Jacoby Ellsbury started this season as the uncontested starting CFer for the Sox. Francona said that the team envision him as its leadoff hitter even when they demoted him in the batting order after the Minnesota serie. How's he doin' at that task, one word to describe that: Average!

Let's try to breakdown his hitting performance this year. Taco is sporting a .302/.353/.419 line although the BA is good, the OBP is average to mediocre if you consider that he's batting leadoff for a club with a WS expectations! If you look to the other contenders in the AL, you'll find that: Jeter is having a .401 OBP for the MFY and Figgins is doing very well for the Halos with a .399 OBP.

Ellsbury is not walking enough for a leadoff hitter (or an above avg baseball player for that matter) with an unhealthy clip of: 7 BB%. He clearly lacks plate discipline, FranGraphs' plate discipline section gives us a good outlook at Taco's tendencies in the batter box:

He's swinging at 23.9% of the pichs out of the zone (Figgins for example is swinging at a much lower clip 15.3%) combine that with the fact that he's making 72.3% contact with those pitchs out of the zone and, unless he's the second coming of Vladimir Guerrero or Pablo Sandoval, raises the probability of making weak contact resulting into outs: 50.1% of his batted balls are ground balls and only 17.2 % of them are line drives.

Don't get me wrong, Jacoby's not a mediocre overall player: He's a terrific base stealer (his success rate is ELITE), gives some highlight reels grabs, pink hats loves him and he plays some REAL GOOD defense....in LF!! But, don't fool your self thinking that we have a Carlos Beltran, I'm sorry to say: We may have a Carl Crawford at best!