September 25, 2010

            There are now 24 players left in the tournament; after today there will be 20.   These are the players remaining, and the schedule:

Baltimore Regional

Cleveland Regional

St. Louis Regional

Los Angeles Regional

Ron Santo 92, Willie Jones 76

            Ron Santo used a 20-9 margin in “Hitting for Average” to build a solid lead over 1950s Philadelphia third baseman Willie Jones, gliding to a relatively easy win:

            Jones and Santo were similar players.   It is the theory of the tournament that all of these guys are pretty similar, but Jones and Santo were more than usually similar, distinguished mostly by the fact that Santo was a .280 hitter and Jones was a .260 hitter.   They were both good third basemen with good on-base percentages.

            After I became a baseball fan in 1960, there were three generations of players in my mind.    There were the active players, whose records were still changing and who appeared in the annual guides and in the box scores and who had new baseball cards every spring.   There were the “old” players like Jimmie Dykes and Bob Elliott and Mel Harder and Phil Rizzuto.  These guys no longer played, but they were still around; they were coaches or managers or broadcasters.   Stories were still told about them, and they got interviewed on the radio before the games, and my brother-in-law had old baseball cards of them, so I understood that they had played not all that long ago.

            There were, finally, the “ancients”. . .what I now think of as the ancients.   The ancients were long gone before I became a baseball fan.    When I became a baseball fan Honus Wagner had been retired for only 43 years, Ty Cobb for 32 years, but it might as well have been a thousand.   I never knew anyone who had seen these men play, and I don’t know if I would have believed it if someone claimed to have (although now that I think about it my uncle had seen Pete Alexander play, as a part of the House of David team.)   Hack Wilson was an ancient, and Chuck Klein and even DiMaggio, although DiMaggio was still around, but he was no longer a part of the game.  He had passed into myth.

            Now, Mickey Mantle has been gone as long as Honus Wagner had been gone in 1960, but he still seems present to me, in some sense indistinguishable from the age of Jason Heyward.   I have been a baseball fan for about 1/40^th of the years since the time of Christ or Julius Caesar; not quite 1/40^th, but I will be there in months.  The lines that were drawn in my childhood are still there; I have trouble remembering, from day to day, that to young people now Mickey Mantle is as distant as Honus Wagner was to me, Willie Mays more distant than was Ty Cobb or Tris Speaker, Sandy Koufax more distant by a decade than was Walter Johnson.

            A hundred years ago there was a player named Charlie Hickman, who appeared in some of the old encyclopedias as “Piano Legs” Hickman.   Apparently he had a large mid-section and short, thin legs.  Of course, he was never really called Piano Legs Hickman; it was just a nickname that was used once or twice, and somebody saw it and thought it was cute, and it wound up in the Encyclopedias.

            Later there was a kind of an effort to take the name out of the encyclopedias, to which I was opposed, thinking “what’s your problem with a colorful name?”  Now, with Jones, I see it the other way.   Willie Jones was never called “Puddin’ Head” Jones, more than about twice; it was just something that made it into a guide somewhere, and made the leap then into modern encyclopedias.   It seems to me a distortion, to call a solid, workmanlike player by a silly nickname by which he was never actually known.

            It’s a difference of relatability.   Piano Legs Hickman was an ancient; I accept a cartoon version of him because the cartoon is as deep and layered as any other image of him that I have.   Willie Jones is real to me; he was almost gone before me, but I still relate to him as a living, breathing presence on the field.

Willie Jones—Won and Lost Contributions

Gary Gaetti 62, Edgardo Alfonzo 61

            Overcoming a 30-point deficit in batting average with better defense and a longer career, number one seed Gary Gaetti squeaked by Edgardo Alfonzo into the third round of the Brooks Robinson Invitational Tournament. 

            Alfonzo, a .300 hitter in 1997, 1999, 2000 and 2002, was a very good player for six years, hitting for high averages with power and as many as 95 walks in a season.    At his best, Alfonzo was not only a better player than Gaetti, he was much better.   Alfonzo had four seasons better than Gaetti’s best season, and Alfonzo would have killed Gaetti on a “peak value” comparison.

            But Gaetti’s career was unusually long, given his level of performance, and Alfonzo’s was unusually short.  It’s just hard to rate a player who has a 1500-game career ahead of a player who has a 2500-game career.

Edgardo Alfonzo—Won and Lost Contributions

Billy Nash 68, Jimmie Dykes 67 (OT)

            In a tournament that desperately needed an upset, 7^th-seeded Billy Nash, a 19^th century player that we might struggle to describe as a star, has upset and ousted from the tournament 2^nd-seeded Jimmie Dykes.

            Jimmie Dykes was taken under his wing as a very young man by Connie Mack.   A good high school baseball player, Mack earned an invitation to a tryout at Shibe Park, at which—at least as he recalled it in his biography, You Can’t Steal First Base—he lost his temper and stalked off the field.   Mack invited Dykes to his house, and offered him a contract.

