Eric Hosmer is a Superstar

Five years ago tomorrow, Eric Hosmer made his big league debut for the Kansas City Royals. He went 0 for 2 with two walks in that game, but those two walks in his big league debut set him apart from pretty much every Royals player and, along with his minor league track record, made people believe he would be the superstar middle of the order the team and organization had been lacking for years. Five years later, I think he’s gotten there.

He started as the third pick in the 2008 draft, and has gone through more than a couple ups and downs through the early part of his big league career. It looks like the ups are here to stay. He’s the best hitter on the reigning World Series champions and plays defense at first base as well as anybody. The Royals have had stars here and there with Zack Greinke, Alex Gordon and even Billy Butler for a couple seasons, but Hosmer might be their first superstar since Carlos Beltran roamed center field in Kansas City.

Those ups and downs of his career actually began with downs. He hit just .241/.334/.361 in his first full season, split between Burlington (then the Low-A affiliate) and Wilmington. He was so bad, he ended up having lasik eye surgery to correct his vision. He hit .354/.429/.545 in Wilmington the next year in 87 games before getting a promotion to Northwest Arkansas where he hit .313/.365/.615 in 50 games. He started 2011 in Omaha and was hitting a ridiculous .439/.525/.582 in 26 games when he was summoned to the big leagues. He’d learned all he could in the minors.

So he came up and hit the ground running. At the end of May, he was hitting .283/.321/.515 with five home runs. If you were wondering, a 162-game pace of that would give him 36 homers and 120 RBIs to go along with 43 doubles and 8 triples. Wow.

He then hit for a few days into June before falling into one of his slumps we’ve grown to know all too well. I believe that was the first time that I referred to Hosmer as “4-3″ because of all his groundouts to second base. He ended the season well, though, finishing with a .293/.334/.465 line with 19 homers in 128 games. Those 19 home runs remain his career high.

In 2012, he started the year just blistering the ball, but was hitting into some terrible luck. As a young player, he seemed to change his approach and that impacted his entire season. He had a .663 OPS, a .241 TAv, and was worth just 0.3 WARP. That’s really bad. He bounced back with a huge second half in 2013, was up and down in 2014 and then finally put together a really good season in 2015. Still, up to the beginning of the year, he had never hit higher than .302, never slugged above that .465 of his rookie season, never had an OPS above .822, never had a TAv above .291 and was never worth more than 3.7 WARP.

This season, that’s all changing, and I believe will continue to change. He’s now hitting .333/.382/.520. He looks primed to hit 20+ home runs for the first time in his career. He’s letting the ball get deep into his swing, which is allowing him to use the whole field with power. He’s just generally having a great start to the season.

One thing that is both encouraging and troubling is that he’s hitting a ton of ground balls. I’m not sure if you know this, but it’s hard to get a lot of extra base hits by hitting the ball on the ground. He currently has a 61% ground ball rate, which would be a career high by far. He entered play on Wednesday with the fifth highest ground ball rate in baseball.

So you might ask why I’m encouraged by that. I’m glad you did. That’s what’s been so amazing about this early season run of success for Hosmer. By the eye test, he doesn’t seem to be hitting all that differently than he has during his cold stretches. He’s not hitting the ball especially hard and he’s actually making more soft contact than at any other point in his career. And yet, here we are. So my point is, Homer hasn’t even really gotten going and he’s hitting like this.

That’s a bit of a statistical fallacy to assume that he will improve on what he’s done, but if he can trade some of his ground balls for the line drives he hit last season, we could be looking at something very special this season.

The journey took a little longer than we expected, but I think he finally made it. His ability actually caught up with his reputation after all these years. Sure he’ll have a tough stretch or two, but this really feels like he turned the Luke Hochevar Corner.

I don’t know how much longer the Royals will get to enjoy the superstar version of Hosmer, but I do have a good feeling it’ll be awfully fun to watch as long as we get to see him in Royals blue.