he makes another adjustment will be up to him. It'd be nice if it happened in October.