Chris Coghlan of the Florida Marlins burst onto the scene last year and put together a fantastic rookie season with the bat, compiling a .321/.390/.460 slash line in 504 PA en route to the NL Rookie of the Year award. Take a closer look at that slash-line, as Coghlan came within one-thousandth of a batting average point of finishing the year with a perfectly rounded slash line. There are no awards to commemorate such an achievement, but, c'mon, you know it would have been fun if he ended the season hitting .320/.390/.460. His numbers got me thinking — how often does a rounded slash line occur? And, of the players in this hypothetical sample, have any achieved their "feat" in a significant number of trips to the dish?
Querying from 1974-2009, I found 1,227 batter-seasons with a rounded slash line, a sample accounting for approximately four percent of all seasons in the span. Not all 1,227 lines were created equally, however, as a pretty penny of the seasons belonged to players who hit, say, 1.000/1.000/2.000 in one plate appearance. Paring the list down to those who actually, you know, played the game, only 21 players rounded their lines while amassing 100 or more plate appearances. Of this group:
That one? Well, that would be none other than the Centaur himself, Alex Rodriguez, who hit .310/.360/.560 in 748 plate appearances back in 1998. His compadres with 600+ PA:
- Fred McGriff, 1990: 658 PA, .322 TAv, .300/.400/.530 line
- Tim Wallach, 1985: 617 PA, .275 TAv, .260/.310/.450 line
- Dave Concepcion, 1980: 669 PA, .245 TAv, .260/.300/.360
And that's it — nobody aside from these four has finished a season with a rounded slash line while playing all year. But, as you'll notice, their TAv's weren't rounded, and that darn A-Rod finished at .302 in 1998 as well. That being said, has anyone ever achieved a quadruple-round, with BA/OBP/SLG and TAv rounded? Well, yes and no. Players have technically accomplished this but not in any meaningful number of plate appearances. Of the 103 to produce a quadruple-round, only two players did so in 100+ PA:
- Jay Canizaro, 1996: 132 PA, .200/.260/.300, .190 TAv
- Chris Sexton, 2000: 118 PA, .210/.310/.250, .200 TAv
Coghlan finished with a .299 TAv, meaning that he was one-thousandth of a point from becoming just the 9th player in the last 40 or so years to have a rounded slash line and another thousandth of a point away from having the most PAs for any quadruple-round player. He won the Rookie of the Year but he has to be disappointed about this.
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For example, I can do this exercise.
- Suppose that the number of ABs is a uniform distribution bound by 100 and 650.
- Suppose that batting averages are distributed normally with a mean of .270 and a variance of 0.20.
- Using the above distribution, generate an integer number of hits H. Then the third digit in the ratio H/AB has the following distribution (10 million Monte Carlo realizations):
0: 10.3%
1: 9.0%
2: 9.0%
3: 9.3%
4: 9.0%
5: 9.1%
6: 9.1%
7: 9.1%
8: 9.2%
9: 9.0%
(I checked my random number generator. It returns 10.0 % for each possible value of the first digit of a uniform distribution between 0 an 1.)
(But the whole discussion is kind of moot, as the third digit in a ratio stat for an individual's single-season baseball performance means absolutely nothing, as the result of a single plate appearance in a full season affects the rate stat by more than 0.1%.)
The actual distribution is:
0: 10.1%
1: 9.9%
2: 10.0%
3: 9.9%
4: 10.0%
5: 9.9%
6: 10.0%
7: 10.0%
8: 10.1%
9: 9.9%
The 0.1% is statistically significant. However, I think the real effect is that denominators in AVG and SLG coincide, i.e., If you have a number of ABs that results in an average with a 0 in the 3rd digit, then you are much more likelier than 10% to also have a 0 in the 3rd digit in the slugging percentage.