My final argument: You might think it trivial, but I don’t, nor do I think the Baseball Writers will because it speaks to the attitude, respect, and class of the individual. I am, of course, referring to the infamous spitting on umpire John Hirschbeck incident in '96. Alomar’s otherwise stellar year was severely tarnished by it, as well as his comments after, and I expect him to be left off more than one ballot in his first year of eligibility on that basis alone. Sandberg has no such tarnish.
Chiming in on the McGriff/Palmeiro issue, I think Viagra boy has a legitimate shot, between real defensive prowess and big offensive numbers throughout his career. I’m not so sure about the Crime Dog, however. He might slip between the cracks as consistently above average, but never a super-star. Let’s face it, being a first baseman these days who hits .280 with 25-30 HRs and 100 RBIs doesn’t put him in with the elite guys, like Giambi or Helton.
That nasty incident certainly doesn’t speak well for Alomar, but I’d hardly say the man’s a scumbag because of one stupid thing he did after he was insulted with a racial epithet (or so he and Johnson claimed.)
If Alomar’s character were in the leagues of Dick Allen (paranoid asshole) or Joe Jackson (corrupt) that would be one thing, but it isn’t. Other than that incident Alomar has been a good sportsman. He’s not Paul Molitor, but I wouldn’t leave him off my ballot for that one ugly fiasco. Much of the incident’s hype was a result of the umpires’ (totally unreasonable) demand that Alomar serve his suspension during the postseason - a demand that MLB could not legally cave in to, as the rules for suspensions are laid out in the collective bargaining agreement that MLB was, at the time, under COURT ORDER to follow to the letter. That wasn’t Alomar’s fault. He was a jerk, but even Hirschbeck isn’t angry about it anymore, and he hasn’t done anything like that since.
What is this crap about adjusting statistics? How exactly does this extremely bogus sounding scheme work? It sounds quite close to the thing that basbeall nerds would do when they would project what Ted Williams final career stats would have been if he hadn’t spent the better part of 5 years in the military.
There’s nothing wrong with that premise at all. This isn’t the same as postulating Williams’s stats. As has been stated in this thread, if you’re going to compare a statistical category from a player in one era with that in another, you need to know how relevant that category is to the other players in that paarticular era. This is why home runs from Babe Ruth were so gigantic - no one else was hitting them. Because he hit them in a period when he contributed more offense than anyone else, his homers are more “valuable” than for a player who hit a lot of home runs during the current offensive boom years.
The point here is not to guess that Ryne Sandberg would have hit if he’d played today, but just to figure out how valuable his contribution was.
If I told you Sandberg hit 40 homers in 1990, that’s just a number. So he hit 40 homers, so what? Is that good or bad? Well, you know 40 is a lot of homers just because it’s more than most guys hit, and if you look it up you’ll know that is was more than ANYONE hit in the NL that year, so obviously that’s a lot of home runs. What really matters isn’t the number of home runs he hit; what matters is how much he helped the Cubs WIN. That’s the job of a ballplayer; to do things that help his team win.
It is obvious, if you look at the facts, that baseball scoring has not been level over time. There have been years when entire leagues hit over .300, and year when they hit under .250. I think it’s pretty obvious that if you drive in 100 RBI in a year when the average team only scored 650 runs, that’s a much bigger contribution that if you drive in 100 RBI when the average team scoresd 850. That’s just common sense. The number of homers and RBI (and whatever else) you pile up only matter relative to the numbers everyone else is piling up. If Sandberg hit 40 homers in a league where the average player hit 43, his 40 homers would not be so big a deal.
So we adjust a player’s stats just to account for how good he is relative to his league; that gives you an idea of how much he helped his team WIN, rather than just what his raw numbers were. A player’s stats don’t mean a damned thing unless you compare them to what other players do.
So going by that logic, despite the fatc that Alex Rodriguex led the AL in HR’s with 57, (and set a major league record for HR’s by a shortstop) and led the AL in RBI’s with 142, that doesn’t mean jack because Texas finished 31 games out of 1st place, in last place in the AL West with a record of 72 wins and 90 losses.
I don’t think you can compare the player just with his teammates (that is, find out how much he helped his team win); you should compare him with the entire league. If the entire league hit .300 and your player hit .330, then he was great relative to that year’s players. If he hit 40 HR and the average player hit 15, then he had a great year relative to the others, too.
Bill James’ revised Historical Baseball Abstract has him ranked as the fifth best 1B ever. When I pulled out the book (which is fabulous, btw), I was prepared to continue the argument if he was anywhere outside the top 10, but looking at “5. Calvin Murray” ought to be good enough for me. Upon closer examination, it isn’t.
Murray’s Win Shares are in line with what I figured: Consistently good for a hell of a long time, but rarely great. Murray’s top 3 seasons gave him 33, 31, and 31 win shares each. Compare that to #1 Lou Gehrig at 44, 42, 41. Heck, you have to go all the way down to #11 Cap Anson (30, 29, 24) to find somebody who had fewer Win Shares than Murray in their top three seasons.
Murray’s Win Shares per 162 games ain’t all that impressive. Murray had 23.40 WS/162. You have to drop all the way down to #13 Tony Perez to find a 1B with fewer WS/162 (20.36) . . . and after that, the next one is #21 Fred McGriff (23.18 WS/162). In fact, there are twenty-one 1B’s with fewer WS/162 than Calvin Murray.
So no, screw it. Bill James is simply wrong. Calvin Murray is nowhere near the fifth best 1B of all time. Being consistently above average for a really long time is a nice accomplishment, but all it means is you were above average for an above average time. Unusual, but by no means special. No Cooperstown for you, Mr. Murray.
No, he didn’t say that you judge a player by what his team did; he said you compare what they did to what the rest of the league did. If he leads the league in several categories and is well above the league average in most or all, then obviously he did more to help his team win than a player who was at or below the average in those categories.
The point was that raw numbers don’t mean anything unless you relate them to the numbers for the rest of the league. If I tell you that a TEGWAR player had 22 offhand diggles last season, do you know anything about what that means? If I then tell you that the average TEGWAR player in the Four States Mountain League last season had 10, and that no other player had more 20, you now know a lot more than you did before: this guy’s season was either great or lousy, depending on whether offhand diggles are good or bad things.
Taking it a step further, if we know that in 1954, the league leader in offhand diggles had 17, and that the league average was 7, a guy who had 16 in 1954 looks a lot more impressive than the guy who had 16 last season, despite the fact that their raw totals were the same.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: