These days, I tend not to promote too many monster cards who are low fielding especially ones that didn’t exactly play a full season in real life. Ones like 2022 Mike Trout with the valuable extras put them over the bump.
I’ll make an exception for World Series hero Yordan Alvarez. His APBA card is pretty juicy, too.
To be fair, Alvarez split his time for Houston between the outfield and the DH role. In that time, he hit 37 homeruns and 68 total extra base hits in just 561 plate appearances. He hit .306 for the season.
AL pitchers were pretty hesitant to give Alvarez anything good to hit. He walked 78 times while striking out 106 times. Not a bad ratio by today’s standards.
| Split | G | GS | PA | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | SB | BB | SO | BA | OBP | SLG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 Totals | 135 | 133 | 561 | 470 | 95 | 144 | 29 | 2 | 37 | 97 | 1 | 78 | 106 | .306 | .406 | .613 |
Alvarez earns a double column hitting card with power numbers 1-1-0-0-0. Had he received a single column card, he most likely would have received just four. Behind his three zeroes, there are eight singles in the second column.
We can count five 14s on Yordan’s 2022 card. There are only five 13s too. I don’t say this often about modern sluggers but that’s impressive especially for a DH/slugger type. Yordan does earn that 31 at 63.
As a part-time DH. it’s not surprising that Yordan Alvarez is rated as a OF-1. He not rated fast but thankfully for Alvarez owners and Astros fans, he is not slow either (making those five 14s that much valuable).
Kudos by the way, to Steve’s APBA-compatible Card Computer who was pretty spot on with Alvarez’ card. I featured Yordan’s unofficial card from Steve’s site back in November before the season was available.
Discussion on the 14s and 13s: If Alvarez had 78 walks and 106 strikeouts, why did he end up with an equal amount of 13s and 14s??
My opinion?? The 14s can be “taken away” via the pitchers’ Z and ZZ rating. On the other hand, Alvarez will get more strikeouts from the pitchers’ X, Y, and certainly the K ratings. It’s true that pitchers with the R rating will decrease strikeouts but they are somewhat rare. And yes, W pitchers will add walks but it’s a lot less than we all think.
On the whole, it should work out in the end.
I was part of a leagues for 15 years in Wisconsin.. The league ran from 1977 to 1991. We had ten teams with an open draft. We had the option of keeping up to 5 players from previous year. I won the league title 5 times. I miss playing but a number of managers just didn’t have the time to keep playing. My main players were Yount,Schmidt, Sandberg, and Henderson.