Happy birthday, Rembrandt, you handy allusion you

Rembrandt Self-Portrait

In honor of Rembrandt’s 407th birthday, here are all the references I have made to him in my writing. Or at least all of them that I could remember or find. All of this is from the Salon column.

They’re s’mores, is all they are. A little circle of graham cracker with marshmallow on it, surrounded, smothered — no, embraced — by a slightly brittle shell of dark, luscious chocolate. Enrobed. That’s the word. The chocolate is poured over the cookie, you see. The cookie isn’t dipped into the chocolate like some common thing. Therefore, says Nabisco, “Mallomars are an enrobed product.” They’re just s’mores, like you make at cookouts. And a Rembrandt’s just a painting, like you make in kindergarten.

Mallomar memories, 2/27/01

My grandmother loved this story, a love letter to Mallomars, which my grandfather, who died in 1968, loved.

I know that sounds silly. A Randy Johnson fastball equals a Rembrandt painting equals a Shakespeare sonnet equals a Kobe Bryant dunk. I can enjoy Rembrandt as much as the next guy. Love what he could do with a dead peacock. But if a tackle-breaking run through the secondary by a tailback gives me the same pleasure, fills me equally with wonder, inspires me in the same way that a Rembrandt painting does, what difference is there? Rembrandt was just as meaningless last Sept. 12 as Emmitt Smith was.

Sports and 9/11, 9/11/02

A little strange on its own but I think it more or less makes sense in the context of the argument I was making. This was the first anniversary of 9/11, and there were some mini-controversies over sportsball people using words like “warrior” or phrases like “let’s roll” when talking about other sportsball people.  Some people thought of this as insulting to the memory of the dead, or to soldiers then just launching a decade’s worth of post-9/11 wars. My point was that we couldn’t live in a state of heightened sensitivity and mourning forever, that we had to get back to our normal lives, which we were doing, and that was a victory. And part of our normal lives is watching and talking about sports, which are exactly as important as we let them be. On Sept. 12, 2001, they weren’t important at all, to anyone. A year later, they were important again—if we wanted them to be. And each of us is free to assign importance to a sporting event, according to our tastes and feelings, just as we are to a Rembrandt painting, which, without the importance we’ve given it as a society, is just colors splashed on a canvas.

I wonder if Cubs fans, deep in their heart of hearts, really love this.

The Cubs are losers again, beaten 9-6 by the Marlins Wednesday in Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. But they aren’t just losers. They are artists of loss, maestros of defeat. They are to losing what Jascha Heifetz was to the violin, what Rembrandt was to still lifes, what Jennifer Lopez is to overexposure.

NLCS Game 7 story, 10/16/03

Readers and friends who were Cubs fans hated this, thought I didn’t understand the first thing about being a Cubs fan. I maintain to this day that it’s just about the truest thing I’ve ever written.

And they’re playing the Braves, whom they beat last year, and who are to losing in October what Rembrandt was to painting faces.

MLB playoff preview, 10/4/05

“They” were the Houston Astros, who did, in fact, beat the Braves in that series. But that doesn’t mean I was right. The preview was set up with a “they will win because” section for every team. I did pick the Astros to go to the World Series, though, and I was right about that. I had them beating the Angels. They lost to the White Sox.

Hall of Nearly Great: My Ron Cey chapter in new baseball ebook

I’m thrilled to be a part of the new ebook The Hall of Nearly Great, an anthology that celebrates the careers of those who are not celebrated.

It’s amazing how quickly very good players can become largely forgotten figures. I’m a pretty big baseball fan and something of a student of baseball history, and it’s not uncommon for me to stumble across some player I’ve never heard of from the decades before I started watching, only to realize that, holy crap, this guy was a six-time All-Star!

And now I’m old enough to be amazed that people in their 30s have never heard of guys I grew up thinking of as very, very good players. If a player doesn’t make the Hall of Fame and doesn’t become a manager or broadcaster, he’s headed for the “Who?” file. You watch: In 25 years, you’ll be able to say the names of terrific players like Ryan Zimmerman, Jake Peavy, Yadier Molina, Corey Hart and Dan Haren, to name just a few, and people in their 20s who love baseball will give you blank stares.

“The Hall of Nearly Great” is meant to celebrate some of those guys. From the promo copy:

It’s not a book meant to reopen arguments about who does and does not deserve Hall of Fame enshrinement. Rather, it remembers those who, failing entrance into Cooperstown, may unfairly be lost to history. It’s for the players we grew up rooting for, the ones whose best years led to flags and memories that will fly together forever. Players like David Cone, Will Clark, Dwight Evans, Norm Cash, Kenny Lofton, Brad Radke, and many others.

Including Ron Cey, the subject of my chapter. Cey was a six-time All-Star, and I have long thought of him as the best player about whom I’ve never heard a single “what about him for the Hall of Fame?” comment kicked around on barstools or message boards. For most of his career he was overshadowed by teammate Steve Garvey, who was not as good a player as Cey, and by Mike Schmidt, the greatest third baseman of all time, whose career stretched over almost the exact same years as Cey’s.

It’s an honor to be among the 42 great writers who wrote this book. The list includes a bunch of friends, e-friends, co-workers and acquaintances: R.J. Anderson, Tommy Bennett, Craig Calcaterra, Cliff Corcoran, Chad Finn, Steven Goldman, Jay Jaffe, Jonah Keri, Will Leitch, Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, Rob Neyer, Marc Normandin, Jason Parks, Jeff Passan, Joe Posnanski, Emma Span, Cecilia Tan, Wendy Thurm, Jon Weisman and Jason Wojciechowski.

Here’s what official MLB historian John Thorn says about “The Hall of Nearly Great”:

Fans love to argue about who are the greatest players. In this splendid book some of the game’s top writers give a nod to players who have no plaques in Cooperstown, but were undeniably great. “Let us now praise famous men … all these were honored in their generations, and were the glory of their times.

You can buy “The Hall of Nearly Great” for immediate download for $12 by clicking the image above or right here. It is an ebook available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats, suitable for reading on a computer, iPad, Kindle, Nook, other e-reader, or smart phone, and it is DRM-free.

Todd Helton without the Coors Field effect

Todd Helton
Todd Helton

Joe Posnanski, writing about the value of walks for the second time this week, makes an aside about Todd Helton:

“Here’s the irony of Coors Field: It undoubtedly helped players put up ENORMOUS numbers. And at exactly the same time, it undoubtedly made those numbers look like mirages. Todd Helton’s career numbers are .324/.424/.555 which are absurd. And you get the sense that if he had put up significantly WORSE numbers but played his whole career somewhere else, his career might be valued higher.”

Todd Helton has been a puzzle for me for a long time. Early in his career, when he was putting up crazy numbers, especially when he chased .400 in 2000 and ended up leading the league in hits, doubles, RBIs, average, on-base percentage, slugging, OPS and total bases, it seemed to me that people didn’t talk about Coors Field enough. Although in retrospect, the fact that he only finished fifth in the MVP vote that year with those crazy numbers says that I wasn’t the only one thinking his numbers were out of whack because of Coors, even though it felt like I was.

But, as with Larry Walker, who appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot this year, it’s hard to get a handle on just how good Helton really has been. It’s probably harder for Helton than for Walker, because we got a glimpse of Walker in the wild. Helton has only played in Colorado, while Walker played in Montreal for six years at the beginning of his career and St. Louis for a year and a half at the end.

Is Joe right? Would Helton be valued higher if he’d played his entire career elsewhere? I decided to try to figure out what that career might have looked like so far.

Here’s the raw data: In his career, Helton has hit .324/.424/.555 with 333 home runs in 1,930 games. That .300/.400/.500 line is sometimes called the magic ratio, and it pretty much means you’re a really good hitter.

At Coors Field, Helton has hit .356/.454/.628 with 204 home runs in 977 games. Everywhere else, he has hit .291/.392/.481 with 129 home runs in 953 games. You can see the difference right away. No magic ratio away from Coors. In addition to hitting 75 more home runs in only 24 more games, Helton has also hit 26 triples at Coors and only nine on the road.

If you just doubled Helton’s road stats, he’d be a pretty fair player. A first baseman with a career line of .291/.392/.481 and 258 home runs through age 36 is nothing to sneeze at. Then again he’s likely not a five-time All-Star who’ll probably get some Hall of Fame consideration. Bill James’ Hall of Fame Monitor, which measures how likely a player is to be enshrined, not how deserving he is, has Helton well above the level of “likely.” It doesn’t take ballparks or era into account, just raw stats.

But it’s not fair to just double Helton’s road stats. Players on other National League teams get to come into Coors Field for road games, after all. A player in the N.L. West would have 11 chances a year to hit at Coors under the current scheduling system.

