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1. Deacon Blues Posted: June 25, 2010 at 02:33 PM (#3570098)quick, a sox fan needs to bring up the 2001 postseason and the 2004 ALCS!
8 - Thanks!
Yep. Jeter, Bernie and Manny lead or are in the top four in plate appearances runs scored, hits, total base, home runs, RBIs and strikeouts. Just click on the postseason link at the top of BBRef.
Yea for large sample sizes. Clutch, smutch. He's just a really good player.
And all the rate stat leaderboards are going to be dominated by guys with fewer PA, either by virtue of playing before the expanded playoffs or playing for teams that didn't make the post-season often. Jeter has accumulated almost a full regular season's worth of post-season playing time, so it really shouldn't surprise anyone that he has post-season rate stats that are pretty much the same as his regular season rate stats.
EDIT: Coke, smoke to conn, smonn.
Do we have "league averages" for post season play? It seems there is an assumption that you should put up regular season numbers in the post season, given a large enough sample, but do we know that offensive levels in the post season are the same as the regular season?
Not that I know of and I wish we did. I think the assumption is actually that there is a little less scoring in the postseason, but how much less? It probably varies a lot from year to year. A postseason page like this would be great.
It's not the be-all, end-all definition of clutch (assuming anyone could really define such a nebulous concept), but...
Postseason walkoff hits:
David Ortiz, 3
Alfonso Soriano, 2
Goose Goslin, 2
Edgar Renteria, 2
Paul Blair, 2
Bernie Williams, 2
92 other batters, including Derek Jeter, 1
After which he'll part the Red Sea, find a cure for cancer and rescue a puppy from a burning condo. And the next day...
Discuss.
http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2010/05/18/jeter-and-the-hit-record/
"I was having an argument with my friend Ian O’Connor a few weeks ago about Derek Jeter. Ian is working on a book about Jeter that will come out next year … and it will be terrific. You will want to start saving your money now."
I presume by "the four" he was referring to Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle.
So who are the best Yankees ever? I am basically talking about performance from a Hall of Famer while a Yankee. Here are the candidates, in order of where I would rank them. Candidates and rankings off the top of my head, so I could be making a glaring error or omission here:
1. Ruth
2. Mantle
3. Gehrig
4. DiMaggio
5. Berra
6. Jeter
7. Ford
8. ARod (not enough playing time for the Yankees yet)
9. Rivera
10. RJackson
I don't think Gossage/Clemens/Mussina/Hunter slot in. Then there are players like Giambi and Mattingly and Randolph and Pettitte and Williams, who fall short of the HOF.
Berra accumulated his games at a more demanding position physically (though SS is to the left of C on the defensive spectrum), and in shorter seasons. On the other hand, Jeter is playing in a more difficult league.
I wouldn't quibble with placing Jeter ahead, but his defense at SS probably leaves him behind at the moment.
Yeah, Reggie only had five years in NY; A-Rod's already in his seventh Yankee season.
For simplicity sake I was considering only HOFers, and the last time I looked closely at Williams's record I concluded he was just short. (Though frankly I don't know exactly what to do with the Williams/Edmonds/Edgar/Walker crowd, who I see as basically the definition of the HOF border. Probably put most of them in.)
But yes, Williams would clearly be slotted in ahead of Jackson's five seasons, as well as Dickey too. Actually, I had thought Jackson played longer than that in the Bronx. The way Yankees fans talk about him one would almost think he played his whole career there. He did play great for them, but the five years would probably have me choosing Williams or Pettitte and maybe even a Mussina or Giambi over him. (EDIT: And definitely Posada. Totally blanked on him.)
More demanding position, mainly.
PS - Dickey should be on that list.
1. Ruth
2. Mantle
3. Gehrig
4. DiMaggio
5. Jeter
6. Berra
7. Ruffing
8. Ford
9. Dickey
10. Rivera
I've seen some discussion of Cano as the best Yankee 2B and nobody is bringing up Gordon and Randolph.
Looks like my top 4 were consistent with WAR. I had Berra and Jeter 5 and 6 but I'd still likely go with my ordering.
I had:
7. Ford
8. ARod
9. Rivera
10. RJackson
Missed on Ruffing and Dickey, though had Ford and Rivera ordered properly by WAR (though I'd imagine the two are close).
