Prince Albert Pujols, he reigneth

Heretic. Apostate. Troll. On behalf of Steve Shasta, I cast thee out!

(Fresh air is good. Sunshine is fine.)

on the other hand, i'm not quite sure which i find more gross aesthetically - a stat which tells you something that's unhelpful (RBI) or a stat which tells you something incomplete (AVG)

Unless you believe in a single, all-encompassing stat like Win Shares or WAR claim to be, then all stats are incomplete. I don't think any stat is inherently unhelpful either. RBI does tell you something about the season a player is having, it just doesn't measure what a lot of people think it measures.

An RBI means that someone was on base and you did something to get him (or, with a HR, yourself) home. That's not meaningless.

No; driving in the run during game X is NOT meaningless. Toting em all up and saying Joe Shlabotnik had 12 fewer than Roy Hobbs this year, THAT'S meaningless.

How can something that has meaning at the game level not have any meaning at the seasonal level? Provided, once again, you're aware of context. I'm not trying to be difficult; I sincerely don't get that.

cause over the course of a season the fact that roy had 12 more than joe basically becomes random--a function of the opportunities that they both had etc. etc.

i mean hell if in a single game joe had 5 and roy had none that doesn't say anything about if joe is a better ballplayer--just that he contributed more in that one game.

btw Shlabotnik's still not a deserving All-Star

a function of the opportunities that they both had etc. etc.

Yes; that's the context. I'm not arguing that we lose that--it's crucial. But the fact that Shlabotnik did this great thing to win last night's game, and he went on to do it 99 more times over the course of the season, I don't want to lose that, either.

This is exhausting. I think I need to go find an argument about racism or abortion or religion, something genial like that.

except not all RBIs are equally "great things"

xp

well I'm tearing you a new one over on the Scott Pilgrim thread :)

yeah clemenza we shouldn't "lose" it but do you see how over the course of 162 games there are so many variables that make it hard to isolate the *meaning* of x rbi's--a problem we don't have in a single game

Acknowledged--six times over!

Thanks for the heads-up, Morbius; answered.

Since this is now the unofficial Triple Crown thread ... I just realized that Halladay has a chance to win the pitching TC this year (he leads in ERA and K, and is one off the lead in W).

I'm assuming that's for both leagues, too. Wow.

0-3 for Albert, down to .316; Votto up to .327, with 3 RBI tonight. I'm ready to switch my allegiance. I'm that loyal.

i like them both but its pretty likely that they'll kill each other's chances at it

Omar Infante (.341) still has an outside shot at the batting title even if he doesn't hit 502 PA.

Will he be close? If not, he'll get charged with a lot oh-fers to bring him to 502.

He's at 370 with 30 games to go...hits leadoff, so he'll probably manage four PA/game. I'm guessing he'll finish right around 500. He's crazy hot this year, I can see him doing it.

I think Ciderpress is probably right, but if one of them does break free of the other, that'll be almost funny if Omar Infante gets in there and mucks things up. Poor guy--he was a villain for getting picked for the All-Star Game, now he can be a villain for winning the batting title.

Ahem, Carlos Gonzalez is htting .326, let's not rule him out quite yet.

That "ahem" was rather prescient--after today's game, Gonzalez is at 31/97/.340. But I guess I'm not as excited by the idea of a Triple Crown per se as I thought I was. I was excited about Pujols winning one. He's out of it now. If Gonzalez were to win, though, it'd be every bit as suspect as most every other great season out of Colorado. He's got a 350-point differential in home/road slugging; he's Ruth at home, Vernon Wells on the road.

This has been some bizarre up-and-down story, though.

Yep, there's no two ways about it - the Triple Crown is a title that Coors will always be a big help with. On the other hand, Matt Holliday, Todd Helton, Larry Walker and Dante Bichette never won a triple crown, and you still need sustained excellence to even get close, so I can live with Cargo getting the plaudits.

I discovered earlier that he's not even on the ballot for 5-tool Player of the Year? Now *that* is dumb.

"Vernon Wells on the road"

Vernon Wells doesn't have an 8 to 1 SO to BB ratio.

75 K, 9 BB--yikes, hadn't noticed that. I just meant that Wells' home run rate and slugging pct. were comparable. And I didn't mean to be dismissive of Gonzalez's season; it'd still be an accomplishment, albeit a compromised one.

As has been pointed out, the fact that players like Cargo are SO strong at Coors makes them (and forgive me if this is stating the bleeding obvious) fantastic players for Colorado to sign. Cargo IS in consideration for the triple crown (and, if you believe some of the more ardent Roxkies fans, the MVP), and if he didn't play at Coors, he wouldn't be. So hallelujah, as a Rox fan, that he does!

