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We expected improvement from Jay Bruce in his second big league season, and while he has shown it in the power department, he hasn't posted the batting average to go along with it just yet. But there are signs that we just need to be patient.

After making his debut last year with 21 homers in 413 at-bats, Bruce has already hit 14 homers in just 179 at-bats this season. It doesn't really have anything to do with any mechanical adjustments -- Bruce is pretty much doing the same things with his swing -- as much as learning what pitches to offer at.

"I'm a big advocate of doing what got you here," Bruce said. "It's just tightening up my approach a bit. I have a plan, pitchers have a plan; it's really about who executes theirs better. It's not about taking pitches; it's about taking pitches you can't do anything with. It's about taking balls and swinging at drivable strikes. Up here you're not going to get as many drivable strikes as you are in the minors, but you're still going to get some and you have to take advantage of them."

That focus is allowing him to do more with the pitches he's swinging at. Bruce's fly-ball rate has shot up more than 15 percent this season, which is driving his power surge. With his swing plane, more solid contact on the barrel means more balls in the air, and more balls with a chance to leave the yard.

At times in his rookie season, Bruce was a little too aggressive and anxious at the plate, but he's gradually learning to slow the game down a little bit.

"Absolutely," Bruce agreed. "It still happens this year, but it's much less. That's one thing I've been working on is keeping that settled-down approach and letting the game come to me a bit more. The game's fast enough up here as it is."

One of the by-products of that is a slight improvement in Bruce's walk and strikeout rates. It's not a huge shift, but things are definitely moving in the right direction, and Bruce is starting to chase a bit less out of the strike zone.

"Last year I struck out a lot, and I didn't walk very much," Bruce said. "This year I'm not thinking more about striking out less, or walking more, or anything like that. All I'm trying to do is have quality at-bats, stick with a certain approach and look for something to drive. Just because it's a strike doesn't mean you have to hit it. That's what I'm focusing on this year, and I think it's been better."

Bruce's strikeouts are never really going to be a big concern for me given his production, but it's good to see things moving in the right direction regardless. Of course, while his fantasy owners love the power, his batting average has been an issue. Even though he has slugged better than .500 this season, he has managed to post just a .229 average. To put that number in perspective, the negative effect of his batting average serves to cancel out all the runs he has scored this season in terms of mixed-league fantasy value.

However, there are good reasons to think that average is going to be on the way up in the future. Bruce is simply too talented to hit in that range for long, especially in light of the improvements in his approach at the plate. The other reason is purely statistical. Bruce has an extremely unlucky .221 batting average on balls in play (as opposed to a .298 mark his rookie season, which was right around the norm).

How unlucky is that number? It is the third-worst BABIP mark in baseball, behind only Brian Giles and Garrett Atkins, and that's likely to even out over the balance of the season.

The one caveat with Bruce has to do with handling left-handed pitching. He still hasn't proven that he can do that at the big league level yet, although I believe he eventually will. Granting they are small sample sizes, Bruce hit just .190 and slugged .291 against southpaws in 137 at-bats last season, and has posted just a .188 mark with a .292 slugging percentage against them in 48 at-bats this season. That's worth noting for those of you in leagues with daily transactions.

The bottom line, though, is that if someone wants to sell Bruce because of his low batting average, I'm buying.

• It appears Reds starter Aaron Harang has safely come out on the other side of last season's whole relief-outing kerfuffle (always wanted to use that word in a column) just fine, and is back to being a quality starting pitcher for fantasy owners.

For those who don't remember, at the end of May last season, Harang was called upon to pitch four innings of relief in an 18-inning game on three days' rest, throwing 63 pitches, and then was asked to start on just three days' rest after that outing.

"I think I just tried to come back too fast after [the relief outing]," Harang said. "My feet were never completely underneath me, my arm wasn't fully recovered, and one thing led to another. I just tried to pitch through it, and things got worse and worse."

Harang started feeling some discomfort and wound up changing his arm angle to compensate, before it got to the point where he couldn't do it anymore. By that time, his numbers had ballooned in the wrong direction.

He wound up hitting the disabled list in early July with an injured forearm, but when he was healthy again late in the season, he posted quality starts in six of his final eight outings and had a 3.07 ERA in September. He has carried that into 2009.

He's in great shape after an offseason of conditioning in which he both lost weight and strengthened his legs, his velocity is fine, and he's posting one of the best strikeout-to-walk ratios of his career while fanning eight batters per nine innings. As a fly-ball pitcher who plays his home games in a hitters' park, he'll always give up his fair share of homers -- which means some ERA fluctuations -- and some poor luck on balls in play has resulted in an inflated WHIP, but he's rebounded from a rough 2008 to be a solid fantasy starter again, and should continue to be one.

He just hopes for one thing: "No long relief appearances this year."

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