Other Teams, Other Notes

I.  The Whiz Kids

I remember a discussion I had with Chris Ketzel about 30 years ago.   We were talking about the Phillies of 1950, a very young team that won the National League.   They were called the Whiz Kids.

“I wonder why they never won again?”  I asked.

“I’m amazed they ever won once,” Ketzel replied.

We went back and forth for some time, I arguing that the team should have contended throughout the 1950s, Chris arguing that they were basically a fluke.   “Two Hall of Famers,” I would argue, “Roberts and Ashburn.”  (Actually this was years before Ashburn was elected to the Hall of Fame, but don’t stop me; I’m on a roll.)   “Del Ennis was one of the top power hitters in the National League.   Curt Simmons was outstanding.  Andy Seminick was good, and Willie Jones and Granny Hamner were solid players.   That’s a lot of talent.”

“Not compared to Brooklyn or New York,” Chris would reply.   

With this method I finally have a clearer take on that issue.   Ketzel was more right than I was.   The 1950 Phillies were not a truly weak champion like the 1961 Reds.

I score the roster of the 1950 Phillies at 199 points, as opposed to 194 for the 1968 Tigers, 176 for the 1967 Red Sox, and 166 for the 1961 Reds.     But the Dodgers score at 226 in 1950, and were over 200 every year in that era—as were the other teams that won National League championships, and some teams that didn’t win National League championships. 

            The Phillies, at 199 points in 1950, increased that total to 225 in 1952 and 219 in 1953, as their key players moved into their prime.    But also, the answer to my question of 30 years ago—why did they never win again?—became extremely apparent as I did this study.

            Every team loses players almost every year.   Certainly over a period of two or three years, parts wear out and you have to replace them.    The replacement parts selected by the Phillies, in the years after 1950, were just ridiculously weak.  The second baseman on the 1950 team, Mike Goliat, hit .234.    They probably should have just left him alone, but .234 hitters tend to get replaced, so in 1951 they replaced him—with Eddie Pellagrini, a 33-year-old who had been exiled to the minors after a four-year career as a bench player with the Red Sox and St. Louis Browns, never hitting higher than .238.   Pellagrini scores at “5”.  In 1952 they replaced Pellagrini with Connie Ryan, another 32-year-old veteran who had never been very good; he scores at 11, which is better, but not good.   After Ryan failed they moved their shortstop, Granny Hamner, over to second—but replaced him at shortstop with Ted Kazanski, a 19-year-old bonus baby.   Kazanski scores at “2”. 

            In the outfield the Phillies replaced Dick Sisler with Johnny Wyrostek, another player who was 32 years old and in all candor had never been very good.    In 1950 the Phillies got a decent third starter performance from one of the Bob Millers.   In 1951 Miller’s ERA went up to 6.88, but the Phillies replaced him with Jocko Thompson, a 34-year-old pitcher who had made only 7 starts in his career before 1951.   Thompson scores at “1”.   Thompson was predictably terrible, but in 1952 the Phillies replaced him with Karl Drews, a 32-year-old who had been sent back to the minors after going 4-12 with the St. Louis Browns in 1949.    Drews had a decent year—as good a year as you can possibly expect from a 30+ veteran rescued from the bus leagues—but he scores at “6”.     

            The Phillies were trying to keep up with the Dodgers and Giants while plastering in their lineup with players who cannot possibly have been expected to thrive.   It’s a puzzle.   What in the world were they thinking?  Was their farm system that weak, that they had no better options available than this long run of tired veterans?

            But if that’s it, then what had happened to the farm system?  This was a farm system, after all, that from 1945 to 1949 had produced Richie Ashburn, Del Ennis, Andy Seminick, Robin Roberts, Willie Jones, Granny Hamner and Curt Simmons.   All of a sudden in 1951 they can’t produce anything?   That hardly seems possible.

            What seems more likely, to me, is that after the championship in 1950, the Phillies got their head screwed on backwards.   “We have the players we need to win the championship,” they must have been thinking.   “We just need to finish the team off with players who can do their part.   Solid veterans who won’t embarrass us.”   But you can’t stand still in sports; either you get better or you go backward.   And putting Johnny Wyrostek and Jocko Thompson and Karl Drews and Connie Ryan in the lineup sure as hell wasn’t making the team any better. 

