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1. Mister High Standards Posted: August 24, 2009 at 03:00 PM (#3303259)I second this request.
I argue that he made the most of what he had left by the time he came to Baltimore.
One of my initial inductees in the Hall of the Very Very Good"; he joins Dewey Evans and Al Oliver amongst my all-time favorite guys to watch.
Dan's done this one already.
I'd like to see Ray Chapman and maybe Harlond Clift post-'42. I think at least one of those guys would be HoF material.
And Larry Yount.
If Jeter plays through 2015, I'll take the over on that.
I'll put the others on my to-do list.
5000+ PAs, average over .315, homers less than 120, steals more than 200, OBP less than .400:
Cnt Player BA HR SB OBP PA From To Ages+----+-----------------+-----+---+----+-----+-----+----+----+-----+
1 George Sisler .349 76 208 .387 5264 1920 1928 27-35
2 Sam Thompson .339 99 202 .394 5027 1887 1895 27-35
3 Ichiro Suzuki .333 81 339 .378 6471 2001 2009 27-35
4 George Van Haltre .327 32 337 .392 5650 1893 1901 27-35
5 Kiki Cuyler .326 86 213 .392 5042 1926 1934 27-35
6 Willie Keeler .326 15 222 .369 5494 1899 1907 27-35
7 Sam Rice .324 21 241 .375 5388 1917 1925 27-35
8 Sam Crawford .319 54 223 .373 5929 1907 1915 27-35
9 Frankie Frisch .316 54 214 .371 5458 1926 1934 27-35
No one at all like Ichiro in 70 years.
Narrow it down to 1947-2009, 4000+ PAs, .300 average:
Cnt Player BA HR SB OBP PA From To Ages+----+-----------------+-----+---+----+-----+-----+----+----+-----+
1 Ichiro Suzuki .333 81 339 .378 6471 2001 2009 27-35
2 Paul Molitor .311 100 223 .379 5008 1984 1992 27-35
OK, 4000+ PAs, .300 Average, less than 150 homers, more than 150 SB, OBP under .400:
Cnt Player BA HR SB OBP PA From To Ages+----+-----------------+-----+---+----+-----+-----+----+----+-----+
1 Tony Gwynn .341 60 186 .394 5290 1987 1995 27-35
2 Ichiro Suzuki .333 81 339 .378 6471 2001 2009 27-35
3 Derek Jeter .314 144 188 .383 6082 2001 2009 27-35
4 Paul Molitor .311 100 223 .379 5008 1984 1992 27-35
5 Julio Franco .309 103 173 .377 5057 1986 1994 27-35
6 Roberto Alomar .303 142 208 .377 5723 1995 2003 27-35
7 Barry Larkin .303 130 236 .392 4860 1991 1999 27-35
Tony Gwynn, I don't really see anyone else as any kind of comp for Ichiro
.280+, less than 100 homers :
Cnt Player BA HR SB OBP PA From To Ages+----+-----------------+-----+---+----+-----+-----+----+----+-----+
1 Tony Gwynn .341 60 186 .394 5290 1987 1995 27-35
2 Ichiro Suzuki .333 81 339 .378 6471 2001 2009 27-35
3 Paul Molitor .311 100 223 .379 5008 1984 1992 27-35
4 Lou Brock .299 87 607 .351 6376 1966 1974 27-35
5 Kenny Lofton .298 97 370 .374 5437 1994 2002 27-35
6 Lance Johnson .295 33 261 .338 4789 1991 1999 27-35
7 Jose Cruz .294 96 243 .363 5232 1975 1983 27-35
8 Brett Butler .293 39 368 .383 6165 1984 1992 27-35
9 Willie McGee .292 41 158 .335 4415 1986 1994 27-35
10 Eric Young .291 54 360 .365 5022 1994 2002 27-35
Basically, Ichiro's signature skill is his batting average. Not many guys up there:
1947-09, ages 27-33, 4000+ PAs, average over .325:
Cnt Player BA PA From To Ages+----+-----------------+-----+-----+----+----+-----+
1 Rod Carew .345 5522 1973 1981 27-35
2 Tony Gwynn .341 5290 1987 1995 27-35
3 Larry Walker .339 4545 1994 2002 27-35
4 Stan Musial .339 6155 1948 1956 27-35
5 Ichiro Suzuki .333 6471 2001 2009 27-35
6 Wade Boggs .332 6175 1985 1993 27-35
7 Roberto Clemente .329 5452 1962 1970 27-35
8 Todd Helton .326 5563 2001 2009 27-35
Why, yes, yes he can.
