Perusing the Historical Abstract, as I am wont to do from time to time, I’m frequently reminded of methods and arguments that Bill has presented in the past, some of which I’m sure he’d rather never get discussed again, ever, by anyone, much less by a writer on his site, but I think there are long-forgotten passages there that need to get revisited occasionally, not only for their historical or literary significance, but because they can be reused in other contexts.

His discussion of Ernie Banks’ career in the second Historical Abstract (on pp. 594-5), for example, sheds light on the discussion now raging in Bill’s modest article on his Twitter poll asking folks which player they think more highly of, Yaz or Kaline. (Actually, all Bill asked was "Carl Yastrzemski or Al Kaline?" but I don’t think I’m far off in formulating it as I have.)  The Banks piece was specifically focused on his ranking in the HA and, simplified, it said that Banks’ shortstop years, 1953-1961, were the basis for his high ranking—during those early years, Banks accomplished most of what Bill considered in ranking players. The latter half of Banks’ career, the first-base years, was essentially padding: Bill said that Banks would rank roughly where he did (#5 ss) if he had played only through 1961, but based on the decade or more after 1961 at 1B, Banks would barely crack the top 100.

The latter years, in other words, were padding, supporting the gems inside the box, and not to be mistaken for the gems themselves. Banks hit over 200 HRs after 1961, which ain’t hay, but a first baseman with 200-odd HRs and little else to recommend him (in Wrigley, playing every day for a decade, etc.) just isn’t all that impressive.

I’ve already made the case against Yaz, and already referred to it in the comments section of Bill’s current article (Here’s a redundant link: https://www.billjamesonline.com/all_of_yaz_why_not_play_all_of_yaz1/?AuthorId=23&pg=5  ), and I want to remind readers (yet again) that I’m a fan of Yaz’s and am not seeking to demean him nor diminish him. But I can’t help pointing out that in certain respects his career is far more padded than Banks’ is, and is probably as padded as it is possible for one player’s career to be.

There are gems in that career, no bout adoubt it: Yaz’ top three years, 1967, 1968, and 1970, match up with anyone’s for sheer domination and star power. For those years alone, buttressed by the other fine years of Yaz’s first decade, he could have and should have and did cruise into the Hall of Fame unassisted by man, beast, or machine. In my 2016 article, I compared Yaz’s credentials favorably to those of Sandy Koufax, perhaps the player I’ve devoted the grossest tonnage of idolatry to over the course of my lifetime: Koufax also had three monster seasons, plus another decade’s worth of lesser work, which was sufficient to clear his cruise-path as well.

But the drop-off in performance in Yaz’s second-half is amazing, especially if we look at it in certain walled-off portions. One ingredient of Yaz’s Walled-Off Salad is his performance against left-handed pitching. Yaz had a huge dropoff in his OPS against lefthanded pitchers, and it only got worse, much worse, after 1971. Essentially, even at his best, Yaz was pretty close to "Meh" against lefties, and you’ve got to wonder (as I did, at great length) why he wasn’t platooned more, but when you look at this question after 1971, you’ve got to question his managers’ sanity as well.

Since Yaz benefitted greatly from batting in Fenway Park, you’ve got to question seriously the great number of at-bats he got on the road, facing lefties, in the clean-up slot after 1971—I speculated that mathematically he must have batted in the cleanup slot for weeks on end in the ‘70s and ‘80s against lefthanders without getting a single hit, and yet his managers kept writing "Yaz DH" or "Yaz 1B" in the middle of their lineup cards. You can do the work, if you want to, going through the daily lineups, but the numbers there were horrible: in retrospect it’s hard to see how starting Yaz against lefties on the road over his final decade didn’t cost the Sox a few games every year.

But I already made that argument: what I’d like to do here is to apply the Banks Principle to Yaz’s career and to Kaline’s. It just happens (it didn’t have to) that Banks’ career divides approximately by halves into "shortstop" and "first base." To get it divided by Plate Appearances (or Games or At Bats or Hits) exactly in half isn’t to the point, so my standard for "first half/second half" is just to locate the season in which a player passed the halfway mark in career Plate Appearances (for Banks, that would be 1961, which was also his last year at shortstop). For Yaz, that season is 1971.