II.  The Miracle Mets

            Conspicuously absent from our list of over-achieving teams was the 1969 Mets.  Certainly there is no question that the ’69 Mets over-achieved, but by how much?   My system’s view of it is that they over-achieved by about 13 games, making them the 34^th top over-achieving team among the 250 studied.   They won 100 games; they should have won about 87—and some of that is probably natural over-achievement.

            Natural over-achievement due to expansion, which put a couple of weak teams into the league, but also, 1969 was a funny moment in baseball due to World War II.    There was a generation of mega-stars born in the early 1930s, 1931-1935; this included Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Eddie Mathews, Roberto Clemente, Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Al Kaline, Frank Robinson and many others (although obviously not many others of that caliber.)     Maury Wills and Roger Maris; Jim Bunning and Ken Boyer.  

            By 1969 these players were old and some of them were retired, but the generation of superstars from the baby boom had not yet arrived.   Peak age is 27; a 27-year-old in 1969 would have been born in 1942, and there weren’t that many families producing babies in 1942, or 1943, or 1944.    1969 is a sort of watershed where one generation was gone, but the next had not arrived.   Overstating the case.

            Anyway, let’s compare the ’69 Mets to the ’68 Tigers, who won 103 games and the 1968 World Championship, and also to the Whiz Kids.  Drawing up this chart makes me realize that there are more questionable evaluations among the Mets than any other team I have seen:

Catcher:

            Detroit              Bill Freehan                  24        Star

            New York        Jerry Grote                   20        Star --

            Philadelphia      Andy Seminick             18        Solid +

First Base:

Detroit              Norm Cash                  19        Solid +

New York        Ed Kranepool               18        Solid +

Philadelpia        Eddie Waitkus              12        Solid --

Second Base:

            Detroit              Dick McAuliffe             19        Solid +

            New York        Ken Boswell                   9        Weak +

            Philadelphia      Mike Goliat                    2        Weak –

Third Base:

            Philadelphia      Willie Jones                  16        Solid

            Detroit             Don Wert                     12        Solid --

            New York        Wayne Garrett                7        Weak +

Shortstop:

            New York        Bud Harrelson              15        Solid

            Philadelphia      Granny Hamner            14        Solid

            Detroit              Ray Oyler                       6        Weak

Left Field:

            Detroit              Willie Horton                20        Star –

            New York        Cleon Jones                  13        Solid

            Philadelphia      Dick Sisler                      8        Weak +

Center Field:

            Philadelphia      Richie Ashburn             29        Star +

            Detroit              Mickey Stanley             15        Solid

            New York        Tommie Agee               11        Solid --

Right Field:

            Philadelphia      Del Ennis                      19        Solid +

            Detroit              Jim Northrup                15        Solid

            New York        Ron Swoboda                9        Weak +

#1 Starter

            New York        Tom Seaver                  35        Superstar

            Philadelphia      Robin Roberts              33        Superstar

            Detroit              Mickey Lolich              25        Star

#2 Starter:

            New York        Jerry Koosman             23        Star

            Detroit              Denny McLain              18        Solid +

            Philadelphia      Curt Simmons               16        Solid

#3 Starter

            Detroit              Earl Wilson                   12        Solid –

            New York        Don Cardwell               12        Solid --

            Philadelphia      Russ Meyer                  11        Solid –

#4 Starter        

            Philadelphia      Bob Miller                      6        Weak

            Detroit              Joe Sparma                    5        Weak

            New York        Gary Gentry                   4        Weak

Closer

            New York        Tug McGraw                24        Star

            Philadelphia      Jim Konstanty               15        Solid

            Detroit              Daryl Patterson             4          Weak

            If I were allowing myself to make subjective adjustments to the values I would take five points away from Jerry Grote (reducing him from 20 to 15) and Ed Kranepool (reducing him from 18 to 13) and give them to Cleon Jones (increasing him from 13 to 18) and Tommie Agee (increasing him from 11 to 16); otherwise the evaluations all appear to be in line.   But moving points from Grote and Kranepool to Cleon and Agee would not change the team totals, which are:

            New York        200

            Philadelphia      199

            Detroit              194

            The overall strength of the three teams is essentially the same.   The Tigers won 103 games and make our list of the top over-achieving teams; the Mets won 100 games and miss the list.

