Baseball: Past and Present

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.

According to Joe DiMaggio’s biography, the Yankee Clipper once was almost traded for Ted Williams. The thinking behind the proposed trade was that each icon would benefit from playing in the other’s home park. There may be something to this with DiMaggio whose offensive production was 8 percent better at Fenway Park than the original Yankee Stadium. Williams is another story. In 1941 when he became the most recent player to hit .400, Williams batted .428 at home. A different ballpark may have cost him. The stat converter on Baseball-Reference.com has Williams hitting .373, for instance, with the Boston Braves.

Not every hitter in baseball history has had Williams’ good fortune with his home park. Here are five men who may have hit .400 if they’d played in more hitters-friendly stadiums in years they approached history:

1. Tony Gwynn, 1994 and ’97: It’s nice Gwynn played his entire career– preps, college, and majors– in San Diego, but he paid a price for his loyalty. Playing for the Padres may have cost Gwynn .400 twice. There’s 1994 where Gwynn hit .394, the closest anyone’s come to .400 since 1941. In the majority of parks in the American League, where teams averaged 5.23 runs, 13 percent higher than the NL rate in 1994, the converter projects Gwynn hitting around .420. Gwynn would have topped .400 again in 1997 had he played for the Rockies. Playing home games that season at Coors Field, he’d have hit .414.

2. Rod Carew, 1977: Carew’s .388 for Minnesota converts to .400 in a number of other parks in 1977. One that stands out: Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta where Carew is projected to have hit .413 with 265 hits. Granted, he would have been on a team that finished 61-101, scored 678 runs and, for one inglorious game, featured owner Ted Turner as manager. Carew would have also had to contend with the pressures of playing every game before a national audience on TBS. Still, I can’t help but wonder what he might have accomplished in one of the great hitter’s parks of its day. And it’s worth noting that the Braves became a contender by the early ’80s. Maybe with Carew in town, that could have happened sooner.

3. George Brett, 1980: Brett hit .390 for the Royals, flirting with .400 for much of the second half and being above the mark as late as September 19. The stat converter has Brett finishing above .400 in 1980 for the Red Sox, Twins, Indians, Tigers, Mariners and Blue Jays. The converter, of course, isn’t infallible. We can rule out Seattle or Toronto, each recent expansion clubs at the time that barely topped 600 runs. The Twins seem unlikely as well, given their 666 runs and 86 OPS+ as a team. A .400 hitter needs a lively offense; the 1941 Red Sox, for one, scored 865 runs.

It’s counter-intuitive to take Brett away from a juggernaut like the 1980 Royals, who lost in the World Series. But Brett may have stood a better chance at .400 that season with Boston or Detroit. The converter has him topping .408 for either team. I like Brett’s chances in Boston most. Detroit scored more runs that season (830 to 757) and each team had a fine hitting park, though the Red Sox lineup gets the edge for star-power: Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Carlton Fisk, Dwight Evans, Tony Perez and Carl Yastrzemski. With Brett substituting for Glenn Hoffman at thrid base, perhaps Boston would have fared better than 83-77 and fifth place in the AL East.

4. Jeff Bagwell, 1994: The Red Sox famously traded Boston native Bagwell while he was in the minors for aging reliever Larry Andersen, with the belief Bagwell wouldn’t beat out Scott Cooper at third base. Next to Babe Ruth for “No, No Nanette,” it’s maybe the worst trade in Red Sox history. Here’s Bagwell’s slash if he’d played his home games in ’94 at Fenway Park rather than the cavernous Astrodome: .401/.486/.811, to go with 44 home runs and 143 RBIs. (Favorite Bagwell stat from ’94? He hit better at home than on the road, .373 to .362. It’s one of the more underrated seasons in baseball history.)

5. Barry Bonds, 2002: When all is said and done, there is no finer use for the stat converter than seeing the kind of cartoonish numbers Bonds would have produced for the Colorado Rockies. There’s the 87 homers the converter projects him hitting for Colorado in 2001 or the 50-50 season he just misses out on in 1996. Then there’s the matter of the .370 batting average (with the is-this-real-life 268 OPS+) that Bonds offered while leading the Giants to the 2002 World Series. Playing for the Rockies instead in 2002, Bonds would have hit .401 with 53 homers and 133 RBIs.

