The one thing you’re missing is stolen bases. I don’t think it’s a wrong assumption that w/o SBs, you need 3 hits an inning to score. It’s extremely rare to score from first on a single. But if someone can get to second base via an SB, your chances increase. And of course, there aren’t any fielder’s choices, because it’s either a single or a strikeout for our hitters.
Will an average baserunner with average speed steal many bases? I’m guessing not, although I guess he could only make the attempt when there’s just a runner on first, and two out, to maximize the payoff and minimize the penalty.
Also, everyone keeps assuming the .300 hitter is striking out otherwise, but the OP only mentions strikeouts for the homerun hitter. The singles hitter could hit into a double play, which would make him worse.
From the OP: “Like above, it’s a single or it’s nothing.” It’s not explicit, but I think that’s what he meant.
If I had a good glove, particularly at a premium position, I could have a half-decent career as a .300 singles hitter. I’d bounce around from organization to organization, all through the minors, if I was the .100 slugger. I want the career and money, I’ll hit the singles.
I pressed the wrong one by mistake, selecting .100 when I wanted .300. .100 sluggers don’t last very long. .300 contact hitters can have long careers.
No, they can’t if they only hit singles and do nothing else. The reality is neither of these guys would last long absent some divine intervention.
I’m a Reds fan and I don’t remember Dunn that way. He was awful in LF, and pretty awful with a bat outside of dinging homeruns. I don’t hate the guy or anything but I never thought he was a very good or very motivated player that gave the game his all.
My memory may be colored by time and alcohol but his RBI numbers with the Reds weren’t always good. He seemed to hit a lot of solo homers that didn’t end up helping the team win…although he did have an incredible grand salami that capped off a win during an unreal 9 run deficit back in the day…I can’t remember whom it was against but it remains my favorite super-emotional Marty Brennaman “and THIS one belongs to the Reds” radio broadcast ever.
How can I look up game specific stuff like that? My google-fu is weak.
Looks like it was on 6-30-2006 off Bob Wickman.
I futzed around with the numbers (which I may have added up wrong) of some .300 hitters who had long careers and were known as great hitters (but not for power), by treating their career extra base hits as strike outs and came up with these NBS (Nothing But Singles) averages, then compared that average to what the league average was over the course of that player’s career.
Tony Gwynn
Real Average NBS Average NL Average (1982-2001)
.338 .256 .259
Rod Carew
Real Average NBS Average AL Average (1967-1985)
.328 .258 .257
Wade Boggs
Real Average NBS Average AL Average (1982-1999)
.328 .245 .266
So if we pretend all of Tony’s extra base hits were really strike outs (ha! as if Tony ever struck out…), he’d have hit .256 for his career, which is only 3 points under the .259 NL average during his playing days. Take away Rod’s extra base hits and he even had a higher batting average than the rest of the league. Wade, on the other hand, not so much.
Does any of this mean anything? Frankly, probably not; it seemed like a neat exercise at the time, but I did too much math and now my eyes are glazing over the screen, so maybe I missed something and I’m wrong about all this, but it kind of looks like, yes, you could have a long career if you hit nothing but singles, at least in so far as your case for staying employed could be backed up by having average numbers.
Thank you. I knew I mis-remembered the final score. The Reds were down something like 8-0 or 8-2 going into the final couple of innings and made an improbable comeback capped by Dunn’s walkoff, which can be seen here: Adam Dunn's walk-off grand slam - YouTube
Harder to find is the Marty Brennaman broadcast of the game. I’d love to hear that again.
He has a career .366 OBP - he was tremendous with the bat. With Cincy, he was even better, a .380 OBP, and a .900 OPS to go along with it. His numbers went up with runners in scoring position, so I think your memory may be a little hazy. He was, however, *really, *detrimentally terrible in the outfield. Watching a guy fumble the ball out there is bound to spoil a fan’s opinion of him, so I definitely don’t blame you!
:smack:
Yeah, once I saw your reply, it was blindingly obvious. Which it should have been before I posted. Ouch.
Both the math and logic in your post are questionable. First, even if Gwynn’s “adjusted” average was below .300, that doesn’t mean the “adjusted” Tony Gwynn would have survived in the MLB for as many seasons as he did. There is absolutely no way to know that, and basic common sense says he likely would not. Why would you even think saying because the “adjusted” Tony Gwynn was in theory worse than our OP’s player, and because the real Tony Gwynn was a great player, that our OP’s player would be regarded similarly? That makes absolutely no sense.
Second, your math is way off. First, you can’t treat extra base hits the same because they are not. Pretending his doubles are the same as his HRs and triples doesn’t make sense in terms of player evaluation. By that logic, two guys with the same average and number of hits are equally talented even if one only hit doubles, and the other hit only HRs.
Third, extra base hits have nothing to do with his batting average. His BA would be the same regardless of whether his hits were singles, doubles or HRs. Gwynn’s career average was .338. If he had the same number of hits, but all were singles, his career average would be… .338. Exactly the same.
Now you may argue that .338 is not too far from .300, so why do I think the .300 guy wouldn’t compare? First, BA uses at bats, not plate appearances. However, the .300 hitter in the OP would basically have the same number of plate appearances as at bats because he never walks, gets hit, etc. That will make him look relatively worse by comparison.
To use an example, in 1987 Gwynn had 680 plate appearance, 589 at bats, 218 hits and a .370 batting average. If he hit for the same average for those 91 appearances that don’t currently count towards his average, he’d have 33 more hits and would likely be rated as far more productive. If you decided to treat those 91 plate appearances (since he actually reached at least 1st base) as hits, his average swells to .454, a number more comparable to the OP’s scenario.
