Trout Has Highest OPS+ Ever For Ages 20 & 21 Combined

500+ PAs over the two years. Trout had 169 last year and 179 this year. Here is everyone with 150 or higher

Player	OPS+	PA	From	To
Mike Trout	174	1355	2012	2013
Ty Cobb	168	1277	1907	1908
Jimmie Foxx	162	1111	1928	1929
Ted Williams	161	1336	1939	1940
Rogers Hornsby	160	1138	1916	1917
Mel Ott	158	1323	1929	1930
Albert Pujols	157	676	2001	2001
Mickey Mantle	154	1166	1952	1953
King Kelly	154	597	1878	1879
Stan Musial	153	585	1941	1942
Al Kaline	150	1374	1955	1956

Below are the leaders in wRC+. There is disagreement over Jackson's age. If he was born in 1887 instead of 1889, he would not be on this list

Name	PA	wRC+
Joe Jackson	727	187
Mike Trout	1355	171
Jimmie Foxx	1111	165
Ty Cobb	1281	162
Albert Pujols	676	159
Stan Musial	585	158
Ted Williams	1338	157
Mel Ott	1320	156
Rogers Hornsby	1139	156
Mickey Mantle	1166	153

The Most Imbalanced Seasons Using SLG & OBP

Using qualifiers for the batting title, I called up the top 1000 seasons in SLG from 1876-1960 and then for 1961-2012. I used the Lee Sinins database and I also called up each guy's OBP along with it. Then I did something similar for the lowest OBPs. Below are the top 25 ratios. I also found the highest OBP/SLG ratios

This was inspired by a Twitter exchange with High Heat Stats and James Gentile. Evan Gattis had .480/.291 =  1.65 this year. Javy Lopez had a high ratio in 495 PAs in 2003, but that was not a qualifier. He 1.82 that year (.687/.378). Now maybe I should have used relative SLG and relative OBP. Maybe I will do a post on that in a day or two.

Player	YEAR	SLG	OBP	SLG/OBP
Matt Williams	1994	0.607	0.319	1.90
Dave Kingman	1979	0.613	0.343	1.79
Tony Armas	1983	0.453	0.254	1.78
Joe Adcock	1956	0.597	0.337	1.77
Tony Armas	1984	0.531	0.300	1.77
Tony Armas	1984	0.531	0.300	1.77
Dave Kingman	1976	0.506	0.286	1.77
Juan Gonzalez	1997	0.589	0.335	1.76
Juan Gonzalez	1996	0.643	0.368	1.75
Sammy Sosa	1996	0.564	0.323	1.75
Juan Gonzalez	1992	0.529	0.304	1.74
Juan Gonzalez	1992	0.529	0.304	1.74
Dave Kingman	1975	0.494	0.284	1.74
Andre Dawson	1987	0.568	0.328	1.73
Sammy Sosa	1999	0.635	0.367	1.73
Henry Rodriguez	1996	0.562	0.325	1.73
Walker Cooper	1947	0.586	0.339	1.73
Ernie Banks	1955	0.596	0.345	1.73
Matt Williams	1993	0.561	0.325	1.73
Juan Gonzalez	1998	0.630	0.366	1.72
Albert Belle	1995	0.690	0.401	1.72
Mike Jacobs	2008	0.514	0.299	1.72
George Bell	1987	0.605	0.352	1.72
Juan Gonzalez	1993	0.632	0.368	1.72
Sammy Sosa	1998	0.647	0.377	1.72
Dante Bichette	1995	0.620	0.364	1.70
Johnny Bench	1970	0.587	0.345	1.70

Now here are the highest OBP/SLG ratios. They are mostly before 1920, so after that is a 1920-2012 list

