Monday, September 12, 2011
The AL glad you left award
Posted by Bojan KoprivicaSwitching over to American League, here are the players who had the most standout performances as a visiting player against each home team.
Toronto faithful have seen more J.J. Hardy than they'd care for, yet they have hardly seen him do one thing—hit a single. In 30 plate appearances at Rogers Centre, Hardy had 11 base hits, yet only one of them failed to be an extra-base one.
The Angels had a different approach. Torii Hunter conquered New York and Howie Kendrick did so in Tampa, as they combined for exactly zero home runs.
Joe Mauer is the only AL player to win the award in two stadiums, and his performance when playing in Kansas City particularly stands out. He is 17-for-29 there over last two years, good enough for .586 batting average and a cool .618 wOBA.
The only players to perform even better were Carl Crawford from the Rays (we separated performances in case players played for more than one team) with .621 in Baltimore and Joey Bats with his .623 in Minnesota. Bautista's performance in Target Field actually deserves a chart of its own:
Not bad, huh?
After playing, coaching and umpiring more than 500 games all over Europe, Bojan realized that it's actually writing about baseball that can be most easily done while holding a beer in a hand. If you want to discuss either baseball or beer with him, drop him a line.