DeCinces 61, Cirillo 59 (OT)

September 22, 2010

            On a day featuring one-sided contests in the other three games, Doug DeCinces and Jeff Cirillo went toe-to-toe and exchanged blows in a match requiring overtime to get to a decision.    DeCinces, who had home run totals of 28, 30, 20, 20 and 26, had a 14-6 edge in the “Power” category over Cirillo, who never hit more than 17 homers in a season.   Cirillo, who hit .325, .321, .326, .326 and .313 in various seasons, had a 14-5 edge over DeCinces in the “Hitting for Average” category, as DeCinces hit higher than .286 only once (.301 in 1982).   Otherwise, the two players were nearly even in every area except Team Success, where DeCinces had a 6-2 edge.

            DeCinces, the #8 seed in the Baltimore regional, will face off against Brooks Robinson on September 26.

            Cirillo is a recent player, and I may not need to say much about him.  One of countless star players to come out of the USC program, Cirillo hit .342 at USC, and apparently was as good a pitcher as he was a hitter, although I am unable to find his college pitching statistics.  An 11^th-round draft pick in 1991, Cirillo made the majors in three years, driving Kevin Seitzer across the infield.   In the first half of his career, he was a tremendous player.   He hit .325 with 46 doubles, 15 homers for the Brewers in 1998, and .326 with 53 doubles, 11 homers and 115 RBI for the Rockies in 2001.   In addition to that he was a very good third baseman—actually the second-best defensive player who has been eliminated from the tournament so far, behind only Clete Boyer--and he walked 79 times in 1998, 75 times in 1999, giving him on-base percentages over .400 both of those seasons.  His won-lost contributions from 1997 through 1999 were 20-11, 22-9, and 20-10.

            His career stumbled to a surprisingly quick end when he was traded to the Mariners in 2002, and just suddenly stopped hitting.   He was 32 years old at that time, and there was an expectation for two or three years that he would snap back and have a couple of good years yet, but he never did, although he did hit .319 as a part-time player for Milwaukee in 2006.  Cirillo played almost a thousand games for the Brewers (978), and his career average with the Brewers, .306, is the franchise record.

Jeff Cirillo—Won and Lost Contributions

Graig Nettles 76, Phil Nevin 50

            Graig Nettles, trailing 42-25 at halftime, won the second half by the rather remarkable score of 51 to 8 to advance into the second round of the Brooks Robinson invitational tournament.   Nettles (1) will face Ken Keltner (9) on September 26.

            Nevin was a premier power hitter, hitting .303 with 31 homers, 107 RBI in 2000, .306 with 41 and 126 in 2001, and .289 with 26 homers, 105 RBI in 2004.    The .300 averages gave him a big advantage in that area over Nettles, whose career average was just .248.

            Nevin had only four good years, and his defensive ability was limited.    But he was one of the better power hitters to have been eliminated in the first round of the tournament.

Phil Nevin—Won and Lost Contributions

Chipper 101, Tiger 74

            Winning every category except Speed and Defense, Chipper Jones rolled to an easy 27-point win over the emotional leader of the 1960 Pirates, Don Hoak.  Chipper’s next opponent will be Harry Steinfeldt, on September 26.

            The 1960 Pirates, to me, are an endlessly fascinating team.  Dick Groat was actually the captain of that team, not Don Hoak, but a lot of people thought of it the other way.   Hoak and Groat—similar names, playing beside one another at shortstop and third—were first and second in the MVP voting; in a way they were almost like Fox and Aparicio, who had been first and second in the MVP voting in the other league the previous year, the co-leaders of an emotional, aggressive team that stole a championship from organizations with vastly more talent.   While Don Hoak was in the Marines, Dick Groat was at Duke University; while Hoak was boxing, Groat was playing in the NBA; while Hoak was slogging his way to the majors through the impenetrable jungle of the Dodger farm system, the Pirates were putting Groat immediately in the majors, skipping the minors entirely, and offering him the use of a private airplane to keep him from jumping permanently to basketball.

            Groat had had a lot of advantages that Hoak didn’t, had gotten to the Pirates seven years earlier even though he was three years younger, and yet on some level they were very much the same, both tough, competitive bastards, both raised in small towns near Pittsburgh, both, I would guess, from the families of coal miners.  Hoak—nicknamed “Tiger”--was famous as a hothead who had been known to go to the mound and ream out the pitcher; Groat was cold and sometimes sour, but just as intense.   They weren’t co-captains and they weren’t rivals, but. . .they were.    Groat was out of the lineup with an injury from September 6 until September 27, 1960.   Somewhere in there, Hoak after a game pulled off a blood-soaked sock.   Like Schilling in 2004, he had been stitched up after a previous game.  The stitches had broken and the sock filled up with blood, but Hoak just went on with the game.   He played every game, that year and the year before.

