Monday, March 31, 2025

Did Earl Weaver's bookmaker uncle turn him into a sabermetrician?

See The Gamblers and Hustlers That Made Baseball’s Greatest Manager: Earl Weaver learned about playing the odds from his bookmaker uncle. Those lessons would turn him into a pioneer of modern analytics by John W. Miller. He is the author of the book The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball. Excerpts:

[Weavers'] "exposure to the gambling world helped make him into an early prophet of baseball analytics." 

[A] "generation before Moneyball, as the longtime manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Weaver valued drawing walks, high on-base averages, power-based offenses, and innovative uses of strategy, and technology. He was also the first manager to deploy a radar gun to measure pitching velocities."

"a culture saturated by gambling was the perfect environment for young Earl Weaver to grasp the elements of the game that actually went into manufacturing wins.

“Earl talked like a bookmaker,” said Dan Duquette, who hired Weaver to instruct his manager and coaches when he was general manager of the Montreal Expos in the 1990s.

Weaver peppered his postgame comments with gambling analogies."

"The sharps [gamblers] can be considered baseball’s first real sabermetricians, combing available data in the search for an edge.

In 1942, a bookie from Ohio named Samuel J. Georgeson published Pitchers Record Guide, a book with pitcher statistics from the previous season, breakdowns versus specific teams, and charts that allowed gamblers to track the performance of pitchers against individual teams during the current season. “It can be of extreme value to know that a certain pitcher is almost always successful against a certain team, but seldom wins against another,” Georgeson wrote in the guide. 

As far back as 1956, an article in Esquire had also described a baseball betting system based on 1-10 ratings for evaluating pitchers that relied on earned-run averages, strikeouts, and bases on balls, while disregarding win-loss records. “A pitcher, after being hit hard, can leave a game at the end of the fifth inning with the score 8-to-6 in his favor and be credited with a victory because his team eventually won the game,” the magazine noted. It is “the ratio between his strikeouts and his [walks]” that bookies look for, he wrote, preceding the insights of modern analysts by decades.

Over a quarter-century later, Earl Weaver introduced to big-league dugouts an awareness of the variability and complexity of matchups of his team’s hitters against specific pitchers, and vice versa."

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Players who had at least a 200 OPS+ over 3 seasons with 1,000 + PAs

I got all the data from Baseball Reference and Stathead. I had Stathead call up all the guys in the AL/NL in each age group starting from 17-19, 18-20 up to 42-44 who fit the criteria. They are in the table below. After that I mention a few guys who just missed. 

Here are the 8 hitters. In the table some of them are listed more than once if they had more than one span (and some of those overlap).

Aaron Judge
Babe Ruth
Barry Bonds
Dan Brouthers
Mickey Mantle
Rogers Hornsby
Ted Williams
Ty Cobb 

Player

OPS+

PA

From

To

Age

Aaron Judge

206

1858

2022

2024

30-32

Babe Ruth

201

1068

1917

1919

22-24

Babe Ruth

227

1543

1918

1920

23-25

Babe Ruth

238

1854

1919

1921

24-26

Babe Ruth

228

1806

1920

1922

25-27

Babe Ruth

224

1888

1921

1923

26-28

Babe Ruth

217

1876

1922

1924

27-29

Babe Ruth

207

1806

1923

1925

28-30

Babe Ruth

201

1759

1924

1926

29-31

Babe Ruth

203

1769

1925

1927

30-32

Babe Ruth

219

2027

1926

1928

31-33

Babe Ruth

209

1963

1927

1929

32-34

Babe Ruth

204

1948

1928

1930

33-35

Babe Ruth

208

1927

1929

1931

34-36

Babe Ruth

210

1928

1930

1932

35-37

Babe Ruth

200

1828

1931

1933

36-38

Barry Bonds

206

1705

1999

2001

34-36

Barry Bonds

237

1883

2000

2002

35-37

Barry Bonds

253

1826

2001

2003

36-38

Barry Bonds

254

1779

2002

2004

37-39

Barry Bonds

244

1219

2003

2005

38-40

Barry Bonds

210

1162

2004

2006

39-41

Dan Brouthers

201

1427

1884

1886

26-28

Mickey Mantle

204

1913

1955

1957

23-25

Mickey Mantle

206

1929

1956

1958

24-26

Mickey Mantle

201

1361

1961

1963

29-31

Rogers Hornsby

207

1833

1922

1924

26-28

Rogers Hornsby

208

1735

1923

1925

27-29

Ted Williams

202

1938

1940

1942

21-23

Ted Williams

203

2003

1946

1948

27-29

Ted Williams

212

1053

1953

1955

34-36

Ted Williams

204

1467

1955

1957

36-38

Ty Cobb

200

1864

1910

1912

23-25

Mark McGwire had 197 over the years 1998-2000 with 1663 PAs.

Jimmie Foxx had 198 over the years 1932-34 in 2024 PAs.

Bonds just missed one from 1992-94 with 199 from 1992-94 in 1760 PAs.