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April 24, 2007

Prospectus Today

A-Rod 200?

by Joe Sheehan

A few years back, researchers discovered that Hack Wilson had been shorted an RBI in 1930. It took a while for MLB to come around, but eventually they acceded to changing his total, so Wilson’s single-season RBI record now stands at 191.

If Wilson is going to hold that record much longer, his fans and descendants may need to round up those researchers and put them to work. Three weeks into the season, there’s a perfect storm of performance and opportunity brewing that could render even the higher record obsolete by the end of the year.

Would you believe A-Rod 200?

Alex Rodriguez is off to the hottest start of his career, and one of the hottest starts in baseball history. Every day brings another set of “fastest to” marks, and with 14 home runs and 34 RBI in the Yankees’ first 18 games, he’s on his way to obliterating the established records for performance in those categories in April.

In baseball, as in the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. A number of players each year are “on pace for” various achievements and records, only to fall off well before the chase gets serious. Certainly I’ve hammered home the point that three weeks of baseball isn’t enough to reach conclusions about any player or team, so you might see this as a strange place for an article about a potential record chase.

This is genuinely different, though. Batting fourth for the Yankees, Alex Rodriguez is in position to drive in more runs than anyone ever has before in part because he’s going to get more opportunities than any player in the game. Last year, Rodriguez led MLB with 534 runners on base when he came to the plate, and in 2005 he had 516, which ranked him second to teammate Hideki Matsui. So far this year, he’s batted with 72 runners on, or four per game, and he's on pace to have well over 600 runners on base for him.