Category: MLB

What he did: If I were to make a list of the 25 or 50 most underrated players in baseball history, Davey Lopes might figure somewhere on there. I suppose it’s easy to forget a man who hit .263 lifetime, whose 557 stolen bases rank 26th on the all-time leader board behind such men as Juan Pierre, Otis Nixon and Willie Wilson. Lopes received two votes his only year on the writers ballot for the Hall of Fame in 1993, not a particularly strong Cooperstown ballot and I doubt many people cried foul.

Lopes’ lackluster defense (1.2 defensive WAR and one Gold Glove lifetime) and late start in the majors at 27 help limit his case for Cooperstown and there are dozens of players I’d enshrine before him. He’s not a Hall of Famer in my estimation. Thing is, upon deeper inspection, Lopes may belong in better company than his numbers would suggest. That’s how it goes for a lot of Hall of Very Good-esque players. And it’s especially true for guys from Lopes’ era of the 1970s and ’80s, no great time for hitters.

Lopes’ 107 OPS+ ties him with Kenny Lofton for 13th-best among modern players with at least 500 steals. Lopes is also one of just seven players with at least 150 home runs and 500 steals, joining Barry Bonds, Rickey Henderson, Joe Morgan, Cesar Cedeno, Paul Molitor and Tim Raines (Lou Brock fell one home run short.)

Era he might have thrived in: Lopes played from 1972 to 1987 and spent much of his career in Dodger Stadium, a ballpark for pitchers in an era that mostly favored them. In a better hitter’s park and offensive era, say Fenway Park or Wrigley Field in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lopes might’ve hit .300 lifetime, upped his steals totals and had a better shot at Cooperstown.

Why: Park and era define so how much of how a player will do. For instance, I was looking the other day at numbers for Lefty O’Doul, whose .349 career batting average ranks fourth all-time. Thing is, O’Doul did his best work in perhaps the greatest offensive age in baseball history, the late 1920s and early ’30s and he did much of it in hitter’s parks to boot. O’Doul hit .428 lifetime in 960 at-bats between the Baker Bowl and Sportsman Park and .316 elsewhere. Put O’Doul in Lopes’ place and he might struggle to crack .300.

I’d run conversions for Lopes on O’Doul’s 1930 Phillies, but steals weren’t a huge part of the game in those days and I’d like an era where Lopes’ speed and power would each be fully appreciated. He’d get this big-time on the 1999 Red Sox. Running Lopes’ numbers through the stat converter on Baseball-Reference.com, his 1979 season for the Dodgers where he hit .265 with 28 home runs and 44 stolen bases would boost to a .297 clip with 33 homers and 52 steals. Give Lopes the chance to make the majors sooner than 27 and consistently post comparable power numbers and I suspect he’d get a lot more than two Hall of Fame votes and be something more than a relatively forgotten player today.

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Any player/Any era is a column here that looks at how a baseball player might have done in an era besides the one he played in.

I was eight or nine the first time I got an autograph. It happened at Candlestick Park in San Francisco and I know it was sometime during the 1992 season because I got it from Cory Snyder before a game one day. Snyder was in the midst of hitting .269 in his only year with the Giants and Baseball-Reference.com tells me he was worth just one win over a replacement player, someone who wouldn’t have been starting on a team better than San Francisco’s 72-90 club. Still, the faint autograph Snyder left on my Giants hat earned him my everlasting gratitude and to this day, I remain a fan of his.

Sometime around college, getting autographs lost its luster. I majored in journalism, studying more or less to be a sportswriter and one of the sayings in that world is, “No cheering in the press box.” Next to that maxim is an implicit understanding that gathering autographs on the job is strictly frowned upon. It just isn’t professional. I got autographs a handful of times, though by the time I graduated, I’d come to more enjoy the chance to make connections with athletes, to talk with them and get a glimpse of them as people. I value this over a signature and if there’s one part of my childhood gone forever, it’s that autographs hold little magic for me anymore.

