Clift 54, Rader 53

            Harlond Clift, the third baseman for some of the worst teams that ever took the field, has defended his #6 seed with a hard-fought 54-53 victory over the always colorful Doug Rader.   Clift will meet Toby Harrah in the second round on September 24.

            The two players were similar in many ways.   Clift hit .272 in his career, but the league average in his era was .281; Rader hit .251 against a league average of .262.  Both players walked a lot and had some power; Clift walked more, and had a little more power.   Both men played good defense and had fairly short careers, and both men played most of their careers for bad teams, although Rader’s were not as bad.

            Rader was a character, a big, cheerful redhead with a lot of energy who would do and say things that would leave others staring in open-mouthed awe.   One time, on a reserve army training mission, Rader and his squad were assigned to “capture” the general.   They failed to locate the general, thus failed in the mission, but in the PX that evening they ran into the general.   “Where the hell have you been?” snapped Rader.  “We’ve been looking for you all afternoon.”

            There are several stories about Rader in Ball Four, but I haven’t read Ball Four in years, and honestly, I can’t remember those stories.   On a web site called “Astroland,net”, I find the following:

Rader was already being called a wild man by the time Ball Four was published in 1970, and as the seventies swelled and matured, Rader made sure to let his hair grow longer and to make ridiculous statements about eating baseball cards or whatever else to reporters. Later, he would try to jettison the wacky image when trying to manage the Angels. I'm suspicious of people who put on different faces for different audiences, so I'll take it easy on the wacky stories most people tell when the name Doug Rader comes up.

            OK, well, to return the favor, I’ll take it easy on sanctimonious assholes who write like third-tier high school English teachers, and who want to portray Doug Rader as the buttoned-down straight man that he never was.  The people who knew Rader as a young man will tell you that the stories, if anything, are understated.

            Later, Rader tried to tone down his image to have a career as a manager, and he did get some shots as a manager.  He won 91 games as the manager of the California Angels in 1989.   Although Rader was very bright, he had some insecurities as a person that surfaced first in the class-clown personality, and, as a manager, in a less attractive form.    Rader was a good hitter despite his .251 career batting average, and an excellent fielder.

Doug Rader—Wins and Losses Summary

Bradley 54, Jones 55 (OT)

            Willie Jones, the third baseman of the Whiz Kids, walked off with a one-point win in overtime over Bill Bradley of the Napoleon Lajoie-era Cleveland Indians:

            Jones will face Ron Santo in his second-round game on September 24.

            I have to tell you:  for the first time in this tournament, I overruled the “Win Shares Value” total, and awarded the victory to the player with fewer Career Win Shares and a lower Career Winning Percentage.

            What we are searching for here is the best possible answer to the question, “Which of these two players was really a better player?”   I think that Win Shares and Loss Shares gets us closer to that answer than any other method that I can use, but there are issues in the analysis that are not fully resolved by the Win Shares/Loss Shares method.   One of those issues is the quality of competition.

            First, the difference between Bradley’s totals and Jones’s is not large.

            Second, I believe that the quality of competition in the major leagues improved significantly between 1900—Bradley’s era—and the 1950s, when Willie Jones played.

            Third, Bradley’s best years occurred in the American League, 1902-1904, just after that league acquired major league status, and at a time when the quality of play in the league was probably still evolving.  These years are not only the best years of Bradley’s career, they are so much better than the rest of his career that they might almost be said to be out of context.

            Fourth, Jones and Bradley have very similar offensive winning percentages, and very similar defensive winning percentages.   Their defensive winning percentages are higher than their offensive.

            This works to Bradley’s advantage, because he is assigned more responsibility for defensive play than is Jones.   He is assigned more responsibility for two reasons:

            1)  That third base was a more critical defensive position in 1900 than it was in 1950 (there was a shift in the defensive spectrum), and

            2)  That the importance of defense in general is inversely related to strikeouts and home runs.   As strikeouts and home runs have increased over time, defense has become less important.

            But while I absolutely believe that these adjustments are appropriate ones, the exact size of the difference is difficult to know, and my assumptions about that issue are somewhat speculative.  We have assigned Bradley responsibility for 110 Win and Loss Shares for his defense; Jones, 87—and Jones played more games, more innings at third.    We have no way to be certain that we have the proportions exactly right, and we should not rely blindly on those numbers.

            Bradley was a good player.   Rube Marquard remembered Bradley in The Glory of Their Times:

When I was about thirteen I used to carry bats for Napoleon Lajoie and Elmer Flick and Terry Turner and a lot of the other Cleveland Indians. They weren't called the Indians then. They were called the Cleveland Bronchos and then the Naps, after Napoleon Lajoie. After the regular season was over, a lot of them would barnstorm around the Cleveland area, and sometimes I'd be their bat boy.

Then later I even pitched a few games for Bill Bradley's Boo Gang. Bill Bradley was the Cleveland third baseman--one of the greatest who ever lived--and he also barnstormed with his Boo Gang after the season was over. So by the time I was only fifteen or sixteen I knew a lot of ballplayers, and I had my heart set on becoming a Big Leaguer myself.

            I am not suggesting that Bradley would be unworthy to advance in this tournament.   I think he was a fine player.  But ultimately, I do not believe that Bradley was a better player than Willie Jones, and I decided to go with Jones.

Bill Bradley—Wins and Losses Summary

Edgardo Alfonzo 86, Pinky Whitney 71

            Riding large advantages in power, plate discipline and team success, Bobby Valentine-era Met Edgardo Alfonzo coasted to a relatively easy first-round victory over Pinky Whitney.

