Bill once noted that the difference between sportswriters and sabermetrics is that a sportswriter starts their analysis with a position on the issue, while a sabermetrician starts with the question itself.
I’ve tried to hold to that ethos. I have tried, for the most part, to pursue the question instead of picking a corner and defending it to the death. I believe that the second mode of thinking is the better, more righteous path. I believe that true knowledge comes by asking questions, not by shouting declaratives.
You know where this is going, don’t you?
I’m dumping that ethos, just this once. For this article, that spirit of noble questioning is getting the boot. We’re taking a break, me and ‘the eternal question.’ Just for once, I'm going full sportswriter. I’m breaking Bill’s cardinal rule and starting with a position, and I’m going to defend that position as loudly as I can.
Jorge Posada should be in the Hall-of-Fame.
He is not a borderline candidate. He is not a ‘maybe.’ He is absolutely, unquestionably qualified to get a plaque in Cooperstown, and anyone who disagrees with this is an idiot.
Jorge Posada. Hall-of-Famer.
* * *
Just a brief aside before we get to the subject: I’ve decided to abandon the BJOL HOF voting that we’ve been running for a few years. I’m sure a few of you have been wondering when that would get posted, so I thought I’d offer some comments on why I’m giving that up.
Part of the reason I set that project up…maybe the main reason…was because I knew that the BBWAA ballot was going to be insanely crowded in the coming years, and I just didn’t want to look at it year after year. I knew that the BJOL readers were in agreement about Tim Raines and Jeff Bagwell, and I didn’t want us to have to talk about them because those were the players that the BBWAA were talking about. I wanted us to have our own conversation.
While I enjoyed the voting, I don’t think I successfully encouraged a conversation to take place. That’s partially a formatting think, and partially because of my own inability to provide alternative spaces where those conversations could occur. In the article’s comments, people just posted their ballots, which was great, but we didn’t really get a conversation started.
At about the same time I started the BJOL HOF, one of the early readers on the site, Bob Gregory, was doing his own parallel Hall-of-Fame project…he was calling his project The Gallery of Renown.
I think, in retrospect, that the outline of his project was better than mine. Certainly, the GOR was a lot more carefully planned: my project was just a lark that went on for a bunch of years. More importantly, Bob’s project did a better job of fostering conversations than mine did. Partially, this was because Bob put a lot of effort into generating those conversations: I can remember many weeks, as the GOR got off the ground, when the message board would be crowded with fifteen ‘GOR’ articles with Bob’s name in the by-line.
Bob Gregory passed away this year. I didn’t have the fortune of meeting him in person, but I knew him from our many conversations over on the message boards of the site. He was a passionate baseball fan and a generous contributor to our community. He was also a man of remarkable courage and grace, and someone whose writing enriched my life. I’m sorry that he is no longer with us. I certainly miss his voice.
The Gallery of Renown was Bob’s pet project, and I’m very pleased that Terry (Ventboys) has taken over the project in Bob’s memory. So has Daniel. I’d like to be on board with that effort: I think it’s a fitting way to honor a man who gave a lot to this site, and I don’t want my own smaller endeavor to get in the way of it. I’m going to participate in the GOR, and I encourage all of you to do the same.
Besides, the Gallery of Renown is a better name than the BJOL HOF.
* * *
Okay….back to the backstops.
Do me a favor: forget everything I posted in that opening paragraph. Ignore the title of the article, too. Just pretend that you know nothing about what I’m talking about. Clear your mind.
We’re going to look at two players.
You have no idea who these players are, so in the interest of anonymity I’ll call them ‘George’ and ‘Will’. You can make a political pundit out of that name…Will George. Let’s give him glasses. I bet he likes baseball.
Let’s look at Will and George. We’ll just look at them as hitters, and ignore all the other pesky stuff.
|
Name
|
G
|
PA
|
|
Will
|
162
|
620
|
|
George
|
162
|
628
|
Oh…I should clarify how we’re looking at these two men. We’re not going to look at career numbers. We’re going to look at these guys on a per-162 game basis. Their careers, shortened to a single-season’s performance.
