Last night, Bryan asked me where I would place Manny amongst the best hitters in baseball. I believe that we drunkenly agreed that the answer was third. To follow up on that declaration, here's the top 10 in Equivalent Average last year:
Bonds .420
Pujols .362
Helton .345
Manny .341
Sheffield .341
Delgado .338
Javy .337
Vlad .328
ARod .326
Giambi/Nixon/Edmonds .325
While I'm at it, here's 2002:
Bonds .457
Manny .370
Thome .369
Giambi .351
Giles .351
Chipper .335
ARod .334
Sosa .332
Vlad .331
Edmonds/Delgado .330
(others: Pujols .319, Helton .320, Sheffield .315)
So, looking just at EQA, Manny's been the 2nd best in baseball over the last 2 years. I'm still tempted to stick with "third" (behind Pujols) as my answer to Bryan's question. At the very least, I feel comfortable saying "in the top 5".
By the way, this underscores how ridiculous Bonds is. He's averaged an EQA of .438 the last 2 years, or 83 points higher than the second highest person (Manny). 83 points down from Manny would be .272.
What is .272?
.272 is below average for a corner outfielder.
Last year, .272 was Ramon Hernandez, Aaron Boone, Jolbert Cabrera, Juan Pierre, and BJ Surhoff.
So, under this measure, the gap between Bonds and the second best hitter in baseball is the same as the gap between the 2nd best hitter and BJ Surhoff.
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