Honorable mentions

Derek Jeter, 1999: Every time I see a mention of the stat converter from a major outlet, it’s generally to punch in numbers players would have offered on the 2000 Colorado Rockies. The ’99 Rockies actually offers slightly higher converted numbers, though I doubt this is widely understood. Take Jeter, who hit .349 for the Yankees in ’99. Playing for the Rockies instead, Jeter’s average rises to .391.

Ichiro Suzuki, 2004: The best season of Suzuki’s career had him batting .372 and breaking George Sisler’s hits record for the Mariners. Safeco Field may have short-changed Suzuki, though. The stat converter has the best contact hitter of his era hitting .398 with, get ready for it, 292 hits in 797 plate appearances for the Rangers in 2004. Alex Rodriguez’s preseason trade to the Yankees would quickly have become a distant memory.

Chipper Jones, 2008: Jones led the National League with a .364 batting average at 36, reminiscent of when 38-year-old Ted Williams hit an AL-best .388 in 1957. Playing at Fenway Park instead of Turner Field in 2008, Jones would nearly have matched the Splendid Splinter. The stat converter has Jones hitting .385, though I suspect the chance to serve as designated hitter on a regular basis might have pushed his average higher.

Joe Mauer, 2009: According to the stat converter, Mauer’s .365 batting average in his MVP season with the Twins becomes .386 for the Yankees.

In my post Sunday on run totals throughout baseball history, I noted a common myth: that the adoption of the designated hitter rule in 1973 jump-started baseball’s offensive era. In truth, run totals didn’t peak until the mid-1990s. That’s been lost on a number of prominent writers who rationalize the inflated ERA totals of any pitcher from the 1970s or later. Just Google “Jack Morris DH era.”

One irksome thing to a baseball historian like me is that sportswriters often treat the so-called DH era as one continuous stretch. What people call the DH era is more like three eras:

1) 1973-92, where American League teams averaged 4.41 runs, while NL teams averaged 4.12. Historically, the AL average was 0.9 percent higher than the average of 4.37 runs from the league’s founding in 1901 through 1972. The increase may have seemed more dramatic at the time, as AL teams had flat-lined at 3.88 runs a game from 1963 through 1972, after the Baseball Rules Committee changed the strike zone.

2) 1994-2009, where AL teams averaged 4.99 runs, while NL teams averaged 4.65. Whatever the reason or reasons, some seismic shift occurred in baseball in the early ’90s, leading to the highest sustained scoring levels in the circuit since the 1930s.

3) The past five seasons, where AL teams have averaged 4.39 runs, while National League teams have averaged 4.14. The current AL scoring rate is slightly below the all-time league scoring average through nearly 114 seasons of 4.5 runs per game.

Has it been harder to pitch in the American League since the DH was the instituted? Almost certainly. Overall, run totals in the American League have been roughly 6.5 percent higher than they have been in the National League since 1973. In all the years before that both leagues were in existence, AL teams enjoyed just a two percent advantage in scoring. So there’s been some boost with the DH, which seems reasonable given that pitchers have been replaced in batting lineups with the likes of Edgar Martinez and David Ortiz.

That said, I think the important thing is not treating all pitchers from the DH era the same. Morris’s 3.90 ERA and Mike Mussina’s 3.68 ERA are two radically different numbers, for one. In the years Morris pitched, 1977 through 1994, American League teams averaged 4.5 runs per game. During Mussina’s career, 1991-2008, the AL average was 4.91 runs. Looked at another way, Morris’s ERA was 13.3 percent better than league average while Mussina’s was 25.1 percent better.

I noted something along these lines yesterday on Twitter and someone replied that Mussina is among the most underrated players all-time. I agree. With a better understanding of run totals from Mussina’s era, maybe this can change.