Bill Terry
Bill Terry

So I decided to try to see what Helton might look like if he were just the player he is on the road, but he got to play some road games at Coors. Helton has played more games at Dodger Stadium then any other road park, 103, so to give him the benefit of the doubt, let’s give him 103 road games at Coors Field, hitting at the same rates he’s really hit there, and then turn the rest of his home games into road games, where he’ll hit at the same rate he’s always hit at on the road.

Make sense? No? Good.

By playing only 103 games at Coors, Helton loses 874 games off his total, so we’ll extrapolate his 953 real road games into (953+874=) 1,827. That is, we’ll multiply his totals by 1.91710388. And then we’ll shrink his 977 Coors games down to 103 by multiplying his totals by 0.10542477. Then we’ll add those two together to get the 1,930 games of the new, non-Colorado Rockie Todd Helton.

We’re back from the commercial and we’ve done the math and here’s what Helton looks like: .298/.399/.496, with 269 home runs. Again, that’s a pretty good player. There are Hall of Fame first basemen who have similar numbers through age 36, though all with more home runs, and we’re still not accounting for era.

For example, Willie Stargell, through age 36, had hit .282/.360/.529 with 388 home runs. More power, especially home run power — the non-Rockie Helton would have 498 doubles to Stargell’s 356 — but less getting on base. Then again, Stargell played in the second deadball era. His career at that point had been 1962-76, when scoring straddled four runs per team per game. In Helton’s era it’s touched five runs and has always been above 4.5 until the last two years. Stargell’s OPS plus through age 36 was 148. Helton’s is 137. Keep in mind OPS plus accounts for ballpark too.

Here’s something off-topic but incredible that I discovered about Stargell. Through his age 36 season, his triple-slash line was, again, .282/.360/.529. Here it is for the rest of his career, which was six more seasons: .279/.362/.529

I looked for other players who had a similar stat line to non-Rockie Helton and I found one. Kevin Youkilis. Through his age 31 season, Youkilis’ career line is .294/.394/.497 with 112 home runs in 791 games. He got a late start to his career and has only been a full-time player for five seasons, and who knows what he’s going to look like at 36, but if you’re looking at that non-Rockie stat line of .298/.399/.496 and trying to figure out what that looks like in real life, it looks something like Kevin Youkilis, so far, with the caveat that Youkilis plays in a pretty nice ballpark for hitters too.

Which is why this whole business of making this kind of adjustment for one player and then comparing him to everyone else, unadjusted, is a rabbit hole and kind of stupid. But it’s my rabbit hole and my kind of stupid. And by the way Youkilis does not have much of a home-road split. He’s 22 points of OPS better at Fenway Park than elsewhere. Helton is 209 points of OPS better at Coors Field than elsewhere.

Kevin Youkilis
Kevin Youkilis

Helton’s career OPS of .979 has him 11th all time, immediately behind Rogers Hornsby, Manny Ramirez and Mark McGwire and immediately ahead of Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Stan Musial. Heady company. The non-Rockie Helton’s career OPS of .895 would have him 72nd all time, still pretty good, but in a much different crowd. He’d be behind Bill Terry, Chick Hafey and Mickey Cochrane and ahead of Chase Utley, Hal Trosky and Youkilis.

Terry was a first baseman who’s in the Hall of Fame, though he played for the ’20s-’30s Giants, so he had a leg up. Hafey was an outfielder who’s in the Hall of Fame, though he had similar help by playing for the ’20s-’30s Cardinals. Trosky was a first baseman who had a short career in the ’30s and ’40s. He was never even an All-Star.

And don’t forget we’re giving Helton a little benefit of doubt by giving him 103 games at Coors Field. If Coors were in a different division from Helton’s home team, he’d have played a lot fewer games there. He’s played about 40 games in most non-N.L. West cities, with a low of 39 in Cincinnati’s two parks, Riverfront Stadium and Great American Ballpark. If we do all that same math for Helton only playing 39 games at Coors Field, we get a .292/.394/.484 line with 265 home runs.

There’s a better way to look at all this. I mean, it would be a strange world indeed if there were not a better way to look at all this. Baseball-Reference has a stat called “Neutralized Batting,” which converts a player’s stats to show what they would have been if the player had played only 162-game seasons — which Helton, as a post-1961 player, did anyway — in a league with historically average offense and in a neutral ballpark. In other words, it attempts to strip away park and era effects.

Helton’s neutralized career line: .301/.399/.514 with 295 home runs in 1,930 games. Very similar to our non-Rockie Helton and very similar, at least in terms of the rate stats, to Kevin Youkilis so far.

Getting back to Joe’s sense that if Helton had put up worse numbers but played his whole career somewhere other than Denver he’d be valued higher, a good question would be: Is Youkilis, at this point, valued higher than Helton? I don’t mean at the moment. Youkilis is in his prime and Helton is in bad decline. But I mean in terms of historical value.

I don’t know the answer to this question, and I don’t know that this little thought experiment has gotten me much closer to getting a handle on just how to value Todd Helton’s career. If you like Wins Above Replacement, Helton has 58 WAR, which puts him in fringe Hall of Fame company, ahead of Stargell, Terry and recent inductee Andre Dawson, to name a few, but also about three wins behind Keith Hernandez and Dick Allen, who are not in.

Coors Field
Coors Field

He’s also nine wins behind Larry Walker, who was named on only 20.3 percent of the ballots this year, and 12 behind Jim Thome, who’s still playing but is probably a lock because he’s hit 589 home runs so far.

It requires more thinking, but at the moment I think that the neutralized, non-Rockie Todd Helton would be a guy with a Hall of Fame case, but not a strong one, and I don’t think he’d get too far with the BBWAA voters with his home run total, which would be likely to end up not far above 300, and his batting average only around .300.

Because I believe the non-Rockie Helton’s stats represent the real Helton better than his real stats do, I obviously think the real Helton has a legitimate but not particularly strong Hall of Fame case too. I have a feeling he’ll get a little more love from the writers than the non-Rockie Helton would, especially if his batting average stays up around .320 and he gets close to 400 home runs. But barring a late-career revival that gets him to 3,000 hits — he probably needs five more solid seasons, which don’t appear to be in the cards — I think he’ll fall well short.

Early in Helton’s career I thought the baseball world overrated him, and while I think I was right about that, looking back, I think I underrated him. Now, to the extent that I can figure out what the baseball world is thinking, I think the baseball world and I have met in the middle. We look at Helton about the same way. He’s been a very good player, a face of a franchise kind of player, but not an all-time great. If he’s been undervalued because of people discounting his inflated numbers at Coors, it hasn’t been by much.

* * *

Photo Credits
Todd Helton: SD Dirk/Flickr Creative Commons
Bill Terry: Wikipedia
Kevin Youkilis: Keith Allison/Flickr Creative Commons
Coors Field: Matt Kozlowski/Wikipedia Creative Commons

The Hall of Fame? Oh, they let anyone in

The latest bum to get in
The latest bum to get in

Comments on Nate Silver’s fine Hall of Fame piece are hiLARRYous. So so so New York Times. Even after Nate carefully explains that:

A) The Hall of Fame has been letting in fewer players than historically usual lately because, while the writers have been voting in about their usual number, the Veterans Committee, which at times has thrown the doors open wide, has essentially stopped functioning.

B) Because of the Veterans Committee’s former generosity, huge numbers of players from the 1920s and ’30s are in the Hall, about twice as many as from any other era, despite the fact that …

C) at the time, there were about half as many teams as there are now, and the player pool was maybe one-fifth the size it is today.

So, just to review, there are twice as many teams, drawing players from a population five times larger, which should mean that the level of play is much higher — obviously true if you just watch a few games from the good old days — and about half as many players are making the Hall of Fame as made it from that earlier era.

And the New York Times commenters sniff: It’s terrible how they’ve lowered the standards! They just let anyone in there now! Sniff!

The elitism just drips. A few choice samples:

  • “Too stringent”? Au contraire. Over the last couple of decades they have admitted so many bums that it defies description. If anything, the standards should be tightened. There are perhaps six active players who should EVER be considered.
  • We’ve dumbed down America and now you want to water down what makes a true athlete great. They should measure up or not be considered!!!! That’s the problem with America continually relaxing standards and codes.!!!!
  • The statistical look at the question is entirely misdirected. There have been a handful of standout players in the game, something less than 50 in total.
  • i thought the hall was for extraordinary accomplishments not just very good …the hall is so diluted these days.
  • When Mickey Mantle hit a home run he ran around the bases with his head down so that he wouldn’t embarrass the pitcher on the other team. He did that 536 times. He got into the Hall of Fame on his first vote. How many of the guys that make fools of themselves jumping around today deserve to get in on their first vote? There are only so many people who have the Right Stuff for the Hall of Fame and their number doesn’t enlarge just because more people are playing the game.
  • I could go on but you get it. The very idea. Why they’re letting rabble into the Hall of Fame now, Lovey. Absolute rabble!