We’re not doing this, incidentally, to cover up some sizeable gap in the careers of these two men. Both had careers of the same duration: one guy player 1828 games, and the other guy played 1882 game. The same integers, with a couple at the back switched around. It’s just a bit easier to see them this way.
PA stands for plate appearances, not personal assistants. That would be a lot of personal assistants.
|
Name
|
R
|
RBI
|
|
Will
|
75
|
98
|
|
George
|
77
|
91
|
You hate these stats. I know you hate them. I don’t care. They’re even.
Hey….you know what else is even? The context that we’re looking at these two players. These aren’t their real batting stats: they are each player’s stats adjusted to a neutral run context. The always wonderful Baseball-Reference allows you to adjust a player’s career numbers to a neutral era, so that’s what we’re doing.
So what you’re looking at aren’t the actual stats of these two players, but their stats adjusted to a neutral context. Just want to point that out.
|
Name
|
Hits
|
|
Will
|
168
|
|
George
|
144
|
Ah…we get a gap between them! Our man Will collected 24 more hits a year than George. That’s a big difference. Let’s see where the gap is:
|
Name
|
2B
|
3B
|
HR
|
|
Will
|
29
|
6
|
17
|
|
George
|
33
|
1
|
24
|
It’s not a gap in extra-base hits. George actually averaged a few more extra-base hits than Will, 58 to 52. So it’s gotta be the singles. Will should have a big edge in singles.
|
Name
|
1B
|
|
Will
|
116
|
|
George
|
86
|
That is a big difference. Thirty singles, even over a full season, is a lot. It correlates to about a thirty-point gap in batting average. The only way George can catch up to Will is for George to draw a bunch more walks…
|
Name
|
1B
|
BB
|
|
Will
|
116
|
58
|
|
George
|
86
|
81
|
…which he does. Will hits more singles, but George gets more extra-base hits and draws more walks.
Which means that their rate stats look alarmingly similar:
|
Name
|
BA
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
OPS
|
|
Will
|
.299
|
.368
|
.464
|
.832
|
|
George
|
.268
|
.368
|
.465
|
.833
|
Will has a gaudy batting average, but when you factor in walks and a few more extra-base hits, you’re looking at two equivalent hitters.
You have no idea who they are, right?
‘George’ is Jorge Posada. ‘Will’ is Bill Dickey.
* * *
You can do this with a lot of players. You can take Juan Pierre and jumble up his stats enough, and say that he looks like Ty Cobb. You can be really selective about the numbers, and if you work at it enough, you can show that Jack Cust was an equivalent hitter to Jack Clark, who was about as good as Will Clark.
But I didn’t have to search around looking through a lot of players to find one that fits. And I didn’t have to jumble the numbers any further than by just neutralizing them to adjust for the differences between 1930’s baseball and 2000’s baseball. All I did was think, for a second, which played in baseball’s long history was an obvious comparable to Jorge Posada. The first player I thought of was Bill Dickey.
It’s obvious why I thought of Bill Dickey first:
- Both men were career catchers. That’s reason #1. Catchers are just different than everyone else, and they just cannot be paralleled to guys at other positions.
- Both men were career Yankees.
- Both men won tons of baseball games. Bill Dickey played in eight World Series, winning seven. Posada, in the Divisional/Wild Card era, played in five World Series, winning three.
- Both men were overshadowed by better, fancier teammates…Dickey lagged behind Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, while Posada had Jeter and Rivera, along with a succession of superstars rolling into the Yankees clubhouse.
- Both men played under HOF managers named ‘Joe.’ I don’t know that that matters too much, but it is a weird coincidence.
- Both men were overshadowed at their position. Dickey rated behind Cochrane and Hartnett, while Dickey never quite matched Mike Piazza’s ludicrous bat, or Ivan Rodriguez’s great defense.
- Neither player ever really dominated their position. Dickey was a .300 hitter, but he was a .300 in an era of extremely high offenses. He never won a batting title, or came all that close. Posada hit a few dingers, but a lot of guys were hitting dingers in his heyday…he didn’t stand out.
