Don’t forget you’re gonna be guaranteed this production for the next 14 years. No, he’ll probably never have an MVP type season, but about a decade and a half of hitting about .350 with doubles, steals, and league average defense sounds pretty good to me.
That is an immensely valuable property, much more so I think than he’s been given credit for.
An average defensive second baseman with an OBP of .350 and an okay slugging percentage is a really valuable player. That is roughly equivalent to Jose Altuve in 2015, when Altuve slashed .313/.353/.459, an off year for him but he was worth 4.8 WAR. He fits the description in stealing bases and defensive skill.
What really makes the kid valuable is that I am guaranteed he will do this every single year for 13 years and never get hurt. The biggest risk with any athlete is unpredictability. That’s what kills sports teams - all teams are trying tio acquire good players, but you can never predict for sure what kids will pan out and which ones will flop, or who will get hurt, or who will be good for a couple of years and then fall apart because of weight problems or cocaine or they get caught taking steroids or the league just catches up to them or who the hell knows what.
A player who helps you win and is absolutely guaranteed to help you win for over a decade with no risk of any downside whatsoever, ever, is worth MUCH more than the 4-5 WAR a year suggests. That player is at least as valuable as Bryce Harper.
You’d win 100 games a year. An on base percentage of .350 is toweringly high, unless of course baseball changes. The current MLB OBP is around .323, was .318 last year, and no team last year was even at .340. That is a huge, huge, huge advantage in baserunners, and so many stolen bases it really would make a difference. Even without home runs your slugging percentage is high enough to drive in a crapload of runs. It would probably be the highest scoring offense in baseball.
I like OPS as a measure. Assuming about +100 points for his non-home run power, he would have a 450 slugging plus 350 on base giving him 800 OPS.
800 OPS is a very nice career. Handful of guys with that career OPS are in the Hall, but most aren’t. He would expect to get near 3,000 hits in his career, assuming 200+ hits a year.
If he trends high, we’re talking hall of fame potential, if he trends low, it’s more of a career starter with an all star nod or two.
One quibble with your numbers, RickJay - to have a slugging percentage of .459, our no true outcome player would have to have something like 48 2B and 10 3B. If you plug in more reasonable #s, something like 35 and 5, you get a SLG of 0.418 (basing this on 655 AB and 229 H).
The zero homers really limits the SLG upside. He’s locked in to an OPS range of roughly .770 to .810. That is of course 3.5 to 5 WAR per year - and with the consistency, that is still very valuable.
I will admit I can’t quite wrap my head around what a team with those stats would look like. A .420 team slugging would have been upper third last year; as you said the OBP would be easily the best. So that should be a very good offense, but I wonder if the lack of homers would somehow skew the total runs scored.
The thing is, this guy never walks and never gets hurt. So he might get 650-700 ABs every year. 45 doubles is more than reasonable for a guy with plus speed.
Sure, that’s possible. Altuve is just a good approximation.
It would be hard to guess without some sort of simnulation. The thing is, .350 with doubles and triples will drive in a lot of runs, homers or no. This is also a team that will have a huge number of guys in scoring position - much higher than any other team - because the OP’s conditions make it maybe the greatest basestealing team in the modern history of baseball. Eight guys stealing 40 bases a year (nine guys if a DH is involved) will steal more bases than the 1985 Cardinals, the best baserunning team I’ve ever seen, and with a better percentage.
Rereading the OP I see that Mr. Applegate specified 40 stolen bases out of 50 attempts - that’s definitely a good enough rate to add some value, but I don’t think it’s a huge amount. Playing with Runs Created formulas, I think it’s about 2.5 - 3 runs created over a player with the same stats that never runs.
Putting his BA, SB% and SB totals together and projecting them out for 13 years, Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo. is somewhere in the category of Gwynn, George Sisler, and Nap Lajoie.
Heck, Mr. Applegate, I personally will sell my soul to sign this guy to a 10-year contract, with options for the next five years.
Duplicate post
A guy with a career .350/.450 OBP/SLG who plays average 2B is basically Craig Biggio, albeit with a somewhat shorter career. (That said, see other people’s posts about whether .450 is a bit on the high side for slugging).
I wanted to get a decent estimate of Joe’s doubles and triples, so I took a look at Ichiro’s stats (MLB only). Mr. Suzuki had 362 doubles and 96 triples out of 3089 hits (plus 117 HR).
If we pessimistically turn all the HR into singles and project Joe to hit doubles and triples at the same rate (rounded off so 1/10 of Joe’s hits are doubles and 1/30 are triples) and using an average .350 BA/OBP, then he’s got an OPS of .756 or so.
(Which is maybe-not-that-surprisingly close to Ichiro’s career .757 OPS) Looks like MLB average OPS is usually around .720 to .750.
Which means, depending on how you want to look at it Joe is an average to slightly better than average MLB hitter, or guaranteed Ichiro without his fielding value.
