About six weeks ago I was doing a long series of articles about the top 10 second basemen of 1972, etc. . . the top X number of everything of the year X.  I had made it through 113 entries of this series before I got off on other things.   Last night in bed. . .well, don’t worry about what night it was; it was probably a week ago before you read this.  Last night in bed I was reading Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project, and I found this paragraph (p. 184):

              When people make judgments, they argued, they compare whatever they are judging to some model in their minds.  How much do those clouds resemble my mental model of an approaching storm?  How closely does this ulcer resemble my mental model of a malignant cancer?  Does Jeremy Lin match my mental picture of a future NBA player?  Does that belligerent German political leader resemble my idea of a man capable of orchestrating genocide?  The world’s not just a stage.  It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance.  And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness.  You have some notion of a parent population:  "Ssorm clouds" or "gastric ulcers" or "genocidal dictators" or "NBA players."  You compare the specific case to the parent population. 

              This is what I have been trying to tell people since the 1970s; I am not saying that I was ahead of Tversky and Kahneman, but I wasn’t far behind them, either.   The first time I remember having this realization was with regard to Gary Sutherland in 1974.  I was wondering why in the hell Ralph Houk would use Sutherland, a severely limited offensive player, as his #2 hitter all season, and I finally realized that it was because Sutherland fit Houk’s image of a top-of-the-order hitter—specifically, Bobby Richardson.   Houk’s first major league managerial assignment in the majors was the 1961 Yankees.  He used his double-play combination, Tony Kubek and Bobby Richardson, as his 1-2 hitters.  They were terrible, but it didn’t matter because they had Mantle, Maris, Elston Howard, Bill Skowron and Yogi Berra coming up behind them, so the 1-2 hitters didn’t have to do any heavy bat lifting.  Taking over the Tigers in 1974, Houk looked for somebody like Bobby Richardson to play second base for him.  Gary Sutherland was very much like Bobby Richardson, except that his career batting average was 20 points lower, but otherwise the same player.  He fit the image.

              That also is what I was trying to say about Woodie Held, in the last article that I wrote before the series lost steam.  Held was a very good player, and he could have had and should have had a career as good as Jay Bell or Leo Cardenas or Dick Groat or Bill Russell or Freddie Patek.   But his problem was, he didn’t look like a shortstop.   He didn’t fit the image.   He was a low-average power hitter; shortstops were supposed to be small and quick.   He was 5-9 and 190 pounds; shortstops were supposed to be six foot and 160.   And this half-ruined his career, because the people making decisions about him just could not get past it.

114. Summary of the Shortstops, 1900 to 1960

              Up to 1960 the greatest shortstop in baseball history was Honus Wagner; Duh.   You probably didn’t need me to tell you that. 

              When I was doing this before I was pausing every 60 years to summarize the best players in baseball up to this point in history.   Actually, when I started this series last December, with the catchers, I was putting in breaks after 40 years—1940, 1980, now—but I decided that was overkill.  

              The ranking method for comparing players over time depended on the season ranks, and it was something like this.   If a player ranked as the #1 player at the position in a year, he got 10 points.   If he ranked second, he got 7 points; if he ranked third, he got 4, if he ranked fourth, he got 2, and if he ranked fifth, he got 1. 

              Except that is not universally true.  If he ranks first at the position, he does always get ten points.   After that, though, it depends on how many teams there are in that season, thus on how many shortstops are being ranked.  The number of points awarded has to be essentially constant in relation to the number of teams in the majors.  To be frank, I actually don’t remember all the details of the ranking system; it’s been like three months since I was using it, and I’ll have to go back into the old articles I wrote before and figure out what I was doing.  Anyway, these are the top 25 shortstops of the years 1900 to 1960.   Hall of Famers are in Gold:

              That’s ranking the top 25 by career value.   I was also ranking them by peak value.   That list is as follows:

              Rogers Hornsby is on this list, whereas he is not on the other one.   The reason for that is that Hornsby, while he was playing shortstop in 1917, was not a career shortstop.  Not being a career shortstop, he’s not eligible for the shortstop list—but he is eligible for the peak list based on his peak value as a shortstop.   That make sense? 

