September 24, 2010

            We’ll start by doing the tournament overview, which we probably should have been doing all along.   There are now 28 players left in the tournament; after today there will be 24.

Baltimore

Cleveland

St. Louis

Los Angeles

Bando 62, Fryman 61

            Sal Bando overcame a 14-5 deficit in hitting for average with plate discipline and team success, and edged past Travis Fryman into the third round, 62-61.

            Fryman out-hit Bando .274 to .254, and, while some of this was a difference in their eras, some of it wasn’t; the norm for a third baseman in Bando’s era was .254, in Fryman’s, .263.   Bando, however, walked as many as 118 times a year, giving him a .352 to .336 edge in on base percentage and an 11 to 5 advantage in plate discipline, although Fryman also walked as many as 77 times in a season.   The advantage in plate discipline gave Bando a 30-29 edge at halftime, and the two men played even over the second half. 

            Travis Fryman was a good defensive third baseman who drove in 90+ runs seven times.   That’s a good player.

Travis Fryman—Won and Lost Contributions

Zeile 58, Money 56 (OT)

            A contest of Zeal vs. Money sounds like a moral debate, doesn’t it?   It was actually Zeile vs. Money, and Zeile won it in overtime, 58-56.

            As I explained earlier, what is actually meant by “overtime” here is that the player who wins the contest by Win Shares and Loss Shares did not win it by the recessive analysis, which is Category Rankings.   By Category Rankings Money would have beaten Zeile handily, 261 to 219.

            Someday, after Dick Allen is elected to the Hall of Fame, Don Money will be the answer to a trivia question:  Who played third base for the Phillies between Dick Allen and Mike Schmidt?   Allen came up as a third baseman, and played third for the Phillies from 1964 to 1967, although his defense at third base was erratic.  In ’68 the Phillies third baseman was Tony Taylor, who was an older player who had lost his second base job to Cookie Rojas, and then late in ’68 Money came up.  Money played shortstop in ’69, moved to third base in ’70, and moved to Milwaukee when the Phillies brought up Mike Schmidt. 

            Another trivia question;  How many players can you name who held the same record in both leagues?   I know of three:

• Mike Marshall held the record for Games Pitched in both leagues, and I believe still does (90 in the American League, 106 in the National).
• Bill Buckner at one time held the record for assists by a first baseman in both leagues (161, National League, 1983, and 184, American League, 1985.   In fact, at one time Buckner ranked one and two in both leagues.  He has since been beaten in the National League by Mark Grace.)
• Don Money at one time held the record for fewest errors in a season at third base (150 or more games)—10 in the National League (1972), 5 in the American (1974).  

            To be honest, it is very unclear—totally unclear—who was actually a better player, Money or Zeile.   Money has a higher “Batting” Winning Percentage, and he has a higher “Fielding” Winning Percentage.    Zeile had a substantially longer career.  Suppose that you compare two players:  Player A has a won-lost record of 100-100; Player B has a won-lost record of 110-120.    They are the same, except that B has 10 more wins, 20 more losses.   Is 10-20 a “positive’ contribution or a negative one?

            It depends on what you think the replacement level is.   If you think the replacement level is .200, then 10-20 is a small positive, since the player is better than his replacement would be.   If you think the replacement level is .400, then “A” is better than “B”.   Since replacement levels in real-world situations vary widely—Philadelphia, after all, replaced Don Money with Mike Schmidt, and Milwaukee replaced him with Sal Bando—since replacement levels vary widely, it is impossible to say exactly what the appropriate replacement level should be.

            I am using a system which, in essence, targets the replacement level at .250.   .250 is pretty low.   We shouldn’t ASSUME that the real-life replacement level is as low as .250, although sometimes it is; after all, there are whole teams of .250 players.   Zeile’s “marginal winning percentage”, above Money’s contributions, is .382.   I don’t know whether that’s a positive or a negative, but the system I have set up treats it as a positive, and I don’t have any strong feelings about it, so I will accept it as an advantage for Zeile.  Thus eliminating Money. 

Don Money—Won and Lost Contributions

Toby 69, Harlond 67 (OT)

            Toby Harrah overcame a 17-5 deficit in the “defense” category to defeat Harlond Clift in overtime, 69-67.

