I am sort of hung up on Norm Cash, in large part because I became a baseball fan in 1961.   Norm Cash in 1961, in his first season as a regular, hit .361 with 41 homers, 132 RBI, and 124 walks.   His OPS was 1.148.    His 1961 season quite literally can be inserted into the middle of Babe Ruth’s career, and not a single number looks out of place except games played.

            It later developed that this was perhaps the greatest fluke season of all time.   It is reported in many places that Cash later confessed to having used a cork bat in 1961, but this is not true; he did not say that, and he did not use a corked bat in 1961.   It was just a fluke.   Every soft liner fell in; every ball that could have gone out, went out.

            There used to be a screen in right field in Tiger Stadium; you had to hit the ball over the screen to get a home run.   In 1962 they took down the screen, figuring that this would add to Cash’s home run total.   Cash fell into the habit of trying to pull everything, and his average fell 118 points to .243.

            Cash was never a .361 hitter, of course, but after 1962 major league baseball entered a pitcher’s era.   The strike zone was re-defined after the 1962 season due to a sentiment on the part of the commissioner and some other old farts that baseball had too many cheap home runs.    They thought that by adjusting the strike zone a little bit they could control this.  This pitched baseball into a six-year run-scoring drought in which the league batting averages dropped to around .240.

            What should have been Cash’s best years were in that run-scoring drought, plus, after the 1962 debacle, the Tigers started platooning Cash.   From 1963 to the end of his career he was platooned every year except 1966.   This kept his numbers down below where they should have been.   In 1965, for example, Norm Cash had a very good .883 OPS.   He had only 467 at bats, however, which kept him below 100 RBI, and makes his numbers look less impressive than they really are.   Compare Cash’s statistics to other players with the same OPS, but a hundred more plate appearances:

            That’s Tony Perez, 1969, Ken Singleton, 1980, and Jim Ray Hart, 1967.    Cash’s numbers look less impressive because he didn’t get enough at bats to get to 100 RBI or 37 homers, even though he had a higher home run rate than Perez.  

            Also, in an odd way, Cash’s 1961 season makes the rest of his career look bad.   With the number of hits and RBI he had, Cash could have hit .300 and driven in 100 runs two to five times.   Instead, he hit way over .300 and drove in way over 100 runs once.   It would look better if it was the other way.

            Cash was kind of a fun player; he had a sense of humor, and he had some attitude.  One time, facing Nolan Ryan on a night when Ryan was striking out everybody, he came to the plate waving a table leg.   Another time, when it was raining hard enough that he felt the game should have been delayed, he came to the plate with an umbrella over his shoulder; he was thrown out for that one.   Once, trapped in a rundown, he stopped in his tracks and signaled for a timeout.   In Jim Bouton’s book, Ball Four, he quotes Cash as saying that his manager, Mayo Smith, had to be the stupidest bleeping manager in baseball, which caused a bit of a stir at the time, and we recently ran a tracer about a story in which Cash and Denny McLain were engaging in an in-game skirmish to see which would win a couple hundred dollars as the star of the game.

            Cash wasn’t on his high school baseball team, because he grew up on a farm, and his father made him come home after school and drive the tractor.   He was just an interesting player, something always going on with him, and I always liked him.  Because I always liked him, I always thought it was stupid for the Tigers to platoon him, about which I may not have been entirely correct.  When Retrosheet got the data together it turned out that Cash had a career batting average of .227, OPS of .691, against left-handed pitching, so there may have been good reason to platoon him after all.

            Anyway, I got to thinking, what would Norm Cash’s records look like if he had the same totals, but with 550-600 at bats in a season—a normal number for a regular.   Note what I am NOT doing here:

            a)  I am not giving him anything back for the fact that he played in the great run desert of the 1960s, and

            b)  I am not giving him any more at bats or any more plate appearances than he actually had.

            I am merely re-stating his actual record so that it looks different.  Using Retrosheet, I created a game log for Cash’s career.  I divided his games into two groups

            a)  2 or less plate appearances in a game, and

            b)  3 or more plate appearances in a game.

            The “a” group I split randomly into two groups, giving us three “phases” to Cash’s career—a pinch hitter phase, a “regular” phase, and another “pinch hitter” phase.   This, in effect, gives Cash eleven years as a regular, even though it does not increase his at bats or plate appearances.  

            Within each group, I put the games in order by a random number, modified just a little bit so that stolen bases and triples would tend to migrate to early in the career, and strikeouts and walks would tend to migrate to late in the career, thus making the numbers resemble more closely an actual career.   I also pushed GIDP to late in his career, although since I then cut the GIDP data out of the presentation form, I don’t know what the point of that was.   Anyway, I then set up “yearly game totals” for Cash, and produced “alternate careers” for Norm Cash, giving him the same totals that he actually had, but more years as a regular.   This is Cash’s actual career record:

            And here are a few alternative versions of what his career record might look like, re-cast to get rid of the fluke year and the platooning:

            After his major league career Cash played professional slow-pitch softball for a couple of years.   He drowned in a boating accident at age 51. . .slipped on the boat, hit his head and fell into the water.

            Oh.. .the corked bat.   What Cash actually said is that he corked his bat in 1971-72.   If you go back to Cash’s actual record up top, you’ll notice that he hit .259 with 15 homers, 53 RBI in 1970, .283 with 32 and 91 in 1971.   Billy Martin was his manager in ’71.  Martin had a friend who could make corked bats, and quite a few of Martin’s power hitters had big years under his guidance.   Late in his life Cash confessed that he had used a corked bat in ’71 and ’72.   A lot of people only knew two things about Cash—

            1)  That he had the fluke year in 1961, and

            2)  That he confessed to using a cork bat,

            So people understandably conflated these two, and began to write that Cash was using a corked bat in 1961.   But it doesn’t make any sense when you think about it, because if he was using a queer bat in 1961 and he got by with it, why would he have stopped using it in 1962?