Derek Jeter / USPRESSWIRE

Yesterday, I put up some data showing that few players have ever hit as well as Derek Jeter has in his Age 38 season after hitting so poorly in their Ages 36-37 seasons.

Now I’m going to show you why that set of data was so misleading. Continue reading →

Derek Jeter / USPRESSWIRE

Admist the allegations about Derek Jeter this morning, I thought I’d check just how unusual his late-career resurgence is. Continue reading →

Reggie Jefferson played 9 seasons in the majors and is the closest to a .300 hitter you’ll ever see. With 637 hits in 2,123 career at-bats, his final MLB batting average is 0.300047.  Jefferson also had a lot of power, posting a career .474 SLG and 112 OPS+.

Jefferson played for 4 teams in the big leagues plus 1 year in Japan. In 320 games for Boston from 1996 to 1998, he hit .327/.372/.524 with a 127 OPS, including a wicked awesome 1996 in which he batted .347 with a 143 OPS+.

Read below to find out how a front-office blunder cost the Reds his rights, which player on the stacked early 1990’s Indians he thinks is the best, and why he gave up switch-hitting.

These days Jefferson (follow him on Twitter @ReggieJefferson) works as a player agent with SFX Baseball Group, one of the leading representative groups for MLB players.

Jefferson (virtually) sat down with us to answer a few questions about his career.

Continue reading →

Some players seem to be able to maintain really high BAbips (batting average on balls in play.) It’s one thing for a guy like Ichiro to do it…he has a .347 career BAbip, which is really high, but not so much higher than his career BA of .322.

Here are active players (minimum 2000 plate appearances) with BAbips at least 20% higher than their batting averages, minimum .296 BAbip, which is league average for 2012 only.

Kind of a neat list, huh? It’s got some fast guys like Fowler and Bourn, who (like Ichiro) probably get a high BAbip because they are able to beat out a higher fraction of infield grounders). It also includes some three true outcome guys like Cust, Reynolds, and Branyan, who don’t necessarily put the ball in play that much, have low batting averages, and hit a higher rate of balls out of the park.

It is, in fact, these TTO guys who have the highest increase of BAbip over  BA. Cust is tops, with a BAbip 39% higher than his BA. The rest of the leaders among the list above are Reynolds (31%), Fowler (29%), Branyan (28%), and Betemit (27%).

My how time flies. It was 5 years ago today that Barry Bonds passed Hank Aaron as the all-time home run leader among MLB players.

2007 Topps Update Barry Bonds 756 #HRK

I’ve got two questions–how did you feel then and how do you feel now?

Then–I didn’t care. Even more than that, I went out of my way to avoid news of it and acted like it was even happening. I hated Bonds as a person, hated Selig as commissioner, hated everything about the whole thing. I practically vomited in my mouth thinking about the spectacle that would ensue when it happened. I didn’t look at Barry Bonds as the poster child of steroids–I knew lots of people used them–but I certainly didn’t want to give him any accolades and act like it never happened.

Now–I still don’t appreciate Bonds as a person but I am a lot more comfortable accepting him as the home run king. Yes, he cheated. He deserves a major knock as a person for that. But lots of other players cheated, and the fact is that he has hit the most MLB homers. That’s a simple fact. Lots of factors have affected baseball records. Ted Williams would have given Babe Ruth a run for his money as HR king had he not lost more than 4 years to military service. Had Glenn Davis played in Fenway park and not the Astrodome, he probably would have been a superstar. Hundreds of players have used amphetamines dating back 50 years. I don’t like Bonds, but he is what he is–the all-time MLB HR leader.

What was it like for you then, and what’s it like now?

Out with a bang

Here are retired players since 1901 with the highest OPS+ values in their final season (minimum 200 plate appearances):

It’s a beautiful thing that these seasons are so spread across baseball history. Check out the league leaders, too: Shoeless Joe led the league in triples, Barry Bonds led in OBP, and Steve Evans led in doubles.

Brian Downing stuck it to the Angels with a strong finish in Texas. Dave Nilsson wanted to go home to Australia and quit MLB while he was still doing really well. Ted Williams finished his career on a homer. Will Clark was an amazing late-season pickup for the Cardinals. Roberto Clemente was still playing really well before dying during the off-season.

That’s a list of (mostly) great players with (mostly) great stories about how they finished up.

Out with a whimper

Here are retired players since 1901 with the lowest OPS+ values in their final season (minimum 200 plate appearances):

These seasons are also spread around a lot, although none are more recent than 1998. I think that teams have become extremely reluctant to give much playing time to guys who can’t do anything with the bat. This makes sense during the really high-scoring era of the 2000s, when defense mattered a little less because saving 1 run mattered a little less.

