Years ago I used to work for Bill. We had a lot of projects going that didn’t reach fulfillment. One of these was to find some way quantify “overrated” and “underrated” players, based on some sort of ratio between a player’s Win Shares and the various honors he received during his career. The project never went anywhere at the time, which was about 2003.  I was eight years old at the time; Bill was about 25. Anyway, I’ve since picked it back up, and I believe I have a system that works, both statistically and intuitively. I’ve only done non-pitchers so far; pitchers will need their own system.

We begin with a number I’m just calling “Value.” It is simply a player’s positive Win Shares Above Average (WSAA), minus five. I got the WSAA file from Dave Studeman at Hardball Times… Basically, I counted a player’s WSAA, but I didn’t include any negative figures. They give you awards for positive performances, and they don’t take them away when you have a bad year, so it didn’t make sense to include the negative years. I subtracted five so guys with relatively low scores didn’t figure too prominently in the list.

I appear to have explained that very poorly, but you’re smart people and you’ll figure it out.  Anyway, the other statistic is “Award Points.” For every Positive WSAA in history (WSAA+, I’ll call it), there is exactly one Award Point. Award Points are calculated as follows:

MVP Award Shares times 22,

plus All Star years times 6.5,

plus All Star starting years times 2,

plus Gold Gloves times 1.5,

plus Silver Sluggers.

For the years in which there were two All-Star games, I’m only counting one. If you made both teams, you only get credited for one All-Star year, the same as a person who made only one team. If you started one or both games, you get credited the same, for one start.

Anyway, each player has two scores—his “performance” score, based on Win Shares, and his “awards” score, based on this stuff I outlined before.   If the awards score is substantially higher than the performance score, the player is considered to have been overrated.  If the performance score is higher, he was underrated.  

I excluded anyone from the study who was born before 1914, since All Star games and MVPs and so forth weren’t as available to them. This isn’t a perfect system, and there are plenty of other awards I didn’t include (e.g. Sporting News awards). But these are the big awards, and there is a one-to-one ratio between Value and Award Points. And more importantly, the results make sense.

Finally, I came up with a score. I tried this a number of ways, but I settled on the following:

(Award Points minus Value), squared

Times

(Award Points minus Value) divided by WSAA+ [the original WSAA+, not Value]

Divided by 10.

I found many, many interesting bits of information in this study, but I’ll give you the main results first. I’ve filtered out the players whose Value and Award Points, added together, equal less than 40.

Top 20 Most Overrated (or Over-rewarded) Players born since 1914:

1.      Bobby Richardson

2.      Frank Malzone

3.      Luis Aparicio

4.      Brooks Robinson

5.      Larry Bowa

6.      Don Kessinger

7.      Steve Garvey

8.      Cal Ripken Jr.

9.      Bill Mazeroski

10.  Nellie Fox

11.  Ozzie Smith

12.  Marty Marion

13.  Sandy Alomar Jr.

14.  Eddie Miller

15.  Red Schoendienst

16.  Ivan Rodriguez

17.  Jim Rice

18.  Ichiro Suzuki

19.  Rod Carew

20.  Benito Santiago

Richardson has a value of zero (4 WSAA+, minus 5, rounded to zero since it was a negative). Yet he has 72 Award Points thanks to 7 All Star years (1 start), 5 Gold Gloves, and 0.77 MVP shares. He has exactly the same number of Award Points as Tim Raines, who has a value of 127. He’s got more Award Points than tons of players, including a number of Hall of Famers.

Aparicio is the second-worst Hall of Famer in the study (after Mazeroski). Aparicio has a Value of just 17, which puts him behind such non-luminaries as Dave Cash, Travis Fryman, and Leo Cardenas. (Maz is at 10, trailing the likes of Johnny Ray, Dave Hollins, and Mike Ivie.) Aparicio is just the 481^st best player born since 1914, based on this study, yet he’s the 50^th most-awarded.

Brooks Robinson and Cal Ripken are the 7^th and 8^th most-awarded players… The moral of the story is, if you want to be overrated, play in Baltimore . Incidentally, Ripken is so overrated in large part due to his 17 All Star Game starts, which is more than anyone else in baseball history (nobody has 16, and only Aaron and Carew have 15).

