Mike Trout's Season Is Now In The Top 100 Of All-Time And It Looks Like It Is Now The Greatest Rookie Season Ever

He now has a WAR of 9.1. Click here to see the leaders. Trout is tied for 94th. Actually 94th-103rd. He also is 2nd only to Babe Ruth's 1923 season in WAR per game (.0858). Click here to see that list. If Trout could get just .0429 WAR per game over the last 33 games, he would add 1.4 WAR. He would finish with 10.5. That would be the 24th highest ever.

Click here to see the rookie list.. I think Joe Jackson has the previous best rookie season at a WAR of 9.0.

Update: Through Aug. 30, Trout has slipped to 8.9 WAR

Update: Through Aug. 31, Trout is up to 9.2 WAR

Who Was The Greatest "All-Around" Player Ever? Another Quantitative Attempt (Part 3)

Part 2  is below with a link to part 1. I used four stats: one for fielding, one for speed (based on triples), one for hitting for average and one for hitting for power (ISO). The four stats were multiplied by each other and I calculated their geometric mean. Players had to have 5000+ career PAs. They are relative to the league average and there is a park adjustment.

I have already used both a triples stat and then a SB stat to measure speed. Here I combined them. I used the square root of the SB stat (see earlier posts for how that worked). Then that was added to the triples stat and I simply took the average of the two. One reason I took the square root of the SB stat is that it had a very large range and this brings it more in line with the other stats. This is actually similar to what Bill James does with his "speed score." One of his stats in that involves SBs and he takes the square root of it. He also uses triples. But I don't use fielding range factor, partly because it would be hard to get it for each guy but also I am already using fielding here. I don't uses CS or GIDP since we don't have them for all of history. I don't use runs scored since that depends on your teammates.

So here is the top 25.

Here are the numbers for Mays. Recall that they are relative to the leage average:

Fielding: 1.13
Isolated Power: 1.89
Average: 1.14
Speed: 1.49

Mays got a slight bumb from the park adjustment (an increase of 2%). For the above replacement level version here are the leaders (this was done the same way as in the first two posts). Mays has a solid lead. He has been the best or near the top so far in all the ways I have looked at this.

http://cybermetric.blogspot.com/2012/08/who-was-greatest-all-around-player-ever_23.html

http://cybermetric.blogspot.com/2012/08/who-was-greatest-all-around-player-ever.html

Who Was The Greatest "All-Around" Player Ever? Another Quantitative Attempt (Part 2)

To see Part 1, go to Who Was The Greatest "All-Around" Player Ever? Another Quantitative Attempt. I used four stats: one for fielding, one for speed (based on triples), one for hitting for average and one for hitting for power (ISO). There was a park adjustment, too. The four stats were multiplied by each other and I calculated their geometric mean. Players had to have 5000+ career PAs.

In this case, I used a stat for stolen bases for speed instead of the one for triples. Because of that, the isolated power stat here was not adjusted for triples like I did the first time. The stolen base stat is SBs divided by number of times reaching first base (singles + walks + HBP). That was then divided by the league average. The next post I do will combine triples and SBs to make a speed stat. I think that neither a SB stat nor a triples stat are good enough by themselves.

So here is the new set of leaders. The 1.57 for Bobby Bonds means that the geometric average of the 4 stats was 1.57. If, for example, he had been 57% better than the league average in each of the 4 stats, his geometric average would have been 1.57. His stats were actually

Fielding: 1.08
Isolated Power: 1.63
Batting Average: 1.03
SBs: 3.41

He was 8% better at fielding. His SB rate was 3.41 times the league average.

Willie Mays once again does extremely well (Bobby Bonds was 23rd before). He was 3rd in the other measure using 3Bs for speed. DiMaggio was first. But here he fell to 449th. His stealing rate was only .37. Rickey Henderson rose from 284th place since he did not have very many triples (he was just about average). So some players moved up or down in the rankings quite a bit. The SB rate had a bigger range than the SB rate (although the correlation between the two rates was about .56). It went from 5.35 down to 0.019. The triple rate ranged from 3.85 down to 0.197.

I also calculated an "above replacement" level value, using the same method as last time. Here is the top 25. I don't think the number has any real meaning or interpretation. This just allows us to take into account longevity and the typical decline in performance that we normally see. Mays was 1st in this one last time. Mays probably would gain on Henderson if I could split fielding into throwing and catching (which I will try to do at some point). Would it be enough to pass Henderson? If so, I think it would strengthen the case for Mays being the greatest all around player ever since he ranks so high using either SBs or 3Bs for speed.

Major League Baseball Could See Its 500,000th Error This Season!

According to Baseball Reference, since 1876, there have been 499,590 errors made. So only 410 to go. With 30 teams and about 40 games left for each, there are close to 1200 games left in the season. With a rate of .5-.6 errors per game, there should be around 600 more errors this season and we will pass the 500,000 mark.

There have also been 98,790 hit batters, so that could be passed in a couple of years.

Update: Jose Reyes made the 500,000th error on Sept. 15th. See Marlins' Jose Reyes fumbles way into history with baseball's 500,000th error by Jeff Passan. It also has a video clip.

Does Mike Trout Already Have The 2nd Highest WAR Ever For A Rookie?

I tried to compile a list of the best rookie seasons by WAR from Baseball Reference. See my earlier post from August 1, Does Mike Trout Already Have One Of The Top Ten Rookie Seasons Ever? Trout now has a WAR of 8.6. My list would have him 2nd only to Joe Jackson in 1911 (9.0). With almost 40 games left, it seems like he will pass that. He has gained 2.0 in WAR in the last 19 games.

He leads the 2nd best position player in the league, Robinson Cano, by 3.0 (Cano has 5.6). The last time a position player was 3.0 or more better for a whole season than the 2nd best position player was in 2002 when Barry Bonds had 11.6 and Jeff Kent had 6.9.

Is Alexei Ramirez A Good Offensive Player?

That is what the announcer said on ESPN's "Baseball Tonight" last night (it was not one of the ex-player analysts who said this). Here is how Ramirez has done in OPS+ in each year of his career:

2008-104
2009-86
2010-99
2011-94
2012-72

His career OPS+ is 92. His career OBP is .317 and this year it is .282. He is not making up for it with base stealing. He does have 14 SBs with only 5 CS this year. But that is of marginal importance and in his career his SB-CS is 61-32.

Is Mike Trout Only The 6th Player To Have 20+ HRs and 35+ SBs In His First 100 Games Of A Season?

He has 24 HRs and 39 SBs in 99 games so far. I called up all the seasons with 20+ HRs and 35+ SBs using the Lee Sinins "Complete Baseball Encyclopedia." 46 players have done this at least once. Then I went through all of those individual seasons and looked at their monthly & daily splits at Retrosheet & gamelogs at Baseball Reference. Here the only players I think have done this before:

Cesar Cedeno-1974
Joe Morgan-1976
Rickey Henderson-1985, 1990
Eric Davis-1986, 1987
Barry Bonds-1990

Let me know if you think I missed anyone. Trout has a good chance to get 30+ HRs and 50+ SBs. Only two players have ever done that, Barry Bonds and Eric Davis, each once.

Update On Mike Trout's Historic WAR Per Game

10 games ago, I reported that Trout had a WAR per game of .0859 (he had 7.3 WAR in 85 games). He now has 8.1 WAR in 95 games or .0853 per game. That is still 2nd only to Ruth's .0901 in 1923 (since 1900). Trout has .08 WAR per game over his last 10 games. If a player did that for a whole season, it would still be the 7th best year since 1900. See Mike Trout's WAR Per Game Is Historically One Of The Best (So Far)

How Much Will The Loss Of Cabrera Hurt The Giants?

