His one sac fly, combined with his terrible average and extremely high strikeouts, makes me wonder how much of his hitting is actually just luck. If he is just a selfish hitter who is always looking for a HR, but has enough talent to make contact, you would think maybe twice in his career he wouldn't hit a ball perfectly square with a runner on third and he'd end up lucking into a sac fly. However, if he's a hitter who has no idea what he's doing and basically just goes up there and closes his eyes and swings as hard as he can, it would make some sense that he never gets a sac fly. I haven't really watched his actual at bats much, but I wonder if he can only hit the ball when a pitcher makes a mistakes and leaves the ball over the middle of the plate. Basically, as long as a pitcher doesn't screw up, he's an out.
An experiment I would like to see would be to take a fairly athletic 6-5 average joe. Not a guy who has been sitting on the coach all day long, but not an NFL linebacker either. Just a big guy who is in good shape. Work with him every day for one year. I wonder how close he could come to Joey's numbers. I understand hitting an MLB pitcher is the hardest thing to do in sports, but it seems like Joey can't do it either. I feel like the Big Average Joe just needs to swing hard at every pitch. He's going to swing and miss nearly every time, but over the course of 162 games, I bet there are 100 times the pitcher makes a mistake and leaves an easy pitch over the plate. Could Big Average Joe take advantage of that 20 times? 30 times? It'd be interesting to see it tried.
Edit: for the purposes of this experiment I don't care about fielding, speed, etc. HRs only. Also, thinking about it more in the car, I realized I don't really know how they are coaching hitting these days. It seems like they don't care about hitting behind runners, etc, so it may be that there are some teams basically doing this experiment already.