And Mike Crudale.
If you do pitchers, how 'bout Herb Score and Addie Joss?
[checking]
OK, I knew he'd missed a few games in Japan, but I didn't realize how many. His reputation for durability fooled me a little there.
My half-assed prediction for him has his debut in 1994, but less of a tail off in games played the last years of his career, giving him something like twelve straight 200-hit seasons, and breaking the hits record in season 21 or 22.
haha, that is rich.
Hey, nothing's preventing the distribution of thanks!
One of my thoughts of fancy has been to do a whole book of what-ifs, interview some of these players and do mini-bios of the time periods in question and end each chapter with the possible projection.
Boggs had he started his MLB career at age 18;
Hideki Matsui had he started at age 19;
Edgar had he started at age 20; and
Bonds had he not been colluded against?
If you've got time, maybe post-Cannae Hannibal, adjusting for his brother not losing an army?
Sure, why not? They still won't wind up with over 4000 hits, though.
THANK YOU, DAN!!!!!
Thanks for your hard work and for the effort you make to share it. I'm STILL working through your methods thread, because your stuff is so complex, but in my mind, that's a compliment to you. You work through the details.
Great work!
Don't stop!!
Thank You!!!
- Brock Hanke
Aloysius Travers.
Eddie Gaedel.
My TOTS* projection shows thank yous peaking at post 27 (as expected) with a false peak at 33.
* Thanks Offered To Szymborski
Boggs was sucking in low A ball at 18.
Matsui DID start his major league career at 19 according to those who see NPB as a major league.
Edgar was hitting .173 in low A ball at 20.
His projection would look something like this: -.215/-.306/-.225 and would cost him half of his career value. (Please don't take that literally).
Dan didn't count Ichiro's minor league statistics, but let's compare them:
Ichiro 18, 19
1992 Ori Jap West 18 - Intl 3b 58 238 42 87 6 4 3 16 10 0 23 16 0 0 0 0 0 .366 .421 .462 883
1993 Ori Jap West 19 - Intl 3b 48 186 38 69 14 6 8 23 11 0 25 14 0 0 0 0 0 .371 .445 .640 1085
Wade Boggs 18,19
1976 Elm NYPL 18 Bos A- 57 179 29 47 6 0 0 15 2 29 15 .263 *.369 .296 *665
1977 Win Caro 19 Bos A+ 117 422 67 140 13 1 2 55 8 65 22 .332 *.424 .382 *806
Edgar Martinez 20,21
1983 BEL Nwst 20 Sea A- 3b 32 104 14 18 1 1 0 5 1 3 18 24 2 0 1 1 .173 .304 .202 506
1984 WAU Midw 21 Sea A 3b 126 433 72 131 32 2 15 66 11 9 84 57 3 2 7 6 .303 .414 .490 904
By 20, Ichiro was OPSing 986 in NPB. Boggs had a .400 OBP in AA.
Now, both Boggs and Edgar turned into more productive hitters in their peaks, but at 18-21, Ichiro's on a better path.
(Incidentally, Japan has only two minor leagues. I would imagine that their level is about AA, but if someone has data, I'd love to learn from it.)
Charlie Ferguson would be a great one.
