The first two things I should say here are that:

            1)  The hard part of this is drawing a line, and saying “I ain’t going to do no more”, and

            2)  That I honestly don’t know how this is going to come out.

            That seems a necessary condition of the exercise, that I should be feeling my way blindly along with the rest of you.

            There are certain players from the past who weave their way persistently into our discussions, no matter what it is that we start talking about—Don Mattingly and Dick Allen, Roger Maris and Joe Jackson, Sandy Koufax and Jim Ray Hart.    I started to do a short little project to compare one of these players to another.   Initially I was going to do five players:  Mattingly, Tony Oliva, Koufax, Rico Carty and Nomar Garciaparra.   I thought it would be interesting to compare one of those guys to another, and say, “OK, which of these guys really has the best argument to be in the Hall of Fame?”   Which has an argument that maybe he shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame, but he would be if he hadn’t gotten hurt?

            I wasn’t going to include Dick Allen, because when you include Dick Allen everything turns into a Dick Allen debate, and we’ve been down the Dick Allen Dark Alley a million times already—but then, isn’t Allen relevant here?   And isn’t Albert Belle relevant here, and isn’t Ralph Kiner, and Joe Jackson, and then isn’t Joe Gordon relevant, and Ron Guidry?   Eventually I had about 400 players who were clearly relevant to the discussion, but I don’t have the time or energy to do 400 players; that’s a book.    The hard part is knowing where to stop.

            I am being besieged on “Hey, Bill” with questions about the Hall of Fame worthiness of Koufax, Oliva, Nomah, Mattingly, etc.   I’ll get to them in this series of articles; I apologize for ignoring you all in the “Hey, Bill.”   What I’m looking at essentially is players who could have had longer careers—more games, more innings pitched—but who for one reason or another didn’t.   I’m going to start with a group of eleven players, who are George Case, Sam Chapman, Vince Coleman, Scott Fletcher, Pete Fox, Thornton Lee, Bob Locker, Steve Gromek, Bobby Higginson, Brian McRae and Danny Tartabull.    I chose these eleven players essentially because they’re not very interesting.

That’s actually hard; I was trying to find some sort of “neutral” players to use as a starting point for the discussion, and I wanted players that nobody has strong feelings about, but somebody has strong feelings about almost everybody.  Short-career players, not bench players, not Hall of Fame candidates, just. . .players.   Somebody to frame the discussion.  We’ll call this the Bobby Higginson group.   I’m going to compare and contrast the contributions of 60-some short-career players, and I’m going to start with these eleven:

11.   Bob Locker

            Bob Locker was a middle reliever with the White Sox in the 1960s and the Oakland A’s in the early 1970s.   Although he had a very, very good season with the White Sox in 1967 he was never a star, and spent most of his career as a complementary reliever, making a living on a hard sinker.

            In his best season, 1967, Locker pitched 77 games, 125 innings with 20 saves and a 2.09 ERA.   The White Sox that year had a fantastic bullpen, featuring Locker, Hoyt Wilhelm (8-3 record, 12 saves, 1.31 ERA), Don McMahon (52 games, 5-0 record, 1.67 ERA), and Wilbur Wood (51 games, 2.46 ERA).   This was ten years before relief aces became “closers”.   The White Sox—who had had a strong bullpen for several years—used their relievers more or less in rotation, although Locker did have that one year as the star of the bullpen.   We credit him with 12 Win Shares, 5 Loss Shares, a Value of 15.  Consistently effective, Locker was a spear carrier for the A’s in 1971-1972, and appeared in one World Series game in ’72.

            We credit Locker with a career won-lost contribution of 71-46, which is a very good .603 percentage, better than almost all of the other players on this list.   But we’re talking about a player whose career was quite short, and whose role on the team in most seasons was very minor.   It’s hard to rate him ahead of players who were regular outfielders for about ten years, which almost all of these other players were.

            Locker’s Team Success Percentage was .530.

10.  Brian McRae

            The Royals about 1990 had a team that included I think seven players whose fathers had played major league baseball, two of whom (McRae and Tartabull) have somehow been included in this group.   The others included Bob Boone, Mel Stottlemyre Jr., David Howard, Kurt Stillwell, and somebody whose father I have forgotten.

