The battle for the 2031 Royal Raker awards is proving to be contentious to the end. Midway through September, there is no SL or IL hitter that is clearly dominating over his peers. Instead, there are four superstars battling for the two awards, and there isn't a whole lot that separates any of the four, let alone the respective league pairs. Francisco Rodriguez (F-Rod of the Kentucky variety), Alejandro Lujan, Pat Barry, and Antonio Santos are the four candidates that seem to be a notch above the field. When discussing the Royal Raker award and the candidates for it, there are of course those that would weight some metrics more than others, but there is also a more fundamental discussion about the award - does defense count? How about base running and stolen bases? The name of the award implies a pure hitting award - particularly a power hitting award, but the award is also considered by some as an MVP award that should take into account all aspects of player contribution. In that light, we will not endorse any candidate here, but we will highlight some of their individual achievements for the season that in some form of summation, will earn each candidate votes from GMs of various mindsets.
Hitter WAR
No stat is quite so ambitious in scope is hitter WAR. It attempts to take all aspects of a position player's performance and to roll it into a single number that corresponds to how many team wins that individual player is responsible above what a league average player would provide. It includes defense and adjusts for position, and some formulations even adjust for park factors. Offensively, the metric typically separately tallies base running runs and hitting runs, using wOBA for hitting runs. More demanding defensive positions, including catcher, non-1B infielder, and center fielder are weighted more than less demanding defensive positions or designated hitters.
Each of our four candidates is extremely close by this metric, with Kentucky Fried Rod leading the pack at 7.6 WAR. Santos and Lujan each have 7.5 while Barry has 7.4. These four are firmly ahead of the next group of players that include Pat Watson and Maxime Plamondon (6.6 and 6.5 WAR, respectively) but their similar scores fail to distinguish among them.
Cumulative Hitting Stats
HR
No stat group is quite so much fun as the purely additive ranking of cumulative stats and among those stats, dingers are king...ers. There's no arguing nuance with a young fan when his or her favorite player leads the league in home runs. Sure there's more to baseball than the long ball, but what other metric is quite so weighted in our childhood minds? Among this year's top RR candidates, Shin Seiki's Santos, acquired from Amsterdam in a nefarious deal between brothers that surely involved poorly lit rooms, fire, and alcohol, is king. His 41 home runs put him just ahead of F-Rod's 39 and Barry's 38. Some might point out that he plays half his games in a home run friendly park while F-Rod's home park is neutral and Barry's is designed to rob home runs. Lujan, the lone non-power hitter, plays in the park with no walls and has accumulated only four home runs on the year, contributing his offense through other means.
Result: Barry = Santos, F-Rod >>> Lujan
Hits, TBs, XBHs, 2Bs, and 3Bs
Singles may not be the most exciting play in the game, but ask West Virginia fans how they feel about the four time hit total champ Lujan, and they aren't likely to speak poorly of the 6-time all star. Lujan's 177 hits are once again league leading and are a major contributor to an exceptional WV offense, significantly outpacing Barry's 157, Santos's 140, and F-Rod's 138 hits. Our other candidates, being power hitters, rank highly on the total bases list. Pat Barry's all level power has him leading both leagues in doubles (42) and total bases (315) over F-Rod's 3rd place 291 TB and Santos's 279 TB. Barry also leads both leagues in extra base hits with 81, compared to 3rd place F-Rod's 69, Santos's 53, and Lujan's 36. If Barry has a particular claim to the title over Santos, it's most pronounced in XBHs. Given that triples are just doubles that are trying too hard, we don't need to discuss them. It's difficult to make a direct comparison between Lujan's totals and F-Rod's (would you prefer 33 more XBHs or 72 more singles?), but Barry is markedly outhitting Santos outside of home runs.
Result: Barry >> Santos, F-Rod ?> Lujan
BBs
Baseball's most anti-climactic non-out outcome, the walk, is a crucial and historically underappreciated part of the game. While Pat Barry has made a year for himself aggressively sending line drives to all fields, Santos has been an incredibly patient hitter, posting a PEBA-dominating 95 BBs so far on the year. Barry's 49 BBs make him a solidly patient hitter, but obviously nowhere near what Santos has managed on the campaign. Lujan is also an exceptionally patient hitter, leading the IL with 85 BBs and putting him well over double F-Rod's total of 40 BBs so far.
