Category: MLB

 [An ad for Ty Cobb’s 1917 acting debut | Photo found at Our Game]

My girlfriend and I were struck this weekend to find a 1920 silent film that Babe Ruth starred in, Headin’ Home available on Netflix streaming. While we only got through a few minutes of the film, which played like a collection of stock footage and is of interest mainly for having a young, pinstriped Ruth in it, my girlfriend encouraged me afterward to look at other times ballplayers have starred in movies. It’s somewhat of a bygone tradition in baseball.

Baseball players still have cameos or make minor appearances in movies these days, with Wally Joyner making something of a name for himself in Mormon films. Near as I can tell, though, it’s been awhile since a baseball player starred in a film. It’s not like the era of Babe Ruth starring in four films including 1942’s “The Pride of the Yankees.” Here are seven other notable players who received star billing in a movie:

Christy Mathewson in “Matty’s Decision,” 1915: Christy Mathewson was nearing the end of his Hall of Fame career when he appeared in this film, intended to be the first of several for him with Universal. Save for an appearance in a 1917 baseball documentary, this was it for Mathewson as an actor. The plot, a full synopsis of which can be found here, revolves around Mathewson and his friend Eddie falling for the same woman and her father deciding that whoever triumphs in a pitching game can marry her. Though Mathewson loses, Eddie sees how distraught he is afterward and sends Matty a note saying he can have the girl.

Mike Donlin in “Right Off the Bat,” 1915: I’d be remiss if I didn’t include Mike Donlin, who hit .333 lifetime and might be in the Hall of Fame had he not retired to pursue a vaudeville career with his wife Mabel Hite. He returned to baseball, was never the same player and returned to acting thereafter. Donlin’s IMDB page lists 66 acting credits in films starring the likes of John Barrymore, Buster Keaton and Wallace Beery, though it’s mostly bit roles. One of Donlin’s few starring appearances came in this five-reel comedy, which I learned of through a much longer look at old-time ballplayer actors at John Thorn’s site.

Ty Cobb in “Somewhere in Georgia,” 1917: Ty Cobb had a unique screen career, even receiving writing credits for, get this, a few 1950s television programs including “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.” Prior to this, Cobb acted. The New-York Tribune praised his starring turn in the 1917 short “Somewhere in Georgia,” though it may be worth noting that its sports editor Grantland Rice wrote the film. The Tribune gushed:

Ty Cobb and Grantland Rice [debuted] on the screen yesterday via the Sunbeam Motion Picture Company. Grantland Rice furnished the story ‘Somewhere in Georgia,’ which is described as ‘a thrilling drama of love and baseball in six innings.’ It is all of that, and as an actor Ty Cobb is a huge success. In fact, he is so good that he shows all the others up.

Others had nice things to say about Cobb’s acting, though, including the Altoona [New York] Tribune and, as noted at Thorn’s site, Variety Magazine. The latter noted, ““Inasmuch as …Cobb is considered about the greatest ballplayer in the world, it goes without saying that [the film] is going to make a ten-strike with Young America.”

Lou Gehrig in “Rawhide,” 1938: I rarely use pictures on this website, as I’m reluctant to violate copyright laws. I hope my use of the picture at right qualifies as Fair Use. There’s simply no other way to capture the awesomeness of Lou Gehrig’s sole film appearance. Currently available on Netflix streaming, it seems like a must-watch for anyone into kitsch. The premise: Gehrig is “a former baseball champion who retires to a ranch where he helps break up a destructive racket in stock feed prices.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Jackie Robinson in “The Jackie Robinson Story,” 1950: Like every player here, more or less, Robinson played himself in his big screen debut. It only makes sense. Robinson was one of a kind, one of the more outspoken individuals in baseball history. While Chadwick Boseman was reasonably passable playing Robinson in the reasonably passable “42” in 2013, there was no replacing the original. That said, one IMDB reviewer noted that Robinson’s costar in his 1950 film debut, the recently-deceased Ruby Dee said Robinson felt out of place in it.

Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris in “Safe at Home!” 1962: There are many reasons ballplayers don’t star in as many movies today. The main one, I’m guessing: They don’t need the money. Roger Maris is a case in point. In the days before free agency and other factors sent salaries skyrocketing, Maris wasn’t financially set by his historic 1961 season. He and his brother wound up running a beer distribution business after he retired.

Maris resigned with the Yankees in February 1962 for $72,000, about $568,000 in today’s dollars. Around this time, newspapers announced that Maris and Mantle would be filming “Safe at Home!” in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, their spring training headquarters at the time. The black-and-white, 84-minute quickie film came out less than two months later. My girlfriend owns a DVD copy and the few minutes we watched were strictly kid fare, save for a wry supporting turn by “I Love Lucy” co-star William Frawley. Maris and Mantle fared better a couple months later with their cameos  in the Doris Day and Cary Grant classic, “That Touch of Mink.”

Found on Newspapers.com

I was enthralled when I came across this piece, an interview with a prominent baseball researcher of the 1920s suggesting Babe Ruth’s home runs were hurting baseball. Jacob Pomrenke of the Society for American Baseball Research told me after I first shared this piece a few weeks ago on Twitter that such stories were common in Babe Ruth’s era as he became the game’s first great slugger.

I suppose it’s human nature to come up with inane rationalizations to justify resisting change, and perhaps no player in baseball history changed the game as much as the Sultan of Swat. There were probably some growing pains for lots of people interested in baseball while Ruth was forever reshaping play. All the same, pieces like the one above seem wonderfully arcane nearly a century on. Historians seem to have long since settled on the narrative that Ruth saved fan interest in baseball, practically on his own, following the Black Sox Scandal. It’s a little surreal coming across pieces that run counter to this. But that’s part of the fun of historical research.

An added bonus, as Jacob pointed out to me: This story ran in the Boston Post, no doubt eager to bash Ruth, barely a year removed at the time from his sale to New York. Geographically, it’s the same press corps that hounded Ted Williams much of his career so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised.

[Babe Ruth with Red Sox teammates, 1915 | Library of Congress]

A frequent refrain from supporters of Jack Morris’s Hall of Fame candidacy is that he pitched the greatest game in World Series history. Certainly, Morris placed himself in unique company in 1991 when he became the third Fall Classic pitcher to hurl a 10-inning shutout after Clem Labine in 1956 [hat tip to Devon Young] and Christy Mathewson in 1913. Morris is also the 10th and most recent pitcher with a Game 7 shutout, joining men like Dizzy Dean in 1934, Sandy Koufax in 1965 and Bret Saberhagen in 1985. In addition, Morris is the only pitcher in World Series history with an extra inning, complete game victory in Game 7.

For some fans, all of this may be more than enough to anoint Morris. By various objective measures, though, Morris’s masterpiece is far from the greatest World Series pitching performance. There’s Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956 or journeyman Howard Ehmke’s surprise start in 1929 where the junkballer set a record at the time by striking out 13 stunned Chicago Cubs including Hall of Famers Rogers Hornsby, Hack Wilson and Kiki Cuyler twice apiece. Then there’s Bob Gibson’s five-hit shutout in 1968 where he set a World Series record that still stands with 17 strikeouts.

By Game Score, the best World Series pitching performance came in 1916 by Babe Ruth with a 97. [Morris is tied for 38th at 84.] Ruth set a World Series record that still stands when he went 14 innings for the Boston Red Sox in Game 2 on October 9, beating the Brooklyn Dodgers 2-1. He even drove in one of Boston’s runs, the New York Times noted, when Brooklyn second baseman George Cutshaw juggled a grounder in the third inning, allowing Everett Scott to score.

No one ever really talks about Game 2 of the 1916 World Series anymore, though it’s a great story. The day after it happened, the New York Times described the game as “the most thrilling world’s series battle ever fought.”

