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Yaz v. Manny

It was one of those conversations that starts up in front of the TV, somewhere in the middle innings when the home team has the game in hand, and we can let our concentration lapse a little.

Somebody said, "So, do you think Manny will go down as the greatest Red Sox left fielder ever?" Three heads turned and six eyes looked curiously at the speaker, whose name was Steve. "After Williams, I mean." Ah, okay.

The place was a small town in Massachusetts and the time was early August 2008. Naturally, Manny Ramirez, who had been recently traded to the Dodgers after spending nearly eight years in a Red Sox uniform, was on people's minds.

Who was the greater Red Sox left fielder? (Ramirez photo by Icon/SMI)

"So, it comes down to Manny versus Yaz," I said logically. "I dunno, Manny has the offense, but he's pretty bad in everything else. Carl Yastrzemski, was a good defender, at least that's what his reputation is. What do you think, Dad? What's your recollection of Yaz on defense."

The oldest of this little family gathering offered this: "Well, I didn't follow the American League that much back in those days, but Yaz was known as an excellent defensive player. Rifle arm."

The arm part made sense to me, since I had written an article called "The Best Outfield Arms of Our Time" for the Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2007 and Yastrzemski ranked as one of the top two arms of the last fifty years, together with Clemente.

"But Manny is possibly the best right-handed bat in history." Steve had the floor again. "Plus, I don't think he's that bad on defense. He makes some nice plays off the wall. And his own arm isn't bad. Didn't he lead the league in assists a couple of years ago?"

Uh, oh. The Boston erstwhile 12-run (!) lead was now down to just two runs. Our attention returned to the game and we saved the Yaz vs. Manny debate for another day.

Hitting the ball

So, who was better, Manny or Yaz? Now, trying to figure out the second-best Red Sox left fielder of all time might seem like an esoteric exercise, but, hey, it's the off-season and what else is there to do? Besides, when I dig into a topic like this, I often turn up something interesting. Before we dive into the numbers, just one point: I'm going to compare Manny's career to Yaz's at the same age, i.e., 36. Both came to the big leagues at age 21, so I'm going to be looking at 16 years of big league play for each player. All numbers shown below for Yaz refer to the period 1961-1976 (he retired after the 1983 season).

Let's tackle offensive production first, since it's generally the most important aspect for position players and the easiest to quantify. Here are the offensive numbers for our two players:

         G    AB    R    H   2B  3B  HR  RBI  BB   SO    BA   OBP   SLG   SB   CS OPS+ 
       ----+-----+----+----+---+---+---+----+----+----+-----+-----+-----+----+---+----+
Yaz    2421  8848 1402 2559 489  50 338 1343 1428 1118  .289  .387  .470  150 103  136
Manny  2103  7610 1444 2392 507  18 527 1725 1212 1667  .314  .411  .593   37  31  155

But what about context? Yaz's prime came in the offense-suppressed '60s, while the start of Manny's career coincided exactly with the offensive explosion that started in 1993. Or to put it another way, the average American League team scored 4.0 runs per game during Yaz's career, but that number is 4.85 runs per game during Manny's years. Yaz produced fewer runs, but so did everybody else and it took fewer runs to win ballgames in Yaz's time.

The OPS+ number given above, though, takes context into account. It adjusts for ballpark effects and the level of league offense and even so, we see Manny with a clear advantage, 155 to 136. But OPS doesn't tell the whole story, so let's look at a more comprehensive statistic for measuring production: Batting Runs.

Batting Runs, also known as "Linear Weights" (a terrible name) was developed by sabermetrician Pete Palmer back in the 1980s. It estimates overall offensive production, taking into most things that a player can do with a bat (not stolen bases, though). The version available at Baseball Reference, which takes into account park effects and league offensive levels, is particularly useful for our purposes. The following table compares Batting Runs for Yastrzemski and Ramirez at the same age:

Batting Runs (Yaz through 1976)
Age     Yaz     Manny
21     -8.5     -5.4
22     18.4     11.2
23     42.1     35.0
24     20.2     41.3
25     40.4     39.9
26     18.7     39.7
27     72.3     63.2
28     55.2     62.2
29     28.8     48.6
30     68.0     56.8
31     13.7     54.2
32     13.1     46.3
33     33.8     43.8
34     34.5     49.4
35     11.0     20.9
36     15.9     55.5
Total 477.6    662.7

That's okay, though, Baseball Reference also provides Batting Wins, taking into the effect of the run environment. What you end up with is 49.6 Batting Wins for Yastrzemski and 60.4 for Ramirez, an 11-win advantage for Manny.