    * * *

    Image lifted from an NBC video without permission. Will remove on request

    1960 Game 7, 3rd inning: A little integration

    Hector Lopez digs in against Vern Law
    Hector Lopez digs in against Vern Law

    Our story so far: First inningSecond inning

    Clete Boyer’s name appears on the screen as “Cletis” as he comes to bat with one out in the top of the third following Vern Law’s slick backhand stab of Johnny Blanchard’s comebacker. Boyer suspects his bat is broken, beats the handle on the ground to confirm it, and trots — trots! — back to the dugout to replace it. I have never seen a major league player trot on his way to get a new bat. They walk.

    Boyer’s quick pace gives me just enough time for a quick Clete Boyer bat story, because I’m pretending that I’m not using the pause button liberally here.

    I am not sure I’m remembering this right, but I think the first bat I ever owned, a black 26-ouncer, was a Clete Boyer signature model. Boyer was winding his career down with Atlanta during the years I was coming into baseball consciousness, 1970 and ’71, so while I remember the bat being a new model, I’m reasonably sure it was picked up at a discount.

    Because of that bat, I always had kind of a soft spot for Clete Boyer, even though I don’t remember ever seeing him play. I don’t mean a soft spot, really, but his name had some meaning for me. I also had, for some reason, a first baseman’s mitt when I was very young, and it was a Mike Hegan signature model. Mike Hegan! How did he ever get his name on a mitt? I don’t have any soft spot for Mike Hegan, though I probably wouldn’t recall his name today if I hadn’t had that mitt.

    Clete grabs a new bat and walks back to the plate without any elaborate on-deck-circle ritual of rubbing it down with just the right amount of pine tar and rosin. Announcer Bob Prince speculates that Boyer could have been “just changing bats and fiddling around a little bit” to give Bobby Shantz more time to warm up in the bullpen, since the pitcher’s spot is up next. But Shantz has been warming up since the top of the first, and if Boyer were trying to kill time he probably wouldn’t have trotted to the dugout to fetch his new bat.

    Boyer pops out to Bill Mazeroski in shallow center field, and that brings up a pinch hitter, Hector Lopez.

    Clete Boyer checks his bat.
    Clete Boyer checks his bat.

    A striking thing about watching this game from 1960 today is that almost everybody’s white. Of the 18 men in the starting lineup, only Roberto Clemente was not Anglo. Elston Howard, who was black, would have been the Yankees starting catcher if he hadn’t gotten hurt, but that’s still a couple of overwhelmingly white lineups.

    Both teams used 25 men in the 1960 World Series, and six of them were minorities. Aside from Clemente, Howard and Lopez — a Panamanian who is black enough to have been considered the first black manager at Triple-A when he took over in Buffalo in 1969 — the rest of the 12 percent minority population consisted of two African-American Pirates reserves, outfielder Joe Christopher and infielder Gene Baker, who would combine for three plate appearances in this Series, and Yankees lefty reliever Luis Arroyo, who had pitched two-thirds of an inning in Game 5.

    Contrast that with the 2010 World Series, when the Giants and Rangers used a combined 47 players, and 26 of them — 55 percent — were minorities. I’m not a census taker or anything, so maybe my count’s off a little if someone’s not what he appears to be, but that’s a pretty striking difference, almost five times more non-white players in the 2010 World Series than in 1960.

    I think it’s easy to get into thinking about history in a shorthand way that doesn’t get at what really happened. Every American schoolkid knows that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947 and baseball was integrated from that day on. And every baseball fan knows that integration hardly happened overnight. The Boston Red Sox, the last team to field a black player, didn’t do so until 1959, as everyone who’s heard the name Pumpsie Green knows.

    But it goes beyond that. The Red Sox were an embarrassment by the end of the ’50s for their refusal to have any black players on the club, but it’s not like they were that far behind everybody else. The Pirates had integrated in 1953, but here they were seven years later with two blacks and a dark-skinned Puerto Rican. Howard integrated the Yankees when he came up in 1955, and now five years later they had two blacks and a light-skinned Puerto Rican, Arroyo. Not exactly a melting pot.

    Hector Lopez (11) coaching Panama in the 2009 World Baseball Classic
    Hector Lopez (11) coaching Panama in the 2009 World Baseball Classic

    Some teams were quicker than others to truly integrate. You can’t write the history of the National League in the 1960s without talking about how the Dodgers and Cardinals dominated in part because they were more eager than other teams to sign black players. In this same year, 1960, the Dodgers had a majority-black starting lineup, with five African-American everyday players: Johnny Roseboro, Charlie Neal, Maury Wills, Jim Gilliam and Tommy Davis.

    But for the most part, and certainly in this Series, baseball in 1960, 13 years into the “integration” era, was still a pretty white game.

    Here’s Lopez, tossing away his second bat. He started a lot of games at third base in 1960, especially when Boyer was hurt in April and May. He also spent some time in left field and played a few games at second base, where he’d played a lot early in his career in Kansas City. But by this time, at 30, he was about done with that. He would play two more games at second the rest of his career, which lasted until 1966.

    His playing career that is. Lopez managed Panama in the 2009 World Baseball Classic. He was 79 at the time. He looked about 55.

    He has an exaggerated stance, hunched over and closed, like he’s going to aim to right field. He does whack a couple of fouls that way. He’d been a pretty good hitter with the A’s, once hitting 22 home runs, and would be a solid fourth outfielder/utility type in his Yankee years. In 1960, his first full year in New York, he’d hit .284 with nine home runs and a 115 OPS-plus in 131 games.

    Now there goes the no-hitter as Lopez bangs one through the left side of the infield for a base hit, the first of the game off of Vern Law. Bobby Richardson, at the top of the order, hits a line drive to left that hangs up for Bob Skinner, who puts it away for the third out. Still 4-0 Pirates.

    Rocky Nelson shows off his mastery of left-handed pitchers as he draws a walk
    Rocky Nelson shows off his mastery of left-handed pitchers as he draws a walk

    Shantz takes over on the mound for the Yankees. The lefty had somehow won the American League MVP with the fourth-place A’s in 1952 and then led the league in ERA in 1957 as a swing man for the Yanks. Mel Allen talks about how a sore arm had limited him since that MVP year, but he’d settled in as an effective reliever. He would spend 1961 with the Pirates before bouncing from the Astros to the Cardinals, Cubs and Phillies over his last three years.

    He gets Bob Skinner on a grounder to first, and then Rocky Nelson gets a nice hand as he comes up. He hit a two-run homer in the first inning. Here he hits a rocket down the right-field line, foul.

    “It will be interesting to note the duel between Shantz and Rocky Nelson,” Prince says, “for Nelson has a greater lifetime average against left-hand pitching than he does against right-hand pitching. He says it’s because he waits longer on the left-hander and can pull him a little better on occasion.”

    Well, that’s interesting. Casey Stengel, sitting in the Yankees dugout, is the master of the platoon, but I had not expected to hear the TV announcer of the 1960 World Series talk about a guy’s platoon splits. And what a counterintuitive story Prince tells, the lefty-swinging Nelson hitting lefties better than he hits righties. Could this be?

    Unlike a viewer in 1960, I have the Internet and can answer that question while Nelson waits for Shantz’s next pitch.

    The short answer: Nelson did not hit left-handed pitching better than he hit right-handed pitching. In his regular-season career to that moment, Nelson’s batting average against righties was .266. Against lefties: .214. And it wasn’t just that he didn’t hit lefties better than righties. He hit lefties so little he rarely faced them. Nelson had 1,409 plate appearances in the big leagues to that point in his career, and 84 of them had come against left-handed pitching. That’s 6 percent. By way of comparison, Yogi Berra, a left-handed hitter who hit lefties pretty well, faced a left-hander in about 28 percent of his big-league at-bats.

    Roberto Clemente on one knee in the on-deck circle
    Roberto Clemente on one knee in the on-deck circle

    So Nelson was no lefty-killer, but maybe Prince was just talking about 1960. Sure enough, Nelson had a better batting average against lefties than against righties in 1960, .368 to .293.

    But he achieved that .368 average in 19 at-bats! He was 7-for-19 with a double. If two of his singles had been turned into an out — a bad hop here, an at’em ball there — he’d have hit .263 against lefties and Prince would have had nothing to talk about. Instead Prince is passing on Nelson’s pontifications about what makes him such a good lefty-on-lefty hitter because of his flukey success in 19 at-bats toward the end of a career in which he hit .188 against left-handed pitching. The next year, his last, Nelson, all waiting longer on the lefties and pulling them and everything, went 0-for-10 against them.

    See, kids, this is how it used to be. Before the Internet, before Bill James, TV announcers and newspaper reporters — and ballplayers and managers — would say stuff like this, and we’d just have to take their words for it. Now, we can fact check their asses. It might take 50 years, but we can figure out the truth.

    Nelson, ducking out of the way of sweeping curve after sweeping curve, works Shantz for a walk. Of course he does, because after all that you knew he wasn’t going to make an out.

