The Futility Infielder

It's Not a Significant Sample Size Until Bernie Williams is Hitting Above .300

You can practically set your watch by it: Yankee centerfielder Bernie Williams is a notoriously slow starter, but inevitably, he reels off a sorching month which brings his stats to the level of the guy in the catalog. With 13 hits in his last five games (including Tuesday night's action), Williams has put himself well above the magic mark:

           PA  AVG  HR  RBI  OBP   SLG  OPS

April    108 .236   1   7  .367  .392  659

May      122 .377   9  24  .459  .725 1174

on 4/15   62 .180   0   1  .349  .200  549

on 5/14  163 .275   4  14  .384  .406  790

Total    230 .313  10  31  .416  .513  928

Williams is very consistent in the way he starts slow and heats up. Here are his month by month breakdowns by batting average and OPS:

       1999       2000        2001      3 year     Career

APR  .291/ 644  .292/ 928  .200/ 644  .270/ 694  .268/ 785

MAY  .367/ 995  .283/ 888  .264/ 757  .308/ 890  .308/ 923

JUN  .364/1109  .386/1155  .450/1330  .400/1199  .347/1052

2000 was a slight anomaly in that Williams charged out of the gate pretty quickly, but even then, he turned it up a notch during an unstoppable June, like he always seems to do. What's also interesting is how Williams seems to go from slapping the ball around like a light-hittting shortstop (note the low OPS even with the respectable batting averages) to murdering it like a cleanup hitter. Williams's low points aren't completely awful, because he does tend to draw his walks even when he's not hitting well--when he was hitting .180, his OBP was still a respectable .349.

I honestly have no idea how many players you could find who exhibit such a demonstrable pattern as Bernie, but I suspect few are as pronounced in their trends (though if we looked at all of Williams's month-by-month breakdowns, the trend disappears). His slow starts do have their explanations. Last year, the declining health and eventual death of his father hung over his head early in the season, and this year's turnaround was spurred by cortisone shots into his weak shoulders.

But for all of his streaky months and slow starts, the marvel of Williams is his year-to-year consistency, your classic steady-like-Eddie Murray ballplayer putting up carbon copies of the same great season. Clearly, he seems well on his way to another one. And look, it's almost June.

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Speaking of Williams, if you live in New York you've probably seen print ads of him endorsing LASIK eye surgery, the corneal procedure which enables one to shed corrective lenses. Top-flight athletes like Greg Maddux and Tiger Woods have undergone the surgery, as has Williams, and Jeff Bagwell, to name a few. Woods and Maddux have claimed that the surgery improved their already-great games, but then like Williams, how are you really going to tell?

The procedure isn't without its risk. In yesterday's New York Daily News, an article about professional golfer Scott Hoch sounded the alarm. Hoch, who had the surgery in January 2001 and went on to have a career year, winning two tournaments and earning $2.8 million, told reporters that during a March tournament he looked down at the ball and saw what seemed like "a TV set with bad reception" in one eye. A second operation failed to correct a ghost-like double vision, and Hoch complains that resulting depth perception problems give him trouble chipping and putting. Ugh.

As somebody who suffers from some pretty lousy vision, I've thought about LASIK, and I always figured I'd get around to it in a few years when the procedure became even more reliable. But right now I'm not so sure I'd even consider it, and it will be interesting to see if other professional athletes who share Hoch's plight start to appear.

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Postscript on Bernie: 2-for-5 with a game-tying 2-run single in the 9th inning. Dare I say en fuego?