As I’m sure you know, there are scores of internet writers who write exclusively about baseball, and dozens more who write about baseball in addition to other topics.  To the best of my knowledge, none has written a word about Mike Trout this season.

In case you haven’t heard, Mike Trout is a rookie outfielder for the California Angels of Orange County, and he’s got a pretty good chance of winning the Rookie of the Year this year.  In fact, if super slugger Miguel Cabrera hadn’t already locked up the AL MVP, we might be talking about Trout for that award as well.  Click below to see why.

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Stephen Strasburg was shut down after pitching on September 7.  The Nationals are 4-1 since then.  This says absolutely nothing about Strasburg.

There’s been plenty of talk about the team’s decision to shut Strasburg down after nearly 160 innings.  The dissenting opinion tends to revolve around the idea that the Nationals are much more likely to win the World Series with Strasburg pitching.  This is probably true, unless we’re willing to attribute his late-season struggles to incurable fatigue.  But just how much worse are the Nationals without Strasburg?  Find out after the jump

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For my first post on High Heat Stats, I’m taking a shortcut and recycling something I wrote for Replacement Level back in April.  It’s no more or less relevant today, but I think it’s worth a little more discussion than it got in my dark corner of the blogosphere.

Bonds 73, McGwire 70, Sosa 66…
Gibson 1.12, Gooden 1.53, Maddux 1.56…
Hornsby .424, Sisler .420, Williams .406

There are single season numbers like the home run totals listed above that the average baseball fan has committed to memory (even if some fans would prefer to remember Maris 61, Ruth 60, Ruth 59…). There are others, like Gibson’s 1.12 ERA and Williams’s .406 batting average, that may not actually be all-time records, but if we look past the deadball era, they stand out so far above more recent accomplishments that we can’t forget them.

Read the rest to see the numbers you should really know.

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