Nothing especially startling here, but it does lay out numerically what's pretty clear: Pujols out, Votto longshot, Gonzalez improbably alive.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/cliff_corcoran/09/08/triple.crown.chances/index.html?eref=sihp

(This followed an exchange where KLaw said tying LaRussa staying to Pujols' re-signing was absurd)

John (St. Louis)

Pujols' future is not all about money, you're absolutely wrong about that . . . He isn't a greedy person

Klaw (1:15 PM)

Right. That's why, after the Cardinals overpaid him by a factor of 2.5 for his last pre-arbitration year, he cut them absolutely no discount on the long-term deal, and made a stink about how they had to give him that deal or he'd go year-to-year and leave as a free agent. (I'm not criticizing that stance. Just pointing out that he, like just about every other human being in history, has an inherently greedy streak.)

via Clem Comly of SABR:

Divisional Triple Crown Winners 1969-2009 (196 divisional races)

Williams 1972 E NL 37 122 .333
Foster 1977 W NL 52 149 .320
Rice 1978 E AL 46 139 .315
Bagwell 1994 C NL 39 116 .368
Belle 1998 C AL 49 152 .328
Ramirez 1999 C AL 44 165 .333
Guerrero 2000 E NL 44 123 .345
Holliday 2007 W NL 36 137 .340
Pujols 2008 C NL 37 116 .357

James did something similar a few years ago...I think he may have looked at guys who won or came close to winning their league Triple Crown. I checked Delgado for 2000: he took HR and RBI in the A.L. East, and finished second in BA (almost 30 points behind Garciaparra, though, so he wasn't really close).

It looks like a dead issue now, unless Gonzalez has at least a couple of multi-homer games. Which, if nothing else, shows that whatever you think of RBI or BA, this is a very hard thing to do.

I cant wait to see the list of assholes who dont vote for Pujols as MVP because the Cardinals dont make the playoffs.

well, there are other defensible reasons to list him second or third.

like hitting an infield pop up this year.

i can think of two reasons: Joey. Votto.

Ditto to Thinwall and Morbius. I'd normally agree with you about Pujols, but surely all votes for Votto (vote-o's?) this year are perfectly reasonable. Even a vote for Halladay seems fine, although somewhere along the way they stopped giving MVPs to pitchers.

If you subscribe to James's site, he has a big thing up today in the "Ask Bill" section about why he thinks no one wins the Triple Crown anymore.

Only NL players w/ WARP3 of 8+ are Wainwright, Halladay, Hudson.

is WARP just WAR using BP stats instead of fangraphs/etc ones?

I don't keep track of these things anymore

That's when I'm no longer a by-the-numbers guy. To me, whether Wainwright's WARP or VORP or whatever is a little higher or a little lower than Pujols', he can't be the league MVP because he's not the MVP of his own team. Absent any drastic fluctuations, Pujols is.

i just realized the relevance of the pop-up thing! wow!

^^^ yeah, this kinda blew my mind too

I STILL BELIEVE in jay bruce

he's gonna hit 35HR next year (i've said this the past 2 years too but This Time It Counts)

― ciderpress, Friday, 27 August 2010 02:35 (2 weeks ago) Permalink

has now hit 7 HR in his last 5 games

anyway, Verducci's emphasis on the "value" of TC stats for "casual fans" means about as much to me as "casual" movie fans who think the Academy Awards are definitive.

Surely you'd agree that Verducci is much smarter than, say, a hack movie writer who takes the Academy Awards really seriously.

I surely can't imagine why anyone would care about that accomplishment.

let's put it this way: was Ducky Medwick the last great NL hitter?

Muscles Medwick.

Again, I didn't want to open this up again, because we reached an impasse last time. All I'm saying: Verducci's a smart guy and a good baseball writer, and in that stuff I mitakenly quoted on the steroids thread, I think he does a really good job of conveying why those of us who have fully absorbed 30-some years of Bill James are interested in, even excited by, the (virtually non-existent at this point) Triple Crown chase. I'll read it again, but I don't think Verducci claimed anywhere that Ducky Medwick was the last great N.L. hitter. Once again, I think you're taking our perhaps nostalgic attachment to the concept of a Triple Crown and inferring all sorts of other stuff into that that simply isn't there. James himself has recently written two or three times about the Triple Crown. Not dismissively, but as an interested fan.

I never knew that smart people could be interested in stuff that I'm not interested in.