The Hardball Times -- Dan McLaughlin http://www.hardballtimes.com/main Baseball. Insight. Daily. en studes@hardballtimes.com Copyright 2013 2013-05-22T08:05:15+00:00 The path to Cooperstown through the hot corner http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-path-to-cooperstown-through-the-hot-corner/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-path-to-cooperstown-through-the-hot-corner/#When:10:40:15 outfielders/first basemen, middle infielders, leadoff men and my two-parter on catchers, I’ll be presenting offensive statistical profiles of these players with three adjustments:

1. I focus on the block of "prime" seasons of a player’s career, rather than career totals or a smaller number of "peak" seasons;

2. within those seasons, I adjust batting stats for offensive context, both era and park; and

3. I present those adjusted batting lines in per-162-team-games notation.

You can examine my offensive method in detail as discussed in the column on sluggers—I've used the same constant methodology and baseline across this series—but I will review it here briefly before we proceed.

Prime value


My view of the Hall of Fame is that it’s fundamentally about the stars of the game, and accordingly that the core of a player’s Hall of Fame candidacy should focus on the years he was a star. Thus, at least in evaluating non-pitchers, the key inquiry for the Hall of Fame should be neither "peak value" (how good the guy was at his very best) nor "career value" (the sum total of his career) but "prime value." Prime value is, roughly, looking at the number of years a guy had when he was a legitimate star and how good he was in those years.

In other words, when I look at a potential Hall of Famer, the first question I ask is, "How many seasons did this guy have where he was a Hall of Fame-quality ballplayer?" And the second is, "How good was he in those years—just around or above the line, or way above it?"

Now, I wouldn’t argue that you should throw peak or career value entirely out the window, but both have their flaws. Peak value really doesn’t capture the way most of us think about the Hall: as a shrine to a player’s sustained accomplishments of a period of years, not his very best day. Career value, on the other hand, has two drawbacks.

One is that that looking only at career value ends up putting too much emphasis on which guy played passably well when he was 38 and playing out the string as a part-timer, rather than the years when he was doing the things we’ll remember him for. I’m a big believer that you don’t play your way out of the Hall in your old age, and neither should you get inordinate credit for padding the career totals with mediocre or part-time seasons. Some credit, if the seasons are productive, but only at the margins if it’s a close call.

Second, baseball is played in seasons. If you look just at career totals, you miss that—you miss the fact that, at least for a star player, two seasons of 600 plate appearances really are worth more than three seasons of 400 PA at the same level of production, because the 600-plate-appearance seasons move the team closer to winning championships, while that third 400-plate-appearance season blocks the team from fielding a full-time replacement (the value of that is debatable, of course, depending what the team’s options are, but if we’re talking major stars, you’d almost always prefer full seasons).

In-season durability is a very important measurement of value, as it minimizes the amount of playing time that needs to be given to weak second-stringers. Most efforts to evaluate players by running career totals miss this.

As a result, what I have tried to do here is excerpt out the consecutive series of seasons, ranging here from five to 16 years, when each guy was a star and weigh that chunk against other guys’ primes. As you will see, I do look in some cases at the years beyond the prime years, for purposes of distinguishing between the players who tacked on extra seasons as part-time contributors and those who just stopped hitting or stopped playing. But I zero in mainly on the prime.

The criteria


I varied slightly the criteria for picking players and seasons over the first four columns, so I’ll flag here what I did differently this time:

1. I define seasons listed under the "other" column as seasons at a certain level of OPS+ (on base plus slugging, relative to the league average, as calculated by baseball-reference.com) over a certain number of plate appearances. I wasn't completely rigid about defining “prime” in those terms—again I tried to isolate the part that let each guy put his best foot forward—but for the "other" column, I tallied up the non-"prime" seasons when the player had 500 or more plate appearances with an OPS+ of 100 or better, or 400 plate appearances with an OPS+ of 120 or better.

In addition to the number of seasons, the chart presents under the "Seas" column the number of prime years in seasonal notation, i.e., total team games divided by 162, which will be 1 for a 162-game season, 0.95 for a 154-game season, 0.67 for a 108-game season, etc. Players whose primes straddled the strikes, World War I or the dawn of standard schedules around 1904 will have a bigger gap between the seasonal notation and the number of seasons.

2. I divide the charts in two groups—the "long prime" players with a prime of eight or more years, and the "short primes" of five to seven years—to avoid mixing apples and oranges. In the usual case, you need an eight- or nine-year prime, at a minimum, to make a credible Hall of Fame case as a non-pitcher.

3. For the most part, there really weren’t many star third basemen who significantly straddled 1920, the breakpoint I'd used in prior columns on the theory that earlier players really aren’t a useful yardstick for evaluating contemporary Hall of Fame candidates who played in the lively-ball era. Regardless of the merits of comparing players from that era with sophisticated statistical analysis, the shape of their statistics is simply too different to make them meaningful yardsticks in real-world arguments about putting modern players in the Hall.

That said, since great third basemen were so rare before 1920—indeed, the great bulk of the list is from after World War II—I also include a separate list here of the pre-1920 third basemen going all the way back to 1871. I haven't divided those by length of prime since the list is mostly short-prime guys.

On the whole, I looked at 61 third basemen, sweeping broadly to illustrate both the relative rarity of the players at the top of the pyramid and to give context to the relative ordinariness of the guys further down who are surrounded by people you don’t think of as immortals. The list consists of 13 Hall of Famers (two of whom, Cap Anson and Tony Perez, are in as first basemen, and a third—John McGraw—who is in as a manager), eight active third basemen (including Alex Rodriguez, whose years as a shortstop I examined in the column on middle infielders), and 40 players who are off the writers' ballot; at this point I've about given up trying to figure out who will and won't be on the next Veterans' Committee ballot, although Ron Santo remains a plausible candidate.

It should be noted that third base is an odd position because a lot of Hall of Famers have put in time at third base without making a career of it. Some, like Carl Yastrzemski, were just brief experiments, but the following Hall of Famers spent one or more seasons in which they qualified for the batting title and spent at least half their team's games at third base:

Five seasons: Harmon Killebrew, Paul Molitor, Perez, Joe Sewell, George Davis
Four seasons: Anson
Three seasons: Cal Ripken, Bobby Wallace
two seasons: Rogers Hornsby, Frankie Frisch, Travis Jackson, Buck Ewing
One season Honus Wagner, Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, Arky Vaughan, Ryne Sandberg (who won a Gold Glove at third; I believe he’s still the only player to win one at two positions), Luke Appling, Roger Connor, Jim O'Rourke

One can find similar examples among guys who are part of the Hall discussion or otherwise had long, successful careers: A-Rod (six, including two MVP Awards), Pete Rose (four), Dick Allen (four, including a Rookie of the Year award), Bobby Bonilla (four), Gary Sheffield (three), Edgar Martinez (three), Jim Thome (three), and Joe Torre (two, including an MVP Award).

The numbers


The first caution I would emphasize here is that this is just a study of batting stats. Having scrapped it in the catchers column, I'm not reviving here my rough, seat-of-the-pants defensive grading system from the prior columns, which didn’t add anything analytical but simply congealed conventional wisdom for convenience.

The batting percentages here (batting average, slugging average, on-base percentage—for the charts I stuck with listing slugging before OBP for consistency with prior columns, but used the Avg/OBP/Slg convention in text) are translated statistics. You can read a detailed explanation of the method in the slugging outfielders article; for consistency with the earlier pieces I used the 2005 National League as the average "season."

All stats are from baseball-reference.com. (I translate based on differentials in league Avg/Slg/OBP rather than runs per game, thus reducing the distorting influence of variation over time in the volume of unearned runs). The essential idea of translations is to show what a player’s performance in Year X and Park X was equivalent to in Year and Park Y, not to project what a guy would have hit under other circumstances, which is unknowable.

The other offensive numbers—plate appearances, steals and caught stealing, double plays—are actual, not translated (I included base stealing and GIDP figures because they’re the two main components of offense that aren’t captured by slugging and OBP), but are averaged per 162-game season, so as to put players whose careers were in the 154-game era or were interrupted by strikes on a common footing. (As discussed above with regard to seasonal notation, for example, 1981 is generally counted as two-thirds of a season in the averaging.)

The "Rate" column in the chart is simply (translated Slg)*( translated OBP)*( translated PA). It’s not any kind of scientific formula, just a handy metric to organize the data on the table by the three main variables. I prefer multiplying rather than adding slugging and OBP (as is done with OPS), since a single point of OBP is worth more than a single point of slugging. As you can see, this metric organizes the data very strongly in favor of guys who were very durable in-season and against guys with low OBPs.

Of course, besides not counting defense, the "Rate" metric doesn’t count the baserunning and double play numbers on the chart, so don’t treat the rankings as holy writ. But they’re a good rule of thumb.

With those lengthy preliminaries out of the way, let’s run the offensive numbers, starting with the longer-prime guys: 
Prime  Oth Player               Age    Seas    Avg    Slg    Obp   Rate   G-3B     In?
    11  5  Eddie Mathews      21-31    10.6   .285   .557   .390  148.5    150    YES
     9  3  Wade Boggs         25-33     9.0   .338   .481   .425  144.1    151    YES
    14  0  Mike Schmidt       24-37    13.7   .267   .572   .375  140.4    141    YES
    13  2  Chipper Jones      24-36    13.0   .303   .529   .390  128.1    110 Active
    11  7  George Brett       22-32    10.6   .317   .547   .376  124.3    133    YES
    11  1  Ron Santo          23-33    11.0   .280   .507   .367  123.1    155     No
     8  3  Stan Hack          26-33     7.6   .293   .436   .374  116.5    153     No
    10  1  Sal Bando          25-34     9.9   .268   .474   .366  113.9    151     No
     9  1  Ken Boyer          25-33     8.7   .287   .484   .349  113.5    144     No
    10  2  Bob Elliott        25-34     9.6   .289   .487   .366  113.2    130     No
     8  2  Scott Rolen        22-29     8.0   .279   .502   .362  113.0    144 Active
     8  3  Toby Harrah        26-33     7.6   .272   .450   .376  110.6    108     No
    10  2  Ron Cey            26-35     9.7   .266   .487   .354  108.9    151     No
     8  0  Ken Caminiti       28-35     7.6   .284   .495   .355  106.3    142     No
    11  1  Eddie Yost         23-33    10.5   .257   .403   .385  104.4    145     No
     8  4  Graig Nettles      26-33     7.9   .260   .477   .332  104.1    157     No
     9  2  Robin Ventura      23-31     8.6   .277   .464   .358  103.7    142     No
    12  1  Brooks Robinson    23-34    12.0   .287   .463   .330  103.4    158    YES
     8  6  Buddy Bell         27-34     7.7   .287   .452   .349  100.7    145     No
    10  6  Darrell Evans      26-35     9.7   .248   .449   .355  100.0    117     No
    10  1  Bill Madlock       23-32     9.6   .310   .484   .365   99.2    111     No
     8  1  George Kell        23-30     7.7   .311   .458   .352   98.2    137    YES
    11  0  Pie Traynor        24-34    10.5   .290   .444   .331   97.0    151    YES
     9  0  Troy Glaus         23-31     9.0   .252   .492   .352   96.7    125 Active
    10  0  Matt Williams      24-33     9.6   .274   .514   .319   96.1    137     No
    13  1  Buddy Bell         23-35    12.6   .286   .441   .344   95.3    145     No
     9  1  Tim Wallach        24-32     9.0   .268   .466   .321   94.6    153     No
    10  0  Ken Keltner        21/31     9.6   .272   .474   .316   93.7    149     No
     8  0  Mike Lowell        26-33     8.0   .275   .454   .333   93.5    145 Active
    11  2  Carney Lansford    22-32    10.7   .297   .446   .346   90.7    127     No
    16  0  Graig Nettles      25-40    15.6   .254   .460   .332   89.9    142     No
    10  0  Doug DeCinces      26-35     9.6   .265   .483   .333   89.0    131     No
* - Data incomplete or unavailable.

I'd profiled Eddie Mathews in comparison to the other great third basemen when he died in 2001, so I wasn't caught totally by surprise at how good he really was, but even I was surprised that he rates as decisively better in his prime than any other player at his position. Mathews beats Mike Schmidt offensively for two reasons: He hit for better averages, thus producing better OBPs, and he was amazingly durable, even by comparison to a guy like Schmidt who never had a major injury.

To cap it off, Mathews hit into the second-fewest double plays of anybody on the chart (unlike Schmidt, without the aid of a ton of strikeouts) and rarely made outs getting caught stealing. He was also an excellent defensive player, arguably as good as Schmidt. As Bill James has observed, Mathews doesn't get the respect he deserves for a variety of reasons: because he peaked early and was overshadowed by the longer career of teammate Hank Aaron; because he played in Milwaukee, in a pitcher's park in an age of bandboxes; because his best years didn't quite match up with those of his teams, denying him any MVP recognition.

How underrated was Mathews after his retirement? His first year on the Hall of Fame ballot, in 1974 (the year Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record), Mathews got 32.3 percent of the vote. This for a man who, at the time, stood in 10th place on the all-time home run list with 512. It took Mathews until his fourth year on the ballot to crack 50 percent, and his fifth year to win induction. Yet the record is clear: Mathews was, at the time he retired, easily the best ever at his position, and more than 40 years later, it remains a fair debate if he still deserves that title.

Wade Boggs is also a little bit of a surprise, if only because we're still unaccustomed to setting him side by side with the greatest ever at his position. Boggs was in some sense a creature of Fenway; for the years of his prime (1983-91), he batted .382/.478/.542 at home, compared with .308/.395/.406 on the road. Over those years, Boggs averaged 58 doubles per 600 at-bats at home, 29 on the road.

But then, the ability to uniquely exploit your home park is a useful skill; even if Boggs may not have been as valuable in another home park, he was a critical part of a team that won three division titles (and one pennant) in those years. The Red Sox from 1983-91 played at a 93-win pace (416-311, .572) at home, and a 77-win pace (346-384, .474) on the road; from 1986-90, a 101-win pace (251-153, .621) at Fenway, a 73-win pace (182-223, .449) on the road. Boggs was a major factor in their dominance at Fenway and must be valued as such.

Mike Schmidt is now the conventional choice as the greatest of all third basemen, and given that his prime years lasted three years longer than Mathews' I might still take him as No. 1. (Then again, Mathews had six solid seasons outside his prime; Schmidt had none. It's a close call.) He shows up here as averaging fewer games at third due to his one-season experiment in 1985 as a first baseman (in an abortive attempt to break in Rick Schu as a successor), but he remained a steady defensive player at third (and won the 1986 NL MVP) after returning.

Chipper Jones averages the fewest games at third per year for his prime on this list because his prime covers a two-year period in which he played every day in left field. Chipper wasn't moved for being a butcher at third, although the move does reflect that he's never been regarded as the kind of outstanding glove man several of the other elite third basemen were.

Adjusted for context, only Boggs tops him in getting on base, only Schmidt had a longer prime, and only Mathews, Schmidt and Brett were more powerful sluggers; Chipper lags behind the first tier only for being a bit less durable year-to-year than the top three. By now, it’s not news that Chipper should and most likely will skate into Cooperstown.

It's hard for me to be dispassionate about George Brett, perhaps my favorite player ever and one of the very few guys whose resume of clutch hitting defies any effort to apply the usual statistical cautions about the elusive nature of "clutch" (although my own theory is that Brett's career average of .337/.397/.627 over 43 postseason games is in part a reflection of him being healthier during postseason series than over the long seasons). It's now 30 years since Brett's magical 1980 season, when he batted .390/.454/.664, drove in more than a run per game, and had more homers (24) than strikeouts (22).

When placed in context, Brett nonetheless comes up short of his contemporaries Schmidt and Boggs on durability and walks, but as usual there are caveats. He had an impressive second career outside his prime years as a first baseman and then DH, including a .306/.389/.509 season in 1988 (103 RBI, 149 OPS+) and a .329/.387/.515 last hurrah in 1990 (AL batting title, 153 OPS+). The 1990 season was one for the books: The 37-year-old Brett was batting an anemic .256/.330/.324 on July 1, then suddenly flipped a switch and turned back into the Brett of 1980 for half a season, batting .386/.433/.663 with 36 doubles in 78 games the rest of the way.

Using the context adjustments above, Brett's 1986-90 seasons (he moved to first in 1987, DH in 1991) score a rate of 111.0, with a batting line of .302/.382/.507. On the whole, I'd still rate Brett ahead of Chipper, but it's close.

Ron Santo should be in the Hall of Fame. Period. When you break down the third basemen this way, you see immediately that there's a distinct first tier: Mathews and Schmidt are the A+ students; Boggs with his slightly shorter prime is the A student; Chipper, Brett and Santo are the A- students. However you break that group out, it's the immortals at the position, and Santo is one of them, and a fine glove man to boot (five Gold Gloves).

Santo was the total package—good batting averages, excellent power, patience, tremendous durability and consistency; the only chink in his armor is a slightly large number of double play balls. Like Boggs, Santo was especially well-suited to exploit his home park, batting .296/.383/.522 at home for his career compared with .257/.342/.406 on the road. In any event, the benefits Santo reaped from Wrigley Field are largely offset by the extreme pitcher-friendly conditions of his era.

That brings us to the guys who inhabit the borders of Hall-worthiness.

Stan Hack, the poor man's Boggs, was also a fine third baseman who played in Wrigley, but there the similarities to Santo end; Hack's prime years were shorter than Santo's, ran through a high-scoring era (although the late 1930s were not nearly as hitter-happy in the NL as in the AL) and got a boost at the end from World War II (I count 1943 as his last prime season, but he excelled in 1945 as well); on the other hand, Hack wasn't a power hitter of the type Wrigley generally favors. He certainly deserves to be remembered as a star of three pennant-winning Cubs teams, but Hack was not enough of an offensive force to bust down Cooperstown's doors on the strength of an eight-year prime.

Sal Bando isn't quite Hall of Fame material either, although the Hall would not be in any way embarrassed by his presence; it can and has done far worse. As you’ll see from the next chart, he was a better player at his peak than Tony Perez, and his prime as a whole holds up better than Perez’s when you consider their positions. He may well have been a better player than Jim Rice, too.

Bando is the classic underrated player: pitcher's park, pitcher's era, value concentrated in his power and walks rather than batting averages. But really, anybody who thinks Pie Traynor was a better baseball player than Bando ... I want to be in a league with that guy. Despite his disadvantages, Bando's value was recognized by the writers of his day—he was runner-up for the MVP to Vida Blue in 1971, fourth in 1973, third in 1974.

After being one of the anchors (along with Reggie, Catfish and Fingers) of the A's dynasty that won five straight division titles and three consecutive World Championships (the only non-Yankees team to manage that feat), Bando arrived in Milwaukee in time to help spark the Brewers' turnaround into a contender. Bando's the only guy on this list with more than two World Championships to his name; Mathews, Boggs, Schmidt, Brett and Chipper each won one.

Ken Boyer was perhaps more respected in his day than Santo, winning an MVP Award and going on to manage, but offensively Boyer didn't do anything quite as well as Santo besides hit for average, and his prime didn't last as long.

Bob Elliott was a converted outfielder whose prime years include a couple of seasons of battering war-depleted pitching, but his MVP season for the Boston Braves in 1947, which he basically reprised for the 1948 pennant winners, shows that he was no fluke. Elliott was dumped when the Braves came up with Mathews, and he never had another good year.

Scott Rolen is the classic guy who could have been a Hall of Famer if he'd stayed healthy—he started early and well, but his prime years were dinged here and there by injuries that stole playing time and leached productivity, and then he ran off the bridge. He's still a productive player now, but a shell of his old self.

Toby Harrah may look out of place in this company, but for eight years he was a fine offensive player and only missed time at third to play shortstop. Like a number of the guys on this list, he was a patient hitter in a lower-scoring era. Harrah's also one of the few of the long-prime third basemen who was any sort of base thief.

Ron Cey was a slightly lesser Bando, a guy who had power and patience, was a key contributor to a lesser dynasty of sorts (four pennants, including one World Championship, with the Dodgers) while playing in a pitcher's park in a low-scoring era, and helped his next team (the 1984 Cubs) over the hump. There are only two World Series-winning teams prior to the 1990s to not have a Hall of Famer (the 1981 Dodgers and 1984 Tigers), and the multiple just-short candidates from each team have a good deal in common. Cey, like Davey Lopes, suffers partly from having had a late start to his career.

Ken Caminiti's story is a tragic one, whether or not you believe that his use of steroids contributed to the toll the cocaine and other drugs took on his heart, killing him at age 41. Certainly Caminiti was one of the poster boys of the steroid age, batting .260/.319/.378 his first five years as a regular, with a career high of 13 home runs, to .293/.382/.531 from age 31-37, including his 40-homer MVP season in 1996—a transformation that's not explained simply by the 1994 offensive explosion and his departure from the Astrodome.

Caminiti just went bonkers down the stretch in 1996, batting .368/.457/.756 with 32 homers and 98 RBIs in 86 games from June 25 to the end of that season. But steroid asterisks or no, while Caminiti was very briefly a great player and for an eight-year stretch a very good one, he sustained greatness for far too little time to be a Hall of Famer.

Eddie Yost didn't do much but walk, but for 11 seasons, mainly for the dead-end old Washington Senators of the 1950s, he walked enough to be a tougher out than anybody on this list besides Boggs, Mathews or Chipper. Not bad.

Graig Nettles is one of the guys I list twice here, because his best eight-year stretch rates him considerably higher, while if you stretch his prime over 16 seasons it's of similar quality, albeit with diminished playing time. Nettles, of course, was also an astonishing defensive player as well as one of the wittiest, most quotable players in memory. My favorite Nettles quote, from 1986, when he was 41 and in his third-to-last season: "I play for two reasons. One, for the fun, the other for the money. When it stops being fun, I'll play for the money."

Robin Ventura, like Rolen, was tripped up by injuries in his prime; Ventura's skill set as a relatively patient power hitter with a good glove gives him much in common with many others on this list, but over fewer years. Ventura will always be remembered by Mets fans for the "grand slam single" in the rain to win Game Five of the 1999 NLCS from behind in the bottom of the 15th, and in Texas as the guy who charged the mound on Nolan Ryan in a 1993 brawl and got trapped in a headlock and pummeled for his troubles.

Brooks Robinson was a better hitter, especially for average, than his raw numbers would suggest, but he simply doesn't belong in a Hall of Fame discussion on the basis of his bat. That said, his durability (note the 158 games played at third base per 162 scheduled team games, over a 12-year stretch) and longevity, combined with solid offensive output, gives him a sound basis to be enshrined for his glove. Buddy Bell was a similar hitter to Robinson and also a good fielder over a long career, but not as good in any respect.

Darrell Evans was another third baseman in the Bando/Cey mold, and like Brett he effectively had a second career—in Evans' case, arguably more successful than the first—at first base (.253/.362/.489, Rate of 102.8 from age 36-40). Evans had a few too many lost seasons in his prime, but at his best (two 40-homer seasons 12 years apart) he was a very dangerous slugger.

How much did Evans hit the ball in the air? In 1987, as a slow-footed 40-year-old batting in the middle of a lineup with enough baserunners to score 896 runs—Evans batted with a man on first 209 times—and striking out just 84 times, he hit into only two double plays all year.

Bill Madlock was a great hitter for average (four batting titles), and had a bit of power and—at times—speed (career high: 32 steals), but wasn't the most patient hitter and was held back by missing time year in and year out to nagging injuries. Note that Madlock's low number of games at third was due to a year-and-a-half experiment of the Giants playing him at second base.

Madlock was a notorious second-half hitter (career: .290/.350/.424 in the first half, including .256/.307/.360 in April; .321/.384/.462 in the second half, including .348/.412/.511 in August), and was acquired in-season in time to help the stretch runs of the 1979 Pirates, 1985 Dodgers and 1987 Tigers.

If you list the guys who are in the Hall of Fame as third basemen and whose prime years began during the years 1871-1950, you get a grand total of five players: Jimmy Collins, Frank "Home Run" Baker, Pie Traynor, Fred Lindstrom, and George Kell. The Hall opened its doors in 1936, but it didn't have a third baseman until the Veterans Committee inducted Collins in 1945, followed by the writers inducting Traynor in 1948, the Veterans inducting Baker in 1955, the Veterans returning—after a two-decade hiatus—with Lindstrom in 1976, the writers finally relenting to let in Mathews in 1978, and then Brooks Robinson and Kell being inducted by (respectively) the writers and the Veterans in 1983.

I offer that list as a mild apologia for the poor quality of some of the early selections: These guys may not look like much when set in context next to their modern counterparts, but in a few cases they were the best of their eras. That said, Kell really isn't defensible even giving a fair amount of credit for his glovework. As a hitter he was a lesser Madlock—he wasn't a significant offensive force for most of his career (he drove in as many as 70 runs in a season just four times), and his prime years were not long.

The best AL third baseman between Baker and Brooks Robinson wasn't Kell; it was Yost or Harlond Clift or Al Rosen, depending how much stress you place on the length of their primes. Kell's prime runs only one season longer than Clift's, and Kell was clearly the weaker hitter. I put little enough stock in the writers, but there's a reason they never gave Kell more than 37 percent of the vote.

When I was a lad in the 1970s, conventional wisdom regarded Pie Traynor as the greatest third baseman of them all, on the basis of seven 100-RBI seasons and a .320 lifetime batting average. Conventional wisdom was insane, given the opportunity to choose Mathews instead.

Traynor from age 24-34 averaged 5 home runs and 39 walks per 162 games, plus his batting averages (unlike his OBPs) failed to reflect more than 20 sacrifice hits per year, including 77 in a two-year period (his batting average in 1927-28 drops from .340 to .318 if you include the sac hits as outs). When you run the whole thing through the sort of context adjustment I'm doing here, so much air lets out of the Traynor balloon that he ends up this far below the likes of Ron Cey, Toby Harrah and Darrell Evans as a hitter.

For all that, I'm not suggesting the voters were wrong to enshrine Traynor. Depending on how much credit you give for his defense—and the weak offensive numbers of pre-Mathews third basemen suggest how much of a defense-first position this was for so many years—he really does have a case to be the best third baseman of the 1900-1950 period, when you consider his 11-year prime, durability and consistency.

Collins and Elliott are the only other contenders whose primes are of comparable length and offensive quality, and Elliott isn't regarded as a great glove man. But with the arrival of superior two-way third basemen after 1950, Traynor no longer has any business in any serious discussion of the greats at the position.

Troy Glaus had, in his his prime, genuinely elite-status raw power, but injuries and a low batting average put a damper on the quality of his career. Much the same could be said of Matt Williams, although in Williams' case it was lack of walks, not lack of hits. Tim Wallach was another poor man's Brooks Robinson, which of course is an excellent thing to have on your team, just not a Hall of Famer.

Ken Keltner is immortalized in baseball analyst circles for Bill James' vivisection of the famously poor case made for his Hall candidacy by a committee of his friends. As I've done before, I just ignore the missing year that Keltner lost to war, but his low OBP in particular erases any doubt that James was right about his being too far back of the pack for it to matter.

The last three names—Mike Lowell, Carney Lansford and Doug DeCinces—are in the "just happy to be listed" category. Lansford comes out here as basically the same hitter as Traynor, but with more injuries.

Next, we move on to the shorter primes among the post-1920 third basemen:
Prime Oth Player              Age    Yrs   Avg   Slg   Obp   Rate  G-3B      In?
    5  1  Al Rosen          26-30    4.8  .295  .561  .374  142.6   146      No
    6  8  Alex Rodriguez    28-33    6.0  .292  .549  .389  139.6   145  Active
    7  5  Ron Santo         23-29    7.0  .289  .530  .378  137.6   160      No
    5  0  David Wright      22-26    5.0  .304  .502  .380  128.9   155  Active
    5  4  Sal Bando         25-29    5.0  .281  .500  .383  128.8   157      No
    5  9  Tony Perez        25-29    5.0  .288  .527  .345  122.7   152     YES
    5  0  Howard Johnson    26-30    5.0  .263  .527  .350  119.4   122      No
    7  1  Harlond Clift     23-29    6.7  .258  .467  .362  117.8   156      No
    5  0  Jim Ray Hart      22-26    5.0  .285  .525  .350  114.1   118      No
    5  0  Whitey Kurowski   25-29    4.8  .286  .519  .348  111.7   144      No
    5  1  Fred Lindstrom    20-24    4.7  .296  .474  .332    106   138     YES
    7  0  Eric Chavez       22-28    7.0  .267  .479  .342  101.4   144  Active
    7  1  Aramis Ramirez    25-31    7.0  .284  .503  .339   97.4   133  Active
    6  3  Richie Hebner     21-26    6.0  .290  .503  .354   93.8   126      No
    6  0  Bill Melton       23-28    6.0  .262  .478  .332   87.4   117      No
    6  2  Bob Horner        20-25    5.6  .272  .542  .329   85.8   108      No
* - Data incomplete or unavailable.

Al Rosen didn't get a regular job until he was 26 (he batted .328 and slugged .563 in the minors while blocked behind Keltner), started breaking down with back trouble at 31, and was retired by 33—but in between, for five seasons, he was as good as the best ever at the position.

I've covered Alex Rodriguez already in the middle infielders column, but while he was already qualified for the Hall just on the basis of his time as a shortstop, he's closing in on also compiling a full Hall of Fame career just as a third baseman, having won two MVP Awards at the position. In A-Rod's case, of course, Cooperstown debates are all about the effects of steroids on sportswriters.

I've listed Ron Santo's best seven-year prime here for context, as it really stands out in terms of quality. Ditto Sal Bando's five best. Both are discussed above.

David Wright, like A-Rod, is listed here through 2009. Five seasons don't a Hall of Famer make, and even a healthy Wright could fall off the pace of the real elite third basemen, especially if he's unable to solve Citi Field as a home run park. But entering his age-27 season, Wright still stands an excellent chance to compile a no-questions-asked Hall of Fame resume as long as he can stay healthy.

Tony Perez came out rather poorly when I stacked up his prime against the first basemen and corner outfielders. If you sever out just the years of that prime when he played third, he looks much better, with outstanding power and a more acceptable OBP. Perez in 1970 was just the 10th third baseman to hit 40 homers (Mathews did it four times, Harmon Killebrew three, Rosen and Dick Allen once each).

But of course, even in that five-year period, Perez was at best erratic at the position, making 67 errors over one two-year period (actually, Perez was moved after the 1971 season, the first of his career as a third baseman when he'd topped the league average in both range factor and fielding percentage), and overall his years as a first baseman just don't measure up to the Hall's standards. Had he posted five more seasons of the same quality as the five at third, he’d be a much more legitimate Hall of Famer.

Howard Johnson earns, oddly enough if you think of him as a compact home run hitter with Popeye the Sailor Man forearms, the distinction of being by far the best base thief among the post-1920 third basemen considered here. HoJo, now the Mets batting coach, was famous for a couple of things.

One, he was a dead-fastball hitter who gained a reputation for big late-inning homers mainly because he owned closers—especially Todd Worrell—who relied heavily on their heat. Two, he had a highly pronounced pattern of playing better in odd-numbered years. Three, he was frequently deployed, sometimes with ghastly results, as a shortstop, mainly due to Davey Johnson's view that the team could afford a weak defensive shortstop on days when they expected fewer ground balls—especially when Sid Fernandez, an extreme power/flyball pitcher who generated few ground balls, was on the mound.

HoJo averaged 43 appearances at short per year from 1986-91 despite the fact that nobody argued that he was a good defensive shortstop, but he never complained about the duty (he was better defensively at third, but also very error-prone, as his lifetime .929 fielding percentage attests).

And four, his power/speed combination: There have only been 17 seasons of 30 homers/30 steals by an infielder in the game's history, and 12 of those have come since 1996; HoJo had three of the first five (along with Tommy Harper and Joe Carter), and in fact averaged 31 homers and 32 steals over the five seasons of his prime. Anyway, for these purposes, Johnson was unquestionably a Hall of Fame-caliber player from 1987-91, but those five years were his only years as a productive regular.

Harlond Clift is sometimes touted as a Hall of Fame candidate, having been the original power-patience-glove prototype that became the template for later success stories at third. His defensive stats are outstanding, although influenced by context (playing for a team with a 6.24 ERA that strikes out 2.6 men per game, you have a lot of defensive opportunities), as were his batting stats in the wild offensive context of the late 1930s.

Certainly he was the best AL third baseman of the 1920s/30s/40s, but unrecognized by virtue of playing for horrible St. Louis Browns teams. Unfortunately, Clift hit the wall at age 30 in 1943, including suffering a debilitating case of mumps that spread to his testicles; he later suffered a horseback riding injury and was done as a major leaguer by age 32 (although his bat revived in the low minors after the war). As a result, there's really only the seven seasons of Clift's prime and not much else.

Jim Ray Hart's career with the Giants of the 1960s was finished off by injuries even more swiftly than Clift's or HoJo's (Hart never had 400 plate appearances in a season after his age-26 season), but Hart, too, was a tremendous hitter. Ditto for Whitey Kurowski, although like many of his 1940s Cardinals teammates, Kurowski's prime numbers include three seasons facing weak wartime competition.

Context may explain the Hall's selection of Pie Traynor and George Kell, but all the context in the world can't avoid the fact that Fred Lindstrom is a ridiculous choice for the Hall, one of the three or four worst ever, along with his infield-mate George Kelly. Both remain notorious examples of Frankie Frisch's influence in getting his old teammates elected by the Veterans Commitee.

Lindstrom got his career off to a solid start, and did finish second in the MVP balloting at age 22, but after his 25th birthday he batted .288/.326/.412, appeared in 100 games in a season just twice, drove in as many as 65 runs in a season once, and played his last game at age 30. And even in his early years, when Lindstrom rode the wave of an NL batting average that went as high as .303, his power wasn't exceptional and he rarely walked. There are easily 20 better third basemen on the outside looking in than Lindstrom.

Besides being the man who proves that even Billy Beane can look dumb when he has money to spend, Eric Chavez is yet another high-quality, though not Hall-quality, third baseman cut down by injury after reaching his late 20s. Aramis Ramirez hopes to avoid the same fate. His Rate here would be 103.4 if you excluded his injury-plagued 2009, but if Ramirez is going to land a respectable place among the longer-prime third basemen, he'll need to press on through the setbacks of 2009.

Richie Hebner ranks low on this list due to gaps in his playing time, and after age 26 he hit some off years and then moved to first base. But in his prime in the low-scoring early 1970s, Hebner was a fine hitter, with an OPS+ as high as 152 in 1972.

Similarly shortened primes, and unlike Hebner not followed by much of a second act, afflicted slugging third basemen Bill Melton and Bob Horner. Horner had Hall of Fame power and a short swing that made him hard to strike out, but he didn't walk much, his batting averages were inflated by his home park, and his weight problems made him useless on the field and the bases and prone to injury.

In prior columns, I left off at this point, but for the third basemen I thought it would also be interesting to look at their predecessors over the game's first five decades. Note that the seasonal notation reflects the fact that these guys played much shorter schedules—Cap Anson, for example, played just 2.36 seasons worth of 162-game schedules over a seven-year period dating back to the start of the National Association in 1871: 
Prime Oth Player             Age   Yrs    Avg    Slg    Obp  Rate  G-3B    In?
  6    0  Levi Meyerle     21-26   2.0   .336   .579   .407 160.7    81    No
  7    18 Cap Anson        19-25   2.4   .326   .511   .409 158.7    88   YES
  6    4  Frank Baker      23-28   5.7   .322   .574   .362 138.7   156   YES
  7    1  Denny Lyons      21-27   6.0   .315   .532   .400 132.9   115    No
  6    3  Heinie Groh      25-30   5.5   .301   .481   .380 123.5   142    No
  14   1  Ezra Sutton      20-34   6.7   .294   .468   .357 113.7   122    No
  10   0  Ned Williamson   21-30   6.5   .256   .459   .361 110.4    93    No
  6    0  Bill Bradley     22-27   5.4   .296   .502   .337 109.7   151    No
  8    0  Bill Joyce       24-32   7.7   .269   .502   .396 106.9    95    No
  9    1  Jimmy Collins    27-35   8.1   .283   .479   .329 105.7   153   YES
  7    11 Deacon White     34-40   4.9   .301   .438   .362 104.3   130    No
  9    0  John McGraw      20-28   7.7   .306   .441   .428 104.0    99   YES
  7    0  Red Smith        22-28   5.6   .285   .463   .348 102.5   157    No
  8    0  Heinie Zimmerman 24-31   7.5   .300   .509   .327 101.5   106    No
  7    4  Tommy Leach      24-30   6.5   .276   .470   .324  96.2   109    No
  6    1  Art Devlin       24-29   5.8   .274   .421   .358  93.6   151    No
  10   2  Larry Gardner    26-35   9.3   .280   .445   .323  90.6   152    No
* - Stolen base data incomplete or unavailable. None of the pre-1920 third basemen had complete caught stealing data or any double play data.

Levi Meyerle is the kind of player who's really impossible to remove from the context of 1870s baseball; he won the first batting and home run titles in organized baseball, hitting .492 and slugging .700 in 26 games in 1871 in the newly formed National Association (the .492 isn’t exactly a real record, but it’s the highest batting average ever recorded over a major league season), but after 1877 he moved on to other leagues that we no longer consider "major." Like Anson, he illustrates the brevity of the schedules played at the time. That said, Meyerle was clearly one of a handful of the standout stars of the infant pro game.

Cap Anson was an offensive monster for two and a half decades, although the extent of his dominance is also exaggerated here by the fact that early baseball, being chock full of errors, saw a lot more plate appearances per game. Reflecting the convention at the time to treat players as generalists who moved all over the diamond, Anson went back and forth between third and first with occasional time as a catcher for his first seven seasons before spending a year as an outfielder, then settling in at first. He doesn't really count as a third baseman in anyone's evaluation, but since he spent just slightly more than half his games at the position for those years, I'm listing him here.

Frank Baker was really the first superstar third baseman the game saw - note that his context-adjusted slugging percentage beats even those of Schmidt, Rosen, Mathews, A-Rod and Brett—and as such I view him as a worthy Hall of Famer despite the relative brevity of his peak (he was still a good player but not at all the same after holding out for a year at age 29 and then again at 34, good enough to contribute to the Yankees' first two pennants). He was famously deadly in October (.363/.392/.560 over 25 World Series games, including an OPS above 1.000 in each of his first three World Series, against some of the toughest pitching staffs of the dead-ball era).

It's too late to bother fixing much in the way of the occasional injustices in the Hall's treatment of 19th-century players, but as arguably the best-hitting third baseman of the 19th century, Denny Lyons could make a case. However, Lyons' achievements need to be discounted just a bit, as he had his best seasons in the American Association in 1890-91, when the league was bleeding talent to the NL and to the Players League rebellion, his career wasn't long and he missed a fair number of games even in his prime.

Heine Groh's prime could be extended two more years if you included his time as a second baseman before moving to third. Groh, the third baseman for the 1919 Reds, hero of the World Series for the 1922 Giants, and a contributor to three other pennant winners famed for his "bottle" bat, was a genuinely big star at his peak: He led the NL in OBP twice, hits once, runs once, doubles twice, and OPS once in a three-year period from 1917-19.

Ezra Sutton, perhaps the most obscure third baseman of the lot, had some serious ups and downs (from age 28-32, he batted .255/.278/.313, an OPS+ of 91, yet somehow kept his job and had his bat come roaring back to be one of the NL's best hitters the next three seasons). Sutton was the first of many great Braves third basemen (see also Mathews, Chipper Jones, Elliott, Horner and Red Smith), spending 12 seasons with the Braves. He moved frequently to other positions, mostly shortstop.

Ned Williamson, third baseman and later shortstop for the Cubs dynasty of the 1880s, is best known today for a fluke: After he hit 49 doubles and two home runs in 98 games in 1883, the ground rules were changed at tiny Lakefront Park, and the Cubs went homer-happy, hitting 142 home runs in 113 games, a staggering number for the 1880s; Williamson's 27 stood as the single-season record until Babe Ruth broke it. Despite outhomering their opponents nearly 2-to-1, the Cubs had a bad year and they changed the rules again; Williamson led the league in walks anyway, but while he remained a solid hitter he never again cracked double figures in homers. In his day, though, Williamson was better known for his superior glove.

Bill Bradley, the third baseman for the Nap Lajoie-era Indians (then the Naps), is a prime example of how excerpting the prime seasons and adjusting for context can change the way you view a player—Bradley's career slugging percentage was .371, but when you translate his prime into the modern context, you get .502.

I thought Bill Joyce would rate much higher here; his career OPS+ is the fourth-highest among third basemen with at least 2,000 career plate appearances. But Joyce missed far too much time, including the entire 1893 season at age 27, and his career lasted just eight seasons.

Jimmy Collins, third baseman for the first World Series winners (the 1903 Red Sox) was the first third baseman to have what we would modernly recognize as a long, stable career. Typical of his era, he was best known for his glove, but had some power.

Deacon White, another of the early game's superstars, was on his second career at third base after finishing his catching years, but like Anson was good enough to still be a star at 40 even with the nearly non-existent training and medical practices of the 19th century.

John McGraw may have been the game's greatest manager, and was certainly the best player among the game's great managers (with the arguable exception of Frank Chance, whose best years as a manager coincided with his years as a star player). McGraw, of course, batted .334 for his career, ranks third all-time in career on-base percentage (.466; he led the league three times and posted a .500 OBP from age 24-28) and was a highly successful base thief. Unfortunately, the scrappy Irishman was frequently injured, missing most of the 1896 season at age 23, being relegated to half-time play by age 28 and essentially full-time status as a dugout manager by 30. The lost playing time, plus his lack of power, causes him to rate low here.

Red Smith's main place in baseball history is the .314/.401/.449 line he put up after being acquired by the Miracle Braves on August 10, 1914, although he was unavailable for the World Series. Smith, too, ended his playing career at age 29 just before the lively ball arrived.

In 1912, Heinie Zimmerman led the NL in batting, home runs, hits, doubles, slugging and total bases, was third in RBIs and fifth in triples and OBP, and finished tied for sixth in the MVP balloting, behind teammate Joe Tinker, who batted .282/.331/.351 to Zimmerman's .372/.418/.571. It would be that kind of career for the lead-gloved Zimmerman, who was eventually banned from baseball as part of the Black Sox-era corruption scandals (he was implicated in a plot with teammate Hal Chase to throw a game in 1919). Zimmerman also batted .120/.120/.200 and made some “boneheaded” defensive plays during the 1917 World Series, which the Giants lost to the White Sox 4 games to 2, and ended up being implicated in a racketeering and bootlegging operation a decade after he was banned from the game. Giants outfielder Benny Kauff, also later banned from the game when he was indicted for auto theft in 1921, batted .160/.160/.440 in that Series. Hal Chase’s high average and low walk totals reflected a talented guy who was believed to have co-conspirators around the league let him pad his stats with meaningless hits to avoid detection (a common practice in their circle—nobody paid attention to batter walk totals at the time). Was Zimmerman, who had a similar offensive profile, involved in the same kind of pervasive corruption as Chase? Was there something fishy about the 1917 World Series? We have rumors, but nothing more, so the cloud over Zimmerman’s career remains murky.

Tommy Leach had a very long career at multiple positions, but some of his best seasons came during his years as third baseman for the Honus Wagner-Fred Clarke Pirates. The third baseman for the rival Giants at the time was Art Devlin; both were interviewed in The Glory of Their Times. Larry Gardner, teammate of Tris Speaker on three pennant-winning teams in Boston and Cleveland, had a long and stable career at third, but wasn't an especially productive hitter despite good batting averages.

Conclusion


By my reckoning, the Hall of Fame’s roster of third basemen, inducted as third basemen, should look like this:

1. Eddie Mathews
2. Mike Schmidt
3. Wade Boggs
4. George Brett
5. Chipper Jones
6. Ron Santo
7. Frank Baker
8. Brooks Robinson
9. Pie Traynor
10. Jimmy Collins

With the arguable, borderline cases being Lyons, Sutton and Bando.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan McLaughlin 2010-04-08T10:40:15+00:00 The path to Cooperstown: The catchers (Part 2) http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-path-to-cooperstown-the-catchers-part-2/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-path-to-cooperstown-the-catchers-part-2/#When:05:03:15 In Part 1 of this series looking at the best catchers of the post-1920 period, I focused on catchers whose prime years ran eight or more seasons. In this followup, I will look at the top catchers whose major league primes were shorter than that. The pickings, as you will see, get much thinner in a hurry.

