Red Sox: Calculating the odds J.D. Martinez wins the triple crown

J.D. Martinez has been phenomenal for the Boston Red Sox, leading the league in homers and RBIs. Does he have a legit shot at the triple crown?

Boston Red Sox slugger J.D. Martinez has been one of the best hitters in baseball in 2018. He’s slashed .323/.391/.638 with 32 home runs and 89 RBI.

Martinez is leading the American League in both homers and RBIs. Considering that Martinez is also in third place in the AL in batting average, one begins to wonder if the triple crown award is in play.

Only Miguel Cabrera has won a triple crown award since Carl Yastrzemski achieved that honor while leading the “Impossible Dream” Red Sox to the 1967 World Series. In the rest of this post, I am going to try to calculate the odds that Martinez ends 2018 with a triple crown of his own.

So here is the way we are going to do this: I am going to try to calculate the odds Martinez wins each of these three categories and then multiply the probabilities. Because leading the league in these three categories are not independent events (every home run Martinez hits, for example, lifts all three boats) this methodology will yield a lower bound on his triple crown odds. We know that leading the league in home runs and RBIs are tied especially close together so the actual probability will be somewhat higher than our final mark, but a conservative estimate here should prove enlightening.