I can’t argue with that at all, but what’s unfortunate for Trammell is that it is only a difference of about 15 hits/year over their careers.
Think about this: the difference between making millions and being demoted to the minor legues for poor hitting is approximately one hit a week. 175 hits in 600 plate appearances is a .291 batting average, while 120 hits over the course of the season in 600 at-bats is a .250 average and unless you’re a super slugger will generally put you on the bench or back in AAA ball.
I think someone fell asleep in math. 
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120 hits in 600 at-bats is a .200 average.
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The difference between 175 hits and 120 hits is 55 hits. While this would be roughly one hit a week in a full calendar year, a regular baseball season (before the playoffs) is only about half a year, or 26 weeks, meaning that 55 hits is just over 2 hits per week
…although if you change it to 150 hits in 600 at-bats, then both of your points remain mathematically sound.
Try this instead with 26 less hits.
AB Hits Avg
550 165 0.300
550 139 0.253
One less hit per week is the difference between a defensive shortstop and an All Star Shortstop.
The Hall of Fame is for the elite. Due to magic numbers like 3000 hits, fame of which Ripken’s is vast and the Streak which surpassed one of the “True Legends of the Game”. Ripken is a sure fire Hall of Famer and Trammell is borderline. It might not be fair, but after all baseball is a game of inches.
Jim
Typo. I fully intended to say 150 hits. You got the gist anyway.
I might as well weigh in with my opinion on this matter (as insignificant as it is).
If I could vote for the HOF, I’d automatically pick Gwynn and Ripken. That’s a no-brainer. As for the others, I’d also select Dawson and Jack Morris. Tommy John, Jim Kaat, Bert Blyleven, and Goose Gossage I’m still on the fence about. Mark McGwire would’ve had my vote but now, after his evasive testimony before Congress and the rumours about him, I’m ambivalent about him (likewise Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds).
Alan Trammell belongs in the HOF. About 15 years ago, there seemed to be little doubt he’d go in but that was before the recent inflated offensive numbers for middle infielders distorted how people evaluated the worth of a shortstop’s or second baseman’s performance. I also agree that Trammell should’ve won the MVP at least once (however, I think that should’ve been in 1984). The fact that he didn’t makes it easier for many voters to overlook him.
And since Ozzie Smith has been brought up, I think it should be mentioned he improved considerably as a hitter the longer he played. He was also a threat on the base paths.
Incidentally, if I may slightly hijack this thread to discuss future HOF candidates, has anybody noticed that “light-hitting” shortstopOmar Vizquel now has more hits than Ozzie (2472 to 2460) and his batting average is much higher (.276 to .262)? Ozzie still has an advantage when it comes to Golden Gloves (13 to 11) and All-Star Game selections (3 to 15) but does anybody out there consider Vizquel HOF material (especially since he’s still playing and still adding to his career totals)?
Actually I do think he is Hall of Fame worthy. He is the best defensive shortstop since Ozzie and I am not convince he was not as good. I think Vizquel had the same range and a better arm. He just did not have the flair of Ozzie to become a walking highlight real. Vizquel & Ozzie are the best two defensive shortstops I have seen. This goes back to around 1972.
Jim
Vizquel iss often compared to Ozzie, but he’s not quite as close as you think, basically for 2 reasons:
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Ozzie was actually a better offensive player than Omar. Omar’s stats look superficially better, but he played in a much higher offense environment. It’s not a huge difference, but Ozzie by almost any analysis was just a little bit better as a hitter. And, on top of that, he was a better baserunner, for what that’s worth.
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As great a defensive player as Omar has been, Ozzie was MUCH better. 13 Gold Gloves to 11 makes it sound like they’re close; they’re really not. Ozzie Smith wasn’t just the best at the time he played, he was possibly the best defensive shortstop ever, with very few competitors; you can make a strong case that he was the best defensive player, at any position, who ever lived. Vizquel, while a very fine fielder, is not at that level. It is exactly equivalent to comparing Babe Ruth’s hitting ability to Carl Yastrzemski; Yaz was great, sure, but he wasn’t close to the Babe.
For what it’s worth, Fielding Runs Above Replacement for a selection of modern shortstops, only counting games at shortstop:
- Ozzie Smith, 783
- Dave Conception, 637
- Luis Aparicio, 579
- Cal Ripken, 512
- Omar Vizquel, 483
- Bert Campaneris, 473
- Mark Belanger, 463
- Alan Trammell, 456
- Larry Bowa, 449
- Garry Templeton, 441
- Barry Larkin, 410
- Tony Fernandez, 393
Vizquel is much more comparable to Dave Conception than he is to Ozzie Smith, IMHO. I think you’re going to have some difficulty explaining why Vizquel is a Hall of Famer, but Concepcion is not.
Can you explain this stat please?