His marks through 1971 are very strong:

Since I’m only using rate stats here, it doesn’t matter that the two career "halves" are only approximate, but Yaz does have counting stats that are strong as well: 1832 hits, 257 HRs, 939 RBIs in his first 11 seasons. His OPS+, which should take Fenway’s friendliness into account, is very strong.

The dropoff in OPS+, though, is also very strong:

A 118 OPS+ signifies that Yaz was 18% better than the average AL batter for the second half of his career, which might not seem all that alarming, except that the average AL batter was not a DH, or a 1B-man, or even a LFer, which were Yaz’s positions in those years. I don’t know what the average DH/1B-man/LFer’s OPS+ was in the 70s and 80s, but I would guess that it had to be at least close to 118, probably a little higher. Yaz was a good player some of these years, a mediocre player other years, and an abysmal player at some points, padding out his career numbers playing every day but not adding materially to his record. (Last season’s full-time 118 OPS+ finishers, for example, were Andrew McCutcheon, Jose Abreu, Corey Dickerson, Eduardo Escobar, and Joey Wendle, all of whom drove in or scored between 61 and 84 runs in 2018—good work, but not credentials for Cooperstown.)  He was a serviceable player, pretty good OBP, with power maybe lacking in what you want from your DH, 1B-man, or LFer, but definitely not someone you could make a strong HoF case for.

Kaline’s career on the other foot had a strong first half, and really didn’t drop off that much over his career’s second half:

In fact, as you can see, Kaline’s OPS+ actually improved during his career’s second half. His OPS dropped off, but that’s to be expected considering this period encompasses the late 1960s when OPS was down all over town. His OPS+ stayed very stable over the two halves of his career.

What this argument boils down to, in my view, is the value of consistency over the value of peak seasons. If you view consistency as the greater virtue, then I’d say you’d choose Kaline easily, but if you focus on peak seasons, you’ll go with Yaz.

The case for peak seasons is one I generally support, the counter-argument going (and I love a good reductio ad absurdum argument, the more absurdum the better) "If a player gets 100 hits a year for thirty years, are you therefore going to elect him to the Hall of Fame because he’s a 3000-hit man?" We measure success by individual seasons, and the goal is to win games and pennants and World Championships in each season, so Yaz’s huge part in the Sox’ 1967 pennant counts for much more than just his impressive stats: players get only twenty-odd shots at winning pennants, and it’s better to mix up great years in which pennants are won with not-so-great years in which they aren’t won than to have a series of pretty-good years where you finish a distant fourth place every year.

Of course, you don’t want to go crazy with that argument either. Teams win pennants, not individual players, and there’s a certain extent to which randomness and luck enter in. A different Ernie Banks Principle says that we don’t want to reduce Banks’ value to 0 just because that is the total number of pennants Banks’ Cubs won over the course of his career. Is it his fault that the Cubs of 1950s and 1960s pretty much sucked turkey eggs?  It’s a tough argument to make that Banks’ 1958 and 1959 were entirely without value. The 1967 Red Sox won the pennant, but it was so close a race that the smallest thing, beyond Yaz’s control (I’m thinking of some other Sox player making the smallest screwup in one close game), and the Tigers rather than the Sox would have won it, giving Kaline the edge in "pennants won." Would that have reduced Yaz’s 1967 stats to zero value? Of course not. His contributions were what they were, but there’s a limit we want to place on a team’s success or lack thereof, even on players who contribute heavily, as no player ever contributed more heavily than Yaz in 1967.

Let me try out another absurdum argument on you: at what point would you feel comfortable dismissing "peak seasons" as your standard? If Yaz had had ONLY 1967, and not 1968 and 1970 (two seasons in which the Sox didn’t win the pennant) as monster years, would you still think as highly of him? (Let’s distribute 10 HRs and 30 RBIs from 1968 and 1970 into other Yaz seasons.) I think one monster year is generally dismissed as a general standard of excellence—even two monster years are usually dismissed. Few cases are made, and none are won, for Roger Maris or Denny McLain or Dale Murphy as having careers of the highest rank, but three will get you into the discussion, Koufax and Yaz being my Exhibits A and B.  But it’s a close thing. We were discussing Koufax’ qualifications for the HoF without his 1966 seasons recently, and we concluded, as I recall, that Koufax, as dominating as he was, would have fallen short without that third monster season.

