Not sure why Win Shares and WAR disagree. DanR WAR isn't agreeing with either one very well

That could lead to another splintered election. For me, the big question is whether George Stone can challenge the big two of Wagner and Lajoie.

DL - I'm not sure how this happened, but I have two copies of this thread on my blogpen. This is the only one with comments so far. You might want to delete the other one. - Brock

HERE'S MY RPA TOP PLAYERS FOR 1906:

1. George Stone 55.34 runs
2. Harry Lumley 46.37 runs
3. Honus Wagner 37.75 runs
4. Frank Chance 37.45 runs
5. Harry Davis 35.93 runs
6. Tim Jordan 33.36 runs
7. Napoleon Lajoie 32.44 runs
8. Al Orth 32.43 runs
9. Harry Steinfeldt 32.21 runs
10. Elmer Flick 30.00 runs
11. Mordecai Brown 29.92 runs
12. Art Devlin 29.67 runs
13. Roger Bresnahan 28.70 runs
14. Bob Ewing 27.67 runs
15. Sherry Magee 27.66 runs
16. Sammy Strang 26.97 runs
17. Roy Thomas 26.83 runs
18. Jack Weimer 25.16 runs
19. Jack Chesbro 24.86 runs
20. John Titus 24.82 runs
21. Addie Joss 24.64 runs
22. Jack Pfiester 24.38 runs

Closed the other thread. Couldn't delete it due to permissions.

1906 prelim

1) Honus Wagner
2) Napoleon Lajoie
3) George Stone - baseball's best hitter 1906
4) Art Devlin - numbers say outstanding fielder at 3B. Noticable dropoff from the top 3 to 4th place.
5) Terry Turner - baseball's best glove 1906?
6) Roger Bresnahan - with C bonus he's the first C to get a vote for me this decade
7) Elmer Flick
8) Pete Hill - .350/.425/.470 over 116 PA plus solid shoulder seasons in Cuba
9) Frank Chance - the only pennant winner in my top 10
10) Danny McClellan - there is quite a bit of data here. 65.7 Negro League innings pitched plus time in Cuba. 117 plate appearances. The MLB pitchers are not impressive in 1906. I have McClellan and Foster ahead of all of them.

11-15) Harry Steinfeldt, Bobby Wallace, Harry Lumley, Rube Foster, Al Orth
16-20) Vic Willis, Doc White, Miller Huggins, Johnny Kling, Harry Davis

1906 Prelim:

1) Honus Wagner


2) George Stone
3) Mordecai Brown
4) Frank Chance
5) Nap Lajoie
6) Al Orth
7) Art Devlin
8) Harry Lumley
9) Harry Steinfeldt
10) Rube Foster

1906 prelim, major league only considered for now. I am surprised
that there are a couple of names that I didn't know.
Still need to research NeL players, and expect that my ballot will change.

1. Honus Wagner
2. George Stone
3. 3-F Brown
4. Art Devlin
5. Nap Lajoie
6. Roger Bresnahan. Catcher bonus tempered by playing 1/3 of games in OF.
7. Harry Steinfeldt
8. Vic Willis
9. Harry Lumley
10. Al Orth

11. Frank Chance

Another Negro League position player besides Pete Hill that people may want to consider is Grant Johnson, who put up a .372/.449/.640 line in 100 PAs.

The Grant Johnson line illustrates part of why I am conservative. It is better than Pete Hill's line, in all three categories, especially in power. But what does that mean? Did Hill play in a tougher hitters' park? Given Negro League schedules, how can you tell? Did Hill play shortstop or catcher, where he could add defensive value to his batting line? Where did Johnson play? The same applies to Hill's Cuban stats. What was the Cuban league like at the time? Was it like the Union Association, where El Presidente's team in Havana has all the best players? Or was it a balanced league? Was it a hitters' league? And those are just the first set of maybe two dozen context questions that it is almost impossible to get a grasp on in 1906, outside of the major leagues. Not that the 1906 major leagues give you anything like a full hitting context, but it is better organized than anything else, and the sample sizes are 5-6 times as great as those in the Negro Leagues. The best I can do is go to such web sites as have stats for the 1906 NgL (which probably means Seamheads and nothing else, or do I have the wrong one?). I can look at those, see if anyone truly stands out, like neither Hill nor Johnson do, since they are too close to each other, and make an educated guess if I find someone who dominates the NgL like Honus dominates position play in the Majors. Right now, Hill and Johnson are so close to each other, and the conditions of 1906 still so favorable to pitchers, that I am not inclined to list either of them, because I have no real way to figure out which of them was better, much less how much better than all the other guys. And I haven't even looked at NgL pitchers. I'm not unwilling to list black guys, but this early, I am conservative, because the record is subject to a huge number of unanswered questions - many of them probably unanswerable absent a time machine. So, I do the best I can do with what I have. - Brock