1. Ruth
2. Mantle
3. Gehrig
4. DiMaggio
5. Berra
6. Jeter
7. Ford
8. ARod (not enough playing time for the Yankees yet)
9. Rivera
10. RJackson
That's about right, except that you've got Mantle too high. His comparative stat (OPS+), which is only 7 points below Gehrig's, is based on the historically weak AL of the 50's and 60's, and his position on the leaderboards reflects the fact that the only other truly great hitter in the AL of his era was Williams. Whereas Gehrig was competing with Ruth, Foxx, Greenburg, Heilmann, Simmons, and a whole host of players who had shorter peaks, but whose cumulative peaks added up to a much higher hurdle than Mantle ever had to jump over.
You can give Mantle a positional and speed advantage, but you'd also have to give Gehrig points for his durability. No matter how you count it, Mantle missed over two full seasons over the course of his career, whereas Gehrig never missed a game once he became a regular.
And I'd also agree that Jackson's five years aren't enough to make that list. I'd put Bernie or Dickey above him, and maybe even Posada. But on quality time, yeah, Reggie'd be up there.
And still ended up playing more than 200 fewer games than Mantle.
Granted, it's not Gehrig's fault, but it's still extra value that Mantle contributed.
I think there's a decent argument that peak Mantle is the best center fielder of all-time. He's certainly in the discussion.
Pretty much guys like Aaron/Mays/Banks/Gibson/FRobinson (til 1966)/Clemente and other top Hispanic/black studs vs..... Minnie Minoso.
True, but the league strength issue that Andy and Howie raised is a very valid one, and must be brought into consideration. It's damn difficult to quantify, but that doesn't make it not real and not relevant.
Plus aren't we falling into stereotypes by taking about Hispanic/black studs". Roberto Clemente was a truly great player. But Al Kaline, born same year and played the same position, was his equal.
True, but the league strength issue that Andy and Howie raised is a very valid one, and must be brought into consideration. It's damn difficult to quantify, but that doesn't make it not real and not relevant.
It sure doesn't. I probably watched Mantle in his prime as often as anyone here on BTF who isn't my age and wasn't then living in New York, and in terms of sheer explosiveness, he may well have had the best skill set ever.
But to expand on Howie's point, while Mays was competing for leaderboard positions with the likes of Aaron, Robinson and Banks, Mantle was competing with the likes of Ted Williams and ????? Once you get past Ted (who retired after 1960), you have to wait until Yaz's 1967 before any other AL hitter who was remotely in Mantle's class appeared in the AL during his time frame. Mantle didn't literally have the field to himself, but without taking league strength into the equation, you wind up magnifying his numbers beyond what they truly represent.
One other minor point about his OPS numbers. In the last four years of Mantle's career, his numbers were enhanced to a great deal by his 343 walks. But in the context of his toothless teammates, those walks were of relatively little value. In his last four years, Mantle reached first, second, or third base a total of 670 times, and yet scored but 112 runs. He did add 82 home runs to that, but that was way below his usual totals. Walks are extremely valuable in most circumstances, but when you've got a group of teammates whom no pitcher has reason to be afraid of, merely dying on the basepaths isn't doing much for the team. Those raw numbers can be very deceptive if you don't understand their context.
I don't see why we should care about this. This is every bit as bad as evaluating players based on RBIs. To determine the value of a player we should be looking at the value of the player - not at the value of his teammates.
The Yankees were still the Yankees. I think it's safe to assume the team that won 14 pennants in 16 seasons was pretty good.* In the years the Yankees somehow didn't win the pennant, the NL won 4 of 6 World Series. Edit: The NL also whomped the AL to the tune of 18-5-1 in the All-Star games of the '50s and '60s.
*Though in the Mantle years they only won 12 of 18 pennants, those losers.
The point being made is the NL was much more aggressive in integrating black and Latino talent into the majors than the AL was, giving the NL a much bigger talent pool to draw from. (And I'd rather have Kaline than Clemente myself, though there's no more than a hair's breadth of difference between them.)
Yes, but, on the other hand, league quality depends not just on top players, but on all of the players in the league.