It started out as a simple question, one I’ve had since reading in The Book that teams scored just under five runs per game from 1999 through 2002 and that generalized run expectancy totals could be gleaned based on that. Many have treated The Book as the definitive tome for sabermetrics since its publication in 2007. Candidly, I was a little irked by its use of run totals from such a peak era of baseball history to suggest normative conditions. It couldn’t be right to suggest teams all through history have averaged five runs a game. Could it?

With the help of Baseball-Reference.com and a willingness to kill a few hours making a spreadsheet, such questions can easily be answered. Going through 139 seasons of data, I found the answer to my question: through baseball history, teams have averaged 4.53 runs per game. There’s more worth saying here, granted. A more detailed, though still admittedly cursory look at what I discovered in my research follows below.

I. Wild West: Before the formation of the American League in 1901

There isn’t much sense in comparing run totals before the formation of the American League in 1901 to today. Baseball in the 19th century was nothing like it is today. Leagues came and went, like the Union Association of 1884 or the Player’s League of 1890 or so many other circuits that no casual fan has ever heard of. Rules that modern fans may take for granted, such as the distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate or the right of pitchers to not have their pitches called by opposing batters (seriously, this happened), were established through trial and error in these early seasons.

Don’t get me wrong, though, the run totals in baseball over the first 25 years after the National League was established in 1876 are a lot of fun. Baseball will never see anything like it again. There will never be another season like 1894, where the average team topped seven runs a game, all of baseball hit .309, and the Phillies boasted an all-.400 outfield and still finished fourth. There will never be another pitcher like Jack Wadsworth having a lifetime 6.85 ERA that’s just 5 percent worse than the MLB average for the years he played. The offensive boon of the 1920s/’30s and the steroid years have nothing on this wacky era.

II. Formation of the American League and the first Deadball Era

I wasn’t sure how to group these seasons together. While this time period more or less constitutes the Deadball Era, depending on who is consulted, these 19 seasons are more representative as a patchwork of a few sub-eras.

There’s 1901-03 where run totals are noticeably higher, primarily the result of two things, I’m guessing: 1) Foul tips not being called strikes in both leagues until 1903; and 2) A bit of chaos the first few seasons after the formation of the American League in 1901. These were years players jumped leagues irrespective of contracts, rosters sometimes being raided. The two leagues made peace in 1903, and run totals plummeted the following year.

With the exception of 1911 and 1912, Deadball Era scoring levels remained fairly constant from 1904 through 1919. Not counting 1911-12, teams scored an average of 3.72 runs per game 1904-19. We can exclude 1911 and 1912 as the ball wasn’t dead during those years. As noted in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, both leagues used a cork-centered ball during these years, causing offense to spike. Emerging use of the emery ball in 1913 restored the advantage to pitchers.

III. A Golden Age for offense

A number of changes happened in baseball around 1920. Eight members of the Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 World Series, leaving baseball scrambling with its first public relations crisis. Then Babe Ruth started hitting more homers than any player before him, attracting more fans than ever at the same time. In the midst, Ray Chapman became the first  major leaguer killed by a pitched ball. For these and perhaps other reasons, Major League Baseball banned the spitball and emery ball in 1921, as noted by Bill James; MLB also elected to keep cleaner balls in play that could be more easily seen by hitters and would be less likely to lose shape late in games.

This led to the first great offensive age of the modern era for baseball, 22 glorious seasons that offered some of the highest RBI totals and batting averages that will ever be seen. There’s a reason Rogers Hornsby’s .424 clip and Hack Wilson’s 191 RBIs have stood as record since these years. While run totals occasionally dipped, such as when less-lively balls were introduced in 1933, scoring stayed high until the majority of big leaguers went to war. I like this kind of baseball, if I’m being candid. It’s a wonder to me there hasn’t been more of it in the modern era.

IV. Second Deadball Era: World War II

Although I haven’t seen it formally recognized as such, I consider World War II the third Deadball Era in baseball’s history, together with the early 20th century and mid-1960s. The run totals are certainly more or less in-line. Like the earliest Deadball Era, this one primarily owed itself to the balls in use. As noted in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract:

During wartime, the quality of baseballs used was inferior, as there was something in regular baseballs that was needed to make explosives or O.D. green paint or something, and the balls manufactured were rather lifeless.

I was tempted to group 1946 in as part of the war years as scoring didn’t rebound until 1947. I doubt the caliber of balls was inferior in 1946; I just have this theory that long breaks tend to favor pitchers and that it took hitters a year or so to get back to form after the war ended. Some didn’t recover, such as Cecil Travis, never the same player after four years of combat service. The popular story on Travis was that he suffered frostbite at the Battle of the Bulge. His New York Times obituary quoted him saying the real reason he declined was he lost his timing as a hitter.

V. Post-war years, before strike zone change in January 1963

One of the things I find most interesting about these years is that run totals didn’t change that much, on average, while otherwise baseball was changing tremendously. The majors were integrated. Teams began to relocate for the first time in half a century and four expansion clubs were added. Transcontinental air travel and night games became commonplace. Despite all this, scoring levels remained reasonably constant most of these 17 seasons never quite returning to the stratospheric highs of the ’20s and ’30s or dipping to Deadball levels.

Run totals for this period, 4.43 runs per game were as close to the average for baseball history, 4.53 runs per game of any of the periods listed here. I assume the balance between hitting and pitching was also as close as it’s been for any sustained period. It was certainly better than it is now.

VI. Third Deadball Era: After strike zone change in January 1963

Sandy Koufax entered spring training in 1961 boasting a 36-40 lifetime record with a 4.10 ERA. He had nearly as many strikeouts for innings pitched at that point of his career, though the young lefty was also averaging more than five walks every nine innings. Famously, Koufax’s catcher Norm Sherry told him to throw less hard, and Koufax proceeded to go 32-20 with a 3.11 ERA over the next two seasons.

Then, on January 26, 1963, as recounted by Bill James in the historical abstract, the Baseball Rules Committee expanded the strike zone, stating that it went from the shoulders to the bottom of the knee. Now blessed as well with the best pitcher’s park of the 1960s, Dodgers Stadium, Koufax went on one of the finest runs a pitcher’s ever had. Over the ensuing four seasons before his arm gave out, Koufax went 97-27 with a 1.86 ERA (with an unreal 1.97 cumulative FIP), three Cy Young awards, and a National League MVP.

VII. End of an era? After pitching mound was lowered

Following the offensive nadir that was 1968, when teams averaged their lowest runs per game in 60 years, Major League Baseball lowered the mound from 15 inches to 10 inches. They did it to help hitters, ostensibly, though it didn’t cause run totals to change that much. In fact, certain pitchers got better while others continued to dominate. There are perhaps a few reasons the lower mound didn’t produce the desired effect.

First, as Jim Bouton wrote during spring training in 1969 in Ball Four:

[Seattle Pilots teammate] Mike Marshall is a righthanded pitcher who was 15-9 in the Tiger organization last season. He’s got a master’s degree from Michigan State. He majored in phys. ed, with a minor in mathematics. He’s a cocky kid with a subtle sense of humor. He’s been telling everybody that the new lower mound, which was supposed to help the hitters, actually shortens the distance the pitcher has to throw the ball. Has to do with the hypotenuse of a right triangle decreasing as either side of the triangle decreases. Therefore, says Marshall, any psychological advantage the hitters gain if the pitcher doesn’t stand tall out there will be offset by the pitchers knowing that they are now closer to the plate.

I recently interviewed former Houston Astros pitcher Larry Dierker, who enjoyed a career year in ’69, going 20-13 with a 2.33 ERA and 8.6 WAR. Assuming the lower mound favored hitters, I asked Dierker how he compensated. He told me he hadn’t even noticed. Dierker said:

What I noticed, when I’m on any mound, is whether it feels comfortable or not. But my arm position was around three-quarters, and I think the higher, steeper mound is really the mound that gives a tall, straight overhand pitcher like Jim Palmer a better advantage. Randy Johnson, when he was with us, the Phillies for some reason or another– I know it wasn’t legal– they had a high, steep mound just like they used to have in Dodger Stadium, and that was the only game that he didn’t pitch well for us. He was complaining about the mound from the first inning on. But he was kind of low three-quarters with his arm position, and I think he preferred a little bit more gentle slope.