The six- or seven-year primes


Catcher              Yrs   Oth Ages    GC/Year  PA    Avg    Slg   OBP  SB   CS   DP   Rate  Hall?
Mickey Tettleton      6    *3 28-33        90   594  .246   .489  .377   2    4    7   109.4  Out
Gene Tenace           7    *1 27-33        91   548  .244   .479  .399   4    5    8   104.8  Out
Roy Campanella        7     0 27-33       133   549  .277   .527  .349   3   *3   16   101.1   IN
Darren Daulton        6    *1 28-33       121   499  .254   .472  .362   6    1    4    85.2  Out
Earl Battey           6     0 25-30       137   530  .283   .440  .352   1    2   17    82.0  Out
Terry Kennedy         6     0 25-30       139   570  .276   .442  .319   1    2   12    80.5  Out
Jim Sundberg          6     0 26-31       147   565  .274   .399  .352   2    4   13    79.3  Out
Gus Triandos          6    *1 25-30       119   495  .256   .464  .326   0    0   16    75.0  Out
Jason Varitek         6     1 30-35       125   508  .257   .427  .340   4    2   11    73.7  Act
Johnny Romano         7     0 25-31       108   435  .265   .473  .356   1    1    9    73.2  Out
Harry Danning         6     0 25-30       122   501  .278   .450  .323   2   na   14    72.9  Out
Joe Ferguson          7     0 26-32        87   439  .244   .451  .359   3    1    9    71.1  Out
Andy Seminick         7     0 25-31       114   439  .249   .458  .345   2    2   11    69.4  Out
Bubbles Hargrave      6     0 29-34        98   381  .288   .483  .361   3   *4   na    66.4  Out
Ernie Whitt           7     0 31-37       124   438  .254   .446  .332   2    3   10    64.8  Out
Al Lopez              7     0 21-27       131   467  .253   .371  .320   3   na  *12    55.3   IN


Catcher            Seasons    Years      GC    GC/Year  SB%     SBA/162C  Adj Att  ADJ%
Gus Triandos         5.75    1956-61     685     119   49.5         71     141    54.3
Earl Battey          5.95    1960-65     813     137   56.5         69     127    57.0
Jim Sundberg         5.65    1977-82     828     147   56.5        143     138    59.0
Roy Campanella       6.65    1949-55     884     133     na         na     116    61.1
Gene Tenace          7.00    1974-80     637      91   62.4        153     144    63.1
Joe Ferguson         7.00    1973-79     606      87   64.1        145     141    64.2
Ernie Whitt          7.00    1983-89     869     124   66.9        128     140    65.6
Johnny Romano        6.95    1960-66     750     108   64.9         92     164    65.9
Terry Kennedy        5.68    1981-86     792     139   68.7        188     141    66.4
Darren Daulton       5.60    1990-95     677     121   70.0        162     136    67.0
Mickey Tettleton     5.71    1989-94     512      90   70.4        152     148    69.8
Jason Varitek        6.00    2002-07     748     125     75        113     144    70.4

Al Lopez             6.65    1930-36     870     131    na         na      na      na
Andy Seminick        6.65    1946-52     761     114    na         na      na      na
Harry Danning        5.70    1937-42     695     122    na         na      na      na
Bubbles Hargrave     5.70    1922-27     556      98    na         na      na      na


Mickey Tettleton and Gene Tenace are essentially two variations on the same theme, although Tettleton was a markedly weaker defensive catcher against the run. Besides their short primes, the main drawback of both in comparison to other catchers is that they spent so little of their time behind the plate, barely more than half their teams’ games over the years of their primes. That said, both overcame low batting averages and high strikeout rates to be highly productive hitters.

Roy Campanella arrived in the majors at age 26, but like a number of Negro League players took a year to adjust before he kicked into high gear in the majors; presumably his prime would have been longer otherwise. Even so, Campy in his prime was a terror in his best years but prone to occasionally not hitting (he batted .207 in 1954 in between two MVP seasons) due to being banged up. The stolen base data I list here are after his offensive prime, when he was physically broken down due to hand injuries; one would assume his numbers in his best years were no worse. Campanella was 36 when he was paralyzed in a car crash, and spent the second half of his life in a wheelchair.

Darren Daulton had similar skills to Tettleton and Tenace, but spent more time behind the plate and less in the lineup. The dropoff to Daulton is steep, but in his case it’s mainly due to the time he missed. Daulton’s absurdly low GIDP totals reflect the fact that he didn’t hit the ball on the ground much.

Earl Battey, the catcher for the Twins in the 1960s, was an excellent throwing catcher in addition to being a consistent producer with the bat.

Terry Kennedy was a workhorse who could hit but lacked any semblance of plate patience and fell apart pretty quickly.

Jim Sundberg’s 147 games caught per 162 team games is the highest of any catcher in this study unless you count the seven years of Yogi Berra’s peak. Sundberg remained a solid but not-as-feared defensive catcher after his prime, going on to start for the World Champion 1985 Royals, but as a hitter he was finished after his prime years.

Gus Triandos, the Orioles' catcher in the late '50s and early '60s, was sort of the poor man’s Ernie Lombardi, great power and arm but no mobility at all.

Jason Varitek’s prime is arguably just three years from 2003-05, but I stretched a bit. Varitek’s throwing record is poor even by the standards of the 21st century American League.

Johnny Romano, another 1960s catcher, is yet another guy who had the bat to play with some of the best at his position, but not the durability.

Harry Danning was the Giants' catcher until World War II, and was 30 years old and coming off two mildly off years when he went off to war after the 1942 season. He never came back to play major league baseball, although the cause was not combat but a knee injury suffered playing baseball while serving stateside during the war.

Joe Ferguson was another catcher in the Tenace mold, plus he played in Dodger Stadium in the 70s, plus the Dodgers kept giving his playing time to Steve Yeager. All that's not a recipe for posting impressive batting numbers. But he could hit. Ferguson was the primary catcher for the vastly underrated 1974 Dodgers.

Andy Seminick was the catcher for the Phillies in the 1950s, and joins a long line of good-hit, not-play-enough backstops. That goes double for Bubbles Hargrave, the first catcher in the post-1890 period to win a batting title.

By the time we reach Ernie Whitt, the catcher for the Bobby Cox Blue Jays, we have landed at "ordinary." But ordinary, in a catcher, remains valuable.

Al Lopez is best considered solely as a manager.

The four- to five-year catchers


Catcher            Yrs   Oth    Ages   GC/Year   PA   Avg    Slg   OBP  SB   CS   DP    Rate  Hall?
Joe Mauer             4     0  22-25      117   567  .311   .442  .393   7    2   16    98.6  Act
Elston Howard         4    *3  32-35      130   540  .311   .517  .353   1    1   13    98.3  Out
Victor Martinez       5     0  25-29      117   561  .291   .457  .361   0    0   18    92.5  Act
Todd Hundley          4     1  25-28      123   496  .258   .513  .351   2    2    7    89.4  Out
Mike Stanley          4    *3  30-33      113   492  .277   .502  .361   1    1   12    89.0  Out
Earl Williams         4     0  22-25       90   554  .253   .480  .326   0    1   13    86.8  Out
Dick Dietz            4     0  26-29      109   453  .270   .477  .388   1    1   10    83.8  Out
Chris Hoiles          5     1  27-31      120   477  .259   .485  .360   1    1    9    83.2  Out
Steve O'Neill         4     0  27-30      136   517  .278   .433  .369   2   *3   na    82.6  Out
Frankie Hayes         4     2  23-26      121   497  .273   .473  .344   4    2  *16    81.1  Out
Bob Brenly            4     0  30-33      112   516  .260   .460  .341   7    7    7    81.0  Out
Tony Pena             5     1  25-29      143   569  .281   .436  .321   8    8   17    79.7  Out
Spud Davis            5     1  26-30      114   455  .294   .467  .361   1   na  *13    76.7  Out
Brian Harper          5     0  29-33      121   502  .302   .447  .332   1    2   15    74.6  Out
Ramon Hernandez       4     0  27-30      120   480  .275   .455  .329   1    0   14    71.8  Act
Johnny Bassler        4     1  26-29      127   487  .285   .383  .382   2    1   na    71.2  Out
Babe Phelps           5     1  28-32       96   375  .291   .483  .346   1   na   12    62.8  Out

Catcher            Seasons    Years       GC   GC/Year  SB%    SBA/162C  Adj Att  ADJ%
Elston Howard        4.00    1961-64     518     130   51.2         54     100    51.5
Joe Mauer            4.00    2005-08     466     117   58.6         82     101    53.8
Tony Pena            5.00    1982-86     717     143   60.6        178     130    58.3
Bob Brenly           4.00    1984-87     446     112   64.1        190     153    60.9
Ramon Hernandez      4.00    2003-06     479     120   66.6        118     155    61.9
Earl Williams        3.96    1971-74     358      90   66.9        142     173    68.5
Chris Hoiles         4.58    1992-96     550     120   70.7        152     149    69.0
Brian Harper         5.00    1989-93     607     121   69.0        181     177    69.0
Victor Martinez      5.00    2004-08     583     117   74.8        140     175    69.5
Todd Hundley         3.59    1994-98     443     123   73.6        135     123    69.6
Mike Stanley         3.59    1993-96     406     113   72.6        144     148    70.7
Dick Dietz           4.00    1968-71     437     109   75.6        114     151    78.2

Spud Davis           4.75    1931-35     541     114    na         na      na      na
Steve O'Neill        3.71    1919-22     506     136    na         na      na      na
Johnny Bassler       3.80    1921-24     482     127    na         na      na      na
Frankie Hayes        3.80    1938-41     461     121    na         na      na      na
Babe Phelps          4.75    1936-40     455      96    na         na      na      na

Joe Mauer isn’t quite yet at the level of a really historic offensive player for his position; he may seem like the modern Mickey Cochrane, but he still needs to add some power to move up from the Bill Dickey class into the real inner circle. But you may not realize—I didn’t—that Mauer is already a defensive catcher of historic proportions, in terms of throwing out opposing base thieves.

It’s tempting to assume that Elston Howard would have been that good for a much longer period of time if his career hadn’t had a late start due to the color line and a late start as a catcher behind Berra. The fact is, however, that Howard through age 31 had more than 2,200 major league plate appearances over five seasons and batted .273/.425/.314 (Avg/Slg/OBP) over that period. Maybe he was not used properly, but even so it appears he was simply a late bloomer. Howard was an excellent thrower in his prime.

Victor Martinez would have much more impressive numbers than .294/.469/.366 and a “Rate” of 107.7 if you left off 2008, but if he’s going to make a run at Cooperstown, he’ll have to live down last season. Martinez has the bat but is very weak against the running game; the contrast to his divisional rival Mauer is stark in that regard.

Todd Hundley emerged for only a brief moment in time as an outstanding hitter, peaking with a 41-homer season at age 27, before he fell apart physically. When the Mets got Mike Piazza they tried Hundley—then 29 years old—briefly in the outfield, where he was the worst outfielder I have ever seen. As the son of Gold Glove catcher Randy Hundley, Todd probably had almost never seen a batted ball coming toward him. As a catcher, Hundley saw few stolen base attempts but at a fairly high success rate, suggesting that he was living off his defensive reputation by the time he started to hit.

Mike Stanley joins the list of good hitters who might have been better but less valuable hitters elsewhere but occasionally were able to make a living behind the plate.

Earl Williams went downhill in almost a straight line from his Rookie of the Year season for the Braves in 1971; Williams through age 25 had a great foundation for a great career, but he’d already been in reverse gear for years.

Dick Deitz had some power and great plate patience, and turned in one of the great years with the bat for the Giants in 1970, but he couldn’t throw out opposing baserunners to save his life.

I could have included two more years for Chris Hoiles at little downgrade offensively, but his playing time was falling off by 1997-'98 and, relatedly, opposing base thieves just abused him his last two years in the league. Hoiles could certainly hit, though.

Steve O’Neill had a very long career in baseball, both as a player and a manager (O’Neill managed a World Champion in Detroit in 1945; he took over a team in midseason three times and all three played .600 ball for him). Like so many catchers, though, he was a star for only a few of those—the only years when he was really a full-time regular. He had his best year as the catcher for the World Champion 1920 Indians.

Frankie Hayes was one of a number of catchers to log a few good years with the bat at the end of the 1930s, but probably the most obscure, as it was a terrible time to be playing for Connie Mack’s cellar-dwelling A’s.

Bob Brenly was a late arrival to star-quality offensive production as a catcher, but an underappreciated contributor to the Giants of the mid-'80s.

Tony Pena was regarded when playing as a defensive star first, and had the thankless job of taking on the Vince Coleman Cardinals. His defensive numbers are indeed good, and his workloads were high for a guy with that unusual, sitting-on-the-ground crouch. A poor man’s Manny Sanguillen even in his best years as a hitter, Pena was an offensive liability for all but a handful of seasons.

Spud Davis, the catcher for the 1934 Gashouse Gang Cardinals (but also the No. 1 catcher for the 1930 Phillies, the team that posted a modern record 6.71 team ERA), was a solid hitter whose numbers soared to eye-popping levels in the Baker Bowl in the early '30s before going to St. Louis.

Brian Harper took a long time and was on his sixth organization before his bat convinced a team to let him catch regularly, but made it worth the Twins’ while, helping anchor the 1991 World Champions. He didn’t walk enough or have enough power that you’d consider him a major star even before you addressed his defensive vulnerabilities, but if there’s one theme to this series, it’s the short supply of consistent, year-to-year hitting talent at the catching position; you don’t lightly discard a catcher who can do that.

Ramon Hernandez is the other type of catcher who emerges in mid-career; whereas Harper was a good bat waiting for a regular job, Hernandez was a guy with a job who developed some power after playing regularly for a few seasons, peaking in his late 20s and early 30s.

Johnny Bassler was a typical high-OBP-and-little-else catcher, but had the good fortune to play for a high-OBP team in a high-OBP era, so the usefulness of his skills was maximized. Typical of his day, Bassler did not carry what we would regard today as everyday workloads, but he played more than the usual catcher of the era.

For five years, Babe Phelps—the last man on this list—was not really that far off, as a hitter, from some of the guys near the very top; what separates the Dodgers catcher of the late 30s from immortality was more durability and longevity than talent. Which is really the story of so many of these guys—at this position, talent may be important but durability, consistency and longevity are the real hallmarks of a guy who is not just a contributor but a Hall of Famer.

The not-to-be forgotten man


Finally, while he’s not directly relevant to this discussion, you can’t talk about the great catchers in the modern game without mentioning the guy who was almost certainly the best of them all: Josh Gibson, the greatest slugger of the Negro Leagues. We don’t have definitive stats for Negro League players, let alone a context to measure them against, so Gibson doesn’t assist us in evaluating anybody else’s resume here.

But I have to give him his due. The numbers we do have are consistent with the consensus that Gibson was a better hitter than any catcher to play in the major leagues, being more comparable to someone like Lou Gehrig (at least) than to Mike Piazza, and over an extended period.

Gibson broke into league play at 18 and played through age 34, and appears to have had a prime as a catcher ending around age 32. A combination of factors (weight, mileage, drug and alcohol problems) seem to have finished his ability to catch by that point, but while his Negro League stats show a dropoff with the bat as well, he was still a fearsome hitter those last two years.

Fifteen seasons is a long prime for a catcher. Gibson died of a brain ailment (probably a stroke) before his age 35 season, the year the color line was broken; had he survived, he might have had a Luke Easter-like last act as a slugger in the majors and given us a better taste of his abilities even in their decline.

The numbers for Gibson’s career as a whole—only 2,305 at bats, given that only a fraction of a Negro League player’s games were against league competition—show him with a batting/slugging/OBP of .366/.678/.449 between the Negro Leagues and the Mexican League from 1930-46 (.365 batting and .674 slugging in 2,529 at bats if you count the Cuban league, but walks are not available for Cuba). Defensive data are nonexistent, and getting good information about Gibson’s defense is like getting hard data about Paul Bunyan, but he was reputed to have a strong arm and be at least an able defensive catcher in his younger years.

We can never know for sure, but I feel comfortable saying on the basis of the evidence we do have that I’d take Gibson over any man who ever played the position in the majors.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan McLaughlin 2009-02-10T05:03:15+00:00 The path to Cooperstown: the catchers http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-path-to-cooperstown-the-catchers/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-path-to-cooperstown-the-catchers/#When:05:04:15 Joe Torre, who got just 29.7 percent of the vote, well short of the 75 percent of required): the catchers. This column, Part 1 of 2, will focus on the catchers with primes of eight years or more—the core of any Hall of Fame discussion—and Part 2 will deal with the rest.

As with my prior looks at slugging outfielders/first basemen, middle infielders and leadoff men, I’ll be presenting offensive statistical profiles of these players with three adjustments:

1) I focus on the block of "prime" seasons of a player’s career, rather than career totals or "peak" seasons;
2) within those seasons, I adjust batting stats for offensive context; and
3) I present those adjusted batting lines in per-162-team-games notation.

I’m also introducing something different for the catchers: context-adjusted defensive stolen base numbers for the post-1956 catchers (baseball-reference.com has data on stolen bases and caught stealing against catchers beginning only in 1956). You can examine my offensive method in detail as discussed in the column on sluggers, but I will review it here briefly before moving on to the defensive data.

Prime value


My view of the Hall of Fame is that it’s fundamentally about the stars of the game, and accordingly that the core of a player’s Hall of Fame candidacy should focus on the years he was a star. Thus, at least in evaluating non-pitchers, the key inquiry for the Hall of Fame should be neither "peak value" (how good the guy was at his very best) nor "career value" (the sum total of his career) but "prime value." Prime value is, roughly, looking at the number of years a guy had when he was a legitimate star and how good he was in those years.

In other words, when I look at a potential Hall of Famer, the first question I ask is, "How many seasons did this guy have where he was a Hall of Fame quality ballplayer?" And the second is, "How good was he in those years—just around or above the line, or way above it?"

Now, I wouldn’t argue that you should throw peak or career value entirely out the window, but both have their flaws. Peak value really doesn’t capture the way most of us think about the Hall: as a shrine to a player’s sustained accomplishments of a period of years, not his very best day. Career value, on the other hand, has two drawbacks.

One is that that looking only at career value ends up putting too much emphasis on which guy played passably well when he was 38 and playing out the string as a part-timer, rather than the years when he was doing the things we’ll remember him for. I’m a big believer that you don’t play your way out of the Hall in your old age, and neither should you get inordinate credit for padding the career totals with mediocre or part-time seasons. This is a particular issue with the catchers.

Second, baseball is played in seasons. If you look just at career totals, you miss that—you miss the fact that, at least for a star player, two seasons of 600 plate appearances really are worth more than three seasons of 400 PA at the same level of production, because the 600-PA seasons move the team closer to winning championships. In-season durability is a very important measurement of value, as it minimizes the amount of playing time that needs to be given to weak second-string catchers.

As a result, what I have tried to do here is excerpt out the consecutive series of seasons, ranging here from four to 17 years, when each guy was a star and weigh that chunk against other guys’ primes. As you will see, I do look in some cases at the years beyond the prime years, for purposes of distinguishing between the catchers who tacked on extra seasons as part-time contributors and those who just stopped hitting or stopped playing. But I zero in mainly on the prime.

The criteria


I varied slightly the criteria for picking players and seasons over the first three columns, so I’ll flag here what I did differently this time:

1. In prior columns I defined "prime" seasons—or seasons listed under the "other" column—as seasons at a certain level of OPS+ over a certain number of plate appearances. For the primes here, I gave myself more latitude with the catchers, since catching careers tend to be a little different, but essentially I tried to isolate the part that let each guy put his best foot forward. For the "other" column with the catchers, I tallied up the non-"prime" seasons when the player had 500 or more plate appearances with an OPS+ of 95 or better, or 400 PA with an OPS+ of 100 or better, or 300 PA/110 OPS+, or 250 PA/120/OPS+ (I went down as far as 250 because it’s common for older catchers to become productive half-time players).

2. Previously, I presented two separate charts for players with a prime of eight or more years and those of, say, five to seven years to avoid mixing apples and oranges. With the catchers, I ended up looking at enough guys with really short primes—so many talented backstops burn out so quickly—that I break the charts in three rather than two: the "long prime" group of guys whose primes lasted eight seasons or more (in one case as many as 17 years, but most are eight to 12), a second group of six or seven-year primes, and a "short prime" group of guys I evaluate over four or five years (unsurprisingly, nobody on the third list is a serious Hall of Fame candidate, although a few active catchers are included for the interest of the reader).

3. As with the tablesetters, I included three catchers here (Ray Schalk Wally Schang, and Steve O’Neill) whose careers straddled 1920. But catchers who played their whole primes before 1920—including Hall of Famers Buck Ewing, King Kelly, Roger Bresnahan and Wilbert Robinson—are not discussed here, as they really aren’t a useful yardstick for evaluating contemporary Hall of Fame candidates who played in the lively ball era. Regardless of the merits of comparing players from that era with sophisticated statistical analysis, the shape of their statistics is simply too different to make them meaningful yardsticks in real-world arguments about putting modern players in the Hall.

On the whole, I looked at 69 catchers, sweeping broadly precisely to give some indication both of the rarity of the players at the top of the pyramid and to give context to the relative ordinariness of the guys further down who are surrounded by people you don’t think of as immortals. The list consists of 12 Hall of Famers (one of whom, Al Lopez, is in as a manager), one guy on the Veterans Committee ballot (Torre), seven active catchers, four who recently retired and have yet to join the ballot, and 45 who are off the writers' ballot, most of whom I assume won’t be revisited by the Veterans. The last list includes Todd Hundley, who would have been on the ballot this year but didn’t make the cut under the new rules for eliminating marginal candidates who meet the minimum 10-year eligibility.

The numbers


The first caution I would emphasize here is that this is just a study of batting stats and of one quantifiable aspect of a catcher’s defense. I have scrapped my rough, seat-of-the-pants defensive grading system from the prior columns, which didn’t add anything analytical but simply congealed conventional wisdom for convenience.

The batting percentages here (batting average, slugging average, on-base percentage) are translated statistics. You can read a detailed explanation of the method in the slugging outfielders article; for consistency with the earlier pieces I used the 2005 National League as the average "season." All stats are from Baseball-Reference.com. (Unlike Baseball Reference’s own translation system, I translate based on differentials in league Avg/Slg/OBP rather than runs-per-game, thus reducing the distorting influence of variation over time in the volume of unearned runs). The essential idea of translations is to show what a player’s performance in Year X and Park X was equivalent to in Year and Park Y, not to project what a guy would have hit under other circumstances, which is unknowable.

