Major League Baseball Players

Erin Ford
Staff Reporter

Imagine who you think is the best RHS varsity baseball player. Normally, you can compare high school baseball players by their number of hits, homeruns, and their batting average. Most people completely ignore the fact that major leaguers play around three times as many games as high school players. So the next time you try and compare high school players to major leaguers, check out the major leaguers’ high school stats. Here are a few players with insane high school stats:
Ken Griffey, Jr. attended Archbishop Moeller High School and was the baseball player of the year in 1986 and 87. He also played football for three years for his high school team. Griffey now plays for the Seattle Mariners, and is considering retiring after the 2010 season. In 1991, while playing for the Mariners, Griffey his .327 in 154 games as a starter. Griffey has slowed down considerably since that season, hitting .214 in 117 games, after being traded from Seattle to Cincinnati to the Chicago White Sox, then back to Seattle.
Ian Stewart was the 2003 first round draft pick out of La Quinta High School in Westminster, California. His .401 on-base percentage (OBP) and .558 slugging (SLG) average in high school make it obvious. In 2008, his Major League OBP went down to .349, and his SLG went down to .455. Sounds like a big deficit, right? Not in the big leagues. It takes a lot of work to have a slugging average of .300, let alone .455. In 2009, his SLG average went from .455 to .464, and he played almost twice as many games as the year before.
When Albert Pujols was in high school, he hit 34 homeruns, and had 121 RBIs (runs batted in) in just 60 games. That’s about two RBIs per game as a high school player. In the majors, as the St. Louis Cardinals starting first baseman, Pujols hit 49 home runs in 160 games during the 2009 season with 135 RBIs and 115 walks. He finished the 2009 season with a batting average of .327.
Surely, there are tons of players in high school history that could match these guys. And who knows, maybe they could come from RHS.