In 2013, Justin "Grit" Upton was a perfectly solid player for us: .263/.354/.464 with 27 home runs and 94 runs scored. Tons of strikeouts, but that wasn't unusual for us, and he hit well overall.
Still, there was that nagging inconsistency problem. You don't have to be Kirk Gibson to find some of the monthly OPS splits a little annoying:
April: 1.136
May: .654
June: .616
July: .757
August: 1.023
September/Oct: .743
It's a reflection of how brilliant Upton was in April and in August when we put away the Nationals that his numbers ended up as solid as they were. And normally I'm not a big fan of going on about "inconsistency;" that's why we have season totals, after all, to account for both hot and cold streaks. Still, last year was an extreme, and it was legitimately a problem to have Justin hitting like a back-up catcher for two months in the middle of the order. July and September/October, while not good, are basically in the realm of "standard-issue mediocre month."
But this year...ah, so much better:
April: 1.041
May: .877
June: .617
July: .903
August: .967
A crummy June, of course, and April was again the best month, but that's a perfectly reasonable, consistent season. He had one particularly awful stretch toward the end of April/beginning of June that coincided with our first seven-game losing streak, and seemed to see him coming to the plate with runners on base every time, but he's generally been a really solid, day-in, day-out performer. He's also on pace to play 154 games this year, which was another point of concern when we traded for him.
He's always going to be streaky in a game-to-game sense; he had a four-strikeout game against Seattle just a few days ago. But that won't do much harm if he staunches the bleeding and keeps the bad streaks to a couple games at a time.
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