Baseball: Past and Present

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.

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.