It’s not to say that everyone I know shares my viewpoint or should. I have a few friends in the memorabilia world and autographs are big there. I also know that other people haven’t had the luxury I’ve had of getting to chat with a few dozen ex-MLB players, from Hall of Famers to journeymen. For some people, an autograph is the closest they’ll get to that world, and I admit that in a sense, we’re both living vicariously. Getting an interview with a famous baseball player is no more a sign of acceptance into their world than getting their signature. Ultimately, both are souvenirs, and if an autograph puts a smile on someone’s face, who am I to judge? I digress.

I got a new full-time job about a month ago, writing ad copy for an industrial supply company called CWC. I’ve been working hard to help the company launch a new website, and I guess the owner is happy, because a few days ago, he distributed some of his Oakland A’s season tickets that he wasn’t going to use. I got four tickets to Tuesday night’s A’s-Rays game. Better, it happened to be my birthday and my parents were already coming to town for dinner, so I got to surprise them. All things considered, it would prove to be an awesome way to spend a birthday, even if the A’s lost 8-0.

Generally when I go to a game, I sit far up in the stands. I don’t really mind, and it’s usually just cool to be at the ballpark. I don’t get there enough, and if the only way I can do it is through a $12 seat in the upper reserve, so be it. That being said, my boss has season tickets 16 rows from the field, just to the right of home  plate, so my folks and I were sitting in style on Tuesday evening. We were also just by the tunnel to the visitor’s dugout and when we sat down, I quickly realized I might be able to get an autograph for a friend who’s a Rays fan and has been going through a rough stretch. I borrowed a pen from my mom and walked over to the railing beside the tunnel.

I wasn’t sure which player would come my way and I would’ve settled for any of the Rays. I wound up catching one of their outfielders, Sam Fuld. One thing of note: Fuld attended Stanford and has arguably made more of a name for himself as a writer than as a ballplayer, contributing to sites like Grantland between hitting .251 over parts of five seasons. Fuld recently did a piece on Brett Butler for a project at Hall of Very Good (one that I was invited to take part in but couldn’t make) and I mentioned this after Fuld agreed to sign something for my friend. Fuld told me that Butler had actually reached out to him earlier Tuesday about his piece. It was a cool moment and much as my friend got a personalized autograph on the back of a ticket stub, I walked away with an anecdote and an excuse for this post.

I’ve been reading about baseball history much of my life, and when I started this blog in May 2009, I considered myself an expert on the subject. For years growing up, I was the odd person among my friends who could recite World Series winners from memory and dispense anecdotes about Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and others. Needless to say, blogging has been an exercise in humility. Since launching this site, I’ve learned a lot about sabermetrics and baseball history. I’ve also learned how much information is out there that I still don’t know.

Much of what I know about baseball comes from books. My grandfather gave me my first baseball history book when I was eight, and since then, I’ve read through more books than I can count: Ken Burns’s Baseball and Lawrence Ritter’s The Lost Ballparks in early adolescence; Ball Four, The Glory of Their Times and Summer of ’49 in recent years. I figured when I started here I’d read a good chunk of the important baseball books in existence. As it turned out, I wasn’t even close. I haven’t scratched the surface with the works of Bill James, John Thorn, Pete Palmer and many other essential baseball writers. Heck, I still haven’t read much of Moneyball. If I ever venture to a desert island, I’m bringing a sabermetric library with me.

For the time being, I’ve commenced to slowly make my way through a list of books that I assume will make me more well-rounded as a baseball writer, researcher and historian. The top of my list features a mix of sabermetric and historical works:

1. The Politics of Glory, by Bill James
2. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
3. Baseball in the Garden of Eden, by John Thorn
4. The Book, by Tom Tango
5. The Soul of the Game, by Joe Posnanski

I’m a slow reader, frequently distracted, and it might take me a year to get through those books, though I’ve made a small dent in the list. I have a friend who lives nearby and shares my interest in baseball history, the kind of guy who talks about having gone to Baseball Prospectus outreach events in the past, the dude I saw “Moneyball” with last year. (On a side note, I’d love to get this guy involved with SABR– he’d fit right in.) My friend recently lent me a stack of old Bill James’ abstracts along with a copy of The Politics of Glory. I’m about 300 pages in and I’m liking it so far.

