All-Star First Basemen With The Bases Loaded.

When you hear the term "slugging first baseman" what do you think of? Runs batted in? Home runs? On-base percentage? Personally, I think about the triple slash stat lines. AVG/OBP/SLG%.

Today, I had a conversation about Justin Morneau, and bases loaded situations. Being the curious cat that I am, I decided to look up what he had done this season with the bases loaded, then to compare what I found to the other All-Star first basemen. For those of you who have short memories, those first basemen were: Justin Morneau, Miguel Cabrera, Paul Konerko for the American League and Albert Pujols, Adrian Gonzalez, and Joey Votto for the National League. I looked up five statistics, and put them into a chart. Those 5 statistics were: at bats, RBIs, AVG, OBP, and SLG%. I then made a point system, to determine who is the best hitter with the bases loaded. Since RBIs really, are not in the control of the hitter, no points were awarded for RBIs. Points were awarded for AVG, OBP, and SLG%. Six points for having the highest in any of the three categories, five points for being second, so on and so forth. Here is the chart. Our boy, Morneau didn't fair to well with this.

Keeping in mind the small sample sizes, and the fact that the leader among All-Star first sackers, Ryan Howard has 10 more ABs than Morneau in this situation, and is getting on base just a little bit more than Morneau, as soon as he gets back, the Twins will have a wonderful clean up hitter.

Other surprises? Albert Pujols got only one point! Nobody saw that coming!