I had a blast last night, when The Common Man, Larry from Wezen-Ball and I recorded our second bi-weekly podcast. We talked a lot about Dan Haren, the trade deadline and the various pennant races. You can check it out here. We'll do it again on August 11.

Almost two months ago, the Twins called up third baseman and marginal prospect Danny Valencia, and I was unenthused. I noted that Valencia's minor league numbers showed moderate power and moderate-to-poor plate discipline, and that he didn't have a sterling defensive reputation; add it all up, and he just didn't look like a big-league regular.

Or, to put it another way, all the best methods available -- his MLEs, CHONE, and ZiPS -- point to the same one sad conclusion: Valencia, as a Major League player, looks a lot like Nick Punto, except without any of those things that make Punto a useful player. Put yet another way: blech.

So. That was June 1. By the end of June, Valencia had played in 16 games and amassed 50 plate appearances, and my predictions were looking OK. Valencia was batting .304, but with just four walks and one extra-base hit (a double), putting his OPS at just .686, right around where his MLEs put him. From observation, I can tell you that most of his hits were bloop singles or little ground balls that bled through a hole somewhere -- exactly the way you might expect Nick Punto to be hitting .304 after a month.

Since then, of course, Valencia has been tearing the league to pieces, capped off by the four-game three-hits streak that The Common Man tackled yesterday. Even after his 0-for-3 to end the streak yesterday, Valencia is hitting .468/.519/.660 in July. He's had about the same number of plate appearances he had in June, and has just one more walk, but has six more extra base hits, including a long grand slam home run off of Zack Greinke. For the year, he's now hitting .387/.441/.495, good for a .417 wOBA and 164 wRC+. UZR also thinks he's played excellent defense thus far (and I can tell you he looks sharp out there on TV). He's already put up 1.3 WAR, which works out to 8.4 wins above replacement over 660 plate appearances, a clearly MVP-type performance. So I thought it would be a good time to reevaluate.

The first thing that jumps out about Valencia is his .438 BABIP (batting average on balls in play). Valencia has been hitting the ball awfully hard lately, but nobody gets a hit 44% of the time he makes contact and doesn't put it over the fence. Valencia's BABIP in the minors was around .340, and it's likely that even that is above his true major league talent (we'd expect slightly better defense in the majors, and his BABIP was much lower as he went up the rungs). But let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he'll normalize to a .340 BABIP. Applying that BABIP reduction to his first 102 PA removes 8 hits from his current total of 36, and one of those eight hits should be one of his seven doubles. Taking those out puts him at .301/.363/.398, a touch better than Orlando Hudson's current numbers (which are good for a 109 wRC+). For a good defensive third baseman, those are still very solid numbers, and would almost certainly make him worth starting ahead of Punto, even with a likely defensive hit.

But, again, that's making all sorts of assumptions; he really needs that .340 BABIP to stay at that level, and I don't think he's likely to sustain it. His line drive percentage of 19.8% is good, but not particularly special; for comparison's sake, the only full-time major leaguers currently getting by with a BABIP above .400, Austin Jackson and Josh Hamilton, are at 27.7% and 22.5%, respectively. Likewise, his 12.8% K rate would currently be in the majors' top 30, but it's not overwhelming, to the point where he can sustain a high batting average just by making tons of contact. His walk rate of 8.8% is better than his minor league numbers would've led me to expect, but still below league average.

I also just keep coming back to a great post by Dave Cameron from a few days ago that made the point that randomness just happens. It may not seem likely that a true talent .650-OPS hitter could put up a .900-plus OPS over more than a hundred PA, but it falls squarely within the realm of possibility. He really could be getting just that lucky. (I should also note that I'm not the first to make that particular connection.)

But Valencia's first 102 PA is certainly some evidence of his talent level. Not a ton of evidence -- not nearly as much as his more than 1500 minor league PA -- but it can't just be ignored. And everything it tells us is good. There's a very good chance that Valencia is a better player than I thought he was, and there's some slight chance that he's somewhere near Orlando Hudson's neighborhood -- not an MVP candidate by any means, but the kind of better-than-just-solid starter that good teams need to have a few of. Odds are better that he's somewhere in between Hudson and my expectations, with at least a little room, at age 25, to grow.

So if you're expecting an All-Star (like, sorry to say, Cecil Travis was), you're likely to be disappointed, at least for now. If you're looking for the first real solid third baseman the Twins have had since Corey Koskie, however, you've got many more reasons to hope than you did two months ago.