It was Ruth’s first start in a postseason game, as the 21-year-old southpaw had been kept in reserve for the 1915 World Series after going 18-8 with a 2.44 ERA that season. Robert Creamer explained in his signature Ruth biography that Red Sox manager Bill Carrigan had elected to primarily use right-handed pitchers in the 1915 Series against Philadelphia and its slugger Gavvy Cravath who had hit 24 homers in the regular season, best in the modern era to that point. Ruth got one pinch hit appearance in the Series while Boston won 4-1 and kept Cravath homer-less with a .125 batting average.

Ruth earned the nod for Game 2 of the 1916 Series after going 23-12 with an American League best 1.75 ERA [as well as a combined 10.4 WAR between pitching and hitting.] Ruth struggled early in his World Series pitching debut, surrendering an inside-the-park home run to Hy Myers in the first inning after, as Creamer noted, two Boston outfielders tripped in pursuit of the ball.  Teammate Jack Barry wrote the following day in a presumably ghostwritten Boston Post column, “Ruth oftentimes has his hardest session at the beginning. We all were sure as the game went along that Ruth would get better.”

Pitching in cavernous Braves Field with 44,000 fans packed in, Ruth threw 13 innings of shutout ball the remainder of the game, allowing five hits and three walks. As Creamer noted, Ruth pitched a no-hitter the final seven innings. Barry wrote that Myers’ homer came off a high fastball and that Ruth kept Myers hitless thereafter by pitching him low. Ruth escaped trouble, Barry noted, recording consecutive ground outs to close the eighth inning after Brooklyn put runners on second and third. Later in the 13th inning, Red Sox left fielder Duffy Lewis provided a running catch off a Jake Daubert fly ball.

The game finally ended amid fading daylight when pinch hitter Del Gainer provided an RBI single in the 14th inning. Having now taken the first two games, Boston would go on to win the Series 4-1. “I told you a year ago I could take care of those National League bums, and you never gave me a chance,” Creamer quoted Ruth telling Carrigan after Game 2. “Forget it Babe,” Carrigan is said to have replied. “You made monkeys out of them today.”

At least a few prominent writers praised Brooklyn’s hurler Sherry Smith, something of a surprise starter as the New York Times noted in its game coverage. [Major League Baseball historian John Thorn tells me there were occasional surprise World Series starters back then, Ehmke being perhaps the most famous.] Hugh Fullerton, a few years away from helping break the Black Sox Scandal, wrote that Ruth was saved by superior defense. Barry also wrote that Ruth received better support. Grantland Rice wrote in his syndicated column the following day:

Smith pitched the better game. For thirteen innings he had the Red Sox lashed to the phantom, swinging as helpless as the bewildered old dame who attempted to sweep back the ocean with a mop. They couldn’t hit with a machine gun loaded with buckshot.

Ruth pitched twice more in postseason play, winning two games in the 1918 World Series. His all-time Fall Classic pitching line: 3-0 with a 0.87 ERA, two complete games and a shutout. Somehow, the best was yet to come.

Every so often, I see tweets or articles from reputable sources repeating a long-since debunked myth. This one was posted about a week ago:

Games like Jered Weaver’s tonight, pitching to score, cost Jack Morris the Hall of Fame. Not good for ERA.

— Lyle Spencer (@LyleMSpencer) August 25, 2014

Lyle Spencer, a writer for MLB.com, is no different than a lot of other veteran reporters or fans who keep repeating this idea that Jack Morris pitched to the score. Morris popularized the notion, I think, to bolster his Hall of Fame candidacy despite a lifetime 3.90 ERA. As far as Hall campaign strategies go, it’s probably been one of the more effective ones. Morris just missed induction through the writers ballot and may be a future Veterans Committee pick.

Never mind that Joe Sheehan picked apart the myth of Morris pitching to the score in a landmark 2003 piece for Baseball Prospectus. In the piece, which is long but worth a full read, Sheehan examined everyone of Morris’s 527 career starts and discovered that Morris put his team behind in roughly two-thirds of them. That Morris had 254 wins while allowing nearly four runs a game is largely a credit to pitching for one of the best teams of the 1980s, the Detroit Tigers and getting at least five runs of support in nearly half his starts.