    Clemente comes up. Prince, the Pirates announcer, does a funny thing. He pronounces his name close to correctly — “Clementay” — and then quickly corrects himself to an anglicized pronunciation: “Clumenty.” The right fielder hits a slow grounder to Bobby Richardson, who starts a nifty 4-6-3 double play, Tony Kubek making the relay. Clemente, who is fast, is out by a step and the third inning is over, the Pirates leading 4-0. Are the Yankees really going to go down this quietly?

    * * *

    Hector Lopez WBC photo by Reuters. Used without permission. Will remove on request.

    1960 Game 7, 2nd inning: Pirates break it open!

    1960 World Series programPreviously: First inning

    Mickey Mantle leads off the second for the Yankees. Was he just trying to drag a bunt there? You’ve got to be kidding me. The Pittsburgh fans think it should have been a strike but it’s a ball.

    Mantle is a 28-year-old 10-year veteran with 320 home runs. I’m trying to picture someone like him today trying a drag bunt in the seventh game of the World Series, down 2-0 in the second inning. Of course there isn’t anyone like him today, not really. Most other days either.

    The only active players who are among Mantle’s top 10 most similar players through age 28 are Albert Pujols and Andruw Jones. Now, Andruw Jones at 28 was a very different Andruw Jones than the marginal big leaguer he’s been for the last four years. His age-28 season was 2005, the year he hit 51 home runs. It also happened to be the last year he played in the postseason. I can’t remember him ever trying to bunt his way on, which doesn’t mean he didn’t. He did have a sacrifice bunt in the 1999 NLCS.

    Pujols put down a sacrifice bunt in an interleague game against the White Sox on June 16, 2001. It was the 67th game of his career. He’s played in 1,555 games since then, including postseason and All-Star Games, and we’re still waiting for sacrifice number 2.

    Ken Griffey Jr., recently retired, is also in Mantle’s top 10 most similar through age 28. He actually was sort of like Mantle, a power-speed center fielder, and he did bunt occasionally, so maybe it’s not so strange to see Mantle try to bunt. The Mick had one or two sacrifices most years up to this point, 13 total, but he’d only have one more, in ’61, and he never sacrificed in the World Series. But he knew how to bunt, and of course he was very fast.

    Even though I know he was fast, I think of him more as a slugger than as a fast guy because he hit all those homers and he was so famous for hitting them so far. And, largely a product of the era he played in, for all his speed he didn’t steal that many bases. He swiped 138 in his career, which at the time was a lot. He was in the top 10 in the American League in steals seven times and the top five three times, even though his career high was only 21. He also stole at an 80 percent clip. But still, when I think Mantle, I don’t think of a guy who’d try to drag bunt his way on. This may have a lot more to do with my ignorance of Mantle than with anything else.

    Mantle gets back in there. It always strikes me, watching old games, how casual the batters look. Here’s Mantle, an all-time great slugger, with that prodigious strength, and he just sort of stands there, waves the bat, waits for the pitch. It’s such a contrast to someone like Pujols, who looks like 230 pounds of coiled spring as he waits.

    I wonder what they would have made of Gary Sheffield if he’d showed up in 1960, menacingly twitching his bat in that way he did. Today’s hitters are all pigeon-toed and twisted, crouched and curled. They know what they’re doing. It’s the state of the art. It’s just funny to see these old-timers walk up there, settle in, calmly set themselves.

    Yankees logoMantle flies out to Bill Virdon in right center and here comes Yogi Berra, swinging two bats as he steps into the batter’s box. He’s actually swinging two sticks as he stands there and shares a laugh with the Pirates catcher, Smoky Burgess. He peels one off and hands it to, I guess, the bat boy, out of frame. There’s another thing you don’t see anymore, a guy carrying two bats to home plate. In fact, you never see guys swinging two bats in the on-deck circle. They swing one weighted bat, or some weighted bat-like object. Lead pipes were popular for a while. I used to swing two bats at a time as a kid. Fat lot of good it did me.

    Smoky Burgess is a familiar name to me, so much one of those old baseball names that I’m a little surprised to see him here in 1960, so recent. Offhand I would have thought he was a 1920s guy, and that’s without even confusing him with Smoky Joe Wood, who was actually a teens guy. I quick trio to the BR Bullpen reminds me why I know Burgess: He’s the guy who held the record for pinch hits that, for a good stretch of my youth, Manny Mota, the Dodgers’ pinch-hitting specialist, was chasing. Mota eventually broke Burgess’ record of 145 career pinch hits in 1979.

    Lenny Harris broke Mota’s record and ended up with 212, which is a record that will probably never be broken because with teams carrying so many pitchers, nobody can afford to carry a pinch-hitting specialist anymore. The active leader in pinch hits is Matt Stairs, who’s about to turn 43. He has 99.

    Berra has that same slightly closed left-handed stance Mantle has, bent slightly at the waist, leaning over the plate. I’ve seen both of them play in a rebroadcast game before, the Don Larsen perfect game, but one difference between that broadcast and this one is the main camera. In 1956, most of the action was viewed from behind home plate and up, a press-box view. In this game, the main camera is the same center field view that’s used today. So you get a little better peak at the hitters’ stances, though you get less of a sense of how much Berra moved around before he swung. He’d literally walk around in the box as he started his swing.

    He swings at a bad one here, down and away, and hits a bouncer to the left side. Pirates third baseman Don Hoak scrambles to his left, smothers it awkwardly on his hands and knees, springs to his feet and fires to first to get the slow-footed Berra. It’s a nice play. I instinctively wait for the three replays, and of course they don’t come.

    “Here’s the Moose,” Bob Prince says, not mentioning Benito Mussolini, whom Bill Skowron’s boyhood friends named him after. Hey, same batting stance as Mantle and Berra, only from the right side. Skowron yanks his head out, toward the third base dugout, as he swings. He hits a low-and-away pitch foul to the right, and I have no idea how he reached it. Skowron was one of the 10 best hitters in the American League in 1960 by OPS, OPS-plus and offensive WAR, but it looks like he has no chance up there. He grounds out to shortstop Dick Groat on an easy play.

    Burgess leads off the bottom of the second and Prince says he’s “known to his teammates as ‘the little round man.'” People complain about the deterioration of baseball nicknames, how colorful monikers like “The Dominican Dandy” and “Old Aches and Pains” have been replaced by unimaginative coinages of the A-Rod, K-Rod, Juan-Gone variety. But so far in this one we’ve got a guy named for a dictator and “the little round man.” Not too impressive.

    Then again, “the little round man” is a nickname for a guy named Smoky, whose real name was Forrest. Why would a guy named Smoky need another nickname? Did his teammates say, “Smoky just sounds so formal. Why don’t we call him ‘little round man.'” And how did that work? Did they actually walk up to him and say, “Hey, little round man, can I have some of your sunflower seeds?”

    The little round man, who has a similar stance to Mantle and Berra, only slightly open instead of slightly closed, whacks one inside first and down the line. Roger Maris makes a nice play to field the ball in Forbes Field’s very short corner — 300 feet down the line — and holds Burgess to a single.

    New Pirates logo, 1960
    New Pirates logo, 1960

    Prince describes Maris fielding the ball “brilliantly” and says, “Ladies and gentleman, that’s all great credit to Roger Maris. Normally, that’s a double.” But Burgess played five and a half years in Pittsburgh and I’d bet folding money he never had a double on a ball like that. A fast runner would have had to bust it to make second. Burgess had no chance, even if Maris had been a lot more leisurely. This was Prince’s home field. Did he really think a slow-footed catcher would routinely get to second on a sharply hit ball into the corner 300 feet from home plate?

    Casey Stengel’s headed to the mound, lineup card in hand, and he and Bob Turley talk to each other without looking at each other. Stengel’s seen enough, though, and he summons Bill Stafford from the bullpen. Stafford’s one of the boys who was warming up in the top of the first, and as he walks in — we haven’t reached the brief era of the “bullpen car” yet — Prince asks Yankees announcer Mel Allen to talk about him.

    He’s 22 and was brought up from Richmond late in the year when the Yankees staff was struggling, Allen says. He mentions Stafford’s 3-1 record, mostly as a starter, but not his fine 2.25 ERA in 60 innings. Stafford would win 14 games each of the next two years. He would eventually be sent to Kansas City, that graveyard for unwanted Yankees, in a deal that also included Roger Repoz, who I mention just to mention. Repoz was an Athletic only briefly before moving on to the Angels, where he would be one of the first ballplayers I knew about.

    Stafford faces the crouching Don Hoak, author of that scrambly play on Berra’s ball in the top of the inning. Stafford’s wild, throwing three straight balls and looking annoyed with himself. The fourth one misses, but it looks like not by much. Hard to tell as we were on the upstairs, behind the plate camera for that one. Two on, nobody out, Pirates up 2-0, and Casey looking worried on the top step. Bobby Shantz and Ralph Terry are working furiously in the bullpen as Bill Mazeroski steps up.

    Remember that name, not to give anything away.

