Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?: 2008 Preview: Adam LaRoche

Can Adam LaRoche duplicate his 2006 season?

I know the question you want me to ask here is "Can Adam LaRoche hit in April?" but the truth is that's not a terribly profitable line of inquiry for two reasons:

It's really hard to break down why he didn't hit in April and May last year because he literally did everything terribly and figuring the problem out would be nigh impossible without complete pitch-by-pitch data and a ton of time.
His career line in April is .184/.282/.354, so no, he probably won't hit in April this year. The best we can hope for is that he doesn't tank May, too.

I'm not positive, but I think Adam LaRoche had one of the most statistically misunderstood seasons in recent memory in his first year in black and gold. Everyone screamed and hollered about his awful start, acting like he was the worst acquisition in history when reality dictated that there was no way he was going to be that awful for a full-season. Then he hit the ball in the second half and everyone declared him cured and the savior we had hoped for back to his 2006 level if he just hadn't hit so badly at the beginning of the year. That idea is almost equally flawed as thinking he would OPS .500 for the season. I know I've done this before, but let's look at his monthly OPS numbers from his breakout 2006 (listed first) and last year (second):

April- .747/.520
May- .910/.798
June- .756/.779
July- 1.043/.905
August- 1.239/.971
September- .786/.796

There's the proof: he didn't even approach the numbers he put up in July and August of 2006 as a Brave. He hit 14 homers in those two months with the Braves and he only hit 21 all year with the Pirates last year. LaRoche is clearly a streaky hitter and there's probably nothing that's going to change that. The big question that's left is whether or not he can have months that match that peak he put up in Atlanta, because those two incredibly hot months are what seperates his 2006 (130 OPS+) from the rest of his career (around 105 OPS+).

Anyways, to try and answer the question of what LaRoche did better in 2006, I queued up David Pinto's Day-by-Day database to check out LaRoche's splits in July and August of 2006 and 2007. It was a mostly fruitless endeavor as his lefty/righty splits don't do much but confirm that he hit everything better in 2006 (he actually hit lefties better during this span in 2006 than he did in 2007). The only thing I could think to do from there was to check his full-season home/road splits. Again, it was pretty fruitless as in 2006 he went .835 at home and .994 on the road while in 2007 he went .881 at home and .721 on the road. Despite all the analysis I did last month, PNC actually helped his bat (if not his power) in 2007.

Anyways, that leads us back to the question of whether or not LaRoche can get as hot in 2008 as he did in 2006. The honest answer is that I don't know. His career history suggests that his numbers in 2006 were probably a bit fluky, but his big drop in road OPS last year kind of confuses me as I don't think of any of the NL Central parks being particularly hard on lefties, especially when he came from a division where he played a bunch of road games at RFK and Shea. I don't see a whole lot of evidence to suggest that he can replicate his 2006 season, but then again I also don't see a whole lot of evidence that he can't given that he's at the age that most players enter the peak of their careers, especially because he should be able to put up monstrous road numbers at parks like Wrigley and Great American and he didn't do that last year.