Player	YEAR	SLG	OBP	OBP/SLG
Yank Robinson	1890	0.281	0.434	1.54
Goat Anderson	1907	0.225	0.343	1.52
Jack Crooks	1890	0.254	0.357	1.41
Jack Crooks	1892	0.294	0.400	1.36
Jack Crooks	1893	0.306	0.408	1.33
Billy Lush	1902	0.262	0.346	1.32
Candy Nelson	1886	0.252	0.332	1.32
Eddie Stanky	1943	0.278	0.363	1.31
Cliff Carroll	1893	0.276	0.360	1.30
Roy Thomas	1906	0.302	0.393	1.30
Paul Radford	1893	0.293	0.380	1.30
Yank Robinson	1889	0.292	0.378	1.29
Paul Radford	1891	0.305	0.393	1.29
Ed Hahn	1906	0.257	0.331	1.29
Donie Bush	1915	0.283	0.364	1.29
Dave Bancroft	1916	0.252	0.323	1.28
Marty Berghammer	1915	0.290	0.371	1.28
Donie Bush	1918	0.266	0.340	1.28
Bobby Wheelock	1891	0.263	0.336	1.28
Hugh Nicol	1887	0.267	0.341	1.28
Al Bridwell	1907	0.242	0.309	1.28
Yank Robinson	1888	0.314	0.400	1.27
Will Smalley	1890	0.239	0.303	1.27
Dick Harley	1903	0.259	0.328	1.27
Donie Bush	1914	0.295	0.373	1.26

Now 1920-2012

Player	YEAR	SLG	OBP	OBP/SLG
Eddie Stanky	1943	0.278	0.363	1.31
Walt Weiss	1995	0.321	0.403	1.26
Mike Tresh	1945	0.273	0.342	1.25
Ron Hunt	1968	0.297	0.371	1.25
Ron Hunt	1974	0.298	0.372	1.25
Rodney Scott	1981	0.250	0.308	1.23
Steve Jeltz	1986	0.262	0.320	1.22
Don Buford	1972	0.267	0.326	1.22
Ron Hunt	1972	0.298	0.363	1.22
Dave Chalk	1976	0.253	0.308	1.22
Gary Pettis	1989	0.309	0.375	1.21
Connie Ryan	1943	0.249	0.301	1.21
Rickey Henderson	2000	0.305	0.368	1.21
Charlie Gehringer	1941	0.303	0.363	1.20
John Sullivan	1943	0.250	0.298	1.19
Rickey Henderson	1996	0.344	0.410	1.19
Walt Weiss	1993	0.308	0.367	1.19
Spook Jacobs	1954	0.283	0.336	1.19
Eddie Joost	1943	0.252	0.299	1.19
Julio Cruz	1978	0.269	0.319	1.19
Ivan DeJesus	1981	0.233	0.276	1.18
Gregor Blanco	2008	0.309	0.366	1.18
Gerald Young	1989	0.276	0.326	1.18
Enzo Hernandez	1971	0.250	0.295	1.18
Bud Harrelson	1972	0.266	0.313	1.18

Cuba says athletes can sign professional contracts in foreign leagues, reversing long ban

Here is the link

Washington Post story

How Well Do OBP And SLG Explain WPA?

I took all the players with 5000+ PAs since 1945 and found their WPA per PA using the data from Baseball Reference.

Baseball Reference only has WPA or Win Probability Added going back to 1945. The idea is that every hit, walk or out a player makes either increases or decreases his team's probability of winning. Players who hit well with runners on base or in the late innings of close games will tend to score higher.

I ran a regresssion with WPA/PA being the dependent variable and a player's OBP & SLG relative to the league average. Here is he equation

WPA = 0.00008686*RELSLG + 0.00016*RELOBP - .0245

Notice that the coefficient for OBP divided by the one for SLG is 1.85. That is pretty close to the 1.73 that Tom Tango shows at Blast From the Past: Proof of the Modified OPS.

The r-squared was .915 and the standard error was 0.0006686 or .468 over 700 PAs.

I also checked to see how each guy was predicted by the equation. Then I calculated how many more or fewer wins they had than predicted. Click here to see the list.

