Yordan Alvarez entered Wednesday leading the American League in batting average at .311, tied for the AL home run lead with 38, and sitting at 95 RBIs. That is a Triple Crown line with about three weeks to play.
It is also a Triple Crown line that has been slipping for six weeks, and that is the part of this story nobody wants to talk about.
Since the start of August, Alvarez has hit three home runs and driven in 13 runs. Those are not Triple Crown numbers. Those are the numbers of a hitter who is either hurt, tired or getting pitched around by a league that figured out he was the only real threat in the lineup.
The Three Races
The batting average is the safest of the three. Alvarez has led the AL in average for most of the season and a .311 mark with a strong plate approach behind it tends to hold. Batting titles are won by hitters who stop chasing, and Alvarez does not chase.
The home run race is a coin flip. He is tied with Tampa Bay’s Junior Caminero at 38, and the 38th was a career high for Alvarez, which is worth pausing on. He has never gone deeper into a season with this many homers. Caminero is 23 and has been on a heater. In a dead heat with three weeks left, a slumping power hitter against a surging one is not the side you want.
The RBI race is the biggest problem. Alvarez has 95. Baltimore’s Pete Alonso has 97 and drove in two on Tuesday. Alvarez has one RBI in September. You cannot win an RBI title without runners on base and without the health to be in the lineup daily, and Houston’s offense has not been feeding him opportunities.
The Historical Weight
Nobody has won a Triple Crown since Miguel Cabrera in 2012, and before that you have to go all the way back to Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. Forty-five years between crowns. That gap exists because modern baseball fragments the categories: the batting average guys do not hit 40 homers, the 40-homer guys strike out too much to hit .310, and the RBI leader is usually whoever hits behind the best on-base team in the league.
Alvarez threading all three was always going to require a perfect final month. Instead he is having his worst stretch of the season at the exact moment he needed his best.
My Call
He does not get it. Alvarez wins the batting title, and I would not bet against him there. He probably finishes second or in a tie in home runs. And the RBI race is the one he almost certainly loses, because he is trailing, he is not driving in runs, and Alonso is in a better situation for counting stats.
Two out of three is an enormous season and it will get him MVP votes. It is not a Triple Crown, and pretending otherwise ignores what the last six weeks have actually looked like.
The thing to root for is a hot final week. If Alvarez runs off a stretch where the power returns, all three races tighten at once and this becomes appointment viewing every night. Baseball has not had a Triple Crown chase go to the final weekend in a long time. Even a near miss is worth watching.
But the smart money says the drought reaches 14 years, and Alvarez becomes the latest hitter to hold all three categories in August and none of them in October.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