Sheehan’s piece is easily found in Google, as are any number of related ones that have come since. It’s like the majority of people who follow baseball aren’t even reading them.

As an enthusiast of sabermetrics, I see the world through proverbial rose-colored glasses sometimes. Primarily through this site and Twitter, I associate with a lot of researchers, analysts and fellow baseball writers, people who can concisely explain why they favor one version of Wins Above Replacement over another. I forget that most of the baseball universe doesn’t work this way.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a fellow who wrote at Baseball-Reference.com’s blog. What he told me: Most fans aren’t like us. They go with traditional stats like batting average or RBIs and don’t seek any kind of deeper statistical appreciation of baseball. They embrace the game’s myths, like Abner Doubleday inventing baseball or Morris pitching to the score. My friends and I? We maybe comprise less than one percent of all people into baseball.

People change, granted. Peter Gammons, among others, changed his mind on Morris pitching to the score after reading Sheehan’s piece. In time, maybe others will follow. But I suspect articles and tweets like the one above will keep coming and more people like me will keep writing pieces denouncing them until this issue, finally, is completely beaten to death. Trying to get people to see things differently seems like a fool’s errand sometimes. I know I often feel like I’m preaching to a choir of like-minded individuals.

The baseball world and the world in general remains so polarized. It’s a shame Jack Morris’s career has become a reminder of this. He was a fine pitcher, one of the best of his era and his work in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series was masterful. I agree with people like Joe Posnanski who’ve written that all this debate about him pitching to the score detracts from this.

For much of the early part of this season, it looked like Victor Martinez might join an exclusive club: players with more home runs than strikeouts in a season. It used to happen with some regularity, though since strikeout rates rose in the 1950s it’s become almost unheard of. Since 1958, just George Brett and Barry Bonds have accomplished the feat. Others like Albert Pujols and Tony Gwynn have come close. Martinez likely will not, as he has 27 homers and 39 strikeouts with a month to play.

According to the Baseball-Reference.com Play Index tool, 25 players in the modern era have had more home runs than strikeouts in a season where they qualified for the batting title. In all, the feat has been accomplished 65 times since 1901 led by Joe DiMaggio who did it seven times and famously just missed having more home runs than strikeouts for his career. Yogi Berra, Bill Dickey, Ted Kluszewski and Frank McCormick all had more homers than strikeouts at least four seasons apiece.

The list below offers a “Who’s Who” of great individual years in baseball history: DiMaggio and Ted Williams in 1941; Stan Musial when he just missed winning the Triple Crown in 1948 and collected 429 total bases, a mark no one’s topped since. My favorite of the bunch? Nap Lajoie, who took advantage of high scoring and foul tips not yet being called strikes in the expansion American League in 1901 to hit .426 with 14 home runs, nine strikeouts and 24 walks. Basically, everything Lajoie saw in 1901, he hit [though the Cincinnati Enquirer suggested late in the season that Lajoie was closing out with “don’t-care-a-rap” play as his team stumbled to fourth.]

That said, having a staggering level of offense is by no means the rule for making this list. Frank McCormick hit .269 when he had more homers than strikeouts in 1941, with adjusted rates of run creation and total offensive production barely above league average. Joe Sewell would have made this list more than twice with any kind of power. From 1925 through his final year in the majors of 1933, the Hall of Fame shortstop averaged four home runs and five strikeouts per season.

All this being said, I offer the following list chronologically:

In yesterday’s post, I noted that Mike Trout was on the verge of having the most Wins Above Replacement in his first four seasons of any center fielder in baseball history. Longtime reader Devon Young commented that Trout already has the most WAR of any player through his age 22 season, which got me thinking.