I watched a lot of Cal Ripken’s & Vizquel games. A handful of Conception & mostly highlights for Ozzie.
Ripken was never close to the defensive player that Vizquel was from my observations.
Jim
You may be confusing “athleticism” with “defensive ability.” There’s no question but that Vizquel and Ozzie were far more athletic and more aesthetically appealing to watch than Ripken was.
Ripken excelled defensively through the brute strength of his throwing arm, which allowed him to set up much deeper, and thus reach a wider range of ground balls than any other shortstop. Bill James once noted that his (KC’s) shortstop, Kurt Stillwell, was being touted as Ripken’s defensive superior. The next game that the Royals played the O’s, James went to the game and noticed how much further back Ripken’s arm allowed him to play than Stillwell’s arm did. I think he estimated it at 15 or 20 feet (that’s 15 or 20 feet deeper than a good fielding shortstop). Considering how many plays most shortstops fail to make by inches, just imagine what setting up 20 feet deeer would do to most shortstops’ range. (This visual observation explains why Ripken had such ungodly range factors as well.) But there’s nothing lovely about setting up deeper (how many people even take note of where players position themselves?) It’s much more exciting to ooh-and-ahh over a diving stab than it is to have the player already standing there able to field the grounder on both feet. But fielding isn’t about ballet–it’s about effectiveness.
You must either be very smart or from Maryland. Me, I’m from Maryland. 
Well, I did go to grad school at Hopkins, but that was back in the late 70s (end of Belanger, beginning of Kiko Garcia) and I rooted for the O’s during the 1979 World Series which I saw in a sports bar in Takoma Park.
Ripken was also an acknowledged master or positioning and anticipation (“invisible range” it’s
been called). Moving 10 feet right and then fielding the sharp grounder right at you is just as
good as having to scoot those 10 feet, dive, then pop up and throw the guy out. Different,
but equally effective.
To start off with your last observation, see, this is why subjective observation is so chancy.
I saw Cal Ripken play a lot of ball games, and I’ve seen Omar play a lot of ball games, and to my eyes, Ripken at his peak was quite obviously as good as, and possibly better than, Omar Vizquel. If you just look for dives and spectacular-looking plays, Omar certainly made a lot more of those - but Ripken was far, far more impressive from a technical point of view. His primary advantage was of course his arm, maybe the best arm a shortstop has ever had; ever throw he made was a 90-mph bullet smack into the first baseman’s glove. His arm was just amazing. Because of that, he played much deeper than any other shortstop, which enabled him to get to a lot of balls that otherwise would’ve shot past. His footwork was exceptional, too; technically speaking he was first rate. On top of that he did everything else very well. His movement around the ball, and coming in, was exceptionally sharp. His reaction times, very quick. If you wanted to film a guy to teach kids how to play good fundamental infield defense, you should have filmed Cal Ripken.
People used to say Ripken was great at “positioning,” but really, what he was doing was simply playing deep and using his amazing arm, combined with extremely sharp, refined fundamentals. As a result, he was making plays look routine that Omar Vizquel would have made by making a fancy backhand stop. Omar made the ESPN highlight reel more often, but that’s not what wins ball games.
To use another example, as a Blue Jays fan, I saw Tony Fernandez a lot. Tony had this play he would make where he would go way, way to his right to pick up what should have been a clean single, and instead of diving he’d grab it on the run, fling himself into the air, and lob the ball over to first with a sidearm whip. It was, visually, the most amazing play you’d ever see. The first time he got someone with it they played it every night for a week. Cal Ripken never did anything like that; he COULDN’T do that.
But the thing is, how many guys did Tony actually get out that way? I would guess, from 1983 to 1989 during his Blue Jays tenure, he might have, at the absolute max, thrown out ten men that way in seven years. Twelve, maybe. Most of the time he did it he DIDN’T get the runner, but the announcers would go on for ten minutes about what a remarkable effort it was.
Ripken, meanwhile, would just play ten-fifteen feet deeper, at a depth most shortstops woulod have trouble making good throws, and would nail 20, 30, 40 or more runners every year with seemingly routine stops that other shortstops would not have made.
As to what the stat means it simply asserts “This is the number of runs this guy prevented as opposed to a replacement level player; if you didn’t have this guy and had to pick some quadruple-A shortstop off the waiver wire to replace him, you would have given up this many more runs.” I’m not saying it’s the final word, I just thought it would be interesting to list them.
Hey guys, I think you taught and old (well middle-aged) dog a new trick. I never caught on to Ripken playing deeper. I knew he had a great arm. Hell, an incredible arm, but I never accounted for it letting him play deeper. I just observed the fact that Omar let very little ever get past him. It appeared to be vastly less balls than Jeter, A-Rod, Garciaparra or Tejada to look at the big names. His style was vastly greater than Cal’s, but I do understand the point.
