Willie Wilson, all-star center-fielder with the dominating Kansas City Royal teams of the 1970s and 1980s showed up recently as one of the players in a quiz I was researching. Rest assured you quiz afficionados will get your chance to try your luck, but first I wanted to tell you about what I found to be a truly startling result.

Those who remember Willie will recall a lightning-fast singles hitter who, unfortunately, couldn’t take a walk to save his life. Thus, he ended up his playing days with a .285/.326/.376 slash, good for just a 94 OPS+. But, wait. Wilson parlayed that 94 OPS+ into a nice 46 career WAR in just over 2000 games. How many outfielders have done that? Actually, only Willie. And, among those with a career OPS+ of 95 or worse, there’s nobody else even close.

So, how did Willie rack up the WAR? More after the jump.

A closer look at the above list reveals Marquis Grissom as having pretty similar counting stats to Wilson’s, except for the power numbers where Grissom holds a sizable edge. While some may remember Grissom as a defensive liability in the latter part of his career, he was actually a pretty fair defender as a younger player and compiled a respectable 4.0 career dWAR, not quite half the 10.0 dWAR that Wilson put up. But, surely that difference can’t account for Wilson’s huge WAR lead.

Indeed, that dWAR difference is not what separates Wilson from Grissom, Rather, it’s WAR baserunning runs that propel Wilson to the head of this list. Wilson compiled 120 WAR baserunning runs over his career. How does that stack up to the competition?

Pretty good company for Willie. But look closely. Wilson finished a reasonably close second to Henderson despite Rickey collecting almost 40% more hits and 5 times as many walks.

Here’s a chart showing Rbaser by age for Henderson, Wilson and Raines.

So, pretty much a dead heat through age 28. Henderson starts to separate himself after that point, extending his lead to eventually reach a margin of over 20 Rbaser.

But, look at the same data expressed as Rbaser per 100 times on base.

Probably best to just ignore the data prior to age 23 or so, as these data are distorted by low career TOB up to that age. The key point, though, is that Wilson maintained a ratio of 4 Rbaser per 100 TB throughout his career while Henderson never reached that level and Raines did so only up to age 25. At age 38, Wilson has a 1.4 Rbaser per 100 TOB edge over Raines and Henderson, almost 50% higher than the rate for those two.

Looking at individual seasons provides this view.

Even a cursory glance quickly ascertains that the blue bars predominate as the top result at most ages. How many others have produced multiple seasons of 4+ Rbaser per 100 TOB? It’s a short list.

And, the career leaders in Rbaser per 100 TOB with a minimum 1000 times on base.

If your’e wondering about the lack of old-time players on the list above, you are right to be suspicious as the derivation of Rbaser is based on much more data for recent players that is unavailable for earlier players. That said, old-time players will be limited in their ability to build up sizable Rbaser scores because of their generally lower stolen base efficiency (often much lower) than for recent players, particularly those of the very recent past.

I don’t mean to minimize the importance of getting on base by looking at ratios per TOB. Clearly, Wilson’s lower TOB totals were a significant detriment to his overall career value. But, for just looking at baserunning skill in isolation, it is startling to me to see how much Wilson outdistances himself from even the top contenders.

To close, here is that quiz I told you about.

Willie Wilson has one of only two seasons since 1946 with a particular offensive accomplishment that was achieved 29 times from 1901 to 1945, including on two occasions by each of these players.

What is the seasonal offensive feat, and who is the other player (besides Willie Wilson) to have accomplished this since 1946?

Congratulations to John Autin and Artie Z! They teamed up to identify Willie Wilson and Chuck Knobluach as the only players with a season since 1946 with 125 runs scored, excluding their own home runs. Here’s the list of all those seasons since 1901.