My Apologies...

...to Albert Pujols.

I was tempted to look at Pujols' year and think that it is a down year for him. He is the only player to begin his career with 7 straight 30 home run 100 RBI seasons. It looks like he will fall short of 100 RBIs this year. Maybe the pack of great NL hitters have caught up to him and maybe he is falling back to earth and will never achieve the heights that he has reached. Or maybe…

I was reading the blog of the great Joe Posnanski and he was talking about Albert Pujols being underrated. I thought that was crazy talk until I looked up the stats.

Batting Average: .350 (!!!) 2^nd in NL

On Base Percentage: .462 2^nd

Slugging Percentage: .618 1^st

OPS: 1.080 1^st (on base plus slugging)

BBs: 79 3^rd (Walks twice as much as he strikes out)

Times on Base: 214 1st

Runs Created: 111 t-1^st (that is runs+RBIs-home runs)

Adjusted OPS+: 183 t-1^st (don’t know what it means, but baseball geeks love this stat)

Adjusted Batting Runs: 51 1^st (see above)

Batting Wins: 1^st (Ditto)

Offensive Win %: .828 1^st (again, don’t know but geeks like it)

Intentional Walks: 28 1^st (by far)

At Bats per Strikeout: 9.6 7^th (that’s pretty good for a power hitter, BTW Yadier Molina is 1^st followed by one of his brothers).

A picture of consistency: look at his numbers in different types of games:

Albert Pujols’ numbers in a tie game: .317/.418/.607.
Albert Pujols’ numbers within one run: .335/.430/.639
Albert Pujols’ numbers within two runs: .335/.432/.630
Albert Pujols’ numbers within three runs: .333/.427/.624
Albert Pujols’ numbers within four runs: .333/.426/.622

(Thanks to Joe Posnanski again for the numbers in different types of games).

That’s a pretty good year, even an MVP type year. I don’t understand all of those stats (like I noted) but Moneyball types and Bill James SABR types love those numbers.

So…Albert, I’m sorry I doubted you.