The Minnesota Twins have bolted out of the gate in the second half of the season, winning nine of their first 13 games, including the last two against the Kansas City Royals by a combined score of 30-3.  In the meantime, they have cut the Chicago White Sox’s lead in the AL Central down to a single game and put some distance between them and the injury-plagued Detroit Tigers.

And in the last four games, rookie Danny Valencia has virtually guaranteed himself the starting 3B job for the rest of the year.  Sure, everyone’s hitting, but no one is hitting quite as much as Valencia is.  In each of the last four games, Valencia has had three hits, including four in each of his last two.  Using Baseball Reference’s Play Index, we can find that Valencia’s hot streak isn’t that uncommon.  In all, 86 players since 1920 have had at least three hits in four straight games including such luminaries as Tyler Houston, Thomas Howard, Dave Chalk, Irv Noren, Cal Abrams, Mel Almada, Creepy Crespi, and Lee Scarsella.  Three players, Kirby Puckett, Johnny Damon, and Gee Walker did it twice.

That said, while the list of players does include a few flukes, it’s far more populated with really good players.  Seventy of the 86 players on that list had more than 10 wins above replacement for their career according to Baseball Projections WAR data.  Fifty-four of the 86 had a career WAR above 20.0.  The average career WAR on the list is 34.9, though that number is misleading because the list is dominated by extremely valuable players like Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, Rogers Hornsby, and Lou Gehrig.  Indeed, the scatter chart begins to look exponential if you plot their career WARs.

A more representative measure, then, is probably to look at the median WAR of these players, which is Cecil Travis’s 26.6.  Actually, Travis, a line drive hitting SS and 3B for the Senators, is a good match for Valencia, who does not project to hit for power at the major league level, and would a good mark to shoot for.  Travis was always solid, and occassionally excellent for the Senators in the 1930s and early '40s, before he went to World War II.  There, Travis served on the front line in the Battle of the Bulge, where he got frostbite in two of his tows, and had to have them amputated.  When he returned after almost four full seasons, Travis was 34 and the time away and his foot injury left him unable to contribute.  After a season and a half below replacement level, he retired.  In all, Valencia’s 1.4 WAR through less than 100 plate appearances already tops five of the players on the list (Mel Almada, Fresco Thompson, Gil Coan, Scarsella, and Houston).

Valencia’s 14 hits over four games is much more impressive.  Since 1920, he is tied (with 9 others) for ninth all time for the most hits over four consecutive games.  While the list contains a lot of great to good players, headlined by Musial and Wade Boggs, the all time leader is Milt Stock, who actually had four consecutive four hit games in 1925.  As remarkable as it was, Stock’s feat was not noticed by the media, and may have been overlooked entirely in his day.  Jimmy Johnston also had two four game spans (6/25-6/29 and 6/26-6/30) in 1923 in which he had 15 hits each.  Johnston holds the record for most consecutive games with more three hits or more, with six straight games in which he collected 23 total hits for Brooklyn.  The papers couldn’t help but notice Johnston, who The Boston Globe noticed had hit .828 for the week.  To put that in some perspective, Valencia’s streak has lasted two fewer games and he’s hitting only .737.  That’s a hell of a week.

So what’s the outlook for Danny Valencia?  It’s certainly possible that the four game streak is a fluke.  After all, Milt Stock and Jimmy Johnston aren’t exactly world beaters.  But for the most part, the kind of stretches enjoyed by Valencia are relatively common for good major league hitters, because to get that hot you generally need to have the underlying skill to support it (with some luck).  The Marv Owens of the world need a lot more luck to be able to pull this off.  So we should be fairly bullish on Danny Valencia.  He is, of course, not going to turn into Wade Boggs or George Brett suddenly (both of whom also had a similar stretch), but the kid looks like he’ll turn into a pretty good major league 3B.  The Twins should happily take a right handed Cecil Travis for the next few years.