The Best Tools ratings are a standard of prospect evaluations, but I thought it would be fun to apply that model to the Major League team. First up, Best Power.
Looking at the 2011 Boston Red Sox, power might not be the first thing that comes to mind. The presence of elite speedsters like Jacoby Ellsbury and Carl Crawford is often heralded as a movement away from the long ball heavy days of yore towards increased athleticism and skill. While the team has changed from the slow-footed, lead gloved sluggers that dominated the ’03-’04 era, the 2011 Sox will still sport some serious power. So, which slugger has the most raw power on the team?
Sox fans will all have their own opinion on that question, but with the data available to us now, we should be able to approach the problem logically and find something close to a definitive answer.
When you think of power, you think of home runs, so we should consider them pretty heavily. Home runs aren’t the only manifestation of power, though so we need to use a metric that considers all extra base hits. The obvious answer is Isolated Power, or
From 2008-2010, the four current Sox with the highest total home runs are J.D. Drew (65), Kevin Youkilis (75), David Ortiz (83) and Adrian Gonzalez (107). In fact, these four player are tops in all four of our criteria. After that, it gets a little bit murkier. Gonzalez has the most home runs and the highest HR/FB rate, but he trails both Ortiz and Youkilis in both
*For average home run distance I am using only 2010 data, where as the other numbers are based on the three year sample.
HR/FB |
2010 AVG HR |
|||
107 |
0.238 |
19.70% |
393.3 |
|
83 |
0.241 |
15.60% |
400.3 |
|
75 |
0.252 |
15.10% |
398 |
|
65 |
0.225 |
16.10% |
390.5 |
Looking at everything, the obvious answer still seems best to me; Adrian Gonzalez has the best power on the 2011 Red Sox. I was surprised by Ortiz, you can still argue that he has more raw power than Gonzalez, but I don’t think so. Gonzalez hits screaming line drives regularly and when he does put the ball in the air, it ends up a souvenir almost 20% of the time. His
Who do think has the power on the team?