A-Rod and RISP

Many learned baseball statisticians consider the ability to get on base and the ability to hit for power to be the two most vital offensive abilities of a batter. Thus, one measure of a player’s prime offensive talents is to simply combine his On Base Plus Slugging Percentages (OPS).

As it has seemed to me that Alex Rodriguez has been struggling in his Yankee career with Runners in Scoring Position (RISP), I decided to look up his OPS for the last 4 seasons when he bats with RISP. The numbers back up what I thought:

2002, with Texas: 1.231 OPS with RISP
2003, with Texas: .904 OPS with RISP
2004, with NY: .785 OPS with RISP
2005, with NY: .658 OPS with RISP

Granted, 2005 is only 19 games old at this point. But, there’s a trend here. When it comes to batting with RISP, as a Yankee, A-Rod is no where near his production levels that he had his last two years in Texas. At the current rate of decline, A-Rod will be soon be answering to the name of Ed Whitson Jr.

April 25, 2005 | Filed Under Math Class

Comments

4 Responses to “A-Rod and RISP”

Cliff on April 25th, 2005 4:58 pm

Steve, that’s pretty revealing. Though if you recall the piece I wrote for Bronx Banter in December on Rodriguez, his hitting overall has been steadily declining since 2000, even if the decline has been extremely gradual, this is just further evidence of the trend.

http://www.all-baseball.com/bronxbanter/archives/016918.html
Steve Lombardi on April 25th, 2005 5:21 pm

Hmmmm……food for thought. I wonder how his OPS w/RISP vs. OPS w/none on over the last 4 years has trended? I have to look at that soon.
Makofan on April 26th, 2005 11:28 pm

Steve

You have absolutely no clue whenever you talk about A-Rod. You abandon all sense of context and lunge at obscure small sample sizes. Of course, A-Rod didn’t kill a bear with his hands while solving the Rwanda crisis like Jeter did. And if he did, you’d accuse him of grandstanding.
Steve Lombardi on April 27th, 2005 11:04 pm

His PA in 2004 with RISP is a small sample size?