He has had about .043 WAR per game this year (assuming 4.5 PAs per game). So over the next 45 games, it would be 1.94. If Gregor Blanco takes over, he would get .76 WAR (he had been averaging about .017 WAR per game). So that is a loss of 1.18 wins. Of course, this is only based on this year's stats. Blanco was not in the majors last year and as of now, his career WAR per game is .01. Last year Cabrera had .026 WAR per game. It is hard to say what the real talent level of each guy is. But if I use the latter 2 numbers, it will cost the Giants .72 wins. If I average that with the 1.18, we get .95 wins. So still in the range of about one less win.

Who Was The Greatest "All-Around" Player Ever? Another Quantitative Attempt

Some players are said to have 5 tools: they can hit for average, hit for power, run the bases, catch the ball and throw it. It might seems simple to come up with a rating for this-you could just add, say HRs and SBs. But a player who hits 500 HRs and has 0 SBs has less "all-around" ability than a guy that hits 200 HRs and steals 200 bases. If you added HRs + SBs, the first guy looks better. So I will use a geomtric mean (Dan Levitt and Jim Baker made helpful comments-any mistakes, of course, are due solely to me).

Here is what Wikipedia says about it: "A geometric mean is often used when comparing different items- finding a single "figure of merit" for these items- when each item has multiple properties that have different numeric ranges." In fact, some of the values I will be using will have much larger ranges than others.

Here are the measures I will use:

Fielding: I use FRAA from the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia (fielding runs above average). Sinins got them from Michael Humphreys' recent book Wizardry. I don't have a way of easily breaking this down into throwing (arm) and catching (glove), but I have something in mind that I will use in a future post. I converted it into a rate relative to the league average (like 1.10 means that you saved 10% more runs than average).

Hitting for Average: I will use average relative to the league average.

Hitting for Power: I will use isolated power relative to the league average.

Speed: I use a player's 3B/(2B + 3B) relative to the league average. This is an idea from Voros McCracken. The idea is that it is a % of the time you hit an extra-base hit that you get a 3B. The faster players will have a higher rate here. It is relative to the league average. Handedness is adjusted for. Triples were taken out of the relative isolated power calculation (for both the player and the league average) since they get used in the speed rating. Actually, for isolated power they were considered doubles. Both the speed and power ratings had ranges far beyond those of fielding and hitting for average.

A park adjustment was also made to each player's overall rating (this was based on hitting only).

The four ratings, each relative to the league average, are multiplied times each other and then I take the 4th root of that number (the geometric mean). I used all players who had 5000+ PAs through 2011. The table below shows the top 25.

Some players are not too surprising while others are. One possible weakness is that some players played long careers and in their later years, the averages and rates were dragged down. So I also tried to create a rating for "all-aroundness" above replacement level. If the average level would be 1.00, then replacement could be .8 (what I used). This might be reasonable because 80% of 81 is about 65 wins, an acceptable replacement level (if we want to go down to say 54 or 52 wins, we could assume that the replacement level pitchers would get you the rest of the way there-remember, these are only position players and their hitting, fielding and running).

So how was this calculated? Mays has 1.385. That minus .8 gets us .585. That is how far above replacement Mays was, qualitatively. To quantifiy this, I assumed a 700 plate appearance levl for a full season. Mays had about 17.85 full seasons. So that times .585 gets us 10.44. He is the leader here.

Alot of all-time greats here. But Steve Finley really jumps out as a surprise.

I hope to post more in the next week or two on some of the assumptions I made and how I came up with some of the measures. Other issues include using SBs instead of 3Bs for speed (Rickey Henderson would rank higher then), using HR% instead of isolated power, how park affects play a role in the 3B/(2B + 3B) rate, the handedness adjustment for that stat, including the ability to get a walk as a "tool" and the earlier mentioned issue of breaking up the fielding rating into throwing and catching (it is possible that someone got a good fielding rating and was not really well balanced, that is, it was all due to their arm or their glove). I also need to explain how I turned FRAA into a rate and how I adjusted for handedness in 3B/(2B + 3B). Same for how I calculated and used the park effect adjustment.

Chris Sale vs. Stephen Strasburg

 

BR means Baseball Reference and FG means Fangraphs. I don't know why they are so different on WAR. I also don't know if FIP, xFIP, Sierra and tERA are park adjusted. It looks like BR gives Sale about a 105 for pitching in U.S. Cellular Field and Strasburg does not seem to get adjusted much, so his park must be neutral. So for the league %'s on FIP, xFIP, Sierra and tERA, we could multiply what Sale has by about .95. He would still be higher than Strasburg, but  a little closer.

Mike Trout's WAR Per Game Is Historically One Of The Best (So Far)

Through yesterday's game, he had 7.3 WAR in 85 games. I found all the seasons with 7.3 or more WAR from 1901-1912 at Baseball Reference. Then ranked them by WAR per game. Trout is 2nd only to Ruth's 1923 season. Then I found the top 200 seasons in WAR from 1871-1900 and ranked them by WAR per game. The table below shows the top 10 from the two searches.

Are Darwin Barney And Brendan Ryan Having Historic Fielding Seasons?

At Baseball Reference, Barney (Cubs) has 3.3 defensive WAR while Ryan (Mariners) has 3.2. With about a third of the season left, they are on a pace to get about 4.8-4.9 defensive WAR. Here are the top 4 seasons ever:

1. Terry Turner-5.4-1906
2. Art Fletcher-5.1-1917
3. Mark Belanger-4.9-1975
4. Ozzie Smith-4.7-1989

So far this year, after Barney and Ryan, the next highest defensive WAR belongs to Yunel Escobar of the Blue Jays with 2.2

Does Mike Trout Already Have One Of The Top Ten Rookie Seasons Ever?

Using the Baseball Reference Play Index, I found the best seasons for anyone in their 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th seasons. If a player had 130 or more career ABs before a given season, I no longer considered him a rookie (I think that is the rule and I think there is something also about days on the roster but I don't know how to find that). So here are what I think are the top 10 seasons ever for a rookie position player in WAR. Please let me know if you think anyone is missing. Notice how few games Trout has played, so it looks like he could pass Jackson.

MJ Lloyd of HaloHangout has a good post on how Trout compares to other great 20 year old players. See Mike Trout Is In Elite Company. AROD has the highest with 9.2 in 1996. So Trout could break that, too.

Doubles As A Percent Of All Hits Over Time

The graph below shows the numbers for the AL.

Now the NL

The trend has also been to a higher frequency of doubles. See The Fastest Players Since 1900 According to the Triple-to-Double Ratio

Why Are The Red Sox Just a .500 Team If They Have a +47 Run Differential And An OPS Differential of +.039?

They hit well with runners on base but their pitchers do very poorly with runners on base and both the hitters and pitchers do poorly when it is close and late. This post was inspired by what David Pinto wrote at "Baseball Musings." See WPA I Can Use. David's post was based on Tango's post WPA insights which in turn linked to Dave Studeman's article Detailed standings at the all-star break.

Here is what I posted at "Baseball Musings."

"They actually hit well with runners on base and RISP. Here are their BA-OBP-SLG-OPS with

RISP) 0.283 0.359 0.458 0.817
None on) 0.260 0.313 0.425 0.738
ROB) 0.279 0.349 0.463 0.813

Now their overall BA-OBP-SLG-OPS and in close and late situations

Overall) 0.268 0.329 0.441 0.770
CL) 0.241 0.310 0.383 0.693

How can a team which hits so well with runners on base do so poorly when it is close and late? Are they at a platoon disadvantage? Just bad luck?

