Watching Houston sports these days is akin to taking a few shots of tequila. There is that sudden rough aftertaste that can only be cured with a lime wedge. In these moments we have confronted with a choice. We can certainly analyze what has happened and offer critiques. We can also find a diversion and forget about the bad news for awhile. Ideally, we will do both in equal measure.
On Wednesday, we took a look at BPO and ROV and how the current Astros are doing. Yordan Alvarez’s numbers obviously don’t belong in this group and they don’t belong in most groups. This is the fun part of April baseball. There will always be out of context numbers that boggle the imagination. However, occasionally players are able to sustain it longer and we get to see if Yordan is one of those guys.
This led me down the rabbit hole to see which players had the best individual seasons. Instead of showing you three or four Babe Ruth or Ted Williams seasons we will take each player’s best individual season and compare that with the top half dozen or so seasons in baseball history (from 1900 on). We will include Yordan’s numbers to see what he has to shoot for.
I love doing this because all good numbers have a frame of reference. How do we know what is good? We know the best seasons in history. How did they finish in real offensive value and bases per out? Keep in mind, ROV is the average between batting average and secondary average. Bases per out takes the total number of bases accrued through total bases, walks, hit by pitch, and stolen bases and divides it by total outs. The following numbers are up to date through Tuesday night’s game.
We threw in a Josh Gibson season because we just couldn’t ignore it now that we have official numbers from those Negro League seasons. I also looked up Willie Wells, but he did not quite cut the mustard. These numbers are beyond ridiculous. Obviously, most of them were MVP winners, but the game’s earlier history had different rules for the MVP awards. Suffice it to say that Yordan is on pace for one of those seasons.
He is on pace to have 62 home runs and about 160 RBIs which would be historic by itself. This is one of those instances where similarity scores come into vogue. He is most similar to Judge, Gehrig, and Bagwell from 1994. That was the season where Judge hit .330 and had 58 home runs. That seems to be a decent enough comp for a healthy and effective Yordan.
Of course, ROV and BPO are not the only way to skin a cat. Since Yordan is a designated hitter (primarily) it would not be fair to look at strictly WAR for offensive dominance. After all, Gibson was a catcher on top of his offensive brilliance. What we can do is go straight to baseball-reference.com and look at offensive WAR. Unfortunately, Fangraphs does not break their WAR down the same way that BWAR is broken down. Since players played for varying lengths of seasons, we will normalize the numbers for a 162 game schedule. Let’s see who takes the top mark.
I should note that these are not necessarily all of the best seasons in baseball history. For one, I eliminated all of the duplicate seasons for each of these players and condensed it down to their very best season. For another, there are some isolated seasons from players like Willie Mays, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, and Mickey Mantle that would approach some of these seasons. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. It is simply a smattering of the current neighborhood that Alvarez finds himself in.
Moreover, the tragedy of a player like Gibson is not only the color barrier. It is the fact that the Negro National League did not play full schedules. Could you imagine the numbers he would have put up if they had a 154 or 162 game schedule year in and year out. It will be impossible to know whether Gibson would have been the best if he had played in the big leagues for his entire career. It’s one of those things we will never know.
One of the things that WAR does is break down the walls between eras. It measures how a player does against the replacement level player and that always changes throughout time. So, Alvarez is on a similar pace as where those guys were. Either way, it has been a special March and April for Alvarez and it remains to be seen if he can continue at this pace. What do you think? Do you think Yordan can keep this up?