Mike Jacobs is hot again, and as an act of goodwill, I'd like to point that out in a little RR post. Let the archives reflect I was not 100% negative.
Jacobs has homered in three of his last four games, and is hitting .357/.357/1.000 in that stretch. Looking at his game log, his hot stretch seems to have started around May 4th.
Jacobs, as you'll recall, hit well to start the season, then nearly went hitless for two weeks, before bouncing back (apparently) with his most recent surge (I bet Jacobs drank Surge back in the late 1990s).
Cherry-picking the data for the most extreme results, you get three distinct patches -- mini-seasons if you will -- of Jacobsball.
| PAs | BA | OBP | SLG | HR | |
| April 7-21 | 47 | .326 | .383 | .698 | 4 |
| April 22- May 3 | 40 | .111 | .200 | .139 | 0 |
| May 4-15 | 40 | .361 | .425 | .750 | 4 |
| Total | 127 | .270 | .339 | .539 | 8 |
At the moment, Jacobs HR rate is right in line with what he did last year (6.3%, 6.2% in '08), which is good I suppose, though a bit of a bummer since he's had to go on a spree to catch up. His strikeouts and walks are both up a tick from last season however, which may suggest a new approach at the plate. At the moment, his walk rate of 8.7% is his highest since 2006.
My impression was that Trey had done a decent job shielding Jacobs from lefties, but the numbers don't quite bear that out. He's still racked up 46 PAs against LHPs this year, against 81 versus RHPs. At best, it's been a partial shielding, and it wouldn't suprise me if uneven distribution of PAs against LHPs is in part whats driving these swings in MJs performance. For the record, his line against lefties is .262/.326/.310, while versus righties he's .274/.346/.671. All eight of his homers are against northpaws.
Thanks to Butler's stunning emergence as a somewhat competent gloveman, Jacobs has only played 81 innings at first this season. Among the twelve players considered full-time AL DHs on Fangraphs, Jacobs is 6th in wOBA, 6th in wRAA and 10th in WPA.