As I replied to Devon, Trout’s comps through age 22 are impressive, though I don’t place a ton of stock in them. The reason? There simply haven’t been that many players in baseball history who’ve racked up a lot of WAR before age 22. It’s rare that players make the majors and receive significant playing time before their mid-20s. Sometimes, this is due to factors beyond playing ability. Some players go to college first. Others are kept in the minors longer than necessary, perhaps with an aging, expensive veteran occupying their position with the big league club.

I decided to see how Trout might rate historically through a different lens: WAR per 162 games over a player’s first four seasons. I got onto this line of thought after noting that Trout and Joe DiMaggio had roughly the same lifetime WAR through their first four years, though Trout’s done it in 81 fewer games. The following is an exercise that rewards this sort of quicker achievement.

The following are the 25 highest totals for WAR per 162 games among position players of the modern era who had at least 15 WAR over their first four seasons. As an aside, I’ll break ties by favoring which player has the overall most WAR for their first four seasons:

It’s no sad consolation for Trout being second to Williams here and if we do another version of this exercise in a year, perhaps Trout will be first. The Splendid Splinter has long since had the standard for triumphant entries into the majors, offering a .356/.481/.642 slash over his first four seasons and hitting .406 in his third year. Kept in the minors through 1938 over concerns about his attitude, Williams was more or less in full stride by his debut with the Red Sox. His 190 OPS+ over his first four seasons is identical to his rate for the stat lifetime.

Mays and Musial’s inclusions here aren’t surprising, though I’m struck by Kenny Lofton. I recently wrote of Barry Bonds as the most underrated player of the 1990s, though I could maybe give it to Lofton now. Similar to Tim Raines, I generally picture Lofton as a journeyman over the second half of his career. I forget the young speedster who electrified baseball, leading the league in steals his first five full seasons while offering a .316/.386/.435 slash. I assume Hall of Fame voters forgot this as well, as Lofton received 3.2 percent of the vote his sole appearance on the writers ballot.

As fellow baseball blogger William Juliano told me today on Twitter, using WAR to make comparisons across eras is shaky. This, William explained, is because WAR for the past decade or so includes defensive data gathered through sophisticated means, while older WAR more or less gauges defense through box scores. While this fact alone isn’t enough for me to abandon this exercise, as WAR skews more toward a player’s offensive contributions, it isn’t insignificant either. Take DiMaggio, for instance.

A surprising amount of DiMaggio’s early value comes from his defense. Perhaps if there was more defensive play-by-play data available for his era, he might rate closer to Trout here. As it stands, finishing eighth-best seems like no slight. [I’m struck in general by the number of legendary players like DiMaggio comprising the bulk of the ranks here. One of my favorite things about WAR is that it often reinforces popular perceptions of players like the Yankee Clipper. In sum, I assume WAR helps the cause of players like DiMaggio more than it hurts them.]

The Veterans Committee gave Mize and Vaughan their due in the 1980s, though they perhaps deserved it far sooner. By WAR, Mize and Vaughan were nearly equal to DiMaggio in the 1930s. Like Grich, Mize and Vaughan probably rate among the most underrated players all-time. All three sustained their value better than Nomar, who’s about to have a similarly lackluster debut on the Hall of Fame ballot.

Bill James has spoken of the joy of baseball research where the results surprise him. Part of the reason I enjoy exercises like this is I wind up with players like Valentin who look gloriously out of place. Valentin’s part of the top 25 because of his 1995 season, his fourth in the majors, where he racked up 8.3 WAR to go with 27 homers, 102 RBI and a ninth place finish in American League MVP voting. He never had another year with even All Star-caliber WAR, though he finished with 32.5 WAR lifetime, a serviceable if generally unremarkable player.

I’m glad to see Kiner here, as he led the National League in home runs his first seven seasons. Next to Babe Ruth, he might be the best slugger out of the gate in baseball history. And this whole exercise would seem foolhardy without the presence of Robinson, even if he’s admittedly the oldest “young” player of this bunch. It’d be a shame not to include the player the Rookie of the Year award was created for. And Robinson’s WAR his first four seasons looks like one more reason he and so many other great black players were long overdue by 1947.

