I had someone tweet me a few days ago asking who is better Miguel Cabrera or Mike Trout. Well, given the Cabrera just won the triple crown - something that has not occurred since before I was born, it should be Cabrera by a mile - right? Not exactly.
So, since we are comparing batters in the same season, the easiest method is to use the Blass Runs Produced measure of MLB batters. So, that is what I am doing. Now for the disclaimer: since I have not had time to download and run the regression on the MLB 2012 season, I will use the weights for the statistics for the 2000-2011 regular seasons to evaluate the two players performance. Each year, I try to tackle this in February when I get the itch for baseball (and the Lehman database is posted on the internet).
Given this disclaimer of using the 2000-2011 statistical weights from the runs scored linear regression, I calculate that Miguel Cabrera is slightly more productive than Mike Trout. Cabrera comes in at 111.98 and Trout at 109.51, or a difference of just only about two and a half runs produced. In the scheme of things, this is not a large difference.
For the details on how I made this calculation:
MLB Team Runs Productivity
MLB Batter Runs Productivity