The other offensive numbers—plate appearances, steals and caught stealing, double plays—are actual, not translated (I included base stealing and GIDP figures because they’re the two main components of offense that aren’t captured by Slugging and OBP), but are averaged per 162-game season, so as to put players whose careers were in the 154-game era or were interrupted by strikes on a common footing. (Thus, 1981 is counted as two-thirds of a season in the averaging). As you’ll see below, offensive stolen base data doesn’t add much anyway to the evaluation of the catchers, only three of whom averaged double figures in steals.

The "Rate" column in the chart is simply (translated Slg)*( translated OBP)*( translated PA). It’s not any kind of scientific formula, just a handy metric to organize the data on the table by the three main variables. I prefer multiplying rather than adding slugging and OBP (as is done with OPS), since a single point of OBP is worth more than a single point of slugging. As you can see, this metric organizes the data very strongly in favor of guys who were very durable in-season and against guys with low OBPs.

Of course, besides not counting defense, the "Rate" metric doesn’t count the baserunning and double play numbers on the chart, so don’t treat the rankings as holy writ. But they’re a good rule of thumb.

With those lengthy preliminaries out of the way, let’s run the offensive numbers, starting with the longer-prime guys as well as the seven-year peak numbers for Bench and Berra:
Catcher            Yrs  Oth  Ages  GC/Yr   PA    Avg   Slg   OBP   SB  CS   DP  Rate  Status
Mike Piazza         10   #4 24-33    135  590   .319  .572  .379    2   2   18  127.9  N/Y
Joe Torre            8   #6 22-29     80  599   .301  .503  .366    1   2   19  110.2 Vets
Ted Simmons         10   #3 21-30    136  613   .298  .497  .360    1   3   18  109.8  Off
Johnny Bench        12    1 20-31    134  603   .269  .520  .341    5   3   13  107.0  IN
Mickey Cochrane      9    1 24-32    132  581   .291  .482  .382    6   4   na  107.0  IN
Gary Carter         10   #1 23-32    144  614   .273  .506  .344    3   3   13  106.9  IN
Yogi Berra          12   #3 23-34    131  592   .286  .517  .336    2   2   10  102.9  IN
Jorge Posada         8    1 28-35    136  574   .275  .474  .377    2   2   15  102.5  Act
Bill Dickey          9    3 24-32    126  540   .294  .514  .356    2   2   *9   98.8  IN
Thurman Munson       9    0 23-31    130  601   .300  .457  .351    5   5   16   96.5  Off
Ivan Rodriguez       9    4 24-32    125  559   .303  .491  .340    9   4   18   93.3  Act
Jason Kendall        8    1 23-30    135  601   .296  .398  .368   17   8   11   88.0  Act
Bill Freehan         8    1 25-32    117  530   .274  .468  .354    1   2   11   87.9  Off
Lance Parrish        8    1 23-30    124  563   .264  .489  .319    3   4   14   87.7  Off
Carlton Fisk        14    5 24-37    114  499   .268  .488  .339    8   3   10   82.4  IN
Gabby Hartnett      14    2 23-36    113  452   .274  .505  .349    2  *4  *14   79.7  IN
Manny Sanguillen     8    0 25-32    123  541   .306  .445  .330    4   4   15   79.5  Off
Darrell Porter      11    0 21-31    116  499   .250  .440  .355    2   3    8   77.9  Off
Ernie Lombardi      11   ^3 24-34    109  443   .298  .500  .352    1  *0  *21   77.9  IN
Wally Schang         9    5 24-32     88  451   .280  .456  .379   11  *6   na   77.9  Off
Javy Lopez          10   #1 24-33    116  472   .282  .483  .326    1   2   14   74.3  N/Y
Walker Cooper       ^9    0 27/36    107  447   .288  .513  .324    2  *1   14   74.3  Off
Del Crandall         8    0 23-30    131  509   .261  .444  .318    3   2   14   71.9  Off
Tom Haller           9    0 25-33    119  453   .263  .454  .347    2   3    6   71.3  Off
Sherm Lollar        10    0 25-34    117  478   .261  .432  .343    2   1   14   70.9  Off
Rick Ferrell         8    0 25-32    129  522   .266  .386  .350    2   3   na   70.5  IN
Terry Steinbach     10    0 25-34    109  474   .278  .440  .326    2   2   14   68.1  Off
Tim McCarver         9    0 21-29    118  475   .277  .425  .334    5   4    7   67.4  Off
Ed Bailey            8    0 25-32    109  438   .254  .443  .347    2   2    8   67.4  Off
Mike Scioscia        8    0 25-32    126  465   .270  .400  .356    3   3   10   66.2  Off
Mike Lieberthal      8    0 25-32    110  453   .270  .438  .326    1   1   12   64.5  N/Y
Benito Santiago     10    1 22-31    123  491   .259  .432  .295    8   6   12   62.5  N/Y
Ray Schalk          10    0 20-29    141  521   .246  .363  .325   16  *9   na   61.5  IN
Smokey Burgess      12    0 25-36     88  371   .295  .464  .355    1   1    8   61.2  Off
Johnny Roseboro     10    0 25-34    122  459   .254  .401  .330    6   5    6   60.7  Off
Bob Boone           17    0 25-42    130  477   .251  .362  .309    2   3   11   53.4  Off

Johnny Bench         7    6 21-27    136  646   .274  .537  .344    6   3   15  119.5  IN
Yogi Berra           7   #8 25-31    149  643   .293  .532  .346    2   2   11  118.1  IN

* - Statistic not available for all seasons
^ - Includes seasons during World War II
# - Includes seasons at other positions

The defensive stats


The addition to this year’s column is defensive lines showing the number of games caught (not just played) per 162 team games (a number important enough that I run it in both the offensive and defensive charts), and averages of opposition stolen bases and opposition stolen base attempts per 162 games caught.

The number of attempts is important because a catcher’s reputation can be as important in deterring opposing running games as his arm is in stopping them. Those are first presented as raw data, since the average reader may not have seen these numbers before in this format, and you will notice a very large variation in the number of attempts faced by the catchers in the study. Some part of that is indeed individual in nature, but some is the great variation over time in the number of stolen base attempts per game in different eras.

So, I also presented translated stolen base percentages and translated attempts (technical note related to how I produced the study and not for any rational reason: for the raw numbers I used attempts per game, for the translated numbers I used per 1,458 innings caught, as innings caught was also available for post-1956 catchers). I used a 66 percent stolen base success rate and 150 steal attempts per 162 games caught as the baseline for the translations, as those are round numbers close to the historical averages for the 1956-2008 period.

If you are interested in looking at the chart I used for the baselines, I posted it here on my blog. The results:
Catcher             Seasons   Years      GC    GC/Year   SBA/162C   SB%   Adj Att  ADJ%
Ivan Rodriguez        9.00   1996-04    1124     125         86    50.8      94    48.7
Johnny Bench         11.95   1968-79    1598     134         95    54.6     105    55.6
Yogi Berra           11.41   1948-59    1496     131        *79   *48.9    *148   *55.6
Lance Parrish         7.67   1979-86     948     124        129      56     130    56.9
Del Crandall          7.60   1953-60     997     131        *57   *54.1    *117   *58.1
Johnny Roseboro       9.82   1958-67    1199     122         74    54.3     112    58.3
Thurman Munson        8.96   1970-78    1165     130        123    55.7     123    59.3
Bob Boone            16.66   1973-89    2171     130        133    59.9     129    59.4
Gary Carter           9.67   1977-86    1390     144        175    61.5     130    59.9
Sherm Lollar          9.51   1950-59    1116     117        *70   *53.0    *135   *60.1
Benito Santiago       9.60   1987-96    1183     123        143    63.8     118    60.6
Terry Steinbach       9.59   1987-96    1045     109        146    62.5     148    60.9
Mike Scioscia         8.00   1984-91    1008     126        164    65.1     131    61.8
Manny Sanguillen      7.96   1969-76     983     123        113    61.2     129    62.0
Darrell Porter       10.64   1973-83    1230     116        154    60.9     135    62.7
Ed Bailey             7.75   1956-63     844     109         75    59.2     124    63.5
Jason Kendall         8.00   1997-04    1076     135        130    67.3     142    64.6
Joe Torre             8.00   1963-70     638      80        115    60.4     140    65.2
Ted Simmons           9.96   1971-80    1354     136        161    65.6     155    65.6
Jorge Posada          8.00   2000-07    1087     136        134    70.6     163    66.4
Mike Lieberthal       8.00   1997-04     883     110        115    69.6     124    66.4
Bill Freehan          7.96   1967-74     929     117        134    62.8     168    67.2
Javy Lopez            9.89   1995-04    1147     116        127    70.7     137    67.7
Carlton Fisk         13.61   1972-85    1553     114         98    65.6     136    68.0
Smokey Burgess       11.51   1952-63    1016      88        *85   *64.3    *140   *68.5
Tom Haller            9.00   1962-70    1071     119        100    64.9     141    69.8
Tim McCarver          9.00   1963-71    1066     118        103    65.3     139    70.7
Mike Piazza           9.59   1993-02    1299     135        184    75.6     179    72.4

Johnny Bench          6.95   1969-75     948     136         75    50.5      91    51.5
Yogi Berra            6.65   1950-56     991     149        *60   *52.0    *118   *59.3

* - Statistic not available for all seasons

And the pre-1956 catchers:
Catcher            Seasons  Years       GC      GC/Year
Gabby Hartnett      13.31  1924-37     1502       113
Ernie Lombardi      10.46  1932-42     1138       109
Ray Schalk           9.23  1913-22     1301       141
Mickey Cochrane      8.56  1927-35     1134       132
Bill Dickey          8.56  1931-39     1078       126
Walker Cooper        8.56  1942-51      916       107
Wally Schang         8.28  1914-22      726        88
Rick Ferrell         7.60  1931-38      978       129

Individual catcher comments


Of the catchers to play in major league baseball after 1920, Mike Piazza was clearly the best with the bat in his hands, as he ranks first by a healthy margin among all the backstops I studied in batting and slugging while rating second only to Mickey Cochrane in OBP among the long-prime group.

Piazza’s defense is another story. Other aspects of his defense may have gotten a bad rap—Piazza handled balls in the dirt well enough and took his share of lumps blocking the plate—but when it came to gunning down baserunners, his record was just bad, the worst opposition stolen base percentage among the long-prime catchers. Opposing baserunners gave Piazza no respect and no quarter, as he was victimized by the most steal attempts relative to the league of any catcher in the study. Piazza ended up confounding expectations that he’d eventually move to another position—an experiment at first base went badly (Piazza’s the only first baseman I have ever seen who blocked throws in the dirt with his shins) and he broke down physically by the time he was tried as a DH.

Piazza is probably the only catcher in the game’s history who could make the Hall on the strength of the same hitting numbers even if he’d been a first baseman or corner outfielder.

Joe Torre is neither fish nor fowl in this discussion—he’s the second-best hitter among the long-prime catchers, but only over an eight-year prime, and, like Rod Carew and Robin Yount among the middle infielders, he’s hard to describe as a catcher without cutting off some of his best years with the bat. Torre spent a year as a full-time first baseman at age 28 before his last season as about a half-time catcher, but I have left out his age 30 season when he moved to third base and won the batting title and MVP award. (If you add that season, his adjusted batting line goes to .308/.514/.373 in 611 PA and his "Rate" shoots up to 117.)

Yet even in his prime, Torre never caught more than 114 games in a season; he was always squeezing in time at first base to keep his bat in the lineup. This despite the fact that, as you can see, at least in gunning down baserunners Torre was slightly better than a league-average catcher (other aspects of his defensive reputation are poor). Like most people, I tend not to give a lot of thought to Torre as a Hall of Fame candidate since everyone assumes he’ll go in as a manager anyway, but despite a relatively short prime (Torre had about three more solid years with the bat after 1971 but was never quite the same offensive force and had to move at last to settle at first) and the difficulty of classifying him defensively, he actually has a fairly decent case.

This is a little off topic, but the Cardinals catching situation in 1969-71 has a lot of interesting threads connecting four of the catchers in this study: Torre was traded to the Cards in ‘69 for Orlando Cepeda to play first base, then after Tim McCarver had his second straight off year, Torre was moved back behind the plate and McCarver was sent to Philly in a package for Dick Allen in the fateful Curt Flood trade. After a year catching, Torre was moved to third base to make room for Ted Simmons, with Torre winning the MVP and Simmons emerging as a star. Meanwhile, McCarver fared poorly in Philly and was replaced by Bob Boone.

If you don’t count Torre as a full-time catcher, Ted Simmons then comes up as the guy who, until Piazza, ranked as the most valuable bat to play the position. Geoff Young has looked favorably at Simmons’ case at greater length in these pages, using a somewhat similar methodology here, but if anything I think Geoff is underselling how rare a catcher with Simmons’ combination of offensive gifts, consistency and durability really is.

Simmons in the decade of his prime was a workhorse, averaging 136 games a year behind the plate; only Gary Carter averaged more plate appearances over that long a stretch, and only Carter and Ray Schalk caught more games. That durability and his dependable bat tend to get overlooked by analyses that focus only on career totals and percentages. And statistically, Simmons caught a little more than a league-average number of baserunners against only slightly more than a league-average number of attempts; at least in that aspect of his defense, there’s no sign that Simmons was a liability. Simmons tends to get the 1-2-3 punch of the fact that (1) he has a poor defensive reputation, (2) he played for a team that won before he got there, underachieved with a lot of talent while he was there, and won after he left, and (3) so many of the great catchers played for so many winning teams that we tend particularly to equate a catcher’s skills with his team’s success.

Perhaps he did contribute to the club’s attitude problem in the late '70s, but many of those Cardinal teams were not as strong across the board as their handful of stars would have you think, and it’s worth noting that Simmons did, outside of his prime years, contribute significantly to a pennant-winning team in Milwaukee. To truly appreciate Simmons, you need to sit back and read the rest of this list—catchers who bring as much to the table as he did, year in and year out for a decade without injuries or off years, are extremely hard to come by.

The best all-around catcher in major league history isn’t a clear-cut thing, between the great weight of Piazza’s bat and the cases one can make for Cochrane and Yogi Berra, but you can’t go far wrong with Johnny Bench.

Offensively, Bench was basically a match for Piazza in the power and walks department, lacking only in batting average; defensively, only Ivan Rodriguez compares to Bench in the combination of low opposing stolen base percentages and sheer intimidation of the running game. (When you look at the numbers for his seven-year peak, it’s even more impressive and closer to Rodriguez—runners started pushing Bench more in the late '70s). And Bench, too, was durable, although prone to occasional off years. Here’s an amazing fact: If you look at the all-time leaders in RBI through age 29, Bench ranks 10th—not among catchers but among everybody, with 1,038 RBI. For a catcher to show up anywhere on those lists in mid-career is amazingly impressive.

In terms of durability, when measured per 162 scheduled games, Cochrane is just a hair behind his more modern contemporaries, but he was way ahead of his time—in 1929 he was the first player to notch 600 plate appearances in a season while playing at least half his games at catcher (in Cochrane’s case, nearly all his games), and through the beginning of World War II the feat had been accomplished just three times, by Cochrane twice and Bill Dickey once.

Cochrane rang up 550 plate appearances four times in five years. He was basically a player without flaw—consistent and durable, hit for average and a fair amount of power (when you translate him out of the 1920s-'30s, Cochrane’s averages come down but his power goes up) with great strike zone judgment, ran well for a catcher, and was well-regarded defensively. On top of that, Cochrane was the field general of a three-pennant/two World Championship dynasty in Philadelphia and player-manager of a two-pennant/one World Championship team in Detroit.

In fact, Cochrane is historically unique: He’s the only guy to win World Championships with two franchises as a genuine everyday catcher. I’ll discuss Wally Schang below; of the two other guys besides Cochrane and Schang who could kinda sorta lay claim to having done so, Earl Smith (like Schang) played for teams that used more of a rotation than a single everyday catcher; Smith was the No. 1 catcher for the 1925 Pirates and the No. 2 for the 1921 Giants. The other, Jimmy Wilson, is even more tenuous; Wilson was the catcher for the 1931 Cardinals and came out of retirement to start (and star) in the World Series for the 1940 Reds after starting catcher Ernie Lombardi got injured and his backup, Willard Herschberger, committed suicide. But Wilson spent nearly all the regular season as a coach.

Gary Carter carried the heaviest catching workload of anybody whose prime spans eight or more years—a staggering 144 games caught per 162 team games (and this for a team, in Montreal, that often stacked up doubleheaders in August due to April snow-outs). If you watched Carter at the tail end of those years and the seasons that followed, you saw what a brutal toll the workload took on his body, as every aspect of his game unraveled. Carter is the classic guy whose numbers make more sense when you extract his prime from the wreckage that followed. Besides being a devastating power hitter, Carter was a very tough guy to run on until his last year in Montreal, and in an age when base thieving was running rampant in the National League. In New York he also mentored a talented young pitching staff, or rather shared that role with Keith Hernandez.

By contrast, for whatever reason, probably nobody had catching take as little out of him as it did to Yogi Berra. In the seven-year peak within his 12-year prime, Yogi just never came out of the lineup, averaging just shy of 150 games caught per 162 games played (not for nothing did Casey note that he never managed an important game without Yogi behind the plate). Yet he still was able to swing the bat well enough and move his legs enough to go on to a few more years as an outfielder.

Yogi was not a notably patient hitter, having the Vladimir Guerrero-like gift of being able to hit basically any ball thrown anywhere. We have stolen base data for only a four-year period of Yogi’s prime, but even adjusting for the piteous state of base stealing in the American League of the late 1950s, Yogi shows up as having been a very tough catcher to steal on. It’s another day’s debate to what extent that means he should get some credit for the high number of double plays turned by the Yankees of Casey’s era. At the same time, Yogi hit into very few double plays for a guy who was slow, batted with a ton of men on base, hit the ball hard and rarely struck out. Yogi, of course, was the starting catcher for seven World Championship teams and nine pennant winners, plus being a part-time catcher or outfielder for three other World Championship teams and four pennant winners, plus managing pennant-winning Yankees and Mets teams.

Bill Dickey is another data point for the argument that catchers, like pitchers, tend to last longer if they don’t carry as heavy a workload in their younger years—he caught 130 games for the first time at age 30. Dickey enjoyed a last hurrah at 36 in 1943, playing half time and pounding war-weakened pitching to a .351/.492/.445 Avg/Slg/OBP and leading a DiMaggio-less Yankee team to the last World Championship of that era, Dickey’s seventh as a starting catcher.

Jorge Posada may not be the most glamorous offensive player, but his high-OBP, grind-it out game has been a key element in the Yankees’ success over his career. Posada’s prime, at eight years, is a little on the light side—without his monster 2007 season, he’d clearly be an also-ran, and it doesn’t help him that his first year as a full-time starter was the last one of the Yankees’ postseason dominance, or that Posada has not put up good numbers overall in October.

But his offensive game, for a guy who was a durable catcher for eight seasons and never has a serious off year, is solid. Posada’s success against base thieves has been less than impressive (slightly worse than league average) despite a reputation as a guy with a good arm. He’ll be a legitimate contender for the Hall even if he isn’t able to have a second act behind the plate beginning in 2009.

Besides Simmons and maybe Torre, Thurman Munson is the guy whose stock went up the most in my estimation from this exercise. Munson tends to be a favorite of non-stat-oriented fans, and there’s something to the argument that his high batting averages weren’t really matched by secondary offensive skills. But (1) Munson was enormously durable, carrying very heavy workloads, (2) Munson played much of his prime in a low-scoring era in a hostile park, and (3) Munson’s batting averages, in context, are even more impressive than those of Cochrane or Dickey. I rate 1978 as Munson’s last "prime" season here; his productivity was in decline in 1978 (albeit somewhat offset by playing an awful lot in a famously tight pennant race) and accelerated in 1979. And he was very tough on opposing baserunners.

Ivan Rodriguez has claimed from Bench the distinction of setting the gold standard for stopping the running game; Rodriguez’ numbers are simply eye-popping when you adjust for the high success rates of modern base thieves. His offensive game has had enough flaws (few walks, many GIDP) to keep him south of the top tier of catchers when combined with time out of the lineup in his prime years (Pudge’s games caught don’t really live up to his reputation as an every-single-day guy due to injuries in 2000-02), but when you add the bat, the glove, the championship in Florida, the pennant in Detroit and the division titles in Texas, it’s more than enough for an easy Hall of Fame case.

Jason Kendall is about the point where I expect that the reader is joining me in saying "we draw the line here." Through age 26, Kendall was basically a dead ringer for Cochrane, batting .314/.456/.402 Avg/Slg/OBP to Cochrane’s .314/.460/.398 (all raw numbers), and in a nearly identical number of games and plate appearances; Kendall even had a higher OPS+ and nearly twice as many steals. And mind you, Cochrane had already won his first MVP by that point. But Kendall was something of a perfect storm of injury risks at that point even aside from the freak foot injury that wrecked the 1999 season that should have been a career year: catcher who rarely takes time off, steals a lot and gets hit by a ton of pitches. First the power went, then the base stealing, then his arm, and eventually the batting average. For Cooperstown purposes, Kendall is a guy who didn’t stay on top long enough.

Bill Freehan was a fine catcher who peaked as a hitter under terribly adverse offensive conditions. Freehan was, however, obviously not respected by opposing baserunners, although their success rate against him was only slightly above average.

Lance Parrish had some Hall of Fame tools—power, a great arm—but didn’t get on base, was poorly regarded as a handler of pitchers, and was completely ruined by a back injury starting at age 30. At 31, Parrish went to the Phillies, and on top of his not hitting the new league suddenly started running completely wild on him, in sharp contrast to his success in that regard in Detroit.

When you adjust for context, Carlton Fisk actually had his best offensive season as a rookie in the now little-remembered epic 1972 AL East pennant race. Fisk made up in the length of his prime what he lost in time to injuries during it, especially in his early years, plus he lasted several more years as a productive half-time player. He was never especially good against base thieves.