Mack, having sold off his stars in 1914 and being left with very terrible teams, was looking for young men that he could build up into a championship team.   Dykes, 21 years old when he came to the A’s after a year in the minors, was one of the first that he found—Dykes, Cy Perkins and Eddie Rommel, but Perkins and Rommel had had their best years before the A’s finally won in 1929.     There was a kind of relationship between player and manager that has not existed since Mack and McGraw left the game, nor is it even really clear that anyone other than Mack and McGraw ever did this, although the relationship between Weaver and Cal Ripken was almost the same.   Connie Mack personally trained Jimmie Dykes—not through surrogates, not through coaches, not through minor league managers (although Dykes did play one year in the minors.)   There were no organized “farm systems” in 1918, but the practice of “farming out” young players for training in the minors was well established even before 1918, and it was called farming out even then.    Teams would find a young player they liked and would sell him to a minor league team under an arrangement in which they would have the first option to re-purchase him two or three years later. . . an “option” arrangement.   We still use the term, although the modern arrangement is totally different.   But in 1918, as there was no farm system, the major league manager had no control of and really no contact with a player that he had farmed out.   The minor league team would decide whether he was a third baseman or a second baseman or a shortstop, according to their own needs.   The minor league manager would “train” the player, or—more often—would allow the player to sink or swim.

            Mack and McGraw would sometimes say “No, I don’t want to do that; I’m going to train this young man myself.  I like this young man; he doesn’t know how to play baseball at this level, but I can teach him, and I don’t want to trust somebody else to do that.”   McGraw did this with Lindstrom and Ross Youngs and Frisch and Fred Snodgrass and Mel Ott and many others; Mack did the same with Dykes and Jimmie Foxx and others.   It’s not clear to me that anyone else ever did this at all, in part because it was difficult for any other manager to take a long-range view.   Managers had about the same turnover rate then that they do now.   If a manager had a bad year or certainly if he had two bad years, he got fired.   He wasn’t going to worry about training some 19-year-old who might be able to help him in four years.    Only Mack and McGraw had the job security that enabled them to do this.

            Dykes could be seen as an American League Frankie Frisch.   Frisch joined John McGraw in 1919, out of Fordham, as an infielder-without-portfolio; he was an infielder, but it was unclear whether he was a second baseman or a third baseman or a shortstop.    Dykes joined Connie Mack in 1918 in the same kind of role.   Dykes was in the majors from a very early age, and, as he had been on the team for years before they added Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove and the other stars, he was the natural leader of that team; he was the guy who was there first, who knew Connie Mack best, had been around long enough to show the others the ropes.   He played with Mack for 15 years, finally was sold off when the Depression left Mack short of funds, played another seven years with the White Sox, and returned to Philadelphia as a coach, and Connie Mack’s right-hand man.    Although Mack continued to “manage” the A’s, in theory, until 1950, when he was 88 years old, he managed the team the last five years the way Joe Paterno “coaches” Penn State.   It was really Dykes who was doing 90% of the work and making most of the decisions, and, when Mack finally retired, Dykes officially became the manager.

            Returning to a theme from the Willie Jones comment, Dykes was “present” in the game in 1960, even though he had come to the majors just one year after Honus Wagner had left.   Dykes managed Cleveland in 1961.   If the history of baseball is a tapestry, Dykes was one of the very long threads that held it all together.   Also, returning to another theme from the Willie Jones comment, how did “Jimmie” Dykes get to be “Jimmy” Dykes?    I mean. . .the man wrote a book.   On the cover of the book it says “Jimmie” Dykes.   Isn’t that a pretty definitive reference as to how his name should be spelled?   How did we throw that away, and decide that he was “Jimmy”?

            Dykes was just an average hitter for his era; his batting average, slugging percentage and on-base percentage were all near the league norms for the time that he played.  He hit 108 homers in his career—75 in his home parks, 33 on the road.  He did gradually increase his on-base percentages so that, in the era when the A’s were a great team (1929-1931), his on-base percentages were over .400, and he was a very good player at that time—not a great player, a very good one, at his best.   Over the course of his long career, he wasn’t a lot better than an average player. 

            His Team Success Percentage, .707, was very, very high for a player with such a long career.   As the A’s had very low expectations at the time that Dykes joined them, they could meet or exceed expectations, as a team, with modest accomplishments.   They very consistently did make modest strides forward, until they had gone from the worst team in baseball to the best.   Shortly after the A’s crested Dykes was sold to Chicago, and the White Sox also made steady strides forward while Dykes was a regular there.  In his 22 years in the majors he played for 17 teams that met or exceeded their expectations for the season.

Jimmie Dykes—Won and Lost Contributions

Tim Wallach 82, Adrian Beltre 77

            Adrian Beltre’s 2004 season, when he hit 48 homers for Los Angeles, is the second-best season by any player in this tournament, behind only Harry Steinfeldt in 1906, which is a kind of a fluke evaluation because the Cubs’ 116-36 record stresses the Win Shares/Loss Shares system:

            Brooks Robinson’s MVP season in 1964 actually ranks as the 19^th best season in the group, while Ken Boyer’s MVP campaign the same year rings in at 65^th. 

