I just added an All-Walker to an average 2008 AL team (replacing 1/9th of the team average), and according to the most popular run estimators, he’d improve the team by about 283 runs! Of that about 166 runs can be directly attributed to him getting on base, and 117 to him never getting out.
Babe Ruth’s wildest season is under 125 runs above average.
Kid would have some weird stats too. At a guess, 225+Runs score <40 RBI.
The comparison to an All HR guy in terms of impact on an average team is a non starter-Homer would hit 600+ HR’s at around 1.44 Runs per. That’s 864 runs, well above what an average team scores in any era, not to mention 100+ runs via ‘extra’ outs.
Except, as Chronos pointed out, anyone who was remotely close to being an always home-run hitter would be quickly turned by the opposing team into the always walker.
[See Barry Bonds for the early stages of that transition]
For what it’s worth, catcher Ernie Lombardi was reputedly the slowest significant MLB player ever. His career batting average was .306 – excellent in and of itself, and made even more remarkable by the fact he seldom if ever legged out an infield hit. However, he did manage to steal eight bases during his seventeen seasons in the bigs, so he was a veritable speed demon compared to our hypothetical “too slow to score on anything but a homer or bases-loaded walk/hit by pitch” guy.
As for the rule made in reaction to Eddie Gaedel, how tall is a player required to be? Having a midget on the team probably wouldn’t be very advantageous anyway, because he could do almost nothing but pinch hit, taking away a precious roster spot from somebody who actually has baseball skills.
As I said above, there is no specific height requirement. The rule made in reaction to Eddie Gaedel was that all player contracts had to be approved in advance by the Commissioner of Baseball. Presumably they would rule out someone like Gaedel on the grounds that they had no evident capacity for actually playing in a game.
Veeck, in protesting the voiding of Gaedel’s contract, was supposed to have said something like, “Well how tall does a player have to be? Three foot seven? Four foot seven? If it’s five foot seven, we can get rid of Rizzuto.”
For a team like the Brown’s, having the bases loaded so a walk would force in a run was probably so rare that it wouldn’t have been worthwhile in any event.
What does this mean? My guess would be that he’s driven in 166 times more than an average player and that somewhere later in the lineup you’d have an extra out which would lead to more runs for the other 117?
It means if you sub out an 1/9 of a team’s stats and replace it with 600-odd walks, the team would score 166 more runs.
But they would also make 400-odd fewer outs. You recalculate the teams runs per out (originally .18 or so, .25 with the Walker) and multiply that by the outs the Walker didn’t make that Joe Blow would have to get 117 hidden runs. Someone might say that’s high because a higher scoring team makes fewer outs than a lower scoring team (due to not batting when leading in the bottom of the 9th) but I’m not going to guess at that adjustment. I’m just offering ballpark numbers here.
I don’t know if there is an accepted way to express these runs-I just call it lineup impact.
It’s basically a function of high OB%, which in effect lengthens the game. For example Ted Williams OB% would net a team something like 15-20 runs a year in this manner, even if Ted were a well below average slugger.
