Opening Day of the Hot Stove League

We don't yet know who will be playing in this year's World Series, but that is not going to stop The Grandstander with making his first post of the 2017-18 Hot Stove League.

You are probably wondering what or who will be the subject of this initial missive, and if I gave you ten guesses, I'll bet that you will not guess who that subject is going to be.

Are you ready?

Max Moroff.  

Yep, you're reading that correctly.  I am going to write about Max Moroff.

Max gets his first game winning walk off hit in

a game against the Brewers in July.

I was there!!

You can go back through Grandstander posts from this past summer and find me railing against the presence of Moroff and his sub-.100 batting average as a sign of the pathetic nature of the 2017 Pirates.  In fact, Moroff finished the season with a batting average of .200, an OPS of .627, 3 home runs and 21 RBI in 120 at bats.  Pathetic, right?  However, if you slice and dice Moroff's rookie season, a positive pattern emerges, as illustrated below.

	AB	Runs	Hits	Home Runs	RBI	BA	OPS
Season	120	19	24	3	21	0.200	0.627
May	9	0	1	0	1	0.111	0.222
June	22	3	2	0	3	0.091	0.386
July	30	3	5	1	3	0.167	0.509
August	9	2	3	1	2	0.333	1.067
September	47	9	12	1	8	0.255	0.756
October	3	2	1	0	5	0.333	1.267
Pre All Star Break	48	4	4	0	4	0.083	0.301
Post All Star Break	72	15	20	3	17	0.278	0.846

As the season wore on, and as Moroff got more playing time and at bats, there was as steady improvement in his production, and this is even more apparent when you break it down to the periods Before and After the All-Star Break.  Three HR and 17 RBI over 72 AB is pretty significant.  By comparison, a player to whom Moroff might be compared, Adam Frazier, had 6 HR and 53 RBI in 406 AB during the entire season.  If you would project Moroff's post All-Star break numbers over 406 AB, they come out to 17 HR and 96 RBI.  (Even those HR/RBI over 120 AB, projects out to 13 HR and 88 RBI over 500 AB.)  And Moroff's post All-Star break OPS was .846 compared to Frazier's season long .743.

I know, I know - BELIEVE ME, I know - that a 120 AB season simply screams "small sample size", but in a season where the Pirates gave us lots and lots to, justifiably, bitch and moan about, maybe, just maybe there is more to Max Moroff that we first realized.  

We don't know what the Pirates are going to do this off-season, but would anyone be surprised of the Pirates front office decides that both Josh Harrison and Jordy Mercer have become too expensive for the penny-pinching Pirates?  In 2017, it seemed that Adam Frazier has earned the right to take the place of Harrison at second base, and a closer look at how Moroff progressed as the season went along shows that he has certainly earned the right to be first in line among whoever Mercer's replacement might be.  No, I am not proclaiming him the to be the next Arky Vaughn, or even the next Gene Alley, Jackie Hernandez, Tim Foli, or Dale Berra, but he has earned the right to not be dismissed out of hand, as many, including Yours Truly, was doing last June and July.