Joey Votto and Jake Arrieta are having historically good second halves

I'm aware half a season is an arbitrary amount of time separated by the ASB(Baloo, thats for you ), but its still really cool to see these sort of crazy halves of baseball by either player.



Lowest ERA in a half of a season(first or second) with minimum of 10 GS


I couldn't get some sort of adjusted stat like ERA+ for half seasons like I could for Votto with sOPS, but fangraphs did a nice article using wOBA that shows Arrieta may be having the best half a season pitching ever. LINK. The point is he has been ridiculous.




Highest OBP in a half of a season(first or second) with a minimum of 200 AB's


Granted OBP isn't as a complete number, as ERA is for pitchers, for judging a hitters performance we can look at sOPS to judge his second half as a whole. sOPS is very similar to OPS+, except it looks at his second half split of OPS v the league, so it helps factor in different eras, parks, etc.
Its not perfect but it works in a pinch



By that ranking Votto is having the 32nd greatest half a season in baseball history(and a top 10 in the post-war era) from a hitting perspective with a sOPS of 230(meaning he was 230% of the league average). That's a hell of a list of players he's on. For reference Bryce Harper's 2015 first half ranks 52nd all time at 226, his second half has also been ridiculous is the thing, while Votto's first half was quite pedestrian by his standards.