OMG, I never even dared to dream. Worst idea in baseball except those inflatable banging things they used to do in Anaheim. (Oh, and the Tomahawk Chop)
When I read this the first thing I thought was “He really was. Why, he was probably the most unique player in history.”
Having thought about that, I figured I should look it up; who is the most unique player in history? The only objective method I know of is Similarity Score.
It’s 100 percent likely the most unique player will be someone who played a long time; if you had a dinky little career you’ll have a bunch of 997 comparisons and Baseball Reference doesn’t even bother to list them. Even a player with a reasonable career will have many comparisons above 900; I looked up Jose Cruz Jr., and he has ten comparisons over 912 and I’m sure many more just below that. But as a player gets greater and played longer, the comparisons die away. Vada Pinson has only two comps just over 900. Willie Stargell has none; his best comp is Carlos Delgado at 892. The best comp to George Brett is Al Kaline at 854, and while 854 sounds high it’s really not; at that point it’s a vague comparison. The best comp for Alex Rodriguez or Willie Mays are each other at 818, which is basically getting to “played a long time and was a great player.”
But Rickey Henderson has no comparison above 713. It’s Craig Biggio. 713 is NOTHING alike. That’s amazing.
And yet even more unique? Pete Rose. His closest comp is Paul Molitor, 679.
Most Unique Hitters
Pete Rose, 679 (Molitor)
Josh Gibson, 685 (Mackey)
Rickey Henderson, 713 (Biggio)
Babe Ruth, 740 (Bonds)
Ty Cobb, 758 (Speaker)
Most Unique Pitchers
Cy Young, 703 (W. Johnson)
Dennis Eckersley, 722 (Lindy McDaniel)
Nolan Ryan, 756 (Steve Carlton)
Taillon goes on the IL instead of making his start tonight for the Cubs
I never liked his attitude but the man was a good pitcher. Hard to imagine a team taking a chance on him since his last winning season was 2016.
And, in 3+ seasons with the Diamondbacks, his ERA has been 5.23.
What’s the score for Ohtani? Does it split him up between hitter/pitcher? Your comment that it needs to be someone with longevity is right - I mean, Eddie Gaedel might be THE most unique player in history, but he’s the wrong kind of outlier. For a short career, Ohtani is also the wrong kind, but I’d think he’s well on his way.
No idea. As he has been around not very long as has a lot of very close comparisons either way but I don’t know how to combine them.
Hard to imagine Ohtani putting himself far on the other side of Ruth for similarity score purposes, at this point. It’s driven by absolute differences in totals (each of the candidates for “most unique” by this measure is somebody who was a major outlier in one or more of the big counting stats). Ohtani is a better pitcher and will presumably have a fuller career on the mound, but Ruth did have significantly more starts/innings/wins/strikeouts/WAR etc. than Ohtani currently does when he stopped pitching. And he was also Babe Ruth. So if our homebrew understanding of the calculation allows for extra uniqueness because you’re a pitcher, which I’d agree it should, then I would think surely Ruth is the most unique.
10 games!
I generally poo-poo Ruth’s pitching, but compared to his peers at the time, he was pretty good. It’s so weird to see a pitcher throw 166 innings and only striking out 40 guys, though. Ruth compiled 1221 IP in 5 full seasons - Ohtani will really only be in his 3rd full season of pitching (if he stays healthy). However, he’s only 20 Ks behind Ruth’s career numbers. I’d love to see Ohtani get 10 seasons on the mound.
I think there’s lots of room to poo-poo, for sure. Throwing 300 innings 100+ years ago, given that you’re already one of the greatest athletes of all time, is definitely a different animal from being asked to be a #1 starter today. Ohtani should get a lot more uniqueness points for being a legitimate Cy Young guy in this era. The similarity score just won’t know about that, only how far he ends up from other players in terms of wins and strikeouts, etc.
And then on the flipside, obviously, it’s unlikely Ohtani distances himself from other batters the way Ruth did. We have to just give Ohtani subjective credit for it being way different to do both at the same time in the 2020s. Maybe he can shift to relief and rack up 70 saves or so, that will make him unique.
I think your points are really valid - it’s just too soon to label Ohtani a historical unicorn. I wonder how that similarity score is calculated.
Remember that hitters struck out much less often in those days, since they typically weren’t swinging for the fences. For instance, when the Red Sox won the championship in 1918, no starters struck out more than 26 times. Hall of Fame Harry Hooper had 569 plate appearances and only struck out 25 times. Hard to imagine that happening today.
I see that Ruth struck out 170 batters in 1916 over 323 innings.
Building that $1 Billion stadium in Vegas needs approval but it’s likely more a formality at this point with groundbreaking happening in about a year from now to be ready for 2027.
My understanding is that their lease at the Colliseum is up after the 2024 season. I don’t see the A’s staying in Oakland for 2025 and 2026. They probably will move to Vegas for the 2025 season, there’s a minor league stadium there they can use for a couple of seasons. I fully expect them to play in Vegas in 2025. Given the situation and now that it’s pretty much a done deal, if they can swing it, move there for next season. Fans in Oakland will not attend games much this year nor next year and if they stay two years beyond that, it will be a disaster, worse than in Montreal where there was talk for a few years the Expos would move but the official announcement didn’t happen until the last week of the 2004 season and they became the Nationals the next season. I feel bad for Oakland fans now knowing their team is moving and these next two seasons are pretty much lame duck. If they can move for next season, it would be best for everyone.
Been waiting my whole life to pretend a question like that was non-rhetorical! It’s classic weird Bill James stuff. The bulk of it is calculated by making a little pile of all the counting stats for each player, and then, starting at 1000, comparing all the piles for every player to every other player.
For each stat, you subtract some amount from the 1000 for the difference between the players’ totals. The amount is based on some factor that Bill James made up, who knows how. 1 for every HR, but only .1 for every game played, that sort of thing.
Once you’ve done that for every player and every stat, each player has somebody whose totals are the least different from theirs, and that’s the similarity scores you see listed. A score in the 900s means the numbers are similar enough that your deductions were a small fraction of the overall totals. A lower score means either all their numbers are a lot different in aggregate from everyone else, or at least one number is insanely different from everyone: Cy Young, Rickey, Nolan Ryan.
There are adjustments for position and maybe some other stuff, but it’s almost entirely made up of the stats themselves. Tony Graffanino probably gets an extra 20 points or something that Ty Cobb doesn’t get for being the same position as Rogers Hornsby, but the 4000 hit difference is going to blow that away.
I was curious, so I looked it up – the A’s averaged only 9,800 fans per home game last season, which (not surprisingly) was last in the league, and over a thousand fewer than Miami drew.
They’re at the bottom this season, too, averaging 11,000 while posting the worst record in MLB (through 12 home games so far), and as news about the Vegas move gets confirmed, I have to imagine that they’ll struggle to draw even 9,800 a game going forward.
It’s like the plot of “Major League” but right out in the open
I can’t wait for the part where they film the American Express commercial. “We’re contenders now!”
Hey, it does keep them from getting shut out at their favorite hotels and restaurant-type places.
Brewers rookie CF Garrett Mitchell may miss the remainder of the season due to a shoulder injury.