Helton is locked up until 2013. That will take him to his 39th B-Day and Year 17 of his career. He currently has 2134 hits which came in 7761 plate appearances. Assuming he gets a hit every 3.64 plate appearances, it will take him another 3150 more plate appearances to get the 866 hits he needs. He has played in 1812 games so it will probably take about another 735 games to get there or about 5 more years. My guess is that if he gets close he will play a year or two in the AL as a DH to get the magic number.
In speculation who would win if the 86 Mets played 2009 Yankees...guess only a NYer would care...according to them it would have been the 86 Mets. What if Sports.com is a neat little site. I ran a simulation of the 2007 Rox vs the 2009 Rox. 2009 Rox won the seven game series 4 - 1. Games really weren't close...2009 version scored 4, 18, 12, and 15 in their wins.
And finally the Sunday New York Times had a nice article about our Rox...you know all the media attention is starting to scare me...every time we get some love we usually turn around and lay an egg!
Is it a Bad Day?
The 2009 version of the Rox committed 87 errors. I have often wondered if an error in the field translates off the field and into the Batter Box (vice versa does a bad day at the plate lead to more errors?). Looking at the 2009 box score (courtesy of baseball-reference.com) the scores show that 23 players committed at least one error. 18 of the 87 errors were committed by pitchers and Barmes led the team with 13.
One problem that immediately jumps out at me is the total number of bats, on days errors were committed, only amounted to 226 bats by players committing errors. These same 23 players had a total of 4,895 bats during the entire season so basically the error at bats only account for 4.5% of the total at bats. So the data to me is entirely suspect because I could probably just randomly pick 226 at bats and probably get similar results. Furthermore, I then took the 9 pitchers out because they only accounted for 21 at bats and their pitching (a study for another day...) would probably be more affected then their at bats.
So instead of 226 total at bats, we reduced this to 205. Of these 14 position players, they had a total of 4,750 at bats in 2009 (so again this sample size is only 4.3% of the total). Data suggests that on error days the Rox batted 0.215 compared to 0.267 during the season. Slugging percentage was 0.410 on error days compared to 0.462 during the season and strikeout percentage (K divided by at bats) rose to 0.293 on error days compared to 0.230 during the season. Any of these results statistically relevant? Maybe...converting percentage points (percentage difference over total at bats) to hits, it would appear that on error days the Rox hit 249 less hits over an entire season.
On the bright side both Atkins and Tulo seem to make up for their errors at the plate. Both of them have higher averages on error days. Each had 9 errors (27 and 29 at bats, respectively) so again just a small sample size. No conclusions at this point but interesting none the less...will have to track 2010.
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