Leadoff Lightning: Jacoby Ellsbury's the Thunder Boston Needs at Top of Order

Numbers. In baseball, especially modern-day baseball, they mean everything. The game has been reduced to a series of numerals and figures and equations complicated enough to make any fantasy stat geek drool.

When I try to picture the scene in the Red Sox war room during free agent negotiations or the amateur draft, I inevitably come back to an image of 30 sweaty, bug-eyed men watching a scroll of numbers longer than the New York Stock Exchange.

Those numbers are the reason Jacoby Ellsbury spent a portion of the season hitting in the bottom third of the Red Sox batting order.

Those numbers are wrong.

Personally, I’ve never been a numbers guy. The minutiae are maddening, and what made someone the best player in the league one year is completely obsolete the next.

Remember when batting average was a good indicator of a player’s offensive competence? Seems like ages ago. Instead, now we have players like Jack Cust surviving in the bigs because his OPS is apparently tantalizing despite the fact that the eye test tells you he can’t hit a lick.

Pretty soon we’ll be able to calculate a player’s worth based only upon the physical distance between his eyeballs.

I go by what I see—and mine eyes are telling me we are witnessing the arrival of Jacoby Ellsbury.

The Red Sox, of course, are steering the train of modern-day sabermetrics, or whatever the stat nerds call it now. Sox GM Theo Epstein loves that stuff (though I’d be quick to point out those metrics signed the likes of Jeremy Giambi and J.D. Drew—failures on different levels, perhaps, but failures nonetheless).

In fact, when Ellsbury was dropped in the order earlier this year, it was Drew who took his place, he of the otherworldly intangibles, like the ability to watch three strikes carefully and coax out backward Ks.

Drew batted under .200 in the top spot. Even the most ardent OPS geeks understand the importance of that number.

Go deeper. Watch a game and tell me what you see from Ellsbury. I see a guy who came with all sorts of hype, and he’s living up to it. He’s a four-tool guy—the power might come someday—with that rare extra gear that simply makes him exciting.

Exciting, for those of you with calculator in hand, is a good thing. Ask a baseball fan.

But he’s more than exciting. He’s damn good. He’s batting nearly .300 for the season and has swiped an astounding 60 bags already while only getting caught nine times, smashing the Red Sox’ previous single-season record for thefts in a year.

But wait, there’s more. Guess who leads the team in base hits? Kevin Youkilis? Nope. Dustin Pedroia? Try again. Jed Lowrie? Sorry, wrong article.

No, it’s Ellsbury, who also ranks fourth on the team in runs scored despite spending several weeks in the bottom half of the lineup.

Ellsbury’s detractors will tell you he hasn’t walked enough, with only 37 free passes on the season and a .347 on-base percentage. But I say he’s also only whiffed 60 times in 530 at-bats. He hits consistently, flusters the opposition, and generally changes the game.

The bottom line is he’s a catalyst at the top of the order. That’s what I want in a leadoff hitter.
   
The fact of the matter is Ellsbury is never going to sit back and watch 32 pitches the way Youkilis does. It’s just not him. So it’s time to embrace what the Sox have and not try to create what they don’t.

Ask Daisuke Matsuzaka what happens when you’re forced to alter your approach.

Instead of analyzing what Ellsbury isn’t doing, let’s take a look at what he is doing. He’s stroking the ball at a near-.300 clip while disrupting pitching staffs across the American League. Just this afternoon, he led off the game with a base hit, stole second, and came around to score, flustering the quick-moving and supposedly un-flusterable Mark Buehrle.

He also plays Gold Glove-caliber defense while covering more ground than most entire outfields do. The guy is downright electric, and on any given night he could do something spectacular, like steal home in front of the Fenway Faithful against the New York Yankees.

And that’s the thing. When he first came to the big leagues, he was nothing more than a sideshow, all style and no stability. Now he’s proving to be a consistent threat in the leadoff spot and a top-notch defender, and he hasn’t had to sacrifice any of his flair.

He’s also 25 years old, and the progress he’s made from year one to year two to year three tells us he’s only going to get better. The guy has future All-Star written all over him, and personally I can’t wait to see what’s next.

He’s essentially improving the same way he plays the game—fast.

So pay attention, because if you keep your nose in the stat books analyzing what he’s not doing, you might miss the spectacular things he’s already done.