Now the same thing for their pitchers

RISP) 0.256 0.343 0.432 0.775
None on) 0.265 0.341 0.431 0.772
ROB) 0.251 0.306 0.395 0.701

So it looks like their pitchers do much worse with runners on base.

Now their overall BA-OBP-SLG-OPS and in close and late situations

Overall) 0.257 0.321 0.410 0.731
CL) 0.271 0.335 0.403 0.738

So their pitchers do worse when it is close and late.

Overall, they have an OPS Differential of .039 (.770- .731). But when it is close and late the differential is negative. It is -.045 (.693 – .738)

Is "Pitching To Contact" Helping The Nationals?

The Yahoo Sports baseball page has a feature article on this. It says "New alphabet: Fewer K's, more W's for Nats: Washington's emphasis on pitching to contact is paying off in victories." The article then is Nationals pitching coach Steve McCatty believes fewer K's equals more W's, and so far so good by Les Carpenter. I really don't see any statistical evidence offered to support this in the article.

This year the Nationals are 3rd in the NL in strikeouts per 9 IP with 8.3 and they have an ERA of 3.21. Last year they were 15th in the NL in strikeouts per 9 IP 6.5 and they had an ERA of 3.58. So it actually seems like they are striking out more batters and their ERA is lower.

This issue came up in April, 2011. See my post Can "Pitching To Contact" Lead To More Scoring? The Twins were supposedly benefiting from it. I was skeptical. Here is what I wrote:

"To look at this, I calculated the batting average and slugging percentage in the AL in 2010 on contact. For contact, I used AB - K + SF. I assumed that sacrifice hits (bunts) and their attempts rarely end up in strikeouts. So in the AL last year when a plate appearance ended in contact, the AVG was .320 and the SLG was .501.

How many runs per game might this lead to? To approximate this, I used the equation

R/G = 16.04*OBP + 11.595*SLG - 5.52

That comes from regression analysis based on the 2007-2009 seasons.

Last year the AL had a leage OBP of .327 and a league SLG of .407. The equation predicts that would lead to a runs per game of 4.44 (it was actually 4.45). But if we used .320 for OBP and used the .501 for SLG, we get 5.44 runs per game. That seems like a big difference.

I am not sure if this approximation works. It would be quite a different game with no walks and the denominator for OBP and SLG is not the same in each case. But even with that said, I am skeptical that pitching to contact (or not trying to cause batters to miss the pitch) is a good idea."

Jeff Sullivan of "Baseball Nation" has a good take on this. See Being Wrong, With The Nationals' Pitching Coach

Baseball Think Factory has an interesting discussion on this. See Nationals pitching coach Steve McCatty believes fewer K’s equals more W’s, and so far so good

Team OPS Differentials So Far In 2012

We are just about at the half way mark. The table below shows all teams. Their expected winning pct is from my equation .5 + 1.26*OPSDIFF

Tango uses 1.8*OBP + SLG to approximate sOBA. Here are the differntials for that

Career Leaders In Game Ending Homers

This was posted to SABR-L on June 24 by David Vincent.

Jim Thome 13
Babe Ruth 12
Jimmie Foxx 12
Stan Musial 12
Mickey Mantle 12
Frank Robinson 12
Tony Perez 11
Dick Allen 10
Reggie Jackson 10
Mike Schmidt 10
Harold Baines 10
Barry Bonds 10
Sammy Sosa 10
David Ortiz 10
Albert Pujols 10

Can Brett Lawrie Set A New Single Season Record For Defensive WAR?

About half way through the season, he has a defensive WAR of 3.4. The current record is 5.4 by SS Terry Turner in 1906. The only other season with 5 or higher is 5.1 by Art Fletcher (SS) in 1917.

Click here to see the leaders at Baseball Reference

Update: After the July 3 game, he is up to 3.5. That is tied for the 51st best fielding season ever. If he stays on this pace, he would end up with 7.0, beating the old record by 29.6%. It looks like he had 5 assists and a putout last night. In his career he now has a defensive WAR of 5.1 in just 120 games. The single season record for a 3B man is 4.5 by Brooks Robinson in 1968. It looks like Lawrie is already in the top 10 seasons for 3B men.

"The Book" blog had an interesting discussion of Lawrie's defense in May. Part of it has to do with where he stands when the Blue Jays put on a shift, which can affect hs stats. See Has Brett Lawrie ALREADY saved 14 runs so far this year?

Sale & Strasburg vs. Non-pitchers

The table below shows some key percentages. For the percentages, I divided by PAs (with IBBs and SHs being taken out). I included HBP in walks.

Strasburg has the big edge in SO% while Sale is ahead in HR% and BB%. Now let's say they each face 36 batters in a 9 inning game and we use the values from the fielding independent ERA. At 1.4 runs for a HR, Sale is just about .2 runs better. On walks, at .33 runs for a walk, he is also about .2 runs better. But using about .2 runs for strikeouts, Strasburg is about .41 better. That makes him about .1 better.

Do Power Hitters Choke in the Clutch?

It might only look that way. See Clutch, WPA/LI, and the Home Run Bias by Kincaid of 3-D Baseball and HR Bias in Clutch scores, based on Situational Wins (WPA/LI) by Tangotiger.

I posted a comment on Kinkaid's post:

"Very interesting. Thanks for mentioning my research. What I posted at tango's blog I went into more detail on mine. See

Don't Let Your Little Leaguers Grow Up To Be Right-Handed Power Hitters Who Strike Out Alot Because They Might Choke In the Clutch.

I also did something several years ago called "Do Power Hitters Choke in the Clutch?" it is at Do Power Hitters Choke in the Clutch?

A study called “Clutch Hitting: Fact or Fiction?” By Andrew Dolphin suggests that they might. It is at

Clutch Hitting: Fact or Fiction

I also did something similar to what you did here by just comparing WPA to linear weights in my presentation on clutch in 2002 at the Boston SABR convention. I had Bonds doing better in the clutch than his linear weights stats would predict.


"A COMPOSITE CLUTCH HITTING STAT
A STAT THAT TAKES INTO ACCOUNT EVERY PLATE APPEARANCE, NOT JUST CERTAIN SITUATIONS. ONE EXAMPLE IS “GAME STATE VICTORIES” BY RHOIDS SPORTS ANALYSIS

"Game State Victories (GSV) is the number of wins a player contributes to his team by measuring the change in the probability of his team winning the game as a result of his At-Bat. It gives greater weight to hits made when the score is close late in the game than those made when the score difference is large or early in the game."

GSV may be similar to Bennett’s PGP (player game percentage) and the Mills brothers’ Player Win Average.

Results from linear regression
Dependent variable: GSV FOR 2001 (231 players with 300 or more at-bats)

Estimated coefficient values for independent variables (all were statistically significant)

1B = .066
2B = .079
3B = .120
HR = .122
BB = .055
Outs = -.021

R-SQUARED = .819   Intercept = -.79

The .819 means that 81.9% of the variation between hitters in GSV is explained by the 6 independent, nonclutch variables. So 81.9% of the weighted clutch performance is explained by nonclutch performance. At most, 18.1% could be explained by clutch ability.

TABLE 10

  

Pred = the GSVpredicted by the regression equation:

-0.79+ 0.066*1B + 0.079*2B + 0.12*3B + 0.122*HR + 0.055*BB – 0.021*Outs

Outs are At-bats – Hits. Diff = the difference between actual GSV and predicted GSV

Tom Ruane On "When Winning Streaks Collide"

Fun stuff. Click here to go to it. The Yankees and Nationals both have 6 game streaks and they are about to play each other. Tom shows this is kind of thing is pretty rare.

