Carlos Delgado is in a slump. He's chasing balls out of the zone and has taken more than a few awkward swings this season. Is Delgado hurt? Are his mechanics messed up? How long will it take him to sort things out? Has he ever had a month this bad?
There's a little less than two weeks to go before we turn out calendar pages to May, but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the best and worst hitting months of Delgado's major league career. I looked at the six full months of each season from 1996 to 2003, and ranked them from best to worst GPA (Gleeman Production Average), excluding those months in which Carlos had fewer than 70 At-Bats plus Walks
| Month, Year | AB | Walks | OBP | SLG | GPA |
| July 2000 | 88 | 27 | .538 | .773 | .435 |
| June 2000 | 95 | 20 | .517 | .758 | .422 |
| September 2002 | 91 | 20 | .491 | .758 | .410 |
| August 2000 | 95 | 19 | .487 | .705 | .395 |
| April 2003 | 93 | 19 | .478 | .699 | .390 |
| May 1999 | 100 | 15 | .378 | .582 | .316 |
| July 1997 | 92 | 13 | .308 | .500 | .264 |
| May 2001 | 106 | 16 | .333 | .453 | .263 |
| May 1996 | 102 | 8 | .342 | .442 | .259 |
| June 1999 | 105 | 18 | .312 | .362 | .231 |
| September 1996 | 72 | 4 | .260 | .375 | .211 |
Average Month | 93 | 16 | .397 | .569 | .321 |
notes: GPA is (1.8*OBP + SLG)/4 and is based on Tangotiger's work comparing OBP and SLG to more sophisticated run estimators; it scales in a similar fashion to batting average and more accurately represents the value of a batter's production than straight OBP+SLG; the AL average GPA in 2003 was .257. |
Carlos Delgado made the necessary 70 AB+W threshold in 45 of the 48 months - he's been very durable over the last 8 years. The median hitting month according to GPA was May 1999, in which Delgado hit .378 OBP/.582 SLG for a GPA of .316. Three of his four best hitting months occured consecutively during his remarkable 2000 campaign.
So far in April 2004, Delgado is hitting .288 OBP/.262 SLG for a GPA of .195. The standard deviation of GPA for the 45 months that exceeded the AB+W threshold is .050, which means his current April GPA is about 2.5 standard deviations below his 1996-2003 average (.321 GPA). With 11 games to go, there's still time for Carlos Delgado to avoid posting the worst month of his major league career.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20040420110808999