The Colorado Rockies are 8-2 over the last 10 ball games and a large reason the club has found success of late has been the strong starting pitching, but it has also been due to timely hitting from guys like Trevor Story.

In Friday night’s 10-7 victory over the Seattle Mariners, Story picked up four RBI to bring his season total to 67, which is the third-most by a shortstop before the All-Star break in National League history. Chicago Cubs legend Ernie Banks went into the Midsummer Classic with 76 RBI in both 1959 and 1960.

Since breaking into the league in 2016 with a pair of home runs on his major league debut, including a three-run bomb off Zack Greinke, Story has struggled with consistency at times, tending to be an all or nothing guy at the plate. However, when he is producing as many runs as he currently is, Rockies manager Bud Black is more than willing to put up with a few strikeouts.

In 2016, Story had an Offensive Wins Above Replacement (oWAR) rating of 2.8. This advanced sabermetric represents how many wins that a player added to a team above what a position player would; but unlike WAR, which also accounts for fielding, oWAR simply looks at how a player fared in the batter’s box. So, essentially what this means is the Rockies would win 2.8 more games in a season if they had Story as their starter than they would without him in the lineup. For reference, the average big league starter should be at 2.0 or higher.

Following an extremely successful first major league season that likely would have ended with the Rockies young short stop winning Rookie of the Year, if he had not gotten injured and had to miss over 60 games, Story’s oWAR rating dipped to just 1.5 in 2017. Even more concerning, his slugging percentage dropped from .567 in 2016 to .457 in 2017, his batting averaged decreased by 32 points and he led the NL with 191 strikeouts in 555 at-bats (38 percent).

Through the first 93 games of the 2018 season, Story appears to have figured things out at the plate. The Irving, TX. native has cut his strikeout percentage down to 25 percent and he has done so without losing any of his power. Story is currently slugging .553, has hit batting average back up to .291 and is taking more pitches, which is evident in his career-best on-base percentage (.353). With 69 games still remaining in the regular season, Story (27) only needs five more doubles to match last season’s total of 32 and 16 more hits to equal his 2017 season total of 120. He is also just 15 RBI away from matching 2017’s total of 82 and already has more stolen bases (12) than either of his first two professional seasons.

Currently sitting three games out of first place in the NL West, the Rockies will need their young short stop to continue to rake if they are going to have any chance of competing with the Diamondbacks and Dodgers for the division crown. The Rockies and Mariners will face off in Game 2 of the three-game series Saturday night. First pitch is scheduled for 7:10 p.m with Jon Gray expected to take the mound for Colorado.