Triple Crowns

Since this is the Base Ball Web Log, when I say Triple Crown, I mean the baseball triple crown. And I'm going to keep it to hitters - for now. The Triple CCrown is when a hitter leads his league in HR, RBI and AVG. I think it's because that's all anyone cared about in the 1930s. You may have a different theory.

Anyways, the Triple Crown has been won 17 times, most recently last year by Miguel Cabrera. The pitching Triple Crown is less rare, and has been achieved 38 times.

Last year, during the Jocks Vs Nerds Great MVP Debate, Tom Verducci wrote that Mike Trout was actually on his way to a rarer triple crown: leading the league in runs, stolen bases and WAR. That has been done 14 times by only 8 players.

The traditional Triple Crown is tough to do because it's hard to hit for power and average. Those skills don't necessarily or usually go hand-in-hand. Defence aside, you can get a job as a .250 power hitter, and you can also get a job as a .350 slap hitter. You cannot generally get a job as a .250 slap hitter. You can definitely get a job as a .350 power hitter.

MVP-Level WAR

The amazing website Baseball Reference gives a handy guideline for understanding WAR:
<0   Replacement
0-2   Substitute
2+   Starter
5+   All Star
8+   MVP

That seems pretty straightforward. Produce 8 or more WAR in a single season, and you are probably in the MVP conversation*.

*Provided you can get through the other BWAA hoops that have been put in place over the years.

WAR is composed of, well, a little bit of everything. It is an attempt to quantify a batter's contribution at the plate, in the field, and on the bases. It combines all of these things into RAR (rawr!!), Runs Above Replacement, and then converts runs into wins to get the WAR number based on how easy runs are to come by during that season. "Replacement" is a funny concept - this is a fictitious player who, theoretically, any team could pick up at any time to get 0.0 WAR in the lineup and contribute to more losses than wins. Think of a "Replacement" team as the worst teams in history - 1962 Mets (6.5 WAR batting, 3.1 WAR pitching), 2003 Tigers (8.1 WAR batting, -1.1 WAR pitching), etc. These are teams made of players that could be had off the scrap heap, or expansion draft, or whatever. Then add players' WAR to move up in the standings.

Puig

Yasiel Puig, Dodgers demigod, is finally coming back down to earth. Sort of. Since the start of July, Puig has hit *only* .300/.333/.420 in 12 games. This leaves his overall line at .391/.422/.616 in 38 games leading up to the all star break since his debut June 3 (remember the crazy throw to 1B?).

On June 2, the Dodgers were 23-32 and 8.5 games back in the NL west, already.

Today, the Dodgers are back to .500 at 47-47 and only 2.5 games back - right in the thick of things in a tight division race.

Puig has missed a single game (a 1-0 win on July 13), so LA is 23-15 with him in the lineup. That's great! Wow! Puig is the difference maker! A losing team turns into a winning team right away, and the Dodgers will keep this up and streak to the pennant!

Don't get me wrong - Puig has been spectacular to start his major league career, and more than that, he is really fun to watch, especially with those throws from right field. But there is more to the story than just Puig. Over his 38 game span with the Dodgers, it is actually debatable whether or not he has been the most productive player on his own team.

The 27th Batter

This post has been a few months in the making and dates back to that pre-web-log era.

In any case, I think it's pretty interesting so I decided to write it up anyway.

There have been 21 perfect games in MLB history, and a surprising number of them have come in the last few seasons. But, there have also been 11 near-misses: perfect games through 26 batters that have failed. The most recent, and my inspiration, was Yu Darvish's season opener this year. On April 2, Darvish mowed through the first 26 Houston Astros, striking out 14 of them. On the 27th batter, he gave up a first pitch single and lost the perfect game (Texas won 7-0).

Before that game, there had been 31 perfect game candidates, 21 of which were completed. Going into that game, the 27th batter was hitting .276/.323/.448 - not bad. After that 1/1, the 27th batter of a perfect game is currently hitting a cumulative .300/.344/.467.

New Stat

On Tuesday night, Josh Hamilton grounded into 3 double plays during a 3-2 loss to the Mariners.

In honour of that, I think its time to talk about a new stat - OPPA, or Outs Per Plate Appearance.

Even good hitters have bad nights, and bad hitters probably have more bad nights, but it takes a special confluence of opportunity and execution to create more outs than plate appearances.

To continue my apparent obsession with GIDPs, and how funny I apparently find it to be when hitters ground into multiple GIDPs, this post is all about the most-GIDP games ever. Unfortunately, triple plays are not as easily accessed, so if a batter created triple play outs I am going to ignore that for this post.

The methodology here is pretty simple:
1. Find all the batters who have GIDPed 3 or more times in a game
2. Count the number of outs they produced
3. Divide those outs by plate appearances.
4. Notice other interesting things.

That search returns 109 batters that have accumulated 3 or more GIDPs in a single game, with the first coming in 1934. So maybe every time I say "of all time" I don't really mean it.

Surprisingly, only one batter ever has GIDPed 4 times in a game. That batter is likely going into the hall of fame... as a manager. Need more clues? He goes by the name of J Torre. No wait, that's too obvious. Joe T.

Weird Numbers

I will start with a question: based on the two seasons of pitching below, who would you rather have?

If you know or care what these stats mean, you might have one of three reactions:
1. I will take the first pitcher - he gives up fewer home runs and has a better FIP
2. I will take the second pitcher - he strikes out more batters and walks fewer batters!
3. I will take both and probably make the playoffs - these guys are both aces.

By these so-called "advanced" stats, these two seasons are not that different. Now let's play that game again:
Pitcher 1: 22-3 over 223 IP in 31 starts.
Pitcher 2: 6-9 over 211 IP in 30 starts.

Now, it's a no-brainer, right? You take pitcher 1. It's not even close.

I think I'm too obvious to actually "blow your mind" here, but... pitcher 1 in the two sets of data is the same! Pitcher 2 in both sets of data is the same! Woah!

Ádám Lind

I thought I knew how to spell Adam Lind, Jays DH (who plays 1B because he's somehow better at it than Edwin Encarnacion. Pardon me. Edwin Encarnación.)

According to Yahoo!, I didn't quite have it right:

This is a joke, right?