Gabby Hartnett was the original home-run hitting catcher; among players playing at least half their games behind the plate in a season, Hartnett was the first to hit 20 homers, the first to hit 30, the first since 1893 to hit 15 and the first since 1891 to crack double figures twice. Hartnett’s productive career was also longer by a good stretch than those of his contemporaries. (He had two more years at the end of the 14-year prime where he was almost as good as a hitter but in declining playing time). Hartnett is docked here for missing nearly the whole 1929 season; if he and Rogers Hornsby had ever both been healthy in the same year for the 1929-30 Cubs, there’s no telling how many runs that team might have scored. He still managed to start for three more pennant winners besides the 1929 team.

From the early 1920s to the mid-1980s, the Pirates accumulated a distinct type of player: an aggressive, athletic, high-average hitter who rarely hit home runs, walked or came out of the lineup. Manny Sanguillen was the best Pirates catcher in that mold, and contributed to the Pirates’ 1971 World Championship. He didn’t do a lot besides hit for average and throw, but he did those plenty well enough to be useful to his teams.

Offensively, Darrell Porter was the opposite of Sanguillen, but did some of just everything to compensate for his low batting averages while playing in big ballparks in low-scoring seasons. He was not a Hall of Famer, but a really good player for more than a decade, catching for a Cardinals team that won a World Championship in 1982 and a pennant in 1985 and for a Royals team that won a pennant and two other division titles.

Ernie Lombardi was sort of like a catcher designed by a Dungeons & Dragons power gamer: He maximized all the attributes of strength (hitting for power, drilling line drives like they were shot out of cannons, strong hands, strong arms) while being perhaps the least mobile everyday player ever over a period of years. Given his relatively low (but characteristic of his times) numbers of plate appearances, legendarily slow baserunning, huge numbers of double plays and poor defensive mobility, I’m skeptical at best that Lombardi belongs in the Hall of Fame even though he was an outstanding hitter over a relatively long prime and then some. It’s pretty well impossible to argue that Lombardi was more valuable to his teams than Simmons or Torre.

Wally Schang was a winner, and not coincidentally a high-OBP guy. As I noted above, Schang doesn’t quite match Mickey Cochrane as a full-time starter for World Championship teams for multiple franchises, but only because Schang’s teams often (as was commonly the case at the time) split time among two or more catchers. But Schang was more or less the No. 1 catcher for six pennant winners in 11 years, including the World Series-winning 1913 A’s, 1918 Red Sox and 1923 Yankees; that he was regarded as the No. 1 is shown by the fact that he appeared in 32 of 34 World Series games for those teams (Schang was also Cochrane’s backup on the 1930 A’s, but he was about finished by then).

Schang’s games caught per year for his prime is artificially depressed by the fact that Connie Mack turned him into a third baseman-outfielder in 1915-16, but that was clearly a decision driven by Mack’s need to keep Schang’s bat in the lineup after Mack sold off the stars of the 1910-14 team. Given that the A’s posted an average record of 40-113 over those two seasons while Schang’s teams won the pennant nearly every year with him behind the plate, it’s safe to conclude he wasn’t moved because he was hurting his teams by catching. Schang’s not a Hall of Famer because of the limits on his playing time, but he was clearly a Cooperstown-quality player when he was on the field.

Javy Lopez, who will probably be best remembered as the answer to the question "who holds the single-season slugging percentage record for catchers" (.687 in 2003) was like Parrish as a hitter, but less durable and without Parrish’s arm. He probably has the easiest pitching staff to catch in the game’s history.

Walker Cooper is another high slugging/low OBP catcher. Cooper had most of his best years during the war, but he missed nearly all the 1945 season in the military (I left that year out) and did have one big year in 1947 for the Giants.

Del Crandall even appearing on a list like this illustrates the paucity of good hitters in the catching profession. Crandall was a valuable player but didn’t have any one especially impressive offensive skill. His stolen base-per-game numbers are a little screwy because baseball-reference.com is missing some games for a few NL teams for 1956, but the percentage figures show that he really was the top-shelf glove man his four Gold Gloves would suggest.

Tom Haller was a fine hitter but more like a platoon player. He was one of the poorest throwing catchers in this study.

Sherm Lollar was, like several of the guys immediately above him, an ordinary hitter whose ordinariness helped his White Sox teams be a perennial contender and a pennant winner in his best year in 1959.

Rick Ferrell has, superficially, an argument for being the kind of hitter who can get elected to the Hall of Fame as a glove man—18-year career, .377 career OBP. But a closer look at Ferrell’s career leaves us with reason to doubt that he was, or should have been, regarded when active as a star of any kind.

First, Ferrell’s offensive numbers, which are not that great to begin with (he had no power, unlike his brother and batterymate Wes), are hugely inflated by the 1930s American League context he played in, including a couple of years in Fenway. Second, Ferrell played for three organizations (the Red Sox, Senators and Browns) that kept shuttling him back and forth, and while the Red Sox had good teams and the Senators a pennant winner during his prime (the Browns also won a wartime pennant late in Ferrell’s career), all three franchises were miserable when Ferrell played for them.

Ferrell’s not the first guy on this list who never played in the postseason—Joe Torre is (until this year, Torre had just one postseason appearance in 32 years in the National League as a player and manager), but he’s the first who never even sniffed a pennant race. Third, Ferrell was traded in midseason three times in his career, two of those in his 1931-38 prime years; very few of the guys on this list had that happen to them even once in their primes (most changed teams at all in their primes only due to financial issues). Ferrell was a productive player but is simply a ridiculous choice for the Hall.

Terry Steinbach was another guy in the Crandall mode, and yet another catcher who was part of the quiet backbone of a multi-year championship team.

Tim McCarver was a surprisingly poor throwing catcher, especially given the help he got from catching Steve Carlton a lot (although less in McCarver’s prime with the Cardinals than later in his career). McCarver’s offensive and defensive games went downhill pretty quickly after having a big year in 1967 at age 25, including a 1970 season lost to injury, although he managed to play another 13 years.

Ed Bailey was a similar player to Haller, and even split time with him in San Francisco despite both being left-handed hitters. Dividing the catching duties 50/50 between the two, Giants catchers batted .250/.477/.370 with 32 HR, 101 runs and 92 RBI in 1962, .262/.465/.353 with 33 HR, 108 runs and 105 RBI in 1963.

Mike Scioscia was first and foremost a contact hitter, the one trait he’s consistently preferred among his Angels teams as a manager. He also blocked the plate like he was the last man holding the pass at Thermopylae.

Mike Lieberthal had an enormous amount of air to let out of his offensive numbers. A solid performer, but never really the star his raw numbers suggested—there’s no reason to think Steinbach or Crandall wouldn’t have done the same things in the same circumstances.

Benito Santiago was an impressive athlete, but swinging at everything and throwing from your knees may be a good way to show what you can accomplish with one hand tied behind your back, but it’s not equal to using both hands.

Ray Schalk is in the Hall of Fame partly for being one of the clean Black Sox, and partly because he was the first multi-year workhorse catcher. Even with all the adjustments for context in the world, Schalk was never a guy who’d bat higher than seventh in the lineup for a .500 team.

Smokey Burgess, the catcher for the 1960 Pirates, is yet another guy who had a Cooperstown-quality bat (for a catcher) and a long career, but never played enough or was good enough defensively to be a star. Burgess’ 1956 defensive data has the same problem as Crandall’s.

Johnny Roseboro was a member of multiple championship teams (he was the starting catcher for Dodgers teams that won four pennants and two World Championships, as well as for a division winner in Minnesota), an excellent defensive catcher and a better hitter than his numbers reflect, but he was never more than an adequate hitter.

If you were making a case for Bob Boone as a Hall of Famer, it would be all defense and durability; Boone was a good hitter for maybe three years, but a defensive contributor who stayed in the lineup for nearly two decades. His record against opposing base thieves improved markedly after moving to the Angels, which is consistent with the general notion that Boone’s and Gene Mauch’s experience fed off each other and made a really good team. As a hitter over the balance of his career, Boone was the poor man’s Ray Schalk.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan McLaughlin 2009-01-30T05:04:15+00:00 The path to Cooperstown: Tim Raines and the Tablesetters http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-path-to-cooperstown-tim-raines-and-the-tablesetters/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-path-to-cooperstown-tim-raines-and-the-tablesetters/#When:04:06:15 Tim Raines, and the players that are in some sense comparable to Raines: the tablesetters. By tablesetters, I mean, broadly speaking, leadoff men and other players who made their offensive living primarily by scoring runs rather than driving them in, and who didn't spend most of their careers playing key defensive positions like catcher or middle infielder.

Not all these guys were leadoff hitters (Raines himself batted third for much of his prime after Gary Carter and Andre Dawson left town), and not all of them were base thieves by any means, or even fast runners, but the key thread is that their skills and jobs were best suited to getting on base or getting into scoring position rather than hitting for power, and by picking a cross-section ranging from obvious Hall of Famers to obvious non-Hall of Famers with similar roles or skill sets to Raines, we can better get some context for how you evaluate Raines on this spectrum.

As with my prior looks at slugging outfielders/first basemen and middle infielders, I'll be presenting the statistical profiles of these players with three adjustments: 1) I focus on the block of prime seasons of a player's career, rather than career totals or "peak" seasons; 2) I adjust batting stats for offensive context; and 3) I present those stats in per-162-team-games notation. You can review my method in detail as discussed in the column on sluggers, but I will review it here briefly:

Prime value

At least in evaluating non-pitchers, the key inquiry for the Hall of Fame should be neither "peak value" (how good the guy was at his very best) nor "career value" (the sum total of his career) but "prime value." Prime value is, roughly, looking at the number of years a guy had when he was a legitimate star and how good he was in those years. In other words, when I look at a potential Hall of Famer, the first question I ask is, "How many seasons did this guy have where he was a Hall of Fame quality ballplayer?" And the second is, "How good was he in those years—just around or above the line, or way above it?"

Now, I wouldn't argue that you should throw peak or career value entirely out the window, but both have their flaws. Peak value really doesn't capture the way most of us think about the Hall: as a shrine to a player's accomplishments of a period of years, not his very best day. Career value, on the other hand, has two drawbacks.

One is that that looking only at career value ends up putting too much emphasis on which guy played passably well when he was 38 and playing out the string as a part-timer, rather than the years when he was doing the things we'll remember him for. I'm a big believer that you don't play your way out of the Hall in your old age, and neither should you get inordinate credit for padding the career totals with mediocre or part-time seasons.

Second, baseball is played in seasons. If you look just at career totals, you miss that—you miss the fact that, at least for a star player, two seasons of 600 plate appearances really are worth more than three seasons of 400 PA at the same level of production, because the 600-PA seasons move the team closer to winning championships. In-season durability is a very important measurement of value.

As a result, what I have tried to do here is excerpt out the seasons when each guy was a star and weigh that chunk against other guys' primes. As you will see, I give Raines some credit for the years beyond his prime, but I zero in mainly on the prime.

The Criteria

I varied slightly the criteria over the first two columns, so I'll flag here what I did this time:

1. I mainly defined "prime" seasons here—or seasons listed under the "other" column—as 500-plus plate appearances and an OBP+ of 100 or better, or 400 plate appearances and an OPS+ of 120 or better. Once again, where there were issues over what seasons to pick, I tried to isolate the part that let each guy put his best foot forward. You can re-run the numbers for any individual player if you think I've cherry-picked too long or too short a mix of seasons. For players whose primes were eight years or less, I list them on a separate chart to avoid mixing apples and oranges.

2. The one new alteration I've made that's different from the prior two columns is that I include here a number of players whose primes straddled the pre- and post-1920 period, whereas I had previously excluded such players. I did that mainly because there were a number of such players who were comparable to the modern players at issue, and more broadly it's more possible to compare a Deadball-era hitter to a modern leadoff man than to a modern home run hitter.

I didn't bother including the really towering figures of the period who had a decade of prime years down by 1920, though (i.e., Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker) or the guys from those years who were really more slugger types (Zack Wheat and Sherry Magee); hopefully I'll get around to looking at that era's hitters separately another day.

3. I'll also deal with third basemen separately—otherwise Wade Boggs would feature prominently in this conversation.

4. Unlike with the corner guys but as with the middle infielders, I looked at a few players who are still in their prime or otherwise still active. Ichiro's "prime" is still in progress, and Johnny Damon's ends here at 2006, but could run longer if 2008 begins a serious revival (which I doubt).

5. Unlike the middle infielders, I didn't have many players whose careers were significantly interrupted by war or who had prime seasons during the war, but those are noted below. Two guys whose numbers might have merited inclusion here were left off because they were partly compiled during wartime (Dixie Walker and Augie Galan), although neither of them would have rated all that highly.

6. I didn't bother cutting off the list at the top, quality-wise—I covered even the very best at the positions, to help give a broader context. But the top would look different if I'd gone back as far as Cobb.

7. While the very best leadoff men may have exceptionally long careers due to their great athleticism, the merely good ones tend to burn out by the seven-year mark, and the list of guys I could have added to this column in the bottom half of these two charts, mainly the short-career list, is quite long, including Walker, Galan, Willie Davis, Matty Alou, Ferris Fain, Curt Walker, Don Buford, Ralph Garr, Dale Mitchell, Terry Puhl, Barney McCoskey, Paul Blair, Garry Maddox, Lonnie Smith, Lenny Dykstra, Lance Johnson, Tommy Harper, Otis Nixon, Jo-Jo Moore, Albie Pearson, Ron LeFlore, Roy Johnson, Terry Moore, Sam West, Marquis Grissom, Bobby Tolan, Pepper Martin, Johnny Mostil, Sam Jethroe and Lyman Bostock. One could debatably have included a few others depending how you classified them as offensive players, like Amos Otis.

I ended up with a sampling of 31 players—about half the size of the prior two columns—consisting of 12 Hall of Famers, three active players, two players who recently retired and have yet to join the ballot, one guy on the writers ballot (Raines), one on the Veterans Commitee ballot (Curt Flood), one on the permanently ineligible list (Pete Rose), and 11 who appear to have permanently dropped off the ballot (let me know if I have mis-classified anyone).

The numbers

The first caution I would emphasize here is that this is just a study of batting stats. Obviously, there's defense, which has to be considered alongside these batting lines. In the chart below, I include a very rough, seat-of-the-pants defensive grading system (Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor). For some of these guys I was largely guessing, but I think I've at least separated out the really elite glove men from the weak ones. "Good," in this context, means guys who won a few Gold Gloves; it's no insult.

The batting percentages here (batting average, slugging average, on-base percentage) are translated statistics. You can read a detailed explanation of the method in the slugging outfielders article; for consistency with the earlier pieces I used the 2005 National League. (I did most of the work on this before Baseball-Reference.com came out with its own translation system. Unlike Baseball Reference’s system, I translate based on differentials in league avg/Slg/OBP rather than runs-per-game, thus changing the shape of a player’s statistics to place them in a more common context). The essential idea of translations is to show what a player's performance in Year X and Park X was equivalent to in Year and Park Y, not to project what a guy would have hit, which is unknowable.

The other numbers—plate appearances, steals and caught stealing, double plays—are actual, not translated (I included base stealing and GIDP figures because they're the two main components of offense that aren't captured by Slugging and OBP), but are averaged per 162-game season, so as to put players whose careers were in the 154-game era or were interrupted by strikes on a common footing (thus, 1981 is counted as two-thirds of a season in the averaging).

The "Rate" column in the chart is simply (Slg)*(OBP)*(PA). It's not any kind of scientific formula, just a handy metric to organize the data on the table by the three main variables. I prefer multiplying rather than adding slugging and OBP (as is done with OPS), since a single point of OBP is worth more than a single point of slugging. As you can see, this metric organizes the data very strongly in favor of guys who were very durable in-season and against guys with low OBPs.

Of course, besides not counting defense, the "Rate" metric doesn't count the baserunning and double play numbers on the chart, so don't treat the rankings as holy writ.

With those preliminaries, let's run the numbers, starting with the longer-prime guys: 
Player            Yrs  Oth   Ages   PA  Avg  Slg  OBP   SB   CS   DP   Rate  Pos Def  Status
Pete Rose          15    4  24-38  731 .313 .469 .381    9    6   11  130.6  UT   F   Barred
George Burns        9    2  23-31  720 .289 .460 .373   39  *23    -  123.5  LF   G   Off
Rod Carew          11    5  27-37  625 .341 .481 .409   27   13   13  123.2  12   F   IN
Paul Molitor       10    7  30-39  667 .316 .484 .379   26    6   12  122.3  UT   G   IN
Rickey Henderson   14    7  21-34  621 .296 .476 .413   78   17    8  122.0  LF   F   Not Yet
Tim Raines          9    6  21-29  645 .304 .481 .389   67   10    8  120.9  LF   F   On
Roy White           9    1  24-32  654 .292 .472 .378   20   10   10  116.6  LF   G   Off
Tony Gwynn         14    2  24-37  624 .342 .480 .389   22    8   16  116.2  RF   G   IN
Richie Ashburn      9    5  23-31  737 .312 .402 .390   17   *8    6  115.4  CF   VG  IN
Lou Brock          11    2  25-35  709 .299 .455 .349   65   19    6  112.7  LF   P   IN
Mark Grace         11    3  25-35  667 .303 .450 .373    6    4   15  112.0  1B   VG  Not Yet
Edd Roush          10    2  24-33  569 .318 .518 .375   20  *16    -  110.3  CF   VG  IN
Sam Rice           13    0  27-40  714 .297 .446 .346   27  *13    -  110.2  RF   VG  IN
Tim Raines         15    0  21-35  631 .296 .456 .382   54   10    8  109.9  LF   F   On
Brett Butler       12    1  27-38  688 .297 .402 .384   40   18    5  106.4  CF   G   Off
Harry Hooper       15    0  22-36  676 .271 .444 .353   25  *15    -  105.9  RF   VG  IN
Ben Chapman        11    0  21-31  666 .283 .446 .356   27   13  *20  105.6  CF   G   Off
Max Carey          10    3  26-35  661 .278 .439 .363   51  *11    -  105.2  CF   VG  IN
Joe Judge          14    0  23-36  616 .279 .452 .354   14  *8     -   98.6  1B   VG  Off
Kenny Lofton       12    1  25-36  635 .290 .415 .357   46   12    7   93.9  CF   F   Active
Ken Griffey Sr.    12    0  25-36  554 .298 .458 .356   15    5    7   90.4  RF   G   Off
Lloyd Waner        12    0  21-32  627 .293 .409 .337    6   -    *8   86.4  CF   G   IN
Doc Cramer         14    0  26-39  690 .276 .382 .312    4    5  *13   82.3  CF   VG  Off
Willie McGee       10    0  25-34  550 .301 .430 .338   25    9   10   80.0  CF   VG  Off

It's not really surprising that Pete Rose scores as the best player of this type in modern years, especially when ranked by a metric that gives very high marks for playing time. Nobody really disputes that Rose would belong in the Hall on the merits, whatever their opinion of the grounds used to exclude him. As I have pointed out before, Rose played more major league games than anybody, ever, and played every single inning of them like he had money riding on them.

Bill James has written about how baseball rewards the player who plays the percentages rather than diving for every ball, breaking up every double play and running into every wall, while punishing guys who play the game as if it's football, where you get a week to lick your wounds before suiting up again. Rose, uniquely in the game's history (even moreso than Ty Cobb, the man he measured himself against), played baseball the way football is played and never paid a price for it; while Rose was only a really spectacular offensive force for about two years (1968-69), he was insanely consistent and durable over a staggeringly long period, being essentially the same player at 38 (when he batted .331 and set a career high in steals) as he was at 24, and with little variation over a decade and a half between.

As I found previously when I ran a Win Shares-based study of top outfielders of the 1914-42 period, George Burns comes in surprisingly highly rated in some elite company, in large part due to having had some very solid offensive seasons in years when scoring was low and/or the schedule was compressed, so that his raw numbers don't look that special. (This is George Burns of John McGraw's Giants, not the Indians first baseman who won the 1926 AL MVP, nor the comedian).

Granted, the evidence suggests that Burns was a terrible percentage base thief, as was not uncommon in his era, and that counts against him. With a nine-year prime, Burns is at the low end of the scale in terms of longevity, and he provided little value outside of those 9 years, so I don't consider it terribly scandalous that he was omitted from the Hall, but he is clearly more deserving than many of the outfielders of his era.

I discussed Rod Carew in the middle infielders column, and two additional and different but overlapping slices of his career are examined here in the long- and short-prime sections. Carew defies categorization among the immortals because he switched from second to first in mid-career, had his best season with the bat and was more durable at first, but had his best batch of seasons at second ... still, regardless of how you divvy up his career he was a tremendous contributor to his teams.

Paul Molitor was, like Rose and Carew and a few others on this list, a defensive nomad, although Molitor is an oddity in that he played well defensively as a regular at six positions, yet ended up playing a plurality of his career as a DH mainly because he could never stay healthy while playing the field. Note that this selection of "prime" seasons is mainly his DH years, and leaves off, for example, his stellar 1982 season when he had 201 hits, stole 41 bases and scored 136 runs for a pennant-winning team.

Offensively, he really was highly similar to Rose, albeit a less patient hitter and a better base thief. Molitor was distinguished by how critical he was to his teams' success; during his years with the Brewers, the Brew Crew played .541 ball with Molitor in the lineup, .458 with him out of the lineup. In fact, 2007 was the first time in the Brew Crew's 38 seasons in Milwaukee that they finished over .500 without Molitor playing at least 50% of the team's games.

Rickey Henderson, of course, is the yardstick against which Raines will be measured, but that's like measuring Duke Snider against Willie Mays, or Hank Greenberg against Lou Gehrig. Rickey has one of those careers that just defies description without comically overstated superlatives, as I demonstrated when I looked at the game's most impressive records. Henderson gets docked slightly here by the metric I use here for the fact that he always missed some games here and there due to overtaxing his turbo-charged "hammies," but averaging 621 plate appearances per 162 scheduled games over a 14-year period really is not such a bad durability record.

The important point for present purposes is that while Rickey's prime was longer than Raines'—and so was his period of hanging around as a good-not-great player—it really wasn't all that much better, at least when you adjust for the fact that Rickey was playing in the AL, which was then a significantly higher-scoring league. You can't knock Raines for not being Rickey.

