Not really a ton of pitching to work with on today's Birthday Team. Some of these guys may have to invent pitches.

C: Boileryard Clarke
1B: George Hendrick
2B: Jerry Royster
3B: Hans Lobert
SS: Alex Cora
LF: Willie Horton
CF/Manager: Burt Shotton
RF: Roy Cullenbine

SP: Candy Cummings
SP: Andy Hassler
SP: Allen Ripley
SP: Frank Meinke
SP: Ed Farmer
RP: Alan Mills

Top Prospect: Yoenis Cespedes

Boileryard... one of my all-time favorite nicknames.

Today also marks 40 years since Dick Williams made Johnny Bench look stupid.

I was looking at A-Rod's BBRef page and noticed that he doesn't have a single similarity score above 900. There are many players without any overall similarity scores over 900, but A-Rod doesn't have a 900+ for any of his "Most Similar By Age" scores. The highest is an 876 similarity with Arky Vaughan at age 21. I wonder if there's any other player with a long career for whom this is true. I've been going through players that I consider unique, and so far all of them have at least had some 900+ scores from the early parts of their careers.

Can anyone come up with anyone else?

Also, Satchel Paige's most similar player is Bill Dawley (and Paige is Dawley's #2). This is obviously because BBRef's similarity engine only "knows" about a small fraction of Paige's career, but I can't imagine that there is any greater disparity in quality between two most similar players.

One of the signs of a great player is a low number of similar players for a career. (Maybe bad players, too, I haven't checked). Ruth and Cobb for instance. I never looked into by age before but this would seem to be pretty rare. Lots of players ahve one good year that may match up.

The key is that A-Rod started out at the peak of the sillyball era, meaning there aren't players who are going to be superficially similar to him. Ruth, for example, has a 952 similarity score with Will Clark through age 23. They have similar slash lines, but the OPS+ scores are wildly divergent.

This is why women can't play baseball. Can you imagine an article about Jenny Snodgrass' muff?

Interesting, Fernigal. Rickey Henderson's comps list has a compelling vector. He starts out very similar to a lot of fast outfielders, and then pretty much year by year gets less and less similar to anybody till at age 44 the closest is Tony Perez, as one might imagine a fairly dissimilar career (592). Overall Craig Biggio is the closest to him, at only 713.

I always enjoyed reading pre-1960s baseball books written for little kids which unashamedly retold stories about "Merkle's boner" and "the Snodgrass muff"...

Ruth, for example, has a 952 similarity score with Will Clark through age 23.

Of course through age 23, Ruth was primarily a pitcher so being a similar hitter to Will Clark was not similar at all. :-)

ARod's young start is part of it of course. Banks and ARod are rather similar players but Banks didn't get started until 23.

So I looked at Mel Ott. He does have some over 900 but only barely ... well, until this year when Bryce Harper had to screw it up and have a 928 sim score.

Ott's list of top comps is simply stunning:

Harper at 19
Trout at 20
T Williams at 21
Kaline at 22
Griffey at 23
4 years of Mantle
6 years of Aaron
5 years of F Robinson

Similarly I'd imagine guys who got started really late wouldn't comp well. But Sam Rice does (Nyjer Morgan?). Boggs has some early but none over 900 after 27.

Hey, I see that Bobby Bonds is Barry's top comp at 27. And somebody tell Brunansky he had a very disappointing career. :-)

#11 brings a trivia question to mind ... are there any pitchers with actual hitters on their hitting comp list? I have no idea and I'd guess the answer is no due to so few PA. Maybe it's not even allowed.

Doc Crandall's hitting comps are all position players, as are Wes Ferrell's. George Uhle has only one pitcher on his (Al Orth). Mike Hampton's are all pitchers except for Julio Becquer and Ramon Webster.

Similarly I'd imagine guys who got started really late wouldn't comp well. But Sam Rice does (Nyjer Morgan?).

Regardless of what Similarity Score says, Sam Rice's most similar hitter is Ichiro. For being separated by about 85 years, they're startlingly identical.

Speaking of: Ichiro's best comp through 27 is Al Wingo. I had no idea who Al Wingo was, but his hitting record is actually better than Ichiro's through that first season. Falls off rather sharply after that, of course.