HOVG Heroes: Sam Fuld on Brett Butler

Sam/Butler: Air one out…

If you put a gun to my head and asked me if I thought Brett Butler deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, I’d have to admit that he probably falls a bit short.

...I’ve only written fan mail to two people in my life. One was to John Glenn, the astronaut-turned-U.S. Senator whose journey on the Friendship 7 was depicted in the movie “The Right Stuff”. I was fascinated by the movie and specifically by the scene that included “fireflies” floating in outer space outside of Glenn’s shuttle. I wrote Mr. Glenn to ask about the fireflies and a couple of weeks later received a response in the form of a pamphlet full of information on space camp.  Bummer. I had too much baseball to play to go away to space camp.

The other letter was to Brett Butler.

...Butler never won a Gold Glove, but at least part of that was due to the strange bias shown toward great hitters when awarding Gold Gloves. We all know that quantifying defense is a challenge, especially when measuring anyone who played in the 20th Century, but most major metrics consider him an above average defender. Bill James gave him a B+ in his Win Shares book, and Matt Souders’ Pythagorean Comparative Analysis (PCA) has Butler as one of the top 20 defensive centerfielders of all time. And if you like simpler statistics, Butler is seventh all-time in putouts by centerfielders and 13th among all outfielders.