            Don Hoak never hit .300 (in the majors or in the minors), never hit 20 homers, never stole ten bases and never drove in 90 runs—and yet he was, for five years, a very, very good player.    He didn’t hit 20 homers but he hit 19, and 16, and 12, and he didn’t hit .300, but he was close, and he didn’t steal bases, but he ran well, and he didn’t walk a hundred times a year but he walked 71 to 74 times every year.   If Groat had moved to third and Hoak to short, one suspects that it would have made little difference.  Hoak was faster than Groat, and he was quicker than Groat. 

Hoak reached the majors after a year in the marines, a brief and spectacularly unsuccessful career as a boxer, and seven long years in the Dodger minor leagues.   Hoak’s home run totals in the minor leagues read 5, 5, 5, 6, 5, 6, 6.  His glove work finally got him to the majors, and his first three years in the majors sort of extended the streak: 7 home runs, 5, 5.   He had now been in pro baseball for ten years, and had hit 5 to 7 homers every year.   That’s hard to do.

            His power finally kicked in with Cincinnati in 1957, but he was 29 years old by then, and the clock was an issue.  In 1957 (18-11) he led the National League with 39 doubles.   In 1960 (22-10) he was, as I mentioned, second in the NL MVP voting.   In terms of front-line talent, the Pirates were no better than fifth in the NL, behind the Dodgers (Koufax, Drysdale, Maury Wills, Frank Howard, Tommy Davis), the Giants (Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, Marichal), the Braves (Aaron, Mathews, Spahn, Burdette) and the Cardinals, who had Ken Boyer at third and probably the league’s two best pitchers, in Ernie Broglio and Lindy McDaniel.   The Pirates’ best player was Clemente, having his first pretty-good season (.314 with 16 homers, 94 RBI), but what made the team go was Hoak and Groat, Friend and Law, and the fact that the Pirates had finished the team in a way that the other organizations had failed to do.   If you compare players 1-5 on the roster, the other teams were much better than the Pirates—but if you compare players 16 through 25, the Pirates were way, way ahead.

            Hoak died of a heart attack in 1969.   A broadcaster for the Pirates, he had been a candidate to manage the team in 1970, and was informed on the morning of his death that he would not get the job.   Hours later he spotted his brother-in-law’s car, which (as I understand the story) had been reported stolen a few days before.   Chasing the car on foot, he suffered a heart attack and died.   His dream had been to manage the Pirates, and his wife would always claim that he died of a broken heart when he didn’t get the chance.

            Hoak wasn’t a good player long enough to be compared fairly to Chipper Jones, and he was nowhere near the hitter that Chipper was.   But if you had most of a championship team and you needed a player with fire in his belly to pull you to the top, Don Hoak was a player who could do that for you.

Don Hoak—Won and Lost Contributions

Ron Cey 88, Jerry Denny 57

            Ron Cey used a 16-0 edge in Plate Discipline to built a 44-32 halftime advantage, and coasted to an easy victory over 19^th century player Jerry Denny.   This concludes the first round of the tournament; second-round action will commence tomorrow.   Cey will meet Willie Kamm on September 26. 

            Born Jeremiah Dennis Eldridge in 1859, Denny has often been described as the last player to play without a glove.   Players were experimenting with gloves by the time Denny reached the majors in 1881, and had almost universally adopted fielder’s gloves by 1886.   Denny never did, and may have been the last player to play barehanded, although, well. . .think about it.    The last time a player took the field without a glove on his hand, did anybody know that this was the last time?    Billy Nash, also in this tournament, also played third base most of his career without a glove, and may well have played gloveless after Denny retired.

            Denny was a good player, except that his batting averages were just average, and his strikeout to walk ratios were terrible.   Whereas an average player in Denny’s era would have had 434 strikeouts, 361 walks in the same number of plate appearances, Denny had 602 strikeouts, 173 walks.    Gloveless or not, much of Denny’s value was in his glove.

Jeremiah Denny—Won and Lost Contributions

            The second round of the tournament will kick off tomorrow with four seeds in action in all four regions.    Carney Lansford, the 4 seed in the Los Angeles regional, will face 12^th-seeded Ken McMullen.    Ken Boyer, the 4 seed in St. Louis, will battle 5^th-seeded Scott Rolen.   Bob Elliott, the 4 seed in Cleveland, will take on 12^th-seeded Heinie Zimmerman, and Matt Williams, the 4 seed in Baltimore, will square off against 5^th-seeded Jimmy Collins.