Could Bob Gibson Have Been Better In 1970 Than In 1968?

To look at this I did a regression with ERA as the dependent variable and HRs, BBs, and SOs (all per 9 IP) as the independent variables. The data includes all pitchers from 1960-1974 who qualified fore the ERA title. Here is the equation:

ERA = 2.16 + 1.42*HR + .296*BB - .134*SO

Once I found the ERA predicted by this equation for each pitcher (Pred in the table below), I divided it by the league ERA in the relevant year. That number is called Ratio. The lowest ratio belongs to Gibson in 1970 with .59. Notice that he had more strikeouts per 9 IP in 1970 than in 1968. The walks were a good bit higher but HRs were pretty close. And the league ERA was much higher in 1970 (4.05 vs. 2.98).

My crude Fielding Independent ERA for Gibson in 1968 is 2.10. But for 1970 it is only a little higher at 2.40.

Did Bobby Abreu Have Good Numbers In The Clutch?

He was booed last night in Philadelphia. See Why Phils fans shouldn't boo Abreu by LESLIE GUDEL of csnphilly.com. One commenter said "Good numbers, but never in the clutch." Let's look at those numbers even though clutch hitting is no big deal. To see Abreu's career clutch numbers, go to this Baseball Reference page: Career Batting Splits.




He has a higher AVG with RISP and runners on than with no runners on. A higher SLG with runners on than with no runners on. No his AVG in Late & Close situations is lower than overall, but that is true for baseball in general. See my article Did The Increased Use Of Relief Pitching Cause A Decline In Clutch Hitting? Usually, AVG falls by even more than what we see for Abreu (it is actually bigger than the .009 we see since my table does not show his non-Late & Close AVG). Abreu hit .295 in non-Late & Close situations. But hs .011 drop is still not quite as big as normal. And his OBP goes up. Getting on base in Late & Close situations is pretty important.

If you want to be technical, we can take IBBs out of the mix. Then his OBP falls from .395 in non-Late & Close situations (using just AB, H, BB, HBP) to .394 in Late & Close situations. Just staying at the same level is good. It usually falls. See General Clutch Data. Now that only covers 1991-2000, but I think it would be similar over Abreu's career. And just think, the other teams thought he was good enough to intentionally walk alot in Late & Close situations. 3.6% of his Late & Close PAs were IBBs. It was only 1.1% overall. So his IBB rate more than tripled in Late & Close situations. Last year in MLB, it was about 2.34 times higher.

Now someone at that site says you need to look at key games and that he did not come through often enough (no specifics are mentioned, though). But if you look at his splits, you can see his career OPS in Sept/Oct is .895, higher than his overall .877. Seems like he hit well in that month, which is most likely to have key games. Also, his career AVG in post-season games is .284, pretty good considering that you are facing better pitching than normal in cool weather. And I think those are key games.

Now the same guy is saying he batted only .243 in Sept of 2005 when they just missed the playoffs. But he still had a .388 OBP. Besides, one month is hardly enough to say he was not good in the clutch. He also batted .320 in August that year, which probably had some key games. This guy also fails to mention that when Abreu hit .294 in Sept of 2001, the Phillies only finished 2 games behind the Braves. A close race and Abreu hit well.

That 23 Year Old Phenom Pitcher Whose Last Name Starts With S Leads His League In ERA

Yes, Chris Sale of the White Sox leads the AL in ERA (with 2.30). Strasburg is 4th in the NL with 2.35. The table below has some statistical comparisons. FIP ERA and xFIP ERA are from Fangraphs and I have the definitions below. ERA+ is from Baseball Reference.




Strasburg, using Baseball Reference splits, has struck out 27.7% of the non-pitchers he has faced this year. Sale has 26.3%. Very close.

The league average FIP's and xFIPs are not the same in each league. For Sale, his FIP and xFIP as a % of the league average are .624 and .753. Strasburg has .608 and .654. So they are very close, at least in FIP ERA.

I am not sure if Fangraphs takes park effects into account on FIP and xFIP, but the pitching park factors from Baseball Reference for Sale from 2010-2012 are 103-106-105, meaning it scores 3-5% more than average and Strasburg has 99-100-100, meaning it is just about average. So Sale's park hurts him a little more than Strasburg's.

Sale has a big lead in ERA+ which is ERA adjusted for the league averae and park effects at Baseball Reference. It could be due to Sale's lower BABIP. If he had Strasburg's .305, it looks like it would add 9 hits and that, on average, would be about 4.5 runs. That would give Sale an ERA of 2.90 and I think his ERA+ then would be about 150. Then Strasburg would have a big edge.

FIP: Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) measures what a player’s ERA should have looked like over a given time period, assuming that performance on balls in play and timing were league average.

xFIP: Expected Fielding Independent Pitching (xFIP) is a regressed version of FIP, developed by Dave Studeman from The Hardball Times. It’s calculated in the same way as FIP, except it replaces a pitcher’s home run total with an estimate of how many home runs they should have allowed. This estimate is calculated by taking the league-average home run to fly ball rate (~9-10% depending on the year) and multiplying it by a pitcher’s fly ball rate.

White Sox Score 52 Runs In Last 5 Games, A Major League High This Year

And they won all five games, too. The next highest 5 game total this year is 48, by the Rangers. If anyone knows the all-time record, let me know. The 1950 Red Sox scored 82 runs in a five game stretch (17-12-4-20-29). How did the 4 get in there?

Here the White Sox last five games:

6-0
11-8
9-3
14-7
12-6

Konerko leads MLB in AVG with .399. He also leads the AL in OBP with .476 and is 2nd to Hamilton (.753) in SLG with .681. Konerko leads Hamilton in OPS+ 211-204. Konerko's best year ever in OPS+ was 160 in 2010 and the next highest was 142 ion 2011. So this year is a big jump up for him.

Pete Palmer Has A New Book

Well,  maybe not real new since it came out last September. Tom Tango mentioned this at his blog. It is called Basic Ball: New Approaches for Determining the Greatest Baseball, Football, and Basketball Players of All-Time. Here is the Amazon description:

"Basic Ball is a three-for-one deal. Fans who enjoy the three American Sports - football, baseball and basketball - will love Basic Ball. Pete Palmer, inventor of the on-base percentage stat and winner of the 2010 Ralph Hay Award from the Professional Football Research Association, has combined with Dave Heeren, creator of the TENDEX formula for basketball to give the reader the most effective statistical methods for rating players and teams in these three sports. They introduce new theories and formulas to analyze the players at the basic level. Each sport is covered in a full section and more than a hundred pages of databases that give statistical ratings for baseball's greatest hitters and pitchers; the best NFL players of All-time; and every active and retired NBA and ABA basketball player."

Palmer was doing some pretty advanced linear weights analysis back in the 60s. See Pete Palmer’s All-Time All-Star Team, 1969.

Tim Lincecum vs. Albert Pujols

Which number do you think is lower: Lincecum's ERA+ or Pujols' OPS+? Lincecum has 57 and Pujols has 68 (100 is average in each case and so this means each guy is performing well below average). Who would have thought this at the beginning of the year? Lincecum might be a victim of bad luck. Here are some key stats each year of his career:

He is doing well in strikeouts and HR prevention. But his hits and walks are high and some of the bad luck might just be the high average on batting average on balls in play, which pitchers don't have as much control over. But he just happens to be pitching poorly with runners in scoring position and with with runners on. That is not true for his whole career. The next table shows this:

This year he has done well with no runners on but in other cases not so well. He has no problem like this over his career and so I think his ERA+ should rise over the season.

