For something else that I was doing I need a measure of a player’s "durability", an actual number to enable us to say whether a player was durable or not.   We might all agree, for example, that Steve Garvey could be described as a "durable" player and that Willie McCovey would probably not be described as a durable player, since he bounced in and out of the lineup with injuries more often than Lindsay Lohan bounces in and out of rehab, but. . .how can we say this, since McCovey played more games in his career than Garvey did?

            My first thought was to charge players "negative durability points" for being out of the lineup after they had established possession of a regular position.   Well. . .how do we know that a player is "in possession" of a regular position?

            A player may be said to be in possession of a regular position if

a)      He was a regular the year before, and

b)      He was productive.

I defined as a regular in possession of a job, then, any player who had been a regular the year before, had been productive the season before (4.50 runs created per 27 outs), had a career OPS of .700 or played 1,000 games, and was less than 36 years old.    When a regular in possession of a job had less than 600 plate appearances, I charged him Negative Durability Points by the formula 603, minus plate appearances in the season, divided by four, the integer thereof.   Basically, you’re charging the player one point for every game that he didn’t play.  

Of course you have to adjust the standards for strike years and such like; that stuff is all really interesting, and maybe I’ll explain that another time.    But, for example, Willie McCovey was a regular in possession of a job in 1964, having led the league in home runs in 1963, but had only 434 plate appearances in 1964.   That’s 169 less than 603; 169 divided by four and rounded down is 42, so we charged McCovey with 42 points (P1) in 1964, for games that he didn’t play and plate appearances he didn’t have.   McCovey was a regular in possession of a job in 1967, but had only 539 plate appearances; we charge him another 16 Negative Durability Points for that, and 50 for 1971.   What we’re essentially saying is that McCovey missed a total of 108 games in these three seasons, or its equivalent.

Steve Garvey, on the other hand, never in his career lost any points under this rule; he had 600 plate appearances (or its strike-shortened equivalent) every year that he was a regular in possession of a job.   He had only 425 plate appearances in 1983, but then, Garvey wasn’t very productive in 1982, with a .301 on base percentage and a .718 OPS, so our system no longer assumes he is in full possession of the job, since he didn’t hit well the year before.   

This was my starting point, but it quickly became apparent that this was not an adequate approach to the problem.    Consider, for example, Sandy Alomar Jr.   I’m assuming you guys remember Sandy; he was always hurt.   He might be in the Hall of Fame like his brother if he had been reasonably healthy, but he was always hurt.  Because he was always hurt, he is never considered to be a regular in possession of a job except for one year (1995).    Joe Adcock is sort of like that; several times in his career he had injuries in consecutive seasons, and Bernie Allen, and we’re not out of the "A’s" yet. 

So I started counting P2 (Negative Durability Points, Category 2), which are charged to

a)      Any player who is NOT a regular in possession of a job,

b)      Who is 25 to 35 years of age,

c)      Who has at least 500 career Plate Appearances before this season,

d)     Who creates at least 4.50 runs per 27 outs, and

e)      Has at least 50 plate appearances, but who

f)       Has less than 500 plate appearances. 

P2 are charged at a rate of 504, minus plate appearances, divided by 5, the integer thereof.    Sandy Alomar Jr. had only 237 plate appearances in 1993 although was an established major league player in his prime who was productive with the bat.   That’s 267 less than 504, divided by five is 53, so Alomar is charged with 53 Negative Durability Points for his 1993 season, and 72 in 1999, and a few in other seasons.

Of course, a player may not be in the lineup not because he is hurt, but just because the manager doesn’t want him in the lineup.   That can happen; it’s not a perfect system.    We can and sometimes will be charging Negative Durability Points to players who were healthy and wanted to play, but who were on the bench because of defense or the team had somebody else who was better, and also, sometimes we have to intervene in the system and "zero out" these points for players like Hank Greenberg in 1941 and 1945 who had partial productive seasons for reasons that can’t reasonably be classed as negative durability.    And, of course, we have to adjust the standards for strike seasons; that’s a lot of fun, and I’ll explain it another time.

Let us take Yogi Berra and Roy Campanella.   The difference between them, of course, was durability; Campanella was better than Yogi when he was healthy, but Campy only had about four good seasons, whereas Yogi had a dozen.      Campanella played in 1954, but hit .207, and he played in 1956, but hit .219.   He was fighting hand injuries both years.

