This one’s a bit dry, but Andy fed me a good lead-in, so here goes.…

What happened to the plate appearances once taken by the 14th and 15th hitters on a roster, now that those spots have gone to relievers? Have they been spread evenly among regulars and remaining bench players, or what?

That question arose when I noticed that only 140 players qualified for the batting title last year, the lowest full-season total since 1992. That surprised me. Yes, the number of qualifiers tends to fall when scoring does, but I thought that would be offset by the roster shift: Surely some of the 200+ PAs from the 14th and 15th hitters would have gone to regulars.

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Buster Olney musing about Billy Hamilton‘s upcoming rookie year:

… given his incredible prowess on the bases, it may not be necessary for Hamilton to produce within the standard models for leadoff hitters. If Hamilton has a .300 on-base percentage, for example — and that may be what the Reds could reasonably expect in Hamilton’s first year in the big leagues — he could still score a whole lot of runs because his singles and walks tend to lead to him standing on second or third base shortly thereafter.

A whole lot of runs, with a .300 OBP — really? The Reds averaged 4.3 R/G last year, and they’ll be lucky to match that after losing their second-best hitter, Shin-Soo Choo. Is there a precedent for what Buster suggests?

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Wrapping up my mini–series on Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker with a look at how timing hurt their Hall of Fame chances, and a bunch of other stuff. Throughout this post, all seasons are projected to 162 games unless noted.

Timing hurt their HOF chances in many ways, but I’ll detail two major factors:

• Offense soared just as they were on their way out. Comparing Trammaker’s 1978-93 prime to the next 16 years, AL scoring rose by 12%.
• More great middle infielders played during Trammaker’s time than any other in MLB history, including three of the seven best (Joe Morgan, Cal Ripken and Alex Rodriguez).

There’s a third factor whose effect I can’t gauge, so let’s start with the certainties.

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Suppose we knew nothing of OPS+, WAR, or any other offensive measure invented since Babe Ruth. How do the traditional batting stats of Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell compare to subsequent Hall of Famers at their positions, if each is ranked among his contemporaries?

Here are 16-year rankings against their contemporary middle infielders, for Trammell and Whitaker plus four Hall of Famers (or soon to be): Ryne Sandberg, Roberto Alomar, Barry Larkin and Craig Biggio. Names have been removed, and the listings are unordered. Can you spot the Hall of Famers?

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Alan Trammell‘s Hall of Fame support fell to 21% on this year’s ballot; in two years, he’ll join Lou Whitaker in veterans committee limbo. To channel my grief, I’ve been shaping some thoughts about them. This post is about peak WAR and career value patterns for a 2B/SS tandem.

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Continuing my series on WAR in the wild card era, this post looks at team WAR, broken out among position players and pitchers. There’s a long preface here, dealing with terms and such; those in a hurry can scroll down to the first major heading, “WAR/pos and WAR/pitch.” (Just look for the charts.)

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Jayson Stark’s “Strange But True feats of 2013” notes the August 24th 18-inning game in which Arizona’s Tuffy Gosewisch batted twice in the final frame and made outs against two different position players. The last player to do that, says Jayson, was Brian Milner, on June 26, 1978.

Now, I played a lot of Strat-O-Matic with the ’78 set, even the last-place Blue Jays; I still remember Doug Ault, Gary Woods, even Sam Ewing. But I didn’t recall Brian Milner, so I looked him up. Turns out, he’s no kin to John Milner (or his cousin, Eddie Milner), and his big-league career was gone in a heartbeat. But a few nuggets came from the search.

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This is the first in a series of looks at the distribution of position-player WAR on teams in the wild-card era (1995-2013). All team wins mentioned are Pythagorean wins. All figures are pro rated to 162 team games.

There are 564 team-years in the era. This post compares the top 160 teams (28%) in WAR from position-players, split into three tiers:

• Tier 1: 35+ WAR from position players. These 20 teams averaged 38.0 WAR and 96 wins.
• Tier 2: 30 to 34.9 WAR/pos. These 39 teams averaged 31.7 WAR and 91 wins.
• Tier 3: 25 to 29.9 WAR/pos. These 101 teams averaged 27.3 WAR and 88 wins.

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When rating careers, most folks will favor a high peak over a steady rate of accrual. They say that a fixed sum of value — like, 50 WAR over 10 years — tends to have more pennant impact if it’s unevenly distributed (say, five years of 7 WAR and five years of 3 WAR), rather than doled out as 5 WAR each year.

That view has intuitive backing. Whereas WAR is gauged against a replacement-level player, the average player is a more relevant value if you’re trying to build a contending team. If you swap Mike Trout’s 2013 value for that of Jay Bruce and Ben Zobrist, you gain WAR (10.2 to 9.2), but you lose Wins Above Average (5.8 to 7.0) — and you have one less lineup spot from which to build back that WAA.

I can’t quite refute that position, but I do have a soft spot for steady, Lou Whitaker types. (You noticed?) So I wonder how far that intuitive logic is borne out empirically, by actual pennants and championships.

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For years, I’ve used the term “Lou Whitaker All-Stars” for players who had many good seasons, but no great ones. Now I’ve chosen two such teams, on the basis of Wins Above Replacement.

Since Whitaker’s best seasons rated 6.7 WAR, I set the main cutoff at “no 7-WAR seasons.” I started with the top 200 in career WAR among retired position players, then eliminated all those with any 7-WAR years, leaving 66 players. Since I’m dividing the teams by Hall of Fame status, I excluded the six who have not yet appeared on the ballot. Of the remaining 60 players, 27 are HOFers, 33 are not.

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