            Brian McRae was not much of a hitter, although he did score 111 runs for the Cubs in 1996, and hit 21 homers for the Mets in 1998.   He wasn’t a terrible hitter; we have him with a career batting won-lost contribution of 102-122, but a better defensive contribution at 32-28.  That’s a total of 134-151 (.470), a Win Shares Value of 125.   He rates as the second-best defensive outfielder (and third-best defensive player) in this group of eleven players.   His Team Success Percentage was .545—surprisingly high for a player who came up with the Royals in that era.   His best year was 1998, with the Mets, when his won-lost contribution was 19-11, a Win Shares Value of 24.

9.  George Case

            Career Won-Lost record of 138-148, best seasons 1943, with a won-lost contribution of 22-13, and 1945 (19-11).

            Case was very fast—the fastest player of the 1940s—and a perennial stolen base champion.   He had no power, had OK walk rates, and his lack of power is not a big negative in his evaluation because he played in parks where home runs were scarce.  A couple of other things he is known for:

            1)  He took color home movies of players who he played with and against in the 1940s.  His son, George Case III, put those on DVDs and has made them available to the public in various formats.

            2)  His son was also Executive Director of SABR for some time.

            Case does not rank as well as I thought that he would going into this because of his very poor defensive evaluation.    As an offensive player he actually ranks better than I thought he would, with a career won-lost record of 112-98 (.532).   But as a fielder, he comes in at 26-50, or .343.   89% of his value is his value as a hitter and baserunner.

            I would have assumed, going into this study, that Case was a good outfielder, since he was very fast, and he wasn’t a big hitter.    It doesn’t work out that way.   First, he played more in left field than in center or right, and the defensive winning percentages of left fielders are lower than those at any other position except first base and DH, since left field is not a position where teams usually put defensive stars.   Second, the teams he played for mostly were not good teams or good defensive teams.   His Team Success Percentage was .411—lower than any player on the list I gave yesterday except Indian Bob Johnson, although higher than Bobby Higginson—and this doesn’t help his defensive evaluations in the Win Shares/Loss Shares system.

            The real issue, though, is that Case’s defensive numbers just are not good—none of them.   His fielding percentages were not good.   His assists totals, other than two seasons (1941 and 1945) were not good.   Whereas all of the other outfielders from that era who will discussed in this series of articles had more assists in their career than errors, Case had more errors than assists.

            And even his range numbers, which we would expect to be good because of his speed, really are not notably good.   It adds up to a defensive won-lost record of 26-50, which makes an overall won-lost record of 138-148, which makes a Win Shares Value of 133.   We’ll revisit some of these same issues in the comment on Bobby Higginson (below).

8.  Vince Coleman

            Coleman and Case were very similar players.  Most of you probably remember Vince Coleman, but I’ll write about him a little bit as if you didn’t.   Coleman was a rookie sensation in 1985, stealing 110 bases and scoring 107 runs, helping to lead the St. Louis Cardinals into the World Series.   He was unanimously selected as the National League Rookie of the Year, one of the few unanimous picks for that award.  During the NLCS he was injured in a fluke accident when the Cardinals’ automatic tarp rolled over his leg during pre-game exercises, and he missed the World Series.

            Coleman stole over 100 bases his first three years in the majors.  We credit Coleman, as a rookie, with a won-lost contribution of 20-17, for a Win Shares Value of 22.    This was the best year that he was ever to have, although he was very close to that level in 1987 (19-15, value of 21).   He didn’t get better, and it seemed like he lost about 3% per year.    He got a reputation as a worse guy than he was.    Asked about Jackie Robinson, he told a reporter “I don’t know nothin’ about him.   Why are you asking me about Jackie Robinson?”  His point, I believe, was that asking black people to hum reverently on command about Jackie Robinson is itself racist, the sort of thing that Jackie would have told you what you could do with.   This didn’t come across.   People took offense—as they often took offense at Jackie himself.   Later, with the Mets, Coleman was one of three Mets players charged by a woman with assaulting her (although he was not charged by the court), and, in another jest, injured Dwight Gooden’s arm while swinging a golf club in the clubhouse.    Most notoriously, he tossed a fire cracker into a crowd of fans at Dodger Stadium, injuring three small children.

