You never want to see any player lose significant time due to injury, but especially not the elite players who make the game so fun to watch. So when Mike Trout hit the disabled list earlier this week with a torn ligament in his thumb that figures to sideline him for a couple months, the whole baseball world took a hit. Obviously, there are ramifications in this league as well. The Mavericks have held a small but consistent lead almost the entire season so far. But that will be put to the test in a big way in the upcoming months. Can a team that was already mediocre offensively tread water long enough until Trout returns?
The list of teams that figure to benefit from this opportunity is long. In fact, at the 1/3 mark of the season schedule, all ten teams are legitimately still in the race. Even before Trout went down, the Mavericks weren’t blowing away the competition. And no team has completely tanked to this point either. Due to an issue with my stats source, the stats haven’t been updated through Friday’s games yet, so I’m writing this looking at the numbers through Thursday. At that time, the Mavs held a slim 1/2 point lead on the Naturals and just a point ahead of the Moonshiners as well. Meanwhile, even the last place Choppers were only 20.5 points behind. Making up that much ground in four months is certainly doable.
The month of May saw 1,060 home runs hit across MLB, the second highest single month total in history. Yet, shockingly, the DTBL Batter of the Month went to a guy who hit one measly homer. But first, here are the guys who won the weekly honors in May.
Batters of the Week:
Week 5 (5/1 – 5/7) – Billy Hamilton, Mavericks
Week 6 (5/8 – 5/14) – Mookie Betts, Kings
Week 7 (5/15 – 5/21) – Corey Dickerson, Gators
Week 8 (5/22 – 5/28) – Charlie Blackmon, Cougars
Pitchers of the Week:
Week 5 (5/1 – 5/7) – Chris Sale, Choppers
Week 6 (5/8 – 5/14) – Zack Greinke, Moonshiners
Week 7 (5/15 – 5/21) – Stephen Strasburg, Mavericks
Week 8 (5/22 – 5/28) – Lance McCullers, Kings
No big surprises on the pitching list as some of the best pitchers in baseball were at the top of their games in May. Even though pretty much all of the players listed above were strong contenders for Pitcher of the Month, the award went to someone else. With the exception of Hamilton, the weekly award winners were certainly part of the huge power surge in May. But as I hinted at earlier, it wasn’t a gaudy home run total that clinched the Batter of the Month honor. Here are the players of the month for May 2017:
Batter of the Month:
Billy Hamilton, Mavericks
.288 AVG, 1 HR, 14 RBI, 27 R, 18 SB, 3.10 PAR
Pitcher of the Month:
Max Scherzer, Kings
2.27 ERA, 0.824 WHIP, 3 W, 0 SV, 60 K, 3.19 PAR
Safe to say Hamilton had the green light in May. He stole 18 bases, which was six more than any other player. He currently leads the league in steals with 28, which is twice the total of the next highest player! He is on pace to blow past the DTBL single season stolen base record which is held by Jose Reyes who stole 78 bags in 2007. Nobody has reached the 60 plateau since 2011, which Hamilton seems close to a lock to achieve, barring injury. The rest of the offensive numbers were solid in May for Hamilton too. It will be important for him to keep up the respectable hitting numbers while keeping the Mavericks offense afloat without Trout. The race for this award wasn’t as close as you might have thought, but the runner-up was Jackalope first baseman Paul Goldschmidt.
I had to do a double-take when I saw Scherzer atop the May pitching PAR leaderboard. He had a couple very poor outings in the month, by his standards, including a game I saw in person in Atlanta in which his velocity was down and his command was off. Yet he rebounded in a big way, striking out 24 batters in his final two starts of the month, one which was a complete game and another that was one out shy of that. In total, he led the league with 60 strikeouts in the month. He just barely won this award, edging out Kings teammate Lance McCullers and the Darkhorses’ Carlos Martinez. This is the second time in three years that Scherzer has won this award in the month of May.