Meet the new Slash, same as the old Slash

Mike Trout’s 2012 AL Rookie of the Year campaign was one for the ages. He compiled a .326/.399/.564 line in 129 games. The resulting .963 OPS was the 16th-highest rookie mark amongst batting title qualifiers in baseball history, and the highest since Albert Pujols’ 1.013 rookie OPS in 2001.

This season, not only is Trout not suffering a sophomore slump, he is maintaining or slightly improving upon those slash stats. Going into Tuesday evening, he was “slashing” .329/.423/.568 for a .991 OPS. This consistency, especially in the batting and slugging averages, got the VORG wondering what the record is for the smallest absolute difference in a player’s slash stats from season-to-season.

In order to minimize the comparisons of players with .000 (or any other “.100”) totals in a category, we restricted our universe to those players with at least 100 at-bats in each of two successive seasons. Here are the results:

Wally Moses 1938-9: absolute difference of 2 points (1 point in OBP, 1 point in SLG):

Six players had an absolute difference of 4 points between seasons. The most recent player to achieved this was Jose Guillen in his first two major league seasons:

There have been a few cases in which a player has had two of the three slash categories match up exactly in consecutive seasons:

Dummy Hoy 1888-9: same batting average and OBP:

Danny Moeller 1915-6: same batting average and OBP:

Walker Cooper 1950-1: same batting average and OBP:

Andrew McCutchen 2009-10: same batting average and OBP:

Mike Stanley 1991-2: same batting average and OBP (he also hit .249 in 1990):

Al Spalding 1875-6: same batting average and SLG:

Cesar Cedeno 1972-3: same batting average and SLG:

Gary Roenicke 1980-1: same OBP and SLG:

Gene Woodling 1949-50: same OBP and SLG:

Billy Sullivan 1907-8: same OBP and SLG:

Garry Templeton 1988-9: same OBP and SLG: