Hitting The Cutoff Man

It’s always interesting to me how you can know without a doubt something is true but still be surprised by it when the facts are presented in a certain light.

Such is the case with Albert Pujols. I think we can all agree he is the best player in baseball and has been for some time. But how much better has he been than the rest of his peers?

This is a topic St. Louis Post-Dispatch Cardinals beat writer Derrick Goold broached in a recent blog post in which he discussed possible contract negotiations between the Cardinals and Pujols, who is a free agent after the 2011 season. In trying to get a handle on how much dough Pujols could command on the open market, Goold compared Pujols’ career numbers to those of the two highest-paid players in baseball since Pujols started in 2001.

Long story short, Pujols has made about half as much money as Manny Ramirez and a little more than a third as much as Alex Rodriguez in that span and put up considerably better numbers. A-Rod has the edge in home runs, but Pujols’ lead in the much more important rate stats (OBP, SLG, etc) is laughable.

This is what I was saying at the beginning: I already knew El Hombre was better than everyone else, but seeing those numbers in front of me still shocked me.

I’d like to expand a little on Goold’s exercise just to bring even more perspective to Pujols’ dominance. Here are the active leaders in some crucial stats from 2001 to the present, thanks to the invaluable baseball-reference.com (counting only those with at least 1,000 plate appearances):

Batting Average: Pujols .334, Ichiro .333, Mauer .327, Helton .326, Guerrero .321

On-base Percentage: Helton .433, Pujols .427, M. Ramirez .415, Berkman .415, Chipper .415

Slugging Percentage: Pujols .628, M. Ramirez .590, Howard .586, A-Rod .584, Braun .574

OPS+*: Pujols 172, M. Ramirez 157, A-Rod 153, Berkman 149, Thome 149

Runs Created**: Pujols 1,364, A-Rod 1,241, Helton 1,178, Berkman 1,161, M. Ramirez 1,105

These stats give you a pretty good idea of how Pujols has basically been operating on his own plane for the last several years. To put this fact another way, Pujols’ worst OPS+ for one season came in 2002, when he put up a 151. Last season, only four players besides Pujols topped that number, and five did it in 2008. So even Pujols’ “worst” is basically unattainable for just about everyone.

An even better statistic for examining Pujols’ total offensive contributions is wOBA, which stands for weighted on-base average. wOBA appropriately gives more weight to OBP than slugging percentage and also considers stolen bases and caught stealing. It operates on the same scale as OBP. Here are the active leaders in wOBA, via Fangraphs.

Pujols .436, M. Ramirez .419, Helton .419, A-Rod, .412, Thome .406

Finally, Goold used the dollar value calculations on Fangraphs that go back to 2002 in order to get a read on Pujols’ total worth. These calculations take into account batting, fielding and the player’s position (first base is an easy position to play, meaning Pujols is docked a lot of points compared with A-Rod, who has played shortstop and third base). Using Goold’s idea as a jumping-off point, here are Fangraphs’ leaders in value since 2002 for position players (in millions of dollars):

Pujols 230, A-Rod 206.8, Utley 159.1, Berkman 149.7, Chipper 149.1

One more thing to ponder: Derek Jeter has racked up $145.6 million in value during this time, meaning Pujols has been worth 158 percent as much as Captain America. That is close to the difference between Jeter and Randy Winn ($89.5 million).

* Adjusted on-base plus slugging percentage measures a player’s OPS against that of other players in a given season, adjusting for ballpark. An average player has an OPS+ of 100, and better than average players are above 100.

** Runs created measures a player’s contributions to his team’s scoring. Although several other bells and whistles have been added over the years to account for various subtleties, the basic formula is OBP multiplied by total bases.