Prince Albert Pujols, he reigneth

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.

I'm not saying don't care about it. I'm just saying don't try to convince me that it means anything beyond "this guy had a great season".

It means at least one thing more: "this guy had a great season, and he also did something that no one's done since 1967 because it's a really hard thing to do." I don't think I've made any claims beyond that. And for what it's worth: comparing one's response to an Academy Award winner and one's response to a Triple Crown Winner is perfectly valid, and that's all that Morbius said, and hopefully all that he meant. Because to compare the achievment of winning an Academy Award to the achievement of winning a Triple Crown would be a non sequitur. One is based on the votes of a group of people and is wholly opinion-based; the other measures the actual accomplishments of an individual and is wholly factual. You may not like what it measures, or the way that it goes about measuring it, both those are separate issues.

I wanted Pujols to win because I knew that all of your objections would be taken care of by the fact it was Pujols. Pujols wins the Triple Crown, and I'm pretty sure that when I start looking at home/road splits, and RBI opportunities, and all the rest of it, it won't be a case of "God, no--this guy Pujols is a total fraud!" If Gonzalez wins one, great--I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I'll think, "He had a great season, and he did something that no one's done since 1967," and I'll also think, "He wouldn't have done it had he played somewhere other than Colorado, which really inflates his home stats." That's a lot to keep track of at once. I can do it.

If Gonzo gets the Triple Crown I won't have any objections whatsoever, but if he gets the MVP that's another story.

Comparing MVP winners or Hall of Fame inductees to Academy Award winners, now that would be valid. Baseball writers, for all of the specious picks you can charge them with, are infinitely smarter and more reliable than whoever the hell it is who votes on Academy Awards, especially the past 20-25 years. (I know: "members of the Academy.")

There is only a certain degree to which you can ignore greatness in baseball. Baseball writers know that Alex Rodriguez and JD Drew and Manny Ramirez exist and are useful players, even if they don't always appreciate aspects of their efforts. Meanwhile, Oscar voters generally haven't even heard of the best movies of the year, or appreciate what is good about them.

it's alot easier to make an obscure movie that's very good than it is to be a very good obscure MLB player.

The major difference, undoubtedly, is that Academy Awards are (most of the time) hugely interconnected to box-office and advertising campaigns and lots of other matters that have nothing to do with the films themselves. Even when they appear not to be, they probably are; I figured that "the Academy" was trying to make a statement last year by giving The Hurt Locker best picture over Avatar. (Not saying anything about the films themselves--thought the first was overrated, no interest in the second.) No such economic push-and-pull influences baseball writers, although I suppose that now and again you get a writer tilt towards an underrated/underpaid player in the MVP voting over a 15-million-dollar guy.

Having said all that--here I go being a nostalgic dimwit again--when something I love is nominated for an Academy Award (Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, Man on Wire, etc.), I root for it, and if it wins, I'm irrationally happy.

Joe (Milwaukee)

Just curious as to how long of a deal you would, were you the Cards GM, offer Pujols. He'll age well won't he?
Rob Neyer (12:05 PM)

Look, I'm going to say this now and maybe never again in this space, but ... There are still some reasonably intelligent people with reasonable doubts about Pujols' age. Just for the sake of argument, if he's actually 33 or 34 would you give him eight years? Nine years? Ten?

SHASTA BAIT

'To watch Pujols interact with fans is to watch a prototypical spoiled, arrogant 21st century sports star at his absolute worst'

So glad Pearlman doesn't have a big gig anymore.

haha tru

2011 capsule:

.156/.243/.250
MLB leading 6 GIDPs
2-10 w/ RISP (haha, actually better than w/o RISP)
2 Errors (total of 4 in 2010)

#arbitraryendpoints

#captsaveapoohole

#shastasbestweekever

btw what were they jeering in sf? "Get one hit" or something?

Story on 60 Minutes coming up--is this new?

maybe he reveals something TERRIBLE in the 60 minutes segment...maybe that's why he's been sucking ass all week...just knowing that everyone will know his terrible secret as soon as the segment airs...god what could it be!