Fun aside: while Dickey got a lot more MVP votes than Posada (finishing a distant 2nd on the 1936 ballot), Posada actually came a lot closer to winning an MVP: he finished 3rd in the 2003 vote, but it was one of those years where the votes were scattered widely: he got 5 first-place votes while the winner (A-Rod) got six. Carlos Delgado received five first-place votes, Ortiz got four, and Shannon Stewart landed on the top of three ballots. Ten guys actually received first-place votes in the AL race that year, and it ended up being something of a toss-up.
Anyway, it turns out that Posada and Dickey, at least as hitters, were more alike than even I assumed they’d be. Though Dickey has bigger numbers, a lot of that inflation is due to the high-scoring era that he played in, and the gaps between him and Posada on the batting average front are balanced out by Posada’s edges in walks and extra-base hits.
This doesn’t tell us that Posada was quite as good as Bill Dickey. The only thing it shows is that our intuitions are sometimes right. Sometimes they can be a shortcut: I didn’t have to start with the question: "What player is most like Jorge Posada," and then run through a billion spreadsheets to get an answer. I could just guess (the very obvious comparable to Posada is Bill Dickey) and check (when adjusted for the differences in eras, they are almost uncannily similar hitters).
Hey…saved me some time.
* * *
I am tempted, here, to post a bunch of numerical columns proving that Jorge Posada wasn’t just a good player, but in fact one of the best players on a team crowded with best players. I am tempted, too, to point out that the WAR metric seems to undervalue catchers, both year-to-year and by career accomplishment, and that Posada, rated against other catchers, does pretty good by the metric.
But I get tired of arguments based on math. It gets old. You want me to tell you why WAR demonstrates Posada’s worthiness? You want to me to tell you what Win Shares says? I’m not interested in doing that.
The reason I’m not interested in doing that is because it is a profoundly narrow way of understanding a complex thing. What is the Hall of Fame? Who does it exist for? Who deserves honor there? What are we meant to celebrate….greatness? What’s ‘greatness’, really?
We’re going to answer those questions with a WAR tally? Really?
Look: we’ve made great strides in our little corner of the baseball universe. We have done tremendous work. But those strides have absolutely narrowed our vision. I think WAR is perhaps the single best analytic measure that’s ever been created in baseball, and I also think that it’s very imperfect. I think that a lot of us who write or think about baseball have been a little too reliant on that brilliant stride forward. It’s a little like using the atomic bomb to regulate world politics…it’s impressive that we’ve invented it, but maybe we should consider diplomacy, too.
I say ‘a lot of us’ are guilty of using WAR like a cudgel. I’m guilty of it. I don’t want you thinking I’m standing on some moral high ground. I’m in the swamp with the rest of you.
My only point is that it blinds us.
In 1934 Lou Gehrig won the Triple Crown. He hit 49 homers and drove in eleventy-billion runs. He had a WAR that would make Mike Trout jealous. That same year, Lefty Gomez won the pitcher’s Triple Crown: he went 26-5 with a 2.33 and 158 strikeouts.
The AL MVP Award went to a catcher who hit two homeruns. Gomez finished 3rd in the vote. Gehrig finished fifth.
We think that's a stupid selection. The current attitude, among those of us in saber-land, is that ‘most valuable’ means ‘the best player.’ Mike Trout is the most valuable player because he’s the best player. Suggesting that ‘value’ is different than ‘quality’ is libel to get you a hundred down-votes on the comments section at FanGraphs.
We’re arguing about consensus on what value means. But what we’re really arguing for is simplicity. We want an easy answer, so we’ve simplified the question. ‘Most valuable’ becomes ‘Best’ because we don’t want to tangle with the many possible interpretations of value. We don’t want to have to consider things that we cannot count. We don’t want to admit to the stuff we don’t know.
