Best Offensive Rookie Year in History

[twobrewers]

braun has a very very slim chance if he can maintain his current average or improve it slightly and pretty much play everyday from here out.

I believe he can qualify even if he doesn't have enough at bats. If he is say - 10 at bats short, they will just count those 10 at bats as an 0-10 for the purpose of computing the batting title.

 

However, since he isn't batting .350 anymore - taking an 0-10 would pretty much drop him out of contention. Regardless, still an amazing rookie year.

[milwaukeesportsfan]

Braun currently has 399 plate appearances after 139 games. He would need 431 to qualify for the 3.1 PA's/game at this point in the season, which means he needs to average 4.48 PA's/game from here on out to reach the necessary 502 PA's to qualify for the batting title. Right now Braun is hitting .334, behind Utley (.341) and Renteria (.336). Braun has 91 games played this year, for an average of 4.38 PA's/game, so he currently is just below the necessary pace to have enough PA's to qualify. With Yost's penchant lately for taking Braun out late in games, as well as Utley's lead in the race, it looks like it will be difficult for Braun to get enough PA's this year to qualify for the batting title.

[Fatter than Joey]

I would think Utley is barely qualified with all the games he missed.

[homer]

Update:

 

Braun's OPS+ (which is probably a better cross generational stat than OPS) = 161

Ted Williams was 160

Pujols was 158

[milwaukeesportsfan]

Actually, Utley already has enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title. He could sit out the rest of the year, and if nobody passed him up, he would be the batting champ. Crazy.

[endaround]

Its nice to have a team with high OBP to give you PAs.

[brewerfan82]

twobrewers -- I was thinking the same thing. Didn't Captain Lou do that in the minors a couple years ago to win a batting title?

 

Right now, the batting leaders are C. Utley (.338, but may fall short of PAs as well), E. Renteria (.335), M. Holliday (.331), C. Jones (.330), H. Ramirez (.329) and D. Young (.328). If he can throw in empty atbats to qualify and he averages 3.5 PAs the rest of the season (70 additional PAs for 481 total and 22 short of qualifying). At his season pace, he will have about 64 ABs in those PAs. Adding in an 0-22 to get him enough plate appearances, he will have to hit .516 (33-64) the rest of the way to have a .338 "qualifying" BA or, similarly, .500 (32-64) to have a .336 "qualifying" BA.

 

So I think it would take a great finish for Braun to win the title, but let's hope he does and carries us into the playoffs as well!

[brewerfan82]

After a quick look at his recent games, Braun's been averaging almost exactly 4 PAs a game for awhile now. At that rate, he'd have 10 more plate appearances than in my previous post and could go .446 (33/74) to end up with a .338 "qualifying" BA. He would still have to get ridiculously hot, but I guess it's possible *cross fingers* http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif