However, on "Luke Easter Night" on August 17, 1963 in Rochester, Easter told the crowd that he was really 52 years old, which would have made his birth year 1911...

Love that story.

A comment from what will be my 2010 ballot, unless I am persuaded otherwise:

Luke Easter – The case of Easter, I truly believe, is sui generis. Exceptionally victimized by circumstance, the historical record shows his career was unique for its longevity.

I ran quick-and-dirty MLEs for Easter's AAA stats: first adjusting for league AVG/OBP/SLG context between AAA and the AL, then multiplying his AVG/OBP/SLG by .87, and finally adjusting for season length. (Two points to bring up: most of his AAA seasons are missing OBP data, so I added .068 to his AVG to estimate OBP; .068 was the average ISO OBP of his last three seasons. Secondly, the 1949 PCL does not have league AVG/OBP/SLG available, so I used the 1950 PCL averages.) These translations show a career 124 OPS+ hitter in AAA, matching his 124 OPS+ in the majors.

Easter finished his career as a Matt Stairs-type power bat, averaging about 100 games and 280 plate appearances for his last three seasons, with OPS+ lines of 121-115-110. What's remarkable is that those were his age-44, 45 and 46 seasons. In all, Easter played 1794 G with 6530 PA from the age of 33 on, with 924 G and 3143 PA from age 40 forward. (Also of note is that he was more durable after he got older and went back to the minors. This fits into the historical record, though.) He might be the greatest 40+ hitter in baseball history.

However, Easter is not so exceptional an outlier in this respect as to reject the idea that he could have racked up that much playing time in this portion of his career. There are 22 players in MLB history with at least 5000 PA from age 33 on. (Easter would be third on this list in PA.) This population had an average (weighted by PA) OPS+ of 123.48. Easter fits squarely into this group, so I looked at what this population did on average from 25 to 32, which covers Easter's career from 1941 to 1948. (The historical record shows Easter as an established, quality player in the Negro Leagues in this time period and covers war credit.) They averaged 4764 PA with an OPS+ of 135.87. Adding 12 points to Easter's MLB/AAA translated OPS+ of 124 gives you a 136 OPS+ from 25-32. Dividing 4764 PA by 4.2 PA/G gives you 1134 G (an average of 142 G and 596 PA over that eight-season span). All told, the translated record gives him 2928 G, 11294 PA and a 129 OPS+, which fits right into the Eddie Murray/Dave Winfield/Carl Yastrzemski (and Rafael Palmeiro) class of long-career HOM “corner bat” inductees (though noting Yaz's defensive value).

(A quick note about his defense: Easter was not some lumbering -10 slug at first base. Both Smith and Rosenheck see him as around average in his MLB career, and both have his 1950 season at around +5. This captures Easter at his most injury-plagued, so it seems likely his glove isn't taking anything off of the table. Well, not until he's simply mashing in his mid-40s.)

Obviously, there is probably no way to know for certain if Luke Easter was a late bloomer like Edgar Martinez or a superstar aging gracefully like Willie Mays. There is probably no way to know for certain the shape of what would have been his first seasons leading up to his peak. (Something like 110-123-126-129-138-142-150-160 OPS+ can perhaps be justified.) However, the way Easter beat the crap out of the PCL is what a great hitter would do and it's the first season in the “formal” professional record. Furthermore, the unique longevity shown by his professional record is another sign of a great player. The weight of the evidence, and the weight of the historical circumstances, leads me to accept the above projection as a reasonable career estimate.

(One last note: if we are talking about “missing” players from the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps Easter is the top candidate.)

I'll give him a closer look. I've voted for him before, but he kind of slipped off my ballot at some point.

I love these discussions about guys like Easter and Marvin Williams and Bus Clarkson. I can't really add anything, just wanted to say thanks and keep on chugging along.

I used a few different proxies to come up with what Luke Easter should look like including Gil Hodges, Tony Perez, Dave Winfield and Orlando Cepeda through age 32. Dolph Camilli is also a decent proxy. Note that none of these guys is a real "peak" star, even Winfield wouldn't rank very highly without his long career. I think we can use Ryan Howard as a modern comp for his ceiling.

It's a pretty wide error band for Luke Easter, the best case scenario is he's clearly a HoM player like McGwire, Killebrew, Winfield or McCovey. In the most reasonable worst case scenario he's in a glut with Cepeda and Perez. Right now I have him around 50th on my list.