I took a look at seamheads.com for the 1906 Negro Leagues. There it seems pretty solid that the best player was Danny McCleland (sp?). Danny was the other pitcher on Rube Foster's team. They pitched about the same number of innings, with similar results. But Danny has over 1 1/2 as many plate appearances as Foster, because he played right field whenever he wasn't pitching, and Foster did not. Danny wasn't the best pitcher in the league, and he wasn't the best hitter, but he was the best combo. The page for 1906, BTW, lists Danny as the Top Hitter, which is wrong, and Foster as the top pitcher, which is also wrong. But Danny does have more WAR and Win Shares than anyone else listed as a position player (Danny is technically listed as a RF), or as a pitcher. So I'd say that Danny is the best negro League player of 1906. He was 28 years old, which is certainly within prime territory. - Brock

1906 Prelim- NL Only

1. Mordecai Brown, P, Chicago Cubs: he may have had a great defense behind him but that 253 ERA+ leads the league by more than 80 points
2. Honus Wagner, SS, Pittsburgh Pirates: 2nd in OPS+, 1st in RC, +10 fielding
3. Harry Lumley, RF, Brooklyn Superbas: 1st in OPS+, 2nd in RC, +3 fielding
4. Vic Willis, P, Pittsburgh Pirates: a great combination of quality (4th in ERA+) and quantity (3rd in IP)
5. Harry Steinfeldt, 3B, Cincinnati Reds: top five in both OPS+ and RC to go along with +6 fielding from the hot corner
6. Jack Pfeister, P, Chicago Cubs: WAR doesn't like him but I'm impressed by 174 ERA+, 2nd in the NL
7. Art Devlin, 3B, New York Giants: top ten in both OPS+ and RC to go along with +15 fielding
8. Frank Chance, 1B, Chicago Cubs: 4th in OPS+ and RC, +11 fielding
9. Sammy Strang, 2B, New York Giants: 3rd in OPS+ while playing mostly second base
10. Johnny Kling, C, Chicago Cubs: the fourth Cub in the top ten

a few words about Frank Chance, player-mgr of the Cubs

No credit is given here for managing while you play. But what if managing actually detracted from your play? If this were true, is it fair to penalize the player for what he would have done if he didn't take on extra duties to help his team? Like those in the Negro Leagues, I hope we would account for circumstances outside of mere WS and WAR.

Chance played fewer games than many of his teammates. Was it injuries, or was it that the team lapped the league and he saved himself for the only thing that mattered, the Series (since the team lapped its opponents)? I don't know. But it's plausible to me. He played the whole Series, and was one of the few bright spots on the team, scoring 3 of their 18 runs.

Chance played a fine 1B when 1B meant a lot more; and in 1906, on this team, we all know defense meant a lot. Much has been written about Win Shares w.r.t. how it doesn't give a ton of credit for over-achieving defenses, and this one is the uberexample. Chance led the league in runs scored, even though (at least from W.S. box scores) he batted cleanup, and missed 16 games; pretty awesome accomplishment, yes?

All in all, knowing what we already know about the man's reputation, it seems like this guy would have received a huge amount of support for MVP if it had existed in 1906.

I'm pretty sure that Chance lost a significant part of his career to injuries - he seems to have been just injury-prone, but his peak years are outstanding. The general issue - whether managing impacts your performance - will get you into HUGE trouble if you look at Rogers Hornsby. Both my dad and Bob Broeg, the old sportswriter, gave me the same version of the first Hornsby trade that actually makes Hornsby out to be a saint and a martyr. Now, my dad was 15 years old in 1926, and Bob Broeg was all of eight, so they're just repeating what kids hear. But here's how it goes: In 1925, the Cards were just playing ordinary ball, with Branch Rickey as both GM and field manager. In the middle of the season, Rickey moved to front-office only, and gave the managing job to Hornsby. The team immediately turned itself around and started to play just like jt would play for some years. This is all true, every word. But the story continues to say that, in 1926, Hornsby sacrificed his personal stats to lead the team to a World Championship. It is VERY true that Hornsby had a SERIOUS off year in 1926, without missing any serious amount of playing time. But Hornsby later managed the Braves (1928) and his playing numbers did NOT go down. Of course, that Braves team was awful, so no amount of managing was going to make a winner out of it. But Hornsby managed several other teams, and developed a reputation as a jackass in the job.

Anyway, the story continues to say that, at the end of the year, Hornsby and Rickey had a feud about who was responsible for the championship. We now know that it was certainly Rickey's farm system, but remember, this is teenage fans at the end of 1926. They have no idea that the team will continue to win regularly for a decade, that it will dominate the 1940s, that Rickey will build the Dodgers into a great team and integrate baseball. So, at the time, to the eyes of a kid, it would look indeed as if Hornsby had done what they said he did. And, starting with that impression of Hornsby as a contributor to his teams, it is impossible to adjust for the personality traits that dominated his career. That is what drives controversy about just how bad a person Hornsby could have been. If he was, indeed, willing to sacrifice his personal performance for the good of the team, then he can't be the really nasty person he turned out to be. So I, personally, would not tend to make that attribution, because it can lead to big trouble in analysis. - Brock Hanke

1906 Prelim- AL Only

1. Napoleon Lajoie, 2B, Cleveland Naps
2. George Stone, LF, St. Louis Browns- Stone is one of my favorite obscure early players and he had the best offensive year in the AL but Lajoie's glovework at a tougher defensive position pushes him ahead
3. Terry Turner, SS, Cleveland Naps- a career year for cotton top
4. Elmer Flick, CF, Cleveland Naps- Flick moves to centerfield for most of the year and still hits as well as anyone in the game
5. Otto Hess, P, Cleveland Naps
6. Bob Rhoads, P, Cleveland Naps
7. Barney Pelty, P, St. Louis Browns- the top AL pitchers are more of a "who's that?" than a "who's who"
8. Addie Joss, P, Cleveland Naps
9. Harry Davis, 1B, Philadelphia Athletics
10. George Davis, SS, Chicago White Sox

1906 Prelim- Combined

1. Mordecai Brown, P, Chicago Cubs: he may have had a great defense behind him but that 253 ERA+ leads the league by more than 80 points
2. Napoleon Lajoie, 2B, Cleveland Naps
3. George Stone, LF, St. Louis Browns- Stone is one of my favorite obscure early players and he had the best offensive year in the AL but Lajoie's glovework at a tougher defensive position pushes him ahead
4. Honus Wagner, SS, Pittsburgh Pirates: 2nd in NL OPS+, 1st in RC, +10 fielding
5. Harry Lumley, RF, Brooklyn Superbas: 1st in OPS+, 2nd in RC, +3 fielding
6. Terry Turner, SS, Cleveland Naps- a career year for Cotton Top
7. Dan McClellan, P/RF, Philadelphia Giants: The Giants are playing a more regular schedule which helps the counting stats and hurts the rate stats; still, McClellan's combo of pitching and hitting puts him here
8. Vic Willis, P, Pittsburgh Pirates: a great combination of quality (4th in ERA+) and quantity (3rd in IP)
9. Elmer Flick, CF, Cleveland Naps- Flick moves to centerfield for most of the year and still hits as well as anyone in the game
10. Harry Steinfeldt, 3B, Cincinnati Reds: top five in both OPS+ and RC to go along with +6 fielding from the hot corner

11. Rube Foster, P, Philadelphia Giants
12. Jack Pfeister, P, Chicago Cubs
13. Otto Hess, P, Cleveland Naps
14. Bob Rhoads, P, Cleveland Naps
15. Art Devlin, 3B, New York Giants

Cleveland has 6 of the top 10 players in the league and can't win the pennant?

Cleveland has 6 of the top 10 players in the league and can't win the pennant?

Baseball is a crazy game sometimes.

The top three contenders in 1906 were Chicago, Cleveland and New York. Chicago won the pennant at 93-58, New York finished second at 90-61 and Cleveland third at 89-64. But that doesn't tell the whole story. The underlying numbers show that Cleveland was the best team by a significant margin.

