One of the bigger stories of the 2026 season thus far was what Mike Trout did during a four-game Angels-Yankees series earlier this month: 19 PA, 8 R, 9 RBI, 6 H, 5 HR, 3 BB, a .375/.474/1.313 slash line. It was only the fourth time a player had hit five HR against the Yankees in one series.
Because of Trout’s nightmarish run of injuries the past few seasons, he’s earned a lot of goodwill from fans, a collective desire to almost will him back into the player he was 10 years ago; “Trout is back!” has become baseball’s equivalent of rock critics reflexively declaring “Dylan’s back!” through the ‘70s. He’s already more than secured his place in history, but still, like Ken Griffey Jr., what-could-have-been looks like it will be an unfortunately central part of his legacy.
In response to someone posting about Trout’s Yankees series on the I Love Baseball message board, I responded “Would still like to see him get his average up, but he's been great otherwise,” then quickly acknowledged that I was dating myself by caring about batting average. It’s not that I don’t understand BA’s limitations; that’s pretty much the first thing you internalize from the moment you start reading Bill James, so I’ve been aware of that for 40 years now. As caught up as I was in Luis Arráez’s half-season flirtation with .400 three years ago, I also realize that when Arráez supplements his always impressive batting average with 50 extra-base hits and 40 or 50 walks, he’s a really valuable hitter to have around; when the extra-base hits and/or walks disappear, like they mostly have ever since, he’s Bill Buckner. And that’s why he’s on his fourth team in four seasons.
Batting average is important as a measure of how many outs you’re making--another sabermetric principle you internalize early is that outs are the most precious commodity* an offense has--but we know now, beyond question, that a .250 hitter with walks and HR is more valuable than an empty .300 batting average (again going back to the foundation of sabermetrics, call it the Gene Tenace Rule, or the Darrell Evans Rule). So it’s not value, or at least not only value, that makes me want Trout to get his batting average back above .300; it’s a matter of aesthetics.
I’m one of those baseball fans who, for as long as I’ve been watching, approaches the game like a mathematician: I find beauty in numbers. I’ve had a friend tell me that statistics are antithetical to baseball’s beauty--which has to do with old ballparks, the rituals of the game, etc.--but to me, the two are inseparable. Put that down to the first Zander Hollander guide I bought in 1970, which had entries for each player both in words and numbers--I found the career statistical boxes much more interesting than the ellipsis-heavy bios--and especially to the first “Big Mac” (the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia) my parents gave me as a gift a few years later, 1974’s second edition. Along with Ball Four and the 1983 Baseball Abstract, no baseball book ever had a greater impact on me.
There were three things I found especially beautiful as I would comb over the lifetime statistical records of players I’d never heard of going back almost 100 years:
1) The players who never had even a bad partial season, very common early or late in a player’s career. By “bad,” to me that probably meant a season where a player hit under .250, regardless of how many AB. If a guy was a September call-up and began his career going 1-12 (.083), he automatically became less interesting to me; ditto if someone hit .221 the season before he retired. Those career boxes just weren’t as aesthetically pleasing to the eye--they were like near-perfect movies with one clunky scene, or a favourite song with a stray lyric that made you wince. Two beautiful career boxes: Ted Williams (one season at .255, the other 18 all above .300--usually well above) and, a more recent example, Tony Gwynn (.289 as a 22-year-old, 19 straight seasons above .300 after that--and again, usually well above).
2) Lots and lots of “black ink”; numbers that meant you led the league that year. Ancient example from the 1920s and ‘30s: Lou Gehrig. More recent example: Aaron Judge. (Who, by the way, fails the first aesthetic test because he hit .179 in 27 games the year he came up.)
3) The third thing I loved couldn’t have happened with the Big Mac, which--I only realized this when I went downstairs and checked--didn’t carry on-base percentages for individual players. I probably started to pay attention to that with James…they’re definitely included in Pete Palmer’s Total Baseball,** which eventually came to supplant the MacMillan encyclopedia. In any event, when it came to what would eventually be designated as a player's “slash stats,” I quickly gravitated to .300/.400/.500 seasons: a .300 BA, a .400 OBP, and a .500 SA. Putting park factors and the context of what era somebody played in aside, a .300/.400./.500 season has a beautiful symmetry to it; you have to do everything as a hitter to reach all three.
Doing so over the course of a career has been accomplished by 14 players:
The list is almost as noteworthy for who isn’t on there: Mays and Aaron and Mantle, whose batting averages and OBPs were suppressed by the pitcher-dominated ‘60s; Pujols and Cabrera, who faded towards the end; Barry Bonds, who fell two points short on BA because of his first three seasons; Joe DiMaggio, two points short on OBP because of his last two; Wade Boggs, Hank Greenberg, Ken Griffey, and others who missed in one category or who came close but just missed in all three. I suppose the two biggest surprises on the list are the last two; Edgar squeaked by on slugging, Chipper on BA.