We’ve exaggerated slightly the value of Yaz’ three monster years, I think, when we put him far ahead of Al Kaline, as Bill’s poll-respondents did. I can see the poll resulting in a wash, and I can see Kaline finishing narrowly ahead, before I can see Yaz finishing ahead narrowly, much less Yaz winning better than 2-1.

Basically, I think there are two good arguments for Yaz beating Kaline: 1) the strength of his peak seasons, and  2) the raw counting stats, where Yaz edges Kaline out in several important categories (HRs, RBI, Hits, etc.)

Not to undermine that basic argument, however, I don’t buy it for a second. Those two things are very strong, but there’s a lot of countervailing evidence in Kaline’s favor that I find much stronger:

1)    Handedness: Yaz batted L, Kaline R, so roughly two-thirds of their at-bats Yaz faced a pitcher complementary to his abilities while Kaline faced a pitcher aligned against his abilities. You could argue, I suppose, that’s just tough luck for Al. Results matter, not how you got those results, and the results are what they are. I guess I’m more impressed by Kaline accruing his results while facing mostly pitchers who are more challenging rather than less challenging. YMMV.

2)    Platoon advantage: this goes along with handedness, but is not exactly the same as handedness. Yastrzemski had a huge platoon difference, almost .200 OPS points, while Kaline had a far more normal difference, only .075 points. To me, this means that Yastrzemski could be pitched to more easily.  A sharp manager or pitcher would be able to target situations where Yaz could be challenged, whereas Kaline was a more unpredictable opponent, therefore more dangerous. Of course, like much of this argument, you could turn this part around and say this means there are situations where Yaz would be much MORE dangerous, but I’d argue back that those situations just mean that it’s clearer when an opponent would know to give him a base on balls, whereas it was much harder to identify such situations with Kaline.

3)    Fenway vs. Briggs. This one puffs up Yaz’s raw numbers by a little bit.

4)    Career length. You could say that this works in Yaz’s favor—he played a little longer, played more games, batted more often, had some better raw counting stats—but I don’t think it does. They both had very long careers, but Yaz’s advantage is mostly in games at the end of his career, when he was basically a slow DH with moderate OBP ability and not much else. This is a variation on my "3,000 hits, 100 x 30 years" argument, above. On a per-game basis,  Kaline’s numbers outpace Yaz’s, even without taking the previous platooning, handedness, home park arguments into account.  More Runs Scored, RBI, HR, per 162 games, a higher unadjusted OPS (.855/.841). Yaz’s entire advantage here seems to boil down to "more games played after he stopped being very good."

5)    Defense. I don’t even get how you argue that Yaz has an edge here. They were both wonderful fielders, multiple Gold Glovers, but Yaz got his GGs in left field and Kaline in right field. Kaline got 95.4% of his defensive starts in RF and CF while Yaz got 93% of his defensive starts in LF or IB. (And Yaz also got 402 starts at DH, which doesn’t count as a defensive position in BBref’s totals, as compared to Kaline’s 144.) I don’t see a bit of evidence that Yaz was a better fielder qua fielder than Kaline (10 GGs compared to 7, for example, plus Kaline played for three full seasons before the first GG was awarded.) I can understand if you want to throw up your hands and refuse to make a call here one way or the other (though I think that’s a copout) but if you want to make the argument that Yaz was the better fielder of the two, I’d like to hear it. I certainly haven’t heard it yet. For whatever it’s worth, probably not much, Yaz committed 9 more outfield errors than Kaline in over 1000 fewer chances, for a .005 difference in OF fielding percentage (.986/ .981).  Anecdotally, Yogi Berra said Kaline had the best arm he’d ever seen. Yaz had a gun, but I don’t know if anyone ever said he had the best OF arm he’d ever seen.  Like I said, I can understand making the argument that they’re about the same defensively, though I wouldn’t know how to frame that argument, but I see no basis at all for arguing that Yaz gets the edge here.

So this entire argument boils down to "Yaz was more famous," which is kinda circular. Yaz, Shoor, he got more ink—I don’t think that’s in question. Kaline was notoriously colorless, bland, white-bread, uncontroversial, Midwestern, 1950s, all of which and more I would concede at the get-go. If all Bill’s poll was seeking to find out was who was more famous, Yaz or Kaline, I don’t know that there was any reason even to run the poll. But I don’t know if there was any reason to run it if all we wanted to find out who was the better player either. The answer to that one is "Al Kaline."