Our next category of Negative Durability Points, then, takes notice of a player who stays in the lineup but plays in a manner that is ridiculously far below his level of ability.     The formula is a little complicated.   First of all, P3 apply only to players who are 22 to 37 years old; players who have supbar seasons when they are very old or very young. ..that’s expected.    Otherwise, if a player is 75 points below his career OPS—which is a long way—we divide the distance by which the player is below his OPS by .200, so that if a player is 100 points below his career OPS, we start with .5.   This figure we modify (reduce) if the player is not exactly 28 years old.   Let’s say he is 26; that’s two years away from 28, 28-26 is 2, so we square that (4), subtract it from 100 (96) and divide by 100 (.96).   Then we multiply the .5 by .96, which is .48.  Then we multiply his plate appearances in the season by that number, divide by ten and round down.  

Mark McGwire in 1991.   McGwire was battling eye problems, heel problems and marriage problems, has stated that he did not lift a weight all year long, and Tony LaRussa sat him down on the last day of the season so that his batting average couldn’t fall below .200; he hit .201 with 22 homers, 75 RBI, but he did stay in the lineup enough to collect 585 plate appearances.  His OPS for the season was .714, a whopping 268 points below his career average, one of the largest discrepancies in baseball history for a regular player.   We divide the .268 by .200, making 1.34.  He was 27 years old, just one year away from 28, so we multiply that by .99, making 1.33.   We multiply his plate appearances (585) by 1.33, making 770, and divide by 10, making 77, so McGwire gets a 77-point penalty for playing below his level of ability.   This is easily the largest such penalty in baseball history; Adam Dunn in 2011 is second at 69, and nobody else is over 61.

That’s the unusual case.   The more typical case would be Garrett Anderson in 2009, which was his year with Atlanta.   He had a miserable year, hitting .268 with a .705 OPS, which was 80 points below his career norm.    80 divided by 200 is .40, so we start with .40.   Anderson, however, was 37 years old, which is 9 years away from 28, so we square 9 (81), subtract from 100 (19), divide by 100 (.19) and multiply that by .40, which makes .076.   We multiply his plate appearances (534) by .076 (41), divide by 10 (4.1) and round down, and there’s a four-point penalty for playing below his level of ability.     Most of the penalties in this category are trivial.

A player cannot earn penalties P1 and P2 in the same season, since P2 is a catch-up for players missed by P1, but a player can be penalized for missing games and playing poorly in the same season—like McCovey in 1964.  McCovey in 1964 was penalized 42 points for missing games, but he also didn’t play well; he hit .220 with 18 homers.   There’s another 29-point penalty for not playing well, as well.   There’s 29 games in there that he played but you wish he hadn’t.

Occasionally a player doesn’t play at all one season in the middle of his career.   P4 is a 150-point penalty for any season in which a player doesn’t play (at all) in the middle of his career, or when a player is killed in mid-career or has a sudden career-ending injury or illness, like Kirby Puckett or Harry Agganis or Lyman Bostock or Thuman Munson.     This doesn’t happen a lot; I think I made a total of 61 P4 assessments.    Home Run Baker got two of them for taking off two seasons in mid-career, Rico Carty missed two different seasons with injuries.   Tony Conigliaro, Tony Horton, Mickey Cochrane, Jim Eisenreich, Nick Esasky, Curt Flood, Willard Hershberger, Jackie Jensen, Bruce Bochte and about 50 others missed full seasons with injuries or were killed in mid-career or something.   I didn’t apply the penalty to Lou Gehrig or Roberto Clemente, because they were more than 35 years old when they died, or to Dave Winfield in 1988, because he was 37 years old when he missed the whole season; if a player was more than 35 when he got hurt, I didn’t count that as "mid-career".   Schoendienst was more than 35 when he missed a season with tuberculosis.   Campanella was at least 35 and was finished as a player when he had his car wreck, so no penalties for that.  Johnny Kling sat out a season I think in a contract dispute, Wes Parker retired to work as an actor, etc.  

It’s a little arbitrary, of course; you could assess a P4 of 500 games for a player who dies at a young age (Lyman Bostock or Austin McHenry), and a score of 150 games for a player at a higher age.   That wouldn’t be the wrong answer, but you can also blunder into a lot of irresolvable issues by doing that stuff, so I just made one penalty there (150 points) and dropped it at that. 

Finally, I applied a penalty (P5) based on the length of a player’s career.   This is just done to reverse the slope.   Since the system works by recognizing outages in the middle of a player’s career, it tends (or would tend, without P5) to give perfect scores to players who had short careers and were never regulars; thus it tends, ironically, to give higher durability scores to players who had very short careers than to players who had long careers, which makes no sense.   Of course, most players who have short careers don’t have short careers because they lack durability; most players who have short careers have short careers because they’re not very good.  But we’d rather have higher durability scores for players who had longer scores than for players who had shorter careers, so what I did is, I subtracted the player’s career games played from 3,000, divided by 50, and charged the player one point (P5) for each 50 games that his career was shorter than 3,000 games, if it was shorter than 3,000 games.   

