Home British baseball NBL leaders, award winners, feats, and official full stats up now

NBL leaders, award winners, feats, and official full stats up now

by Joe Gray

I have just finished adding up numbers and tallying votes

and I can at last announce that the end-of-season National Baseball League (NBL) leaders, award winners, feats and official full stats have been published.

To access all the new information, among with full historical data, go to Project COBB’s top-tier stats archive.

NBL leaders

In the blue-ribbon batting categories:

  • Jarrod Pretorius (HARLOW NATIONALS) won the batting title with a .500 average, ahead of fellow South African Ryan Bird (HERTS FALCONS), whose batting average had to be adjusted owing to his plate-appearance tally being seven short of the eligibility minimum.
  • Maikel Azcuy (HARLOW NATIONALS) won the home-run title with four long balls. This is a title he also won outright in 2010 and tied for in 2007. The 2012 total moved his career tally (now 26) to the third highest in the modern game.
  • Maikel Azcuy also claimed his first RBI title.
In pitching, Roberto Almanzar (HARLOW NATIONALS) won the triple crown with his nine wins, 52 strike-outs, and 3.36 ERA.


Award winners

Jarrod Pretorius was named Most Valuable Batter and Roberto Almanzar Most Valuable Pitcher. The fine all-round season of Gary Davison (SOUTHAMPTON MUSTANGS) earned him the Most Valuable Two-Way Player award.

The following Best Fielder awards were made:

  • C: Will Lintern (HARLOW NATIONALS);
  • 1B: Ryan Bird (HERTS FALCONS);
  • 2B: Luis Goncalves (HARLOW NATIONALS);
  • 3B: Jarrod Pretorius;
  • SS: Robbie Unsell (HERTS FALCONS);
  • OF: Cristobal Hiche (HERTS FALCONS);
  • OF: Michael Trask (BRACKNELL BLAZERS);
  • OF: Marius Urbanavicius (SOUTHAMPTON MUSTANGS).

It has also been decided that from 2013 Best Young Player awards will be made for under-18 and under-21 categories.

Feats

Among the new feats added to the archives were the grand slams in either end of a double-header on 5 August, both hit by Clint Milner (BRACKNELL BLAZERS), and the 11 total bases by Gian Luca Ciuppani (LONDON METS) on 22 July, which is the third-highest known total in a top-tier game since 1995.

Official full stats

Finally, the official 2012 stats are downloadable here in a fully sortable Excel spreadsheet that can be filtered by team. It would be remiss to put in this link without noting that we have slipped some way from a couple of years back, when every plate appearance of every game was captured. I have come to this late this year, and not in an official role other than scorer for one of the teams, but have spent a lot more time than I had factored on giving to British baseball in this specific capacity in 2012.

I must note that it is disappointing to have so many gaps. Any constructive suggestions for making the large necessary improvements for 2013, or offers of volunteering support to get us there, will be gratefully received in the comments below (or by contacting me privately). I think that the uploading of NBL scores needs to be addressed too, as there were big delays this year and the standings on the site are still incomplete. Also, the NBL was put to shame by other divisions this year in game reporting, and this was not helped by the unresponsive and, even confrontational, nature of some teams. Is there any ready volunteer there? All in all, there’s a lot to look at over the winter, and I hope the teams in the league can pull together more to make the NBL something that we can boast about proudly in Europe (which I don’t feel we can at the moment).

I will finish on a positive note, though, in expressing a big thank you to those individuals who ensured that we had good stats for at least some teams in 2012.

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1 comment

Matt Smith November 5, 2012 - 7:37 pm

Well done to all the winners and to the volunteers that kept the records. I know through my experience of writing my two chapters for ‘Nine Aces ..’ how important it is to have good, accurate records to refer to. If the games are worth playing then they’re worth preserving in the official records so that others can refer to them for years to come.

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