I've been meaning to write something up on Juan Pierre for a little while, and after listening to him strike out in the top of the seventh today, I figured it's time.

I was not thrilled to get Pierre in the offseason, but I thought it was a defensible move. Felix Pie didn’t figure to be ready for another year, and Pierre was arbitration eligible and not too expensive. Sure, he had an off-year last year, but he also had OBPs of .374 and .361 in the previous two years with Florida, and would only be 28 years old in 2006. Plus, Jim Hendry has a decent track record with this kind of thing paying off, bringing in Aramis Ramirez and Michael Barrett at low points of their career. I thought the Cubs gave up way too much to get him, but as a one-year stopgap, Pierre looked like a reasonably good choice.

As we all know, however, he’s been terrible. I wrote in the offseason that if Pierre doesn’t hit for a high batting average, “he becomes just another Jose Macias.” It turns out that was a generous assessment - Macias was never this bad at the plate. He’s been far worse than any could have reasonably expected; his OPS is about 65 points lower than his 10° PECOTA projection at Baseball Prospectus.

So the question is, what hope is there that he’ll get better? Unlike other struggling Cubs like Todd Walker, Aramis Ramirez, or Matt Murton, Pierre is in the second year of a protracted slump. He’s over 800 ABs removed from being a .300 hitter, so sample size issues don’t really apply here. For whatever reason, Pierre seems to have lost the ability to hit for a high batting average on a consistent basis.

Considerably more worrying is that Pierre is also striking out at a much higher rate than he ever has. Previously one of the most difficult men to strike out in the majors (16.17 AB/K entering this year), Pierre has already struck out 19 times this season in 191 AB (10.06 AB/K). His strikeout rate also made a big jump last year, so this definitely qualifies as a huge blinking warning light.

Even worse, his walk rate has plummeted this year as well. Never a very patient hitter (14.58 AB/BB entering the year), Pierre has only 8 walks in 191 AB (23.88 AB/BB) after today’s game. That’s positively Patterson-esque, and I mean the bad Corey Patterson, not the good Corey Patterson who’s shown up in Baltimore this year.

The combination of a big spike in his strikeouts and a big drop in his walk rate suggests to me that Pierre has completely lost the approach to the plate that made him successful. I’m not sure how many hitters have ever recovered from that. In fact, it’s hard to think of anyone who’s actually experienced that combination as drastically as Pierre has so far this year. Of course, we are less than two months of the way through the season, so perhaps Pierre can still turn it around. I think it’s reasonable to expect that his batting average won’t stay in the .230s all year, since he still has a lot of speed and batting average tends to fluctuate anyway.

But the warning signs couldn’t be more ominous. If the Cubs still have aspirations to contend this year, I think they need to start looking for ways to get Pierre out of the lineup now. I don’t think simply waiting out Pierre’s slump will help, because a meaningful end will probably never come.