In academia, one must distinguish between indicators and causes, as things that tend to happen as a result of an event or alongside it are not necessarily the cause of said event. In the highly academic world of debating esoteric baseball records, though, we have nothing but indicators: home run champion, batting champion, RBI champion. Occasionally, all those indicators indicate one single person in one single league, and that person would win what's called the Triple Crown. And the indicators are majorly indicating that Yordan Alvarez is on his way to doing just that.
Explaining the cause of this absurd season is much more difficult, but we’ll get to that in a minute because first we need to figure out his chances. If the season ended today, Alvarez would win the American League Triple Crown — the first to do so in either league since Miguel Cabrera in 2012, and just the second in the last 60 years.
Alvarez leads the field in home runs (35), RBI (85) and batting average (.329). He has an essentially insurmountable lead in the latter (+0.29) and a solid enough lead in RBI (+7). The home run crown is our failure point, with Junior Caminero right on his tail with 33. Given Yordan’s game-breaking run, though, we have no reason to doubt him, and I would mathematically assign his odds of doing it as pretty good/10. Also, if you’re rooting against him to win the Triple Crown and are not a Tampa Bay Rays fan … please get a life.
The MLB Triple Crown is an impossibly rare achievement
Winning the Triple Crown is much rarer than you might think. Across the entire 155-year history of Major League Baseball, only 28 guys have led their league in batting average, home runs and RBI in the same season. But why stop there?
Why not go for the MLB Triple Crown, or to lead both leagues in all three categories? That is a fundamentally, philosophically and downright spiritually rare achievement, having happened only four times by four all-all-all-all-time greats: Rogers Hornsby in 1925, Lou Gehrig in 1934, Ted Williams in 1942 and Mickey Mantle in 1956. Ya know, solid players.
Alvarez is in a much tighter race if we include the NL: Luis Arraez trails his batting average by only 0.03, and he’s actually behind Sal Stewert (87) and CJ Abrams (88) for RBI. So I’d put the chances of the MLB Triple Crown at distinctly possible/10. In any case, it’s still one of the greatest hitting seasons of all time; so how on earth is he doing this?
Alvarez is blending contact and power like an all-time great
I wrote a long exploration of Yordan’s season just over a month ago which highlighted a number of features: xwOBA, season-over-season trends and his ability to smoke middle-middle pitches. But since we’re talking about the Triple Crown rather than writing some consultancy report about the Yordan Alvarez Investment Thesis, we’re going to zero in on the most interesting aspect of his game, and one that is enabling the Triple Crown chase: a superhuman blend of contact and power hitting.
Yordan Alvarez is marching toward the AL Triple Crown and could seriously contend for the MLB Triple Crown. And he's doing it by combining power and contact hitting on rarer-than-you-think levels.
— Oliver Fox (@oliversfox) August 7, 2026
2026 zone contact rate over hard hit rate: pic.twitter.com/W0zi5m8qO4
We had some perfunctory graphs in the last piece showing how Alvarez’s contact rate and home run total were simply off the chain, but I want to drill home just how rare it is to combine a high-contact approach with the kind of power he’s creating. Most high-contact hitters intentionally eschew power and hunt for base hits — think Steven Kwan and Luis Arraez. They almost never hit home runs, and if they do, they’re among the best hitters of their generation like Freddie Freeman. Alvarez in 2026 is like if you took Aaron Judge’s power profile and put it in Tony Gwynn’s brain.
What about zone contact over barrel rate? Yep, Yordan Alvarez pic.twitter.com/B1eRCrtnk7
— Oliver Fox (@oliversfox) August 7, 2026
Per my other Alvarez piece, if he gets in the neighborhood of 50 home runs, he’ll easily wind up with the highest zone-contact rate season of anyone with that kind of home run total ever. And in a way, the Triple Crown measures a hitter’s ability to do exactly this. Take a high-contact approach but annihilate the baseballs you make contact with. If you think about it, that’s the perfect hitter.
It’s part of why it feels so hard to pitch to Alvarez, and why it’s so terrifying to watch your team play against him: He simply does not miss balls thrown in the strike zone and crushes them. It’s like trying to pitch to Spiderman with heightened senses but also superhuman strength.
The sad, boring hangup to the Yordan Triple Crown chase will be the intentional walk. Eventually, teams are just going to stop pitching to the guy. In many ways, they already have:He leads the Majors by a mile in intentional walks in 2026 with 23. N(o one else even has 10.) But if we can just all be cool and let the man do his thing (unless it’s against the Red Sox #TotallyBiased), we may just witness a grand statistical marvel. Please do not resist.
Add us as a preferred source on Google