    Maz bunts Stafford’s first pitch in the air down the first base line. It lands fair but Stafford and Clete Boyer let it roll foul. Prince praises their “very smart execution” but doesn’t mention whether Mazeroski should have perhaps taken a strike instead of bunting at the first pitch, given that Stafford, a 22-year-old rookie, had just come into the game and walked the first hitter on four pitches.

    Maz bunts again on the next pitch, this time a bouncer down the third base line. It looks to me like it’s going to go foul again, the last bounce much closer to the line than the second to last, the ball looking like it’s got some serious english on it. But Stafford has pounced off the mound sharply and he cuts in front of Boyer, makes a barehand pickup just before the ball bounces onto the dirt and, falling backward across the foul line, throws to first. Safe! The bases are loaded with nobody out. “And Casey’s beside himself,” Prince says. Maybe he thought that ball was going foul too.

    New MLB logo, 1960
    New MLB logo, 1960

    Stengel charges out of the dugout. He’d been booed last time he emerged and he’s booed again. He gives Stafford a lecture, looking right up into his face this time and resting his index finger on Stafford’s chest as he speaks.

    Vern Law is the hitter. For a pitcher, he’s no slouch with the bat, a lifetime .195 hitter with eight home runs at this point, and he’d had 17 hits that season, a career high to that point. He takes one, misses one, fouls one on a check swing. Virdon waits in the on-deck circle — on one knee, with two bats. Law hits a comebacker. Stafford jumps to spear the one-hopper and start a 1-2-3 double play. The crowd is silent.

    Prince had just mentioned that the Pirates hadn’t had many chances to KO the Yankees in one shot in the Series, and now the double play had put a big damper on this chance. But Virdon could still make it a 4-0 game with a hit. Virdon fouls one off to the right, another to the left. Stafford works from a windup. The 0-2 pitch is inside, and then Virdon lofts a soft liner toward right center. Maris charges but has to play it on a short hop, which he bobbles. Two runs score and Virdon slides into second. Hit and an error.

    MLB Network shows Virdon, in the theater in Pittsburgh watching the game in 2010, smiling and shrugging. Back in 1960, Groat grounds out to Boyer on a check-swing grounder to end the inning, but the damage is done.

    “We were up 4-0 and it felt pretty good,” Mazeroski says in a contemporary interview, “but by a long shot it didn’t feel like we had won this game yet. There was still a lot of game left to play, and, you know, you’re never comfortable with any lead. I don’t care if it’s a 15-0 lead. You’re never comfortable with that many innings to go.”

    I don’t know, Maz. Four to nothing after two with the Deacon on the mound? I like your chances.

    * * *

    All images from Chris Creamer’s Sportslogos.net, used without permission, but in the hope that no one minds.

    1960 World Series Game 7 live blog: 1st inning

    Mickey Mantle kneels in the on-deck circle
    Mickey Mantle kneels in the on-deck circle

    I’m live blogging the recent rebroadcast of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series on the MLB Network. Except it’s not live. I recorded the game and I’m watching it at my leisure several weeks after the broadcast. It might take me a few weeks to watch it.

    And I’m pausing it a lot to write. And rewinding. And at least at the beginning, I’m ignoring the part with Bob Costas and some of the players from the ’60 Series — and Franco Harris and Michael Keaton, natch — at a theater in Pittsburgh, watching a tape of the game.

    But this is definitely a blog. Oh look, it’s starting.

    What a weird pregame show. It’s just Mel Allen giving the batting orders Where’s Jeanne Zelasko waxing poetic? Where are the movie tie-ins?

    The starting pitchers appear to be warming up in front of the dugouts, not in the bullpens.

    Bob Prince, the Pirates’ announcer, is doing the play by play at the start. I remember him from my childhood. I didn’t hear him a lot, of course, in those prehistoric non-Internet days, but the Pirates were a powerhouse then, and it was still a tradition for postseason teams’ announcers to appear on the national TV broadcasts during the playoffs, so I got to hear him once in a while on NBC. I’d be lying if I said his voice was familiar, but I was always conscious of him because my best friend was named Robbie Prince, and Robbie’s dad was Bob Prince.

    Mr. Prince was an exterminator, and since we lived on the Westside of Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and Bel-Air were in his orbit, so he was, at least part of the time, an exterminator to the stars.

    The Princes were from rural Texas, and whenever the relatives came to visit, which they did a lot, we’d all pile into the Princes’ gigantic maroon — I want to say it was a Chrysler New Yorker but it was some kind of land shark with black seats and the permanent smell of cigarettes, and there’d be the four Princes, me and however many relatives, up to about four adults, all piled in — we’d all get in there and Mr. Prince would drive us over to Beverly Hills and Bel-Air and point out the houses he worked at or the ones he just knew. Lucille Ball’s house, Bob Hope’s. Buddy Ebsen.

    It was fun except that Mr. Prince had a strange way of driving. He wouldn’t keep his foot steady on the gas. He’d gun it and coast, gun it and coast. People like to joke about how those old ’60s family sedans were like big boats, but we’d actually start to get seasick driving around on flat, straight streets. Robbie and I, all tangled up in Texas Prince knees and elbows in the backseat, couldn’t look at each other or we’d burst out laughing, which might make us throw up.

    Somebody's maroon '68 Chrysler New Yorker from YouTube. Really don't know if this is the right make and model, but something like it.
    Somebody's maroon '68 Chrysler New Yorker from YouTube. Really don't know if this is the right make and model, but something like it.

    This driving issue was about the only negative thing about Mr. Prince. He would call you “boy,” only it sounded like this: “bwah.” And when he’d get really worked up during a game and start talking about Jethro Pugh, fearsome defensive lineman for his beloved Dallas Cowboys, he was an orator of the first rank. You might not know that the Cowboys signed Jethro Pugh when they saw him catching polecats with his fists and eating them alive on the spot, but I learned it.

    Anyway, I always had a soft spot for Bob Prince of the Pirates because of that.

    In the top of the first inning, we see Bill Stafford and Bobby Shantz of the Yankees warming up in the bullpen as the Yankees bat, though Bob Turley is the starting pitcher. “This alerts you to the possibility of a lot of thinking on the part of Mr. Stengel. They go for broke today,” Prince says. “Turley will start, but Shantz and Stafford will be ready.”

    I have long wondered why teams don’t do this routinely in elimination games. It’s one game for all the marbles, and if your starter doesn’t have it, that might be evident right from the start. But without anybody warm, you might have to suffer through three or four more batters before a reliever’s ready. It could be the difference between being down 1-0 and 5-0. I suppose it might offend the sensibilities of the starter to have someone warming up before he’s even thrown his first pitch. What, you don’t have faith in me, Skip?

    I have faith in you, I’d say. I also have two guys warming up in the bullpen, you feel me?

    As Roger Maris bats with two outs and nobody on, Mickey Mantle sits on one knee in the on-deck circle. It’s a classic pose, but nobody does that anymore. Everybody stands up and swings a bat or a weighted bat. Players used to sit on one knee all the time. Wonder where that went.

    Yogi Berra’s in left field, of course. He’s a part of this game’s famous climax, watching Bill Mazeroski’s home run go over his head. Elston Howard had taken over the catcher’s job from Berra that year, starting 80 games behind the plate to Berra’s 53, with Berra starting another 33 games in the outfield. Howard was out of this game, having broken his finger the day before, but instead of putting Berra behind the plate, Stengel went with Johnny Blanchard.

    Can you imagine a team carrying three catchers on its World Series roster today, even if one of them habitually played the outfield? With teams carrying 12 or 13 pitchers, there’s barely room for two catchers. The Yankees, like the Pirates, had a 10-man pitching staff in this World Series.

    Stengel evidently wanted Blanchard’s left-handed bat in the lineup against the righty Vern Law. His outfield options if Berra caught were right-handed: Hector Lopez and Bob Cerv, two men who had come off the Yankee shuttle from the Kansas City A’s and, together with Berra, manned left field that year. Lopez and Cerv had hit pretty well, better than Blanchard. But Stengel went with the platoon advantage.

    Prince says that “the Yankees have another catcher available to them if they’d like to use him, Dale Long. I don’t know if he has his left-handed catchers’ mitt with him, though.” It sounds like a joke, but Long, a power-hitting, left-handed first baseman, did catch in two games, a total of an inning and two-thirds, for the Chicago Cubs in 1958. He was the first left-handed thrower to catch in the major leagues since Jiggs Donahue in 1902, which I mention only so I could type the name Jiggs Donahue. It wouldn’t happen again until 1980, and now it hasn’t happened since 1989, according to the Hardball Times.

    A two-out walk to Bob Skinner and the game has its first base runner. Skinner is very tall, listed at 6-4. We see him held at first by Moose Skowron, who looks like an ordinary-sized man. He’s listed at 5-11, 195.

