Minutes after finishing the other study about Speed and On Base Percentage, I thought of another way to study the problem.   As I have discussed here before, I maintain a data base of players’ career game logs, really just because I like to have it; it is now up to 157 players’ careers, and 272,414 lines of data, each representing a game by a player.  The data records what each player’s batting order position was, so it occurred to me that I could use that to study more directly the question posed by Owen H:  which is more valuable, a fast leadoff man with a .350 on base percentage, or a slow leadoff man with a .375 on base percentage? 

            The first step in the study was to create speed scores for each player, based on the data in the file.   I’ve got five things in the file which can be used for that:  Stolen Bases, Triples, Grounded into Double Plays, Defensive Position and Reached On Error.  I gave the player:

            25 points for a Stolen Base

            50 points for a Triple

            Negative 40 points for Grounding into a Double Play

            2 points for reaching on an error

            2 points if his first defensive position in the game was center field or pinch runner

            1 point if it was left or right field or shortstop

            Negative 1 point if it was first base

            Negative 2 points if it was catcher, DH, or pinch hitter

            Then I created rolling totals for each player during each 100-game sample of his career, and divided that by his plate appearances in those 100 games.  The player has a different speed score every day.   According to the system, the fastest player in the data was Willie Wilson on August 10, 1978; he had 972 Speed Points in the 101 games surrounding that game, and only 139 plate appearances, an average of almost 7 points per plate appearance (6.993).  The slowest player/day was Ernie Lombardi on April 22, 1944; he had negative 1,187 points with 348 plate appearances, an average of negative 3.41 points per plate appearance. 

            It’s a crude system, but it works.  The next-fastest player after Willie Wilson on August 10, 1978, is Willie Wilson on August 11, 1978; the fastest 70 player/daily ratings are all Willie Wilson.  The fastest players after Wilson are Miguel Dilone (peaking September 3, 1979), Lou Brock (peaking July 29, 1974 at 4.72), and Maury Wills (peaking August 8, 1962).  Wills is in 467^th place, but the 466 names ahead of him are all Willie Wilson, Miguel Dilone and Lou Brock, and remember these are not scores from that game, but scores from the 101 games of which this game is the central game.  Then Davey Lopes (August 13, 1976), Cesar Cedeno (September 23, 1977), Willie Davis (July 5, 1970), Ray Lankford (September 9, 1971), and Bert Campaneris (June 20, 1965).  Slowest, after Lombardi, is Rusty Staub at the end of his career.   Raines and Henderson are not in the data yet.

            Anyway, everybody has a speed score, which changes every day.   Having assigned speed scores to everybody, I took out of the study group all games by all players in which they batted in any position other than leadoff.   This left me with 31,840 games, all by players with "known" speed, and all batting leadoff. 

            The slowest player used in the leadoff slot was Rusty Staub on August 19, 1983, but that was just a pinch-hitting appearance, not a true leadoff man.  The slowest player used as a leadoff man to start the game was Red Schoendienst on July 21, 1962.   Schoendienst would have been 39 years old at that time; all of the "slowest" players are guys at the end of their careers.

            Anyway, next I removed from the data all games in which:

(a)  The player did not start, or

(b)  In which he had less than 3 plate appearances, or

(c)   In which he had more than 7 plate appearances. 

Not a big deal, but I didn’t want pinch hitters and other substitutes in my data, and long extra-inning games will screw with your data sometimes.  This left me with 30,103 leadoff games, of which 15,052 were tagged as games by "fast" runners and 15,051 were tagged as games by "slow" runners. 

Almost everybody who leads off, probably literally everybody, is "slow" by the standards of leadoff men toward the end of his career.   Even Willie Wilson is in the slow group for a few games in the 1990s, and Maury Wills is in the slow group in 1972.   Not sure if the opposite is true, probably not; not sure if Brian Downing ever makes the fast group.  I’ll check. 

Anyway, now I have fast games and slow games; now my problem is to get fast leadoff men with a .350 on base percentage, and slow leadoff men with a .375 on base percentage.  

