As promised–as promised late, even–a look at how players with less of a reputation for inconsistency perform when subjected to the arbitrary measure of removing their five best calendar weeks. Here is what we have, from Troy Glaus, to measure by. Glaus’s 740 OPS is just 62% of his 1203 OPS in his best weeks. We’re going to look at the percentages of Albert Pujols, a hitter considerably better than Glaus; Rick Ankiel, a hitter of Glaus’s caliber; and Derrek Lee, a similarly inconsistent–by reputation–thirtysomething hitter.

First up we’ve got the consistent-est player who ever did consist, Albert Pujols. I don’t think I need to recount Pujols’s consistency for anybody devoted enough to their Cardinals fandom to continue to read this blog; he’s never had an OPS+ under 150, he’s never hit fewer than 30 home runs, and he’s never not pronounced the silent g at the end of the word mang. To put one of Baseball Reference’s most notable phantom nicknames to work, he is The Machine.

     G   PA  AB  R   H  2B 3B HR RBI  BB  SO    BA   OBP   SLG   OPS
   +---+---+---+---+---+--+--+--+---+---+---+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 
4/7   7  29  24   7  10  2  0  3   7   5   3  .417  .517  .875 1.392+ 
4/21  7  35  22   6  10  2  0  1   6  11   1  .455  .657  .682 1.339+ 
5/27  6  23  19   5  10  2  0  3   4   4   1  .526  .609 1.105 1.714+ 
7/14  4  15  12   4   7  1  0  0   5   2   0  .583  .600  .667 1.267+
8/4   6  29  22   6  10  2  0  3   8   7   3  .455  .586  .955 1.541+ 
8/18  5  23  19   3  11  4  0  2  10   4   1  .579  .652 1.105 1.757+ 
--------------------------------------------------------------------+
TOT  35 154 118  31  58 13  0 12  40  33   9  .492  .604  .907 1.511   

He is just so, so good. When looking at his good weeks–when looking, even, at his bad weeks–it became difficult to format them correctly, because I had trouble distinguishing the intentional walk line from the strikeout line. You have no idea how difficult this was; weeks in which he hit .400 and didn’t strike out were not only not safe enough to allow me to overlook any particular week–they were almost guaranteed to be replaced by weeks in which he hit .460 and didn’t strike out.

As far as looking for trends in his OPS and going from there, well, there have been exactly three days all year in which his OPS wasn’t, after the game, over 1.000. (One of them was opening day.) I couldn’t include last week, because he only hit .474. If this player is not the most valuable player, the most valuable player award–its goals, its voters, its name–needs to be thrown out and replaced. There’s just no way around it.

So yes–during the total of his five weeks, he was as good as Glaus was in his best week. During the rest of the year, he was… just look at it:

          G   PA  AB  R   H  2B 3B HR RBI  BB  SO    BA   OBP   SLG   OPS  ISO
        +---+---+---+---+---+--+--+--+---+---+---+-----+-----+-----+-----+----+ 
PUJOLS    35 154 118  31  58 13  0 12  40  33   9  .492  .604  .907 1.511  415  
Pujols    89 389 325  53 103 23  0 18  51  56  38  .317  .416  .554  .970  237

Q: How do you get Albert Pujols? A: Just add five weeks of a .500 batting average to David Wright! Pujols’s .970 OPS is 64% of his peak OPS; a Glaus-ian mark, in that category, would put his rest-of-season OPS at .937.

It’s not a major difference, and after this first control group I have to think that the main issue when determining perceived consistency is how good a player is in the first place. Once you get up around 1.200 over a period of time it’s hard to distinguish between super-human and super-super-human, so that Glaus and Pujols seem, when they’re hot, to just be impossible to get out. The gradations between Pujols’s .907 slugging percentage and Glaus’s .720 slugging percentage are just not readily apparent; it’s when they’re human, or human-like, that we notice. A .740 OPS and a .970 OPS… that’s the difference between Scott Rolen 2004 and Scott Rolen 2005. Easier to separate than Barry Bonds 2004 and Barry Bonds 2003.