            Two questions: 

            1)  Could Beltre, if he continues to play well, pass Wallach on this list before he retires?, and

            2)  Does Beltre have any chance to have a Hall of Fame career?

            Answers:

            1)  Certainly,

            2)  Very little.

            Beltre is a .550 player in his career.   A .550 player is not ordinarily a Hall of Famer; a .600 player is a Hall of Famer.   A .600 player is not a .600 player every year; he’s a .700-.800 player in his good years and a .400-.500 player on the way up and the way down.

            Beltre’s been a .700 player this year.   If he continues to be a .700 player over the next three or four years, then he could emerge as a Hall of Fame candidate.   There have been some players who had their prime seasons, the seasons that made them a Hall of Famer, at ages 31-34, rather than 25-29, but it is not at all common.  Beltre has a “Win Share Value” of 219.  He would need to push that, to be a Hall of Famer, to 350.  That’s a long, long distance away.

Adrian Beltre—Won and Lost Contributions

Explanation of the Points

            Ok, we’re nearing the end of this puppy, so let me explain how the “points” in the games are actually determined.   The points, as I explained earlier, are actually derived from the “Category Rankings” method which is the recessive comparison system.    Also, as I explained earlier, I ranked the players 1 through 66 in eight categories, which are the eight categories that are used to compare each and every set of players.

            The first thing I do, to get a “Score” for the “Basketball Game”, is to determine whether the player who does better in the category rankings is the player who should win—that is, the player who, in my best judgment, was actually a better player.   In this case, Tim Wallach does better than Adrian Beltre in both Category Rankings and Wins and Losses, so. . .we’re good to go.   We can use the Category Rankings to determine the score, as we can more than 80% of the time.

            These are the actual category rankings for these two players in the eight categories:

            In other words, Tim Wallach ranks 26^th among the 66 players in the group in “power”, so he is ahead of 40 other players, so he gets 41 points in this category.   Adrian Beltre has more power, so he gets more points.    Adding up the points for all eight categories, we have 322 points for Wallach, 299 for Beltre. 

            The next question we ask is how many points should be scored in the contest, the “game”.   We determine the number of points that will be scored in a contest by a formula, which is 105, plus 80 times a random number.   In this case the random number was .6802; 80 times that is 54, plus 105 is 159; 159 points will be scored in the game.  The maximum points for the two players in a game under this formula is 185; there may have been an early game in which more points than that were scored, but I changed the formula a few days into the tournament.

            The next thing we have to determine is how many of those 159 points will be scored by the winning player, who in this case is Tim Wallach.   In the chart above we had 322 points for Wallach, 299 for Beltre.   We add 200 to each of those, making 522 for Wallach, 499 for Beltre.   The ratio of points scored in the game will be 522 to 499, plus one extra for Wallach (to avoid having ties).   522 / (522 + 499) * 159 + 1 = 82, so Wallach will score 82 points.   That leaves 77 points for Beltre, so the score of the game will be 82-77.

            You can probably see intuitively why I added the 200 points to each total before determining the score, but I’ll explain it anyway.   Without the 200 points, the scores would be too lop-sided to resemble real basketball games.    Without the 200 points, Tim Wallach would have defeated Bob Aspromonte in the first round, 144 to 37.    Adding in the “ballast” made it 118 to 63—still a lop-sided game, obviously, but there are basketball games like that.   144 to 37 is not a real basketball score in any tournament you are likely to take an interest in.

            OK, Wallach is going to defeat Beltre, 82 to 77.  Now we have to allocate those points to the eight categories that we are using to explain and justify the results.   First, we assign a “weight” to each of the eight categories, which are as follows:

            There are 25 points for “Power”, and Adrian Beltre wins the Power Category 52-41 (above), so Beltre wins those 25 points by a 52-41 ratio.   A 52-41 ratio in 25 points is 13.98 for Beltre, 11.02 for Wallach.    This produces the following values for these eight categories;

            Except that, when you add that up, it doesn’t add up to 82-77 for Wallach.   It actually adds up to 71-69 for Beltre. . .70.676 for Beltre, 69.324 for Wallach.

            To make it 82-77, Wallach, we multiply all of Wallach’s scores by 82 divided by 69.324, and all of Beltre’s by 77 divided by 70.676.    That makes the following:

            Then we convert those into integers:

            And we have a point-by-point comparison of the player’s skills, that adds up to look like a basketball game.

            It can happen that there is a rounding error that changes the score of the game, but I’m not going to worry about that unless it causes a tie or causes the wrong player to win.  I’ll go with the score at the end of the process, not the score that was intended.  Of course, there are some distortions in the process, and it can happen—and occasionally does—that a player who hits .262 winds up beating a player who hits .270 in the “Batting Average” category, 14 to 12.   When I spot something like that, I intervene in the process to fix it, but sometimes I probably don’t spot it, and I’m not really going to worry about it.   The system is what it is; you can accept it or you can dismiss the whole thing as silly; that’s up to you.