Result: Santos >> Barry, Lujan >> F-Rod
Stolen Bases and Base Running
Weight them how you will, but several players have made big names for themselves recently with staggering SB totals. While none of the top RR candidates this year are among those historically prolific base pirates, F-Rod stands alone as a significant base stealing threat. His 41 SBs (4 CS) put him well ahead of the rest combined (1 + 3 + 7 = 11). Lujan's 7 SB might seem important until you realize he's been caught 6 times, so he's probably not helping himself in that area. There are several metrics for tabulating base running, but by all metrics, F-Rod is the lone RR candidate with legs.
Result: Barry = Santos, F-Rod >> Lujan
Rate Stats to the Rescue
When trying to measure total contribution, it's easy to compare similar players like Barry and Santos, but it becomes more of a challenge with comparisons between dissimilar players like Lujan and F-Rod. That's where comprehensive rate stats can become handy tools. Runs created per 27, wRC+, OPS/OPS+, and wOBA all try to capture total offensive contributions in various ways while others are more focused on simply trying to erase the effects of playing time when comparing two players. This might seem superficially counter intuitive, but when looking at player A and player B, if they have all the same cumulative stats, but player A has accumulated those stats in fewer appearances, he's hitting better. Whether or not he's more valuable depends on the context, but these are all part of the grand RR picture.
The slash line: AVG/OBP/OPS
The days of considering batting average as the golden offensive metric are long behind us, yet we still crown a prince each year with the highest. Among our candidates, Lujan dominates this category. He's hitting an astounding and league leading .340 while the rest of our candidates hit .299 (Barry), .282 (Santos), and .267 (F-Rod). This dominance carries over to on base percentage, where he leads the pack as well: .430 (Lujan), .401 (Santos), .358 (Barry), and .319 (F-Rod). Where Lujan loses ground is, of course, in OPS, where his lack of power/SLG drops him to 4th place among our candidates: .964 (Santos), .958 (Barry), .881 (F-Rod), and .867 (Lujan). Of course, these results do little to add clarity to any possible ranking of our candidates.
Results: Barry = Santos, F-Rod = Lujan
RC/27, wOBA, and wRC+
These metrics try to quantify run creation into one number. RC/27 is a simple bit of arithmetic while wOBA is a more advanced metric that weights hitting outcomes like walks and doubles based on how many runs they create on average. wRC+ is a little more advanced still in that it's park adjusted, league adjusted, and normalized. This allows comparisons of players in different parks and even in different eras. Since each of our candidates have played a similar number of games (134 to 137 games started), these stats are pretty easy to compare. Lujan (7.7) ranks markedly ahead of F-Rod (6.9) by RC/27, while Santos (8.2) holds a slimmer lead over Barry (7.
. wOBA paints a blurrier picture: Santos and Barry are deadlocked at league-leading .399 while Lujan's 3rd place .374 is ahead of F-Rod's 7th place .366. Lastly, the most complex of these metrics places Barry (183 wRC+) ahead of Santos (176) and Lujan (161) ahead of F-Rod (153). It should be noted that these metrics are purely hitting metrics and ignore base running and defensive contributions.Results: Barry > Santos, Lujan > F-Rod
Just in Case: Defensive Metrics
While it appears most GMs don't intentionally weight defensive contributions when voting for the RR, some may be interested in these stats, if for no other reason than a tie breaker may be in order at the end of the season.
Positionally, third base is considered a more valuable position to play than corner outfield (if we go by WAR metrics) and approximately equivalent in value to center field. This would place RF Pat Barry at a disadvantage to our other candidates, two 3Bs and a CF. When it comes to fielding, we generally care about two things: how much ground can a player defend and how often does he screw that up? Range Factor and Zone Rating are two means of quantifying the former while Defensive Efficiency is a means of quantifying the latter. Comparing Barry to Santos and Lujan to F-Rod is hard because they play different positions, but here goes: (RNG/ZR/EFF)
Santos (2.45 / -0.3 / .992) appears to play a slightly less efficient 3rd base than Barry does right field (2.18 / 2.3 / .992), but again 3rd base is a more valued position.
Lujan appears to play excellent 3rd base (2.61 /8.4 /1.064) while F-Rod plays good center field (3.17 /4.6 / 1.006). While the IL candidates are clearly better defenders than their SL counterparts, there doesn't appear to be anything damning in comparing among SL candidates or among IL candidates.
Results: Santos > Barry , Lujan > F-Rod
While these four candidates stuck out in my review, other darkhorse candidates could steal the award with a strong finish to the 2031 season. Among them, honorable mentions must include Havana's Claudio Hernandez, Shin Seiki's the other F-Rod, and Neo Tokyo's Tomas Martinez. The annual RR threat and original glass cannon, Pat Watson, has some great rate stats but has simply missed too much of the season to earn this year's accolade.
