Paul Goldschmidt Is Making a Run at the Triple Crown(s)

While Francisco Lindor is having an MVP-caliber season — that is, one that would not be out of place given historical precedents and that belongs in the discussion of this year’s potential honorees — he’s not the leading candidate for National League hardware. Particularly after what he’s done in August as the Cardinals have pulled away with the NL Central lead, Paul Goldschmidt must be considered the favorite, as he not only leads the NL in all three slash stats (and wRC+), but he has a shot at winning the league’s Triple Crown.

The 34-year-old Goldschmidt finished the weekend hitting .338/.421/.639 with 33 home runs, 105 RBI, a 194 wRC+, and 6.9 WAR. All of those figures lead the Senior Circuit except for his homers, and he’s tied for the RBI lead. Here’s how those numbers stack up versus other NL players:

From a traditional standpoint, Goldschmidt is vying to become the first player to win the Triple Crown (league leads in batting average, homers, and RBI, for you whippersnappers) since the Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera in 2012, and the first NL player to do so since the Cardinals’ Joe Medwick in 1937:

Note that because RBI did not become an official stat until 1920, Lajoie, Cobb and Zimmerman are considered unofficial winners in the eyes of Major League Baseball, though the efforts of researchers that have since been incorporated into Retrosheet have confirmed them as such. Zimmerman’s status as a winner wasn’t really settled until 2015.

Meanwhile, Goldschmidt is trying to become the first player to win the slash-stat Triple Crown over a full-length season since the Brewers’ Christian Yelich in 2019 (Soto did so in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season). There have been 48 such winners overall according to my former SI.com colleague Cliff Corcoran, including eight during the Wild Card era:

The last player to combine both feats — the Triple-Double? the Double Triple Crown? — in the same season was Yastrzemski. It’s been done 10 times since 1901:

I’ll leave it to Dan Szymborski to figure out the odds of Goldschmidt joining that select company if his chase gets closer. For now it will suffice to say that while Lindor, Arenado, Freeman, Manny Machado, and Mookie Betts are having strong enough seasons that one of them going bananas over the final six weeks while Goldschmidt tails off could tip the balance in their favor, the 34-year-old first baseman has to be considered the heavy favorite to bring home the hardware that eluded him in 2013 and ’15, when he was the runner-up in the voting.

Goldschmidt has rocketed into this position thanks to an absolutely torrid second half during which he’s hit .359/.442/.744 (225 wRC+) with 13 homers and 35 RBI. At the All-Star break, he led the NL in the slash categories and advanced ones, but trailed Schwarber in homers and Alonso in RBI; he’s made up a lot of ground since, particularly on the former, who has homered just twice in August:

On June 1, Ben Clemens wrote about Goldschmidt’s hot start and observed that he was having success when swinging at inside pitches, as well as pulling the ball in the air with greater frequency. For the first of those, Ben used a more esoteric definition of “inside” than the standard Gameday zones, though I think those get the point across well enough. Here’s what he’s done on pitches on the inner third of the plate and further inside:

Goldschmidt is getting better results on those pitches on the inner third and in than at any other time in the Statcast era, though that’s in part due to a wider-than-usual divergence between his expected results and his actual ones (a point to which I’ll return). His SLG on those pitches is more than 200 points above his 2015-21 SLG of .540 as well as this year’s xSLG of .551. As you can see by the PA% column, such pitches are also accounting for a larger share of his results than at any other time in the Statcast era.

As for those pulled fly balls, they account for a greater share of Goldschmidt’s batted balls than at any other time in the Statcast era, and his slugging percentage on those is higher than in any other full season since 2017:

At times during the Statcast era, Goldschmidt has been more productive on such balls in terms of AVG and wRC+, but the larger footprint of this year’s batch more than makes up for it.

So, how often is Goldschmidt producing fly balls on these inside pitches? With the caveat that Statcast and Sports Info Solutions’ batted ball classifications tend to differ at times, Goldschmidt has 21 such batted ball events so far, one off his Statcast era season high, set in 2019; he had 21 combined in 2020-21. Those account for 6% of his batted balls, one percentage point ahead of his high set in 2019; he’s generally been in the 3-4% range. His .632 AVG, 2.421 SLG, and 1.145 wOBA on those pitches are all his highest marks since 2018, and miles ahead of his expected numbers (.351 xBA, 1.348 xSLG, .641 xwOBA).

On that note, while Goldschmidt is hitting the ball hard — his 91.0 mph average exit velo, 12.6% barrel rate, and 47.3% hard-hit rate are all in the 83rd to 86th percentile — those numbers are still down a bit from last year. He actually has the majors’ largest gaps between his expected and actual batting average, and the same is true in terms of his slugging percentage and wOBA:

I suspect that the extra share of pulled fly balls — which so often go for extra-base hits – is a major driver of the gaps between expected and actual production; Happ, Canha, Arenado, Bogaerts, Machado, Goldschmidt, and Iglesias all have wOBA-xwOBA gaps of at least .393 on pulled fly balls, which places them in the 82nd percentile or above among players with at least 10 such batted ball events. But as my recent looks at Machado, Lindor (and, peripherally, McNeil) and others have illustrated, there’s more than one route to exceptional production.

I do think that those aforementioned gaps point to some potential for Goldschmidt’s regression over the final six weeks. But particularly with his recent surge coinciding with the Cardinals taking control of the NL Central race — making the games he and Arenado missed in Toronto due to their unvaccinated status (which the Cardinals split) a moot point — the die may be cast when it comes to the NL MVP award. If he does win, Goldschmidt would be the first first baseman to win a full-season MVP award since Joey Votto in 2010. So long as he continues to clean up in the aforementioned statistical categories, it will be tough to mount a convincing argument in any one else’s favor — including that of teammate Arenado, who has hit for “only” a 200 wRC+ in the second half.

Particularly in this impressive season of his, I’ve been asked several times about where Goldschmidt stands regarding the Hall of Fame. I wrote a few paragraphs about him in that context last month, but even since then, he’s made impressive progress. He entered the season ranked 25th overall at 46.5 JAWS, and 0.1 above the peak standard of 42.1 for first baseman. At the time I wrote the aforementioned piece, he had produced his seventh-best season by bWAR, thereby accelerating his climb the rankings. He’s now at 7.1, his second-best season by bWAR, and his overall line has jumped from 50.7/42.2/46.5 at the start of the season to 57.8/44.7/51.2 today. He’s 15th in peak, and 18th overall, 2.6 points below the JAWS standard, and he’ll keep gaining double traction for the remainder of the year; ZiPS projects him for another 1.1 WAR, which would push him past Mark McGwire in JAWS (52.0). I strongly suspect he’s well on his way, regardless of how he fares this awards season — but of course, an MVP award and a Triple Crown (or two) would only further his cause.