The lights may be dimming on the Cardinals’ playoff hopes, but the spotlight is still on Albert Pujols and his race with Chipper Jones for the National League batting-average OBP title. While many people are following the pair’s batting-average exploits, the OBP race is even tighter, and, as we’ve argued, more interesting and meaningful.

As in the BA race, the OBP race is Pujols and Jones, and everyone else. Here’s how things stand at the beginning of play Tuesday:

That’s about as tight as you can get. Both players have already met the minimum of 502 plate appearances (based on a full-season schedule of 162 games for each team), so we don’t have to worry about adjusting by adding hitless plate appearances at the end of the season (as Barry Bonds required the last two years). Pujols and Jones have been 1-2 for a while now, and have been back-and-forth since the All-Star break:

Speaking of close finishes, let’s take a look at the league’s history in OBP races (virtual ties have been expressed to four significant digits):

* Hernandez was third with .4094.
^Cravath was third with .402 and Bresnahan was fourth with .401.

The list reveals some interesting matchups, not the least of which are Keith Hernandez’s near-misses in 1984, 1986 and 1979 (he also lost by .003 to Mike Schmidt in 1983, the year the Cardinals booted him to NY). Some more OBP title trivia:

• The Cardinals had one player win the OBP title between Stan Musial (1957) and Hernandez (1980). Who was it? Joe Cunningham in 1959, with a .453 OBP.
• The first Cardinal to win an OBP title (though doubtless uncelebrated at the time) was Mugsy McGraw (yes, he played for St. Louis) with a .505 OBP in 1900.
• Stan the Man won six OBP titles and was runner-up seven times.
• For his part, Albert has finished second twice but never won (not yet, anyway).
• Jones has finished as high as third.

So whereas the Cardinal-Wild-Card chase is liable to end this week, we’re betting that the NL OBP race goes to the wire. We’ll check in again as the season closes — with all the attention on the "old-timey" batting race, the exciting OBP race may not get as much attention as it deserves.

This entry was posted by Pip on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under by the numbers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.