To the uninitiated, The Politics of Glory is a 1994 book James wrote about the Hall of Fame– its history, its membership and how James envisioned reforming the museum. I don’t agree with all of it, but a lot of it’s fascinating reading, a good primer for anyone with an interest in Cooperstown. It’s also been interesting to see how well James’ concepts hold up nearly 20 years after publication. Some ideas fare better than others, which is probably reasonable considering there’s stuff I wrote a couple years ago here that I’d just as soon not have my name on now.

Baseball-Reference.com adopted the Similarity Scores idea James introduces in Chapter 9, as well as his Hall of Fame Monitor, Standards, and Black Ink Test that he writes about at length. I see occasional mentions online to James’ “Keltner List” for Hall of Fame candidates that he breaks down for Chapter 22 (here’s Geoff Young doing it for Mark Davis.) And I’m curious if the book got any players into Cooperstown, specifically George Davis, a forgotten Deadball Era infielder the Veterans Committee honored in 1998. James compares Davis favorably to Joe Tinker in Chapter 16, even writing that at the turn of the 20th century, Davis was one of baseball’s best players.

Less remembered is James’ idea in Chapter 21 to convert pitcher’s win totals, winning percentage and games above .500 to a single Fibonacci score. No one ever acted either on James’ proposal in Chapter 29 to have Hall of Fame voting handled by five groups: players, fans, media, scholars and professionals. Then there’s James list on page 365 of players he predicted would be enshrined by this year (Bill Parker blogged about it here.) James correctly predicted 21 honorees, though players he figured would be in by now but aren’t include Joe Carter, Al Oliver and Brett Butler, who received just two votes in 2003, his only year on the writers ballot for Cooperstown.

All things considered, I’m glad to be reading the book, though it comes at an interesting time. James has been under fire recently for some comments he made defending Joe Paterno, and it makes me wonder how relevant the so-called Godfather of Stats is these days. That’s a post for another time. For now, what I’ll say is that I’m glad to be finally reading him. I’m reading Bill James for the same general reason that I’ve read The Great Gatsby and the first few books of the Old Testament. At least in baseball terms, James is part of the canon of the  game’s literature. To not read him, to ignore his work is to miss something vital.

My great-grandmother lived to be 92, dying when I was 11. Gigi, as my family called her, spent the final few years of her life in a nursing home in Ripon, California about an hour south of where we lived in Sacramento, and my mom took me and my sister to visit her almost every week. The general pattern was to pick Gigi up and go for food, Mexican or Chinese in Ripon, McDonalds or Olive Garden in nearby Modesto, and there’d usually be time to talk.

I’ve loved history, particularly primary source history as long as I can remember, and with Gigi being born in Oakland in 1902, I knew she had a wealth of stories. I wish I’d been old enough to ask her more about her memories of standing on the East Bay waterfront in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, watching the city burn. Still, even her small, inconsequential stories of growing up and raising my grandmother during the Great Depression enthralled me. It was like having a window into another world.

Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m drawn to baseball history, why I can talk at length with men who knew Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, or Willie Mays. I started research on a book two years ago on a man named Joe Marty who played in the majors from 1937 to 1941. At the time I set out on my project, four of Marty’s big league teammates were still living, and I got to interview one of them. I can’t describe how surreal that phone conversation was, the wonder I felt hearing this man, who was 96 at the time and has since died, tell me first-hand anecdotes about Marty, who died in 1984 and has otherwise been challenging to research. How I welcome the opportunity to cut through myth and get a glimpse of the realities people lived.

In this spirit, I got to do an email interview this past winter with founding Sports Illustrated editor and longtime baseball writer Robert Creamer. I’m still amazed by the experience. Creamer, who died at 90 on Wednesday, gave an enchanting, beautiful interview. The man who wrote the definitive biographies on Babe Ruth and Casey Stengel took almost three weeks to answer my questions, offering more than 4,000 words and a lifetime of baseball knowledge in response. Creamer wrote of watching Babe Ruth hit home runs, of being at the Polo Grounds in 1951 when Mays hit his first career home run and again in 1954 when the Say Hey Kid made his famous catch in Game 1 of the World Series.

