The Nationals couldn't be faulted for assuming before the season started that Brad Wilkerson would be a star of their team for years to come. After all, Wilkerson had put up stellar and improving numbers for years. But this year Wilkerson has taken a big step backward:
Year --- OBP -- SLG -- OPS
2002 -- .370 -- .469 -- .839
2003 -- .380 -- .464 -- .844
2004 -- .374 -- .498 -- .872
2005 -- .370 -- .428 -- .798
What explains this decline?
Wilkerson's OBP has remained consistent from 2002 through this season, but his SLG has dropped dramatically. To get to the bottom of this (hopefully), we took Wilkerson's 2003 numbers (we didn't like the 2004 numbers because the Expos played so many games in San Juan) and broke them down into home and away numbers. To compare accurately the 2003 and 2005 numbers, we applied RFK's park effects to the 2003 home runs, triples, and doubles, and singles Wilkerson hit in Montreal and recalculated his slugging percentage.
That calculation yields a slugging percentage of .407. That's 57 points below his actual 2003 slugging percentage of .464. When we recalculate Wilkerson's 2003 OPS using this new SLG result, we get an OPS of .787, which is only 11 points lower than Wilkerson's actual OPS this year.
So, while the numbers suggest that Wilkerson's production has been declining, that's not really true when you do a little digging.
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