Tejada v. Reyes Check In

In April we looked at how Ruben Tejada was doing in comparison to then slumping Jose Reyes, which you can read here. At the time Tejada was surpassing Reyes in most categories, things have cooled down a bit but Tejada still has some nice advantages.

Player	AVG	OBP	SLG	WAR	WPA
Reyes	.277	.344	.417	2.4	1.74
Tejada	.311	.356	.373	1.4	-0.92

The first thing to consider when looking at the numbers is that Tejada was injured for a significant amount of the season (played 59 games) while the normally injury prone Reyes has not been hurt at all (played 102 games). Tejada is hitting the ball well and has a clear advantage over NL batting champ Reyes although much of this is due to an extreme slump that started Reyes season that he is still recovering from. Tejada has a slight but inconsequential lead in OBP. The one place where Reyes absolutely own Tejada is speed and it shows in his greater SLG%.

The conclusion here, Reyes is clearly a better player than Tejada but not by much. The simplest measure of comparing two players is WAR, Reyes has exactly 1 win more than Tejada, which is significant but not astronomical. One area where Ruben excels is value. Tejada will make 491k dollars this year whereas Reyes will make 10 million. Tejada is putting up very close numbers to Reyes at a fraction of the cost.