    Joe Torre a few years before I met him
    Joe Torre a few years before I met him

    Now, at this point, I thought I had a story about Moose Skowron but I don’t. It’s a story, and it’s a story about a guy named Moose, but it’s not about Moose Skowron.

    I was on the field doing interviews during batting practice before an A’s-Angels game in Oakland in the late ’80s. I worked for KALX, the radio station at Cal, and it was a thing there to get famous people, any famous people we came across in all walks of life, to do station ID’s for us. You know, to say, “This is Joe Celebrity, and whenever I’m in Berkeley I listen to 90.7 FM, KALX Berkeley.” If I recall, if we could get them to say “KALX” and “Berkeley” in a row, we could use it as a legal ID at the top of each hour.

    One guy had gotten a jailhouse interview with Charles Manson and he got Manson to do an ID. “Hey, it’s your weird old Uncle Charlie,” Manson had begun. I think it ran once, but people were offended so it got yanked. Spalding Gray did one in which he said that he was sitting in the studio in Berkeley, “a loving city, the only city in the world where people put up flyers that say, ‘Kitten found.'”

    So I’m there with my tape recorder and I see a rumpled guy come out of the Angels dugout wearing brown slacks and kind of a loud shirt, chomping on a cigar and carrying a briefcase. He looked like a hustling insurance salesman. No, he looked like a guy playing a hustling insurance salesman in an episode of “The Rockford Files.” It was Joe Torre, then a broadcaster for the Angels.

    I stopped him and asked him if he’d do a station ID for us and he said sure. He couldn’t have been nicer. Just a friendly guy. I explained what I needed and he grabbed the microphone and said, “Hi, this is Joe Torre, National League MVP, 1971, and when I’m in Berkeley …” I thought, nice guy, but what a cheeseball. I felt a little bad for him. Failed manager, still talking about his MVP from almost 20 years earlier. Like winning an MVP would get old. I was young and stupid. He ended up doing OK for himself, I hear.

    Right after that a big moose of a guy comes lumbering out of the Angeles dugout. This is the moose part of the story. He’s older, a coach. I say to myself, “Who’s that moose?” He walks by me and I see the name on his back: Stubing. It was Moose Stubing, a big moose of a guy who used to be a coach for the Angels. Sometimes, a nickname just fits.

    I was thinking it was Moose Skowron, who I had mixed up with Moose Stubing. Their nickname is where the resemblance ends. Stubing had a cup of coffee while Skowron was a fine player for many years. Also, Skowron was no moose. He got the nickname as a kid because his pals thought his haircut made him look like Mussolini. I think I’d have insisted, at some point, that people just call me Bill, wouldn’t you?

    Rocky Nelson, the Pirates cleanup hitter, who had a career year at the age of 35 that year, hitting .300 with seven home runs and 35 RBIs, but somehow ending up as the cleanup hitter in a World Series Game 7, has an odd batting stance, which Prince talks about. Nelson, a left-handed swinger, stands almost like a fencer, with his front foot pointed toward the pitcher. Prince says he adopted the stance to learn how to pull the ball.

    Maybe that was the mystery transformation in 1953 that this article about Nelson in, again, the Hardball Times refers to, when he suddenly became a power hitter. In any event, what a story this guy was. He’d played in parts of eight seasons between 1949 and 1960, for the Cardinals, Pirates, White Sox, Dodgers, Indians, Dodgers again, Cardinals again and Pirates again. He’d never appeared in 100 games and had only twice put up a league-average OPS. And here he was hitting cleanup in the seventh game of the World Series.

    Not to give anything away but he’s going to be involved in one of this incredibly famous game’s most famous plays much later, but for now, it’s 2-and-0. Turley drops a nasty curveball on the inside corner. Nelson has a long look and then another at home plate umpire Bill Jackowski — “from North Walpole, New Hampshire,” Prince says. He tosses his bat up and catches it, shakes his head and climbs back in.

    “There’s a drive, deep right field, way back she goes aaaaand you can kiss that one goodbye!” Nelson sprints around the bases and gets handshakes and pats on the back in the dugout. Slapping five was almost a decade away, high fiving almost 20 years in the future. The home run brings Casey Stengel to the top step of the Yankees dugout. “Right there,” Prince says as Stengel’s Number 37 is centered on the screen.

    Roberto Clemente, looking impossibly young and skinny, though at 26 he’s hardly a child, steps directly toward the third base dugout and checks his swing as Turley’s first pitch, a rainbow curve, drops over the middle of the plate. Clemente was an awful lot of fun to watch. Turley, the 1958 Cy Young winner, looks like he’s aiming slop balls up there.

    Whenever I watch games from the old days, I’m struck by how the pitchers look like they’re working in a 50-and-older league, flipping up all manner of here-hit-this pitches without appearing to break a sweat. Anybody who wonders why pitchers used to routinely throw complete games and almost never do anymore need only watch one game from the black-and-white-TV era to find the answer. The contrast to today’s max-effort pitchers, with their electric stuff zipping toward the plate, is startling.

    Why teams didn’t score 30 runs a game off these guys is a mystery to me, though. Well, it could have had something to do with the hitters swinging 42-ounce tree trunks, I suppose.

    Clemente pops out to Bobby Richardson to end the first inning. Pirates 2, Yankees 0. I think that should hold up behind Vern Law, don’t you?

    * * *

    The wife just asked what I was doing. I laughed and said, “You’re going to say I’m crazy.” I explained the story of the 1960 World Series Game 7 and how MLB had rebroadcast it, and I told her I was watching it and writing about it. “Oh, that’s good,” she said.

    “So I’ve written 2,400 words,” I said.

    “Wow!”

    “And I’ve just watched the first inning.”

    “Are you on speed? Are you doing meth?”

    “I told you you’d say I was crazy.”

    “I didn’t say you’re crazy. I said you’re on drugs.”

    * * *

    Photo credits
    Mantle: Ed McDonald/Flickr Creative Commons
    Torre: Jim Accordino/Flickr Creative Commons via Wikipedia

    Cliff Lee vs. league-average

    Cliff Lee of the Phillies
    Cliff Lee of the Phillies

    A Facebook friend asked, in light of last week’s post headlined “For the want of league average, greatness was missed,” what the signing of Cliff Lee means to the Phillies. That is, “I would be interested to see if the numbers project them as a rotation for the ages,” he wrote.

    Well, I think yeah. The numbers clearly project them as a rotation for the ages. Whether they’ll be one, who knows. Joe Posnanski talked to Bill James about that question. Jayson Stark huddled with Leo Mazzone and Davey Johnson and compared expectations of the 2011 Phillies staff to the greatest rotations since World War II.

    Go read them if you want to read something smart about the 2011 Phillies starting rotation.

    But what I wondered — and what I thought my Facebook friend asked on first reading his question — is whether adding Lee to the 2010 Phillies rotation would have made it one for the ages.

    You’ll recall that, with Roy Halladay, Cole Hamels and half a season of Roy Oswalt, the Phillies’ rotation was quite good, a close third in the National League by ERA. The problem was the rest of the starting staff: Kyle Kendrick, Joe Blanton and Jamie Moyer, all of whom pitched poorly, plus a few decent spot starts from J.A. Happ, Vance Worley and Nelson Figueroa.

    Replacing Kendrick, Blanton and Moyer’s 78 starts with league-average pitching would have dropped the Phillies starters’ combined ERA from 3.55 to 3.22, which would have been the lowest in the N.L. since the already legendary 1998 Atlanta Braves starters put up a 3.06. But what if we just replaced one of those guys with Cliff Lee? Would that be enough? How does adding one great pitcher to a staff that’s half elite and half poor compare to replacing the poor half with average pitchers?

    Kyle Kendrick would have been the odd man out if Lee had signed with the Phillies before 2010, so what happens if we replace his 177 and two-thirds innings and 4.81 ERA in his 31 starts with Cliff Lee?

    But what numbers do we use for Cliff Lee? We can use his actual 2010 numbers with Seattle and Texas. He made three fewer starts than Kendrick but tossed 34 and two thirds more innings, thanks to his astonishing average of 7.58 innings per start. We can add three starts of similar pitching to Lee’s total to match Kendrick’s 31 starts. That would bring him up from 212.1 to 235 innings. Either way, because the difference is so small, substituting Lee’s numbers for Kendrick’s we’re left with an ERA of 3.26 for the Phillies starters.

    Cliff Lee of the Rangers
    Cliff Lee of the Rangers

    That’s for the ages, all right, also the best since the ’98 Braves, but not as good as the 3.22 we came up with by using all league-average starters in place of the three Phillies’ non-aces.

    Adjusting for the American League’s higher run-scoring environment wouldn’t change much because the A.L. didn’t score that much more than the N.L. this year. The N.L. ERA of 4.02 was 97 percent of the A.L.’s 4.14. For starting pitchers the N.L. ERA of 4.07 was 95 percent of the A.L.’s 4.27. Using either multiplier to take a few earned runs away from Lee, we get the Phillies starters’ ERA down to 3.23.

