He has been impressive
This is a great article about Elvis.
The Complete Reinvention of Elvis Andrus | FanGraphs Baseball
After last night, he’s got three home runs in 2017. Another player with three home runs is Mike Trout. Andrus also has three doubles and a triple, so he’s slugging .800. Those numbers don’t really matter, but when you look at them, you also look at what Andrus pulled off a season ago. There’s no longer just an attempted reinvention. The reinvention is effectively complete. Elvis Andrus is somehow still just 28 years old, and now he’s an offensive threat...
There’s no eye-popping exit velocity, no 500-foot distance. Andrus isn’t capable of those home runs, and so he doesn’t hit them. But 500-foot homers don’t need to exist. Those last hundred feet seldom matter. Andrus has enough pop, and this homer here isn’t a wall-scraper. It’s a convincing visual as we walk back through Andrus’ history.
Andrus was a rookie when he was 20 years old, and given his age, he held his own. This is his ninth straight year of being a regular, so the Rangers have clearly been satisfied, but for a while Andrus was less of an acceptable hitter, and more of an acceptable hitter for a shortstop. And that’s okay, but through 2015, Andrus never once managed a three-digit wRC+. He was a slap- and ground-ball hitter, a guy who might be able to single and steal a base. Andrus used to bunt a lot. There were so many bunts.
It was during 2015 that Andrus started trying to make changes in earnest. He got the idea to try to drive the ball more, which is a good thing to try to do, and while Andrus was no stranger to making tweaks, what he was trying then was going to be laborious. It was going to require physical changes, as well as changes to Andrus’ batting approach. Andrus talked about embracing the changes a little before the 2015 All-Star break. His first half was a rather unpleasant one...
For all I know, Andrus is still improving. Relatively speaking, this adjusted approach is fairly new to him. Maybe he’s still getting accustomed to the ins and outs of being a hitter worth worrying about. Yet if Andrus is simply what he is, it’s still been a remarkable surge, and the planned reinvention has been a runaway success. Andrus isn’t just an acceptable hitter for a shortstop. He’s an acceptable hitter, period. And that still undersells him. He’s a better hitter now than most other hitters.
Very true and some may have forgotten that Wash darn near ruined him.
Can you imagine our angst if they had traded him a couple of years ago and then he turned into this kind of a hitter?
Wash wanted Elvis to bunt and Doug Rader wanted Dave Stewart to quit fooling around with the forkball. A couple of great managers those two.
Rua doesn't hit RHP well.
