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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Friday, October 01, 2021
Since the all-star break, Soto’s on-base percentage is .535. It’s a number that should be stared at and marveled over. He has reached base in more than half of his plate appearances in what approaches half the season. Given that reaching base invariably helps your team — indeed, it is the base objective of any appearance in the batter’s box — that percentage is staggering. Then, add some context: According to baseball-reference.com, here are the hitters who have reached base at a higher clip in the second half of any season in history: Barry Bonds and Babe Ruth three times apiece, Ted Williams twice, and Rogers Hornsby once.
I did not realize how well he was doing in the second half.
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1. coppermist72 Posted: October 01, 2021 at 05:20 PM (#6042881)Anyway, the walks and GBs have kept his HR rate at a good but not great 5%. His HR/FB also is "just" very good, not great in this era, and that's not likely affected by being pitched around. In terms of overall numbers, Thomas might be the better comp than Bonds right now. But once we bring age into it, we have no good modern comps -- not sure we have anybody other than Sheffield and Harper to even compare him to. Sheffield was not very good at these ages (possibly in part because he was trying to play his way out of Milw) and Harper Ks too much (relative to Soto) although both have had great age-22 seasons.
(not sure why I cannot delete or edit #6 above...)
Alas Giles had a 0.60 career G/F ratio, including his younger years, so he doesn't fit either.
G/F of 1 or higher and power probably isn't unheard of -- Clemente certainly had a high GO/AO -- but finding a guy like that who also walks a lot is stumping me. If we adjust power for era, Yaz might have done it -- his GO/AO is 1.16 ... but Soto's is 1.54 so Yaz might not be that GB-heavy.
Wow, prime Joe Morgan made only half his outs on the ground. That's the same as McGwire in his prime. Clearly Joe should have been hitting the ball on the ground more to take advantage of his speed in those yearrs. :-)
Okay, now I see - I was looking at "advanced batting" (which I guess doesn't include liners in its ratio?), which had him at 1.19 career, rather than "ratio batting."
Ryan Braun had some GB/FB ratios around 1.0, more in his weaker years, though, and I didn't realize how infrequently he walked.
I thought of Ferris Fain. GO/AO of 1.14, SO/W of 0.29, averaged well over 100 walks a year. Now, one might not consider Ferris Fain a great hitter, but when he was briefly winning batting titles he was very good, at least. Also a very long time ago and a different style of play, some guys walked a lot in those years.
Holy crap -- they just fixed it. As in like between when we posted and now when I just checked. I pointed it out to them months ago and have commented on it a few times here with nothing happening ... you mention it once and get results! I'm well jel. :-)
So Giles' G/F now correctly shows as 0.60 in "advanced batting."
How about Bob Elliott, then, among Fain's contemporaries? 1.14 GO/AO on his career, decent power, always walked more than he struck out and sometimes a lot more.
Though the totals are misleading. Early on in Pittsburgh, Elliott hit a lot of ground balls and not many home runs. Later with Boston he hit 20 HR a year, walked a lot as always, but had consistently more AO than GO. He had two half-careers with different styles of hitting.
Roy Cullenbine, another walking man of that era, was similar. When he finally started to hit some HRs late in his career, he also started to record more GO than AO.
He wasn't a huge power hitter or a huge walker, but Bernie Williams averaged 75 unintentional walks and 22 homers per 162 games with a .94 GB/FB ratio. Even in some of his better seasons he was hitting more grounders than fly balls.
Possibly for that reason, he led the National League this season in GIDPs with 23.
This is one of those years where the Fangraphs WAR shows a different race. Turner, Harper, Soto, and Tatis are tightly grouped #1-4 in that order, and then there's a step down to Bryan Reynolds.
I'd vote for Soto but Harper also had an incredible second half (1188 OPS) and was just about the only Phillie to hit down the stretch. The biggest difference between bWAR and fWAR is that bWAR doesn't like Harper's defense, while fWAR gives it a slightly positive rating. If Harper had somehow carried the Phillies into the postseason, I might give him the nod. But they ultimately came up well short.
leader in IP, KO, CG, ShO... and bb-ref WAR over the position players above
nice 2.78 ERA
The guy who did the most to win that game was Logan Webb. He went 7 innings, allowed 4 runs which is not great. But he had 2 hits, one a homer, and scored 3 times. So give him the MVP for clutch performance in the pennant race. Or not, and just give it to Soto for what he did over the season.
It really is wide open this year, and could give us a dark horse candidate like when Ivan Rodriguez won.
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