This sounds similar to what all the old timers have always said about Joe DiMaggio. He was said to always make the play look easy. He would anticipate where he needed to be and glide the remaining distance as opposed to make the lunging play. Even Willie Mays said he was the best there ever was. I take it this is what you are all trying to tell me about Ripken’s style?
I was always impressed with the incredible range Omar displayed. **RickJay ** or Pseudo, can you provide some other good fielding comparisons to show how Ozzie, Cal, Omar and others were? You have got me curious now.
Jim
I think those three guys are pretty much as good as you’re going to find. Cal Ripken had a different style but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’s going to rank above those dudes. I listed all the best shortstops I could think of. If you go back to before WWII you find some shortstops with really eye-poppiling numbers - Rabbit Maranville ranks WAY above Ozzie - but defensive numbers from back then are kind of weird and it’s hard to say how they really compare.
Dave Conception, also an elite shortstop, was a tall, lanky guy with a strong arm; he was kind of 30% Ripken, 70% Vizquel, but still, mostly Vizquel.
There have been other big-dudes-with-strong-arms to play shortstop, like Ernie Banks or Vern Stephens, but none nearly as big, or as pronounced on playing deep, as Cal Ripken was. Alex Rodriguez was kind of like that as a shortstop. But most shortstops are in the Omar Vizquel mold, not that that is a bad thing.
And yeah, DiMaggio is a good example of a guy who didn’t look sensational, but was. Actually, Devon White was pretty much the same center fielder (not quite the hitter, of course!)
One player who was really, really famous for looking great and sucking was Carney Lansford, the third baseman I’m sure you recall. Lansford was the extreme opposite of Cal Ripken; he played shallow and left his feet the instant the ball was hit. I mean, right away; if the ball was on either side of him he took one step and dove no matter what. It looked great, but statistically Lansford was a brutal third baseman because he let 60 grounders a year go by him he could’ve gotten to if he’d stayed above his shoes.
RickJay, I’m not sure if you’re channeling James here, or just passing on his observations, or coming to the same conclusions he did, but James made the same exact point about Lansford’s diving.
I never saw Dimaggio play, but I understand his reputation a little differently. It wasnt so much about his positioning (though obviously that had to be pretty damned good, too) as about his style of defensive play, how he ran fast without looking as if he was exerting himself (as opposed to Willie’s frenetic cap-off-the-head hustling style of running), and his textbook method of catching the ball (two hands, always positioned to throw immediately after–again as opposed to Willie’s basket-catch, or tumbling, backhand lunges.) He made it look easy, Willie made it look impossible. But Willie also had a reputation as a positioning genius–Tom Seaver wrote somewhere that he would always review his pitching strategy before the game with (the 40-year-old) Mays and damned if Willie didn’t play every hitter, on various counts, exactly where he needed to play given Seaver’s strategy.
As to
, it is hard but rewarding to compare numbers from era to era. One of the most interesting articles on this has to do with Napoleon Lajoie’s absurdly great fielding stats, which James argues are misleading and which he attributes finally (after much evidence comparing Lajoie’s stats to other contemporary second-basemen) to Lajoie’s status as Cleveland’s manager. IOW, it wasn’t that Lajoie was able to GET to more balls than other second basemen, but he insisted on getting to every ball where it was a judgment call as to who would field it, him or the shortstop (i.e., he handled virtually every SB attempt, took every throw into second from the outfield, called for every popup in the vicinity of the 2B bag, etc.) . I raise this point because people all too often insist that “statheads” like James just spit out numbers—no, no, no, they ANALYZE numbers and try to figure out what they MEAN. They often dont mean squat until you’ve figured out how to interpret them.
Of which, the importance of fielding at 2B has actually changed (relative to 3B) over the past century (3B used to be more important defensively than 2B, now it’s just the opposite) . James explains why this shift has occurred, and creates a context for all these “bad” hitting 3B at the turn of the century (which also partially explains why there are still so many fewer 3B men in the HOF than seems logical–essentially 3b men of the 1900s and 1910s were being judged by batting standards of the 1940s and 1950s, which were different from their own era, so the voters just assumed that the early 3B men just weren’t very impressive hitters, when they actually were. The game had changed, but no one had yet figured out how the game’s statistics would have changed.)
I remember his comments. I think. But James himself was simply repeating what many others said. Lansford was famous for it, and he was quite something to watch.
I could talk about this stuff all day.
It’s kind of off topic, but the most fun defensive player to watch I ever saw was Kevin Reimer. I am quite certain he was the worst defensive outfielder in the history of baseball. Once, I watched him play a Rance Mulliniks single into an inside-the-park home run, and this was when Rance was 36 and ran like Wilford Brimley.
I will see your Kevin Reimer and raise you Babe Herman. Or Jose Canseco.