One final thing– Donaldson and Eric Davis each had 15.8 WAR, 374 games, and 6.8 WAR per 162 games through their first four seasons. I’m giving Donaldson the edge because his fourth season isn’t over yet, and I assume he’ll boost his numbers through the pennant race unfolding in the AL West. That’s not to slight Davis or the other 40 or so players with at least 6 WAR per 162 games over their first four seasons. If this exercise reminded me of anything, it’s the number of good young players who’ve shined throughout baseball history.

Five notable young players who fell short of the top 25: Barry Bonds (6.7 WAR per 162 games his first four seasons), Ken Griffey Jr. (6), Fred Lynn (5.4), Mickey Mantle (6.4),  Alex Rodriguez (6.6)

I saw Mike Trout play for the first time last Friday. I make it to three or five games a year and aside from going to spend time with family and friends, my goal is generally to see historic players in action. Trout more than qualifies. Four seasons into an already-storied career, the Los Angeles Angels center fielder looks like his generation’s version of Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays. In fact, going off Wins Above Replacement, Trout’s better. By WAR, Mike Trout could be the best young center fielder in baseball history.

The chart above represents the 10 best WAR rankings, via Baseball-Reference.com, for center fielders who logged at least 75 percent of their games at the position over their first four seasons. Entering today, Trout was tied with Joe DiMaggio for first with 26.3 WAR. If Trout has a good game tonight, he’ll be in the lead tomorrow [though not for Fangraphs’ version of WAR, where DiMaggio bests Trout over their first four seasons, 28.7 to 27.] More impressive, Trout accumulated his WAR in 82 fewer games than the Yankee Clipper, just beating out Mays and– this surprised me– Kenny Lofton, for best WAR per 162 games, at 9.2. That’s an MVP-caliber rate for Trout’s career.

Another thing that gets me about the list above is that most of the players on it went on to have stellar careers. DiMaggio, Mays, Earl Averill and Al Simmons are all deservedly in the Hall of Fame. Ken Griffey Jr. will be in a couple more years. I could make Cooperstown cases for Lofton, Vada Pinson and Cesar Cedeno and one can only wonder what might have been if Grady Sizemore hadn’t been beset with injuries. Oh well, Grady, we’ll always have this Sports Illustrated cover.

I keep wondering where the fail-safe point is with Trout, when we’ll know for sure that he’s another legend, not a Pinson or a Cedeno who started off so brightly and then declined precipitously. [Cedeno’s early comparisons to Mays looked like a joke by the end of his career.] I’d say we’re close right now on Trout, maybe a year or two off. I certainly got my money’s worth last Friday, watching Trout hit a homer that cleared the left-center fence in a hurry. I’ll be sure to see him play again before too long.

I’ve seen mentions over the past few years from major outlets like MLB Network of one of my favorite tools on Baseball-Reference.com: the stat converter.

To the uninitiated, the stat converter can be found by clicking More Stats on a player page and scrolling down to where to it says Neutralized Batting or Pitching. With this tool, we can discover things, such as that Ty Cobb would have had 101 steals if he’d played his 1915 season for the ’62 Dodgers, meaning Maury Wills still would have broken his single-season record. And Pedro Martinez might have bested Bob Gibson’s 1.12 ERA if he’d played his 2000 season for the ’68 Cardinals; the converter has Martinez at a 1.00 ERA. It’s enough to keep a stat geek like me occupied for hours. It has, I think.

Near as I can tell, the stat converter works on a simple algorithm. Essentially, every player in baseball history has been on a team that scored an average number of runs per game and has played in a ballpark with numerical factors based around 100 that denote how conducive it’s been to pitching and hitting. The stat converter seems to tweak players’ numbers by taking the average runs and ballpark factors from their original teams and substituting those values out for whatever team they’re placed on, with the overall average runs for their leagues also being taken into account. It’s a fun, quick way to make projections across eras, but it isn’t perfect.

