Silver Slugger Showdown

Last week Colorado Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki won the Silver Slugger award, the even less glamorous cousin to the already not that exciting Gold Glove award. I, of course, was outraged that Jose Reyes, who won the NL batting title did not also win this award. This is however to be expected since I generally believe that the Met’s should always be winning awards that the general public thinks they don’t deserve. I decided to take a look at the numbers and try to determine two things.

1) Who really deserved the silver slugger?

2) Who is a better hitter?

The silver slugger is awarded by coaches who consider various stats as well as the "coaches' and managers' general impressions of a player's overall offensive value", which means they can pretty much decide arbitrarily. As far as I can tell the specific criteria used isn’t laid out anywhere so we can assume the coaches are using basic batting stats: Batting Average, OPS, RBI and HR’s. Here is the breakdown on those four categories.

	BA	OPS	RBI	HR
Reyes	337	877	44	7
Tulowitzki	302	916	105	30

Using only the most basic categories, you would have to give the award to Tulowitzki. He has a significant lead in homeruns and RBI and a slight lead in OPS. Reyes of course lead the entire NL in batting average. RBI however is unfair to judge between the two. Reyes is a lead off hitter and therefore is naturally going to have less RBI as he doesn’t have anyone to knock in. Despite that Tulo still leads in two categories and does well enough in BA to deserve the award.

Let’s see how things look with more advanced stats.

The first thing we notice is that these two players are remarkably similar. In the following stats Reyes and Tulo had near identical numbers. WAR, wOBA, wRAA and wRC measure overall productive value, while o/z swing and contact % measure plate discipline (more information about any of these stats can be seen at www.fangraphs.com).

	WAR	wOBA	wRAA	wRC	o swing%	z swing%	Contact %
Reyes	5.8	386	32.7	98	32.3	58.2	90.2
Tulowitzki	5.8	389	35.2	103	26.6	57.7	88.5

These numbers indicate that both players have about the same impact over an average replacement player and both have similar levels of plate discipline and that in both cases they are in the top echelon among all players.

The final thing to look at is speed, Jose Reyes is a prolific base stealer and therefore much more dangerous once he gets on base. He outpaces Tulo in steals 39-9. However for the purposes of this report we are examining hitting ability so we won’t count stolen bases. The other speed factor to look at is doubles and triples:

	2B	3B
Reyes	31	16
Tulowitzki	36	2

Here we see that Reyes is the clear leader. He outpaces Tulo in triples by a large margin and is only behind him in doubles by 5, largely because he stretched a lot of doubles into triples. However in total extra bases Troy still has 30 homers to add to his tally.

Conclusion:

I started off this process with the idea that I was going to prove Reyes the better hitter and I have to admit, this was probably just the homer in me. The numbers show that these two players are nearly identical in most categories. The only huge variation is in homeruns and batting average. In the end .35 batting average points is not as valuable as 23 more homeruns. Ultimately I have to admit that Tulo deserved the Silver Slugger and is a better batter.