Todd Helton's road stats

He came close to getting into the Hall of Fame with 72.2% of the vote. I am not against him being in the Hall since he ranks pretty high in WAR (114th among position players with 61.8).

Helton had 318 Win Shares (from the 2014 Bill James Handbook). I don't know where that would rank right now all time but looking at the original 2002 Win Shares book, it would tie him for 133rd among both position players and pitchers (if anyone knows of a website with the current all time leaders in Win Shares, please let me know). I know his rank would be lower now but I don't know where. Probably still pretty high. I would guess that he would fall no more than 20 places.

But from 1998-2013 he ranks 24th in the NL in road OPS with .856 for guys with 2000+ road PAs. That seems a little low. See NL OPS Leaders 1998-2013 (from Stathead as are all other links given below).

If we just look at each of his best years (from 2000-2004) and have a PA minimum of 200, here are his ranks in the NL each year in road OPS:

2000-4th
2001-11th
2002-24th
2003-14th
2004-9th

These links have the leaders in road OPS in the NL for those years:

2000 

2001 

2002 

2003 

2004

But for guys with 1,000+ road PAs over the entire period of 2000-2004 in the NL, he was 7th with .973. So, at his peak, he was a pretty good road hitter. Click here to see those leaders.

Here is another way to look at it. Where would he rank in overall OPS if we only looked at his road OPS in each of the years 2000-2004?

The numbers below show his road OPS in each of those years and where that would rank in the top 10 in the NL in OPS, but OPS including both home and road. The number after his OPS is the rank but with him actually removed from the original ranking.

2000) 1.074 (T3)

2001) .977 (10)

2002) .875 (21)

2003) .949 (8)

2004) .991 (8)

 

In 2000, Helton actually led the NL in OPS. Vladimir Guerrero was 4th at 1.074. Taking Helton out moves him up to 3rd and since Helton had 1.074 in road games, those two tied for 3rd. 

What about adjusting his road OPS upward based on normal league home/road splits? That probably won't make much difference since from 2000-2004 the NL had an overall OPS of .770 in home games and .741 in road games. 

So we could up his OPS in road games each year by .015 (about half of the difference between .741 and .770). The we would get the following OPS with ranks among the leaders

2000) 1.089 (2)

2001) .992 (10)

2002) .890 (19)

2003) .964 (6)

2004) 1.006 (T7)

 

He moves up just a bit in those rankings.

See a related post titled: Rockies, including Charlie Blackmon, dominate home/away splits. It is from August 14, 2020. Excerpt:

"I used Baseball Reference's "Stathead" database to find all the players who had 2,000+ PAs in both home and away games in their careers. Then I ranked them by the difference between their home OPS and their away OPS. Their were 1,270 players.

Six of the top 10 are guys who played all or a good part of their careers with the Rockies: Charlie Blackmon, Carlos Gonzalez, Dante Bichette, Nolan Arenado, Larry Walker and Todd Helton."