            As I said, I don’t really think Coleman was a bad guy, but he wasn’t a great guy, either, and he let these incidents get away from him.    We credit him with a career won-lost record of 144-166, .465 percentage, Win Share Value of 135, and that breaks down as 115-122 as a hitter, 29-44 as a fielder.   82% of his value was as a hitter and baserunner.

            Although Coleman’s teams were in the World Series in two of his first three seasons, his Team Success Percentage was just .429, as he played for five teams in his career that had extremely poor seasons.

7.  Steve Gromek

            Steve Gromek won 19 games for the Indians in 1945 (19-9) and 18 games for the Tigers in 1954 (18-16).   In no other season did he win more than 13 games, and in only one other season did he win more than 10.  He was around for a very long time, won 123 games, pitched a complete-game victory in the 1948 World Series, and was an above-average pitcher by every measure.   He is a short-career player, in a sense, because his innings were limited for almost every season of his career by nagging arm injuries.

            We have Gromek with:

·        A career won-lost contribution of 140-120, a .538 percentage,

·        A 122-106 contribution as a pitcher,

·        17-14 as a hitter,

·        A Team Success Percentage of a very good .586.

His won-lost contributions for his three best years are 16-8 (1944), 20-9 (1945), and 22-10 (1954).  That’s Win Share Value of 21, 25, and 27, respectively. 

6.  Sam Chapman

            Sam Chapman was the center fielder for the Philadelphia A’s from 1938 to 1950, the same era as George Case.

            Chapman was a kind of golden boy, a handsome, dignified, well-spoken man who had been an All-American football player at the University of California before signing with the A’s.   In 1938 he led his team to victory in the Rose Bowl—the last time California won the Rose Bowl—and to the National Championship, and he is a member of the college football Hall of Fame.    He was drafted by the NFL, but the NFL was small potatoes at that time, and Chapman chose instead to sign with the Athletics.   He went directly to the majors and held his own, hitting 17 homers and driving in 63 runs for the A’s after graduating from college that May.

            Chapman had his first really good season in 1941, hitting .322 with 25 homers, 106 RBI.   He was 25 years old.    The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor a few weeks after the season ended, however, and Chapman went immediately to volunteer for service in the Navy.   He was a pilot and flight instructor throughout the war, missing what would almost certainly have been the best seasons of his career.   After the war he was a regular for five more seasons.

            Chapman, like Case, does not rank as well in this study as I would have expected him to.   His batting averages and on base percentages were below league norms for his era, and well below league norms for outfielders of his era.   He had power, but not tremendous power.   He played for bad teams (Team Success Percentage of .453) in hitter’s parks.  We have him with a won-lost contribution of 110-107 as a hitter, and just 28-46 as a fielder. 

            These numbers would rank Chapman just a hair behind George Case and a little further behind Steve Gromek, but that’s an irrational conclusion.   Chapman and Case were contemporaries in the same league, competing head to head.   Case’s “advantage” is a won-lost contribution of 69-53 in the years 1942 to 1945, when Chapman was sitting on the shelf.   Set aside Case’s performance in the years when Chapman was in the Navy, and Chapman would be far ahead.   Gromek, as well, had two of his three best seasons during World War II.

            But Chapman, like Case, does not score nearly as well, as a defensive player, as I expected him to.    Chapman led the American League in putouts four times.   This is certainly an indicator of a good defensive outfielder—but it is not the only thing that we look at.   He was the regular center fielder on teams that had very low strikeout totals and relatively high outfield putout totals.   They (the teams) had very poor Defensive Efficiency Records, indicating balls that were dropping without being caught.    My analysis of his defensive value—contrary to my own expectations—does not show him to be a valuable defensive player, but shows instead that 85% of his value is in his hitting.

            We have Chapman with won-lost contributions of 20-10 in 1941, and 20-15 in 1948, but overall 138-152.    These numbers are worse than either Vince Coleman or George Case.   He no doubt lost several other 20-win seasons to World War II.   We can take some notice of this and make some adjustment for it in his evaluation, but we can’t invent performance that didn’t happen.