Sandy Alomar, Sr. had the biggest positive differential. I plugged in his RELOBP of 76 and RELSLG of 91 (both are below 100 and therefore, below average) and it predicted a WPA/PA of -.0034 but he actually had -.0015. So that means he actually hit better the more important the situation, the closer and later it was, the more outs there were and the more men that were on base.

Over 700 PAs, that is 1.33 wins. That means his teams 1.33 more games per season than we might have thought based only on his OBP and SLG.

Click here to see Alomar's career splits at Baseball Reference. He batted .297 in high leverage situations with a .341 OBP. Medium leverage, he had .240 & .286. Low leverage .232 & .275. Maybe being a switch hitter helped so that teams could not get the platoon advantage on him. He his followed Eric Davis, McCovey and Berra.

But Ted Williams had the biggest negative differential. Click here to see his splits. If you go the list I have and scroll down, he his at the bottom. The Red Sox won 1.96 fewer games than we might expect based on his OBP & SLG. The table below shows how Williams hit in the various situations

Split	BA	OBP	SLG
High Lvrge	0.323	0.468	0.576
Medium Lvrge	0.349	0.485	0.638
Low Lvrge	0.333	0.475	0.633

His numbers are all down when it was high leverage (this probably only includes his post-war data). Maybe because he was a lefty, he faced more lefties in high leverage situations than he normally did. If I used the Baseball Reference Play Index correctly, he normally faced lefties 23.8% of the time but in high leverage cases it was 26.4%

But his overall OPS over the years they have play by play data was 1.158 vs. righties and .915 vs. lefties. In high leverage cases, it was 1.104 and .884. So he declined against both lefties and righties, and more in absolute terms against righties.

But Williams is not the only great player near the bottom of the list. The bottom 11 includes three other Hall of Famers: Musial, Boggs and Kiner. Robinson Cano is there, too.

Update 9-28: I broke down all the guys into groups of .1 and then made a distribution chart. Here it is. Actually, I cut everyone down to 1 decimal point and then did a frequency distribution. If there is a better or easier way to do this with Excel, please let me know

Per 700 PA	count
1.3	2
1.2	1
1.1	2
1	4
0.9	10
0.8	11
0.7	20
0.6	27
0.5	31
0.4	37
0.3	50
0.2	47
0.1	51
0	48
-0.1	47
-0.2	44
-0.3	38
-0.4	31
-0.5	26
-0.6	20
-0.7	11
-0.8	6
-0.9	8
-1	9
-1.1	1
-1.2	1
-1.3	1
-1.4	2
-2	1

Here is a slightly different version

Astros will finish under .350, 1st team with 3 straight years under .350 since the 1962-65 Mets

Click here to see my post from July which shows all the teams that did it. Even if we looked for teams with a pct < .375, the last to do it was the Blue Jays, 1977-79 with .335, .366, and .327. So the Astros are performing at the level of a new expansion team these past 3 years.

Trout is youngest player ever to reach base (H, BB, HBP) 300+ times and have 300+ TBs in one season

See my post on this from Nov. 2009 Baseball's "300" Hitters. That has a list of everyone who did it. Cabrera did in 2011. He is not on the list I had back then. Ted Williams and Joe Kelley both did it at age 22

Who Held The Single Season WPA Record Before Barry Bonds Came Along?

Baseball Reference only has WPA or Win Probability Added going back to 1945. The idea is that every hit, walk or out a player makes either increases or decreases his team's probability of winning. Players who hit well with runners on base or in the late innings of close games will tend to score higher.

Barry Bonds has the three highest WPA totals ever. Our player in question has the 4th best. Bonds had 12.95 in 2004, 11.48 in 2001 and 10.49 in 2002. So in 2004, the Giants won 12.95 more games with Bonds than they would have if an average hitter were in his place.

Here are some clues about the record holder before Barry Bonds:

He is in the Hall of Fame

He was MVP in the year he broke the previous record.

