But I hope it will. As I recall, BPro wrote a while back that he showed good discipline in the minors. Hopefully, Coop and Co. don’t try to screw with his plate approach – I know that they were talking about how he should be making more contact and hacking away. I don’t think we have any good reason to expect him to suddenly become a spectacular leadoff hitter, but we can hope he improves.

If he struggles again in 2009, manager Cecil Cooper will have Reggie Abercrombie and Darin Erstad as fallback options.

God help us all.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the fact that Bourn’s numbers look good…it sure as heck beats seeing bad numbers out of him in the winter league. But it makes me nervous when writers make such sweeping conclusions about a performance reversal from such a small sample size. Yeah, congratulate him on doing good so far, but don’t jinx him or get everybody’s hopes up. I recall that Bourn was putting up a .350-.400 OBP during most of the first 2/3 of spring training games; and it certainly got a lot of fans’ hopes up. But the competition gets stronger as spring training continues…and regression to mean also sets in as the sample size increases…and the next thing we know is that Bourn’s numbers plummeted.

Do winter league performances carry over…sometimes and sometimes not. Does anyone remember Hidalgo’s glowing winter league stats when he was signed before the 07 spring training? (Unfortunately, his luck ran out in spring training and he was just terrible.) Luke Scott always had terrific winter league stats…and they may have foretold his great 06 tear. The competition probably is more like high minor leagues than major leagues, though.

Pitchers down there he might be facing this year include Carlos Marmol, Ubaldo Jimenez, Damaso Marte and Ervin Santana.

Or maybe its the team cheerleader/godmother

Interesting.