Saturday Discussion: Michael Bourn's new found
discipline

post from The Crawfish Boxes on 22 November 2008 03:03:00 PM. © The Crawfish Boxes

Like all of you, I'd love nothing more than for Michael Bourn to do a 180* about face and lived up to some that promise Ed Wade lavished on us -- and to be fair analyst from BPro too. I finally got around to reading the Astros.com piece on Bourn's staggering reversal of his K:BB ratio in the Dominican League:

In the 2008 regular season, Bourn struck out 111 times and walked 37 times in 467 at-bats. That computes to a strikeout rate of 1/4.2 at-bats and a K/BB rate of three-to-one, statistics that don't bode well for a leadoff hitter.
Contrast those numbers with his Dominican stats. His strikeout rate has improved to 1/6.6 at-bats, and he has more walks than strikeouts for the first time since his sophomore year at the University of Houston. That lends hope for Bourn, who at 25 has plenty of time to improve, and for Astros management, who acquired Bourn and Geoff Geary from the Phillies in a deal for Brad Lidge and Eric Bruntlett last November.

I've never seen anything on translations from Winter Leagues and I know that winter league baseball is a hugely limited sample size -- akin to Spring Training, but even less quality pitching -- but it's nice to see that the man can control his destiny at the plate.

My question for discussion is (please discuss, I'm trying to procrastinate on writing a paper -- enable me):

Poll