Brian Dozier: Is he a Trick or a Treat?

Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports

The depressing fact is that I haven’t had my yearly viewing of ‘It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown’ and it’s Halloween. Traditions are meant to be broken, but Snoopy is like the beagle I never had and is a more animated edition of the dog I used to have. This is a long way of telling you that I am still very emotionally attached to a cartoon. But there are things I have grown out of for Halloween like trick-or-treating.

Trick-or-treating is a tradition that will not go away anytime soon, because people will always love candy. Death, taxes and love of candy are the three things every American is guaranteed. Even though it’s only kids that are trick-or-treating, at least it should only be kids, the Minnesota Twins had a player trick-or-treat them this past season and that was Brian Dozier.

By trick-or-treat I am asking is the performance the Twins saw from Dozier in 2013 what will continue for years to come (treat) or was it all just a flash in the pan (trick).

Brian Dozier came up in 2012 with the spotlight shining on him at shortstop as the Tsuyoshi Nishioka experiment went down in flames. Dozier came up with too much hype and was unimpressive hitting .234 in 88 games and committing 15 errors in that timespan in 2012.

2013 came and Dozier was flipped to the other side of the diamond and put at second base, where he flourished. Dozier raised his batting average ten points, increased his on-base plus slugging percentage by 123 points to .702. On defensive the evidence was even more eye-popping, Dozier commited only six errors while playing in 523 more innings than the year before.

WAR proves it, too. 2012 Dozier only had a WAR of 0.7 and increased that to 3.8 in 2013. Dozier was one of only three Twins players who had a WAR over two, the others being Joe Mauer with a WAR of 5.4 and Pedro Florimon with a WAR of 2.1.

So was Dozier’s 2013 a trick or a treat? A fluke or a stash of candy we can savor for a long time?

I believe Dozier is a treat. Dozier’s 3.8 WAR was the eight best WAR amongst major league second basemen, not to mention Dozier looks a lot more comfortable at second base.

It’s not totally unrealistic to believe that Dozier might make an All-Star game appearance sometime in the future, too. Now that would really be a treat!