I'm sure some of you have noticed, but Jason Giambi is absolutely tearing up the league at the moment. So he still can't play defense, who cares! Using Baseball Musing's Day by Day Database we can see his SecAvg and ISO by month.
First thing is first...Giambi has a SecAvg of .895 for July, with an ISO of .619.
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New York still needs pitching (paging Hideo Nomo) but having this bat in the lineup rather than the one who put up a .224//395/.373 line in April and a .241/.349/.315 in May is going to help them. I'd like to take a second to point out that Will Carroll believes that steroids are capable of hindering your performance rather than helping it in some cases, as evidenced by parts of his latest book "The Juice" (which if you have not read yet, shame on you). If Giambi's career path is any indication, it appears that Carroll is correct in his assessment. He has never hit like this during his time in New York besides his first year there, before the steroids may have caused the problems that they did for him. Also, his medication for his health problems last year keeps him from going back to using performance enhancers because they will adversely affect his health. This is clean domination. Let's check his Net Runs Above Average (NRAA), VORP and WARP3 by season to prove my point about just how far his career has fallen and risen again. Just so everyone knows, as of the day before the All-Star break, Giambi's NRAA/162 stood at -2.42 for this season.
One caveat about the NRAA/162 in 2005; his defense is so awful at this point that it is canceling out a good deal of his hitting prowess. His Rate2 is 82, or 18 runs below average per 100 games. Normally he is anywhere from 2 over to 5 below. You can see from that table that everything seems to be back on the upswing. If he has an August anything like his July then April, May and June will be wiped entirely off the slate, giving him some sort of insane line that you should not have after the struggles of the first 3 months. I will hold no real grudge against Giambi if he can produce clean like he has been for the rest of this season and onward. If there is one thing Giambi can do, it is hit the ball a mile, and as you can see from his pre-and-post steroid numbers, he can do it without any help. Of course, we do not know the exact date he began using, so the pre portion of that is iffy at best. Atleast we are aware of the post part.
The longer he can produce clean the more valid his Oakland numbers can become. Hopefully the rest of you are thinking in the same sort of fashion, but if you disagree there is the always the poll at the end and an e-mail to send.