I heard that!Gray, we are singing from the same hymnbook about this panda. Watch out for Nvalvo though. It's funny how people can seemingly ignore your posts and then all of a sudden pounce on them like a duck on a snail.
Maybe I came down on you too hard, Al, but I'm not convinced that his weight and his performance correlate all that well. I admit it's intuitive that it would be harder to play well while fat, but the more I reconstruct his weight history, the less it squares with his performance history, at least on offense — which may well be an important caveat. He lost a ton of weight before 2014, and then started the year terribly. He gained both pounds and points of OPS as the year went on. How does that square with the theory?
I'm not sure what to make of it, and the weight stuff is mostly anecdotal, but the pattern does not scream monocausal explanation to me.