As you can see from the chart, I've listed Tim Raines twice to enable a fuller evaluation of his merits. Raines is like Fred McGriff in that his career shows a series of stages of gradually declining quality down from a peak of greatness, rather than a clearly distinguishable prime surrounded by chaff. Raines was a great player, one of the very best in baseball, for 9 seasons from 1981-89, after which he was a good regular for six more seasons from 1990-95, after which he was a quality platoon player for a championship team for three more years from 1996-98. (If you include the whole 18-year sweep, Raines' "Rate" drops to 99.1 due to the inclusion of platoon seasons, but he still comes out as a .296/.452/.381 hitter with 46 steals in 54 tries - none too shabby for a stretch of nearly two decades).

As you can can see, the slugging/OBP rate stat sells short the fact that Raines was a superior base thief, with as high a stolen base success rate as the game has seen from a guy who ran anywhere near that frequently, and who never hit into double plays. I can tell you, from watching him as a fan of a rival team with the best pitching in the game, that I feared Raines greatly in his prime years and never more than on May 2, 1987, when he inaugurated perhaps his best season—after a forced month-long layoff and spring training lockout due to collusion by the owners on the free agent market - by going 4 for 5 with a triple and a game-winning 10th-inning grand slam.

One of my favorite illustrations of Raines' offensive value is the 1984 season, when he mainly batted third (behind Pete Rose and Brian Little) or leadoff, in either event followed closely by Andre Dawson, then Gary Carter, then Tim Wallach. The results: 
Rose:    .259/.334/.295, 34 Runs in 95 G
Little:  .244/.332/.293, 31 Runs in 85 G
Raines:  .309/.393/.437, 75 SB, 106 R
Dawson:  .248/.301/.409, 73 R, 86 RBI
Carter:  .294/.366/.487, 75 R, 106 RBI (led the league)
Wallach: .246/.311/.395, 55 R, 72 RBI

You have two tablesetters who did nothing and rarely scored, a middle of the order with two more guys who had terrible years with the bat - yet both of those guys ended up with respectable RBI totals and the third guy led the league in RBI batting behind a guy with a .301 OBP and bad knees. All made possible because Raines was setting the table.

Raines' only real weakness at his peak was his poor throwing arm, which consigned him defensively to left field, but the Win Shares method, at least, gives him 51 career WS with the glove compared to 45 for Tony Gwynn, who won five Gold Gloves. I would not, when you line up their full careers, put Raines on the level with Rose and Henderson, but he was arguably the best player in baseball at his peak, a great player for nearly a decade, a good one for another half a decade and a productive contributor to a championship team for three more seasons. Raines certainly fits my definition of a Hall of Famer.

Roy White, you ask? That Roy White? Yup. Like Burns, and unlike Raines, White has little more than his nine best seasons to recommend him (although White was still contributing in 1977-78), and like Burns he managed to time them (one) so as to produce raw numbers that are less impressive than they would be in a different context and (two) so as to be overshadowed by more colorful teammates at the beginning and end of his prime in the media center of the baseball world, while having his best years when fewer people were watching the team. But for a few years there, he was one heckuva ballplayer.

Tony Gwynn was a great player, though of course not as great a player as the devotees of batting average would have you believe. He may have been a marginally better player than Raines overall by virtue of holding his value a few years longer, and honestly despite the Win Shares numbers I do believe the general consensus that he was a better glove man due to his superior throwing arm. Raines' advantage on the basepaths helps balance that out, and Gwynn doesn't have Raines' additional years as a valuable part-timer. In any event, it will be a serious injustice if the writers who voted Gwynn into Cooperstown by a wide margin decide to make Raines cool his heels.

Richie Ashburn is a respectable, if borderline, Hall of Famer due to his superior on-base skills, durability and glovework; he had little power and wasn't much of a base thief. There remains a raging debate over whether Ashburn's unearthly defensive stats reflect 1) a glove man of historic proportions or 2) a really good center fielder who happened to play behind a pitching staff, built around 330 innings a year of Robin Roberts, that offered up a humongous number of fly balls.

Lou Brock, whose skill set was about the exact opposite of Ashburn's, is one of those guys whose career is subject to a number of cross-currents that simultaneously cause him to be over- or under-rated depending on who is doing the looking. Brock didn't walk much and hit for good but not great batting averages, so his OBPs are pretty unimpressive for a guy who is in the Hall of Fame as a leadoff man. He was also a terrible defensive outfielder. On the other hand, Brock had a lot of power for a top of the order guy, he had his best years in the offense-starved Sixties, and he was tremendously durable (and it's hard to rack up quite that many plate appearances playing in the low-scoring era Brock played in), he had a very long career, was a great base thief and a dynamite postseason player.

One oddity of Brock's career is that when his power essentially dried up at age 31 in 1970 just as scoring was on the rise around the league, he suddenly started drawing more walks and running more, essentially reinventing himself as more of a classic leadoff man in his thirties (he was 35 when he stole the 118 bases). Brock's a unique Hall of Famer, but the combination of his virtues satisfies me that he's not a bad one.

Mark Grace is almost certainly the slowest guy discussed here, as you could tell from the steals and double play columns even if you hadn't seen him play, but he lacked the power that placed similar hitters like Keith Hernandez and John Olerud in the sluggers column. I don't regard Grace as a serious Hall of Fame candidate, as his lack of speed made him less valuable than the other tablesetters and his defensive value was limited by the position he played, but he was a solid player for many years. I could have added three more years to the "prime" seasons for Grace without a huge falloff.

Edd Roush, like Burns, stretched his prime over a period when the game was in flux and the NL was being overshadowed by the AL. I'd traditionally regarded him as just a figment of the 1920s' high batting averages and missing a "hook": he never batted .360, hit 10 homers, drove in 90 runs, scored 100, stole 40 bases or drew 50 walks in a season. But his numbers actually hold up fairly well in translation, with the exception of a weak record for durability, and he was an excellent defensive player. Roush may not deserve his plaque, but again, he's pretty close to the line either way.

Sam Rice was the Don Sutton of outfielders. Rice was incredibly consistent and durable, and his career has some unusual footnotes—he missed a year after being drafted into the Army in World War I and also got a late start in the majors because he’d joined the Navy at age 23 after his parents, wife and two children were killed by a tornado (Rice saw combat in the Navy, landing at Vera Cruz in 1914). When he did reach the majors, it was as a pitcher.

Without those interruptions—and I do give him credit here for his age 27 season and overlook the age 28 season lost to WWI—Rice could easily have had 3700 hits in the major leagues, and maybe you’d have to consider him as a Sutton-type candidate, a minor star of truly exceptional consistency over an exceptionally long time. I think I'd leave Rice out of the Hall if it were up to me because he never really was a major star, although it does bother me that I’d basically be counting him out for years that he was wearing his country’s uniform.

Brett Butler, the poor man's Ashburn, just misses the something extra you would need to consider him for the Hall. He had no power, he was a poor percentage base thief, and while his prime was long it wasn't extraordinarily so. Even so, he rates not far off the pace of the great leadoff men of the past century, and that's not so bad. Butler's offensive numbers look marginally better if you look at him over 10 rather than 12 years (.301/.409/.389, 109.4 rate).

I tend to regard Harry Hooper as a ridiculous Hall of Famer. The numbers for his prime, combined with fine glovework, suggest that he's likewise not so dramatically far off, but Hooper was really just never a significant star.

Ben Chapman was basically the Johnny Damon of the 1930s, a solid player with a mix of power and speed surrounded by superior offensive talents (although Chapman had an excellent throwing arm). Chapman's double play figure here is a bit unfair since it's taken from just the last two seasons of his prime.

Max Carey seems at first blush a highly similar player to Raines, a leadoff man with a long, steady career and great stolen base percentages (Carey's are even more impressive than Raines' when you consider the success rates prevalent when he played). Carey was also a better glove man. But he never had Raines' bat. I'm a little unclear on whether Carey missed time with military service in 1918.

Rice's longtime teammate Joe Judge, like Grace, was more of a slick-fielding first baseman than a leadoff man. Judge's stats actually translate with more power and less batting average than his 1920s numbers would indicate.

Kenny Lofton's career is a lesser version of Raines': he was a very good player for the handful of years of his true prime, but it was shorter and not as good as Raines'; and he's been a good player for a much longer stretch, but not as good as Raines.

In doing these columns, I'm simultaneously reminded how narrow is the gap that separates Hall of Famers from ordinary good players, and yet how really hard it is to cross that gap. Ken Griffey Sr. was, in his best seasons, the kind of talent that can have a Hall of Fame career - but he missed time here and time there, never had a real monster year, never turned his blinding speed into big-time base stealing, and ends up way off the pace when you add it all up.

Lloyd Waner was a significantly lesser player than Griffey, and no serious person argues for him as an immortal; he was really not much more than an average player after a bout with appendicitis that cost him half a season at age 24.

I believe Pete Palmer or one of the other sabermetricians who tries to compute net negative as well as positive contributions once rated Doc Cramer as the worst player ever, given that Cramer was constantly in the lineup for many years, yet produced little offensive value. Cramer's value fell off after Connie Mack got rid of him; during his Red Sox years, he was a silent drain on the offense that featured the likes of Jimmie Foxx, Joe Cronin and Ted Williams. Me, I always think of Cramer as a Jersey Shore guy - he was born and died there and there's a street named in his honor where we used to vacation when I was a kid.

Willie McGee had the one great year and won a batting title in 1990, but just never had the consistency or the secondary skills to be a year-in, year-out star. "E.T." will be better remembered as the Babe Ruth of ugly.

Now, for the guys with shorter primes: 
Player          Yrs  Oth   Ages   PA  Avg  Slg  OBP   SB   CS   DP   Rate  Pos  Def Status
George Sisler     7    2  23-29  673 .345 .574 .387   43  *19    -  149.3  1B   VG  IN
Rod Carew         6   10  27-32  666 .354 .519 .416   36   14   13  144.0  12   F   IN
Ross Youngs       7    1  21-27  674 .307 .487 .393   18  *15    -  128.9  RF   G   IN
Ichiro Suzuki     7    0  27-33  740 .331 .429 .375   39    9    5  119.0  RF   VG  Active
Tony Phillips     8    3  31-38  701 .273 .411 .383   14    9    9  110.3  UT   F   Off
Dom Dimaggio      8    1  24-34  718 .282 .431 .350   11    6   12  108.4  CF   VG  Veterans
Kenny Lofton      7    5  25-31  661 .303 .423 .367   62   15    8  102.5  CF   G   Active
Johnny Damon      8    1  25-32  697 .281 .422 .345   29    7    7  101.3  CF   F   Active
Curt Flood        8    0  24-31  676 .297 .410 .344   10    7    9   95.3  CF   VG  Veterans
Willie Wilson     6    0  23-28  648 .305 .414 .343   60   10    4   91.9  CF   F   Off

Bill James, in the original Historical Abstract, compared George Sisler to Babe Ruth at his prime, concluding that anybody who could stand next to the Babe and not look ridiculous was pretty impressive. James seemed to have backed off that assessment by the revised volume, perhaps as we got a more thorough look at park effects from his era and partly due to James' conclusion that Sisler had been vastly overrated with the glove, but it remains the case that Sisler was having an upper-crust immortal's career until a sinus infection cost him a season and seems to have permanently impaired his eyesight, converting an offensive wrecking crew into a slap hitter. In that sense, Sisler's career is shaped much like a souped-up version of Don Mattingly's, though Sisler had just enough more great seasons, and better enough, that he made it to the Hall where Mattingly came up short.

Ross Youngs may be tossed in the bin of overrated Frisch cronies from the 1920s, but before Bright's Disease cut short his prime and then killed him, Youngs really was a tremendous player, the star of a team that won four straight pennants and beat Ruth's Yankees in consecutive World Serieses.

Ichiro Suzuki is another truly unique case, although with just two or three more years any debate about whether you need to assign some credit for his Japanese seasons to get him across the Hall's threshold will be academic. That "740" in annual plate appearances may look like a typo, but it's not. Ichiro's combination of consistency and durability are the closest thing we have seen to Rose since the Hit King hung up his spikes.

Tony Phillips is another defensive nomad, who was used as a sub by Tony LaRussa but didn't bloom into a star until Sparky Anderson made him an everyday player in Detroit at age 31. Phillips was never really a good glove man anywhere, but filled many defensive roles adequately. Would have been more valuable if he'd been a plus base thief.

Dom DiMaggio, who took Cramer's job in Boston, was basically Brett Butler but with a career interrupted by war, and may have been better than Butler - the numbers here are for ages 24-25 and 29-34, so the lost seasons were very likely his best. Like his brothers, he was a fine fielder.

Johnny Damon's power compensates for his unspectacular OBPs if you are measuring him for contemporary stardom, but not so much in this crowd.

Curt Flood's Hall of Fame case is as a trailblazer of free agency, although one would surmise from the fact that the Veterans Commitee has elected Bowie Kuhn and not Marvin Miller that its sympathies won't lie in Flood's direction any time soon, and with Flood dead a decade there will be no hurry. Flood wasn't a Hall-caliber player but he was a good one, mainly due to his glovework.

Willie Wilson had his virtues: good batting average, tremendous speed well-applied on the field, excellent durability. But Wilson's lack of patience or power and the shortness of his prime leaves him bringing up the rear in this company, and Wilson's career went on for many years after he ceased to have any value.

Conclusion

Raines, at his best, stands up quite well against his contemporaries Henderson, Gwynn and Molitor; he was a formidable offensive force in the 1980s. Yes, his prime was shorter than theirs, but his productive years continued on for nine more seasons, which helps count against the charge that he wasn't durable enough. And Raines stands well ahead of a number of Hall of Famers of similar talents, many of whom are not obviously unqualified for Cooperstown. Electing Raines would not require the lowering of the Hall's minimum standards, or indeed its average, ordinary standards; and it would reward one of the greatest tablesetters the game has ever seen.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan McLaughlin 2007-12-27T04:06:15+00:00 The Path to Cooperstown Through the Middle Infield http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-path-to-cooperstown-through-the-middle-infield/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-path-to-cooperstown-through-the-middle-infield/#When:04:01:15 Cal Ripken, will surely be inducted. Three others—Alan Trammell, Dave Concepcion, and Tony Fernandez—are on the ballot. Four more—Joe Gordon, Marty Marion, Maury Wills and the recently deceased Cecil Travis—are on the Veterans Committee ballot, with results to be announced Feb. 27.

Last January, I looked at the candidacies of Jim Rice, Albert Belle, and Andre Dawson by doing something that is, in my view, too infrequently done—lining them up against a reasonably comprehensive collection of similar players both in and out of the Hall. The goal should be to look at enough players who are somewhere around the line that divides Hall of Famers from non-Hall of Famers to get a sense of where the line should be drawn. I'd like to do the same with the shortstops and second basemen.
I've followed the same methodology as in the previous column, which I will summarize briefly here—you can go back and read last year's edition for the full details. My goal is to do two things: Identify each player's prime years and present, for those prime years, their average season translated into a common offensive context.

Prime Value

At least in evaluating non-pitchers, the key inquiry for the Hall of Fame should be neither “peak value” (how good the guy was at his very best) nor “career value” (the sum total of his career) but “prime value”. Prime value is, roughly, looking at the number of years a guy had when he was a legitimate star, and how good he was in those years. In other words, when I look at a potential Hall of Famer, the first question I ask is, “How many seasons did this guy have where he was a Hall of Fame quality ballplayer?” And the second is, “How good was he in those years—just around or above the line, or way above it?”

Now, I wouldn't argue that you should throw peak or career value entirely out the window, but both have their flaws. Peak value really doesn't capture the way most of us think about the Hall: As a shrine to a player's accomplishments of a period of years, not his very best day. Career value, on the other hand, has two drawbacks. One is that that looking only at career value ends up putting too much emphasis on which guy played passably well when he was 38 and playing out the string as a part-timer, rather than the years when he was doing the things we'll remember him for. I'm a big believer that you don't play your way out of the Hall in your old age, and neither should you get inordinate credit for padding the career totals with mediocre or part-time seasons.

Second, baseball is played in seasons. If you look just at career totals, you miss that—you miss the fact that, at least for a star player, two seasons of 600 plate appearances really are worth more than three seasons of 400 PA at the same level of production, because the 600 PA seasons move the team closer to winning championships. Inseason durability is a very important measurement of value. As a result, what I have tried to do here is excerpt out the seasons when each guy was a star and weigh that chunk against other guys' primes.

The Criteria

I used slightly different criteria here than I did with the first basemen/outfielders:

1. I was more flexible with longer and shorter primes, although the bulk of guys still ended up with a roughly decade-long prime. I mainly defined "prime" seasons here as 500-plus PA and an OPS+ of 100 or better, rather than 120 with the corner guys, but where there were issues over what seasons to pick, I tried to isolate the part that let each guy put his best foot forward. You can re-run the numbers for any individual player if you think I've cherry-picked too long or too short a mix of seasons; I included an "Oth" column, meaning other seasons, which totals up seasons when the player had an OPS+ of 100 or greater and at least 400 PA, or an OPS+ of 120 or greater and at least 300 PA (lower thresholds than I used for the corners). For players whose primes were less than eight years, I list them on a separate chart to avoid mixing apples and oranges.

2. I'm only looking here at second basemen, shortstops, and guys who split between the two. With a few noted exceptions, I excluded seasons at other positions. Of course, for some guys like Rod Carew, Robin Yount, and Alex Rodriguez, all of whom won MVP awards at other positions, that cuts off a big chunk of why they are in or headed to the Hall. But this study isn't about whether Rod Carew belongs in the Hall, it's about what careers like his and others say about the guys on the bubble.

3. No dead-ball players. The three earliest guys on here are Rogers Hornsby, Frankie Frisch and Dave Bancroft, and in each case I started their prime years at 1920 or later. I did that mostly because the lively ball changed the nature of the game to such an extent that, while you can compare their value, dead-ball era players don't tell you much about the Hall of Fame's standards for more modern players.

4. Unlike with the corner guys, I included a few players who are still in their prime or otherwise still active, mainly because it's interesting to see where, say, Derek Jeter or Miguel Tejada stacks up.

5. I also, this time, included a whole bunch of people whose careers were significantly interrupted by war or who had prime seasons during the war. A huge number of significant middle infielders in the Hall or on the Veterans ballot saw their prime years intersect with World War II. Rather than eliminate them, I just note in each case how the war affected them. Note that by “World War II” I mainly mean 1943-45—the war didn’t really affect the quality of play in 1942, and most of these guys were still in the majors that year.

6. I didn't bother cutting off the list at the top, quality-wise—I covered even the very best at the positions, to help give a broader context.

7. I had to draw the line somewhere, but I should note a bunch of players who would have figured somewhere in these charts, albeit for one reason or another less durably productive as middle infielders, including Dick McAuliffe, Roy Smalley, Glenn Wright, Alfonso Soriano, Edgardo Alfonzo, Toby Harrah, Garry Templeton, Delino DeShields, Edgar Renteria, Dick Bartell, Jose Vidro, Steve Sax, Robby Thompson, Carlos Baerga, and Bret Boone.
I ended up with a sampling of 60 players, consisting of 26 Hall of Famers, four guys on the writers ballot, four on the Veterans Committee ballot, nine active players, four players who have recently retired and have yet to join the ballot, and 13 who appear to have permanently dropped off the ballot (let me know if I have misclassified anyone).

The Numbers

The first caution I would emphasize here is that this is just a study of batting stats. Obviously, when you are dealing with middle infielders, defense looms larger than at any other position, possibly including catcher. I am not arguing here that defense should not be considered; instead, I'm recognizing that offense is easier to quantify in ways people can generally agree on, and use that as a starting point for discussing other aspects of a guy's game.

In the chart below, I include a very rough, seat-of-the-pants defensive grading system (Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor). For some of these guys I was largely guessing, but I think I've at least separated out the really elite glove men from the weak ones. "Good," in this context, means guys who won a few Gold Gloves; it's no insult. I reserved "Excellent" ratings for five guys who were really regarded as historically amazing glove men, and rated only two guys as "Poor," although I discuss other debatable rankings below.

The batting percentages here (batting average, slugging average, on-base percentage) are translated statistics. You can read a detailed explanation of the method in the earlier article; for consistency with the earlier piece I used the 2005 National League. (I did most of the work on this before Baseball Reference came out with its own translation system. Unlike their system, I translate based on differentials in league Avg/Slg/OBP rather than Runs/Game, thus changing the shape of a player’s statistics to place them in a more common context.) The essential idea of translations is to show what a player's performance in Year X and Park X was equivalent to in Year and Park Y, not to project what a guy would have hit, which is unknowable.