E.g.,. perhaps the AL had a stronger middle tier than the NL. (I don't know that to be the case, and I'm not disputing that the NL was stronger, but I'm troubled by an approach that seems to mainly focus on the top tier of talent. The difference in quality can be overstated that way.)
Plus aren't we falling into stereotypes by taking about Hispanic/black studs". Roberto Clemente was a truly great player. But Al Kaline, born same year and played the same position, was his equal.
I hope we don't have to go through this again. It's not that the Yankees weren't that good, or that they couldn't have competed in the NL and even won a few pennants, it's that the REST OF THE AL was so pathetic---and that's who Mantle was putting his numbers up against.
Until the Orioles finally broke the ice in 1966, only two AL teams other than the Yankees had won pennants in Mantle's career. The 1954 Indians (the most overrated team in ML history) won 111 games and got swept by the Giants, and the 1959 White Sox were handily dispatched by the 88-68 Dodgers.
And when you've finished pairing off Clemente and Kaline and Mantle and Mays, try coming up with the AL equivalents of Aaron, Banks, Frank Robinson, Tommy Davis, Ted Kluszewski, Dick Allen, Eddie Mathews, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Willie Stargell, Duke Snider, etc. I'll give you Ted Williams, of course, but good luck trying to match some of those others.
E.g.,. perhaps the AL had a stronger middle tier than the NL. (I don't know that to be the case, and I'm not disputing that the NL was stronger, but I'm troubled by an approach that seems to mainly focus on the top tier of talent. The difference in quality can be overstated that way.)
The top talent tier of the AL during Mantle's era was disproportionately centered in New York. Once the Yankees were removed from the mix (and Mantle never had to bat against his own perennially strong pitching staff), the AL's inferiority was completely exposed, in the World Series, the All-Star games, and the pre-season games, which the NL also dominated year after year. The Hall of Fame discrepancy has been noted many times, as has the superstar differential, but the imbalance extended from top to bottom. There's not a single fact that counters this overall pattern, other than the "Yankee exception," but that's what the Yankees were---the sole exception to the trend.
Nitpicky correction: that would be the Twins in 1965.
And that's even though it was tougher to be a league leader in NL offense, or even top 10, because of having twice as much overall stud competition.
You would think there would be more "AL hitting stars but not HOMers," since it was much easier to be an All-Star in the AL. But there just don't seem to be many of them there.
E.g.,. perhaps the AL had a stronger middle tier than the NL. (I don't know that to be the case, and I'm not disputing that the NL was stronger, but I'm troubled by an approach that seems to mainly focus on the top tier of talent. The difference in quality can be overstated that way.)
Point taken, Ray. But those of us who've undertaken as broad-based a study of this as can be reasonably undertaken, looking at many more things than just the names of the big stars (see for example my article in the 2010 Hardball Times Annual book), come to the firm conclusion that the difference in league quality between the AL and NL from approximately 1955-75 was very significant, the biggest it's ever been in history.
Still a team game, last I checked.
Not at all. The error with how RBI typically are cited is the use of a heavily teammate-dependent stat to evaluate an individual. It's a failure of considering the necessary context. Taking into account teammate production when discussing the value of walks is using additional context to determine that value. It's exactly the opposite.
And I disagree. All we can rationally expect a player to do is to provide the most value he can as a player - which means, on offense, to make the most of the individual pitcher-batter matchups. Expecting him to take into account that his teammates suck -- and thereby adapt his game to try to account for that -- is not reasonable. And it's far from guaranteed that a change in approach for him would have been better for the team anyway, would have made gains that offset the losses. Also, the quality of the team changes from year to year anyway, and he's a player, not a talent evaluator.
His teammates sucking may have minimized the value of his walks as far as that specific team was concerned, but I don't care about that. I don't know why we would.
Nor do I know how we would. For starters it would have to be done for every player. But I don't see Andy doing it for every player.
Rickey on both counts. If you go by the WAR on Baseball Reference, it's not even close.
Rickey's got about a 400 games played edge in Oakland, which helps a lot. Reggie's 57 ahead in NY.
Reggie's got a 9 point OPS+ lead in Oakland and 13 in NY.
Rickey's OPS is a lot more heavily weighted towards OBP.
Rickey has a rather enormous, and obvious edge as a baserunner.