I first noticed an issue a few years ago when trying to project Live Ball Era numbers for Deadball great Home Run Baker. Wanting to see if Baker would have been worthy of his nickname on the 1999 Colorado Rockies, who had four players with 30 homers, I ran his converted numbers and saw he jumped from 12 home runs with the 1913 Philadelphia A’s to 18. This didn’t seem right. The converter also projects Baker having over 200 RBIs and a .400 batting average, also seemingly unrealistic. His projected strikeout rate doesn’t wash, either. In 1913 where AL players struck out once every 9.7 plate appearances, Baker whiffed once every 20.7 plate appearances. In 1999 where NL players struck out once every 5.9 PAs, Baker is projected to K once every 23.4 PAs.

The problem with the converter is apparent as well going from Live Ball to Deadball Era. Barry Bonds of 2001 is projected to have hit 57 home runs on the 1916 Boston Braves. Dave Robertson, Cy Williams and Wally Pipp led baseball with 12 homers apiece that season. And Bonds’ projected ballpark, Braves Field boasted vast dimensions such as nearly 500 feet to dead center to facilitate inside-the-parks homers, Boston owner James Gaffney’s favorite blend of baseball. I don’t care how much better Bonds was than the rest of the majors in the early 2000s. He would’ve been pushed to hit even 25 homers for the 1916 Braves, a team that hit 22 collectively and had no player with more than four homers.

The issue doesn’t just lie with Live Ball to Deadball conversions. I couldn’t find a modern pitcher projected to win 30 games on the 1968 Tigers, not Randy Johnson in 2001, Bob Welch in 1990, or Ron Guidry in 1978, to name three recent pitchers who’ve come close since Denny McLain won 31 games for Detroit. Part of the problem is that the stat converter doesn’t appear to adjust for different pitcher usage rates between eras. Welch, for instance, was fourth-best in baseball with 238 innings in 1990. The fourth most-durable pitcher in 1968, Bob Gibson had 304.2 innings, though the stat converter offers Welch’s projections with 238 innings that year. It’s part of the reason he’s projected to go just 14-12 for the Tigers.

All of this, so we’re clear, isn’t to take major issue with the stat converter. It’s one of many, many reasons that Baseball-Reference.com is easily my favorite baseball website of them all, one more reason I should probably be paying Sean Forman rent for the amount of time I spend on his site. I don’t know how or if it’s feasible to adjust the stat converter so that it becomes anything more than a fun, simple tool that projects based on run-related averages. But I offer all of this with the hope of advancing creative endeavor.

It seems like a common notion among casual baseball fans that expansion boosts scoring. Certainly, the individual achievements that have happened in expansion seasons would appear to support this. Every time baseball has expanded, it seems, something noteworthy has happened, be it Roger Maris breaking the home run record in 1961, Mark McGwire doing likewise in 1998, or Rod Carew, John Olerud and Andres Galarraga hitting close to .400 in other expansion years.

Granted, the notion of expansion boosting scoring has its skeptics, most prominently perhaps Bill James who wrote in his 2001 historical abstract:

Expansion favors neither the hitter nor the pitcher, on balance; it does as much to create a shortage of good hitters as it does to create a shortage of good pitchers.

While I trust Bill James more than I trust conventional wisdom in baseball, his claim raised a red flag for me. With the help of the spreadsheet of baseball run averages since 1876 that I wrote about earlier this week, I applied a cursory test.

My thought? James is mostly right. Expansion alone won’t create a scoring boon, though it could favor individual achievement since the best players in baseball will face more marginal talents in expansion years. In his 1992 book Baseball’s Last .400 Hitter, SABR member John Holway suggested that in order for someone to hit .400 again, the majors might need to be tripled in size in order to restore player-population ratios of Ted Williams’ era.

That said, the fact that scoring has increased six of eight times that a league has expanded and didn’t meaningfully decrease the other two times is striking to me. I could drill down deeper in my research, though I’ll leave this as is for now.