Cleveland had the best offense in the league. They scored 664 runs to lead New York by 24 (640) and Chicago by almost 100 (their 567 was good for 3rd). They had a team OPS of .682 which translates to a team OPS+ of 115. The Highlanders had a team OPS of .655 (OPS+ of 97) and the pennant-winning White Sox were well behind with a .588 OPS (87 OPS+).

Cleveland and Chicago both had excellent pitching staffs. Chicago gave up the fewest runs and earned runs (460 and 326) but Cleveland wasn't far behind (482 and 328). Cleveland actually had the better ERA with 2.09 to Chicago's 2.13, a gap that looks even bigger by ERA+ (125 to 119). New York's pitching was well behind the other contenders with 544 runs allowed and a 2.78 ERA (107 ERA+).

So was Cleveland let down by bad defense? Hardly. Cleveland had a .967 fielding percentage to go with a team-wide +71 fielding runs and 9.0 defensive WAR. Chicago had a .963 fielding percentage to go with +46 fielding runs and 5.9 dWAR. Meanwhile, New York was the bad defensive team. Their fielding percentage was .957, fielding runs were -4 and dWAR an even 0.0.

By pythagorean formula, Cleveland should have finished first at 98-55 and won the pennant by seven games over Chicago (pythag of 90-61) and ten over New York (pythag of 87-64). The White Sox and Highlanders each overperformed by a couple of games and the Naps underperformed by a ridiculous 9 games, handing the pennant to Chicago and a third-place finish to Cleveland.

In regards to my ballot, I'm guessing that the question is whether or not I'm overrating Cleveland's pitchers. (At least, I'm assuming you don't have a problem with my placement of Lajoie, Turner and Flick who are 3 of the top 4 position players in the NL according to WAR.)

I use ERA rather than DIPs which is why I differ from WAR, especially in these early years. WAR gives a lot of the credit to Cleveland's excellent defense, instead of their pitchers. However, those 3 pitchers finished in the top 6 for ERA and ERA+. WAR prefers New York's Orth and Chicago's Doc White. I looked at both of them since Orth leads the league in IP and White in ERA. But White is held back by a low innings total (219) and Orth was more about bulk innings (his 127 ERA+ doesn't crack the top ten). The other guy in there is the Browns' Pelty and I did have him listed as roughly equal with the Naps' pitchers, just ahead of Joss.

In any case, the Naps pitchers didn't make the final ballot once I blended all of the candidates together so it's somewhat of a moot point. None of Orth, White, Hess, Rhoads or Joss are getting a vote from me. And, according to your comment, none of the AL pitchers are getting a vote from you either.

Following the point about Cleveland's star power, I took a quick look at the Win Shares by Team section of the book Win Shares because, while it is dated, it is also very conveniently arranged so that if you want to see how the talent on a particular team in a particular year was distributed, you can.

In the 1906 AL, Cleveland was odd and interesting. They did, in fact, have six players with more than 20 win shares, which is a lot. But after Addie Joss at 23, they drop to B. Congalton at 15, and only have 5 players in the teens. So, this was a team entirely driven by their few superstars, without much behind them.

Chicago had 7 players over 20 WS, and 6 more in the teens. Their over-20s are not as good as Cleveland's, but there is one more of them, and then it only drops to 18, twice. That is, they are not as star-driven as the Naps, but have more strong depth.

New York takes Chicago one step further. They had only 4 over-20s, but one of them is Al Orth, at 36. They also have 7 teens, starting 19, 19, 18, 16, 15. That is, their intermediate quality players are better than the other teams', and there are more of them. So, Cleveland is star-driven, New York is deep, and Chicago is in between.

Chicago has the best offense of the three teams, New York the worst, while Cleveland relied on their three 20-WS hitters. New York has the best pitching, relying heavily on Orth and Jack Chesbro, who were so much better than their other pitchers that they almost have an old 1800s-style two-man rotation. Cleveland has three 20-WS pitchers (Hess, 24; Joss, 23; and Rhodes, 23) plus Bernhard at 14, but nothing behind those four, and so the worst pitching of the three teams. Cleveland is vitally tied with New York for the best fielders, with Chicago bringing up the rear. All in all, the teams look pretty close, except that their distributions are different. As mentioned, Cleveland had the best stats, but underperformed their Pythagorean by a serious amount, possibly because they have no useful bullpen. I don't know. Pythagoreans are weird. - Brock Hanke

Win Shares "adds up" so when a team underperforms its Pythag projection by a lot then its an effective penalty on each player on that team.

Cleveland easily had the best defense in the AL, so its pitchers take a noticeable hit in the WAR department because of this. They do not do as well as their team 115 ERA+ would suggest.

That they did so poorly vs Pythag is very interesting. There's not much in terms of bullpens back then. Most games were CG's. Looking at the game logs, they appear to have a very atypical run distribution. They really ran up the score in their blowout victories, but were very mediocre (21-25) in one-run games.

I suspect, though I've never plowed through game logs looking for it, that teams with a few VERY strong hitters and then some other guys will be prone to wild fluctuations in runs scored. The stars are going to score a couple of runs in most games, but the better opposing pitchers will just shut down the rest of the lineup. However, when you get a pitcher who can't handle the undercard today, then the innings can get just completely out of hand. I have no idea whether such teams generally underperform their pythagorean. And if I did, I'd still have to separate the seasons where that happened because of the offense from the seasons where it happened because of the defense. - Brock

The Usual 3XT prelim. No post season. No adjustments.
Need to research NL players so they are not included yet.
Man, does FWAR hate pitchers in 06. They don't have a single one in the top ten

Player
1-Honus Wagner
2-Napoleon Lajoie
3-George Stone
4-Art Devlin
5-Terry Turner
6-Frank Chance
7-Al Orth
7-Harry Steinfeldt
9-Mordecai Brown
10-Vic Willis

1906 World Series

Player Name  G  AB  R  H  2B  3B  HR  RBI  BB  SO  BA  OBP  SLG  OPS  SB  E
George Davis  3  13  4  4  3  0  0  6  0  1  .308  .308  .538  .846  1  2
Fielder Jones  6  21  4  3  0  0  0  0  3  3  .143  .250  .143  .393  0  0
Ed Walsh  2  4  1  0  0  0  0  0  3  3  .000  .429  .000  .429  0  1
Doc White  3  3  0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  .000  .250  .000  .250  0  0

Mordecai Brown  3  6  0  2  0  0  0  0  0  4  .333  .333  .333  .667  0  1
Frank Chance  6  21  3  5  1  0  0  0  2  1  .238  .360  .286  .646  2  0
Johnny Kling  6  17  2  3  1  0  0  0  4  3  .176  .333  .235  .569  0  1
Jimmy Sheckard  6  21  0  0  0  0  0  1  2  4  .000  .087  .000  .087  1  0
Hry Steinfeldt  6  20  2  5  1  0  0  2  1  0  .250  .286  .300  .586  0  1

Pitcher Name  G  GS  ERA  W  L  SV  CG  IP  H  R  ER  BB  SO  WHIP
Ed Walsh  2  2  0.60  2  0  0  1  15.0  7  6  1  6  17  0.867  
Doc White  3  2  1.80  1  1  1  1  15.0  12  7  3  7  4  1.267

Mordecai Brown  3  3  3.66  1  2  0  2  19.2  14  9  8  4  12  0.915

I took a look at seamheads.com for the 1906 Negro Leagues. There it seems pretty solid that the best player was Danny McCleland (sp?). Danny was the other pitcher on Rube Foster's team. They pitched about the same number of innings, with similar results. But Danny has over 1 1/2 as many plate appearances as Foster, because he played right field whenever he wasn't pitching, and Foster did not. Danny wasn't the best pitcher in the league, and he wasn't the best hitter, but he was the best combo. The page for 1906, BTW, lists Danny as the Top Hitter, which is wrong, and Foster as the top pitcher, which is also wrong. But Danny does have more WAR and Win Shares than anyone else listed as a position player (Danny is technically listed as a RF), or as a pitcher. So I'd say that Danny is the best negro League player of 1906. He was 28 years old, which is certainly within prime territory. - Brock

Brock, I can't find the win shares for him that season. What does Seamheads give him?

Seamheads credits McClellan with 10.4 Win Shares for 1906, ahead of Foster (9.0), Hill (7.8) and Palomino (7.8).

I found it on Seamheads now, Chris. Thanks for your assistance.