A shout out
24 April 2006
A lot of people that have been around me and that I've talked baseball with know that I absolutely love Todd Helton. If there could be an award every year for the most underrated player in the league, last year Helton would've taken home his 8th straight trophy.
16 million a year is too much for this guy?
Excluding his 35 game short stint in his rookie year (where he still hit .280), Helton has never dropped below a .315 batting average for the last 8 years, he's hit 20+ home runs every year, picked up a couple of gold gloves, flirted with .400 and has a hefty .608 slugging percentage.
To put that into perspective, Bonds currently has a career .610 slugging percentage. With that, I'm not sure that there is another player in the league that has hit at least .300+ every year since their rookie season. I'll go as far to say that no current player has ever had 8 straight years of a .300+ average. Although I don't know this for a fact, but it's still quite an amazing stretch. I'm not saying he'll come close to breaking Cobb's 23 straight seasons of .300+, but Tony Gwynn's 14 seasons is well in sight.
If someone could find another player (or players) that have had a stretch anywhere close to this (besides that Pujols character), I would really like to know. Maybe I'm just overlooking the league, or maybe I'm just very biased towards how good of a hitter Todd Helton is.