            Harlond Clift was one of the wonder boys of early sabermetrics.  Naïve analysis—the evaluation of players that preceded organized research—leaned heavily on three points:  batting average, magic numbers, and playing for the glamour teams.   A “star” player, before sabermetrics, was basically anybody who hit .300 and played in the World Series a few times, and hit some magic numbers—2000 hits, 100 runs scored in a season, 200 hits, 20 homers.   Fielding was evaluated by visual reference, and by fielding percentage.   Fred Lindstrom.   High batting average, played in New York, played on championship teams, had 230 hits in a season twice, had good fielding percentages.   That’s a star.   Bobby Richardson.

            When sabermetrics developed and we began to ask basic questions like “Why do teams win?”, “What are the characteristics of winning teams?” and “How valuable is batting average, really?”, we developed our own ideas about who was good and who wasn’t.   Harlond Clift was, so to speak, the anti-Fred Lindstrom.   He played the same position as Lindstrom and sort of in the same era, a little later, but he had the opposite virtues:   He walked a lot and hit for power rather than hitting for average, his fielding percentages were ordinary but his range numbers extremely good.   In 1937 he had 405 assists and 50 double plays—both major league records at the time, both broken by Graig Nettles in 1971, but both still very near to the top of the all-time list.  But since he had played for terrible teams in small cities, basically nobody remembered him, and after about 1955 one could say that nobody had ever heard of him.

            He was, then “our” guy, our player—Clift and Dolph Camilli and Bob Allison and Roy Cullenbine and Maxie Bishop and Dick McAuliffe; these were the players who stepped forward from the caverns of history to claim the honors they had been unjustly denied while they played.   Of course, the story is always a little more complicated than that.   While Clift had had big numbers, he had done so in a league with very high ERAs and in hitters’ parks.   While his range numbers were extremely good, one has to remember that, on a team like the St. Louis Browns, there are a lot of balls in play.

            So many players have come and gone since then that the early heroes no longer seem quite as important.   We’ve had Mike Schmidt and Rickey Henderson and so many others, sabermetric-type players who WERE recognized in their own time.   But we have also moved the ball, since the mid-1970s, to where we are able to deal with these other issues better, and I would like to assert again:  Harlond Clift was a really good player.   We know now, courtesy of Retrosheet, that Harlond Clift in his career hit .272 at home, and .272 on the road, 88 homers at home, 90 on the road, .436 slugging at home, .442 on the road.   He did play in hitter’s parks, yes, but. . .it’s a 4 or 5% adjustment in some years, less in others.

            You’ll probably laugh at this argument, but it’s hard to believe how important it used to be.   If Bobby Richardson was “really” as bad a hitter as we said he was, the experts would demand to know, then why did the Yankees win?  If Harlond Clift was really as good as we said he was, why did he play for teams that lost a hundred games a year.  Didn’t the fact that Bobby Richardson played for good teams and Harlond Clift played for bad teams “prove” that Richardson was really a “winning” player?

            Well, think about it.   Harlond Clift in his best year (1937) had a won-lost contribution of 23-8, but his team finished 46-108.   46-108 is 138 Win Shares, 324 Loss Shares, a .299 winning percentage.   If you take Clift out of it, that just means that his teammates were 115-316, a .266 Winning Percentage.   There’s nothing really notable about that; all it means is that Clift had a lot of teammates who were not good.

            The fallacy of that argument, that the traditionalists used to make and probably still do if you don’t kick them once in awhile, is this:  that it pretends that they were making an effort to “consider” winning, that they were making an effort to force everything to add up the way it should, when it reality they (the traditionalists) were making absolutely no effort to understand how the pieces added up; it was only us who were doing that.   We were the ones who insisted that everything had to add up.

            Traded to Washington during World War II, Clift had a serious case of the mumps and an accident with a horse, limiting his contributions to the Senators’ pursuit of the pennant in 1945.   Well. . .maybe; that’s the company line.   In 1945 the Senators missed the American League pennant by one and a half games, while Clift hit just .211 with 8 homers and 53 RBI, far distant numbers from what he had done in St. Louis, where he had driven in 118 twice in a row.

            But look again.  The 1945 Washington Senators hit only one home run in their home park all season.   As a team.   They hit 27 homers that year, 26 on the road.   Their pitching staff gave up only 6 home runs at home (36 on the road).   You can’t really fault Clift for not hitting home runs in a place where there were no home runs.  With 76 walks for that season in 119 games, Clift’s won-lost contribution for that season is 14-10, despite the very poor triple crown stats.

            That’s actually very normal for a 32-year-old player of Clift’s skill. . .22-7 at age 25, 21-11 at age 29, 14-10 at age 32. . .it’s a normal progression.   It only looks abnormal because we’re contrasting what Clift did in a hitter’s park in a league that hit .281 (1937 and 1938) with what he later did in a very extreme pitcher’s park in a league that hit .255 (1945). 

