10 Degrees: Matt Kemp's start is no mirage By Jeff Passan | Yahoo! Sports For all that Matt Kemp is doing right now – crushing baseballs, running like a sprinter, carrying a moribund franchise, spinning the earth on its axis to reverse time – let us remember: He is no Chris Shelton. Never is there a better time to remember Shelton than two weeks into the season. What Tuffy Rhodes is to opening day Chris Shelton is to the first two weeks. In 2006, when Shelton was a fairly anonymous 25-year-old first baseman, he went on the tear of all first-two-weeks tears. As staggering as Kemp's line was after another home run Sunday – .487/.523/1.026 with six homers and 16 RBIs – Shelton went .512/.535/1.293 over his first 10 games with the Detroit Tigers in '06. And then, for good measure, he hit bombs in games No. 12 and 13. By the end of July, Shelton was back in the minor leagues, mustering a .246/.319/.371 line after playing Barry Ruth for a fortnight. Hitting a baseball might be the toughest thing in sports, but it doesn't make Herculean feats an impossibility for even those without the blessing of otherworldly talent. Which, as it turns out, Matt Kemp has. It makes his spurt here no less impressive, of course. The scariest thing about Kemp is that at 27 years old, he finally understands who he is as a baseball player and what he can do. Not one of Kemp's six home runs this year has gone to his pull side. Two to dead center field and four, including Sunday's, to right-center. It takes scary raw power to consistently punch home runs to the opposite field. It takes even more discipline for a player to understand his swing works in such a fashion. What we're seeing, then, is the self-actualization of a player like Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton, born with gifts that the rest of us without only hope to see materialize. We saw it last season, and even more this year … 1. Matt Kemp is wowing us on a nightly basis. And for as much as the San Diego Padres' pitching staff is to blame – or, in Kemp's case, thank – all of his home runs have come in Petco Park and Dodger Stadium, two of the five worst hitters' parks in the major leagues. The power and performance are very, very real. It didn't take Ted Williams vision to notice that after last season, when Kemp should've won the National League MVP – and not because Ryan Braun ostensibly used synthetic testosterone but because Kemp simply was a better player. Kemp told Yahoo! Sports' Tim Brown he wanted to go 50-50 this year, and it seemed all hubris and chest-thumping and machismo, but damn if the first 50 seems well within reach, if not altogether likely. The second 50 – well, Kemp is 1 for 3 on stolen-base attempts, and he set his career high with 40 last season, and his legs are getting no younger, and the most home runs anybody has hit while stealing 50-plus bags is Eric Davis with 37, and the most for anybody Kemp's age or older is Rickey Henderson with 28.
