Trend Spotting: Michael Bourn and a few notes

On successful teams or at least competitive ones it becomes easy to overemphasize or highlight specific player performance while undervaluing other complimentary production. This probably occurs because polarizing production is most interesting at least in terms of penetrating or attentional biases. Be it the recent ineptitude of Mark Reynolds or the scorched earth Jason Kipnis leaves behind we enjoy obsessing over extremes in production which is not an unreasonable thing. In fact, watching Michael Bourn plate the first two runs against the Twins Friday night probably instigated my interest in his production. One of the things that has his value flying under the radar is that entering the first game post all-star break. Bourn had played just 68 of the Indians 95 games. Outside of being the center of tremendously easy twitter hash tags like #Bourntorun, the speedy centerfielder has been an altogether uncelebrated commodity. Having missed over a quarter of the season Bourn is still on...