Over his last 11 games, Andy Weber has 12 hits. Eight went for extra bases: four doubles and four home runs.
Weber is a 29-year-old left-handed-hitting second baseman for the Charlotte Knights, the Chicago White Sox affiliate at Triple-A, one level below the major leagues. Major League Baseball's player record lists no major league debut for him.
In those 11 games, between August 14 and Thursday night, he is hitting .324 with a .419 on-base percentage and a .757 slugging percentage in 37 at-bats. His season line is .273 with a .325 on-base percentage and a .481 slugging percentage. Four of his 11 home runs this year have come in those 11 games.
It is a month, not a hot week
Read by the calendar rather than by an 11-game window, the batting average does not move much: .130 across a seven-game May, then .293 in June, .268 in July, .296 in August. What moves is the power. Weber's slugging percentage by month runs .217, .424, .549, .577, and the August figure is the highest of any month he has played this season. He has 50 runs batted in across 76 games, nine of them since August 14.
The eleven games
Weber homered against Rochester on August 14. He had two hits and a run batted in at Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on August 18, in the game Charlotte won 9-8 in ten innings after trailing 8-1 in the eighth. On August 22 he went 2-for-4 with a home run, a double and three RBIs; the next afternoon, in the finale of that six-game series at PNC Field, he went 2-for-3 with another home run and another double. The club put his line for the series at two home runs, two doubles and a .476 on-base percentage.
He has a hit in each of the three games of the current homestand at Truist Field, the Knights' ballpark uptown. Wednesday's ended early: a 2-0 loss to the Memphis Redbirds called in the middle of the sixth with rain, official because five innings were complete. Thursday he hit a two-run homer in his first at-bat, finished 2-for-4, and was the only Charlotte player with more than one hit in a 3-2 loss in ten innings.
The season around him
Charlotte is 68-61 and third in the International League East, 11 games back with 21 to play. The Knights were 42-33 through the first half of the season and are 26-28 since.
Weber is not going to change that in three weeks. What the last 11 games have produced is a 29-year-old infielder, at the level closest to the majors and without a day in them, putting up the best power month of his season.
The Knights and Memphis play again tonight at 5:05, then Saturday and Sunday. Charlotte is 1-2 in the homestand.