Thursday, August 26, 2010

Best Season of All-Time

'Tis the season to discuss annual player awards (while we wait for the playoffs to get interesting).

But rather than going through the usual enumeration of who should win (according to me) or how WIS figures out who to put on the ballot, this year I'm going to focus on just one player's performance this year and how it stacks up to Belle's best seasons ever.

That one player, of course, is the Salem Goonies' slugging DH, Jose Vargas, who missed winning the AL Triple Crown by 11 RBI (.370/49/121).

What I got to wondering was how Vargas' season really compares to the top offensive seasons of Belle. All of the previous top 5 RC27 seasons in Belle occurred in the steroid era (which for us ended during Season 13). Vargas' season actually comes in at #5.

I'm not a stats guy, so somebody correct me if this is erroneous. To get an estimate of the difference between the steroid era and now, I just looked at average runs scored in the AL in Season 2 (Steven Spencer's all-time best RC27 of 17.05) and this season's AL average. Runs were 22.76% higher in the AL in Season 2.

Add 22.76% to Vargas' 14.399 RC27 this year and you have 17.68, which would top Spencer by a fair amount.

I think he's got a case.

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