I did this in the following manner.  The overall on base percentage of the 30,103 leadoff men was .344.   I sorted the games at random, creating a random sequence of games within each speed group.   I started with the first 50 games for each group, randomly selected, all marked "1" or "In", and I figured the on base percentage of those 50 games.  

Then, for all additional games, I scored it "1" (in) if the player reached base in that game by hit, walk or hit batsman.   If he did not reach base in the game by hit, walk or hit batsman, the game was still "1" (in) if the group’s cumulative on base percentage so far was over .35000000, for the speed group, or over .375000000 for the slow group.   All games were included in the study unless (1) the player did not reach base in the game, AND (2) the group was in a position in which they needed runners on base to increase their on base percentage.  Of course, 1-for-4 or 1-for-5 does not increase the on base percentage, but that doesn’t matter; if you just exclude a few games in which the player did not reach base at all, the on base percentage will stay above the target. 

Of the 15,052 leadoff games by fast players, 14,747 wound up being included in the sample; you just need to exclude 2% of the games to drive the on base percentage of that group up to .350.   Of the 15,051 leadoff games by slower players, 13,765 wound up included in the sample, as you need to exclude 8.5% of the games in order to drive the on base percentage up to .375. 

            You may note that there is nothing in this system to comply with the "all other things being equal" mandate.  I counted on the nature of the game to ensure that the other things, the unmonitored things, would even out, and this was more or less true; they generally did even out, more or less, although you can quibble about that if you want to. 

            Anyway, at the conclusion of this I had 14,747 games by "fast" leadoff men with an on base percentage of .350, and 13,765 games by "slow" leadoff men with an on base percentage of .375.   This is equivalent to 91 162-game seasons by fast leadoff men, and 85 162-game seasons by slow leadoff men. 

            Conclusion:  it is probably but not certainly true that the advantage lies with the slower leadoff men with the higher on base percentage.  The advantage, if there is one, if it does in fact exist, is very, very small, certainly no more than five runs per season, and probably less than half of that.   However, it does appear to me, as best I am able to see, that the advantage lies in that direction.

            I can see that I am going to have to break this data down into two or three lines.  This is the "fast" leadoff men:

            "XI" is "reached base on catcher’s interference."   The fast leadoff men hit .293, had 199 hits per season, 28 doubles, 9 triples, 10 homers, 55 RBI, 56 walks.   This is the "slow" leadoff men:

            The "slow" leadoff men hit .301, had 32 doubles, 7 triples, 14 homers, 65 RBI, 76 walks.  The OPS for the fast group was .754, for the slow group .809, but most if not all of that advantage was offset by the speed advantages.   The slow players had one more hit per season (200 to 199) and scored one more run per season (109 to 108).  Per 162 games, the fast players stole 36 more bases (50 to 14) with only 4 more caught stealing (14 to 10).  The fast players hit more triples (9 to 7), reached base more often on an error (11 to 10), and grounded into fewer double plays (7 to 10).

            The simplest analysis is that the slow leadoff men scored 1 more run per season (109 to 108), plus they made 18 fewer outs per season, which has a value of about three runs.  The slow leadoff men are about 4 runs per season better. 

            The slow leadoff men created 7 more runs per season (110 to 103), but whereas the fast players scored MORE runs than they created (108 to 103), the slow players scored less than they created (109 to 110). 

            OK, just for the halibut, here is a count of the games by each player included in the "fast leadoff men" study.  Remember that some games were arbitrarily excluded from the study because the player did not have a hit in the game.   Lou Brock had another 53 games in which he was classified as a fast leadoff man, but those games were not included in the study because they were excluded in order to maintain the .350 on base percentage.  He also had another 5 games in which he was classified as a slower leadoff man, but those were excluded into order to maintain the .375 on base percentage of the group.  Fast:

            And slow:

            There are actually 100 players, an even 100, who are listed in the study as slower leadoff men.   Most of them never made it into the "fast leadoff men" group, as Brian Downing did not.   Thanks for reading.

            Lonely days,

            Lonely Nights.

            What would I do without my readers?