Something is going on with Rickie Weeks' offensive game. He isn't at all the same player he was through the first 4 years of his career. It's not that he is having his "best" run as a hitter, because he's had 1.000 OPS months before and he isn't in that territory this season. His on base percentage is actually down from where it has been at times in his career. His power is as good as it's ever been, but not outrageously so. He is, however, hitting for more average than just about any time in his career. His AB's are very different than in the past as well. So what is going on?

A cruise around ESPN.com's Baseball Prospectus section led me to this article on the evolving and improving game of Kevin Youkilis that might help to discover some answers. The basic point is to figure out why, while several of Youk's more basic measures of plate discipline regressed (OBP, pitches per plate appearance), his overall productivity went up. Their hypothesis is that he has learned better which pitches to attack early in the count and has increasingly done so, to his benefit.

Unfortunately it's an "insider" feature, but here is the first key portion of how his game changed in a seemingly negative way while actually improving and how it relates to Weeks:

There is some truth to the hypothesis that he has become more aggressive over time. For example, in his first exposure to the majors, he had just 39 plate appearances that resolved early in the count -- on the first pitch or at 1-0 or 0-1. These accounted for 15.7 percent of his plate appearances. Discounting his abortive 2005, his percentage of early-resolving plate appearances grew each season, reaching 22.2 percent last year. This seems to be an extremely successful adaptation for him; in 2008, Youkilis hit 12 of his 29 home runs by swinging early in the count, batting .439 in the process. There was a concomitant drop in the percentage of his plate appearances ending in a walk, sinking from 13.3 percent in 2004 to a bare 8.9 percent last year. His pitches per plate appearance bottomed out at 4.02.

So how does Weeks stack up? Well, for his career, 22.7% of his PA's resolve in those "early count" situations, which is a higher baseline than Youkilis was working with. Looking at the year by year results something jumps right out:

2005: 20.5%
2006: 23.7%
2007: 20.0%
2008: 23.8%
2009: 31.9%

See it?

It's early, but that is a monumental leap in the number of early ending PA's and it all happened at once. So in that sense, Weeks is like Youkilis. Has this been a similarly successful change for Weeks? In those early ending plate appearances, Weeks is hitting .400/.432/.800 with 3 homers, 3 doubles, a triple and 2 HBP (the reason why his OBP is higher than his BA). When he's attacking those early pitches, it's paying off for him in a big way, which is probably a sign that he is looking for a specific pitch to hit in that case, which is just what you would want from him.

Another way to see Youkilis' transformation into a more aggressive hitter is to see the percentage of pitches that he swung at. Not only has he swung at more pitches outside of the strike zone over time, increasing his percentage of such swings from 15.1 percent in 2006 to 20.9 percent last year, but his overall percentage of pitches swung at rose from 37 percent in 2004 to 41 percent last year.

Ditto for Weeks. According to his fan graphs page, Weeks has increased the percentage of pitches he swings at outside the zone from a steady 19.6 career percent (he's never been more than a percent different than that from 2005-08) to 26.5 percent this season and his overall percentage of pitches swung at this season is up more than 4 percent from his career number. That is just the beginning of the info to be gleaned looking at swing percentages.

While the percentage of pitches inside the strikezone that Weeks makes contact with is only 4 tenths of a percent different from his career average (84.2 compared with 83.8 career), he is making more and more contact when he swings outside the strikezone over time. In fact, it's risen each and every year, from a low of 39.0% of the time in 2005 to 59.1% of the time this year so far. So not only is Weeks swinging at more pitches outside of the strikezone than ever before, he is also making more frequent contact on those swings.

In the end, Weeks isn't seeing drastically more balls inside the strikezone than normal this year, with 53.1 of pitches being in the strikezone this year compared with 52.1 percent for his career. He is just attacking pitches earlier and expanding his zone a bit to hit pitches he can make contact with. It's a long season, and we're going to have to wait to see if this sort of "progress" will ultimately result in more production and eventually pitchers working around Weeks more than they have thus far. The data we do have, though, suggests that this is not at all the Rickie Weeks that we all came to know and love as Brewer fans.

This isn't to say that Weeks is morphing into an MVP cannidate the way that Youk did, but it's interesting how parallel they have been in regards to attacking earlier in the count and expanding their strikezone at the right moments. One has to wonder if there might be some connection between Dale Sveum taking over as hitting coach and his having spent a lot of time working as a coach in Boston, where they work hard with players on being aggressively selective. In any event, it looks like this is having a positive impact on Weeks' game, even if his OBP is down a bit in the early going. How nice would it be to never again hear misplaced complaints about Rickie Weeks' supposed uselessness?