The Ministry of Baseball
Juan Urbina vs Chu Yu-Hsien
The battle to be the most dominant hitter in the world
A little context
First thing, let’s get some stuff out of the way. Yes, Juan Urbina is currently playing in a semi-professional competition while Yu-Hsien is playing in a professional league, but as a great man once said ‘it’s all relative’. Given the context of what level each player has played the majority of their career at, we think it’s pretty fair to do a direct comparison between the two without there being too many technicalities. The bottom line, Urbina is a semi-pro playing in a semi-pro competition against semi-pro opposition and Yu-Hsien is a pro playing in a pro league against pro-opposition. So without further adieu, let’s get comparing, shall we?
Background checks
Juan C. Urbina
A veteran of Nicaraguan baseball, the 40-year-old outfielder has been the RBI leader in the Pomares 4 different times and has been the home run leader twice. He also currently sits 9th in the all-time deep ball hitters of the competition at 159. An impressive career, especially by Nicaraguan standards
Chu Yu-Hsien
2019 CPBL MVP off of a .347 avg and 30 Home runs, this guy is a formidable hitter at the plate. He also holds the half-season CPBL home run record at 22. Plus, compared to Urbina he’s on the younger side at a fresh 29 years of age.
So there you have it, the veteran from Central America vs the prime slugger from Taiwan. Not the most likely contenders you’ve ever seen, and certainly not the players we thought we’d be talking about challenging for the title of ‘best hitter in the world’ but here we are. It’s a funny old world we live in.
It’s comparison time
To make this a fair fight, due to Yu-Hsien only having had 28 at-bats and 7 starts this season, we’ll only be using Urbina’s latest 28 at-bats/7 games, whichever happens to line up better.
Let’s kick it off the batting average, Yu-Hsien leads with a .536 avg compared to Urbina’s .447. Home runs, Yu-Hsien again getting the point here with 7 HRs to 4. RBI’s? Well, that’s in Chu’s corner as well, 15-12. So why has this been so one-sided when both of these hitters have been in such great form? Well, one thing jumps out at us straight away, in a 5-4 loss to Esteli on April 4th Urbina went 0-4 at the plate. A real off day for the veteran and it’s safe to say that if he’d kept to his average and gotten a couple of hits that game, this comparison would’ve been much, much closer.
So there you have it, Chu Yu-Hsien is indeed the most dominant hitter in the world currently, though we think he’ll have to keep his eye on some ball games going on some 15,000 kilometers away if he wants to keep that title.
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