Daric Barton falls off a Cliff Pennington

I've already slightly touched on my sentiment of Daric Barton my last post, but truth be told I really do love the guy. I mean come on...who else do you know that owns a Daric Barton shirt?* Anyways, cute title puns aside, my beloved Oakland A's cannot win with a first basemen who hits like a shortstop. Actually, Pennington has a higher wOBA at .293 than Barton's putrid .275. Kansas City's all glove-no bat short stop, Alcides Escobar, currently sports a wOBA of .274. Hows that for some peer persepctive? Due to this offensive futility as well as Barton's usually above average defense also taking a dive, the A's have been forced to option Barton down to AAA. Given the small sample size of this year, the question isn't it IF it was the right thing to to do, but exactly how justified was the move? Now that's to say that it's acceptable to have wRC+ of 75 at first base, but lets take a bit of a deeper look at his numbers

*I also have an Eric Chavez, Kurt Suzuki, and I've ordered a Craig Breslow one. Random players, I know. But hey, my fandom knows no bounds.

Coming from the trade with St. Louis that sent Mark Mulder out of town, Barton has never projected as a power hitting first basemen. His ceiling was always that of a 40 doubles, .400 OPB kind of guy. And if only prospects would reach their ceiling, what a wonderful land this would be. Anywho, when a player offensive numbers hit the fan like so, my first instinct is to check for any glaring abnormalities in his BABIP, LD%, BB%, K%, and finally O-swing% to see if he is pressing too much and therefore chasing pitches.

	Career	2011
BABIP	0.294	0.260
LD%	20.5	19.4
BB%	14.2	13.9
K%	19.3	19.9
O-Sw%	16.2	17.6

Now, I haven't yet decided to do a heat map of his pitch recognition or anything to like, and now I don't really see the need to. To be honest, I think we can safely say that our friend Daric Barton has simply been a victim of bad luck. Would it be great if he learned how to ISO .250 over night? Of course. But we know that won't happen. BABIP takes a long time to normalize, sometimes even a full baseball season isn't a long enough time. The A's made the right choice in the demoting Barton, however I would expect him to be back up sooner rather than later. His approach appears to be fine and unchanged. Simply put, the BABIP gods decided to toy with his emotions thus far this year. He'll be back.