There are no active .300/.400/.500 players, or at least nobody with a few seasons on his resume. First of all, there are only two active .300 hitters--besides Arráez, Jose Altuve still makes the cut at .303, but even Altuve’s mid-range power leaves him well short of a .500 SP (a mark he has reached five times seasonally--his OBP is also under .370). If you move down the BA average a bit, you get Trout at .293/.407/.570 and Judge at .292/.412/.614. Again, Trout looked like a cinch early on--with even a shot to join Ruth, Williams, Gehrig, and Foxx in the ultra-rare .300/.400/.600 club--but, if he can hang on re OBP, he’ll finish with two of the three. Judge shocked everyone by winning the batting title last year, so who knows? Eight points of batting average is still a lot to make up at the age of 33; even if Judge gets close or dips above in the next couple of seasons, I expect he’ll slide below after that (cf. Pujols and Cabrera; Thomas just barely hung on). Juan Soto also has two of the three safely covered (.417 OBP, .531 SA), but his lifetime BA is .282; Shohei only has slugging covered, with no real chance, at 31, of getting to .300/.400 in the other two categories. Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Jose Ramirez--HOF hitters all of them, but not destined for the .300/.400/.500 list. Again: this is about beauty, symmetry, and my own old-school obsessions.
I’ve intentionally bypassed one name so far, probably my favourite hitter this decade: the Astros’ Yordan Alvarez. I started an I Love Baseball thread on him in 2023, naming it after the famous description of Kevin Youkilis: “Yordan Alvarez: The Greek God of ‘I'm the Best Hitter on the Planet Right Now.’” (Someone on the board said they misread “Hitter” as “Hitler”--that was grimly funny.) Outside of Houston, Alvarez doesn’t get anything remotely approaching the media coverage or fan adulation enjoyed by Judge and Ohtani, and he’s much less written about than Soto, or Vlad, or Bryce Harper, or any number of players. Purely as a hitter, though, he’s right there near the top of the list. Here are the active leaders in OPS+, along with their slash stats (at the moment, Alvarez is 15 PA shy of the 3,000 needed to appear on Baseball Reference’s career leaders list; he’ll jump onto the list in a week or two):
(There’s a big drop-off from the leaders to Freddie Freeman in sixth place.)
Of the five, I’d say Alvarez is the only one with a
decent shot at finishing his career as the next and 15th name on that
.300/.400/.500 list. He’s got a lot of baseball from here to there still to
play--he doesn’t turn 29 until June--so although any of those numbers could
head south, he also (unlike Judge or Ohtani, I’d say) has enough time left to
edge his BA and OBP to where they need to be. Key to all that is that Alvarez
appears to be just entering his prime: before the start of play today, he leads
the American League--leads both leagues, in fact--in BA, HR, and RBIs. (He also
leads in SP, OBP, hits, total bases, and a number of more esoteric analytic
categories.) Early indications are that he’ll be pursuing a Triple Crown over
the summer, another select group of players--18 TC seasons, 16 different
players (Hornsby and Williams did it twice)--of almost exactly the same number
of members, with Miguel Cabrera the most recent addition in 2012.
And there’s nothing the least bit surprising about that.
When Judge won a batting crown last year, that was disorienting. When BA/OBP
savant Wade Boggs hit 24 HR in 1987, even in a big hitter’s year that seemed to
come out of nowhere. But Alvarez, like Cabrera and Frank Thomas before him, was
put on this Earth to win a Triple Crown. And, if you count the slash-stat Triple
Crown as a thing unto itself, he might just win two this year.
Three obstacles:
1) A history of injuries: since becoming a regular in 2021, Alvarez’s GP log reads 144, 135, 114, 147, 48. 2025 was a write-off, he missed a third of the 2023 season, and there have been other, shorter interruptions. Even as a DH, he’s an injury risk.
2) Even if he is able to play a full season, there’s that Judge fellow from New York. Staying ahead of him in HR is just about the toughest thing you could ask of any hitter today.
3) Alvarez is used to playing on good-to-great teams; early indications are that the Astros are anything but this year, sitting at 10-16 and in last place in the A.L. West at the moment. Could just be a slow start, but they have had a long run of success that was destined to end eventually. The problem right now, though, isn’t their hitting: they lead the A.L. in runs (admittedly, primarily because of Alvarez, so that’s circular evidence). If that holds, his RBI opportunities shouldn’t be too reduced.
Whatever public attention Alvarez has received in his career is largely attributable to some memorable post-season HR he’s hit (what first drew my attention, too), topped by an upper-deck walk-off against the Mariners in 2022.*** That, and his swing, one of those classic, picture-perfect left-handed swings--Ruth, Williams, Mattingly, Griffey, Olerud--that, for reasons I’ve never understood, have a majesty that just doesn’t translate to right-handed hitters. Which brings everything full circle, back to the realm of aesthetics, and for me, that will always cut both ways. There’s the beauty of watching Alvarez hit, absolutely, and if I were John Updike, I’d spend a few pages talking about that. But when configured just right, there’s also beauty in the numbers that document that hitting. And, very quietly, Yordan Alvarez has been configuring them about as well as almost anyone in the history of the game these past few years.
*So much so that I think I’m plagiarizing the phrase “precious commodity” from somewhere.
**Discovered that my red second edition must have
suffered water damage or something--the pages are all crinkly--so I tossed it;
still have the green seventh edition, though.
***Alvarez's regular season numbers are closely mirrored by what he's done in the playoffs: .294/.393/.551 over 252 PA. That was something else that fascinated me flipping through the Mac, players who had the same carryover across the board come October (in smaller sample sizes than today's expanded format). Ruth: .342/.474/.690 vs. .326/.470/.744 in the postseason. Foxx: .325/.428/.609 vs. .344/.425/.609 (only three World Series and 73 PA--uncanny). Clemente: .317/.359/.475 vs. .318/.354/.449. Almost as if great hitters are great hitters--but of course, exceptions are numerous and often infamous.
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