    What about adjusting for ballpark? Lee made six home starts in Seattle, where Safeco Field is a pretty extreme pitcher’s park, and seven home starts in Texas, where the Ballpark is favorable to hitters, though not to the same extreme. Despite its reputation and early history as a hitter’s haven, Citizen’s Bank Park in Philadelphia has played as roughly neutral the last few years, according to both Baseball-Reference.com and “The Bill James Handbook.”

    Happily for me, because I wouldn’t be able to figure it out anyway, it doesn’t look like there’s any way transferring Lee’s 2010 numbers from Seattle and Texas to Philadelphia would lower his ERA by much because of park factors.

    Maybe we should look at the ever-so-brief time when Lee actually pitched in Philadelphia, in the second half of 2009. He started 12 games and had an ERA of 3.18 in 79 and two-thirds innings. If we take those same numbers and extrapolate them out to Kendrick’s 31 starts, we’d have a Phillies starting ERA of 3.30.

    Well, listen, it looks like any way I know how to slice it — which, let’s be clear, probably leaves out a lot of really smart ways of slicing it — replacing Kyle Kendrick with Cliff Lee would have had pretty much the same effect on the starting rotation’s ERA as replacing Kendrick, Blanton and Moyer’s starts with league-average performance.

    That’s interesting, isn’t it?

    Cliff Lee of the Indians
    Cliff Lee of the Indians

    But what about cost? Lee is awfully expensive. Which costs more, picking up an elite player to go with two poor ones or replacing three poor ones with average players? That’s an easy one to answer. I don’t know.

    But we can compare the actual guys we’re talking about. Lee’s new contract will reportedly pay him an average of $24 million a year, so let’s use that figure. With Lee as a starter for the 2010 Phillies — making his 2011 salary — the other full-season starter would have been Blanton, with Moyer probably filling a spot for half the year till the Oswalt trade.

    Cot’s Contracts says Blanton signed a three-year, $24 million deal before the 2010 season, with annual salaries of $1 million in 2010, then two years of $8.5 million, plus a $6 million signing bonus. I’d call that $7 million for 2010. Moyer made $8 million, various online resources tell us.

    So Lee, Blanton and Moyer would cost $39 million in our imaginary world, $35 million if we could jettison Moyer and his contract upon getting Oswalt.

    The four starting pitchers who straddled league average ERA in the N.L. this year were Bronson Arroyo and Derek Lowe below it — that is, better than average — and Barry Zito and Randy Wolf above, all veteran guys, meaning they’re expensive. Zito’s got a ridiculous contract, so let’s use the other three as our league average guys to replace Blanton, Moyer and Kendrick. Arroyo made $11 million in 2010, Wolf $9.25 million and Lowe $15 million. The three of them cost $34.25 million together.

    We only need two and a half of them, so if we could get away with only paying half to one of them our total would be somewhere between $27.8 million and $30.6 million. Less, but not a lot less, than the $35-$39 million we’d have paid for Lee, Blanton and half a year of Moyer.

    Cliff Lee of the Mariners
    Cliff Lee of the Mariners

    Close enough that I’d rather have Lee, even if the overall ERA is going to be similar. Having four elite starters would come in pretty damn handy in the postseason.

    I realize this is some whack cipherin’ I’m doing here. I have no idea, really, how adding Cliff Lee to the 2010 Phillies would have affected that staff. And there are all sorts of ways to get both poor pitching and league average pitching a lot cheaper than by paying Blanton, Moyer, Arroyo, Wolf and Lowe to do it — the next two ERAs above Wolf’s, for example, belonged to Jonathan Niese and Randy Wells, neither of whom made $430,000

    But it’s fun to think about, and I do think that while I certainly haven’t proved anything, it’s a reasonable assertion that replacing one poor pitcher with an elite pitcher like Cliff Lee has about the same effect on a staff’s overall performance as replacing three poor pitchers with league-average performers. I’d love to see someone who can really make a spreadsheet sing study that.

    What I think that person would find: Those league-average guys, they’re pretty good.

    * * *
    <p><i><b>Photo credits</b>
    Phillies: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/artolog/3776568591/”>Art Siegel</a>
    Mariners: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/macberns/4715005608/>John Berner</a>
    Rangers: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidehike/5152160871/”>Bo Nash</a>
    Indians: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/marksobba/1472917568/”>Mark Sobba</a>
    All via Flickr/Creative Commons</i>

    * * *

    Photo credits
    Phillies: Art Siegel
    Rangers: Bo Nash
    Indians: Mark Sobba
    Mariners: Bo Nash
    All via Flickr/Creative Commons

    In defense of replacement-level players?

    Ryan Rowland-Smith of the Mariners was 3.6 wins below replacement in 2010, the most of anyone in the majors.
    Ryan Rowland-Smith of the Mariners was 3.6 wins below replacement in 2010, the most of anyone in the majors.

    [Update: There’s an interesting discussion of this piece at the Baseball Primer Newsblog.]

    The really fun thing about poking around in baseball numbers is the same as the really fun thing about watching baseball. If you do it enough, then no matter how long you’ve been doing it you still see things all the time that you’ve never seen before. You still get surprised.

    Or, as Bill Cosby used to say at the beginning of “Fat Albert”: If you’re not careful, you might learn something.

    When I was poking around recently looking for illuminating factoids to hold up my side of a learned confab about the value of league average players, which I wrote about here and here, the most surprising thing I found wasn’t about league-average players, it was about replacement-level players.

    I’m not going to tell you that they’re “pretty good” too, but they’re better than I thought. I bet they’re better than you thought.

    First, what is a replacement level player? It’s a tough concept to get your mind around if you’re not familiar with it. You can read some good definitions on Tom Tango’s website, at the Hardball Times and on the Mariners blog Lookout Landing. That last piece is part of Lookout Landing’s excellent Sabermetrics 101 from a few years ago.

    Replacement level is a mathematical construct that represents a baseline against which all players can be compared. It’s the level of play expected from the least valuable players who are still good enough to play in the majors.

    So, to put it another way, if you had a team full of replacement-level players, you would have a contender for the worst team of all time. Baseball history tells us that the very worst teams of major leaguers are going to win just under 50 games. Occasionally teams actually win even fewer. In the last half century the 1962 Mets won 40 and the 2003 Tigers won 43, but those totals probably included some bad luck. Their Pythagorean winning percentages — what they figured to have won and lost based on how many runs they scored and allowed — had the Mets winning 50 games and the Tigers 49.

    A good way to think about it is that replacement level is what’s expected from a player who can be acquired at little or no cost: called up from Triple-A, plucked off the waiver wire, picked up in a trade for a player to be named later, that sort of thing. It describes the bottom layer of players who are good enough to play in the big leagues. But there isn’t some clear demarcation line between big leaguers and minor leaguers. At any time there are plenty of guys at Triple-A who are just as good as many big leaguers. The circumstances just haven’t broken right for them to be in the majors at the moment.

    But just because replacement level is the lowest level of play teams can expect from a big league player, that doesn’t mean they’ll get it. There are always some guys who perform below replacement level. Their Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is a negative number.

    You know he's not going to hit it: Pedro Feliz's -2.3 WAR was the worst in the big leagues in 2010.
    You know he's not going to hit it: Pedro Feliz's negative 2.3 WAR was the worst in the big leagues in 2010.

    That can happen for a number of reasons. A guy who’s shown himself to be capable of perfectly good play has an extended slump or a down year. A rookie who was thought to be ready isn’t. A veteran who was thought to have something left in the tank doesn’t. A marginal player, a replacement-level guy, who has a string of bad luck — an unusual number of hard-hit balls right at people, let’s say — will end up below replacement level, even if his actual talent level is still the same.

    Consider the Giants starting rotation, which we’ve been talking about around here lately. The Giants’ signed Todd Wellemeyer in the offseason for $1 million. Fangraphs does the math every year and figured out that this year teams paid, on average, about $4 million to free agents for each marginal win, or win above replacement. The minimum salary is $400,000. So the Giants were expecting Wellemeyer to be a little bit, a very little bit, better than replacement level.

    He’d been 2.3 wins below replacement in 2009 with the Cardinals, using Baseball-Reference’s version of WAR, but he’d been a 2.3-win player in 2008 and the Giants were hoping for a rebound.

    They didn’t get it. Through June 10 Wellemeyer made 11 starts and a relief appearance and had an ERA of 5.52. He struck out 6.3 batters per nine innings, but he also walked 5.4 and gave up 1.8 home runs, both staggering figures. He was a half a win below replacement, which is kind of an accomplishment in only a little over a third of the season. WAR is a counting stat, and by the end of the season only seven National League pitchers had accumulated -1.5 WAR or worse.

    Wellemeyer went on the disabled list for two months with a quad injury, made one relief appearance in August and was released.