Pujols has a career OPS+ of 168 and last year it was 148. So the 68 so far in 2012 is pretty shocking with more than 25% of the games played. He only has a .224 BABIP while his overall AVG is .213. For his career, those numbers are .309 and .325. So it does not look like any bad luck on balls in play.

His line drive % is 20% while for his career it is 21%. So nothing major there. But hit HR/FB rate is 5.3% while it is 15.3% for his career. This year 18% of his flyballs have been in the infield while his career rate is 11%. Maybe he is popping up alot. His GB/FB rate is .70, same as it is for his whole career.

If his HR% this year was the same as it was last year (6.4%), he would have 11 HRs and his AVG would be .253 (assuming it was 7 FB outs turned into HRs). So maybe he is not hitting the ball far enough. If he wants to bat .299 this year (as he did in 2011), he needs to bat .337 the rest of the way (assuming he gets 579 ABs).

Last year his April & May OPS+'s were 112 & 113. This year they have been 61 & 70. To reach an OPS+ of 148 this year (what he had in 2011), he needs an OPS+ of 181 the rest of the way. Last year, his post May OPS+ was 172.

This year his SO/AB rate is .129, just a little higher than his career rate of .112. But his BB/AB rate is only .045 while it is .113 for his careeer (in both cases, intentional walks were taken out). So he is not walking alot and maybe he is swinging at too many pitches.

In his last 9 games or 36 ABs, he has 10 hits, good for a .278 AVG. But if he does that the rest of the way, he ends up hitting just .258. He does have 1 2B and 3 HRs in the last 9 games. So his SLG over this stretch is .556. If he did that the rest of the way he still finishes with just a .487 for all of 2012.

How Is That 23 Year Old Phenom Pitcher Doing? You Know, The One Whose Last Name Starts With S?

Oh, you mean Chris Sale of the White Sox. Pretty well. His career stats are in the table below.

Now his being a reliever in 2010-11 helps, since relievers usually have better stats than starters. From 2007-11, relievers had, on average, an ERA that was .037 lower than starters. Sale, a lefty, also has faced left handed batters about 40% of the time. So that helps him. But he is certainly doing well this year as a starter. In 32 IP, he has an ERA of 2.81, with 24 hits allowed and 8 walks, 29 strikeouts and just 2 HRs allowed. If Strasburg had Sale's career stats or stats this year, I doubt anyone would think he was not living up to his potential.

Pujols Has His Worst Month Ever In OPS+, By Far

The table below shows his OPS+ for every month of his career. 100 is average and it adjusts for the league average in each month and park effects. Now this April was his worst calender month. It is possible that he had a worse 23 game stretch sometime in his career (he played 23 games in April). But when you look at each individual month, it is hard to see when that would have happened because he would have had to offset an OPS+ of 63 with an extremely high one in the other games.

He could have had an OPS+ of 63 over 23 games in June 2006 and then 177 over the other 7 (no problem for Pujols). That would get us 90. So for Pujols to have had an OPS+ of 63 over some other 23 game stretch is possible. But it seems unlikely if you look at his next worst month, the 110 in July 2001. If he had an OPS+ of 61 in 23 games that month the other 7 would need to be 263.

And I know, I recenlty posted Should The Angels Be Worried About Pujols? (and I basically said no). But his OPS was .668 then (4-18). Now it is .570. His AVG-OBP-SLG are .217-.265-.304. The league averages are .252-.318-.408. He did recover after a slow start last year in the first two months. But at least those were above average. The table shows all months with OPS+ < 120 in red. He has struck out once every 6.57 ABs this year. Last year it was 9.98 and for his career it is 8.91.

How Long Can The White Sox Stay With Gordon Beckham?

His AVG is .180, his OBP is .255 and his SLG is .240. He was not the starting 2B man today but he is in now as a pinch runner who just got thrown out at home on a double. The table below shows his hitting since 2009

Now he did actually have positive WAR last year with 1.2. But this year he has negative fielding value from Baseball Projections and Baseball Information Systems. The next table shows his OPS+ for each month of his career

Now a graph of those numbers. He is definitely trending downward.

What If Ted Williams Came Back To Life?

There is a new book out called Extra Innings by Bruce E. Spitzer. Here is the Amazon description:

"In the year 2092, Ted Williams, the greatest baseball hitter of all time, is brought back to life through the science of cryonics. Once again playing for the Red Sox, Williams finds himself trapped in a world he hardly recognizes: the corruption of the game he loves with über-juiced batters and robot pitchers; difficult love affairs clashing with his old desires; and a military conflict of the future in which he must harness the fighter pilot skills he used in his first life. Dr. Elizabeth Miles is the cryonicist who brings him back to life, initiating a dramatic sequence of medical achievements. She and her young son Johnnie are a constant reminder of what Williams lacked in his first trip around the bases, never devoting much time to love and family. But old habits die hard. With enemies and allies both on the field and off, Williams must make sense of it all and play on against a machine that he detests, pressure to take the “giddyup” he abhors, unrelenting media mania, and a dystopian world he can’t ignore. The narrative resonates with the consequences of the major issues we face in our world today—the steroids debate in sports, global warming, corporate greed, technology run rampant, and the moral ambiguity of war. Extra Innings is alternately poignant and humorous, heartbreaking and joyous. Thought-provoking throughout, it’s a rollicking ride that looks at second chances and redemption, the ability to triumph over adversity, and the search for meaning in this life and the next. Flawed in his first life, Williams must decide in the second what’s more important, the chance to win his first World Series, or the chance to be a better man? The Greatest Comeback of All Time is More Than Just a Game."

It's Easy To Be Humber When You're Perfect

Phil Humber of the White Sox just pitched a perfect game against the Mariners. Click here to go to the box score  

Click here to read the story

Click here for a longer story

How Well Might Pujols Perform After Age 35?

I did something similar in December called How Well Might Pujols Hit After Age 35? It seemed like the odds were against him doing well after 35. Here what I did was to find the top 27 players in WAR under age 32 and then see how much WAR they got over age 35.

In the table below they are sorted from highest to lowest in over 35 WAR. I don't have numbers for AROD or Pujols over 35 yet. So for the other 25, they averaged 13.4 WAR over age 35. As you can see, though, there is quite a distribution and Bonds must affect the average quite a bit (it is 11.67 without him).

Should The Angels Be Worried About Pujols?

Tim Brown of Yahoo Sports has a column titled Angels, Pujols slump through April waiting game. Excerpt:

"Eleven games into life as an Angel, Pujols has not hit a home run and the Angels have not put together so much as back-to-back wins.

That's not necessarily a problem yet, but the certain plan was to hit the twice-defending AL champion Rangers in the mouth before the nights turned warm. Instead, the Angels are rooting around for something like consistency and, this morning, sucking their breakfasts through straws."

The main Yahoo baseball had the blurb "Big-budget-flop" over a picture of Pujols looking downcast, perhaps after making an out. It also says: "In a region that runs on buzz, the Angels have been alarmingly ordinary. This isn't what owner Arte Moreno paid for" and "Brown: It's not just Pujols."

The table below shows the OPS that Pujols has had after 11 games in all of his season along with his full-season OPS. This is his 2nd worst start after 11 games. But last year was worse and he recovered to finish above .900. So he could still turn things around.

Who Was The Least Likely Triple Crown Winner?

This is related to my most recent post from Friday

I came up with a point system for this. A player would get 10 points for each time he led his league in HRs, 9 for a 2nd place, etc. The same was done for AVG and RBIs. So the player had a career total number of points for each stat (data from the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia). A tie for 1st was still worth 10 points. Then those three numbers were multiplied times each other (meaning if a player never finished in the top 10 in one of these stats, his total will be zero). So the idea was that players that finished among the league leaders often are the ones most likely to win the triple crown.