            Gary Gaetti will face Bill Melton tomorrow, and Alfonzo will meet the winner on September 25. 

            Whitney was the 8 seed here, Alfonzo the 9, so this is technically an upset, although, in the NCAA tournament, 9s beat 8s over half the time, and 9 seeds are 2-0 in this tournament. Whitney, to be honest, is a player that I don’t know very much about, other than his stats; his Wikipedia entry suggests that nobody else knows much, either.   He has several things in common with Harlond Clift, a first-round winner earlier today.  Both Whitney and Clift had superficially very impressive batting stats, but did so

a) only for a few years,

b) playing in hitter’s parks,

c) in high-run eras, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Whitney drove in 100+ runs in four of his first five seasons in the majors, and hit for averages including .327 (1929), .342 (1930) and .341 (1937).

Also, both Whitney and Clift have very good defensive numbers as well, Whitney leading the National League in putouts, assists and double plays 1929, 1930 and 1932.   He also led in fielding percentage in 1932, 1934 and 1937, and led in double plays in 1933, and in assists in 1934.

The 1930 Phillies scored 100 runs more than the 1961 Yankees, in a schedule that was 8 games shorter, yet they won only 52 games, so when you start translating runs into wins, it takes a lot of runs for each win.   There are about 18 runs for each win there, whereas a normal ratio is more like 9 to 1.   We see Whitney as a decent fielder but a below-average hitter, context adjusted.   Overall, he was about a .500 player in his good years. 

Clift played for horrible teams—but the teams for which Whitney played were even worse.    Also, for what it is worth, one of Clift’s nicknames was “Blackie”.   Blackie, Pinky. . .get it?   I don’t know that this is true of Whitney, but “Pinky” in that era was sometimes a nickname for a player with a hot temper. 

Pinky Whitney—Won and Loss Contributions

Bell Tolls for Brookens

Buddy Bell 94, Tom Brookens 67

            With advantages in Hitting for Average, Career Length and Awards totally up to 52-6, #1 seed Buddy Bell romped to a 27-point first-round victory over Tom Brookens:

            Bell will face Mike Lowell on September 25; Lowell defeated Hubie Brooks yesterday.

            Although never really in the contest, Brookens did have an 11-2 edge over Bell in speed, and a 12-1 margin in the “Team Success” category; Bell, like Whitney and Clift, played mostly for bad teams.

            Brookens played through the era when I was writing the annual Abstracts, and, in those years, I was probably too hard on him.   Brookens’ chief contribution was defense, and we didn’t have good ways to evaluate defense then.   Brookens was one of Sparky Anderson’s favorites, and I had difficulty seeing the world the way Sparky did (although, if you went back and read the Abstracts, you might surprised at how positive my comments about Sparky actually were.)

            Brookens had the shortest career of any player in this tournament, or at least had the fewest plate appearances (4,258), so that’s a massive disadvantage when we compare him to Buddy Bell, who had one of the longest careers, plus Bell was a better hitter and Bell won six Gold Gloves, so it’s not really a fair contest.  Brookens hit in the .240s without power and without a lot of walks; his career OPS (.663) is the third-lowest in the tournament.   But he could hit left-handers, he was a role player on a series of very good teams, and his defense was extremely good.

            Twenty-six players have now been eliminated from the tournament.   This is how those 26 players rank the “Team Success” category:

            Team Success Percentage is fully explained in an article published earlier, but I’ll explain it briefly here.  Each team is assigned a level of success on a 1 through 5 scale.   The World Series winners are always “5”, and otherwise, if a team exceeds their normal expectations based on their performance in previous years, they might be a “5” or at least a “4”.   If a team doesn’t live up to expectations, they would be a “1” or a “2”.   Seattle last year was a “5”; this year they’ll be a “1”.

            Pinky Whitney’s first major league team, the 1928 Phillies, finished 43-109; that was a “1”, a disappointing year.  In 1929 they improved to 71-82; that was a “5”.   That was a great year for that team, given where they were coming from.   In 1930 they relapsed to 52-102; that was a “1”.  After that the success of his teams reads, by year, 3, 5, 1, 4, 3, 1, 4, 1, 3, 1, 1.  He played for seven teams that had very disappointing seasons, and the weighted average of the yearly totals is 2.5902.  The yearly numbers are weighted by the players “Game Shares” in each season—his Win Shares plus his Loss Shares—to get the weighted average.

            From the weighted average, we subtract 1 and divide by 4, making (for Whitney) 1.5902/4, making .398.   If he plays for terrible teams in every year of his career, that will make a percentage of .000; if he plays for highly successful teams in every year of his career, that will make 1.000.    If they’re neither good nor bad, that’s .500. 

            In tomorrow’s contests, 7^th seeded Billy Nash will face 10^th seeded Joe Randa in Baltimore, Clete Boyer will face Ken Keltner in the 8-9 match in Cleveland, number one seed Gary Gaetti will take on Bill Melton in St. Louis, and Bob Aspromonte will challenge #2 seed Tim Wallach in Los Angeles. 

            The first-round games will conclude on Wednesday with Doug DeCinces (8) vs. Jeff Cirillo (9) in Baltimore; the winner of that one will have the honor of taking on Brooks Robinson himself in the second round.    Top-seeded Graig Nettles will meet Phil Nevin in Cleveland, Chipper Jones (2) will face Don Hoak (15) in St. Louis, and Ron Cey (3) will face 19^th century player Jeremiah Denny (14) in Los Angeles.