Jim Palmer, for his part, averaged 19 wins and a 2.47 ERA from 1969 through 1972, twice finishing in the top five for American League Cy Young voting.

VIII. First 20 seasons after the implementation of the DH

There’s this myth veteran sportswriters repeat around Hall of Fame voting time that the implementation of the designated hitter rule in 1973 created a greater offensive era. The myth is used to justify Jack Morris’s 3.90 ERA, among other things. The next time someone trots out the myth, please, show them the chart above. Maybe tell them also that for the years Morris pitched in the majors, 1977 through 1994, teams scored an average of 4.34 runs a game. (So we’re clear, I don’t take much issue with Morris being a future Veterans Committee selection for the Hall of Fame; I just am leery of hyperbole.)

With the exception of a few outlying seasons, notably 1987 where a rabbit ball may have been in use, run totals after the 1960s didn’t rise to major heights until the mid-1990s. Scoring rose slightly, granted, but was below the average for baseball history of 4.53 runs per game. The 1970s and ’80s weren’t an era that favored offense. It was more or less average, with pitchers enjoying a slight edge and small ball an oft-used strategy of the day. The sooner this is better understood, the more that players like Dwight Evans, Dave Parker, and Dale Murphy may get recognition from Cooperstown.

IX. The offensive explosion

There still isn’t consensus about what caused run totals to increase so much in the mid-1990s and early-2000s, and I don’t know if there will ever be. It’s a controversial, polarizing subject, and I don’t know if all the variables from the era will ever fully come to light. The common suggested culprits for the spike in offense, I think, are steroids, expansion, weaker pitching and a livelier ball. It’s somewhat of a cop-out, I’ll admit, to say I suspect that a combination of these and other factors engendered the greatest offensive era in baseball since the 1930s. Strictly speaking, though, there’s no quick explanation for the era. There generally isn’t in baseball history. I’m reminded of the Oscar Wilde quote, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

X. What’s going on?

Something’s been happening in baseball over the past five seasons, causing run totals to trend down. I don’t know what the reason is, but we’re clearly in an age for pitchers. It’s why Clayton Kershaw is having the best season of any hurler in 15 years, why Felix Hernandez, Adam Wainwright and others aren’t far off. We’re heading toward the fourth Deadball Era if this trend doesn’t reverse. And if that happens, fans can bet on more rule changes from Major League Baseball to liven the game.

Today marks the final installment, for now, of my series about the most underrated baseball player of each decade. (When I know more about 19th century baseball than the cursory amount that I do, I’ll write something. My thought, by the way, is that many 19th century ballplayers are underrated and that we’re just re-discovering them via Baseball Reference.)

We’ve looked over the past few days at the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s and the 1900s, ’10s, and ’20s.

Now, let’s turn our attention to an era still settling.

1990-99:  Barry Bonds

It sounds crazy, I know, to suggest a player who won three National League MVPs and eight Gold Gloves in a decade was anything but one of the most celebrated players of it. I should clarify.

This project has primarily been about identifying players who look underrated in the historic rear view. Bonds qualifies here because the steroid-addled caricature he created for himself in his final seasons obscures everything he was before. Now, when anyone mentions Bonds, it’s to marvel over the freakish stats he offered from 2001 through 2004 or, conversely, to denounce his Hall of Fame candidacy. (In the interest of full disclosure, I figure in the former group.)

I’d like to see more focus on what Bonds did over his first 13 seasons, 1986 through 1998, before it’s generally assumed he began taking steroids. Heck, make it 1990 through 1998. In those seasons alone, Bonds accomplished more than many players in Cooperstown: those three MVPs, 76.1 Wins Above Replacement and 112 defensive runs saved (second-best in baseball for those years behind, get this, Sammy Sosa.) Bonds packaged this with averages from 1990-98 of 36 home runs, 36 steals and a .305/.438/.600 slash. It’s not the best peak in baseball history, but it also isn’t far off.

