Don’t look now, but Albert Pujols is on his way to winning the Sabermetric Triple Crown. If he finishes the season leading the league in OBP, Runs Created and Total Bases, he’ll be the first Senior Circuit player to do it since Todd Helton in 2000 and the first Cardinal since Stan Musial in 1949.

True, teams still have at least 11 games to go (and the Phillies have 14). But Pujols has opened up a comfortable lead on all his challengers:

Pujols should prevail in OBP. With an average of 4.4 plate appearances per game played, Pujols could go o-fer the rest of the season — 0 for 48 plate appearances (in 11 games) — and still have an OBP of .416. If in those 48 PAs, he reached base safely just three times, he would tie Nick Johnson’s .421 OBP.

To top Pujols in Runs Created, Prince Fielder would have to average two more runs created than Pujols each game. To put this into perspective, Fielder is averaging .9 RC per game. (he has 135 in 150 games played), so he would have to produce more than double his season per-game average just to tie if Pujols stopped playing today.

Total bases are a similar story. With Pujols’s lead of 37, Fielder would need to hit a triple (or the equivalent number of total bases) every game the rest of the way and Pujols not play another game.

It would be the 25th NL triple crown, of which an amazing 10 would be held by Cardinal players (Musial has three, Rogers Hornsby five and Crab Burkett one):

Even if TLR rests Pujols a couple of times after the Cardinals clinch, Pujols should be in good shape to win. We’ll be the first to salute him on a triply superlative season.

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.