Everyone with even a passing knowledge of Major League Baseball knows that San Diego Padres third-baseman Manny Machado has long been an excellent player. And that excellence has been consistent across his 14 seasons in the majors to date.
How consistent Machado has been, though, merits highlighting. Across three very different franchises – the Baltimore Orioles, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Padres – Machado has somehow posted almost the exact same numbers, especially his slugging percentage. He has been so consistent for so long that his career stats just looks wrong.
Machado Defying The Concept Of Luck
Baseball has always been a sport driven by numbers, and having given birth to the sabermetrics era, it remains at the apex of all that is sporting data. Batting averages, earned run averages, OPS, WAR, and ten million more metrics; every corner of the game is analyzed through the digits and decimals as much as it is the sights and sounds. Yet with Machado, a statistical consistency has emerged that seems so unlikely as to be scripted. He has Uncanny Valleyed baseball.
It is one thing for a player to show consistency in a skill set. It is quite another to see a stat as complex as slugging percentage – which folds together singles, doubles, triples and home runs to give an indication of a player’s power at the plate – land on as-near-as-is the exact same figure across thousands of at-bats with three different franchises.
Players changes ballparks, lineups, opponents, and even leagues, and the numbers inevitably shift. For all its in-built repetitiveness, baseball is also a sport with tremendous variation based on luck. But Machado has nonetheless stuck rigidly to his numbers, to the point that he should just probably make .487 his jersey number.
Machado’s Three Franchises
Machado began his MLB career in Baltimore, where the Orioles drafted him third overall in the 2010 MLB Draft and promoted him to the majors aged only 20 back in 2012. He quickly emerged as an All-Star, developing into one of the most polished two-way infielders in baseball, offering both power and steadiness in an up-and-down period for the franchise. In 860 games across seven seasons with the Orioles, Machado would record a .487 slugging percentage.
As all things do, Machado’s time in Baltimore ended eventually. In 2018, the Orioles dealt him to the Dodgers in a midseason blockbuster, in exchange for the collective haul of Yusniel Diaz, Dean Kremer, Rylan Bannon, Breyvic Valera and Zach Pop. The Dodgers were chasing a pennant, and Machado was the plug-and-play All-Star. Yet despite all the new variables in play, and the reduced sample size of his half-season of work with the Dodgers, Machado once again hit an exact .487 slugging percentage.
Then came the Padres, with whom Machado signed a ten-year, $300 million deal in 2019, the richest free-agent contract in North American sports history at the time. And although it may have changed by the time you read this, at the time of writing, Machado has posted a .486 slugging percentage in his seven seasons in San Diego. Had he not been taken out of Game 162 early, and hit one more extra base hit, the perfect symmetry may have been attained.
There is some year-on-year variation, to be sure. But the wider average is always unnervingly identical. And what makes this coincidence so eye-catching – and yet oddly eerie – is how unlikely it is.
The Sheer Statistical Improbability
Slugging percentage is volatile by nature. A dozen extra-base hits one way or another can shift it over the course of a season, let alone across multiple franchises. Ballparks of course play a sizeable role, too, while Camden Yards was at the time friendly to right-handed power, Dodger Stadium can suppress offense, and Petco Park was once notorious as a pitcher’s paradise before being re-dimensioned.
For Machado to emerge from all three with the same numbers is a quirk that borders on the surreal. And it is not just his slugging percentage, either. Machado’s wider stat lines across all three teams – .283/.335/.487 with the Orioles, .273/.338/487 with the Dodgers, .275/.340/.486 with the Padres – are also unnervingly similarly, as are the OPS marks of .825, .822 and .825 respectively.