In baseball, sometimes the small sample size of April leads to hot starts and early slumps that got corrected as the season progresses. However, there are other occasions where someone’s April production remains pretty consistent as the season progresses.
Now that it’s almost July, let’s examine four notable April starts and see what’s happened since then.
Good April, didn’t last: Randal Grichuk
During the offseason, an infamous Oriole killer left the AL and was shipped from Toronto to Denver. Randal Grichuk was traded to the Rockies, ending his reign of terror against Baltimore that included a career 1.084 OPS with 21 homers in 57 games.
Grichuk didn’t take long to get familiar with his new team and ended April with a .333 batting average and a .871 OPS. Interestingly enough, he wasn’t providing much power to go along with his excellent average, providing just three doubles and two homers across his 16 games in April. Among 175 qualified hitters in April, his batting average ranked 11th, but his isolated power sat much lower in 82nd place.
However, once April ended, everything went downhill. He had a .226 batting average during May, a 107-point decline from the first month. His OPS during the month also nosedived with a .598 figure. Additionally, he spent May walking less and striking out more, a combination that is almost always a bad sign for a hitter.
His OPS in June is a slightly better .627, but it still gives him a .611 OPS since April ended. Out of 171 qualified hitters, his OPS across May and June ranks 157th. His OPS in the last two months is also the worst among the eight qualified Rockies hitters.
Not even Coors Field can seem to help Grichuk right now.
Good April, kept it up: Jose Ramirez
It’s hardly a surprise that someone like Jose Ramirez had a strong April, but I still want to make it clear that this wasn’t any ordinary good start from a star.
Entering 2022, Ramirez’s career high for an OPS in March/April was .982 in 2017. This year, he smashed that figure with a 1.133 OPS, exceeding 2017’s mark by 151 points. Ramirez ended April leading the league in slugging and ranked second in OPS with seven homers, seven doubles and a triple.
Once April ended, Ramirez was not able to maintain his outstanding 1.133 OPS, but he’s still been hitting incredibly well where his first month doesn’t really look like an outlier.
He had a .972 OPS in May and his OPS in June is currently .937, giving him an OPS of .957 since May began. Since May 1, his OPS ranks ninth among 171 qualified hitters, so he’s still been one of the best hitters in the sport even without an OPS above 1.000 in the last two months.
Highlighting a star like Ramirez might be boring, but it’s still noteworthy when someone has the best April of their career and has hardly cooled down since then.
Bad April, got it together: Julio Rodriguez
It’s always reasonable to expect rookies to struggle to begin their career, but the 21-year-old Julio Rodriguez had a particularly ugly first month in the majors.
He ended April with a 2-to-1 ratio of strikeouts to hits, whiffing 30 times while recording 15 hits. His batting average was .205, while his strikeout rate was 37 percent. On top of that, he failed to hit a homer and had a slugging percentage under .300.
Unsurprisingly, the former top-five prospect started to figure things out once he spent more time seeing major league pitching. He homered six times in May while batting .305 during the month and reduced his strikeout rate by more than 10 percentage points.
After ending April with a .544 OPS, Rodriguez has had a much more productive .851 OPS since May 1, including a batting average just barely below .300. That .851 OPS is in the top 40 among the 171 qualified hitters, proving that Rodriguez has been a very solid hitter since his dreadful April.
Rodriguez is just one of many examples that even the best prospects won’t always hit the ground running and need some time to settle in. Just ask Adley Rutschman.
Bad April, still struggling: Justin Turner
Father Time is undefeated and his latest victory appears to be the 37-year-old Justin Turner.
The normally productive Turner ended April with a .525 OPS after hitting just one homer in 19 games. The .525 OPS ranked 159th out of 175 qualified hitters in April, which was quite an alarming start for someone who ended last year with a .832 OPS.
Since the start of May, Turner is still struggling with a .702 OPS that is more than 100 points lower than his end-of-year figure from 2021. He’s improved from April, but that was also a very low bar to clear.
The biggest concern for Turner is his lack of homers. He hit 27 homers last year, but this year he only has four of them in his first 64 games, putting him on pace for just 10 homers according to Baseball Reference.
From 2014 to 2021, Turner was one of the most reliably productive members of the Los Angeles Dodgers, providing a .877 OPS across over 900 games. Now, it appears his career is coming to its conclusion.
BSL Analyst
Rose Katz is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, where she worked for The Diamondback as the online managing editor and a sports blogger. As a student, she spent almost all of her time on campus in The Diamondback’s newsroom or at Xfinity Center, Ludwig Field and Maryland Stadium. Rose gained intern experience with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN).