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Base Runs and Carl Hubbell

Base Runs

• It is flexible in its architecture, such as the way it always values a home run as one run. That makes the Pujols/Pena comparison more apt.
  
• It can be adjusted for context by simply recalculating one part of the formula.

• It's a well-known run estimator.
  
• It's pretty good.
  
• It's used in Win Shares, which we also publish in our stats.

Player               Team    BR     RC    Diff
Berkman, Lance       HOU     64     67      -3
Utley, Chase         PHI     62     61       1
Burrell, Pat         PHI     59     59       0
Hamilton, Josh H     TEX     58     56       2
McLouth, Nate        PIT     58     59      -1
Kinsler, Ian M       TEX     57     55       2
Jones, Chipper       ATL     57     65      -8
Sizemore, Grady      CLE     56     56       0
Gonzalez, Adrian     SD      55     60      -5
Bradley, Milton      TEX     54     53       1

Carl Hubbell

I think probably one of the most fortunate things in my life was, there was an old lefthanded pitcher on the ball club named Lefty Thomas (short-term major leaguer Claude Thomas)…Really knew how to pitch, and for some reason or other he really attracted me. He was the only one I ever looked at. He made pitching look easy, and he had a kind of a sinking fastball. Of course the righthanded hitters like to tee off on the lefthander, especially when they get him in a hole. And he’d go out there and got one or two on, and he’d just throw that sinker on the outside corner to get a three-hopper to shortstop, boom-boom. He’d walk off, wouldn’t break a sweat or anything. And, boy, it just enthralled me. I guess I had the instincts of knowing – I was real young – and to know that was the one, right there.

[In spring training the next year] I was going to work on turning that ball over…I had a pretty good sinker, but they wanted me to try to get a change of pace that goes off my fastball. Fortunately I had pretty flexible joints and wrists.

I found out that the more I turned it over, the more I come up and over [overhand] I could get a much better break on it, you see. Of course, the more spin you get on the ball, the more break, and it slows it up. When I threw the screwball I came right over the top, and I turned my arm clear over and let the ball come out of the back of my hand. That’s exactly the way I threw it.

And, you know, everybody said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna tear your arm up.’ The amazing thing, in 30 days I could get that over the plate as good as my fastball. I just came right up and turned it over, and it came out of the back of my hand. And that slowed it up tremendously. The real effectiveness of the screwball was not the break at all. It’s the speed of the ball. I threw it just like my fastball…I did have a fairly good fastball. And that was the effectiveness of the screwball. I threw it exactly with the same motion.

…The only thing it bothered in my arm was here [elbow]. I never had an ache or a pain in my shoulder, a ligament or a muscle or nothing. Just a calcium deposit [in my elbow], just from pounding. When you throw, you take a hell of a pounding. And nature starts putting in there something [calcium deposits] to protect it…My arm started crooking up in 1934. I was just half a pitcher. (Hubbell won more than 20 games each year from 1933-1937, but his career quickly tailed off after that. It was said that he had to have his coat sleeve shortened because he could not straighten his left arm.)

[What do you think of other pitchers who throw screwballs?]

Nobody ever mastered it. They throw ‘em, I mean [Warren Spahn and Mike Marshall]. They don’t turn their arm over. [Fernando Valenzuela] comes right up over the top, but unless you get slow-motion you can’t tell.

[After Detroit managers Ty Cobb and George Moriarty rejected him, Hubbell joined the New York Giants in 1928. His manager was John McGraw.]

He played that ‘Little Napoleon’ bit to the hilt. I mean, that was his life. His life. He lived it. He must have dreamed it. The Little Napoleon.

I just couldn’t understand it. I’d had such a bad experience in Detroit. He gave me a chance to pitch in the big leagues, and I appreciate it a hell of a lot.

But he called every pitch, and every pitch was a breaking ball, be a curveball or a screwball. He didn’t think you had sense enough to throw a fastball. He must have been the worst curveball hitter in the world.

The only pitcher he would allow to pitch his own game was Christy Mathewson. And the only reason for that was that he was the only college graduate pitching in the major leagues at that time…

He give me a chance to pitch. I didn’t want to say anything [bad about him]. Four years with him, it’s a wonder my arm lasted as long as it did, it really is…

[Roger] Bresnahan, the old catcher, was a coach. [Bresnahan played for McGraw from 1902 through 1908.] I started asking him about John McGraw, how he could be like he is. He said, ‘You don’t understand how it was.” [McGraw] started managing before the turn of the century, with Baltimore…

[Bresnahan] said in those days a regular player made about twenty-five hundred dollars a year. A star like Mathewson might make five thousand. He said, hell, they couldn’t stay in a decent hotel. They had to stay in rooming houses down by the railroad tracks, you see….

Then Ruth came along, and the salaries went up, the college graduates came in. They could afford to stay anywhere…But McGraw did not change. He was the Little Napoleon.

He had the news media so conned, this Little Napoleon did. Nobody interviewed McGraw. After every game Bozeman Bulger [of the New York Times] would come in [to McGraw’s office]. Nobody said a word. McGraw would write out everything that happened in the ball game. If we won, it was something he had done, and if we lost the ball game, it was something some damn ballplayer did…

And Bulger would take it out and say, ‘Fellows, here’s McGraw’s report.’ And they would write it down.

• I used a league-average scoring rate to adjust the "B" component.
  
• I calculated Base Runs by subtracting each player's stats from a league-average team. The difference was that player's Base Runs.
  
• I added a "clutch" component to Base Runs, giving each player credit for hitting well with runners in scoring position. I used the exact same methodology employed in Runs Created.
  
• I applied a park factor to both figures.