If you skimmed the second list, you may have missed one name near the end: Alan Trammell. He’s the only guy on that second list with a career OPS+ over 97 (his was 110). Fangraphs has his wRC+ in that final season as 37, meaning he created runs at 37% of league average…abysmal.

With the Phillies stinking pretty bad in 2012, many folks are wondering if their recent run of success is over or if this year is just a blip. (With their team getting old and 3 playes signed to huge over-market deals, I tend to think it’s not a blip.)

I’m here to tell you that in the big picture, it doesn’t matter anyway.

Check out how many games over .500 the Phillies team has finished each year in its history:

Phillies’ number of games above .500 each year. Click on the image for a larger version.

As you can see, this team has been bad more often than good and went through an abysmal stretch from 1918 through 1948 where they were under .500 (usually WAY under .500) every year except one.

The Phillies’ success over the last decade is clearly their best run ever, edging out the one from the mid 1970s through the early 1980s.

But if we look at cumulative number of games under .500, it ain’t pretty:

Phillies’ cumulative games over .500 in franchise history. Click for a larger version.

Oh…it’s bad. Once the losing started in 1918, they took a massive plunge. The “good” news is that once they reached that first trough in 1948, they’ve lost only a cumulative 200 further games since then, and actually gained most of that back in the 10 years before 2012.

Realize, though, that at more than a thousand games under .500, the team would have to go 101-61 for each of the next 25 years just to break even. Wow.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that OPS+ is my go-to stat for a quick player evaluation. Here’s why. Continue reading →

High Heat Stats is an affiliate for The Hall of Nearly Great. Follow that link to purchase a copy of the book, and you’ll be supporting this blog as well.

Following are some selected quotes from the electronic book. Please consider purchasing a copy (for just $12!) to support not only a great collection of essays, but also the concept of crowd-sourcing great efforts like this. Note that the baseball card images below are from checkoutmycards.com and are not reprinted in the ebook itself.

Joe Posnanski on Dale Murphy:

“That’s what I mean when I say that Murphy represented the ideal baseball player. He did not drink, did not smoke, and would always pick up the check. He would not give television interviews with his shirt off. The man endorsed milk, for crying out loud.”

Wendy Thurm on Bobby Bonds:

“There must have been a time when Barry Bonds was known as Bobby Bonds’ son. At some point, that changed.”

Jeff Passan, interviewing Marvin Miller for his essay on Andy Messersmith:

‘How are you, Marvin?’ I ask.    ‘Not good,’ he says.

Marvin Miller is 95. He’s tired these days. He says he doesn’t have much time. I tell him I’d like to talk about Andy Messersmith. He talks for 30 minutes straight.”

Sam Miller on Brian Downing:

“Christopher Reeve resemblance aside, Superman isn’t the right superhero for Downing, and neither is the Incredible Hulk. Those guys were strong because of circumstances out of their control; they were merely the vehicles through which power flowed. Every major leaguer worked hard, works hard, puts in effort that we can’t imagine. But they’re, at their core, Superman. They’re the Hulk. They’ve been given their talent. Downing is, if any superhero, Batman: a self-invented force of will. He did something all of us could do, but that, in the end, none of us can do.”

Still not convinced you should buy The Hall of Nearly Great? Read my first review of the book for more excerpts and a more detailed explanation of why this project is so well worth supporting.

Using ESPN.com’s attendance data I calculated total attendance as a fraction of capacity for each year going back to 2001 (as far back as ESPN has the data). In brief, I made sure it was weighted properly by essentially finding the total number of seats available at all games in all ballparks, then taking the total actual MLB attendance as a fraction thereof.

So far in 2012, 72.9% of all seats have been sold, the highest number in the entire available range back to 2001. Leaders are the Red Sox and Phillies, both of whom apparently are overselling capacity (though this is known to be a sham in Boston’s case, as local ticket agencies are required to buy up any unsold tickets for each game and Fenway itself rarely close to full on game day.)

Here is the fraction of total capacity sold each year:

2012	72.9
2011	70.0
2010	68.3
2009	68.2
2008	72.1
2007	72.4
2006	69.4
2005	69.4
2004	67.3
2003	60.4
2002	60.2
2001	64.3

Attendance reached a high (in both absolute numbers and fraction) in 2008, then started to decline as the US recession deepened. Since then, the economy has improved slightly, but capacity has also shrunk with, for example, the new (smaller) Yankee Stadium opening.

As average game attendance every season prior to 2001 was lower than the average in 2012, I think it’s a reasonable guess that fraction of capacity was also lower in all those earlier seasons. The only seasons with a higher average attendance that 2012 were 2007 and 2008, and as we can see, the fraction of capacity is higher in 2012. Of course, as the year drags on and more and more teams fall out of contention (or trade their stars as will happen in the next couple of days), attendance is likely to fall in many places and 2012 may fall out of first place.