Well, I think either way any GM takes that in a split-second, but we might not be immediately hiring a sculptor for Joe’s Hall of Fame bust, especially without knowing how the league will change over the next 15 years (e.g. will MLB keep juicing the balls, so average OPS hits .800? Or will switch-hitters get more valuable as defensive shifts increase?)
That’s not really an average hitter though.
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Joe’s OBP is a disproportionate part of his overall offensive value. OBP is much, much more important than slugging percentage. A player with an OBP of .350 and a SLG of .406 is a more valuable player than a player with the same OPS made of a .320 OBP and a .436 SLG, and a vastly more valuable player than one with a .280 OBP and a .486 SLG.
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A second baseman with ANY OPS is a slightly more valuable player than a player at most positions with the same OPS. A decent defensive second baseman has a lot of value.
Joe, assuming 650 at bats, would create 95 to 105 runs, according to any Runs Created method one cares to use. That’s not average, it’s very good; if every guy in your lineup was exactly that good you’d have the best offense in baseball. It’s the on base percentage (I assumed a midpoint of .350) that drives the runs up.
I guess I’m not super up on latest research; I had thought that SLG was generally considered a little more valuable, but I’ll certainly take your word for it that he’s well above average value for hitting. And good point that an average-fielding second baseman is worth more than his offense alone (even if he doesn’t have Ichiro’s arm).
But with that, where do you value Joe in the big picture? Absolutely no-brainer for the GM to sign a guaranteed above-average-for-a-decade second-baseman, even if he’s only marginally above average. If I could accomplish 1/9th of my job (OK, more like 1/20th) for the next 12 years with one signature, I’d sure do it.
But do you see him in the HOF? (As they say, it’s not the Hall of Very Good)
If he lasted 15 years, sure. 12 years would be a little short maybe.
I don’t think I do. He’s a hitting machine, but with zero walks, his OBP will be very good, but not exceptional. He’s an average fielder at 2B, which is, of course, better than being below-average, but isn’t going to add a huge amount of value in the field (and I could foresee that, when his team has the lead in late innings, his manager might replace him with a better fielder).
Also, as per the OP, he’s only going to produce in this fashion until he’s 35, and he’s currently 22. 13 productive, extremely consistent years is a darned good career, but I’m not sure that he’ll produce enough in the “counting” numbers.
Take a look at Ichiro’s entry on Baseball Reference. Near the bottom of the page, there’s a section on “Similarity Scores” – take a look at the other players whose careers look most similar to Ichiro’s at each year of age. Now, Ichiro was 27 when he joined MLB, so I’ll take that into account, but of the batters who look most similar to Ichiro across their late 30s into their early 40s, including Jack Tobin, Wally Moses, Lloyd Waner, Kenny Lofton, and Doc Cramer, only Waner is in the Hall of Fame.
Kind of surprising kenobi, on your list of similar players, that Kenny Lofton got as short shrift from the Hall voters as he did. .299/.372/.473, with 2400 hits, 622 SB, and over 1500 runs. 68.3 WAR.
I get not voting him in, but dumping him from the ballot in 2013 with 3.2 percent seems low.
Lofton’s an interesting one, and I agree, he didn’t get much enduring recognition . But, if you look at his stats on Baseball Reference, you see that he had 8 very good years at the start of his career…and then stuck around for another 8 years, in which he was still good, but not really anything like what he’d been earlier, and he bounced around from team to team.
Near the bottom of the page, there’s a section called “Hall of Fame Statistics,” where they show how often he was a league leader in a stat (“black ink,”), among the league leaders (“gray ink”), as well as a couple of other compilation measures – he falls somewhat short of a “likely HOF player” on all of those measures.
It also shows that his career WAR, 7-year peak WAR, and his JAWS number, which correlates with the peak, are all just a smidge below that of an average HOF center fielder. When you look at his career similarity scores, among the modern players whose career his was most similar to, there are as many guys who aren’t in the Hall (Ken Griffey Sr., Brett Butler) as there are who are / will be (Tim Raines, Ichiro Suzuki).
12 years would make him basically Chuck Knoblauch so yeah.
I would guess that a team of Joes would average somewhere in the .600-.650 range and win a lot of pennants. Except for the position, he reminds me of Richie Ashburn who had a lifetime total of 29 HRs and only a .308 lifetime batting average, hitting lots of doubles and triples. He is in the HOF, although partly on account of his defense. He regularly had 10% more putouts in CF than even Willy Mays, who was second. (Of course, a quarter of his games were behind Robin Roberts a notorious fly ball pitcher.) I think Joe would be a tremendous player and I would bat him leadoff. Ashburn did get a lot of walks to get his OBP up to .396. That made up for a lot of the missing BA.
Joe doesn’t seem HOF to me either. For instance, his OBP and OPS are both worse than career for Dustin Pedroia. And Pedroia has the advantages of being an above-average second-base fielder, on multiple WS-winning teams, and moderately charismatic, but I don’t think Pedroia’s going in the Hall.