5.   Scott Fletcher

            Drafted four times before he finally signed with the Cubs, Scott Fletcher came up with the Cubs in 1981, was traded to the White Sox in January, 1983, and had a long career as an American League shortstop and second baseman.   His career numbers are superficially similar to Phil Rizzuto’s, and once, provoked beyond endurance by Yankee fans, I suggested that if Phil Rizzuto went into the Hall of Fame, Fletcher should be next, although I understand perfectly well that Rizzuto and Fletcher are very different players in terms of defensive value and offensive context.

            Fletcher hit .300 with 34 doubles in 1987; we score that season at 18-11, a value of 21.   He was 15-8 with the Brewers in 1992, 15-11 with the Red Sox in 1993.   He was a decent player, but always a little bit anonymous, always about a two-week slump away from losing his position as a regular.   Although he bounced from team to team as if he was not valued, his teams generally had good seasons, with a Team Success Percentage of .556.

            We have him with a career won-lost 147-153, a .490 percentage, which breaks down as 99-135 as a hitter, but 48-18 (.724) as a defensive player.   That makes a value of 144, with 44% of his value as a fielder.   He was the best defensive player in this group of 11 players.

            As these lists are filled out, some of you will be surprised by some of the players who rank below Scott Fletcher, and I expect to get some posts saying “How can you rank XYZ below Scott Fletcher?”   But. . .Scott Fletcher was a good player, a better player than he usually got credit for being.

4.  Bobby Higginson 

            A one-team anomaly in a rent-a-player age, Bobby Higginson played left and right for the Detroit Tigers from 1995 to 2005, hitting 25 to 30 homers four times from 1996 to 2000.   The Tigers at the time he came up were a struggling organization, losing 109 games in 1996.   They rallied for a 79-win season in 1997, and opened their new park with another 79-win masterpiece in 2000.   Higginson was their best player that season, and after that season signed a four-year contract extension covering the years 2002-2005, making him the highest-paid Tiger for most or all of those years.   It proved to be an unpopular contract, as Higginson never drove in or scored more than 64 runs in a season during the period of the contract.

            Higginson’s Wikipedia entry says that “At his best, he was considered one of the better-fielding outfielders in baseball.  He twice led the Majors in outfield assists, and also led all American League left fielders in putouts in 2000 (305) and 2001 (321), although he never won a Gold Glove for his fielding.”   Well, our system has him, as a fielder, at 18-35, which is very poor even for this group of outfielders, most of whom were not very good defensively.

I’m not saying our system is right, but let me explain why there is this discrepancy.   First, left fielders in general are not highly-rated defensive players.   Second, yes, Higginson led American League left fielders in putouts, but what does that really mean?   There were only about three or four really regular left fielders in the American League in those years, and the others were players of quite limited defensive ability.   Carlos Lee.   Mark Quinn.   Ben Grieve.   That’s about it.

Third, Higginson played in a park with a huge left field area for a team with a well-below-average number of strikeouts.   Leading left fielders in putouts is like leading prostitutes in church attendance.

Still, Higginson’s bat made him a good player.   We have him with a career won-lost contribution of 142-121 (124-86 as a hitter, 18-35 as a fielder.)    The teams for which he played were, as noted, terrible, with a Team Success Percentage of .340—the lowest of any player in this group, and lower than anyone in the larger group introduced yesterday except Indian Bob Johnson.

3.  Pete Fox

            Pete Fox was a regular outfielder with the Tigers when they won the World Series in 1935, hitting .321 with 38 doubles, 15 homers, and 116 runs scored.   He had 208 hits and scored 116 runs again in 1937, hitting .331, and was a contributing player to the Tigers in both their 1934 and 1940 pennant-winning seasons.   Traded to the Red Sox in December, 1940, he played through the war with the Red Sox, but with little impact.

            Primarily a right fielder, Fox scores very well as a defensive player, with a good ratio of assists to errors.   He scores at 20-8 in 1935, a Win Share Value of 26.   He is rated as easily the best defensive outfielder in this group of players, which includes seven outfielders, and he played for the most successful teams of any player in this group of eleven players.

            For his career, we have the following:

            Won-Lost contribution of 161-156.

            Win Share Value of 164.

            Offensive Record of 116-120.

            Defensive Won-Lost record of 46-36.  

            Team Success Percentage of .605.

            31% of his value as a fielder.