    In 2008 the Giants had a guy whose first 11 starts were almost identical to Wellemeyer’s in 2010. He had an ERA of 5.53. He was barely striking out five batters per nine innings, and walking as many as he struck out. But he didn’t go on the disabled list or get released. He made 21 more starts. At the end of the year his ERA was 5.15, and he’d been 0.6 wins below replacement. That’s because his name was Barry Zito, he’d been a good pitcher for half a decade in Oakland and he was a year and a half into a seven-year, $126 million contract.

    The Giants also got negative WAR numbers this year from Bengie Molina, who was washed up but keeping the chair warm for Buster Posey; from Ryan Rohlinger, a journeyman minor leaguer who was forced into 18 plate appearances worth of duty by injuries; from Mark DeRosa, who tried unsuccessfully to play through a wrist injury. There are a lot of ways a guy can get to a sub-replacement performance.

    He showed up: Denard Span provided 705 plate appearances' worth of replacement level play for the Twins.
    He showed up: Denard Span provided 705 plate appearances' worth of replacement level play for the Twins.

    But here’s the thing I found that really surprised me, as I finally roll around to the point of this sub-replacement-level blog post. I’ve always thought of replacement level as basically the bottom of the major leagues, the worst you can play and still be a big leaguer. I think if you’d asked me I’d have acknowledged that it’s actually the worst you can be expected to play and still be in the big leagues, and that there’s a difference between that and the worst level at which some players actually play.

    What I didn’t realize was how big a difference. Because there is a lot of sub-replacement play in the big leagues.

    In the major leagues in 2010, 24.5 percent of all innings were thrown by pitchers who ended the season with a negative WAR. Almost one out of every four innings. More than two innings of every game, on average, were tossed by sub-replacement-level pitchers. Every team had at least 100 innings thrown by sub-replacement guys, and if you throw out the Twins’ 103, every team had at least 140 innings. Only the Giants, Twins and Rockies averaged fewer than one of every nine innings thrown by sub-replacement pitchers.

    The Diamondbacks got 816 and a third innings from pitchers who were below replacement level for the year. That’s more than half.

    Meanwhile, sub-replacement hitters accounted for 18.4 percent of all plate appearances not made by pitchers. Almost one in five times a guy walked to the plate in the majors this year, he was a guy who would end the season with a negative WAR. That’s about seven plate appearances per team per game, and remember we’re not talking about pitchers hitting.

    In 2009 the numbers were almost exactly the same: 18.5 percent of all plate appearances and 25.2 percent of all innings were by sub-replacement players, guys who ended the year with a negative WAR.

    So it’s misleading to think of a replacement-level player as the bottom of the league, because a whole big pile of players isn’t even that good. Almost a quarter of the league does not play as well as the guy who is supposedly “freely available.”

    I didn’t know that. I wasn’t careful. I learned something.

    * * *

    Rowland-Smith photo: Jane Gershovich/Flickr Creative Commons
    Feliz photo: SBoyd/Flickr Creative Commons
    Span photo: Bethany Khan/Flickr Creative Commons

    For the want of league average, greatness was missed

    Jamie Moyer
    Jamie Moyer

    I tend to follow up a reasoned debate like the one that inspired me to write about the value of league average performance by diving into stats to find facts to back up my view. And if I find them, I obnoxiously pepper my interlocutor with them via e-mail.

    This time, searching for ways to get across the idea that league-average performance is pretty damn good, I stumbled across something that I think illustrates the point beautifully.

    Before I get to that, I want to make clear that this league-average is pretty good business is nothing like an original thought of mine. It’s sabermetric gospel. As Jay Jaffe pointed out on Twitter, it’s fundamental Bill James observation #2. In the 1988 “Baseball Abstract,” James wrote: “Talent in baseball is not normally distributed. It is a pyramid. For every player who is 10 percent above the average player, there are probably twenty players who are 10 percent below average.” I don’t think you can really understand roster construction without understanding this point, and a whole lot of people understand roster construction just fine.

    But a lot don’t, even among some pretty hardcore baseball fans — and writers.

    So I decided to look at the pitching of the Philadelphia Phillies and the San Francisco Giants, the National League’s best regular-season team and its champion, both of which had very good starting pitching. One of the things that got me thinking about these two teams was a line in a national story about the Giants late in the season that mentioned them having “the best rotation this side of Philadelphia.”

    As a Giants fan, this struck me as odd because there’s no way I would have traded the Giants’ five-deep rotation for the Phillies’ three stars and pray for rain. At the time, the Giants’ worst pitcher was Barry Zito, who had been struggling since early August after pitching well for the first four months of the season.

    And this is where I’ll tell you that the league-average guy my friends and I were arguing about was Barry Zito. Except for his terrible 2008, when his ERA ballooned to 5.15, and he really was legitimately that bad, Zito has been a roughly league-average pitcher for his four years in San Francisco.

    In 2007, the National League ERA was 4.44, but for starting pitchers it was 4.64. Zito’s was 4.53. In 2009, N.L. starters had a 4.30 ERA, the league ERA was 4.20 and Zito’s was 4.03. This year, Zito’s 4.15 ERA was a bit higher than the league ERA of 4.03. Starting pitchers’ ERA was unusually close to the overall figure, 4.05.

    The problem is, Zito is a terrible guy to use to illustrate the idea that league average is pretty good because Zito makes a ridiculous $18 million a year on a seven-year contract. Of course he’s a terrible disappointment. He hasn’t lived up to that deal, but then, almost no one could have. It would have been an insane deal even if Zito were a better pitcher than he’s ever been.

    Also, Zito got to a little worse than league average in 2010 by pitching beautifully for four months, then pitching horribly for two. He had a 3.35 ERA through his first 23 starts, and then for the rest of the year, starting Aug. 11, he had a 6.66 in 11 starts and a relief appearance. He was dreadful. Not the best poster boy for “pretty good.”

    But you have to count the good four months. Overall, Zito was an important part of a terrific staff. The Giants’ starters combined for an ERA of 3.54, second best in the league behind the Cardinals’ 3.50. The Phillies were right behind the Giants at 3.55. But look how they got there.

    The Giants got 34 starts from Jonathan Sanchez, 33 each from Zito, Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum, 18 from Madison Bumgarner and 11 from Todd Wellemeyer, the only one of the bunch who didn’t pitch well. Here were their ERAs as starters — Zito had the one relief appearance and Wellemeyer had two:

    Bumgarner: 3.00
    Sanchez: 3.07
    Cain: 3.14
    Lincecum: 3.43
    Zito: 4.13
    Wellemeyer: 5.82

    The Phillies got 33 starts each from aces Roy Halladay and Cole Hamels and 12 from Roy Oswalt, another elite guy who came over in a midseason trade from Houston. The rest of the starts were Kyle Kendrick 31, Joe Blanton 28, Jamie Moyer 19, J.A. Happ 3, Vance Worley 2 and Nelson Figueroa 1. Their ERAs as Phillies starters:

    Oswalt: 1.65
    Happ: 1.76
    Worley: 1.80
    Halladay: 2.44
    Hamels: 3.06
    Figueroa: 3.60
    Blanton: 4.74
    Kendrick: 4.81
    Moyer: 4.84

    OK, you want to see the value of league average?

    The Giants got 44 starts from pitchers whose ERA was below the league average of 4.02, although 33 of those were by Zito, who had the lowest below-average ERA in the league. In other words, Zito was the best below-average pitcher in the N.L.

    The Phillies, though, got a whopping 78 starts — almost half their season — from Kendrick, Blanton and Moyer, none of whom were as bad as the Giants’ Wellemeyer, but all of whom were well below league average. And the Phillies still almost matched the Giants and were third in the league in starting pitcher ERA.

    But look  what would happen if you replace that trio’s 464 innings with league average pitching: The Phillies starting ERA would drop to 3.22. There hasn’t been a team anywhere near that figure this century.

    And what was standing between the Phillies, with their trio of elite starters, and that historically great rotation? It was the lack of two and a half league-average starters, three for half the season before they got Oswalt, and then two for the second half.

    If the Phillies had managed to have, say, Bronson Arroyo, Derek Lowe and Zito, the three pitchers who straddled the league-average ERA, instead of Blanton, Kendrick and Moyer, they’d have had a starting rotation for the ages.

    And all the stories about that great rotation — and there would have been a lot of them — would have focused on Halladay, Hamels and the midseason pickup, Oswalt. Arroyo and Co. would have gotten a mention, but they’d be lesser characters, just keeping the mound warm for those two days between Oswalt and Halladay.

    But we know better, don’t we? It would have been Arroyo, Lowe and Zito, three league-average guys, who made the group historically great. After all, Halladay, Hamels and Oswalt were actually there in 2010, and the Phillies rotation wasn’t great. It was only very good — third best in the league.

    With league-average starters the rest of the time, instead of poor but not Wellemeyer-ishly terrible starters, they would have been the best rotation since the mid-’90s Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz Braves.

    * * *

    Moyer photo by Hounddiggity/Creative Commons license