The player whose record he broke is also in the Hall of Fame and was also MVP the year he set the record.

Our player, not surprisingly, led his league in SLG and OBP.

Our player is also among the all-time leaders in WPA.

He batted .349 with runners in scoring position in his record year.

His SLG was .678 with runners on base.

In close & late situations, he batted .390.

In close & late situations, his SLG was .792.

Click here to see who this player is and his splits for this record year

Click here to see the single season leaders

Click here to see the career leaders

Click here to see the progressive leaders

Is The Year Of The Great Fielder?

Below are the current top 18, through yesterday. The four from this year are in red. But at Baseball Reference, the league average, if I understand things correctly, has to be zero. That would mean that someone else has to be especially negative for these guys to be so high. Should they still have the high rank see here? I am not sure. Click here to go to the Baseball Reference leaders

Up date after games of 9-20: Simmons falls back to 5.3 fielding WAR

Rank	Player (age that year)	Def WAR	Year
1	Andrelton Simmons (23)	5.4	2013
	Terry Turner (25)	5.4	1906
3	Art Fletcher (32)	5.1	1917
4	Mark Belanger (31)	4.9	1975
5	Ozzie Smith+ (34)	4.7	1989
6	Brooks Robinson+ (31)	4.5	1968
7	Mark Belanger (24)	4.4	1968
	Frankie Frisch+ (28)	4.4	1927
9	Joe Tinker+ (27)	4.3	1908
10	Darin Erstad (28)	4.2	2002
	Carlos Gomez (27)	4.2	2013
	Manny Machado (20)	4.2	2013
	Rabbit Maranville+ (22)	4.2	1914
	Brooks Robinson+ (30)	4.2	1967
15	Hughie Critz (32)	4.1	1933
	Adam Everett (29)	4.1	2006
	Gerardo Parra (26)	4.1	2013
	Jack Wilson (27)	4.1	2005

Andrelton Simmons now tied for best fielding WAR ever

Tied with Terry Turner at 5.4. Click here to see the rankings at Baseball Reference. Manny Machado is tied for 10th at 4.2.

After yesterday (9-17), he is back down to 5.2. So 2nd best ever

After 9-18 Andrelton Simmons is tied again for best fielding WAR ever Machado and Carlos Gomez are tied for 13th

Chris Davis 26th player to have a 40+ HR & 40+ 2B season

Here are the others and how many times they each did it

T1   Lou Gehrig                3  
T1   Albert Pujols             3  
T3   Albert Belle              2  
T3   Todd Helton               2  
T3   Babe Ruth                 2  
T3   David Ortiz               2  
T3   Chuck Klein               2  
T3   Hank Greenberg            2  
T9   Hal Trosky                1  
T9   Alfonso Soriano           1  
T9   Shawn Green               1  
T9   Willie Stargell           1  
T9   Richard Hidalgo           1  
T9   Carlos Delgado            1  
T9   Frank Thomas              1  
T9   Chipper Jones             1  
T9   Larry Walker              1  
T9   Ellis Burks               1  
T9   Manny Ramirez             1  
T9   Juan Gonzalez             1  
T9   Rogers Hornsby            1  
T9   Miguel Cabrera            1  
T9   Mark Teixeira             1  
T9   Jeff Bagwell              1  
T9   Derrek Lee                1  

Has Andrelton Simmons been in a fielding slump the last 12 games?

Andrelton Simmons field WAR was 5.1 12 games ago and it is 5.1 now. I think that means he has been just average the last 12 games if I understand how Baseball Reference does it. Suppose he has been like a .400 hitter as a fielder this year and a .250 hitter is average. I used my Excel program to calculate the binomial probability of a .400 hitter getting 12 or fewer hits in 12 games (48 ABs). It gave me 2.2%. Is that significant? Is that low enough to say he is in a slump? Or would we expect a .400 hitter to have an occassional run of 12 games only hitting .250?