            There is a line of argument that would go “This system understates expectations for Detroit because it understates the value of Denny McLain.    McLain and Seaver were the same age, both born in 1944.   If you look at them through the end of the 1969 season, McLain is not only the equal of Tom Seaver, he’s far better than Seaver.   Through 1969 Seaver was 57-32, had won 20 games once and had won one Cy Young Award.   McLain was 114-57—twice as many wins, with a better winning percentage—had won 20 games three times including 30 games once, and had won two Cy Young Awards.   The system distorts the relative values of Seaver and McLain by looking at what happened to them later on.”

            But Denny McLain was not the equal of Tom Seaver and Robin Roberts.   Seaver and Roberts are two of the classiest men in the Hall of Fame; Denny McLain was, at base, a criminal.   It is not a distortion to take this into account; it is essential information that was not available in 1969.    We have the advantage now of being able to look at rosters of these teams and see the full picture.   It would be a mistake not to do that.  

            Here’s something else about the team that I had never noticed.  The 1971 New York Mets actually under-performed by more than the 1969 Mets over-performed.   The ’71 Mets, on paper, are substantially better than the 1969 team, due primarily to the additions of Ken Singleton in right field and Nolan Ryan in the rotation.   The ’71 Mets, on paper, should have won about 100 games.  

            But both Singleton and Ryan under-performed, leading to two consequences:

            1)  The Mets won only 83 games, and

            2)  The team gave up on both Ryan and Singleton, and let them get away.

            Which let the Pirates and then the Phillies take command of the division. 

III.   Whitey’s Royals

            From 1976 to 1980 the Kansas City Royals ruled the American League West, and the Yankees the East.   There were only two divisions in each league then.    The Royals and Yankees met in the American League playoffs in 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1980, and the Yankees won the first three of those matches.

            The press may have a certain East Coast bias, and most of the nation accepted as proven that the Yankees were a better team than the Royals—not only the Yankees, actually, but commonly we heard that the Red Sox and Orioles were better than the Royals, too, although not quite up to beating the Yankees.   As a Royals fan I never accepted this.   Winning three post-season series out of four, I would point out, was hardly convincing evidence of the Yankees’ superiority.   The Royals generally beat all of those teams in the regular season.   (The Royals were 7-5 vs. the Yankees in 1976, 5-5 in 1977, 6-5 in 1978, 8-4 in 1980.)   And, I would argue, they had a better roster.  

            The Royals had an outstanding roster, with George Brett, Frank White, Hal McRae, Amos Otis, Dennis Leonard and Dan Quisenberry, but was it in fact better than the Yankees?   

            It was not.   The Royals roster scores at 206 in 1976, 227 in 1977, 222 in 1978, 230 in 1979, and 227 in 1980.   That’s a strong team, comparable to the Dodgers of the 1950s—but the Yankees’ rosters in the same years score at 240, 263, 251, 287 and 230.   The Yankees “win” every year, by amounts varying from 3 to 57, and averaging 32 points per season.  

            I don’t like it.   I’d prefer to go on believing that the Royals were the better team.   But I’ve never had a method to study this question before, and this is what the method suggests. 

IV. The Early Padres

            The Royals and Padres were expansion classmates, both born in 1969.   I decided to look at the Padres every year from 1969 to 1984, and this turned out to be one of the most instructive projects to come out of this study.

            Obviously the Royals were dramatically more successful in their first 15 years than the Padres were, but you know what I hadn’t realized?   The Royals farm system, in its history, has produced one Hall of Famer, George Brett.  In their first fourteen years of operation, the Padre farm system produced three Hall of Famers—Dave Winfield (1973), Ozzie Smith (1978) and Tony Gwynn (1982).   That’s a fairly remarkable accomplishment, isn’t it?    What team do you root for?   Has their farm system ever produced three Hall of Famers in a ten-year period?

            In addition to the home-grown talent, the Padres in their early years were also able to attract or acquire several other Hall of Fame players—Willie McCovey (1974-76), Gaylord Perry (1978-79) and Rollie Fingers (1977-1980).    Beyond those they had several other very good players—and yet the general history of the Padres in these years is one of frustration.   How did that happen?

            Phenomenal short-sightedness.   You have to back away from the team, look at the big picture of the roster over a period of years, to really understand just how far this organization had their head up their ass.   Compare Frank White, the Royals near-Hall of Fame second baseman, to Derrel Thomas.   The players are the same age, both are essentially second basemen, both ran very well, and both started out about the same place as hitters.   Both men were extremely good athletes, and both (to the best of my knowledge) are fine gentlemen. . ..certainly Frank White is, and I always had a positive impression of Thomas. 

            Although White is actually four months older, Thomas reached the majors almost two years earlier, in late 1971.  In 1972 Thomas, 21 years old, played regularly and hit .230 with a .290 on base percentage, .310 slugging.   These numbers are very similar to what Frank White hit in his first year as a regular, four years later--.229, .263 on base percentage, .307 slugging.

            However, when Frank White did that for the Royals in 1976, the Royals said “that guy’s pretty good in the field; maybe we can build on that.”    When Thomas did that in 1972, the Padres said “that’s guy’s pretty good at second base; maybe he can play shortstop.”   They moved him to shortstop, realized that he couldn’t play shortstop, moved him back to the second base—and then traded him to San Francisco for an older second baseman, Tito Fuentes. 

            Fuentes gave the Padres two pretty good years at second base, but then left as a free agent.   The Padres needed a second baseman, and Derrel Thomas had blossomed in San Francisco, hitting .276 in 1975 with 28 stolen bases and a strikeout/walk ratio better than even.  The Padres then made a trade with San Francisco to get Derrel Thomas back.      

            To get back from San Francisco the player they had turned away three years earlier, the Padres gave up Mike Ivie.   Ivie was 24 years old his last year with the Padres, hitting .272 with 66 RBI.    His second year with San Francisco he hit .286 with 27 homers, 89 RBI.   Ivie was a frustrating player, a player with a world of talent who just never performed the way you wanted him to, but anyway, the Padres sent him to San Francisco to get Derrel Thomas back.   Thomas had an OK year, but then he, too, left as a free agent.

            Which shouldn’t have been any problem, because the Padres now had two good young shortstops.    In 1977 the Padres had one of the best young shortstops in baseball, in Bill Almon.   In 1978 they came up with a better young shortstop, in Ozzie.   This is Baseball 101:  when you have two young shortstops and a void at second base, what do you do?

            No.

            They asked Almon to play third base, which was an obvious problem because Almon had neither the power nor the arm of a third baseman.   And, when that failed, they moved Almon to the utility infield job, and gave second base to a veteran utility infielder named Fernando Gonzales, previously the property of the Pirates, Royals, Yankees and Pirates again.

            Looking at it in the big picture, it almost seems as if the Padres wanted both Thomas and Bill Almon to fail.   Both had long knockaround careers.   I would argue that either man, given a sustained opportunity at second base, could have had a career not that different from Frank White’s.    I would argue that Thomas, properly respected, could have and should have been better than White.

            The Padres, in their first fifteen years, did things like this all the time.  When they came up with a young pitcher who looked good, like Clay Kirby or Steve Arlin or Randy Jones, they would work him hard for two or three years, at which point he would suddenly become useless.  

            This is the position-by-position chart for the Padres during their first five years:

            By the end of 1973 the Padres had made basically no progress.  That “18” at relief ace in 1973 represents Mike Caldwell, a 24-year-old who would go on to have a good career.  The Padres, typically, had been unable to decide whether he was a starter or reliever.  In 1972 he had made 20 starts, 22 relief appearances, and in 1973 13 starts, 42 relief appearances.   That winter they traded Caldwell to San Francisco for a 35-year-old ex-MVP, Willie McCovey.  In 1974 the team was better on paper:

            The team was better on paper in 1974 because of the addition of two Hall of Famers—Winfield, and McCovey.   Neither player played like a Hall of Famer that year, however—McCovey drove in 63 runs and Winfield 75—and the team in reality was no better, repeating the 60-102 record of the year before.   In 1975 they added three more veterans to the lineup—Fuentes, Doug Rader, and Willie Davis.   Rader had been the Astros regular third baseman for years and had been very good, but was 31 years old and had slipped badly, while Willie Davis was a very good player who had been annoying the hell out of his managers and teammates since 1960:

            They were “building” the team with veteran players, fading stars in their 30s.   Yes, they were getting better on paper, but the real progress was nearly invisible.   This phase of Padre history lasted three years, 1974-1976:

            By 1977 the free agent era had begun, and the Padres were one of baseball’s first free-spending teams.   San Diego is a nice place to live, and the owner of the Padres, Ray Kroc, had more or less invented fast food.   With the combination of McDonald’s money and California sunshine, the Padres did great at attracting free agents.   From 1977 to 1980, the Padres on paper got consistently and dramatically better:

            The 1980 Padres had a Hall of Fame shortstop (Ozzie), a Hall of Fame right fielder (Winfield), and a Hall of Fame relief ace (Rollie Fingers).    They were solid—that is, they had players who decent careers—at almost every other position.  On paper, that was a very impressive team.

            The problem was, they didn’t perform.   The 1979 and 1980 Padres, who finished 68-93 and 73-89, were among the most under-achieving teams that I have found record of. 

            I will give you two interpretations of this era in Padres’ history:

            1)  It turns out that veteran players who want to enjoy the sunshine and get paid well are not great investments, or

            2)  This team is similar to the 1961 Minnesota Twins.   The ’61 Twins, on paper, were an outstanding team, although they lost 91 games.  But you can kind of understand why:  they had been losing for years (in Washington), and they just hadn’t realized yet how good they really were.   They began to figure it out the next year.  

            By now—2009—it is universally understood that the return-to-investment ratio on top-dollar free agents in their early 30s is generally poor.   Your goal with a baseball team is to build the best team you can, not to spend the least amount of money you can spend, so sometimes you have to go after those costly guys to provide something that the organization needs.  But the idea of building an entire team around free agents has been pretty thoroughly discredited.   The Padres of the 1970s were one of the teams that discredited it. 

            Signing too many free agents—like shuffling around Derrel Thomas and Billy Almon, like trying to get too many innings out of Clay Kirby and Randy Jones—is a short-sighted policy.  In the winter of 1980 Dave Winfield left as a free agent, Rollie Fingers and Ozzie Smith were traded to St. Louis in separate trades, and the Padres went back to the drawing board:

            The 1981 Padres took an immense step backward, almost back to where they had been ten years earlier.   (The 1981 strike has nothing to do with this reduction.  Since the system ignores the season’s stats, the norms for 1981 are essentially the same as for any other season.) 

            In 1982, however, the Padres actually did something smart:  they hired a Hall of Fame manager.    They began to re-build the team under Dick Williams’ leadership:

            On the 1984 team the catcher was Terry Kennedy.   He didn’t play defense, and Dick Williams couldn’t stand him, but he could hit.   The first baseman was Steve Garvey; I didn’t like him, and Williams didn’t like him, but he was a Solid + player.  The shortstop was Garry Templeton, acquired in trade for Ozzie Smith, and yes, it was a bad trade, but Templeton was still a good player (and Williams loved him.)   This team out-performed expectations in 1982 and 1983, finishing .500 both years with a weak roster, and became a championship team in 1984, when the Padres added a Hall of Fame right fielder, Tony Gwynn, and a Hall of Fame closer, Goose Gossage.

            The 1980 Padres lost 89 games, the 1984 Padres went to the World Series—but on paper, the 1980 team was better than the 1984 team:

            The 1980 Padres were better on paper because Dave Cash had a better career than Alan Wiggins, Ozzie Smith was better than Templeton, and Graig Nettles in 1984 was 40 years old by the end of the season.   But the 1980 team under-achieved by a whopping 27 games, whereas the 1984 team over-achieved by about one.

V.  The Wallbangers

            The Milwaukee Brewers were expansion classmates with the Royals and Padres.   I checked out the 1982 Brewers because I thought that, with Ted Simmons, Paul Molitor, Robin Yount, Rollie Fingers, Ben Oglivie and Cecil Cooper, they might register as a historic team.

            They don’t.   The starting pitching wasn’t good enough.    It’s a good team, 262 points.  But it’s not a historic roster.  

VI.  Joe McCarthy’s Red Sox

            The 1948-1950 Red Sox were like Harvey’s Wallbangers, but not nearly as good.   Like the Brewers in 1982, the Red Sox could score runs in bunches, and you can look at them and say, “Wow; that’s a great team.”  

            They’re not.  They didn’t have the pitching to be a great team, to begin with, and also, they never quite finished the lineup.   The only legitimate stars on that team were Williams and Bobby Doerr.   Pesky and Dom DiMaggio and Vern Stephens. . .those guys were good players, but so were Red Kress, Sammy West and Harlond Clift, from the Browns of the 1930s.   They didn’t have enough to beat the Yankees, and certainly not enough to be considered a truly outstanding roster.

            The best Red Sox team that I have found so far was the 1975 Red Sox.  The ’75 Red Sox are truly an impressive team—maybe not a great team, because they won only one division title and no World Series, but an extremely impressive collection of talent. 

VII. The Browns

            Another team that is very interesting over a period of years is the St. Louis Browns from 1930 to 1940.   I realized, doing this study, that I had never really understood this team, and I thought perhaps I should share my impressions with you.  

            At the start of the decade the Browns should have been a .500 team.   Look at the 1930 team—Hall of Famers Goose Goslin and Rick Ferrell, quality players in first baseman Lu Blue, second baseman Oscar Melillo and shortstop Red Kress, and the starting pitching is decent—Lefty Stewart, George Blaeholder, Sam Gray and Dick Coffman.  

            The Browns went 64-90 in 1930, 63-91 in 1931, and 63-91 in 1932—but they should have been basically a .500 team all three years.    I don’t know what it was, but something was terribly wrong in that clubhouse.

            The Browns blew up the team and started over.   Again, I was misinterpreting this team because I was looking at them as a “defeated organization” as early as 1930.   They weren’t.   They were a decent team on paper that was consistently under-performing—and, reaching the end of their patience, they made a sincere and determined effort to get better.    They traded Kress for a pretty good pitcher (Bump Hadley) and a good young outfielder (Bruce Campbell).    In 1934 they brought in Rollie Hemsley, a quality catcher, Harlond Clift, a power-hitting third baseman, and Roy Pepper, an outfielder who drove in 101 runs in his first year in the lineup—yet they continued to lose.

            When those moves failed, they brought in two more young sluggers—Beau Bell, and Moose Solters.    In 1936 Bell had 212 hits and drove in 123 runs, averaging .344; Solters drove in 134 runs.   The Browns continued to lose.

            Although the hitting numbers were good, the team was getting worse during most of the 1930s.  There were three problems:

            1)  they lacked operating capital,

            2)  they were slow getting into the farm system business,

            3)  their talent, although it was not horrible, was too thin.

            By 1935 the A’s, Tigers, Yankees, Indians, Red Sox, and White Sox all had some sort of farm system running.   As more teams developed farm systems, less talent was left free-floating through the other minor leagues.   The Browns and Senators continued to try to compete by purchasing players after they had worked their way up the ladder—the way the system had been set up to work 20 years earlier.    They came up with talent, yes, but never quite enough talent to make it work.

            History was running against them, and then, finally, they did quit.   By 1937 it was an organization that had realized that, try as they might, they simply could not keep up with the top-end teams, and then by the end of the decade they were just going through the motions, a defeated organization putting out what should have been a 60-94 team, and seeing them lose 105 or 110 games every year.

VIII.   The 1959 Dodgers

            The 1959 Dodgers won only 88 games, but won the World Series.   I have often described them—and other people have described them—as one of the weakest World Championship teams ever.

            They may be better than I thought they were.   The Dodgers managed the very odd feat of winning a World Series with a team that was right in the middle of a re-building cycle.   The stars of the 1950s—Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Furillo, Carl Erskine—were gone or were going.  The stars of the 1960s—Maury Wills, Sandy Koufax, Tommy and Willie Davis—either had not arrived or were not yet mature players.   Only four or five players on the team were in their prime.

