<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">In his last 100 at-bats on the road, Jose Altuve has 51 hits.</p>— Brian McTaggart (@brianmctaggart) <a href="https://twitter.com/brianmctaggart/status/755857565007831040">July 20, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This will rock your world. Altuve is hitting .500 (49-for-98) in his last 23 road games.</p>— Brian McTaggart (@brianmctaggart) <a href="https://twitter.com/brianmctaggart/status/755655151860518912">July 20, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
are bonita fish big? <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This is insane. h/t <a href="https://twitter.com/MLBNetwork">@MLBNetwork</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Altuve?src=hash">#Altuve</a> <a href="https://t.co/7tMd0OQway">pic.twitter.com/7tMd0OQway</a></p>— Alyson Footer (@alysonfooter) <a href="https://twitter.com/alysonfooter/status/756137253403922433">July 21, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Except he is doing it against Major League pitching. If we offered Jose for Trout I bet the Angels do that given how great Altuve's contract is, but I wouldn't since Altuve has a such a good contract.
when he first came into the league, I thought he would be david Eckstein on roids. I'd make comments like how much fun he is to watch, only for the oldies to come out with oh buhumbug what's so fun about altuve. he is no longer that fun contact hitter. he is a baseball holy phenom. even the millennials, who use baseball games a background noise, stop and watch altuve at the plate. So glad the organization didn't hand over the keys to Kemp.
If you want to know how good Jose Altuve has been so far in his career, all you have to do is look at his Bill James similarity score through age 25.... #1 Billy Herman #2 Pete Rose #3 Rod Carew Those are three all time Hall of Fame elite players. There are 10 batting titles, 10,000 hits and 46 all star appearances between those three guys. A lot can happen over the next dozen years, but Altuve is on track to have a Hall of Fame career through age 25... if he keeps this up, he will have two batting titles, have lead the league in hits three times and stolen bases three times by age 26.
The baseball-reference similarity scores don't apply because he wasn't in the MLB yet, but to me the guy Altuve compares really closely to is Ichiro. Altuve thru age 26: .311 / .354 / .432, 117 OPS+ Ichiro age 27 thru 42: .314 / .357 / .405, 108 OPS+ The difference obviously is that Ichiro has some old age bad years at the back end weighing him down; but the other big difference is that Ichiro, even in his single season hits record year, never put up the kind of numbers that Altuve is putting up this year. Ichiro's max OPS+ is 130, when he hit .372 with 262 hits. The max his slugging ever got to, however, was .465. Altuve had an OPS+ of 135 two years ago when he batted .341 with 225 hits. I think most of us at the time myself included figured that would be Altuve's greatest year of his career. With his free swinging style we figured he'd never learn the necessary plate discipline to do better than the high batting avg low OBP player he'd been his whole career, basically an inferior Ichiro. Well this year Altuve has an OPS+ of 166 and splits of .357 / .427 / .563 so far. He's on pace to do something we rarely see anymore, walk more than he strikes out. Now it's not fair to compare leadoff hitter types to those power hitting HOF types that routinely have OPS+ >150, but look at a guy like Biggio whose best year was 1997 (OPS+ 141, .309 / .415 / .501) or Derek Jeter whose best year was 1999 (OPS+ 153, .349 / .438 / .552), and you start to have perspective on just how good Altuve's year has been. And what kind of stratosphere it's propelling him into. We're not talking about marginal HOF here. If he keeps this up he's a shoe-in. An icon.
The hand-eye coordination and plate discipline means his game should age well; and he very well go on a run of batting titles like Rod Carew did at about the same age. Ichiro is a good comparison, I like the Rod Carew comparison personally.
I love the above few posts/comparisons. He's a legend at this point, and it's still kind of hard to comprehend because he didn't come up with the fanfare of Correa or Bregman. I might get killed on this forum for saying this, but there is some similarity to Steph Curry. I think we're not used to star and superstar players improving at this rate once they reach stardom. It's just impossible to predict or expect massive leaps once a player has achieved something fairly historic in the way Curry did 2 years ago, or Altuve 2 seasons ago. But both players achieved great things fairly early in their careers, and they both put in a ton of work to continue to improve. Great work ethic. Insane drive. And super skilled, of course.
That's incredible. Videogame esk.... some of the responses in the tweet from Alyson Footer cracked me up. Spoiler
Whoever said trade Altuve for Trout, that's just idiotic. Altuve has a 5.6 WAR playing at 2B. This is far greater than Trout having a similar war in CF. Check out the war of other 2B in the league, there's Altuve, Cano and no one else at this level. That's just reason #1 why Altuve is hands down is the best pound for pound player in baseball, and it's really not close when you consider the position he plays.
The point being you find 2B that can do what Altuve is doing. Trout is a great CF, but there are many more CF than 2B that could do what Altuve is doing.