2.   Thornton Lee

            Thornton Lee was perhaps the best pitcher in baseball in 1941, when he went 22-11 with a 2.37 ERA in 300 innings for the Chicago White Sox.    He also hit .254 that year, and we credit him with a Win Share Value for that season of 38 (28 Wins, 9 Losses—24-7 as a pitcher, plus a record of 4-1 as a hitter.)   A Win Share Value of 38 is an MVP-type number, although of course he was not an MVP contender in 1941 with Ted Williams hitting .406 and DiMaggio hitting in 56 consecutive games.   He finished fourth in the MVP voting, behind those two and Bob Feller.

            I seem to have picked a group mostly of 1940s American Leaguers, although I had no such design, and incidentally a bunch of college players.   A lefty, Lee grew up in Sonoma, California, and was a four-sport star at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo.   Signing with the Indians out of college, he labored in the minors for several years, finally reaching the majors at the age of 27 in 1933.  He had opportunities to establish himself with the Indians from 1933 to 1936, but with little success.  Turning 30, he was given to the White Sox in a three-way trade involving an ancient veteran and another knockaround pitcher.  Lee immediately came into his own with the White Sox, and was their best pitcher for most of the next ten years, having won-lost equivalents (not won-lost records) of 16-9 in 1937, 19-11 in 1938, 17-12 in 1939, 17-9 in 1940, and 17-11 in 1945.

            Lee lived on a sinking fastball.   Lee and his son, Don Lee, both surrendered home runs to Ted Williams—the only time in baseball history that a player has homered off of two generations of the same family.

            We credit Lee with:

·        A Win Shares Value of 174,

·        A Won-Lost contribution of 158-127,

·        138-106 as a pitcher,

·        20-20 as a hitter (meaning that he was an average hitter for a pitcher),

·        11% of his value as a hitter, 89% as a pitcher,

·        A Team Success Percentage of .511.

1.  Danny Tartabull

            Tomorrow’s group of players will be called the Jim Ray Hart group.   As this group of players is chosen to be not particularly interesting (and thus emotionally neutral), tomorrow’s group is chosen from players who are inherently interesting.

            But while I can’t recall that Danny Tartabull has come up in the “Hey, Bill” section in the last six months, Danny Tartabull and Jim Ray Hart are, when you look at it, very similar hitters—strong right-handed hitters with almost interchangeable numbers.    Tartabull drove in 100 runs five times and Hart never did, but it’s a borderline distinction; Tartabull was usually at 101 RBI, and Hart at 96.   In fact, now that it comes up, Tartabull drove in 100 runs five times, but his career high was 102.   That has to be some sort of record.

            Tartabull’s father, Jose Tartabull, was a little Cuban base stealer who was a part-time outfielder on the first teams that I rooted for, the Kansas City A’s of the early 1960s.    Jose had no power, but Danny was a muscular kid who belted 14 homers in the Florida State league as an 18-year-old in 1981—which is a ton of homers for an 18-year-old in the Florida State League—and then had 43 homers for Calgary in 1985, forcing his way to the majors.   Asked where Danny got his power, Jose joked that he must have gotten it from his mother.    It is a measure of how little attention was being paid to the s-word in that era that this would even pass for a joke.

            Danny was a very handsome, extremely well-dressed man, at times charming, at times arrogant and difficult.   Joining the Yankees as a free agent in 1992, Tartabull appeared as himself in two episodes of Seinfeld, and the Yankees of 1993-94 had successful seasons, building toward the greater success that would later follow.

            Tartabull’s image soured after that, and he was pretty quickly relegated to the back pages of our memories—but based strictly on his record, he was easily the best of the eleven players in this group.   I credit him with a career won-lost contribution of 175-94, a .654 percentage, Win Share Value of 217.     He wasn’t much of a fielder (21-33), but then, most of the outfielders on this list really weren’t very good in the field.   Tartabull at least could hit.   His Team Success Percentage was .564.

            In tomorrow’s group:   Johnny Allen, Lu Blue, Tony Bonham, Spud Chandler, Tony Conigliaro, Jacques Fournier, Jim Ray Hart, Firpo Marberry, Jack McDowell, Johnny Murphy, Johnny Pesky, JR Richard, Herb Score, Bobby Shantz, Riggs Stephenson, Roy Thomas, Bob Veale, and Smokey Joe Wood.    I guess we’ll take tomorrow off because of Easter, and publish that section on Monday.