I’ve done many interviews, and they often go well. My subjects are usually interesting people, often baseball writers I admire or former players, and I also believe everyone has a story. I’ve found it’s generally a matter of asking good questions, helping a person feel comfortable and listening. All this being said, I knew before Creamer was halfway through my questions that he was offering something remarkable. There’s a part in the foreword to John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Confederacy of Dunces where novelist Walker Percy remarks of his reading the manuscript for the first time and having thought, “Surely it was not possible that it was so good.” I felt a little like that each time one of Creamer’s emails came in with another question or two of mine answered.

For instance, I asked Creamer about his favorite baseball memories. His reply so struck me I read it aloud to my mom. Creamer began:

This is a very tough question to answer, first of all because some of one’s most treasured memories have nothing to do with the big leagues but with personal experience. I remember when I was about nine around 1930 being in our backyard with my grumpy old grandfather. I was throwing a rubber ball against the back of our neighbors’ garage and trying to field it. Suddenly Pop asked me “You like baseball?” I said “Sure!” He said “What position do you play?” I said,”Shortstop,” which was simply a nine-year-old’s dream back before Little League and organized kids sports. He said, “I used to play shortstop,” and I was astonished. This cranky old man had played baseball? Had played shortstop?

That’s all I remember of the conversation, but some time later the local daily ran a sentimental Look-Back issue, reprinting pages from an 1890 newspaper, and there was a story about the Mt. Vernon All-Stars beating the Wakefield 200, and there in the boxscore was my grandfather’s name — Fred Watts, ss. — and he had a hit! And my uncle John Brett played right field. It wasn’t until years later that I realized it must’ve been a picnic-type game for a barrel of beer, but for a kid, seeing his grandfather’s name in the newspaper playing shortstop for the “Stars”– that was a thrill I still remember. There are a lot of non-pro things I can recall and which meant then and still do now a great deal to me.

Creamer gave a powerful, touching interview, something that could’ve and probably should’ve run somewhere much larger. I was lucky to get to share it here.

Creamer and I kept up for a few months after the interview. He was fun to email with, witty, helpful and always kind to me. I’ve undertaken two projects on my blog since I interviewed Creamer, and I invited him to write for both of them. When he said no for the first project, he told he’d been having some health woes and that it was difficult for him to write much of anything, even short emails. I didn’t realize the gravity of Creamer’s situation, that he might have anything like the prostate cancer that ultimately took his life. Creamer was still gracious enough from his sickbed to put me in contact with one of his former SI colleagues, Walter Bingham, who contributed a piece on Casey Stengel that I linked to in April for the first project. Creamer also offered encouragement for my writing and even wrote me a letter of recommendation on April 25. Regrettably, it was the last I heard from him.

Creamer turned 90 on July 14, and I organized a birthday card of sorts through this site. My goal was to have people leave comments saying how Creamer touched them and to put a smile on his face and help make his birthday special. I’m wondering now if he saw the post. I wouldn’t expect it, though perhaps this piece can be sent to Creamer’s family. I’d like them to know how grateful I was for the opportunity to talk with him, what a wonderful man and baseball writer that he was. He set a fine example for me and, I’m guessing, countless others. I’ll cherish my association with him.

Over the winter, I was fortunate enough to interview longtime baseball writer Robert Creamer. He gave a fantastic interview, one that could’ve ran anywhere and is a must-read for any baseball fan or aspiring writer. Creamer and I have kept in contact since then, and I feel lucky to consider him one of my mentors. From the beginning of our association, Bob, as he insisted I call him, has been generous with his time and I enjoy exchanging emails with him.

Now, I’d like to return the favor.