Ok, that's the easy part, evaluating the hitting contributions of these guys. But, baseball is more than just swinging the bat. I now turn to three other parts of the game that we can do a reasonable job evaluating statistically: baserunning, defensive range and throwing arm.

Baserunning

Proficiency on the basepaths is an aspect of offensive production that is not included in Batting Runs. Neither of these players were fast and it shows in their stolen base numbers. Yaz would run occasionally, although not at a high success rate. In the period we are considering, he stole 150 bases in 253 attempts. Manny on the other hand rarely attempts a straight steal, and many of his 68 attempts, 37 of which were successful, were likely hit-and-run plays.

We can assign a run value to the stolen base (.22 runs) and the caught stealing (-.38 runs) to find that these stolen base attempts amounted to -.7 wins for Yaz and -.3 wins for Manny. But running the bases is more than just attempting steals—there is the whole business of taking the extra base on a hit or an out.

Although several people have worked on baserunning metrics, including Dan Fox (here at THT and later at Baseball Prospectus) and Bill James in his Baseball Annual, I was unable to locate any baserunning results for Yaz (beyond stolen bases) and I haven't seen full data for Manny, either. So, I decided to analyze the Retrosheet data myself to get an estimate of the baserunning skills of both of them.

I don't have the space here to go into a detailed description of my method, perhaps I'll do that in a future article. The basic idea is to measure how often a player goes first-to-third or second-to-home on a single, first-to-home on a double or moves up a base on a flyout. An average run value is assigned to each outcome (e.g. extra base taken, thrown out, etc.) for each of these situations and a player is compared to a league-average baserunner. The end result is a measure of baserunning expressed in runs above average.

As an example, consider the following table, which shows the base reached when the runner was on first base (with second base unoccupied) and a single was hit:

Runner final destination, starting on 1B, Single
+----------+------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+
| Player   | Opps | ThrownOut | 2B    | 3B    | Home  |
+----------+------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+
| Yaz      |  443 | 0.032     | 0.589 | 0.348 | 0.032 | 
| Manny    |  314 | 0.016     | 0.707 | 0.268 | 0.010 | 
+----------+------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+

However, we cannot compare Manny directly to Yaz, because over the years runners have become less willing to take risks on the basepaths. This is seen in the next table, which shows the results for the league as a whole, for the Yaz years and the Manny years:

League averages, starting on 1B, Single
+-------------+-------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+
| Era         | Opps  | ThrownOut | 2B    | 3B    | Home  |
+-------------+-------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+
| Yaz years   | 81318 | 0.019     | 0.626 | 0.343 | 0.012 | 
| Manny years | 97858 | 0.013     | 0.675 | 0.300 | 0.012 | 
+-------------+-------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+

Baserunning runs
+----------+-------------------+------+------+
| Player   | Situation         | Opps | Runs |
+----------+-------------------+------+------+
|   Yaz    | runner 1B, single |  443 |  1.5 | 
|   Yaz    | runner 1B, double |  155 | -0.3 | 
|   Yaz    | runner 2B, single |  273 |  1.5 | 
|   Yaz    | runner 2B, flyout |  254 | -0.1 | 
|   Yaz    | runner 3B, flyout |  173 | -0.7 |
+----------+-------------------+------+------+
|   Yaz    | Total             | 1298 |  1.9 | 
+----------+-------------------+------+------+
|  Manny   | runner 1B, single |  314 | -2.0 | 
|  Manny   | runner 1B, double |  167 | -8.8 | 
|  Manny   | runner 2B, single |  277 | -5.4 | 
|  Manny   | runner 2B, flyout |  194 |  1.1 | 
|  Manny   | runner 3B, flyout |  147 | -2.9 | 
+----------+-------------------+------+------+
|  Manny   | Total             | 1099 |-18.0 | 
+----------+-------------------+------+------+

Frankly, I thought that Manny would fare worse in the baserunning analysis. He isn't fast and doesn't look particularly good on the basepaths. The fact that he also stands at home plate and watches his long fly balls doesn't really help his baserunning rep. It's noteworthy that my baserunning analysis does not (and cannot) measure how often a single is stretched into a double (or a double "shrunk" to a single).

In any case, we see here that baserunning has only a tiny effect on our evaluation of these two players. This is generally true, although of course some players are so good (or so poor) on the basepaths, that their baserunning performance becomes important in their overall evaluation.

Where we stand

We're about halfway done with this little exercise, so let's take stock. After accounting for batting and baserunning, here is how our two heroes stack up:

Wins Above Average
                Yaz      Manny
------------------------------
Offense         49.6     60.4
Baserunning     -0.5     -1.9
Range                 ?
Arm                   ?
------------------------------
Total so far    49.1     58.5