            “I think the routs are pretty much over,” said ESPN analyst Dick Vocale.   “Most of the games from this point on are going to be hard-fought, two-point contests, with very good players being eliminated from the tournament.”

            In Thursday’s action Sal Bando (3) will face Travis Fryman (6) in Cleveland, Todd Zeile (3) will face Don Money (6) in St. Louis, and Toby Harrah (3) will face Harlond Clift (6) in Baltimore.    Mike Lowell, a 9 seed, will take on top-seeded Buddy Bell in Los Angeles in the day’s final matchup.  

            OK, let me explain a little bit more about how the players are compared.  The recessive system, as I said earlier, is a ranking of the players one through 66 in eight different categories.

            This is not our primary method, on which we are relying; this is a sort of primitive or pre-sabermetric ranking method.   You know the system of free agent compensation rankings that baseball uses, that was negotiated into the Basic Agreement during the 1981 strike and is still there today, despite its manifest flaws?   That’s an average rank system.   This is a system like that—better than that, without the horrible glitches that that system has, but essentially the same.

            We rank the players one through 66 in eight categories, which are:

            1.  Isolated Power.    As mentioned earlier, Troy Glaus ranks first among the 66 players in this category, and Bob Aspromonte is last.   Glaus thus gets 66 points in the summary below, and Aspromonte gets 1.

            2.  A primitive Speed Score, which is (3 * triples, plus stolen bases, minus caught stealing, plus .05 times plate appearances) times 1000, divided by plate appearances.    The purpose of the .05 times PA addition is just to avoid dealing with negative numbers.   Most of these players tend to be slow—it’s one of the defining characteristics of the group--but the slowest players in the group are 1. Ken Reitz, 2. Vinny Castilla, 3. Mike Lowell, 4. Ray Knight, and 5. Todd Zeile. 

             3.  Batting Average.    Freddy Lindstrom has the highest batting average in the group of 66 players, and Clete Boyer the lowest.

            Of course, were we actually relying on the average rank system to evaluate the players, rather than merely using it to compare the players and explain the results, then we would have to park-adjust and era-adjust the things like Batting Average and Isolated Power.   This would be messy and time-consuming.   But since we are not actually relying on the numbers anyway, there is no real reason to make those adjustments.

            4.  Plate Discipline.  Just walks per plate appearance.   Harlond Clift ranks first among the 66 players in this category, with 155 walks per 1000 plate appearances, and Jerry Denny ranks last, with 34. 

            5.  Career Length.   Based on Career Plate Appearances.   Brooks Robinson ranks first in this area, while Tom Brookens ranks last. 

            6.   Defense.   Based on career Defensive Winning Percentage, from the Win Shares system.   Of the 20 best defensive third basemen in the tournament, 16 are still alive, the exceptions being Clete Boyer, Jeff Cirillo, David Bell and Don Hoak.    Of the 20 worst defensive players among the 66, 16 have been eliminated, the exceptions being Toby Harrah, Carney Lansford, Todd Zeile and Chipper Jones.

            7.  Awards.   I set up a simple system, giving players 10 points if they were in the Hall of Fame, 5 points for winning an MVP Award, 3 points for winning a Gold Glove, 2 points for appearing in an All-Star game, and 1 point for Rookie of the Year. 

            Brooks Robinson had 92 “Award Points”; no one else in the group had even half as many.   Ken Boyer, although not in the Hall of Fame, was second in this category with 45.

            Somebody posted a comment arguing that it was inappropriate to consider Awards in a comparison like this.   I think that’s dead wrong, and I’ll explain why another time.  In theory, I would like to consider and give some weight to awards.  However, the reality is that we couldn’t actually consider them here, because there would be such a “time line inequity” involved in so doing.    There are no MVP Awards before 1912 and very few before 1931, no Rookie of the Year Awards until 1947, no Gold Gloves until 1957, no All-Star games until the 1930s.   There are a lot of players who have “Award totals” of zero.   I ranked the players who had award totals of zero in inverse order of their games played.   The more games you played without winning an award, the lower you rank.    But, of course, we’re not REALLY going to low-rate Harry Steinfeldt or Billy Nash because he didn’t win awards that didn’t even exist when he was playing.   It’s just something to look at.

            8.   Team Success.   Ranked in order of team success percentage, of course.  I ran the data on this yesterday. 

            To this point, 34 players have been eliminated from the tournament.   This is how those 34 players rate in the Category Rankings comparison.   Again, the Category Rankings really have nothing directly to do with who is eliminated—but of the 20 players with the lowest Category Rankings, 16 were eliminated in the first round.   The four exceptions are Buddy Bell, Don Money, Willie Kamm and Harlond Clift.