The other numbers—plate appearances, steals and caught stealing, double plays—are actual, not translated (I included base stealing and GIDP figures because they're the two main components of offense that aren't captured by SLG and OBP), but are averaged per 162-game season, so as to put players whose careers were in the 154-game era or were interrupted by strikes on a common footing (thus, 1981 is counted as two-thirds of a season in the averaging). The "Rate" column in the chart is simply (SLG)*(OBP)*(PA). It's not any kind of scientific formula, just a handy metric to organize the data on the table by the three main variables. I prefer multiplying rather than adding SLG and OBP (as is done with OPS), since a single point of OBP is worth more than a single point of Slugging. As you can see, this metric organizes the data very strongly in favor of guys who were very durable in-season and against guys with low OBPs. Of course, besides not counting defense, the "Rate" metric doesn't count the baserunning and double play numbers on the chart, so don't treat the rankings as holy writ.
Player           Yrs  Oth    Ages   PA   Avg   Slg   OBP  SB  CS  DP   Rate  Pos Def    Status
Rogers Hornsby    10    5   24-33  672  .344	 .648  .429   8  11# --  186.7   2B   P        IN
Alex Rodriguez     8    3*  20-27  685  .298  .559  .368  21   6  14  140.7   SS   G    Active
Arky Vaughan       9    4*  21-29  657  .305  .500  .402   9  --   6  132.1   SS   F        IN
Joe Morgan         9    9   25-33  660  .286  .494  .403  55  12   6  131.4   2B   G        IN
Charlie Gehringer 11    3   25-35  709  .298  .490  .369  13   6  --  128.2   2B   G        IN
Craig Biggio       9    4*  25-33  720  .299  .459  .385  34  10   6  127.3   2B   G    Active
Cal Ripken        10    3*  21-30  705  .283  .491  .352   3   2  19  121.9   SS   G  OnBallot
Derek Jeter        9    2   24-32  695  .313  .458  .382  24   5  14  121.6   SS   F    Active

Jeff Kent          9    5   29-37  633  .294  .518  .355   8   4  16  116.6   2B   F    Active
Ryne Sandberg      9    1   24-32  671  .288  .501  .346  27   7  10  116.3   2B  VG        IN
Lou Boudreau       9    0   22-30+ 653  .301  .471  .373   5   5  13  114.8   SS   G        IN
Roberto Alomar    11    2   23-33  662  .302  .463  .370  34   7  12  113.4   2B  VG   Not Yet
Vern Stephens      9    1   21-29+ 665  .277  .504  .332   2   2  14  111.3   SS   G       Off
Billy Herman       9    3   25-33+ 708  .291  .442  .354   4  --  17  110.9   2B   G        IN
Chuck Knoblauch    8    0   23-30  708  .291  .418  .375  41  12  11  110.9   2B   F   Not Yet
Joe Sewell         8    2*  22-29  711  .287  .430  .361   8   9  --  110.4   SS   G        IN
Joe Cronin        12    1   23-34  652  .279  .469  .355   7   5  15# 108.6   SS   G        IN
Bobby Doerr       10    2   22/32+ 655  .273  .494  .333   5   4  16  107.7   2B   G        IN
Jim Fregosi        8    0   21-28  665  .289  .454  .354   8   4  11  106.9   SS   F       Off
Frankie Frisch    11*   1   22-32  658  .292  .458  .353  30  13  --  106.3   2B   G        IN
Joe Gordon        10    0   23/34+ 642  .262  .493  .335   9   6  17  106.1   2B   G  Veterans
Tony Lazzeri      11    0   22-32  625  .274  .479  .353  13   7  --  105.6   2B   F        IN

Nellie Fox        10    0   23-32  739  .300  .404  .346   7   7  12  103.2   2B  VG        IN
Lou Whitaker      10    6   26-35  614  .277  .462  .362   8   4   8  102.6   2B   G       Off
Barry Larkin       9    4   27-35  567  .295  .473  .377  28   5  11  101.3   SS  VG   Not Yet
Pee Wee Reese     10    0   27-36+ 691  .270  .405  .360  18   8# 16  100.8   SS   G        IN
Luke Appling      15    0   26/42+ 641  .300  .415  .377  11   7  14# 100.3   SS   G        IN
Bobby Grich       13    1   23-35  564  .272  .468  .377   8   6  10   99.5   2B  VG       Off
Jay Bell           9    0   25-33  675  .268  .435  .339   7   5  14   99.5   2S   G   Not Yet
Alan Trammell     11    1   22-32  613  .292  .451  .358  17   8   9   99.1   SS   G  OnBallot

Ray Durham         9    0   26-34^ 622  .275  .437  .345  19   7  11   93.8   2B   F   Active 
Tony Fernandez     9    3*  23-31  660  .285  .406  .336  22  10  11   90.0   SS  VG  OnBallot
Davey Johnson      8    0   24-31  566  .268  .446  .343   3   3  13   86.7   2B   G       Off
Dave Concepcion    9    0   26-34  638  .277  .411  .327  23   7  17   85.9   SS   G  OnBallot
Willie Randolph   12    2   21-32  599  .278  .378  .378  21   7  14   85.6   2B   G       Off
Ozzie Smith        8    0   30-37  636  .282  .370  .359  38   8   9   84.4   SS   E        IN
Jim Gilliam       11*   1   24-34  682  .259  .355  .348  18  10   7   84.3   2B   G       Off
Bert Campaneris   12    0   23-34  636  .278  .391  .323  47  13   6   80.5   SS   F       Off
Luis Aparicio     12    0   25-36  661  .271  .369  .312  34   9  11   76.2   SS   E        IN
Frank White       10    0   27-36  567  .262  .427  .299  11   6  11   72.3   2B  VG       Off
Bill Mazeroski    12    0   20-31  609  .263  .392  .301   2   2  15   71.9   2B   E        IN
Marty Marion       9    0   23-31  588  .254  .371  .306   3  --  11   66.8   SS   E  Veterans

* - Includes seasons at another position – see below
+ - Career affected by war – see below
# -  Indicates that this statistic is not available for all seasons
^ - Prime seasons still going as of 2006

Rogers Hornsby: Even compared to the top guys on this list—or the outfielders on the last list—Hornsby is entirely off in his own universe as a hitter, which is one reason I have trouble buying the arguments for other guys as the best second baseman ever. I left out Hornsby’s pre-1920 seasons, including leading the league in slugging as a 21-year-old shortstop; he was a Hall of Fame caliber player in those years too, but not in the same ballpark as the 1920s. If I’d included them, Hornsby would rank as a better fielder; he was a decent glove man up through about 1922.

Alex Rodriguez: A-Rod’s prime is still going, but I cut him off here after he came to the Yankees and moved to third at age 28. That’s artificial, since he moved to accommodate Derek Jeter’s incumbency and not due to any deficiencies with the glove. A-Rod’s decision to put team harmony above individual glory has won him no praise or even moderation of criticism, but almost certainly cost him a chance to be considered one of the top two shortstops of all time, maybe even the best (though Honus Wagner, who became an everyday shortstop at the age at which A-Rod moved to third, is a tall mountain to scale).

Arky Vaughan: Moved to third base at age 30, played through the war at age 31, then retired for a few years in a clubhouse dispute while he was still a good player. Bill James wasn’t kidding in ranking Vaughan, in the latest historical abstract, as the second-best shortstop ever. I may have underrated him as a defensive player.

Joe Morgan: I left off three outstanding years in Houston (1965-67) mostly because they were separated from the rest of his prime by an injury that wiped out 1968; only Carew and Yount have a similar number of quality seasons that aren’t included in the prime chart. Morgan and Vaughan stand well above the competition in on-base percentage, though well below Hornsby.

Charlie Gehringer: Gehringer had a broad base of skills and tremendous consistency and durability, but I was somewhat surprised that he did not rate higher in batting average, ranking below the likes of Nellie Fox, Cecil Travis and Craig Biggio.

Craig Biggio: I included his last year as a catcher here, since that’s a more demanding defensive position than second base; if anything, it drags down his averages. Biggio never had jaw-dropping on-base percentages like Morgan, Gehringer or Luke Appling—his career high is .415. But due to his consistency and the fact that he was doing it in the Astrodome, he rates highly in that regard. Biggio’s high ranking here is largely a factor of playing time—not only was he indestructible in his best years, but he was leading off for a loaded offensive team. Biggio’s 3,000th hit should remove any possibility that he won’t get his due as a great player. The four other years include one as a catcher and one as a center fielder.

Cal Ripken: Yes, from 1982 to 1991, he really was that good, his only weakness being the double-play ball. How much a guy plays is so underrated as a measure of value: When you consider the average offensive production of the average backup shortstop in the '80s, Ripken’s refusal to come out of the lineup even for an inning in those years becomes all the more valuable.

Derek Jeter: I was surprised that Jeter rated quite so high—I’d always thought him more comparable as a player to Joe Cronin and Frankie Frisch, but Jeter’s OBP sets him a cut above those guys.

Jeff Kent: I’m still not prepared to consider Jeff Kent a Hall of Famer, but that’s my Mets fan bias showing—Kent is a serious slugger of a type rarely found at second base, and especially over a consistent period of years.

Ryne Sandberg: Sandberg is another fine illustration of the ways in which durability, power and speed can compensate for mediocre plate discipline. I’m comfortable with Sandberg, by acclamation the best second baseman of his era, in Cooperstown despite a relatively short career, since it's really more his decline phase that was cut short.

Lou Boudreau: Played through the war while age 25-27, so you have to discount him a bit for that. Boudreau was all but finished after his MVP season at 30, having just one more good year as a regular.

Roberto Alomar: A great one in many ways for over a decade; really a no-brainer as a Hall of Famer.

Vern Stephens: Played through the war while age 22-24, and moved to third base at 30. His numbers might justify the Hall if you didn’t discount the war-weakened competition that made up a third of his prime.

Billy Herman: Rates highly here in large part due to his durability. Herman had a big year against war-weakened competition at 33, but then missed ages 34-35. Hit into a lot of double plays.

Chuck Knoblauch: Knoblauch is rated here as a “Fair” fielder as a compromise—he was a pretty solid glove in Minnesota before the throwing problem hit him in the Bronx. His eight-year prime is definitely Hall quality work with the bat, but is a little too short for a guy with his defensive problems, even with the four World Series rings.

Joe Sewell: Moved to third base at 30; is remembered today mainly as a trivia question due to never striking out or breaking his bat, as well as due to inheriting his starting job from Ray Chapman. But Sewell was the AL’s best shortstop in the 1920s.

Joe Cronin: More of a power hitter than a high-average hitter, in the context of his time and the parks he played in. Would do better were it not for a poor, injury-plagued 1936 season that dragged down his average plate appearances. You will see that as a recurring theme here—when your rankings are based on plate appearances, a season lost or half-lost to injury makes a huge dent. Given the consequences to a contending team of having that happen to a star in his prime, I think it’s fair to dock guys for that.

Bobby Doerr: Played through war ages 25-26, missed age 27 (the slash in the chart means I skipped years lost to war). In the end, very similar to Gordon, which may eventually help Gordon with the Veterans.

Jim Fregosi: I added Fregosi at the last minute, not realizing quite how strongly he shows here, with average translated numbers that would have been career bests for him as raw numbers in the offense-starved '60s in the AL. Fregosi was washed up at 29, was traded after that season for a young Nolan Ryan, and never really bounced back as an everyday player.

Frankie Frisch: I included age 22, when Frisch played mainly at third base—he was young and playing a defensive position that at that point was still as demanding as second, due to the high rates of bunting at the time. His averages are dragged down a bit by the 1931 season (age 32), but I couldn't well leave off a year when he won the MVP.

Joe Gordon: Played age 28 through war, missed ages 29-30 and struggled his first year back. Giving him the benefit of the doubt for the war, Gordon wouldn’t be a terrible Hall of Famer. He was somewhat out of place in his era, as a relatively low-average, power hitting middle infielder.

Tony Lazzeri: Had some issues with nagging injuries, notably in 1928 when he missed 40 games but finished third in the MVP balloting anyway. Held up better in translation than I expected.

Nellie Fox: Fox even on his best day was never a great player; he had no power, drew few walks, didn’t steal bases, and didn’t win batting titles. But he did four things well: hit for good batting averages, fielded very well, was tremendously consistent and never came out of the lineup. Plus, he rarely struck out. The Hall of Fame will always reward that package.

Lou Whitaker: Whitaker’s a real challenge. I have argued before that Whitaker is an easy Hall of Famer due to the length of his career, his offensive consistency and productivity at a difficult position, and his good glovework. He also avoided double plays, one of the hidden skills that is easily overlooked. He was the premier AL second baseman between Grich and Alomar. And while you see Whitaker's best 10-season stretch up there, his last three, at least, are equal or better in quality, just lacking quantity. But therein lies the problem: Whitaker never did hit left-handed pitching, and the last seven years of his career he kept his averages up by being platooned. I'm inclined to say he was more valuable to his teams over the long haul than Fox, but the difference in plate appearances per season is a large gap to cover.

Barry Larkin: Larkin's one of the main reasons for this study, and has a particularly bad fit between his best seasons and most durable seasons. Even in the near-decade of his prime, he had an endless series of small injuries and a tendency towards bigger ones. The quality of his game is unquestionable. Like Whitaker, only moreso, Larkin was without a doubt the best at his position in his league for about a decade, won an MVP award and a World Championship, with two other top seasons for his team (the 1995 division title and 1999 loss in a one-game playoff) when he was clearly the team's star and leader. I think that adds up to a Hall of Famer anyway.

Pee Wee Reese: A borderline Hall of Famer on the numbers, until you consider that he missed age 24-26 to the war.

Luke Appling: Played age 36 through the war, missed age 37, and I ignored his age-38 season, when he batted .368 in 18 games after returning in late 1945. Played more third base than shortstop at age 41, but returned to short the following year. I was surprised not to see him rate higher, but Appling had little power, played in an era of high OBPs, and missed significant playing time at age 27 and half the season at 31. Still, he came back at essentially full strength even into his forties after a layoff for the war.

Bobby Grich: Has Whitaker's problems with limited playing time, and then some, having missed two-thirds of a season at age 28. I lean in the direction of preferring Whitaker's consistency, but while both guys are outstanding and underrated players, it is understandable why Hall voters have given them short shrift.

Jay Bell: Switched to second at age 33. Bell has never, to my knowledge, been accused of doing anything improper, and I know only what's been publicly reported, but even if his resume was Hall-worthy (it's not) he would suffer from: 1) Matching to a T the statistical profile of a steroid user in terms of a dramatic and unexpected post-30 power surge for a guy who, in his twenties, was known mainly as a great bunter and 2) being a teammate of several other guys with similar statistical profiles.

Alan Trammell: Trammell has the Larkin problem, and wasn't as good or as consistent when healthy (his age 24 and 27 seasons were utterly mediocre, while the prime listed leaves out an outstanding age 35 season), with adverse consequences for his teams' ability to win when they had a tremendous talent core. If you draw the line just under Larkin or Whitaker or Grich, you are likely to leave Trammell out.

Ray Durham: Yes, Ray Durham, and yes that includes 2006. Durham exists in the sphere of players who are clearly comparable to serious Hall candidates but who equally clearly don't have a legit case of their own. He's a heck of a player who hasn't gotten enough respect.

Tony Fernandez: Will presumably last just the one year on the ballot. Other non-prime seasons include his late-90s resurgence as a second and third baseman. Is one of several guys on this list hated by Mets fans for his tenure with the Mets.

Davey Johnson: Grich's lesser predecessor was better than his raw numbers, but short on durability.

Dave Concepcion: Concepcion rather inexplicably draws continuing Hall support. As I've written before, Concepcion is a classic example of a guy with the skeleton of a good Hall of Fame argument but no meat on the bones: the best shortstop in his league for half a decade but never actually a good hitter, and a guy who could never be the star of a contending team. It's not like the Big Red Machine hasn't gotten adequate credit in Cooperstown, between Morgan, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, and Sparky Anderson.

Willie Randolph: Very similar offensively (better OBP, lesser base thief) to Ozzie Smith, but not Ozzie with the glove, obviously. It's funny—you look at the numbers for a guy like Randolph and can halfway talk yourself into thinking him a serious candidate, but a systematic approach like this one draws out his flaws in comparison—he just wasn't as durable as some of the other guys listed, he had no power, and he was a good but not great fielder. Randolph was probably a more skilled and talented player than Nellie Fox, and if he'd had another 140 plate appearances a year he would have a long string of 100-run seasons and would probably be in Cooperstown too.

Ozzie Smith: Even with a cherry-picked sample of his eight good years as a hitter out of a much longer career, Ozzie just didn't have what it took to be a Hall of Famer if he was anything less than Ozzie with the glove. But for a guy with zero power he made the most of his remaining offensive skills, and was the best hitting shortstop in the NL for a few years. Add in his legendary defensive work, long-term durability and winning teams, and he's well-qualified.

Jim Gilliam: Played third base at age 30-31. Along with Frisch, one of a select few post-1920 players to go to four World Serieses without playing for the Yankees, spanning from the Boys of Summer years to the Koufax era. Basically a lesser version of Randolph, but more durable and versatile.

Bert Campaneris: Really has nothing to recommend himself as a Hall of Famer; very similar to Aparicio as a hitter.

Luis Aparicio: I'm skeptical at best of Aparicio as a Hall of Famer, though he really was a sensational fielder for a long time, was durable and consistent, and played at a time when few shortstops contributed much more with the bat than he did.

Frank White: Not a serious Hall candidate, but as similar with the bat to Mazeroski as Campaneris is to Aparicio, plus White was an outstanding glove man in his own right. Really didn't draw walks.

Bill Mazeroski: Mazeroski was a bad hitter, and unlike Aparicio he hit into a lot of double plays, wasn't much on the bases and wasn't especially durable. I was on board with his Hall candidacy some years ago based on his defensive stats alone, but I've long since concluded that a guy with his offensive weaknesses just can't belong in the Hall.

Marty Marion: Played through the war ages 25-27, including his 1944 MVP campaign. As my dad likes to remind me, when Reese, Boudreau, Stephens, Appling and Phil Rizzuto were playing, it was Marion who was nicknamed "Mr. Shortstop." But his prime besides the war amounts to all of six seasons, and even during the war he wasn't much of a hitter.

Now, the shorter-prime guys:
Player           Yrs  Oth    Ages   PA   Avg   Slg   OBP  SB  CS  DP   Rate  Pos Def    Status
Jackie Robinson    5    4*  29-33  682  .312	 .503  .395  25   8# 14  135.6   2B  VG        IN
Ernie Banks        7    6*  24-30  679  .288  .569  .350   5   4  14  135.3   SS   G        IN
Robin Yount        5    8*  24-28  670  .308  .533  .362  14   4  14  129.2   SS   G        IN
Rod Carew          5   10*  25-29  644  .343  .474  .395  27  11  16  120.7   2B   P        IN

Miguel Tejada      7    0   24-30^ 703  .291  .482  .342   7   2  20  115.9   SS   F    Active
Nomar Garciaparra  7    0   23-29  532  .312  .529  .355  11   4  11  109.4   SS   G    Active
Julio Franco       7    3*  26-32  646  .310  .440  .370  24   8  21  105.3   2S   F    Active

Eddie Stanky       7    0   28-34+ 651  .265  .378  .398   6   5#  7   98.2   2B   F       Off
Red Schoendienst   7    0   28-34  666  .298  .425  .344   4   4  14   97.3   2B   G        IN
Cecil Travis       7*   1   21-27+ 623  .307  .441  .353   3   3   9#  96.8   SS   F  Veterans
Alvin Dark         7    0   26-32  681  .288  .442  .322   7   5# 12   96.8   SS   F       Off
Gil McDougald      7    0   23-29  594  .285  .451  .354   6   5   9   94.8   2S  VG       Off
Dave Bancroft      7    1   29-35  615  .280  .418  .362   9   8# --   93.2   SS   E        IN
Davey Lopes        7    2*  28-34  627  .267  .421  .352  53  11   8   93.0   2B   F       Off

Travis Jackson     6    3*  22-27  574  .274  .467  .332   8  --  --   89.0   SS   G        IN
Phil Rizzuto       7    1   29-35+ 664  .272  .387  .339  13   6   9   87.0   SS   G        IN
Omar Vizquel       7    0   29-35  666  .274  .366  .338  30  10  11   82.4   SS  VG    Active
Maury Wills        7    1*  27-33  670  .289  .354  .339  60  19   7   80.4   SS   G  Veterans
Jackie Robinson: Won the Rookie of the Year at first base at age 28, was an outfielder/third baseman at 34-35, so his prime as a major league middle infielder was short—but oh, was it spectacular. It's sometimes forgotten that the war cost Robinson as much time as the color line did, but either way, he missed a lot—both the big, muscular middle infielders like A-Rod and Ripken and the speedy guys like Alomar and Knoblauch tend to have their best years in their early to mid-20s, and Robinson (who was both) didn't even get in the door until he was 28. In other words, we may not even have seen the best of him. Robinson may be surrounded by a lot of hard-earned myth and hype because of how he changed the game and the country, but he requires no apologies among the best second basemen ever.

Ernie Banks: Moved to first base at 31, and spent years as a mediocre first baseman, driving up his counting stats without ever being a star caliber player. But the young Banks was a monster (he once led his team in RBIs by a margin of 91), and properly immortalized as such.

Robin Yount: I could have padded out Yount's "prime" with significantly lesser years, but basically he left an unfinished resume as a superstar shortstop to become a center fielder, and is only in the Hall because he finished the job at that position.

Rod Carew: To take Carew beyond five years, you have to include his age-24 season when he missed two thirds of the year, and his prior years were of lesser quality and hampered by his duties in the Marine Corps Reserves. There were really only three seasons (1973-75, age 27-29) when he was healthy and at his peak before moving to first. Carew, like Yount, has to be evaluated as a multi-position guy and can't really be a yardstick for middle infielders.

Miguel Tejada: A year or two away from really entering this conversation in earnest. You could not have convinced me in 2000, even after Tejada whacked 30 homers and drove in 115 runs, that he could end up with a better career than Nomar, but that's more likely than not now. May yet break the single-season GIDP record.

Nomar Garciaparra: Nomar gets docked here for 2001—as he should, since his loss that year to a team that had Manny and a half-season of Pedro was crippling. He's never been the same since. Once an "of course" Hall of Famer, Nomar will need a Carew-like second act to make it now, and the game has changed since then. I don't know that he has batting titles and MVP awards in him as a first baseman.

Julio Franco: Moved to second base at 29, and then to designated hitter and first base from 33 on. Yes, it's quite humorous to see Franco associated in any way with short careers, but the injury that cost him his 1992 season cut off his prime as a middle infielder. Note that Franco hit into boatloads of double plays even when he was young and fast.

Eddie Stanky: Played through war at 28; the war probably helped Stanky because it forced talent-starved teams to consider his unique skill set. His value was almost entirely in drawing walks and annoying people.

Red Schoendienst: Joe Torre and Gil Hodges can draw inspiration from Schoendienst and Wilbert Robinson, guys who are in the Hall really as both players and managers despite being qualified as neither (though Torre has an argument as a player and a good one by now as a manager).

Cecil Travis: Was a third baseman at age 21 and 26, went to war ages 28-30 and might well have had a real Hall resume if the war hadn't ruined him as a player. I say "might"—you can see here that Travis doesn't really stand up that well here against his contemporaries, and unlike a guy like Reese, there's a fair bit of speculation in projecting more than just a few more years of the same.

Alvin Dark: Durable power hitter, drew few walks but was well-suited to bat behind Stanky, his double play partner for pennant winning Braves and Giants teams.

Gil McDougald: Like Jackie Robinson, a versatile defensive player, but unlike Robinson, McDougal wasn't an offensive superstar and never got a chance to play every single day.

Dave Bancroft: A very shaky Hall of Famer, given his short career, though his defensive numbers and reputation are impressive.

Davey Lopes: Was 28 when he got a job in the majors; wasn't really Cooperstown material anyway, but could really have had an impressive career if he'd started earlier and played under less hostile offensive conditions. Had a revival in his 40s as a part-time outfielder. Stole 89 bases in 97 attempts (92%) at age 33-34 and 62 in 66 attempts (94%) at age 39-40.

Travis Jackson: Moved to third base at 31. A silly Hall inductee, sort of the Chick Hafey of shortstops (short, injury-plagued prime, never really the star of any of his teams), plus, unlike Hafey, he wasn't even that great a hitter when he suited up.