Five rules:

P1)  Penalties for players is possession of a job who miss games,

P2)  Penalties for players in mid-career and who hit well but just don’t play much,

P3)  Penalties for players who play but in a substantially subpar manner,

P4)  Penalties for players who miss seasons or are forced into sudden retirement by injuries, and

P5)  Penalties for players who have short careers.

We add up the penalties under P1 through P5, and that’s the number of "games" we consider that the player has missed.     Willie McCovey in his career played in 2,588 games and is considered to have missed 340 games, so his "durability" rating is 2,588, divided by 2,588 plus 340, or 88%.     Steve Garvey played in 2,332 games and is considered to have missed 47 games, so his durability rating is 98%.

The Results

Every player in baseball history has at least one point on P1, P2, P3, P4 or P5, with one exception.    There is one player in baseball history, and only one, whose durability rating is a true 100%.   Do you know who it is?  

I’ll give you a minute to think about it.   It isn’t Ripken.    Let’s grade them this way:  If a player’s Durability Score is 98% or higher, we’ll score that an "A+"

 Just knowing what you know about them, what kind of durability grades would you give to these players?

C—Todd Pratt

1B—Conor Jackson

2B—Esteban German

3B—Jim Ray Hart

SS—D’Angelo Jimenez

LF—Rico Carty

CF—Jacoby Ellsbury

RF—Milton Bradley

That’s a "D+" team, a team of players who had, or have had so far, durability grades of 71 to 73%.   They played some, but they got hurt a lot, too.   What about this group:

C—Ivan Rodriguez

1B—Jim Thome

2B—Rod Carew

3B—Chipper Jones

SS—Alan Trammell

LF—Luis Gonzalez

CF—Amos Otis

RF—Dwight Evans

That’s an "A-" team, a team of players with very good durability.   How about this group:

C—Kurt Suzuki

1B—Joe Pepitone

2B—Chone Figgins

3B—Steve Buechele

SS—Felix Fermin

LF—Warren Cromartie

CF—Gary Pettis

RF—Alex Rios

Tricked you; that’s another "A-" group; players who maybe weren’t around as long or had other issues, but these were durable players who stayed in the lineup as long as they held a job.    What about this group:

C—Raul Casanova

1B—Nick Johnson

2B—Jed Lowrie

3B—Josh Fields

SS—Andre Robertson

LF—Joe Charboneau

CF—Jerome Walton

RF—Tony Conigliaro

That’s the "F" group, of course, guys who have had a hard time staying healthy.   Actually, some of those guys are "D-minuses"; I couldn’t find recognizable names at some positions who have been hurt often enough.   OK, what about this group:

C—Bob Boone

1B—Eddie Murray

2B—Craig Biggio

3B—Pete Rose

SS—Derek Jeter

LF—Joe Carter

CF—Johnny Damon

RF—Henry Aaron

That’s an "A+ durability" team, of course; here’s another  team of players with A+ durability:

C—Brad Ausmus

1B—Tony Perez

2B—Bill Mazeroski

3B—Brooks Robinson

SS—Cal Ripken

LF—Lou Brock

CF—Willie Mays

RF—Bobby Abreu

The one player in baseball history who has no penalties in any of the five categories is Stan Musial.     Cal Ripken in 1991, when he was 30 years old, won his second MVP Award at .323 with 34 homers, 210 hits.   The next year he stayed in the lineup all year but hit .251 without much power, so he loses a few points that season by playing so far below his ability.  Otherwise his record is clean.    There are seven players in history who score at 100% if you round off to the nearest percent:  Those are 1) Musial, 2) Lou Brock, 3) Luis Aparicio, 4) Dave Winfield, 5) Brooks Robinson, 6) Hank Aaron, and 7) Willie Mays.  

At 99% we have the following players:

There are twenty-one of those; at 98% we have 47, including, ironically, Sandy Alomar Jr.’s namesake:

Those are the most durable players in baseball history, at least as I have figured it; I’m sure there are a couple of career-ending injuries in there that I should have penalized for but didn’t.   Anyway, on the other end of the scale, there are ten players in history who have penalties totaling 500 or more games:

Turkey Mike Donlin was a player a hundred years ago who was always missing games—and seasons—because he was in jail, or on trial, or had quit baseball to pursue an acting career, or something; he was an immensely talented player and a very intelligent man, but he had some issues.     He eventually made a pretty good living as an actor, and I guess can still be seen in some old, old movies.  

These are the durability scores for the Hall of Famers:

 Of course, Hall of Famers have relatively high grades because Hall of Fame players are players who are good in every area of performance.   If you graded them in speed, power, whatever, they’d come in with high marks everywhere.  It isn’t a perfect system, but I needed a way to measure a player’s durability, and this is what I came up with.  Take it for what it’s worth.