Chris Davis’s Oddly Historic Season So Far

A lot of ink (and pixels) have been spilled about Chris Davis’ great season.  It’s hard to overstate just how great a .337/.432/.721 start through roughly one-third of the season is, especially in this renewed era of depressed offense.  MLB’s .722 OPS this year so far ranks it as Baseball’s second-lowest since 1992’s .700.  (2011 = .720)  Quite straight, Davis is having the best offensive season in the American League of any player whose first name is not some variation of “Michael”.

Here’s yet another data point for you to chew on: Chris Davis is on track to have one of the highest extra-base hit (XBH) to plate appearance (PA) ratios in history.

As of the morning of Memorial Day 2013, Davis has hit an XBH in 16.5% of his PAs.  In conversational terms, he hits an XBH about every six times he steps to the plate.

If Davis were to end the season with this ratio and qualify for a batting championship, it would rank second in history behind this other guy’s pretty good season.

In fact, only nine qualified players in modern history have ever had an XBH-PA ratio of greater than 15% over the course of an entire season.  Here is the list, with Davis’s 2013 added for context:

Rk	Player	Year	XBH	PA	XBH %
1	Babe Ruth	1921	119	693	17.2%
2	Chris Davis	2013	34	206	16.5%
3	Albert Belle	1995	103	631	16.3%
4	Lou Gehrig	1927	117	717	16.3%
5	Barry Bonds	2001	107	664	16.1%
6	Babe Ruth	1920	99	616	16.1%
7	Jeff Bagwell	1994	73	479	15.2%
8	Al Simmons	1930	93	611	15.2%
9	Albert Belle	1994	73	480	15.2%
10	Todd Helton	2001	105	697	15.1%

You may have noticed that 30% of the players on this list are named either Al or Albert, but none of them are named Pujols.  None of them are named Miguel, either.  In fact, the closest the reigning American League Triple Crown winner has come to cracking this list was in 2010 with a 13.0% XBH-PA ratio, and as of this morning he sits well out of range in 2013 at 12.5%, despite his own empirically otherworldly start.

This is, without a doubt, a most exclusive list of a most consistently slugging nature.  It’s enough to send pitchers into grand mal seizures at the very contemplation of this.  Or perhaps more exactly, it might if they were even aware of it.  This data point has probably not yet been illuminated in quite this way—this here article is the closest I myself have found so far, and Davis is not even the star of the piece.  But that does not mitigate the impressiveness of this feat of his so far.

This is not to say that Chris Davis is a better hitter than Miguel Cabrera, or Albert Pujols or Joey Votto or even Shin Soo Choo, for that matter.  But even if this does turn out to be a world class-level fluke season for him, Davis has a chance to crack an elite list inhabited only by the greatest of the great, even if he never knows it.