The table below shows the point total for all the winners, from lowest to highest. I used the list from The Baseball Almanac.

Baseball Reference includes Paul Hines (1878, 36,613 points) and Tip O'Neill (1887, 50,525 points) but not Duffy. They have Sam Thompson leading the NL with 147 RBIs in 1894 and Duffy with 145. Click here to see the leaders. Hines' point total includes one year of 6th in average in the National Association, the precursor of the NL. O'Neill played most of his career in the American Association and all of his points are from that league.

So, depending on who you want to count, it is Duffy, Hines or O'Neill. Yaz is definitely the one from the live ball era (If I use the data from Baseball Reference for Duffy, his point total would be 50,456, including data from the American Association-Click here to see his page)

I did not take age into account. The oldest was Gehrig, but 31 is not that old and he is 4th all-time in this point total (see Friday's post). Cobb was just 22, but he is 5th all-time. I also did not try to figure out how far from the leader these guys were when they finished in the top 10. That could matter but I would have to come up with a way to evaluate it.

Babe Ruth was by far the most likely to win who did not. In fact, his point total is way ahead of everyone else (Ted Williams might have surpassed him without military service). How could Ruth have not won it, even once? He led the league in HRs 12 times and RBIs 6. He did win one batting title. His 81 points from AVG is the 13th highest of all-time.

In his era, not surprisingly, he ranked very high in AVG. Here are the top 4 in AVG in the AL from 1918-1931 (covering all the years he led the league in HRs) for AL players with 2500+ PAs (data from the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia):

1 Al Simmons .363
2 Ty Cobb .362
3 Harry Heilmann .356
4 Babe Ruth .352

Ruth's highest average was .393 in 1923. Heilmann beat him in AVG by 10 points. Ruth lost the batting title to Heinie Manush in 1926 by just 6 points (.378-.372), a year he led in both HRs and RBIs. Ruth won the HR crown that year 47-19 over Simmons and beat George Burns 146-114 in RBIs. According to Retrosheet, Ruth was at .371 after 9-21 while Manush was at .370. It is not clear that Ruth would have known this. The NY Times does not show Ruth in the lead in the 9-22 edition. I can't find any day he was listed as the leader in Sept using Proquest.

Manush went 9 for 14 in his last 3 games after 9-21. Ruth went 5 for 12 in his last 4 games after 9-21.

In 1924, Ruth won the batting title over Charlie Jamieson, .378-.359. He led in HRs 46-27 over Joe Hauser. Goose Goslin beat him in RBIs 129-121 (the Retrosheet splits page had Goslin at 130). At the end of August, Goslin led 108-107 (but it would have been a tie if we go with the 129 figure). Ruth had only 2 RBIs in his last 13 games after 9-13. Goslin had 16 RBIs after 9-13 in his last 14 games.

Ruth was walked 12 times in his last 13 games. But that was not unusual for him. He batted 3rd the whole season (except for 1 AB). The 1st two guys in the order had OBPs of .350 and .341. Goslin batted 4th 93% of the time. The 1st 3 guys had OBPs of .357, .364 and .386. Goslin did bat 3rd the rest of the time so some of that .386 is from him. But Sam Rice batted 3rd in 318 ABs with and OBP of .399 and Bucky Harris batted 3rd in 190 ABs and had a .352 OBP. So it looks like Goslin had more RBI opportunities. It would be great to know Ruth's and Goslin's stats with runners on and in scoring position.

In 1923 Ruth led in HRs 41-29 over Ken Williams. He beat Speaker 131-130 in RBIs. As late as 9-3, Ruth led Heilman .393-.390. On the 20th, Ruth only trailed .387-.386.

Baseball's Elite, Its Millionaires

So what is a baseball "millionaire?" (warning to the hard core-this is probably an example of what Bill James called a "junk stat," perhaps less valuable than a junk bond).

This came about while I was working on a post about who might have been the most surprising triple crown winner (I hope to post that in a day or two). I came up with a point system for this. A player would get 10 points for each time he led his league in HRs, 9 for a 2nd place, etc. The same was done for AVG and RBIs. So the player had a career total number of points for each stat (data from the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia). A tie for 1st was still worth 10 points. Then those three numbers were multiplied times each other (meaning if a player never finished in the top 10 in one of these stats, his total will be zero).

There are only 4 millionaires. Ruth is the leader. He had 81 AVG points, 160 HR points (all-time leader) and 123 RBI points. Then 81*160*123 = 1,594,080. The top 25 are in the table below.

Finally! A Completely Scientific, Objective All-Time All-Star Team

This took years of work and I incorporated the best analysis from all the top sabermetricians. This team will end all the debates and gives everyone a chance to work on other topics. As usual, I could not have done this without the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia.

1B-Cy Barger
2B-Cy Rheam
SS-Cy Wright
3B-Cy Block
LF-Cy Neighbors
CF-Cy Seymour
RF-Cy Williams
C-Cy Perkins

SP-Cy Young
RP-Cy Acosta

Power Hitting 2B Men Over Time

This issue came up recently on the email list of the Hornsby chapter of SABR. Someone said that the power hitting 2B man was not necessarily a recent phenomenon.

I covered something similar in a post from 2009 called Positional Hitting Over Time. I looked at how each position did in SLG relative to the league average. Here is what I said about 2B men:

"2B men started declining in the AL in the 1940s, then starting rising again in the 1960s. But even now they have not reached their earlier peak. They started declining in the 1920s in the NL but then started back up in the late 1950s."

Below are the top 25 2B men with 5000+ PAs in SLG relative to the league average. The top 4 played along time ago and it looks like 6 of the top 10 played before 1940 or mostly before 1930. The numbers are rate, the player's SLG and the league SLG. For Hornsby, we have .577/.392 = 1.47 and multiplied by 100 we get 147. The table after that uses ISO. Data from the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia.

It looks like many of the power hitting 2B men played a long time ago.

Do Batters Learn During Their Career?

This is a guest post by Tom Ruane. It is from some SABR list posts in 1999. I was reminded of them by a recent post at "The Book" blog by mgl called What effect does batter/pitcher familiarity have on performance?

Tom Ruane posted three separate items and I combined them all into one site which you can read at Do Batters Learn During Their Career? The basic question is how batters do against pitchers the more they face them.

Below is an excerpt from the first post Tom did in 1999 and then a list of some issues he dealt with in the next two posts.

"Back in 1996, Dave Smith, the president and founder of Retrosheet, did a study showing that batters tended to improve against a pitcher as a game went on. His paper was entitled "Do Batters Learn During a Game?" and, rather than attempt to summarize his methods and findings, I recommend that you read his work for yourself. A copy of the paper can be found at:

http://www.retrosheet.org/Research/SmithD/batlearn.pdf

This got me to wondering if a batter showed a similar increase in performance as his career progressed. Was a batter or a pitcher at a disadvantage the first time they ever faced each other? How did their performance change as they got more familiar? In order to attempt to answer these questions, I looked at all batter-pitcher matchups from 1980 to 1998. I only considered matchups where the batter and pitcher faced each other at least 20 times over the course of their careers and examined how they did in each of their first 20 confrontations. (Note: since my data started in mid-career for all players active prior to 1980, I did not include any match-ups where both pitcher and batter were active in the 1970s.)

