James Leroy Wilson's one-man magazine.

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

A Study in Contrasts

You will never find statistics so different from each other as the AL batting leader Ichiro Suzuki and NL batting Leader Barry Bonds. To be fair, Suzuki is Mariner's lead-off hitter while Bonds is the heart of the Giant line-up. But as the book Moneyball reported, the two offensive statistics that lead to victories are on-base percentage and slugging average (total bases divided by total at-bats), with on-base percentage three times as important as slugging average. Small wonder that Suzuki's impressive, potentially record-breaking number of hits hasn't taken Seattle anywhere, whereas Bonds's stats, and his mediocre teams lead in the wild-card race, pretty much verify what Moneyball already said.

Look them up for yourself. My next two posts will be be links to Suzuki's year-by-year stats and Bonds's year by year stats.

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