I just checked Luke Easter's minor league stats page on Baseball Reference, and it now has seasonal walks data. I'm now incorporating this data into my MLEs instead of a flat ISO OBP of .068. Using the method I describe in my longer post above, here are his new MLEs (minor league numbers only, adjusted to 162 games):



Add that in to his MLB career:

I think Eric Chalek and Chris Cobb used the square of the BA factor as the ISO factor in the past (so in Easter's case that would be .76 rather than the .87 James uses). I've rerun the MLEs with this change; I'm also using .90 as the PCL factor rather than .87, reflecting its reputation as the top AAA league during this period. Lastly, my MLEs are a bit lower than James's even for BA and OBP (where they should be the same), but I think this is because James's are placed in the context of the AL without pitchers, whereas mine are placed in the context of the AL with pitchers included.

Year mle BA mle OBP mle SLG OPS+
1949 0.319 0.426 0.603 180
1952 0.276 0.367 0.527 155
1954 0.272 0.353 0.464 131
1955 0.235 0.344 0.402 108
1956 0.266 0.377 0.495 136
1957 0.244 0.340 0.464 126
1958 0.269 0.356 0.490 138
1959 0.225 0.335 0.387 104
1960 0.270 0.331 0.434 113
1961 0.257 0.320 0.442 109
1962 0.244 0.323 0.423 107
1963 0.231 0.297 0.341 85

Also, what about Easter's parks? Per Wikipedia, Offermann Stadium in Buffalo, where Easter played from 1956-1958, was a hitter's park, 321 to left, 345 to left-center, 400 to center, 365 to right center, 297 to right. Silver Park in Rochester, Easter's home field from 1959 to 1964, was 320 to left, 420 to center, and 315 to right (wikipedia doesn't mention whether it was considered a hitter's park or a pitcher's park).

I'm starting to take a look at players whose case is based, at least in part, on data outside of my system. I have Player won-lost records for all of Luke Easter's (integrated) major-league career, but, of course, that's a fairly small part of the full picture. One kind of interesting thing: for the seasons that I do have, Luke Easter looks much better in context than out of context. Looking at his career splits on BB-Ref, Easter's career OPS in "high-leverage" situations was .881 (.293/.360/.521) compared to his overall career OPS of .830 (.274/.350/.481). I've looked at whether this sort of "clutch" hitting persists (here if you care) and I found what I think is the consensus result: there may be such a thing as a "clutch" hitter, but it's a very, very small effect. Retrospectively, I'm cool with giving somebody some credit for what they actually did, but, of course, Luke Easter has no case based purely on what he did in the (integrated) major leagues, no matter how "clutch" he was in his 3 good seasons there.

Anyway, I tried to extrapolate Luke Easter's career a couple of ways to see what it might suggest. First, I looked at the players most similar to Luke Easter from age 34-36 (considering overall record - in and out of context - and batting). The 10 players included three Hall-of-Famers (Joe DiMaggio, Dave Winfield, and Jackie Robinson), one current serious HOM candidate (Jeff Kent), one possible future candidate (David Ortiz), and a bunch of guys who probably don't make anybody's consideration set (Don Baylor, Ellis Burks, Paul O'Neill, et al.). Taking a simple average of those guys would put Luke Easter somewhere in the 25-35 range of my consideration set (somewhere between Fred Lynn and Jim Rice).

Another thought I had was to take his three full MLB seasons and multiply by 6, based on comments through this thread that seem to suggest an 18-year career might be a plausible extrapolation for Luke Easter in a fully integrated, World War-less world. If I just take his 1950-52 records at face value - including the crazy-good clutch hitting - my best-case scenario can get him up reasonably close to Gary Sheffield's Hall-of-Merit case. Sheffield will probably end up in the 5-8 range on my final ballot. But that's an absolute best-case scenario built in part of unsustainable contextual advantages - although it also assumes that his age 34-36 seasons were average seasons for his career, so maybe those two assumptions reasonably balance each other out? If I blow up his career based on his context-neutral 1950-52, he ends up similar to where his most similars put him - somewhere around Jim Rice.

If somebody had a really compelling case that Luke Easter has a genuine statistical case that lines up with somebody legitimately in the Hall of Merit - Willie Stargell?, Dave Winfield?, Willie McCovey?, I want to be open to it, because I feel like Luke Easter has a potentially fascinating case, but I can't put him on my ballot based on what I know right now.

Nothing new here, but I really like Poz's article on Easter: link

thanks, dlf

I would quibble with some details, but many deserving stars get just a little more deserved recognition off that article so I'll take it every time. My sense has been that younger people don't grasp how aware white America - from fan to sportswriter to MLB player - was of how good Negro League players were. they played against them, they covered them, they attended the games. they knew.

Hey, everyone,

Please see my latest MLEs for Luke Easter. These will be updated as more information is made public.

Thank you, Dr. Chaleeko, for your fantastic work on these updated MLEs.

This time around Luke Easter.

LUKE EASTER: 1B
Year  Age  Lg  Pos   G    PA  Bat  Bsr  DP  Fld  Pos  RAA   WAA  Rep  RAR   WAR  WAR162
=======================================================================================
1937  21   AL  1B  124   540   20    0   0   1   - 5   16   1.5   18   34   3.2   3.4
1938  22   AL  1B  123   540   20    0   0   1   - 5   16   1.4   18   34   3.1   3.3
1939  23   AL  1B  126   550   21    0   0   1   - 5   16   1.5   19   35   3.3   3.4
1940  24   AL  1B  127   550   21    0   0   1   - 5   16   1.5   19   35   3.4   3.6
1941  25   AL  1B   62   270   10    0   0   0   - 3    8   0.8    9   17   1.7   1.8
1942  26   WW2                            
1943  27   WW2                            
1944  28   WW2                            
1945  29   WW2                            
1946  30   AL  1B  127   540    6   -1   0   1   - 5    1   0.1   18   19   2.2   2.3
1947  31   AL  1B  137   580    6   -1   0   1   - 6    1   0.1   20   20   2.3   2.4
1948  32   AL  1B  138   600   27   -1   0   1   - 6   21   2.1   21   42   4.2   4.4
1949  33   AL  1B   76   330   17    0   0   0   - 3   14   1.4   11   25   2.5   2.7
1950  34   AL  1B  141   623   16   -1   0   4   - 7   13   1.3   19   32   3.1   3.3
1951  35   AL  1B  128   532   13    0   0   0   - 6    7   0.7   16   23   2.3   2.4
1952  36   AL  1B  140   600   27   -1   0   1   - 6   21   2.3   21   41   4.6   4.8
1953  37   AL  1B   68   230    7   -2  -2  -1   - 2    1   0.1    7    8   0.8   0.8
1954  38   AL  1B  101   430   13   -1   0  -1   - 4    7   0.8   15   22   2.4   2.6
1955  39   AL  1B   86   370   10   -1   0  -1   - 4    5   0.5   13   18   1.9   2.0
1956  40   AL  1B   85   370   19   -1   0  -1   - 4   14   1.4   13   26   2.7   2.8
1957  41   AL  1B   65   280   14   -1   0   0   - 3   10   1.0   10   19   2.1   2.2
1958  42   AL  1B   48   200   11    0   0   0   - 2    8   0.9    7   15   1.6   1.7
1959  43   AL  1B   24   100    2    0   0   0   - 1    0   0.0    3    3   0.4   0.4
1960  44   AL  1B   12    50    1    0   0   0   - 1    0   0.0    2    2   0.2   0.2
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  1938  8285  282   -9  -2   5   -84  194  19.3  278  471  48.0  50.5

The MLE suggests that there’s nothing to recommend him for election.
1) There’s no data on Easter prior to 1947, so we really are making much of it out of whole cloth.
2) The data after 1961 is not applicable. I don’t include it as part of the MLE.
3) During his career, he had serious injuries that ate into his playing time (car accident in 1941 and various foot and lower leg injuries later).
4) He wasn’t actually a great hitter. A good one, yes, but not a great one.
5) Even if you gave him 130 games a year at his career average rate of value, he’d be at 25 WAA and 64 WAR. That’s a lesser player than Ben Taylor and Eddie Murray and Jake Beckley. That’s easiest to see in WAR7. Easter’s at 26 WAR7 in 162 notation. Murray’s at 39, Beckley’s at 34, Taylor’s in the low-mid 30s. Now, to some degree, that’s the flattening effect of the MLE process, but there’s not enough octane in the raw numbers to result in more impressive value.
6) There’s the big question of how long the man would have stayed in the big leagues were he white. And the more you knock off his career, the less he looks like a career-oriented candidate. Everyone has to decide whether it’s legit to give him five years in his 40s.

Easter, in my opinion, is a weak candidate.

[Cross posted from 2020 discussion thread.]

Hey all:
Bumping this thread because I'm doing research for a story on Easter. If anyone who participated here would like to share ideas please let me know. baudib1@Gmail.com

I'd vote for Easter if he actually had the career in #113. 48-50 WAR is not enough, though as mentioned it did get Cepeda and Perez in. That fictional Luke Easter doesn't have a peak, but only because he's missing what should be his best seasons (age 26-29) because of the war. I have to assume that such a player, without the military service, ends up around 65 WAR.

But in reality we don't have any data, not minors, not Negro league, before he was 31. He was playing baseball, SABR bio says he didn't play well enough against the higher level Negro leagues to get a chance to play for them. Seems like a late bloomer. Kind of like Edgar Martinez, but not on the same level.

Kind of like Edgar Martinez, but not on the same level

More like Raul Ibanez

I think the best case scenario for Easter is Nelson Cruz. And while I love Nelson Cruz, he wouldn't make my top 150 if he didn't play another game.