Are The Yankees The Luckiest Team This Year?

Through Friday's games, their hitters had an OPS of .692 and their pitchers allowed .730. So they have a differential of -.038. From regression analysis, I came up with the following equation to predict a team's winning pct

Pct = .5 +1.21*OPSDIFF

That predicts that they would have a pct of .454 while it was .532 throug Friday. So they are doing .078 better than expected. Over 162 games, that is an extra 12.63 wins. The table below summarizes how all teams did in the prediction
 

Team	OPS	OPSA	Diff	W-L%	Pred	Diff	per162
NYY	0.692	0.730	-0.038	0.532	0.454	0.078	12.63
ATL	0.730	0.670	0.060	0.607	0.573	0.034	5.57
KCR	0.694	0.707	-0.013	0.518	0.484	0.034	5.46
BAL	0.753	0.750	0.003	0.536	0.504	0.032	5.24
LAD	0.724	0.672	0.052	0.593	0.563	0.030	4.87
PHI	0.687	0.746	-0.059	0.454	0.429	0.025	4.11
ARI	0.712	0.726	-0.014	0.507	0.483	0.024	3.88
STL	0.731	0.689	0.042	0.574	0.551	0.023	3.76
TEX	0.742	0.701	0.041	0.571	0.550	0.021	3.47
OAK	0.731	0.686	0.045	0.574	0.554	0.020	3.17
CLE	0.730	0.713	0.017	0.536	0.521	0.015	2.50
PIT	0.711	0.653	0.058	0.579	0.570	0.009	1.43
SDP	0.692	0.739	-0.047	0.450	0.443	0.007	1.11
CIN	0.724	0.677	0.047	0.563	0.557	0.006	0.99
BOS	0.793	0.714	0.079	0.601	0.596	0.005	0.88
MIN	0.701	0.754	-0.053	0.439	0.436	0.003	0.51
WSN	0.704	0.699	0.005	0.507	0.506	0.001	0.15
SEA	0.701	0.739	-0.038	0.454	0.454	0.000	0.00
TOR	0.727	0.756	-0.029	0.461	0.465	-0.004	-0.63
TBR	0.742	0.692	0.050	0.550	0.561	-0.011	-1.70
NYM	0.687	0.711	-0.024	0.453	0.471	-0.018	-2.91
HOU	0.682	0.804	-0.122	0.333	0.352	-0.019	-3.14
MIA	0.630	0.710	-0.080	0.381	0.403	-0.022	-3.60
COL	0.742	0.751	-0.009	0.465	0.489	-0.024	-3.91
LAA	0.743	0.742	0.001	0.471	0.501	-0.030	-4.89
SFG	0.696	0.709	-0.013	0.447	0.484	-0.037	-6.04
CHW	0.681	0.722	-0.041	0.400	0.450	-0.050	-8.16
CHC	0.701	0.717	-0.016	0.429	0.481	-0.052	-8.37
MIL	0.712	0.728	-0.016	0.429	0.481	-0.052	-8.37
DET	0.794	0.687	0.107	0.582	0.638	-0.056	-9.01

I wondered if they were doing especially better in clutch situations. The next table is for their hitters. These stats are through yesterday

Split	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
All PAs	0.248	0.313	0.380	0.693
RISP	0.263	0.345	0.392	0.737
None on	0.245	0.306	0.384	0.691
Men On	0.251	0.322	0.374	0.696
Late & Close	0.219	0.298	0.332	0.630

A little better with RISP but terrible when it is close and late. As you can see in the next table for pitchers, they do better with runners on but it does not seem really big. Their improvement when it is close and late is about at the league average for this year.

Split	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
All PAs	0.263	0.320	0.414	0.734
RISP	0.246	0.322	0.386	0.709
None on	0.268	0.321	0.428	0.749
Men On	0.255	0.318	0.394	0.713
Late & Close	0.250	0.304	0.386	0.690