Prince Albert Pujols, he reigneth

Joey Votto has been pretty good hitter since he got his Sept call up in 2007. He was kind of streaky for his power hitting his first couple of years, seeming to hit his homers in bunches. The guy has been a freaking witch going to the opposite field and he hits lefties pretty well. That homer he hit off Kershaw and both yesterday against the Giants were to left field. While I am sure over his career, Great American will help his power numbers, so far his HR splits are actually better on the road (helped by this west coast swing). I'm sure not having Encarnacion playing third has helped, but Votto has really noticably improved at first base this year. One of the questions for next season is whether Votto would perhaps consider being moved to left field, as the Reds top prospect Yonder Alonso might be ready for the bigs, but they say the guy doesn't have the speed or arm to play in the outfield.

Pujols is in another category, the guy has been so good for so long. I'd love it if Votto could end up with a decade like that.

he's the only ball player i can think of from my hometown. if he had a decade like that i would likely become locked in perpetual orgasm.

yonder can't play any position at first, where he is actually pretty decent

the kid can really, really hit, but he's pretty much going to be a worse version of all star -- potential to be a perennial all star but votto is a potential perennial MVP -- i wouldn't jeopardize that by trying to move votto to another position

what they need to do is evaluate a position of weakness (maybe an OF prospect as insurance against stubbs/bruce flaming out) and trade yonder for a player at that position

lol at that whole post

can't play any position BUT first

he's pretty much going to be a worse version of VOTTO

they are gonna be a potential powerhouse tho -- yasmani grandal is fucking sick

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)

yeah i mean he's not having a horrible season or anything

stubbs i think is teetering on the brink of major bust

or maybe he's just sophomore slumping, idk

stubbs is a good defensive CF though, he doesn't have to hit that well to be an average player.

also true

is this actually happening

just this whole game

this game is a literal nightmare

whoops, too many cards threads at once

I think Joey Votto could do OK in left, the guy can run quite well and seems to have enough arm to hit a cutoff guy. I think if the Reds prime the pump and come up with a big enough contract, I think JV might consider the move as he seems like a dude that really wants to WIN. I love Gomes as a personality, but left is kind of a black hole for the club. Alot of Reds fans are wanting to give Alonso away on tons of dumbass trade ideas, I just know they let him go they will regret it unless it is tied to bringing back Hanley Ramirez.

Stubbs could do better just by even putting the ball in play, his speed would get him another hit a week. The guy is a K machine, then again so is Chris Heisey and Jay Bruce for that matter.

i would likely become locked in perpetual orgasm

TMI

i was thinking single-season and career for the pitching "triple crown" stats of strikeouts, wins, ERA

I figured that ... I guess it's a bit strange that the people always make a big deal about guys chasing the hitting triple crown, but nobody says anything about the pitcher's triple crown. I think Clemens, Pedro, and Santana have all done it in the past 15 years, and maybe Johnson did too? It should be a big deal even to people who only care about conventional stats. It should be an even bigger deal when somebody does it during a hitter's era.

Adjusted ERA+ is fairly basic stuff, it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to get more people to start using it (even OBP and SLG are standard these days). Unless people really do think that Bob Gibson in 1968 was twice as good as any pitcher in the game today.

Pitching triple crown winners:

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/awards/pitrip.shtml

(all the guys I mentioned, plus Jake Peavy)

And over the last 30-40 years, it's been just as rare as the hitting TC. Between 1972 and Clemens in 1997, only Dwight Gooden managed it (1985). In the AL, Clemens was the first to win the TC in 52 years! (as a Jays fan, I should have remembered that)

as a J's fan i've been purging Clemens from my memory.

As a Jays' fan (I think we just completed a Triple Crown), I do remember some coverage of Clemens' two TCs, but you're right, not a whole lot. I have no explanation as to why. There was a wire-service story in one of the Toronto papers this morning about Pujols and Votto chasing the TC, so maybe it's just about to get some attention. The story reminded me that Yaz and the other most recent TC winners were all in the AL; no one's done it in the NL since Medwick in '37.

One thing that jumped out at me when I looked at the Wikipedia list of TCs (they put hitters and pitchers on the same page) is the quality of names on there. The majority of players were first-tier, overwhelming HOF'ers, and the rest, almost without exception, were career stars of one magnitude or another. More than the MVP or Cy Young lists, I'd say (partly, but not wholly, explained by the fact that awards are subject to the whims of voters). The list of AL hitters is especially daunting: Lajoie, Cobb, Foxx, Gehrig, Williams (twice), Mantle, Robinson, Yastrzemski. When Yaz is the worst player on the list, that's some list.