I think that the 1934 AL vote is one of the great triumphs of the MVP award. I love that Mickey Cochrane won the MVP over Gehrig. I think that’s brilliant. The voters gave credit to Cochrane’s work as the manager of the Tigers. They gave him credit for mustering his team into the World Series. Mickey Cochrane wasn’t within a country mile of being a better player than Lou Gehrig, but it seems imminently reasonable that the writers viewed him as the more valuable player, even if they were crediting him with things that had nothing to do with playing.
That wouldn’t happen today. Today, the MVP goes to the one guy who leads the league in WAR, or to the one guy who comes close to the lead, and plays on a winning team.
I don’t know that this is any better. I don’t know that we do a better job of thinking broadly about what the MVP means than those writers in 1934. I think, in many ways, that we’re thinking about this less than we should.
* * *
How does this come back to Posada?
Jesus….I don’t know. Do I have to bring everything back to the start? Can’t I just ramble on and then call it a day?
I guess the way it relates is this. The wide-angle view of Jorge Posada’s career is much more compelling than the narrow view, and I’d urge you to consider his career through that wider lens.
The narrow lens is this: Jorge Posada tallied a career WAR of 43.8, which rates him 440th all-time, right next to Amos Otis. On this
year’s BBWAA ballot, Posada ranks 18th in career WAR, below such luminaries as J.D Drew and Mike Cameron. That is not impressive.
The wide lens is this: Jorge Posada was the catcher for the most recent Yankees dynasty. He had fifteen years when he saw significant playing times, and his team made the playoffs fifteen times….every single year. He wasn’t just a catcher: he was one of the best of his era. He couldn’t hit like Piazza, but he was a far better defensive player. He didn’t compare to Ivan Rodriguez behind the dish, but he out-hit Pudge by a wide margin (121 to 106 in OPS+).
It is common, when people talk about Jeter Era Yankees, to discredit the accomplishments of individual players by saying that they got lucky with their teammates. Bernie Williams wasn’t really great…he just had good teammates. Same holds for Posada.
I have never found this a particularly convincing argument. You don’t get to be the catcher or centerfielder for the richest team in baseball by luck: you earn that. And you better keep earning it, or you’ll be replaced. Jorge Posada was good enough to keep his job for a decade and a half: to me that reads like the organization believed he was an integral part of the team’s success.
How much did he really contribute to the success of those teams? I have no idea, and neither do you. Neither does a metric like WAR. WAR measures a player’s contributions with the bat and in the field, and attempts to understand those contributions within the context of other players in the league. That is a tremendous leap forward in our understanding. We can learn a lot from WAR.
But it obviously doesn’t tell us everything. In the case of Jorge Posada, and in the case of catchers in general, I think there are wide swaths of contributions and costs that WAR simply cannot access.
Actual wins matter. This seems like a taboo statement in an era where we care more about a team's Pythagorian W-L record than we do about their actual tally of wins and loses. Wins are the check that brings our far-reaching metrics back in line. If WAR tells us that the Cubs were the best team in baseball in 2016, we can buy it. But if WAR tries to make the case that the Padres were really great last year...well...that's going too far down the rabbit hole.
I have always found it a fascinating parallel that the one team that has dominated baseball over the last century happens to be the one team that has dominated the catcher's position more than any other team in the live ball era. A list of the twenty best catchers in major league history will invariably include five Yankees: Dickey, Berra, Howard, Munson, and Posada. That's at least interesting, isn't it? That has to tell us something, doesn't it?
All of those Yankees catchers played second- or third-fiddle to bigger stars: to Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, to Mantle and Maris, to Reggie and Jeter and Mo. Maybe all those catchers were supporting players, but it seems interesting to note that the rare years when the Yankees struggled were usually years when the team didn’t have a reliable backstop.
Jorge Posada had fine teammates, but we make our own fortune in this life. Posada didn’t luck into his gig as the primary catcher for the best dynasty team I’ve ever seen. He earned that job, year in and year out.
I am not certain of much, but I’m certain of this: our best yardsticks and equations, admirable as they are, have only scratched the surface of the true effect that a player like Jorge Posada has on a team. We are not yet perfect, and until we become perfect we should be hold lightly how much we think we know, and recognize the limits and borders of our shared vision.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.