Most surprising AL hitters

So with the season winding down, and with most fantasy leagues into the playoffs, I figured I'd take a look and pick out some of the most surprising hitters in the American League. Because I'm lazy, I'll let others do most of the work for me on this. I could go the WARP or VORP route to try to determine value, but this blog has a bit of a fantasy bent, so I figured I'd look at fantasy stats. So I went to Yahoo (correction, Yahoo!) and sorted by their seasonal ranking for AL hitters. I'll admit, I don't know how this is computed, but the results look pretty good. Powered by the song in the iPod nano commercial (1, 2, 3, 4 by Feist) here then, in order of rank, are the surprising additions to the top hitters in the American League.

- Magglio Ordonez, second highest rated hitter in the AL. While Maggs is no slouch with the bat, no one expected him to be this good this season. I think most people figured his better days were behind him, but he's hitting an obscene .359 with 128 driven in already.


- Curtis Granderson, 6th highest rated AL hitter. Grandy has exploded through the ceiling of what I thought he was capable of. Before the season I though his line would be about:

.283 average, 91 runs, 24 HR, 76 RBI, with a decent chance to get 20 steals.

he's already got:

.305 average, 112 runs, 21 HR, 71 RBI, and 20 steals.

Oh and he also has that whole 20-20-20-20 thing.

- Carlos Pena, 11th rated AL hitter. Holy crap! This guy has always had worlds of potential (said to be a future star on Baseball Prospectus '02 and '03), but it looked like he was never going to realize it. He hit 27 HR in 2004 with the Tigers, but was rapidly slipping to journeyman status (see also: Phelps, Josh). With 38 HR already, it looks like he's reached that star status after all.

Others worth mentioning:

Nick Markakis (#13) - Good combination of power and speed, turned out to be a better player than many expected.

BJ Upton (#14) - Much like Markakis, a great power speed combo, Upton is finally showing his immense talent on the field.



Adrian Beltre (#24) - He'll always have the air of an underachiever after that monstrous 2004 season, he's having a very solid season.

Jose Guillen (#27) - A lot of people thought my former binky was washed up after a couple injury plagued, unproductive seasons, but Jose has really rebounded.