Agreed! I'm just going to pretend I never saw it and keep dreaming about his coulda/shoulda HOF career.
Very interesting. If he'd stayed a pitcher, then the HR wouldn't have been in vogue for who knows how long, and MLB wouldn't have catapulted to the undisputed forefront of Americana as early as it did. We might have had a very interesting chase for the career HR record in the 60's/70's with Aaron/Mays/Mantle. Roger Maris would be in the HOF for sure, and wouldn't have been so grumpy all the time. The Yankees would have moved out west to, perhaps to Oakland or Yuma, sometime in the late 50's/early 60's along with the Dodgers and Giants. People would think the candy bar was named after a president's daughter.
BTW, Post #36 is hilarious. I knew as soon as I got on this site that I would eventually get the two Dans mixed up. I'm 61, and my memory, while still good both long and short term, has troubles with names. I read up on this, and it turns out that brains have a finite capacity for names. As you get older, it fills up, and you get to the point where any new name that you retain forces an old one out. The result of this, for me, is that I have trouble remembering new names. Two Dans in one venue is more than my brain can now handle consistently. Just a FYI for those of you who aren't that old yet.
- Brock
Dan R. is the one who was known as Dan Rosenhell until the vagaries of the journalism world required him turn it down a notch.
That's not all that disappointing projection unless you think Thon was a sure-fire HoFer. The 80s Astrodome (or anything Astrodome) is obviously not the best environment for gaudy stats. The games played are disappointing, but when you're projecting out 15 years, there's a lot of uncertainty. A 104 OPS+ is a darn good career, especially for a competent shortstop with some speed.
The uncertainty is even more prominent with long-term pitching projections. The attrition rate is such that despite Tim Lincecum and Felix Hernandez being much better pitchers than Jeff Suppan, the reality is that Suppan is probably more likely to throw 150 innings at age 38 than either of the other two are.
I have a problem with this one. The evidence isn't real solid, but still ...
Most of Ruth's innings as a starter happened in 1915 through 1918, when he was 20 through 23 years old. He carried 300+ IP loads in the middle two of those years, at age 21-22. His strikeout rates per nine innings: 4.63, 4.73, 3.53, 2.16. OK, that's not fair - league strikeout rates were dropping dramatically in the same years. So do that as a percentage of league strikeout rate: 118, 126, 106, 74.
There are a couple of ways you can look at that. One is to discount the evidence of 1918, when he was already down to being a half-time pitcher and half-time outfielder, and point out that over the three previous years, his strikeout rate was better than league average in each of them. Maybe that's the right point of view. Or perhaps 1918 is a signal, and part of a three-year decreasing trend. And if a young pitcher stops striking people out? There's a distinct possibility that we're looking at a career path somewhere between Gary Nolan and Doc Gooden - in particular, perhaps you've already seen the best of him, and the rest is downhill.
(In 1919, in which he was even less of a pitcher so it's even less reliable, his strikeouts were down to 63% of league average and his hits per inning shot up. But by then, the Yankees knew they weren't buying a pitcher.)
Not really, it's just that he's one of the first autographs I ever got, so naturally he's like one of my favoritest players, so I kind of think of him as larger-than-life.
So, looking back on it: in the 1983-84 offseason, what would your relative ranking of Thon, Garry Templeton, and Ozzie Smith have been? In fact, what was your relative ranking at the time?
Wow, I would guess most people would have placed Ozzie last in that ranking in '83-'84, assuming that Templeton could bounce back from his poor 1982 and '83 (which of course he never really did).
Age Thon Temp Ozzie20 91
21 118 110
22 66 91
23 96 112 82
24 110 108 48
25 127 98 71
26 79 62
27 77 84
28 82
Of course, if you project Templeton forward from his age 25 season, what do you get? Does he make it to 3000 hits?
I thhink that Thon would have played a lot more games per year if healthy.
Maddux and Mussina if they hadn't retired.
Ray Fosse.