Phil Rizzuto: Missed ages 25-27 due to war. Even giving credit for that, it's hard to find many guys on this list who were demonstrably lesser players than the Scooter.

Omar Vizquel: A better base thief than Rizzuto, but a little less power—still, all but the same player, and like Rizzuto, he had one really good year at age 32.

Maury Wills: Didn't get a full time gig in the majors until age 27, moved to third baseat age 34. As I have noted before, good luck finding writers who would admit they thought the 1962 MVP was actually a better player than Willie Mays, Frank Robinson and Hank Aaron at the peak of their powers. And except for his 1962 season, Wills wasn't an especially good percentage base thief. I see no basis for considering him a better player than Lopes.

Conclusion

Well, there you have it. This analysis is intended to be more of a foundation for arguments than an argument in itself—there really are a number of guys you have to consider as right around the line. And while the Hall voters haven't done a great job of drawing that line, you can at least see the systematic biases at work—in particular, it really does matter if a guy is able to show up for work consistently over time.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan McLaughlin 2007-01-09T04:01:15+00:00 Rice, Belle, and Dawson in Context http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/rice-belle-and-dawson-in-context/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/rice-belle-and-dawson-in-context/#When:05:04:15
There's a bit of explanation up front, but bear with me. As long time readers of my blog know, I'm dead-set against putting Dawson in Cooperstown, while I've gone back and forth repeatedly but leaned towards thinking that Rice just misses the cut. My initial gut reaction was that Belle should go in, but I wanted to lay the cases for and against each of these guys together on a common basis rather than keep having one-off discussions that ignore the broader question of where you draw a consistent line among candidates who seem to inhabit the grey area around the Hall's standards.

As I have argued for several years now, at least in evaluating hitters, the really key inquiry for the Hall of Fame should be neither "peak value" (how good the guy was at his very best) nor "career value" (the sum total of his career) but "prime value". Prime value is, roughly, looking at the number of years a guy had when he was a legitimate star and how good he was in those years. In other words, when I look at a potential Hall of Famer, the first question I ask is, "How many seasons did this guy have where he was a Hall of Fame quality ballplayer?" And the second is, "How good was he in those years—just around or above the line, or way above it?"

Now, I wouldn't argue that you should throw peak or career value entirely out the window, but peak value really doesn't capture the way most of us think about the Hall—as a shrine to a player's career accomplishments, not his very best day. The fact is that looking only at career value ends up putting too much emphasis on whether or not a guy played well when he was 38 and playing out the string as a bench player, rather than the years when he was doing the things we'll remember him for. You don't play your way out of the Hall in your old age.

Another downside of career value is that it overlooks the fact that baseball is played in seasons. If you look just at career totals, you miss that—you miss the fact that, at least for a star player, two seasons of 600 PA really are worth more than three seasons of 400 PA at the same level of production, because the 600-PA seasons move the team closer to winning championships. Looking only at career averages misses the fact that in-season durability is a very important measurement of value.

Thus, the principal statistical test for a Hall of Famer—though it's hard work to pull together—should be to excerpt out of his career the seasons when he was a star and weigh them on their own merit. Albert Belle's prime lasted nine seasons, from his first full year in 1993 to his next to last season, given that his last season was just so-so due to his bad hip. Jim Rice's prime lasted 12 years, from his 1975 rookie season to 1986; he played regularly for two more years but only as a shell of his former self, barely an above-league-average hitter at a hitter's position.

The Criteria

To properly compare a set of players to these two, I looked for players who fit the following criteria, without applying them mechanically:

1. A roughly decade-long prime. Everyone in the chart below had an identifiable "prime" of 9-12 years, except for Larry Walker (13 years) and Jack Clark (14 years). I mainly defined "prime" seasons as 500+ PA and an OPS+ of 120 or better. Not everyone was at these levels every year, but for most of them, the first, last and majority of the seasons in between met both of these, while few or no seasons were left off either end of the prime that met them. More below on how I sliced the careers to get the selection of seasons in the chart.

It would have been an apples-to-oranges comparison to add guys in here who had a whole lot of seasons over 120+ OPS that aren't captured by the 10-year slice. One guy whose prime was just a little long for this chart was Jeff Bagwell; another was Rafael Palmeiro. I briefly discuss at the bottom a few guys who fell short of the 9-year mark.

2. First basemen and outfielders only. I left off guys who mainly were designated hitters, like Edgar Martinez and Chili Davis, as well as guys who played more demanding positions. Of course, there are still substantial differences in defensive value between a good center fielder and a poor first baseman, but at least we're still in the right general neighborhood.

3. I stuck to sluggers/RBI men—no leadoff men, no guys mainly known for their base stealing (although there's a few good thieves on the list).

4. No dead-ball players; they're too hard, for these purposes, to compare to modern home run hitters.

5. Nobody who's active and still in their prime. Of the active players listed, Ken Griffey and Jim Thome in particular may have more Hall-quality seasons left in them, but they'll be disconnected from their main prime years, in Griffey's case by a long string of injury-shortened seasons. I'll come back another day to people like Gary Sheffield, Manny Ramirez, Jim Edmonds, Vladimir Guerrero, Bobby Abreu, Carlos Delgado, and Brian Giles who are still steaming forward at full speed.

6. Nobody whose career was significantly interrupted by war or who had prime seasons during the war (although I do list Indian Bob Johnson's ten years before the war, and just omit his three stellar seasons as an aging slugger clobbering weak wartime pitching). Johnny Mize, Hank Greenberg and Enos Slaughter would each have had a "prime" lasting more than a decade if you counted in the years they lost to war.

That gave us a sampling of 61 players, consisting of 19 Hall of Famers (including a few no-doubt-about-it Hall members like Duke Snider, Paul Waner, Al Simmons and Roberto Clemente), four guys on the ballot right now (Dawson, Rice, Parker and Belle), five active players (Thome, Griffey, Sammy Sosa, Juan Gonzalez, and Bernie Williams), eight players who have recently retired and (if I'm counting correctly) have yet to join the ballot (Walker, Fred McGriff, John Olerud, Bobby Bonilla, Darryl Strawberry, Jose Canseco, David Justice, and Tim Salmon), and the rest are either up to the Veterans' Committee or have permanently dropped off the ballot (I list all of these as "off" rather than try to guess, unless the player was on the 2005 Veterans Committee ballot; Minnie Minoso is also on the current Negro League ballot).

The Numbers

For the moment, I'm looking only at batting stats; I include a very rough, seat-of-the-pants defensive grading system (Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor; for some of these guys I was mainly guessing) just as a reference point, but my main purpose here is to place these guys on the offensive spectrum, from which point they can be moved up or down the list based on other factors.

The batting numbers here are translated statistics. What I did was simply to create a translated seasonal Batting Average, Slugging and OBP by dividing each season's percentages by the park-adjusted "league average" figures from Baseball Reference, and then translating into a common context&mdahs;for familiarity, I picked the 2005 National League averages of .262 batting, .414 slugging and .326 OBP. I then rolled up the seasonal averages into an average for the "prime" years, the same way you would do a batting average over a period of years (I would have created a fuller translated batting line, but really, this was quite enough work as it was).

The other numbers—plate appearances, steals and caught stealing, double plays—are actual, not translated (I included base stealing and GIDP figures because they're the two main components of offense that aren't captured by Slugging and OBP). In reaching those averages, I divided the player's total by the number of 162-game seasons played. Thus, for example, ten seasons during the 154-game schedule is 9.51 seasons, the 1981 season is 0.666 seasons, and 1994-95 is 1.59 seasons (I didn't bother with the small variations in the games played per team in the strike years, or with the shorter labor disturbances in 1972 and 1985).

The "Rate" column in the chart is simply (Slg)*(OBP)*(PA). It's not any kind of scientific formula, just a handy metric to organize the data on the table by the three main variables. I prefer multiplying rather than adding Slugging and OBP, since a single point of OBP is worth more than a single point of Slugging. As you can see, this metric organizes the data very strongly in favor of guys who were very durable in-season and against guys with low OBPs.

In most cases, the choice of where to start and stop the "prime" period was easy (there's a lesson in there about how quickly elite ballplayers can emerge and hit the wall). In a few cases, I left off a season or two—or three—where the guy hit just or almost as well as in his prime, but in significantly reduced playing time. I left off seasons like that for Snider, Clemente, Olerud, Canseco, Hernandez, Griffey, Will Clark, Norm Cash, Larry Walker and Boog Powell.

On the other hand, I could have cut shorter and raised the average PA for a few of these guys by knocking off a season that was a bit short on PA—that's true of Clemente (his 1970-71 seasons were among his best with the bat but short on at bats, so his "Rate" would go up to around 125 if you left them out), Babe Herman, Will Clark, Kiki Cuyler, Powell, and of course, Fred Lynn.

Some guys had multiple additional seasons that I left off because of lower or inconsistent quality, i.e., OPS+ below 120 (Dawson had two such seasons at each end of his prime; also Billy Williams, Goose Goslin, Orlando Cepeda, Tony Perez). Others I had to stretch to get 9 seasons by including a year at one or both ends just below 120&mdahs;Goslin, Gil Hodges, Ralph Kiner. I made no real judgment calls to stretch out Walker or Jack Clark; those guys' numbers are depressed by missed time in the middle, not subpar seasons at the ends.

As for the special case of McGriff, I'll discuss him separately below. You can re-run the numbers for any individual player with an Excel spreadsheet if you think I've cherry-picked too long or too short a mix of seasons. To reflect the fact that there are additional seasons missing, I included the "Oth" column which totals up seasons when the player had an OPS+ of 110 or greater and at least 500 PA, or an OPS+ of 120 or greater and at least 400 PA.
Player           Yrs  Oth   Ages   PA   Avg   Slg   OBP  SB  CS  DP   Rate  Pos  Def    Status
Frank Thomas      10    2  23-32  684  .314  .573  .423   3   2  17  165.7   1B    P    Active
Ralph Kiner        9    0  23-31  685  .271  .561  .377   3  *1  14  144.7   LF    P        IN
Albert Belle       9    0  24-32  674  .293  .573  .362  10   4  20  140.1   LF    F  OnBallot
Paul Waner        12    1  23-34  709  .313  .508  .389   9   - *14  139.8   RF    G        IN
Duke Snider        9    1  22-30  680  .293  .559  .366  10  *6  14  139.3   CF    G        IN
Jim Thome         10    1  24-33  631  .277  .556  .397   1   1   8  139.3   1B    F    Active
Bill Terry         9    1  28-36  687  .317  .520  .376   6   - *11  134.3   1B    G        IN
Fred McGriff       9    3  24-32  658  .283  .544  .375   6   3  15  134.1   1B    F   Not Yet
Sammy Sosa        10    1  25-34  670  .282  .570  .351  14   6  13  134.0   RF    F    Active
Dick Allen        11    0  22-32  570  .304  .603  .390  10   4  11  133.9   1B    P  Veterans
Ken Griffey Jr.   11    2  20-30  643  .290  .567  .366  15   5  11  133.7   CF   VG    Active
Billy Williams    11    4  24-34  700  .293  .534  .358   7   4  14  133.7   LF    G        IN
Al Simmons        10    2  23-32  640  .319  .577  .361   6   4   -  133.4   LF    G        IN
Chuck Klein        9    0  24-32  643  .298  .569  .362   8   -  *7  132.5   RF    G        IN
Joe Medwick        9   #2  21-29  677  .306  .558  .349   3   -  17  131.9   LF    F        IN
Earl Averill      10    0  27-36  699  .288  .525  .357   7   6   -  130.8   CF    G        IN
Minnie Minoso     10   ^1  28-37  687  .304  .498  .380  19  13  17  129.9   LF    G  Veterans
Goose Goslin      10    3  22-31  682  .293  .526  .359  15   7   -  129.0   LF    G        IN
Bernie Williams    9    1  25-33  649  .309  .504  .388  13   7  15  126.8   CF    F    Active
Rocky Colavito     9    1  23-31  669  .274  .524  .359   2   2  16  125.9   RF    F  Veterans
Dwight Evans      10    5  28-37  659  .274  .505  .377   4   2  13  125.4   RF   VG       Off
Bob Johnson       10   #3  27-36  665  .277  .522  .361   8   5 *17  125.3   LF    G       Off
Frank Howard      10    0  25-34  590  .292  .566  .369   1   1  17  123.5   LF    P       Off
John Olerud       10    3  24-33  650  .301  .475  .399   1   1  17  123.2   1B   VG   Not Yet
Keith Hernandez   11    1  23-33  666  .301  .473  .388   9   5  12  122.5   1B   VG       Off
Kirby Puckett     10    0  25-34  678  .317  .506  .356  10   6  18  122.2   CF    G        IN
Jim Bottomley      9    0  23-31  643  .288  .532  .357   5  *5   -  122.1   1B    G        IN
Babe Herman        9    2  23-31  616  .298  .546  .363  10   - *13  121.9   RF    P       Off
Roberto Clemente  12    1  25-36  606  .331  .534  .377   5   2  16  121.9   RF   VG        IN
Larry Doby         9   ^1  24-32  630  .280  .526  .367   5   4   9  121.6   CF    G        IN
Jim Rice          12    0  22-33  665  .294  .530  .345   5   3  23  121.4   LF    P  OnBallot
Gil Hodges         9    1  25-33  681  .272  .507  .352   5  *4  13  121.4   1B   VG  Veterans
Bobby Bonds       11    0  23-33  662  .273  .515  .353  39  14   9  120.5   RF    G  Veterans
Bobby Bonilla     10    1  25-34  651  .285  .514  .359   3   4  13  120.2   RF    P   Not Yet
Rusty Staub       10    2  23-32  632  .296  .495  .383   3   3  16  119.8   RF    F       Off
Heine Manush       9    1  24-32  679  .311  .503  .351   9   5   -  119.5   LF    F        IN
Earle Combs        9    0  26-34  682  .300  .476  .368  11   8   -  119.4   CF    G        IN
Will Clark        12    2  23-34  606  .302  .510  .377   5   3   7  116.6   1B   VG       Off
Tony Perez        11    1  25-35  642  .285  .522  .346   4   2  14  116.0   1B    F        IN
Greg Luzinski      9    2  24-32  610  .271  .518  .363   3   3  11  114.7   LF    P       Off
Darryl Strawberry  9    0  21-29  571  .267  .554  .360  22   9   6  114.0   RF    F       Off
Jose Cruz Sr.      9    2  28-36  639  .305  .480  .371  30  13   8  113.9   LF    G       Off
Reggie Smith      11    0  23-33  575  .292  .539  .363   9   6  11  112.6   CF    G       Off
Jimmy Wynn        11    0  23-33  598  .263  .499  .376  18   8   9  112.1   CF    G       Off
Norm Cash         11    3  26-36  568  .280  .525  .375   3   2  11  112.0   1B    G       Off
Tim Salmon        11    0  24-34  614  .276  .489  .372   4   4   8  111.7   RF    G   Not Yet
Orlando Cepeda    10    3  20-29  568  .308  .547  .358  11   6  14  111.2   1B    F        IN
Al Oliver         11    2  25-35  626  .312  .503  .348   6   5  15  109.8   CF    G       Off
Juan Gonzalez     11    0  21-31  586  .290  .559  .333   2   2  15  109.0   RF    F    Active
Boog Powell       10    3  21-30  559  .281  .525  .369   2   1  11  108.6   1B    F       Off
Kiki Cuyler       11    1  25-35  598  .294  .492  .365  27 *13 *11  107.2   RF    G        IN
Larry Walker      13    0  24-36  541  .294  .535  .369  16   5  10  106.9   RF    G   Not Yet
Jack Clark        14    0  22-35  534  .271  .522  .383   4   4  12  106.7   RF    G       Off
Andre Dawson      11    4  25-35  607  .285  .530  .330  20   6  12  106.2   RF    G  OnBallot
Dave Parker       12    2  24-35  595  .295  .518  .342  12   8  12  105.3   RF    F  OnBallot
Kent Hrbek        10    0  22-31  581  .284  .499  .361   3   2  13  104.8   1B    F       Off
Fred Lynn         10    2  23-32  560  .286  .514  .362   6   4  10  104.3   CF    G       Off
Jose Canseco      10    3  21-30  551  .274  .537  .352  16   7  13  104.1   RF    P   Not Yet
Cesar Cedeno       9    1  21-29  558  .298  .512  .364  49  14  12  104.1   CF    G       Off
Bob Allison       10    0  24-33  563  .260  .499  .356   8   4  11   99.9   RF    G       Off
David Justice     11    0  24-34  532  .272  .503  .364   4   4   8   97.4   RF    G   Not Yet
* - Indicates that this statistic is not available for all seasons
# - All three of Johnson's other seasons, and one of Medwick's, were during the 1943-45 period against war-depleted competition
^ - Does not include seasons in the Negro Leagues

A few thoughts and observations on the numbers:
  • Man, Frank Thomas is off in his own world. I included Thomas here because he was a contemporary and teammate of Belle, but of course he really has no business being compared to people who are only arguable immortals (Jimmie Foxx, whose prime spanned roughly 12-13 years, would produce similar totals to Thomas).

  • Showing up really is half the battle. Other than Thomas, it's actually astonishing when you look through this crowd how similar a lot of these guys were with the bat; you could replace Duke Snider with Reggie Smith, or Goose Goslin with Greg Luzinski, and on the days they were both healthy you'd hardly skip a beat with the bat. But the Hall's actual voting has definitely favored the guys at the top of the chart in large part because they were consistently in the lineup. The extreme example of this is Billy Williams, who never missed a game in his prime and had a few other decent years, and thus rises above a bunch of people who really weren't any more talented.

  • The Hall has also tilted in favor of the guys with better batting averages. Tops in this crowd is Clemente. Clemente really was a great player, but you have to let a little air out of his reputation, which in the media tends to get entirely un-tethered from reality (a few years back I had to explain in some detail why he was not, in fact, better than Stan Musial; this should be unnecessary).

  • Dwight Evans really got shafted. Evans was, in his prime, at least 95% of the defensive player Clemente was, and like Williams, he's at the upper end of this group in terms of having additional productive seasons outside his prime years. Evans' problem, of course, is that (1) a lot of his value was in walks and (2) in his mid-twenties he was the fourth best outfielder on his own team.

  • Though he falls short on durability—a point I've harped on before—you really can't turn down a bat like Dick Allen's.

  • One guy who really doesn't quite fit in the mold of a ten-year prime is Fred McGriff; McGriff really had a seven-year peak of tremendous productivity, followed by eight years of being a good-not-great player, so you can look at either of the two pieces or the 15-year whole:
    Player       Yrs   Ages   PA   Avg   Slg   OBP  SB  CS  DP   Rate 
Fred McGriff   7  24-30  650  .286  .567  .385   6   3  13  141.8 
Fred McGriff   8  30-38  640  .277  .468  .352   3   2  16  105.4 
Fred McGriff  15  24-38  644  .281  .511  .367   5   2  15  120.8
    It's hard not to take McGriff seriously as a Hall candidate when you look at the numbers from that angle.

  • Besides Thomas, Olerud and Thome have the best on base percentages in this group. I was also surprised how high Bernie Williams places.

Belle, Rice and Dawson

As you can see, the Hall hasn't skimped on guys whose primes ran short after 9 years. I wouldn't be eager to add many more of those unless they're really spectacular. Belle, to my mind, fits the bill; he was not only a fearsome power hitter and a more patient hitter than the likes of Rice, but he was also, until his career-ending injury, an indestructible, never-come-out-of-the-lineup kind of guy. His teams won a lot, too. His only real negative besides the length of his career is an unusually large number of double plays.

Rice, I remain ambivalent about—he was indeed a major slugger for 12 years—but at the end of the day the combined effect of a subpar OBP and a huge number of double plays means that he just made too many outs. Add in indifferent at best defense, and you have a guy who should just miss the cut. I'll hardly be heartbroken if they put Rice in, but I would vote no.

And Dawson ... let's face it, if you've bothered to read this far, you're probably not the kind of person who would vote for Dawson anyway. Dawson's low OBP sticks out like a sore thumb here, with only Juan Gonzalez within 10 points of him. He just wasn't good enough, and his election would be a thumb in the eye of everyone who takes the time to understand these things and take them seriously.

The Short Career Guys

Let's also take a quick look at a few other guys who are in the Hall, on the ballot or on the Veterans' Committee ballot, but don't quite add up to a nine-year-minimum for inclusion in the big chart:
Player        Yrs Oth   Ages   PA   Avg   Slg   OBP  SB  CS  DP   Rate  Pos  Def     Status
Don Mattingly   6   1  23-28  684  .329  .550  .372   1   1  15  140.2   1B   VG  On Ballot
Hack Wilson     7   0  26-32  640  .284  .574  .374   5   -   -  137.3   CF    P         IN
Dale Murphy     8   0  24-31  681  .276  .535  .361  17   6  12  131.7   CF    G  On Ballot
Tony Oliva      8   0  25-32  634  .322  .542  .360  11   7  12  123.7   RF    F   Veterans
Steve Garvey    7   1  25-31  696  .310  .516  .344   9   6  17  123.3   1B    G  On Ballot
Vada Pinson     7   3  20-26  702  .296  .495  .342  23   8  12  118.9   CF    G   Veterans
Chick Hafey     8   0  24-31  532  .293  .548  .358   8   - *11  104.3   LF    G         IN
There were other guys with truncated primes I could have added to this second chart if I had the time, like Dolph Camilli (7 years), Chet Lemon (7 years), Paul O'Neill (6 years, maybe 8 if you stretch), Cecil Cooper (6 years), Mo Vaughn (6 years), Roger Maris (6 years, at most) and Ted Kluszewski (5 years), just to name a few. I also didn't bother with Hall of Famer George Kelly, who had just two seasons—at age 25 and 28—with an OPS+ of 120 or greater; it's just beating a dead horse to compare people to Kelly. Nor did I bother with Lloyd Waner, who never even once topped an OPS+ of 120.

None of these guys belongs in the Hall. Murphy, Wilson and Oliva were all major stars, but they ran short on time. Mattingly was even more dominant, and if his prime ran 8 or 9 years at this quality, I'd be apt to consider him; six years just isn't enough for an everyday player's entire Hall of Fame resume. Hafey is, of course, a ridiculous Hall of Famer, a guy who was often out of the lineup and at that for only a short few years. But he was, when he played, a fine hitter.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Dan McLaughlin 2006-01-31T05:04:15+00:00