Power and Speed: A rare and valued combination!

I was thumbing through the August ‘83 issue of The Baseball Digest, when I stumbled over an article titled “Power and Speed: A rare and valued combination! It really wasn’t an exciting article, but it was all over the place.  It talked about the previous year’s world champion Cardinals team, and its speed.  It had a number of quote from Whitey Herzog, talking his theory of team building.  He talked about how he would love to have great hitters - “You don’t think I’d love to have an Andrew Dawson, Buddy Bell or George Brett?”.  It also had some quotes from Whitey that were ahead of his time “There are a lot of ingredients you can put together to win.  The most obvious and dominant thing you can have is the great relief pitcher.”

The article goes on to talk about building a team to your home park, as Herzog said if he managed the Red Sox he would be out looking for power hitters.  The article covered a lot ground, but I haven’t gotten to what I thought was interesting.  While now reading a mainstream article and seeing Bill James quotes and Bill James invented statistics isn’t that uncommon - but but in the early 80’s it was.  A full page of stats showing “Bill James Power/Speed Numbers” - The 1982 leader, All Time Single Season Bests, Active Career Leaders, and All-Time Leaders, accompanied the article.  I was very surprised to see that.  I was even more surprised when reading the article, the author cited a Bill James study to elaborate a point made by Steve Boros then manager of the A’s. 

“The ideal,” sats Oakland manager Steve Boros, who has studied speed and base-steeling to great degrees, “isn’t speed of power by itself (Bill James calculated that, since 1969, the average team with the most stolen bases has finished in 2.75th place, the team with the most home runs in 2.43rd place, and the team with the most runs scored 2.11 place).

“You can’t win with only stolen bases. Few teams win with only power, because they eventually can be pitched to. The great modern teams had a blend of speed and power. The Oakland A’s of 1972-74, the Cincinnati Reds of 1975-76 and the Yankees in 1977-78. But those were great teams. The rest of us adapt to what we have.

While none of this all that ground breaking 23 years latter, it was interesting to me that all of this was written by a writer who historically has been lambasted on this site for not have a clue about sabrmetrics.  Well maybe he doesn’t, but I’m amazed that Peter Gammons was writing about Bill James in August of 83 - I certainly didn’t expect to see it.