Honorable mention: Craig Biggio, who will be lambasted as one of the worst defensive Hall of Famers when his 3,000 hits get him enshrined. Biggio cost his team 100 defensive runs lifetime which will rank worst among Hall of Famers, at least until someone like Dick Allen, Derek Jeter or Gary Sheffield goes in. Thing is, Biggio was a valuable fielder during the ’90s. He cost the Astros one defensive run for the decade while providing offense that surely totaled more aggregate value than a slick-gloved infielder with no bat.

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2000-09: Scott Rolen

Seemingly every baseball generation has its underrated third basemen. Graig Nettles and Darrell Evans came up in yesterday’s post. There’s also Buddy Bell, Ron Santo, Ken Boyer and a range of other third basemen who hit respectably and offered superb, if under-appreciated, defensive value. It’s tough for a third baseman if they don’t have Mike Schmidt’s power, George Brett’s batting average, or Brooks Robinson’s highlight reel glove. The best they can generally hope for is a belated nod from the Veterans Committee.

The two third basemen in recent years who’ve seemed poised to join Nettles, Evans and company in underrated purgatory are Adrian Beltre and Scott Rolen. Beltre’s lucky. He’ll likely get into Cooperstown on the writers ballot, thanks to a late career renaissance with the Rangers that has pushed him near 3,000 hits and a .300 lifetime batting average. I wonder if Rolen might be in the same boat if he’d spent more time at the Ballpark in Arlington; his slash in just 34 plate appearances there is .419/.471/.742.

Regardless, Rolen has borderline Hall of Fame numbers for a third baseman and quietly did much of it the first decade of the 2000s. Among Rolen’s accolades from 2000 through 2009: 48.3 WAR, 127 defensive runs saved and a .285/.368/.497 slash. In spite of it all, Rolen will be lucky to top 15 percent his first time on the writers ballot.

Honorable mention: Bobby Abreu, who fell just short of a .300/.400/.500 slash for the first decade of the 2000s. Abreu’s quietly wrapping up his career as we speak, his best years a distant memory. He reminds me a bit of Reggie Smith, another eternally underrated outfielder. If there’s any indication from Smith’s showing on the Hall of Fame ballot– 0.7 percent of the vote in 1988, one of the weaker ballots in recent memory– Abreu doesn’t have much to look forward to in five years.

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2010-now: Jason Heyward

Heyward turned 25 on August 9, and to a frustrated Braves fan, their right fielder has struggled since finishing runner-up in NL Rookie of the Year voting in 2010. There’s the .261 lifetime batting average and the ever-fluctuating power numbers, including a .386 slugging percentage this season. Thus far, Heyward has mostly seemed to offer tantalizing glimpses of what he might become. He certainly has gone all-but-unrewarded since that first season, save for a Gold Glove two years ago.

Look past Heyward’s garish traditional stats, though, and a brightly talented player emerges, one who’s averaged All Star-level WAR since the beginning of his career. His 5.5 WAR this season is seventh-best in the majors. Heyward’s 96 defensive runs saved are also best in baseball, by a wide margin, over the past five seasons. I assume Heyward’s best years are in front of him. I also count him as one of the few players 25 and under who already has a shot at Cooperstown.

Honorable mention: “Anyone who plays for the A’s,” my girlfriend said after I told her about this project. I’ll zero in on Oakland’s bullpen past closer Sean Doolittle. Featuring obscure castoffs and salvage projects like Dan Otero and Eric O’Flaherty, A’s relievers have a collective 2.85 ERA and 1.07 WHIP this season. Like Oakland’s more celebrated starting rotation, there’s tremendous depth in the bullpen (plus a couple of talented relievers on the 40-man roster who could get September call-ups.) It’s just a challenge for any non-A’s fan to name one of these guys.

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Missed the first three parts of this series? Get caught up: 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s | 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s | 1900s, ’10s, and ’20s