Hitters are off to record starts
Escobar was on pace for 72 HR, other fun facts
If there’s anything more fun than projecting a season’s worth of baseball stats way, way, waaaaaay too early in the year, Rube Foster and Abner Doubleday kept it to themselves.
Arizona Diamondbacks third baseman Eduardo Escobar, for example, was on pace to hit 72 home runs after nine games, and he’s not alone in having a hot start.
For the record(books), none of the following statistics are likely to hold up over an entire season. In fact, history just about guarantees they won’t — but anything is possible.
(For the sake of levity, we’re going to keep the math easy, projecting all numbers as “statistic” divided by “games played” and multiplied by “games in a season.”)
Escobar has cooled off to a pace of 68 home runs through 12 games, which will impress Diamondbacks fans, but not necessarily baseball historians.
Barry Bonds has the record, hitting 73 home runs for the Giants in 2001. This was just three years after Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa went blast for blast in the “Long Gone Summer” with 70 and 66 home runs, respectively. They toppled single-season home run king Roger Maris, who famously hit 61 in ’61.
Well, none of those men are in the Hall of Fame.
Babe Ruth hit 60 in 1927, and he tops the list among the all-time, single-season home run leaders who are actually in Cooperstown. Escobar was on pace to beat that by a dozen off the strength of a four-game stretch where he homered every day.
A former Diamondback, JD Martinez, once hit four home runs in a row, too. That was in one game four years ago against the Dodgers. Martinez hit 29 home runs in 62 games in 2017, which would have projected out to 76 over 162 games.
Anyway, this year Martinez is on pace to knock in 236 runs for the Red Sox, which would cut Hack Wilson down to size. Wilson has the single-season RBI record with 191 for the Cubs in 1930.
Unlike the single-season home run leader, Wilson is in the Hall of Fame. So are Lou Gehrig, Hank Greenberg and all the other guys on the top-10 list.
That might make it seem like RBIs are better than home runs, but the RBI is an embattled statistic.
Previous generations thought it helped explain whether a guy could hit at the most important times. Lately, it’s been dismissed as a dependent stat that has more to do with whether a hitter has other good players on his team. For me, I’d rather not play against a guy who can drive in 236 of them in a season, especially since the highest RBI total since the 1930s is 165, hit by Manny Ramirez, playing for Cleveland in 1999. (That’s 14th on the all-time list.)
Good thing the Diamondbacks don’t have to face Martinez in Boston on this 10-game road trip.
Contact, average and power
They will, however, have to deal with Ronald Acuna Jr. in Atlanta. He’s on pace for 287 base hits, which is especially fun to think about since it makes Ichiro Suzuki’s 2004 season that much more impressive in retrospect.
Ichiro had 262 hits that year, taking down an 84-year-old record after a slow start. (George Sisler hit 257 for the St. Louis Browns in 1920.) Through three games, Ichiro had only 2 hits in 13 atbats. He was hitting .154. Then he had a stretch of 11 hits in five games that signaled it as a year for the history books. Ichiro hit .372 that year.
Acuna is hitting .429, right now. If he could keep it up, that would be a record. Barely. The single-season batting average leader is Hugh Duffy, who hit .440 in 1894 for the Boston Beaneaters.
No one has gotten anywhere close to the 127-year-old record recently. Tony Gwynn hit .394 in the strike-shortened 1994 season. George Brett hit .390 in 1980.
If Acuna were to finish above .400, he’d be the first player to do it since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941. But Acuna would add a power element to the accomplishments of Ichiro, Gwynn, Brett, Williams and the Duff Man.
Acuna has a 1.000 slugging percentage, meaning he’s likely to score a run each and every time he comes to the plate. (Slugging percentage is the rate of total bases per at-bat.) None of the members of the “Foolin’ Around Near .400” Club slugged better than Williams’s .735 in their hallmark hitting seasons.
No one has finished higher in singleseason slugging than Barry Bonds who slugged .863 in 2001. (That was the year he hit 73 for San Francisco.) Remarkably, another guy mentioned earlier, JD Martinez, is on pace to beat Bonds, slugging .867. But Martinez is only averaging .378, which is downright realistic after looking at some of these numbers.
Again, these paces aren’t likely to hold up.
Ask George Bell, Tuffy Rhodes, Dmitri Young or Matt Davidson, who all had 3 home runs in one game on Opening Day. (Bell for the Blue Jays in 1988. Rhodes for the Cubs in 1994. Young for the Tigers in 2005. And Davidson for the White Sox in 2018.)
If they just could have hit 3 dingers a game, every game, for 162 games they would have finished their seasons with 486 home runs. Only two active players have that many home runs for their careers. (Albert Pujols with 663, and Miguel Cabrera with 488.)
If there’s anything more fun than thinking about some of these way, way, waaaaaay too early projections, then it’s a closely guarded baseball secret.
History says these numbers won’t hold up, but anything is possible.