If you are gluten free, you might want to be careful of this post, because to draft Jedd Gyorko again in 2015, after what he did last year, you need to be a gluten for punishment. I am spelling that right, right? (Stutterer!) On a side note, I want to open a gluten-free bakery that isn’t really gluten-free called Gluten for Punishment because I have a theory that there’s no such thing as gluten-free people. How else do large companies sell another loaf of bread to people who usually only buy one loaf a week? Make up a fake ailment and then a product to sell to them. Now people are buying a loaf of regular bread and another loaf for the one person in their family that is supposedly gluten-free. The Padres are actually the good news and the bad news. The good news, who on earth else are the Padres going to bat in the middle of their order besides Gyorko? The bad news, they have no one else to bat in the middle of the lineup other than a guy that hit 10 homers last year and .210. The mostly good news that was bad news, he was hurt last year. Reason why that was not completely good news is no one knows if his ailment will flare up again. Though, no one really knows if he was actually hurt and not just so crizzappy that he was benched under the guise of being hurt. I’m going to assume he was hurt, since he had a walking boot on. If Jedd was wearing a walking boot just to throw people off his scent, Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity did a less involved insurance scam. Or Gyorko just has seriously funky feet and the walking boot was literally meant to throw people off his scent. This is neither here nor there or there nor here or there-here or here-there. He was bad last year. Luckily, we’re now talking about 2015. Uppercase yay. Anyway, what can we expect of Jedd Gyorko for 2015 fantasy baseball and what makes him a sleeper?
In 2013, Gyorko hit 23 homers and had a 23.4% K-rate (that was in 125 games). In 2014, he had 10 homers and a 22.6% K-rate. That’s right, as bad as his season was, he actually cut back on his strikeouts. He didn’t swing at balls outside of the strike zone as much (from 33.6 to 29.7) and made more contact (73.8 to 75.2). On face value, these are positives. An argument could be made that he actually had a better year last year with plate discipline, which has always been his petard. To misquote the Black Eyed Peas, let’s not get petarded in here. You can’t say his plate discipline simply got better. He may just have been less aggressive at the plate and didn’t swing at anything as much, ball or strike. He saw more strikes in 2014 (44.4 to 46) and swung at less. So, this isn’t a straight positive. The reason why I’m nagging on this like your grandmother in heaven complaining about the draft is because Gyorko needs to be aggressive and hit some fly balls. If his fly balls stay down (literally!) like they were in 2014 (39.8 to 34.7) and his ground balls stay up (not literally!) (37.6 to 43.6), there’s nothing a little bit of plate discipline is going to do. With that said (reversal time!), this is a guy that hit 24 homers in Triple-A in 92 games and 23 homers for the Padres in 2013. That shizz doesn’t just evaporate. I think we just need to throw out 2014 like that girl’s number that is never calling you back. He won’t be nearly as costly in 2015 and he’s well worth a flyer for upside and 30-homer power. For 2015, I’ll give him the projections of 66/24/69/.246/3 and hope he doesn’t make me look like a Gyorko for two years straight.