Top 20 Most Underrated (or Under-rewarded) Players born since 1914:

1.      Darrell Evans

2.      Gene Tenace

3.      Brian Giles

4.      Bobby Abreu

5.      Jimmy Wynn

6.      Eddie Mathews

7.      Ryan Klesko

8.      Roy White

9.      Gene Woodling

10.  Jeff Heath

11.  Willie McCovey

12.  Rick Monday

13.  Oscar Gamble

14.  Edgardo Alfonzo

15.  Don Buford

16.  Ray Lankford

17.  Thome, Jim

18.  Norm Cash,

19.  J.D Drew

20.  Tim Raines

Evans, Tenace, Giles, and Abreu are way, way ahead of everyone else. A few other lists:

Top 10 Most-Awarded Players:

1.      Barry Bonds

2.      Willie Mays

3.      Stan Musial

4.      Hank Aaron

5.      Ted Williams

6.      Mickey Mantle

7.      Cal Ripken

8.      Brooks Robinson

9.      Mike Schmidt

10.  Joe DiMaggio

Top 10 Best Players (by Value):

1.          Bonds

2.          Mays

3.          Mantle

4.          Williams

5.          Aaron

6.          Musial

7.          DiMaggio

8.          Joe Morgan

9.          Frank Robinson

10.      Schmidt

It’s clear that middle infield glove men tend to be overrated, and guys with high secondary averages tend to be underrated. Either that, or the Win Shares system has it wrong and Bobby Richardson and Luis Aparicio deserved a lot more Win Shares. In either case, the prototype of an overrated player in my study is a Gold Glove fielder with a .290 batting average and a .150 secondary average, while the prototype of an underrated player is a .240 hitter who hits for power and draws 100 walks a year. The top 20 overrated won 91 Gold Gloves, and the top 20 underrated won just one. But it’s not only that… The Underrateds, who are supposed to be the offensive types, won a grand total of two Silver Sluggers. Their Overrated counterparts won 18. I made up an all-overrated and an all-underrated team:

In terms of value, the Underrateds win easily, 747-238, but in terms of Award Points, the Overrateds dominate, 836-255. But man, I’ll get crucified if I say that Ryan Klesko is the equal of Jim Rice, or that Brian Giles is more than twice the player Ichiro is. Not that I believe it’s that extreme, but still… the differences are huge.

I was really surprised to see that Ron Santo shows up as being neither overrated nor underrated – he got what he deserved, and he deserved what he got. Santo accumulated 96 value points (a borderline Hall of Fame figure), but he received 101 award points: 9 All Star games (4 starts), 5 Gold Gloves, and 1.23 MVP shares. He was better-rewarded than Duke Snider and Willie McCovey, and he’s way ahead of Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. He may be getting cheated out of a Cooperstown plaque, but in his own time, he was rated just fine.

Same thing for Alan Trammell. He had 81 value, 75 award. Yes, he should have won the MVP in 1987, and he should have started at least a couple All Star games (he was a 6-time All Star, but he had zero starts). But that’s partially offset by the fact that he was an undeserving All Star in 1985, and he won the Gold Glove in 1984 despite playing only 114 games in the field. Plus, in the ’87 MVP vote, while Trammell didn’t win, he did have a 0.79 MVP share, which is huge. All things considered, Trammell was properly perceived as the fine player that he was.

Another surprise was Tony Perez. I thoroughly expected Perez to be on the overrated list, but he’s not. In fact, Perez was actually mildly underrated in his own day. His value was 79, but he had only 68 award points. In other words, he was less rewarded in his own day than Bobby Richardson, and way less than fellow (and inferior) 1970s NL first baseman Steve Garvey.

Several all-time greats got exactly what they deserved: Mays, Aaron, DiMaggio, Frank Robinson, Frank Thomas, Willie Stargell. Ted Simmons was not really underrated; Lou Brock was not really overrated. As expected, Derek Jeter has been overrated, 82 value to 119 award... but, lo and behold, Alex Rodriguez is even more overrated, 163 value to 210 award.