That’s to say nothing of the fact that ONLY hitting singles is not nearly as useful as hitting everything. Double and triples drive in RBIs at a much higher rate, and are better for a variety of obvious and non-obvious reasons. The fact is a .300 singles only hitter as defined in the OP is pretty much useless.
It wasn’t meant as a direct comparison of Tony to the OP’s player. It was just to see what would happen if, for a laugh, we turned real ballplayers into mythical singles-only hitters and then judged them by their adjusted BAs since BA is (or at least was) a common way to evaluate a player. We can’t realistically adjust RBIs, etc. to correlate, so this clearly isn’t an apples-to-apples situation.
I never said adjusted Tony would have “as long” a career as real Tony. But I did say a “long” career, and granted that might well be an overstatement. We’ll probably quibble over what long means, but the average career is about 5.5 years. So if we call 8 seasons a long career, and we count adjusted Tony’s first 8 seasons only then he has a .261 BA. Baseball-reference.com tells us that there have been 213 players with career BAs of .261 or less and had careers of at least 8 seasons. And again, that isn’t apples-to-apples, but judging him by his adjusted BA tells us a career of 8 seasons isn’t out of the picture.
The math itself isn’t off, as far as I can tell. I subtracted all EBHs from total hits and kept ABs the same to get the adjusted BA. What about that math is incorrect? What are your comments about 2Bs, 3Bs and HRs being different (which of course they are) regarding? I ask because the purpose here was only to find out what the adjusted BA is, which is to say we’re only talking about the singles.
Yes, I know. I don’t understand why you are bringing this up. What I tried to do was see what would happen to their numbers if, as you said, “they hit singles and nothing else.” So to reach that goal, I converted all EBHs into strike outs leaving only the singles (maybe I wasn’t clear about that), which would indeed affect the BA. In other words, the adjusted Tony now has a different number of hits. And the numbers for Tony and Rod show that, as far as their BAs are concerned, they’d still be average hitters and so could be employable.
Sure, it’s not as useful, you definitely get a lot more milage out of doubles, triples and home runs and they make you a better ballplayer. But being not as useful does not equal useless. BA certainly isn’t everything, which is why I waffled my conclusion with the stipulation of using BA as a measure of employment.
One thing I just noticed now was the no walks rule in the OP. While that won’t change the adjusted BAs, it certainly makes them less attractive players playing by the OP rules. My example deviates a bit, but that’s a good reminder that we’re all dealing with hypotheticals and caveats. So as for a .300 singles-only hitter being useless… well, as you said: there is absolutely no way to know that.
I found this baseball lineup simulator and ran some experiments. I took the stats from the 2013 Royalsand Red Sox from baseball-reference.com and arranged each team from the highest on-base average to the lowest. I used the players shown at the top of each page - I believe these are the players with the most games at each position.
I ran the simulator three ways for each team. Once with the real player with the lowest OBA in the ninth slot, once with Mr. Slugger in the ninth slot (this is the guy with a .100 OBA with all home runs), and once with Mr. Singles in the ninth slot (this is the guy with a .300 OBA with all singles).
Over 162 simulated games the Royals scored 585 runs with Alcides Escobar in the ninth slot, 581 runs with Mr. Singles in that slot, and 570 runs with Mr. Slugger in that slot. The Red Sox scored 815 runs with Will Middlebrooks in the ninth slot, 795 runs with Mr. Singles in that slot, and 764 runs with Mr. Slugger in that slot.
Not surprisingly, both Mr. Singles and Mr. Slugger were worse than either real player they replaced. Mr. Singles was better than Mr. Slugger in both simulations - in the Red Sox simulation he was better by 31 runs.
I tried shuffling the Red Sox batting order to put Ellsbury in the leadoff spot, Pedroia second, Ortiz third and Napoli fourth. With Middlebrooks in the ninth slot they scored 823 runs, with Mr. Singles they scored 798 runs, and with Mr. Slugger they scored 772. Mr. Singles was still significantly better than Mr. Slugger.
I guess it’s not too surprising that the two imaginary players had less of an effect on the Royals’ runs scored than on the Red Sox’. The Royals are not as good a team, and Will Middlebrooks is a better hitter than Alcides Escobar. It would be interesting to see what effect Mr. Singles and Mr. Slugger had on a truly bad team, like the 2013 Astros.
There is no adjusted batting average.
Which makes it an almost useless comparison. But again, your math makes no sense.
It pretty much is if all the player does is hit singles and not get walks, etc.
You cannot subtract the non-singles hits. That makes no sense because then you are saying he basically struck out when he actually got doubles and other hits, but you are still counting the at bats. Obviously, that makes him a significantly worse player. Let’s use an extreme example to highlight the absurdity of what you did. Say you had a player who hit .500 over 1000 at bats. Let’s also say he had 250 doubles, 140 triples, 100 home runs and 10 singles for a total of 500 hits. By your method his adjusted average would be .010 if he were a singles only hitter. That makes no sense. Do you think saying his adjusted average is .010 is meaningful at all given he is having a one of the best streaks by a hitter ever by almost any other measure?
A more sensible way would be to count the EBH as single, keeping his hits and average the same, then using another metric like slugging to measure the magnitude of difference. Or you can compare their OBS or WAR. Your measure tells us absolutely nothing, and punishes a player more harshly the better (fewer singles) he is.
See above. They would not really be employable at all.
No, there is a way to know that. It’s called math and using common sense.
Wow, that’s a sour reply for a friendly, hypothetical thread.
That *was *the usual lineup.
There’s, ah, some room for disagreement about that. 