What in the Sam Hill is this version of Moustakas

The first few weeks of the season is dangerous territory to be making any kind of declarations, as you dedicated minions of the small sample size know all too well. Third base has typically been my beat, and I’m certainly not interested in ringing the alarm of Adrian Beltre‘s .158 batting average nor am I bandwagoning onto Luis Valbuena’s .356 ISO. Players have strong starts, they have cold starts, our job is to remember the whole marathon versus sprint metaphor.

Mike Moustakas is having a strong start, for instance. But it’s not just his .327/.413/.545 line that makes it surprising. Mike Moustakas isn’t just hitting the ball well, which would be notable in any month, it’s that he’s not really looking at all like the player he’s been for his previous 2000 professional plate appearances.

First of all, Moustakas has a career line of .239/.293/.384 over 2058 plate appearances. That ought to be pretty stable. He’s been pretty useless against left handed pitchers, managing just a .218/.276/.340 slash line, and given his pull tendencies he started to succumb to the evil shift and his batting average just continued it’s descent into the abyss.

But dig this, he’s hitting left handed pitchers so far this season. In fact, he has exactly 50% of his hits off of left handed pitchers. His slash line versus RHP is .321/.406/.536. Versus LHP, it’s .333/.419/.556. Yes, SSS police and all, but this is happening right now.

In his career, Moustakas has a 161 wRC+ when pulling the ball. To center, it is 76 wRC+. Opposite field, just 24 wRC+. Blech. And the percentage of his overall hits came heavily when pulling the ball (thus, the shift — duh):

	Career	wRC+
Pull	53%	161
Center	31%	76
Opposite	16%	24

And here’s how that distribution of hits and wRC+ looks like so far this season:

	2015	wRC+
Pull	16%	92
Center	28%	158
Opposite	56%	223

Essentially the bizarro version of himself. He’s not being aided by an inflated BABIP. His batted ball profile looks fairly normal, with an elevated IFFB%, but yeah the sample is teensy, so whatever.

For fun with visuals, let’s just take a look at his hit distribution from 2014:

Source: FanGraphs

Pretty clearly all home run power to right field, most doubles to right field, a bit of a spraying of singles. In comparison, there’s this:

Source: FanGraphs

Pretty much up the middle and opposite field. Even his outs are well distributed.

If this is the result of a conscious shift-killing approach, well you just run with it Mr. Moustakas because you’re on to something — and the fantasy baseball world ought to take notice, and fast. Of course, as you know, we’re too early in the season to say this is a thing.

However, it’s worth noting that strikeout rate has been said to stabilize at 60 plate appearances, and Moustakas has 65 of those, with a strikeout rate about half of what we’re used to seeing. So maybe this is the great best-shaper-approach-change that flew under the radar due in part to some kind of Wolf-crying deterrent. Regardless, in a world of small sample sizes, there are hots and colds and then there are just completely unexpected results, with Moustakas representing the latter. It will be intriguing to see how the league reacts, and whether this can be thoroughly panned by the end of May.