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):
| Year | Tm | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1938 | PHA | .307 | .369 | .424 |
| 1939 | PHA | .307 | .370 | .423 |
Generated 8/5/2013.
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:
| Year | Tm | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1997 | PIT | .267 | .300 | .412 |
| 1998 | PIT | .267 | .298 | .414 |
Generated 8/6/2013.