I'm going to pretend I didn't just find out from an ILE thread that Pujols will be at the Glenn Beck rally this weekend.

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, Thursday, August 26, 2010 10:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

apparently batting him leadoff was the secret catalyst

great timing huh

I'm going to pretend I didn't just find out from an ILE thread that Pujols will be at the Glenn Beck rally this weekend.

― clemenza, Friday, August 27, 2010 2:07 PM (6 hours ago)

wow, just when i was starting to get lukewarm to the guy... lol.

apparently batting him leadoff was the secret catalyst

i like to call him "Jay the Bruce". that is all.

JR (Vegas)

Regarding the Triple Crown, I know RBI is a meaningless stat, having said that, I think it would still be fun to see Votto or Pujols win the Triple Crown. What are your thoughts?

Klaw (1:24 PM)

Mixed. On the one hand, it's fun to see someone chase a record or milestone that hasn't been touched in 40 years. On the other, won't it lead to a new emphasis on or love affair with RBI?

That's like every bad stereotype about "stats" guys summed up in two lines. That might be the dumbest thing that KLaw's ever said in a chat.

B-b-but it WOULD reinforce the notion that RBI is a valuable stat.

I like that little exchange; I think it's fine to have mixed feelings about the significance of a TC. (I guess I consider mixed feelings a victory from a sabermetrician.) The one part I find silly is the questioner's blithe description of RBI as meaningless. They're not meaningless! Flawed, sure, like a lot of stats. But if you were to go through everything Bill James has ever written, and I'd be surprised if he ever described RBI as meaningless. (Law's concern that a Triple Crown will lead to mass stupidity is kind of funny, though.)

RBI make Joe Carter's career look Hall-worthy. They are meaningless in terms of evaluating players comparatively, so I don't know what other meaning they could have.

...unless it's "I was attached to them in my youth, just like w/ Laverne & Shirley"

I wrote a mammoth thing for my old fanzine on how wildly deceptive Carter's RBI counts were (using mostly situational stats from the old Elias annuals); I'm well aware of that. But again, it's a big leap from flawed to meaningless. 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. As to whether you got a zillion chances to do so because you had Rickey Henderson and Roberto Alomar and Tony Gwynn batting ahead of you, like Carter did throughout his career, that's another issue, and you take that into account when necessary. But I still think you'll find that Joe Carters are outnumbered by guys who have high RBI counts because they're very good hitters.

We keep ending up at the same place: you're a true believer, I'm not.

I'm a true believer that you are trolling this board with stale ideas about 5-7 years after people got tired of talking about them.

RBIs are purely circumstantial, with the exception of the HR.

Let me go back to the Jennifer Doyle quote I posted on the sabermetric thread: "and know how to hold contradiction in their head without trying to resolve it." I don't think it's that difficult to navigate your way through the idea that RBI are another indicator of value with some players (most, I'd say), and not so much with others. Instead, "RBI are meaningless" seems to me to be grounded in a belief that because you sometimes get a case like Carter's, you better just throw the whole stat out for fear that anybody mistakes Joe Carter for a Hall of Famer. (A mistake the writers rather easily avoided.) That's why I find the Law's "won't it lead to a new emphasis on or love affair with RBI?" so funny. It's like he's afraid that, having internalized the idea that RBI should not be taken at face value, we're going to unlearn that because Albert Pujols wins a Triple Crown.

Shasta: geez, that's really a shame. Someone's questioning some ideas you hold dear, and you don't want to be questioned. Give me a break.

Trolling? Really? Come on.

RBIs are purely circumstantial

Well, no--RBI opportunities are purely circumstantial; to get the RBI, you have to do something.

I have no idea what constitutes trolling; I'm sure there's a sabermetric formula that makes that clear. But I've been posting on ILM and ILE for six or seven years (formerly under my real name); just started posting on ILB maybe six months ago. I mean, is there some kind of hazing ritual I was supposed to sign up for beforehand?

rbi's are a fine descriptive stat. when i read a box score it's cool to know who drove in the runs. i'm not sure that the only value of a stat is that you can use it to compare players.

or do u guys find wpa completely meaningless too

This whole Capt. Save-a-trad-stat is funny, maybe I'm taking you too seriously. What sacred cow are you going to reclaim next Clemenza, perhaps Wins as the absolute measure of a pitching performance? I have no problems with trolling, it's just a bit anachronistic on this board which maybe has a long history of debating trad vs. sabr and IMHO feels a bit played out in 2010, but i think I mentioned on that other thread might be worth revisiting...? Not sure if your arguments are really shifting the paradigm though tbh.

Now I have a hot chick waiting in my bed busy weekend y'all, enjoy your day!

If some of this stuff has been debated before, fair enough. But it's not like I'm pulling it out a hat--on this thread, the question of whether or not RBI mean anything ties in directly with the question of whether or not the Triple Crown means anything, which ties in directly with the subject's thread, Albert Pujols. It's not a mission; it just kind of evolved.

I do find your irritation at having your worldview questioned highly ironic. I'm trying to remember the Abstract where Bill James wrote, "We should question everything. Until my ideas pass into conventional wisdom, though--we can stop questioning at that point and just start congratulating ourselves about how smart we are. And if anybody doesn't fall into line, we'll just yell 'Troll!'" Maybe I missed that one.

B-b-but it WOULD reinforce the notion that RBI is a valuable stat.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 28 August 2010 13:25 (2 hours ago)

No it wouldn't ... people already view RBI as a valuable stat, I don't see how someone would argue that it becomes even *more* valuable because somebody leads the league in RBI + a few other categories.

I was really LOLing at the way Klaw framed his response -- as if RBI was some kind of evil political entity that could rise up and destroy the foundations of baseball.

Clemenza -- I don't know if anyone is really arguing that RBI are completely meaningless, but it's really difficult to use RBI as a metric for comparing players (never mind comparing across eras, but even for comparing players on the same team in the same year ... Joe Carter is a good example of this). Having numbers as a basis for comparing players is like, 99% of the reason that there are so many stats in baseball. What's the point of relying on data that doesn't help to show why Player A is better than Player B?

RBI is also a fairly arbitrary stat ... as you prob know, it was one of the last major official stats to be instituted (in 1921, I think). When you think about it, the definition of RBI is pretty contrived. There's no obvious reason why it should have the kind of importance that it does.

i would argue that stats were developed to describe the events of a game and comparing players is a secondary use.

Stat categories were invented to keep track of what happened in a game, but we use stats for comparing players. You don't really learn anything about players from a single boxscore, but a season's worth of boxscores is meaningful.

Thanks to both of you for your sanity.

NoTime: We both seem to find Law's comment funny for the same reason, so we're starting on the same page. I took "meaningless" right from JR in Vegas's question, and it developed from there. I really and truly am cognizant of the inherent flaws in RBI, and have been for quite some time. Even if I hadn't been, I think any Jays fan who experienced the Carter years would quickly arrive at such an understanding. I think my argument with those guys is simply that I don't want to throw RBI out the window altogether, and, if I'm understanding them correctly, they do.

One thing I like about the Triple Crown is that it ensures RBI do not exist in a vacuum--you also have to hit home runs, and you have to hit for a high average. You're not going to see a Joe Carter-like player win a Triple Crown.

Someone who makes a living evaluating prospects (like Klaw) probably has even fewer reasons to care about RBI ... even old school scouts would probably get laughed at for saying that so-and-so is 2nd on his college team in RBI's, that shows he's a gamer and we should draft him. What do RBI's tell us about a player's raw ability? (answer: probably nothing) So why should we use RBI to gauge ability at the major league level?

(sigh)

You're watching a game. Your team has a runner on a second and the next guy gets a hit and knocks him in. You get excited, he gets an RBI. At the end of the year, there's a number that more or less describes how many times that happened. That's all--not how many times as a percentage, not whether or not he's a better or worse player than they guy he knocked in, and not whether or not he has character. Just how many times. If other people read those things into the number--and I will agree with you that they do--that's their problem; I know how to apply some context, so I don't feel there's any great need to get rid of the number.

ntbt you keep shifting the argument--no one is saying we should use rbi's to evaluate a player's ability.

I wasn't arguing with you guys in my last post, I was trying to make the case for a guy like Klaw (I have no idea if he'd agree with my post or not), at least based on what he implied in his chat comment. Although I think it's a reasonable point -- what happens between amateur and pro baseball where RBI's suddenly matter a lot more to so many people?

I totally agree with clemenza's last post ... if a guy knocks in the winning run in the ninth, he's the hero. If he does it a bunch of times in the season, then that a nice story, and it's worth keeping track of those things.

Last post before I head out for some...what's that called again?..."fresh air." One thing I desire in a statistic is that I have the ability to calculate it myself. One of the reasons that WAR and VORP and Win Shares have limited appeal to me is that they involve a series of calculations that are well outside my scope. Conversely, I think James's RC/27 outs is the greatest stat ever invented because a) it avoids most of the blind spots of traditional stats, b) it produces a number that's very easy to get a handle on (a team of this player would be expected to score this may runs), and c) if I have a calculator handy, I can figure it out myself quickly and easily. I'll give WAR and VORP the first two, but not the third. (Actually, I would always use the easier and slightly less accurate RC/25.5 outs.)