A-Rod: Yankees vs. Mariners

Buried at the bottom of this piece from SI’s Tom Verducci is an interesting little note: Alex Rodriguez now has more at-bats with the Yankees than he did with the Mariners. That kind of surprised me at first because it seems like Alex was with the Mariners for an eternity, but yep, he had 3,126 official at-bats with them and right now sits at 3,136 with the Yanks. He must have passed his Seattle total sometime during Saturday’s game (I’m guessing, I didn’t bother to look). Plate appearances is a bit of a different story, because A-Rod has almost two hundred more of those with the Bombers than he did in the Great Northwest (197 to be exact). He’s also appeared in 51 more games with the Yanks than M’s, but I digress.

Since he’s officially had more at-bats with the Yanks than any other team, let’s take a second to look at how Alex’s stats compare with the two clubs.

With Seattle: .309-.374-.561, 17.5 K%, .252 IsoP, .335 BABIP
With New York: .299-.400-.568, 18.9 K%, .269 IsoP, .322 BABIP

There’s a rather significant difference in his counting stats like homers and RBI and stuff like that because he was playing his games in different parks with different teams and different lineups in different divisions, and frankly it was a different era as well (pre-PED testing vs. post). Overall, A-Rod’s been basically the same player. He’s hitting for slightly more power now, which is what you’d expect considering he’s older and spent most of his prime-aged seasons with the Yanks. He’s also sacrificed 10 pts of batting avg for 24 pts of on-base percentage, a tradeoff I’ll take every day of the week.

The biggest difference is that Alex’s numbers with the Yanks are coming from third base, whereas with the Mariners he was manning the middle infield. Those numbers coming from a shortstop aren’t just great, they’re historically great.

The question is this: let’s say A-Rod retired right now, today, for whatever reason. What hat does he wear in the Hall of Fame? All the PED stuff is irrelevant here, this is just a hypothetical. A-Rod’s production warrants unanimous selection into the Hall of Fame if you ask me. What do you think, Yankee cap or Mariner cap? Discuss.