EDIT: Oops ... thanks Dan!
How about the same for Michael Jordan, if he were 21 instead of 31?
To do so, you'd probably have to throw out the steroid era from your historical data set (in terms of projecting how players perform going forward).
That raises an interesting question--are player projections less accurate now due to potential chemical enhancement than they were before steroids? For each player, in addition to the regular statistical possibilities, there's the variance added by not knowing whether the guy will start taking steroids or not. If you don't think steroids are performance-enhancing, then obviously this is an irrelevant question.
Also, doing that for Bonds is irrelevant. In 2001, baseball, loudly announced in advance, told the umpires to start calling higher balls strikes, to return to the rulebook strike zone. It turned out that Barry Bonds had a sweet spot high and inside that no one knew about because that pitch had always been a ball and no matter what else you think, you have to give Barry his strike zone judgment. The fad term "McCovey Cove" is where homers right down the right field line go. You can check this visually. ESPN, for some reason, pieced together a video clip of all 73 Bonds homers, back to back. You can see the high inside pitches going out and out and out into the Cove and also down the line in away parks. Also, if you check out some full broadcasts of Bonds games, even as late as September, announcers were still intoning that Bonds' weakness was high and inside - just as another high inside pitch went to the Cove. So baseball did not catch on about Bonds until 2002. That's the reason he hit all those homers, not roids.
- Brock Hanke
No offense Brock, but this strikes me as ludicrous a remark as saying McGwire would definitely have hit less than 60 that year barring a steroid diet. There are simply too many factors involved to conclusively determine what steroid's impact on an individual player's performance in any direction was.
Guy can rake.
RETROJECTION!
As argued in this Ichiro thread, Japanese stats translate nearly one-to-one with the exception of home runs and walks (to a lesser extent). Doubles get a small boost because, IIRC, they are cut down in NPB due to the shape and dimensions of Japanese outfield walls. (A one-to-one translation of doubles would cut 34 2B off the line below, which would give him a .473 SLG. However, the doubles total used below matches his 2B/AB ratio in MLB.) Also in the translation, home runs are cut in half after adjusting for season length.
Here's a rough translation of his Japan career:
1529 G, ~6578 PA (AB+BB+HBP), 5513 AB, 1676 H, 331 2B, 19 3B, 200 HR, 1065 BB(+HBP), .304/~.417/.480
You can make the case for taking 10-20 points off the OBP (TEH FEAR will not be as great) and AVG, but using this as a ballpark estimate, you get the following career line:
2419 G, ~10294 PA (AB+BB+HBP), 8775 AB, 2626 H, 527 2B, 30 3B, 335 HR, 1486 BB(+HB), .299/~.399/.481
Again, this is only meant as a quick-and-dirty estimate, but with that caveat, you can say that Matsui's career is a testament to exceptional durability and consistency. He's always hit like he has in MLB (his rookie season excepted), and played in every game for 12 years in a row. He probably hangs around long enough to clear 3000 hits, 1500-1700 RBI and runs, 600 2B and possibly 400 HR.
Dan, I would love to see a ZIPS translation. Maybe the Matsui-for-HOF train can get rolling at BTF (much to Ray DiPerna's delight). . .
:-) Well, I don't support him because I bizarrely only consider MLB performance, but I do find it curious that we hear only crickets from the pro-Ichiro crowd (including MSM types) about Matsui. They will say that his MLB career hasn't been good enough, but once one decides to incorporate Japan careers it seems rather whimsyish to gloss over such a fantastic Japan career in the face of a merely successful MLB career. Wasn't Matsui "prevented" from playing MLB sooner, like they argue with Ichiro? Well, had Matsui started his MLB career sooner his MLB career would be more worthy. He played all of his age 26-28 peak seasons in Japan. Even Ichiro got to play his age 27 and 28 seasons in MLB.
You've loosely translated him to an .880 OPS over 2400 games. That's a serious HOF candidate.
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