When I first became a baseball fan people would still talk about Zeke Bonura. I became a baseball fan in 1960, Zeke had been out of the majors for 20 years at that time, meaning that he was within the active memory of the game. The managers remembered him, the older sportswriters remembered him, even the older players remembered him at least as somebody who was active when they were kids, much as today people would remember Alvin Davis or Andy Van Slyke or Carmelo Martinez or Willie Aikens. Zeke was a bit of a character, and, more to the point, a bit of a spectacle on the field. He was very strong and a lifetime .307 hitter, but he was notoriously slow and, at least as the old-timers remembered it, a fantastically inept fielder, like Willie Aikens or Dick Stuart. The statistics don’t really show him to be an inept fielder, but I am drifting off the point.
The point is, I was looking at his record, and I was wondering what his record would look like if there were more of it. Zeke—his actual name was Henry John Bonura; he was given the nickname “Zeke” after John McGraw saw him play for the first time and marvelled “What a physique!”. Seriously. Anyway, what-a-phy-Zeke was in the majors for only seven seasons, but he was a regular for all seven sevens, and he drove in 704 runs. He is unique, Zeke. I would suppose that he must be the only hitter in major league history who had a career that short, but averaged more than 100 RBI per season. It makes one wonder what the rest of his career would look like if there had been more.
So I started thinking about that, and I got to thinking, “Well, OK, let’s find all the other seasons which are within the parameters of Zeke Bonura’s performance standards.”
First of all, I’m going to set Bonura’s 1940 season aside as being non-representative of his real abilities. He hit just .270 that year, 7 homers, 65 RBI. . ..hitting like that, he couldn’t stay in the majors, and didn’t. Borrowing terminology from the people who work to preserve historic neighborhoods, baseball seasons could be sorted into “defining”, “contributing” and “non-contributing” seasons. . .more on that some other time. We’re going to set Bonura’s 1940 season aside as non-contributing, and define Bonura’s career by the other six seasons.
Bonura never played less than 116 games in a season or more than 148, so we’ll define Bonura’s “game range” as 116 to 148 games. These are the parameters of a Zeke Bonura season:
116 to 148 games played
447 to 587 at bats
72 to 120 runs scored
146 to 194 hits
27 to 41 doubles
2 to 7 triples
11 to 27 home runs
85 to 138 RBI
44 to 94 walks
22 to 31 strikeouts
0 to 5 stolen bases
Batting Average .289 to .345
On Base .364 to .426
Slugging Percentage .472 to .573
Through 2006 there have been 72,905 hitter/seasons in baseball history. Take a guess at how many of those 72,905 seasons fit within all of those parameters. Ready?
Seven. These seven seasons, and only these seven seasons, fit within all of the parameters of a Zeke Bonura season:
Zeke Bonura, 1934
Zeke Bonura, 1935
Zeke Bonura, 1936
Zeke Bonura, 1937
Zeke Bonura, 1938
Zeke Bonura, 1939
Sid Gordon, 1950
Isn’t that something? There is only one season in baseball history—Sid Gordon, 1950--that could be a Zeke Bonura season, but wasn’t. Gordon’s season is “faux Zeke Bonura”—fake Zeke Bonura. But it is the only such season in baseball history.
This really rung my chimes, when I first discovered it, because I just wasn’t expecting it. I would have guessed there might be a hundred other seasons in major league history which were just like Zeke Bonura seasons, although they didn’t happen to be—100, maybe 200, maybe 300. If you’d told me you had researched it and there were a thousand other seasons that could be Zeke Bonura seasons, I wouldn’t have argued with you.
Think for a moment about what this means. Zeke Bonura’s skill set, like his fingerprints or his DNA, is (almost) entirely unique to Zeke Bonura. What a fantastically cool concept. If he commits a murder, does he leave an .867 OPS at the scene of the crime?
This accidental discovery, that nobody is truly like Zeke Bonura except Zeke Bonura himself, set up a series of other thoughts/experiments/concepts. These are outlined in the other articles in this series. . . .Faux Tony Oliva, Faux Musial, etc. The next article in this sequence is “Faux Tony Oliva”.
Bill James
Ft. Myers, Florida |