[Editor's note: Tom has a very detailed table here so click on the link I provided to see it]

So Batters seem to be at a noticeable disadvantage when facing an unfamiliar pitcher. The field seems to level off after the third time they see each other, but the batter still seems to get slightly better the more he sees a pitcher. Here's the breakdown in groups of five plate appearances:

PAs OPS
1- 5 .727
6-10 .742
11-15 .744
16-20 .758

Five of the top six slugging percentages and four of the top five on-base percentages occurred in PAs 16 through 20."

Now some issues that Tom addressed in the second two posts:

Someone wondered if requiring twenty or more plate appearances was biasing the sample by eliminating the batters who fail to learn (and so leave the big leagues before facing any one pitcher enough to meet my criteria).

Someone else argued that what we're really seeing here are within-game effects, that the first appearance is earlier in a game than the second, which is probably earlier in a game than the third.

Someone else wondered if the later plate appearances came in higher run scoring years.

There was also some question at the time about how much of this effect was really due to batter learning during a game.

Does Consistent Play Help a Team Win?

That is the title of a recent post at Fangraphs by Bill Petti. He looked at the volatility of runs scored per game and runs allowed per game for teams. Click here to read it.

I am not totally clear on his technique, but here is one of his conclusions:

"Overall, RS_Vol [game to game runs scored volatility] had a negative relationship to team wins. So the more consistent a team’s run scoring, game to game, the higher their win total. The relationship was the same for RA_Vol [game to game runs allowed volatility], just much stronger."

I did a study a couple of years ago. It is below. I agree that "RS_Vol had a negative relationship to team wins" but disagree that and got the opposite result for runs allowed. I also found that just runs scored per game and runs allowed per game mattered alot more than consistency.

I took both consistency and runs per game (both scored and allowed) into account. He only took volatility (or consistency) into account. I also found that adding in variables for consistency did not improve the accuracy of the model very much.

So here is my study from April 2010

It seems to matter, but maybe much less than simply scoring and preventing runs.

I looked at two periods, 1963-68 and 1996-2000. In each case, I first ran a regression with team winning percentage as the dependent variable and runs per game and opponents' runs per game as the independent variables. Then I added two variables in a second regression which measured consistency. HITCON was the standard deviation (SD) of runs per game divided by runs per game (just the SD would not be right since high scoring teams will have a greater SD). PITCON does something similar on the pitching side.

For 1963-68 (120 teams), the first regression equation was

PCT = .528 + .108*R - .115*OR

Again, R & OR are per game. The r-squared was .903, meaning that the equation explains 90.3% of the variation in the dependent variable. The standard error was .023. For a 162 games, that works out to about 3.73 wins. Now the 2nd regression with the consistency variables added in.

PCT = .493 + .098*R - .103*OR - .084*HITCON + .117*PITCON

The r-squared did rise, but only slightly, to .912 while the standard error fell to 3.59 wins per season. The coefficinet values on the consistency variables seem to make sense. The more consistent hitting teams win more for a given average runs per game while the less consistent pitching teams win more. That may seem strange, but if you allowed 4 runs per game on average you would win at least 81 games if you gave up 0 runs half the time and 8 the other half. You would win some of those 8 runs games, so you would have a winning record. If it were a league that had an average of 4 runs per game, you would win more than expected.

On the surface, it might look like the consistency variables are pretty important. But the coefficient values are only about as high as they are for R & OR because the consistency variables are alot lower. For example, average runs per game was 3.86 while the HITCON average was.73. So the coefficient values have to be relatively high on the consistency variables.

The R & OR variables were more significant, with higher t-values. Here they are for all four:

R: 16
OR: -17.96
HITCON: -2.2
PITCON: 2.99

I also found the number of exta wins that would be generated by a one standard deviation improvement in each variable. That means scoring more runs, giving up fewer runs, scoring more consistently and giving up runs less consistently (because the coefficient on that PITCON was positive).

R: 7.68
OR: 8.12
HITCON: 1.05
PITCON: 1.34

So a one SD improvement in run scoring consistency (HITCON) adds 1.05 wins. That is a lot less that the 7.68 for simply scoring. We could say something similar on the pitching side. So it looks like a team should be more interested in just trying to score runs than being more consistent. Less consistency on the pitching side is desirable, but not nearly as much as simply preventing runs.

For the 1996-2000 period (146 teams), the first regression was

PCT = .500 + .0944*R - .0945*OR

The r-squared was .894 and the standard error worked out to 3.63 wins per season. The second regression was

PCT = .441 + .085*R - .082*OR - .139*HITCON + .202*PITCON

The r-squared was .915 and the standard error worked out to 3.28 wins per season. The results are similar to those of the 1963-68 period. Adding the consistency variables does improve the accuracy of the model, but only slightly. The signs on the coefficients are the same.

The t-values were

R: 22.5
OR: -21.3
HITCON: -3.3
PITCON: 5.3

The number of exta wins that would be generated by a one standard deviation improvement in each variable were:

R: 7.34
OR: 7.4
HITCON: 1.02
PITCON: 1.81

These numbers a very close to the numbers for the 1963-68 period. So again, it looks like it is much more important to score and prevent runs than become more consistent (or less, on the pitching side). This is true for a low scoring era, 1963-68, when the average runs per game was 3.86 as well as for the latter period when it was 4.97.

Sources: Retrosheet, Baseball Reference, Sean Lahman Baseball Archive

Players With Three Or More Consecutive Seasons With 7+ WAR

One idea I have about the Hall of Fame is that worthy players should have at least some significant peak value. Maybe something like 3 straight MVP caliber years. Baseball Reference suggests that a WAR of 8 or higher is an MVP type season. So I lowered it just a bit to 7. This would actually make for a very restrictive Hall. I found only 36 players in this group. They are listed below.

The co-leaders are Henry Louis Aaron and Henry Louis Gehrig. Their two streaks were exactly 30 years apart. Gehrig's was 1926-37 and Aaron's was 1956-67. Some great players did not make it, including Frank Robinson and George Brett (who are definitely Hall of Famers, probably in anyone's book). Ron Santo had 4 straight years, 1964-67. Jackie Robinson had 5 straight from 1949-53. That is incredible. Andruw Jones and Jim Edmonds are two of the more interesting surprises.

Who Had The Flukiest Seasons? (Part 2)

Part 1 was actually Which Players Had The Most Uncharacteristically Good Seasons? What I did there was to find all the players who had 10+ seasons of 400+ PAs and then see who had the biggest difference between their average (offensive winning percentage) OWP and their highest. Here I simply looked at their best OWP vs. their 2nd best. Jeter actually had .715 in 2006. That would drop him down to about 87th place out of about 500 guys. So there could be some other big ones since then but I will need to look into that. I also looked at this including everyone with 3+ seasons of 400+ PAs. I will post that if I get a chance or you can email me about it.

Who Had A Season With WAR ≥ 10 But Is Not In The Hall Of Fame?

The table below shows all the position players who had at least one season of WAR 10 or higher (from Baseball Reference).


Of all the players who are eligible, the only one not in the Hall is Norm Cash. Now it might seem like his 1961 season when he batted .361, hit 41 HRs, drew 132 walks had a .487 OBP and a .662 SLG was the flukiest season ever. He never batted .300 again (his last year was 1974) nor did he ever reach 40 HRs or 100 RBIs. He never reached a .400 OBP again or a .600 SLG (he only reached .500 3 more times-he was pretty much a full-time player until 1973).