Catchers tend to be a bit overrated. In my master list (not the shortened list I’ve been using above), catchers have a value of 2975, and they’ve won 3597 award points, a four-point difference on average. Does Win Shares underrate catchers? I don’t think that’s what it is... Think about it. Berra. An all-time great, obviously, but he had almost four full MVP shares, which is an enormous total. He made 15 All Star games, and he started 10 of them. Altogether, he had 155 value points, but he received a whopping 205 award points. Bench is basically the same story, though his value isn’t as high as Berra’s. Piazza, too: he’s rated equal to Bench, and it’s tempting to see him as underrated because he never won an MVP. But Piazza’s MVP share is huge, 3.15, and he started 10 All Star games. Likewise Ivan Rodriguez: great player, but a dozen All Star starts? That ties him with Bonds, Mantle, and Ted Williams, and puts him ahead of all but five players in baseball history. It’s a bit much.

Plus, there are plenty of other catchers who are underrated, but they’re easy to forget. Gene Tenace, Joe Ferguson, Johnny Romano, Tom Haller, and more recently, players like Jason Kendall and Joe Mauer. All told, I don’t think there is some sort of inherent bias in the Win Shares system against catchers. If anything, it’s the way awards are given – there are All Star spots for every position, but catchers tend to play fewer games, thus accumulating less value. So you have guys who might contribute less, relative to players at other positions, being rewarded with All Star spots. Also, catchers have done really well in MVP voting. Think of Berra’s three awards. In 1951, he created 92 runs. Ted Williams created 137 runs and finished thirteenth. It’s easier to make a case for Berra in ’54, but in 1955 he batted .272 with 27 homers, 90 Runs Created, while his teammate Mantle hit .306 with 37 homers and 148 Runs Created. And Mantle didn’t get a single first place vote.

Across town, Campanella was winning his trio of MVPs. In ’55, when he won his third, Campy played in just 123 games. He barely qualified for the batting title. Meanwhile, Duke Snider had a monster year, Ernie Banks hit 44 homers as a shortstop, Willie Mays hit .319 with 51 homers and didn’t get even one first place vote... You get the point.

Another interesting tidbit: The mean birth year for the top 50 underrated players is 1949. The mean birth year for their overrated counterparts is 1945. I don’t know if it means anything.

Unpacking that a bit… There were 66 players in the study born between 1914 and 1923, and they had 3604 award points (an average of 55). The rest of the decades of birth:

1914-1923: 55 players, 3604 Award Points (66 avg.)

1924-1933: 45 players, 3164 Award Points (70 avg.)

1934-1943: 67 players, 4583 Award Points (67 avg.)

1944-1953: 73 players, 4263 Award Points (58 avg.)

1954-1963: 71 players, 4379 Award Points (62 avg.)

1964-1973: 74 players, 4589 Award Points (62 avg.)

So players born before World War II tended to have more Award Points. (Remember, I’m only considering players who had 40 Award Points+Val right now.) What’s causing this – expansion, a flaw in my system, or something else? How about another angle:

1914-1923: 3604 AP, 3292 Val (+6 avg. difference, i.e., overrated)

1924-1933: 3164 AP, 2705 Val (+10 avg. diff.)

1934-1943: 4583 AP, 4441 Val (+2 avg. diff.)

1944-1953: 4263 AP, 4280 Val (0 avg. diff. – on average, they got what they deserved)

1954-1963: 4379 AP, 4129 Val (+4 avg. diff.)

1964-1973: 4589 AP, 4973 Val (-5 avg. diff. – the first truly underrated generation)

Now, on the whole, the players in this sample are +2 on average, i.e., slightly overrated. This is obviously counterbalanced by the players who were excluded from the sample – the guys who had less than 40 AP+Val. In general, though, players whose primes have come in the 1990s and 2000s have found it more difficult to earn awards than players of past generations. I would think this is due to expansion – right?

Anyway, it’s clear that there is more exploring to be done here.