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.

RBIs

Let’s start with the easiest one to place: RBIs.

This one is easiest to predict only because Martinez has a solid lead over the rest of the league in this category. Martinez’s 89 RBIs top his closest competitor’s total, Khris Davis‘ 84 ribbies, by five.

So here’s what we are going to do. We are going to look at the AL and NL RBI leader on July 31 each year since 2002 (FanGraphs splits leaderboards only goes back that far). We will take note of the margin the player is leading his league by and whether or not he won the RBI crown. To avoid opening a can of worms we will throw out all years that involved a tie at the top of the leaderboards at the trade deadline.

So of the 28 data points not invalidated by ties, the league leader in RBIs finished first 15 times. Further, if we want a closer picture to our current leaderboard we can consider only seasons when a player led his league by five or more RBIs (again, Martinez currently leads by five). In these cases, the league leader at the trade deadline went on to win six out of twelve times.

We could go in further depth, but the numbers seem to be pointing to about an even split for Martinez.

Odds of leading the league in RBIs: ~50%

Home Runs

This one is more complicated only because Martinez is tied at the top of the American League with Jose Ramirez at 32 dingers a piece. So we will use the same methodology as above, ignoring the fact that Ramirez exists, and then divide the resulting odds by two to account for the Indian’s slugger.

In 16 of the 28 non-void data points, the league leader in homers on July 31 went on to lead his respective league in home runs. We could be more cynical and look at years where the league leader was above his closest competitor by three homers or less (Martinez and Ramirez sit three homers above Mike Trout). In these cases, the player went on to lead his league in homers nine times out of twenty (again, throwing away voided data points).

Going with that number, there is at least a 45% chance Ramirez or Martinez will lead the league in round-trippers. Cutting that in half, we get a 22.5% chance Martinez leads the AL in homers.

Odds of leading the league in home runs: ~22.5%

Triple Crown Odds

To put these all together we simply multiply the percentages to calculate the odds of Martinez leading the league in each category.

.50 x .225 x .111 = .0124875

So we have found the lower bound for J.D. Martinez’s triple crown odds to be approximately 1.25%.

That’s not particularly likely of course, but stranger things have happened and this is still just a lower bound. When adjusting for the lack of independence of these categories my gut tells me it’s closer to 3-5% (which is not, by any means, a scientific estimate).

But if there’s any conclusion from this piece it’s that winning the triple crown is really, really hard no matter how great of a season you’re having and everything has to break just right. Let’s hope it does.