Rickey was a much better defensive player (especially with the Yankees where he played center field in '85 & '86).
Reggie's got the postseason heroics with both teams, while Rickey never got there with the Yanks, but was good in the postseason with the A's.
Both were lots of fun to watch (not that that's really relevant).
All told, given a choice between the two, it's pretty easy to take Rickey in both places.
Okay. Not having studied the issue myself, I'll defer to your wisdom on this. (Note that I wasn't necessarily disputing it, just taking issue with the way it was being presented.)
By the way, what is your sense of the difference in quality between the 2000s NL vs. AL? Is the disparity as wide as commonly believed?
I don't know exactly how wide the disparity is commonly believed to be, but it's been wide. Not as wide as that between the leagues in the other direction at the peak of the '50s/'60s/'70s disparity, but it's been significant.
That's why I've been keeping a close eye on this year's interleague play results, and updating them weekly on THT. Nearly halfway trough this year's round of interleague, the NL held a slight lead, after having been soundly beaten for five straight seasons. Then the AL showed its strength again. As of this morning, the margin was 110-100 in favor of the AL, a .524 winning percentage; if that holds, it will be the closest margin of any of the AL's six straight interleague-winning years.
His teammates sucking may have minimized the value of his walks as far as that specific team was concerned, but I don't care about that. I don't know why we would.
Because baseball teams play these "games" for the purpose of "winning," done by scoring more "runs" than their opponents. If something does not lead to scoring (or preventing) runs, it is not valuable.
Nitpicky correction: that would be the Twins in 1965.
Sorry, but while my mind was thinking "won the World Series," my hand typed out "pennants."
That's what you get for typing with one hand.
Well, if it's winning World Series that you're after, the fact is that until the Orioles finally broke the ice in 1966, zero AL teams other than the Yankees had done it in Mantle's career.
I'll reply to that with a nitpick of my own. You should have started with 1954, when the best in the NL whooped the best in the AL all during the Spring and all during the Fall, and when the five bottom teams in the AL had exactly two Hall of Famers among them in their starting lineups and starting rotations---and one of them was a 19-year old Al Kaline with a .652 OPS.
EDIT: The operative word there was "nitpick," since I know you wrote "approximately," and I also know you're fully aware of the 1954 AL's historic suckitude.
Well, if it's winning World Series that you're after, the fact is that until the Orioles finally broke the ice in 1966, zero AL teams other than the Yankees had done it in Mantle's career.
Yeah, and that was exactly my point, which illustrates the complete lopsidedness of the AL all during Mantle's career.
Exactly. Why focus on walks? Who was Mantle going to be driving in with more hits and XBH at the expense of less walks and more outs if there was nobody on base?
We can penalize him for not deciding to play home run derby, too, given the ineptitude of his teammates. It makes little sense.
Gaining the extra runner is nearly always better of course, but the point is the extreme nature of the dropoff and whether that matters. At some point, it must, but one can argue if this case is one of them I suppose.
That being stated my all-time favorite Yankee team:
C: Yogi
1b: Moose
2b: Willie
ss: Gil
3b: Craig
Lf: Roy White
cf: Joe
rf Reggie
sp Allie
sp Ron
rp Goose
Mgr: Billy
That being stated my all-time favorite Yankee team:
C: Yogi
1b: Moose
2b: Willie
ss: Gil
3b: Craig
Lf: Roy White
cf: Joe
rf Reggie
sp Allie
sp Ron
rp Goose
Mgr: Billy
As a lifelong Yankee fan, I'd go with:
C: Jorge
1B: Tino
2B: Robbie
SS: Jeter
3B: Craig
LF: Gene
CF: Bernie (started watching the year after Joe retired)
RF: Paulie
SP's: El Duque, Gator, Vic, Chief, Andy
RP: Mo
MGR: Casey
It makes complete sense.
Are you seriously arguing that a walk is a walk is a walk? In any era, in any park, in any base/out situation, a walk has always had the exact same value?
And no, it isn't just walks, it's anything. Everything is affected by the context.
If you concede that in some circumstances, a walk (or anything) might be more valuable than in others, then you agree with me (and Andy).
If you do not, then what game are you watching?
