For a team that's chasing home field advantage throughout the playoffs, 30-year-old OF Austin Jackson has been consistently delivering clutch hitting in under-the-radar fashion for Cleveland all summer long. With a 4-5, R, RBI evening in Anaheim, this is the type of low-profile yet still valuable outing Indians fans have been getting accustomed to seeing from Jackson while the rest of the country focuses on the crazy power surge that has swept the league. Jackson has just seven homers through 250 AB, but he's a high-AVG guy who has scored 22 runs since the beginning of August. Even though the counting stat totals for a short season don't leap off the page in a cursory scan of free agents, it's worth noting that Jackson's BA of .316 is better than that of dark horse AL MVP candidate Jose Ramirez. He's settled nicely into being the 2-spot hitter for the Tribe, and the RHB figures to draw several more starts against the Angels and Mariners while his streaking bat is hot.
Now, on to the rest of the league for some notable hitting efforts:
I wouldn’t address what is missing from Turner’s top 20 game if I were you either. More importantly, I wouldn’t make any negative reference to anyone trying to help me identify my biases. Two category production is not elite. The issue is that he was around #10 to start the year and all the only part of the deal he is following through on is the speed, which makes him a lot like Dee Gordon and Billy Hamilton who are not top 20. His OPS is down 150 pts from what his top 20 status is based on. People actually thought that he was going to improve offensively, which is what pushed him so high in the rankings. You should not recommend him as a 1st round pick, which is what you are implicitly doing. If you drafted Turner with your first pick, then your team had a bad year. His 2016 production looks like a fluke and injuries have always been a part of his game going back to college. Turner is the kind of guy that I am hoping someone else drafts with their first round pick.
Bour or Smoak down the stretch?