A's Catcher Shea Langeliers is Doing More Than Swatting Dingers

The A's have the top two hitters in baseball dating back to June 30, and even if you don't pay attention to the club much, you're likely to be able to name at least rookie Nick Kurtz, whose four-homer performance last month in Houston put him on the map. He's been the baseball's top bat, batting .377 with 13 home runs, 40 runs scored, 35 RBI, an OBP approaching .500, and a 16% walk rate in 39 games.

Kurtz went into Tuesday's game with a 234 wRC+ (100 is league average), which leads all players in that span by a wide margin. He's also put up 2.9 fWAR, which is extremely impressive. That's a 12-win pace over the course of a 162-game season. Only four players have ever had a 12-WAR season--Babe Ruth (five times), Barry Bonds (twice), Lou Gehrig (once) and Rogers Hornsby (once).

While he won't get there, it speaks to the kind of pace he's on of late.

But the player right behind Kurtz on the leaderboard (at least in wRC+) is teammate Shea Langeliers, who has a 180. The first non-A on the list in Toronto's Vladimir Guerrero Jr. with a 178. While Langeliers hasn't quite been putting up Kurtz-type numbers (nobody has), he's still on an extreme heater that involves more than just hitting home runs.

To be clear, he's doing that plenty as well, with 17 long balls in 39 games, pushing him up to 27 on the season. That's the attention-grabbing number right there, since it ranks second to only Philadelphia's Kyle Schwarber in that span.

But the A's catcher is also batting .312 in his past 39 games, and has cut his strikeout rate to just 18%, down from 27.2% last year. We mentioned back in April that he'd been doing the little things and not quite seeing the results just yet. Well, now we're seeing some of the results with his luck flipped just a touch.