But his 1961 season was not the flukiest. I have written about this before. See Which Players Had The Most Uncharacteristically Good Seasons? Cash had the 25th flukiest season.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the voting for some of these other guys. Bonds, Giambi, Sosa and AROD might be penalized by some voters for using PEDs. Pujols should get in easily. It is probably too early to tell for Kemp. But Beltre is interesting. His yearly performance has been inconsistent. But he now has 47.6 WAR and he will be 33 starting next year. He is 189th in career WAR among position players but if he could get up to about 62, he would be in the top 100. His last two years were 6.1 and 5.2, so another 14.4 seems possible. Being in the top 100 would make him a legitimate candidate.

Now a WAR of 10 gives an edge to guys who played after 1961, when the season went to 162 games (in the AL, 1962 in the NL). So I looked for guys who had 9.5 or more before then (covering about the 5% difference in games from a 154 game season). There were a total of 82 seasons of WAR ≥ 10 and another 21 ≥ 9.5 before the 162 game season came in. Of the guys in that group who are not in the Hall of Fame we have George Stone (9.8, 1906), Joe Jackson (9.5, 1912), and Al Rosen (9.7, 1953, the year he missed the triple crown by losing the batting title to Mickey Vernon, .337-.336).

Click here to see George Stone's stats at Baseball Reference. He did not have a long career, ending at 33 with 3600 PAs. His next highest WAR was 5.2. Click here to read his SABR bio by John McMurray. This passage discusses his decline:

"After his great initial success, Stone held out for $5,000 to start the 1907 campaign. In order to make sure that team owner Robert Hedges met his demands, Stone did not report to the team until right before the start of the season. The holdout, as one publication put it, "seems to have been the turning point of his career." On one level, "the papers aired the case and naturally by some Stone was censured for what was termed unreasonable demands." Moreover, "when he was finally granted the amount he asked, the fans figured that a player getting such big money should never fail to deliver the goods. Any time Stone failed, and unfortunately for him he had a rather tough year in 1908, he was roasted to a turn by the fans. Stone began to show signs of slowing up that year."

Stone's statistics fell off in both 1907 and 1908, though he was still an outstanding hitter. One account indicates that he contracted malaria in 1908, and Stone's production plummeted in 1909 when he suffered an injury to his ankle. That injury cost Stone his speed, which had enabled him to beat out many infield hits. He also had problems with his arm, and "any time a ball was hit into his territory the opposing base runners advanced almost at will. The worry over all these things caused Stone's batting to suffer and as a result the sensation of the American League of 1906 was a near joke in 1910." Stone never hit higher than .300 after 1907, and his average fell to .256 in 1910, his last season in the major leagues. Stone returned to the Milwaukee Brewers in 1911, batting .282, but injuries led him to retire from professional baseball just 12 games into the 1912 campaign."

Why Didn't The Writers Vote Johnny Mize Into The Hall Of Fame?

He got in, via the Veterans Committee, in 1981. So it might seem a little late and silly to complain about it.

But he never he even got 50% of the vote from the writers (he topped out at 43.6% of the vote in 1971 and he got 41.3% in 1973, his last year of eligibility). If we went strictly by WAR, it seems like he should definitely be in. Even now, about 50 years from when he first became eligible, he is 55th in career WAR among position players with 70.2. He had 8 top 5 finishes and one first place. He was in the top 5 each year from 1937-40.

So he had very high career value and peak value. In Win Shares, he also had 8 top 5 finishes among position players, including 3 first places finishes. He was 104th through 2001 in career Win Shares (338) including pitchers. He also missed 3 seasons due to WW II. Bill James ranked him as the 6th best 1B man in the 2nd Historical Abstract.

We certainly cannot fault the writers in the 1960s and 1970s for not being up on sabermetrics. He did seem to have very good conventional stats, though. He hit 359 HRs and easily would have made 400 if not for the war (he was 10th in career HRs through 1960, his first year of eligibility). He had a .312 career average. He lead the NL in HRs 4 times, RBIs 3 times and AVG once. He was selected to 10 all-star teams. The writers seemed to like him when he played. He had 4 top 5 finishes in the MVP voting and even now he is 57th in MVP shares with 2.46 (of course, there was not much MVP voting before 1931, but that is still a pretty good rank). If a guy was the 57th best player since 1931, that would be a good case for being in.

So why didn't the writers vote him in, never reaching 50% of the vote? His bio at SABR by Jerry Grillo has one interesting quote: "Broeg and others have indicated that Mize’s defensive liabilities probably cost him..." Yet his career defensive WAR is a positive 2.6. He also finished in the top 3 in fielding Win Shares 7 times among NL 1B men (and 1st in 1948). Bill James gave him a B as a fielder. The SABR bio mentions that he got his nickname "The Big Cat" due to his fielding, scooping out bad throws.

The Baseball Reference Bullpen article on Mize says this:

"For a player with such notable sabermetric statistics, he was also quite late in being inducted into the Hall of Fame, finally being chosen by the Veteran's Committee 28 years after his retirement, in 1981. There are at least two possible explanations for this. One, during his playing years, he apparently did not enjoy particularly good relations with the baseball sportswriters, from whose ranks are chosen those members who vote on candidates for the Hall of Fame. Two, his power, his fine batting average, and his extremely good On-Base Percentage were not as evident to his contemporaries, who were more impressed by Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Stan Musial, as they are today in the light of sabermetric analysis.

Another couple reasons are quite powerful, too. First, his lifetime stats are not very impressive compared to most Hall of Famers - he barely had 2,000 hits, he had 359 home runs (currently # 65 on the all-time list as of 2006, one below Gary Gaetti), and he had 1,337 RBI (currently # 76 on the all-time list as of 2006, four below Gary Gaetti). Second, he played in his early years in a ballpark that favored hitters. So he was a top-notch player, but one that didn't put up numbers as large as most Hall of Famers. Since he missed three years to World War II, the Hall of Fame rightfully adjusted for the numbers."

I don't know anything about his relationship with the writers. But as I mentioned earlier, he did well in the MVP voting (a point Bill James has made about Ted Williams).

On the park effects, those are taken into account in WAR and Win Shares. Now it is possible that park effects are not always fair to individual hitters. It was only 250 feet down the line in the Polo Grounds. Yet the park factors for the Giants in the years Mize was on them are pretty neutral. Click here to see them at Baseball Reference. So maybe his hitting stats don't get adjusted downwards as much as they should.

Here are his AVG/OBP/SLG/OPS both home and road:

Home: .320/.406/.598/1.004
Road: .305/.389/.527/.916

So a big split, but not that bad. His road stats are very good. Again, the writers might not have had access to this, but it seems like there should have been a general sense that he hit well everywhere, given that these guys watched him play all the time.

In fact, if we only used his road OPS, it would be the 37th highest of all-time through 2009 (relative to the league average) of players with 5000+ PAs (using the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia). His road OPS was about 25% higher than the league average. He is 9th among 1B men (guys who played at least 50% of their games there). One of the guys ahead of him is Todd Helton, who benefited even more from his home park.

In his first year of eligibility, 1960, he got only 16.7% of the vote. Click here to see the voting that year at Baseball Reference. Twelve guys got more votes than he did that year and he had more WAR than all of them. He beat 8 of them buy 20 or more WAR. Edd Roush, Sam Rice and Eppa Rixy all got over 50% of the vote that year, a level Mize never achieved. None of them had even 52 WAR (Mize had 70.2). All but one of the 12 got in before Mize (except Lazzeri). Most were by the Veterans Committee. So they too, did not give Mize the credit he deserved.

I think the writers, and to a lesser extent the Veterans Committee, did a poor job in evaluating Mize. I hope the writers have been, and are getting, better. But when I see the voting for guys like Raines and Bagwell, not to mention Lou Whitaker being gone after just one year on the ballot, I am not sure.

More discussion at Baseball Think Factory