The Curious Case of Danjamin Uggla

            Earlier tonight, Dan Uggla muscled a first-inning slider over Starlin Castro and extended his hitting streak to 33 games.  This is one of the most comically improbable things I have ever witnessed.

            Uggla came to Atlanta in an off-season deal with the division rival Florida Marlins, who worried they would be unable to re-sign the slugging second baseman.  Uggla was plugged in at clean-up and expected to be the bopper between Chipper Jones and Brian McCann, both All-Star hitters with just mid-level home run numbers. 

Uggla came in with exceptional expectations and did everything he could to disappoint.  Uggla was lost and impotent at the plate.  He still knocked the occasional homer, but hung around the Mendoza Line for most of the early season.  Summer came, and Uggla lost his grip on even that; he spent the entire month of June mired around .175, every Braves win coming in spite of a nightly train wreck clogging up the middle of the order.

            To manager Fredi Gonzalez’s credit, he never overtly panicked.  The talking heads around baseball never truly believed that Uggla could disappear this brutally in the prime of his career.  He was pressing, they said, trying to hard to live up to the lofty expectations placed on an imported masher joining an offensively challenged contender that seemed just one bat away from outlasting eventual champion San Francisco in the first round of the previous year’s playoffs.

            Uggla had never been a high-average guy.  He swung hard, struck out a lot, and usually found his average in the .240-.260 range.  Slumps were inevitable with his high-impact approach and limited (but acceptable) walk rates.  A season long slump was even in play; but never this.

            On Independence Day, the Colorado Rockies came to town to celebrate America by losing to a team represented by its native peoples.  Uggla went 0-3 in the first game of the four-game sweep, dropping his average to .173.  The next day, Uggla collected two hits, including a homerun.  The following day, he did it again.  Uggla kept hitting; his average so low that even around the 15-game mark his streak was mentioned only to mark the minimal increase in his anemic average. 

            The same skills that caused Uggla’s slump should have just as easily disrupted his streak.  High strikeouts, high stakes at-bats.  He was a power guy, not a singles hitter.  Far more Harmon Killebrew than Charlie Hustle.  The guys who got DiMaggio’s name mentioned by curious-toned broadcasters were all .300 hitters with some speed to leg out infield hits – Rose, Molitor, Luis Castillo.  Yet Uggla keeps hitting, trading off two-homer games with 1-4 salvages.  His single in the first sent his average just over .230, a seemingly improbably average for any hitter.  So insane was it that Jayson Stark, I’m imagining in a confounded blind fury, wrote a column dedicated to its absurdity.

            Uggla has already placed himself in the Braves history books, with the longest hitting streak in club history.  He will almost undoubtedly not catch Joltin’ Joe, though we’ll all be cheering like hell for it.  If the streak ends tomorrow, though, it will have been enough to weirdly capture a city’s ironic heart.  Mario Mendoza still lurks beyond the curtain.