            Well, you can’t hit .211 and hold your job. ..couldn’t then, anyway.   Probably still couldn’t.  Clift—who walked more often than any other player in this tournament—handed off the Washington third base job to a 19-year-old player who walked even more than he did:  Ed Yost.   I always wonder whether that is just a coincidence, or whether Clift, working with a young players as veterans often do, stressed to him the importance of getting on base any way he could.  And, while Clift walked more than any other third baseman in this study, it’s not a big advantage for him against Harrah, because Harrah also had five seasons with more than 90 walks, with a career high of 113.  

            Against Freddy Lindstrom; that’s another story.   We have Clift with an offensive won-lost contribution of 145-95 (.604); Lindstrom at 134-98 (.577).  We have Clift with a defensive won-lost contribution of 54-34 (.614); Lindstrom of 48-44 (.520).   Offense and defense together, that ‘s 199-129 for our guy, 182-142 for the one they put in Cooperstown.

Harlond Clift—Won and Lost Contributions

Buddy Bell 60, Mike Lowell 58 (OT)

            Buddy Bell overcame a 14-5 power disadvantage against Mike Lowell, defeating Mike Lowell 60-58 in overtime with a series of small advantages.

            The Red Sox this season have two Brooks Robinson-model third basemen, Lowell and Adrian Beltre.    It is impossible to imagine two players who “scan” more similarly—that is, they do the same things well and have similar numbers—but who look and play more differently.   These two guys, if you watch them play, just have nothing in common in the way they approach the game.

            Mike Lowell had, I am quite certain, the best hands and wrists that I have ever seen on an athlete, and the highest level of confidence in his hands and wrists.    He played with an absolute economy of motion, other than in his hands.   He snared balls out of the air by slipping them into his glove, the rest of his body balanced and relaxed.   His ability to catch a line drive hit near him at third was extraordinary.   He fielded bad hops as if it was nothing; he could wait back on the big hop because he knew that he could react to it no matter whether it was a true hop or whether it wasn’t.   He could charge balls in front of him with immense confidence for the same reason; he didn’t need a true hop.   He could be charging a ground ball, get a bad hop, and unless you were watching closely you would never know it was a bad hop.   He made all the adjustments he needed to make between his elbows and his fingertips, quickly and automatically, moving nothing without need.

            He threw the same way, snapping off perfect throws effortlessly with his wrists, his feet at rest, his legs quiet, his torso hardly moving, his shoulders shifting a little, zinging the ball across the infield with no evidence of torque.   He hit the same way, with his feet at rest, his shoulders quiet, his waist and butt scarcely moving, generating stunning power with a quick motion that never seemed to get closer to his navel than his elbows.

            Beltre, of course, is the exact opposite; every muscle in his body is involved in every action.   Beltre hits with his whole body; he throws with his whole body.  Beltre’s swings pull him down to one knee; his throws are like javelin launches.   A line drive would simply disappear into Lowell’s glove; you were never quite sure he had it until he pulled it out and flipped it to the shortstop.    Beltre will knock the line drive down, wrestle it into submission, and gun it to first base.    Lowell played with fantastic efficiency; Beltre, although he is having as good a year as Lowell had in 2007 or better, seems to be trying to expend as much energy as possible on every play.    Beltre is super-intense; Lowell was super-calm.   Beltre plays with a perpetual urgency, a self-imposed desperation.  Lowell. . .I am not in any way suggesting he didn’t hustle. . .but Lowell played within himself, relaxed and easy.  Beltre chases a foul ball as if it was not only important for him to get there, but important for him to get there early.   Beltre is always on the very edge of being out of control; Lowell was just hanging out, letting the game come to him.

            Whether one of them is better than the other. . .well, it’s pretty close.   They came up at the same time, but Beltre is several years younger, so he probably will move ahead.  They are both true Brooks Robinson types, both .270-.280 hitters with medium-range power and good defense; Beltre, of course, is faster but not truly fast.   It just seems amazing to me that two players could be so totally different, and yet get results that are so much the same.  

Mike Lowell—Won and Lost Contributions

            The chart below compares the 42 players who have now been eliminated from the tournament, and ranks them 1 through 42:

            As you can see, Ken Boyer is by far the best player eliminated from the tournament so far.   Boyer clears the first and second hurdles to be considered as a viable Hall of Famer.   No one else eliminated so far clears even the first.