115.  The Base Stealer

              In article 112 I had gotten us through the era in which Ernie Banks was the best shortstop in baseball.  That era ended in 1960; it ran through 1960. 

              Maury Wills had been trapped in the minor leagues a long, long time, not reaching the majors until he was four months away from his 27^th birthday.  The story, well told in a 2004 article by Jared Ravich, features Bobby Bragan, then managing Wills in the minors.   Bragan was an Alabama native who had been on the Dodgers when Jackie Robinson was signed, and he was one of the players who had refused to play with Jackie.   The Dodgers’ had said, "Oh, like we care", and Bragan re-evaluated his place in the universe.  Ten years of experience in a black and white world had changed his heart or at least his habits, and when his shortstop was struggling in early 1958, he pulled him aside and wrapped his arms around him. 

Bobby Bragan put his arms around me in Spokane in 1958 and suggested that I become a switch-hitter because I was afraid of the curve. He said, 'You can run, Maury. You can throw and you can field. But you're afraid of the curve.'

"Now, no man wants to admit that he's afraid of anything, especially a baseball player saying he's afraid of a curveball. But for some reason, God must've touched me right on the shoulder and said, 'You just keep quiet,' because I was able to muster enough humility to listen to him and I knew deep down in the innermost part of myself that I was afraid of the curve."

              Quote is from the Jared Ravich article.  A year later Don Zimmer, the Dodger shortstop, was struggling with a toe injury, and the Dodgers were trying to trade for a shortstop.  Bragan convinced them to give Wills a shot.  Wills was in his 9^th season in the minor leagues.  He had played 1100 minor league games, an extraordinary number.  In an odd note, Ty Cobb had been in the stands and had seen Wills’ last minor league game, and had been quoted in the newspaper on the day that Wills was called up, saying that he liked the way that Wills’ slid. 

              In his first month in the majors Wills played 14 games, hit .143 and was caught stealing the only two times he attempted to steal.  He scored two runs.   And he won the starting shortstop job, or at least a shot at it.  As bad as he was, and as little confidence as the Dodgers had in him, he was better than Zimmer, who was limping around the infield and was in a 2-for-36 slump at the plate.  Wills held the job, started to hit a little, and the Dodgers won the World Series. 

              Three years later he was the MVP, which was kind of a joke; anybody who thinks that Wills in 1962 was a better player than Willie Mays or Frank Robinson. . . .   He wasn’t, but he was good, and he was the first man in modern baseball to steal 100 bases, breaking Ty Cobb’s record of 96.  It was a big story at the time.  He was the best shortstop in baseball from 1961 to 1963, or at least I have him ranked as such. 

              Wills was intense, and he had a tremendous desire to be a great player.  His offensive game was really simple; he just bunted and slapped the ball around and ran like hell.   The way he explained it, it sounded like genius.  He would give the writers seminars on how to get the largest possible lead off of base, and he was inclined to expand on his expertise whenever he had an audience.  He played the banjo on the Johnny Carson show; the banjo is now in the country music Hall of Fame in Nashville.  He dated Doris Day, and bragged to reporters that he had scored with her. 

              I explained, about Ernie Banks, that he won a Gold Glove Award because somebody has to, and it was an odd league in which the three best defensive shortstops (Roy McMillan, Ruben Amaro, and Alex Grammas) were all banjo hitters and all riding the bench.   There wasn’t a Gold Glove shortstop to be found, so the award went to Banks in 1960 and to Wills in 1961 and 1962, although neither man was what you would ordinarily describe as a Gold Glove shortstop. 

              I kind of don’t like Wills—you might have picked that up—but I don’t mean to deny him credit for what he was.  He was an intelligent player.   He was intensely competitive, and he was resourceful.   He took a limited skill set and an unpromising start to his career, and turned it into a near-Hall of Fame resume.   And he was not truly a bad person; he was a sensitive man, and he had been badly scarred by the racism with which he had dealt.  

I will be in New York this week for the Edgar Awards; The Man From the Train was nominated for an Edgar Award.    I may have limited contact with the site, I don't know, but I will post this article and the next two entries in this series before I leave, so there should be another one on Wednesday and another on Friday.  Thanks for reading.