And is an out from an expanded zone in a situation were a walk has little value better or worse than the walk? It must be, otherwise all you're saying is the batter should be a better hitter.
Nobody else has talked about him changing his approach, or Mantle otherwise taking into account that his teammates sucked. That's a total red herring in this discussion.
People are talking about value. We don't credit players with .46 runs for singles and .33 for walks because the players know that that's what they're worth and are optimizing their games for that; we credit them like that because those are our best estimates for the actual value (absent more context). Andy (and others) are saying that those walks actually had less value, and that's why we should count them as less.
I'm a bit uncomfortable with that approach, especially applied haphazardly (as Ray pointed out in another post). Especially in the case of Mantle -- if his poor teammates made him less valuable in the late '60s, then wasn't he more valuable with Maris, Berra, Howard, Skowron, etc., around him for most of his career?
Indeed. It's been one of the most repeatable findings of analysts for decades, dating to Dick Cramer's 1980 study (popularized in The Hidden Game). I agree with Ray's posts that just looking at the top players or the WS is insufficient; when there's so much evidence of this great disparity between the leagues, I'm a little surprised to see those weak arguments here.
As Harold understands, I'm not evaluating his approach at all. Just trying to measure what happened.
then wasn't he more valuable with Maris, Berra, Howard, Skowron, etc., around him for most of his career?
Yes, probably.
Poor Craig. Even his biggest fans don't notice.
I'm a bit uncomfortable with that approach, especially applied haphazardly (as Ray pointed out in another post). Especially in the case of Mantle -- if his poor teammates made him less valuable in the late '60s, then wasn't he more valuable with Maris, Berra, Howard, Skowron, etc., around him for most of his career?
Of course he was, since by getting on base, and by driving him in, they provided him with more opportunities to produce value (in the form of runs) for his team. As you said in the paragraph above that, "value" only makes sense within the context of the particular situation. And the fact that we can't make precise mathematical calculations that take these changing contexts into full consideration doesn't mean that we should ignore them.
Once again, the problem is taking an individual metric (in this case, walks) that's used as a comparative measure to "rate" players against one another, and confusing that decontextualized metric with "value" in what may be a completely different context.
IOW you can't simply reduce a player's true value to some golden number. You can approximate it, but you can't be all that precise. You have to look at individual statistics within their specific contexts, such as the nature of your teammates, or the talent of the other players within your league during your career. This doesn't have anything to do with a player's "talent"---Mantle may well have been the most talented player in history at his peak---and it's not about "penalizing" him because he had lousy teammates for four years. It's simply a matter of acknowledging that in the context of the 1965-68 Yankees, walks without accompanying stolen bases just weren't all that valuable to his team, compared to what they would have been earlier in his career.
Oh, Jesus, that reminds me of a friend of mine named Gary Grant whom everyone kept calling....
Anyway, I blame Harvey for the hypnotic quality of his original post. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
The Michigan point guard?
The Michigan point guard?
Nah, just an obscure NCC student from a long time ago.
Right. So I'm wondering why you feel we should give Mantle less credit for his walks in '65-'68, but not more credit (for walks and for other events) in '51-'61.
(Edited to add: or maybe you do. But you only pointed out the former here.)
Didn't he just clearly say he should get more credit?
Anyway, I don't think anybody is really disagreeing on anything anymore here.
Exactly.
As a belated response to this and the the handful of posts that immediately followed it, here's the link to the Hall of Merit discussion thread for ranking the all-time centerfielders.
My own moderately long-winded contribution to that thread was post #70, in which I work my way around a "quadrilateral" - first comparing contemporaries Cobb and Speaker and contemporaries Mays and Mantle, then comparing the defensive aces Mays and Speaker and then the offense-first candidates Cobb and Mantle, then finally being forced to consider both diagonals.
The vote was the closest we had in our positional ranking votes, and was very far from unanimous. The ranking at the top:
1. Cobb
2. Mays
3. Speaker
4. Mantle
5. Charleston
Cobb versus Mays was an extremely close vote. After the top five, there was a clean separation, with DiMaggio a near-unanimous 6th, and another clean separation behind DiMaggio.
True, but still worth noting that Jeter broke the record for postseason hits in fewer games than the previous record holder, Pete Rose.
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