It’s Friday evening in California as I write this, and in a few hours, Bob turns 90. For my present to him, I’d like to do something that a blog lends itself perfectly to. I’d like to invite anyone reading to share in the comment section below about how Bob has touched them, what his writing has meant. It shouldn’t be too hard. Bob did great work in his 30 years at Sports Illustrated and wrote the definitive biographies on Casey Stengel and Babe Ruth. (For what it’s worth, I think the Hall of Fame is well overdue on honoring Bob in its writers’ exhibit.)

Bob checks his email regularly, at least daily generally, and I’ll be sending him a link to this page after there’s at least a few comments here. Let’s put a smile on his face and wish him a happy 90th birthday.

As anyone who’s a regular here has surely noticed, posting at this site has been a bit sparse of late. I’ve had a bit going on in my life, including a new job, and the truth is I’ve also been at a bit of an impasse here. I run hot and cold with this website, and for the past couple of months, my creative fires have cooled, at least in regard to BPP. I assume they’ll come back; they always do.

I apologize for anyone who misses my writing here, though with that being said, as the title would suggest, I have some cool news. A few months of hard work (that I’ve neglected to mention here before now) has culminated with my first-ever freelance piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. I wrote about Tony Gomez, a sandlot player from the 1930s who faced an uphill battle getting into professional baseball because of the dark color of his skin.

The story will be in the Tuesday edition of the paper and can be read online here.

I hope everyone enjoys this story, and I’d love some constructive feedback from anyone who can offer it. My hope is that this is the first of many pieces in the Chronicle and that I can build on my work and continue to grow as a writer.

What he did: I kicked off a new project here Monday, having people vote on a 50-player inner circle for the Hall of Fame, and I suppose it’s no surprise Earl Averill is an afterthought in voting. Players like Averill often suffer in these exercises. Averill, who currently has two votes, played just 13 years in the majors, needing until a month before his 27th birthday in 1929 to debut. His lifetime numbers pale compared to legions of greats who’ve appeared more recently. Even his place in Cooperstown wasn’t easily come by. Averill campaigned for a plaque for years after retiring in 1941, Bert Blyleven for an earlier generation, and it took until 1975 for the Veterans Committee to recognize him.

This isn’t to say Averill doesn’t deserve his due. His 238 home runs, .318 batting average, and 133 OPS+ place him among the best hitters of the 1930s. His 45.1 WAR, while distantly down the career leaderboards, isn’t bad for 13 seasons– just 142 players in baseball history have posted a better total in that span. Averill is certainly one of the greatest Cleveland Indians of all-time, arguably worthy of the franchise’s Mount Rushmore. And I wonder what he might have done with a longer career.

Era he might have thrived in: Averill was a product of his environment, beginning with a town club in 1920 in his hometown of Snohomish, Washington and eventually working his way to the Pacific Coast League and, after starring for three years in that circuit, the majors. He debuted in the American League during a golden age for hitters and took advantage of an ideal home field for offense, League Park in Cleveland, hitting .360 there with a .439 on-base percentage and .625 slugging line. It might not be easy to find Averill a superior situation, though I assume it’s possible.

With Averill’s size, 5’9 and 172 pounds, he might not get drafted today. But I’m reminded a little of Mel Ott. A similarly diminutive outfielder and left handed hitter, Ott also took advantage of a ballpark seemingly built for him. Where it was 290 feet to right field in League Park with a 40-foot fence for Averill, Ott faced just a 258-foot right field porch at the Polo Grounds which helped him hit 323 of his 511 career home runs there. Age and raw talent wasn’t a hindrance for Ott, either, as he got a contract at 17 from the Giants who let him sit the bench a couple years before he became a regular player. Without giving too much away, Ott seems like a lock for my project’s inner circle. With similar career circumstances, Averill might have similar odds.

Why: Numbers talk in discussions about all-time greats, and while Averill wasn’t quite the power hitter that Ott was, I suspect that with a full career and a better park for his skill set, he might have come somewhere close to doubling his lifetime home run totals. I looked at the rates that Averill and Ott homered at their primary parks and elsewhere, and I found that Averill didn’t hit balls out at a terribly worse pace at home or on the road than Ott did.

Home run splits for the two players are as follows: