Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
Baseball has never loved guys like Dunn, Kingman, Rob Deer, Gorman Thomas, and so on and so on with high HRs, high Ks and low BA. Jeff you say it's more accepted now but is it? The overall impact should still be the same, whether you measure it by WAR or something else.
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I don't know that we can lump Pete Alonso into the group of high strikeout/low average folks you mentioned, just yet.
His career WAR of 17.6 in 4.5 seasons is already almost as high as the career totals for Dunn (17.9), Thomas (19.8), and is higher than Kingman (17.3), Deer (13.8).
This got me thinking though, so I put together the below table to compare and added a few other sluggers (Howard, Kiner, Ortiz, and Thome).
A few things jumped out: Alonso's Strikeout to At-bat rate of 26% is lower than most others. But his walk rate is per Plate Appearance is lower than all of them except Kingman.
His HR/AB is the highest, and is actually even higher this year at 8.9%.
What I fear is that because he is a very large man, he may not age well. And he started his career relatively late, getting to the majors at age 24. Thome is a large man who aged well, but many think he did Roids. Same for Ortiz.