            Based on that, I have always thought of this as a weak team—but if everybody on this team had had their best year, they would have won 151 games.    There’s actually a tremendous amount of talent on the team, but most of it is discounted because it is off-prime.   What I now realize is that, even off-prime, these guys are pretty good.

IX. Billy Martin’s A’s

            As I neared finishing this project I was discussing it over dinner with Tom Tippett.   Tom suggested as an under-achieving team the 1980-1981 Oakland A’s, so I decided to run the numbers; this brings the number of teams studied to 252.  The issue suggested had to do with the role of outfield defense in over-achieving teams; the 1980-81 A’s had three center fielders (Rickey Henderson, Dwayne Murphy and Tony Armas.) 

            The 1980-81 A’s did in fact over-achieve, by my method, by about 12 games in 1980 and about 14 in the strike-shortened 1981 season.   It is a large but not quite historic over-achievement, and might be considered a historic over-achievement if you look at the two-year total.  

            It may be that all of Billy Martin’s teams over-achieved, in Martin’s first season with the team, by a margin similar to this.   It might also be that most of them under-achieved, two years later, by a similar margin.     

X.  The Three Rooms Analogy

            Perhaps it would be helpful to think of the questions we are discussing here as being on the second level of a three-tiered building.   In the first set of rooms are the questions that we are fully prepared to analyze—how good a player was Rickey Henderson, how good a team was the 1980 Oakland A’s, who belongs in the Hall of Fame, etc.   There are a very large number of questions in the bottom room.

            In the room on the second level there are a series of questions that we have never discussed, as an analytical community, because we have never had access to that room.   What was the most talented roster ever?   How strong was the roster of the 1963 Detroit Tigers?   By how much did the 1963 Tigers under-achieve?   What was the most talented Tigers team of all time?

            I don’t read everything published in the sabermetric community, and forgive me if I’m slighting someone, but I don’t believe that we’ve ever discussed these issues before, because we have never had any method to gain access to those questions.   My purpose in writing these articles was to construct a scaffolding that we could climb on to gain access to these questions.  I am trying to begin the process of finding objective answers to those questions.  Beyond that room there is another room full of questions, questions to which we cannot yet get any access.  We will be able to get some access to the questions in the third room once we have agreed (to some reasonable extent) upon the answers to the questions in the second room.

            In constructing our scaffolding we have represented Mickey Mantle as being of the same size as Luis Aparicio, which of course is not exactly drawn to scale, and of course there are people who get hung up on that issue.   We have a few people on the site who want to stand on the ground floor and shout, “LUIS APARICIO WAS NOT AS GOOD AS MICKEY MANTLE.”

            Well, yes, of course he was not.    What you are missing is, we are not discussing that issue.   We are not comparing Luis Aparicio to Mickey Mantle.  We are in a different room, talking about a different subject.   You can join us or not; that’s up to you.   You can stand on the ground floor and complain about the scaffolding being rickety from now until September if that’s what you want to do.    There are always people who do that; you’ll have plenty of company.  

            At some risk of being rude. . ..well, it’s not exactly a risk of being rude.   I’m pretty sure this is rude.   My apologies.   To those of you who are hung up on the Aparicio/Mantle type of issues, let me point out what you are missing.   What you are missing is, everybody already knows that.   What you are pointing out to us is deafeningly obvious, and everybody except you has already got it.   I mean, I spent pages and pages in the opening article talking about the failings and limitations of my system, pointing out case after case in which my system failed for one reason or another.   What exactly did you think was the point of that?

            Don’t answer that.  The point of that was to get past those kind of arguments, so that we could move on to the second room, and begin to survey that set of questions.   Yes, I understand that it’s not a perfect system.   It’s a temporary scaffolding.    We have to start somewhere.

            I appreciate your patience.   This started as a small, two-day project, and has grown to consume about two months—and could easily consume another five.   I apologize for not having written more regularly during the time I have been working on this, and I promise to do better about that in the future.

Bill James

Ft. Myers, Florida

March 20, 2009