Since 1901, 318 baseball players have posted a 150 OPS+ or better with at least 500 plate appearances. Just 10 of these players, though, have surpassed a 150 OPS+ while walking 25 times or fewer, including just two players since the Deadball Era.
I’ve been writing about baseball online for four years, and early on, I learned I needed to work hard to create anything meaningful. A few years ago, I killed a weekend creating a stat I dubbed, “Runs Accounted For.” It looked at a player’s run and RBI totals compared to his team’s run total and, as I later learned, was more or less a simplified version of Bill James’ work, Runs Created. I didn’t know this when I posted my piece (I hadn’t read a James book up to this time), and proudly, naively, I submitted a link to Baseball Think Factory expecting to be applauded.
The response I got is fairly typical for anyone who creates a new baseball metric and is one reason I don’t devote much time inventing stats.
Hi everyone,
When I’m not posting here, I can be found at Baseball: Past and Present. I’ve kicked off a project at my website today having people vote on a 50-player inner circle for the Hall of Fame, and I’d like to invite anyone who’s interested to take part. I could also use some help getting the word out.
To vote, please visit this Google form. More info about the project can be found at this post or by emailing me at thewomack@gmail.com.
With the First-Year Player Draft going on as we speak in baseball, I read an interesting tweet from Jay Jaffe a little while ago. Jay tweeted:
last time Astros had 1st pick, they passed on Derek Jeter, took Phil Nevin. Scout/HOF P Hal Newhouser quit in disgust nyti.ms/Ks4x9M.
— Jay Jaffe (@jay_jaffe) June 4, 2012
It got me interested, and it turns out Jeter fell to the Yankees with the sixth pick in 1992. The Astros deserve some slack. The teams that drafted second through fifth picked far worse than they did.
I love the 1989 film Major League. I’ve seen it maybe 20 times since childhood to the point that watching it is now more or less an annual ritual. There’s no suspense for me at this point, I’ll admit, as I could probably transcribe much of the script from memory. I know well the story of how a ragtag Cleveland Indian team is culled from the Mexican League, correctional system, and beyond to deliberately lose to spur relocation and how the players begin to win after learning of the ruse. It’s Hollywood contrivance to a large degree, though I also assume there’s some truth in it.
I interviewed Joe Posnanski in 2010, and one thing he told me (that I left out of the interview I published) is that some of the hardships for the club in question, such as a dilapidated team plane, drew from the 1977 Indians. I also assume there’s enough decent players outside of the majors right now to stock a team. This post offers a 25-man roster of such players, life imitating Major League, we could call it.
I’ve returned to the newspaper industry recently, doing some agate shifts for a wire service that assists the San Francisco Chronicle. To the uninitiated, agate is the small print located in sports sections where scores, stats, and other items of record can be found. It’s not generally a place for sabermetrics.
I recently had lunch with an old-timer who played in the 1940s, and he said something I’ve heard from other old baseball people before. We were on our way to the restaurant when he remarked that players today couldn’t hold a candle to earlier baseball generations. I didn’t say much because the old-timer’s a nice man, and I didn’t want to argue or disrespect, and I happen to disagree.
Don’t get me wrong, I love baseball history, though I assume players are better than ever today. I assume modern players are stronger, faster, and able to throw harder. I write often on my website about projecting old players to the modern era, and I generally stress the importance of allowing players time to make adjustments. I assume if a long-ago great, even Babe Ruth, was merely dropped into today’s majors via time portal, he might look more out of place than the Bambino did in 1935 ignominiously closing his career with the Boston Braves.
I also assume earlier players had it easier not having to deal with backdoor sliders, tightly condensed schedules, or black competition. I assume coaching is more sophisticated, injury treatment better, and training aids, such as video, greatly more evolved. And, barring any unforeseen catastrophe for Major League Baseball, I assume players will only continue to evolve, that the next generation of ballplayers will be even better than this one.
I’m interested to hear other people’s thoughts, and I’ll keep this short. I think cases could be made for either side, and I’d love to hear them.
It’s old news that Josh Hamilton and Matt Kemp are having career years. With the season roughly one-fifth complete, each man is hitting around .400, Hamilton a few days removed from a four home run night, Kemp already hearing “MVP” chants in Los Angeles. It’s no bold statement that Kemp and Hamilton each have a shot at being baseball’s first Triple Crown winner since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. Hamilton would win the award if the season ended today, and Kemp is trailing in the National League only for RBIs.
It would be wonderful for Hamilton and Kemp, their teams, and for baseball if either man made a run at the Triple Crown. And as it stands, Hamilton and Kemp have a shot at something rarer.
A fellow baseball blogger, Sky Kalkman wrote something interesting this morning. In a post exploring the relationship between control and command for pitchers, Sky opined:
My non-expert hunch is that one of the main reasons pitchers don’t throw more pitches in the strike zone is that their stuff isn’t good enough. They aim for the edge of the zone because the cost of missing outside (a ball) isn’t as bad as the cost of missing over the heart of the plate (a line drive or home run.) A pitcher with impeccable aim but mediocre stuff won’t rate highly in control.
My first impulse was to disagree with Sky, considering Greg Maddux threw in the 80s for much of his career and was an expert at slowly widening the strike zone. With a look at the numbers, though, Sky may have a point.
A tweet by ESPN baseball writer Buster Olney has me thinking. Buster tweeted a little earlier:
Tim Kurkjian and I have argued whether Rivera would be on the Yankees’ Mt. Rushmore. I say yes, with Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio; he says no.
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) May 4, 2012
It’s an easy time to offer sympathy for the longtime Yankees closer, who injured himself this evening shagging balls in the outfield before a game, though I think Olney is going a little far here. I don’t see how anyone other than Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle are the Bronx Bombers’ equivalent of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abe Lincoln. At most, Mariano Rivera is Harry Truman, the best relief president in American history, but no one who deserved to have his visage retroactively chiseled into a mountain.
I think Olney’s idea could be extended throughout the majors. For my favorite team, the Giants, I go Christy Mathewson, Mel Ott, Willie Mays, and Barry Bonds, and if I’m being a homer, I also find a spot on that mountain for Will Clark. He’s my all-time favorite player and one of my childhood heroes, though I’ll concede that for purposes of presidential metaphors, Clark might be Woodrow Wilson, another man whose talent and potential exceeded his accomplishments and who some say was a racist.
To anyone reading: Which four players are on your team’s Baseball Mount Rushmore?