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Hall of Merit— A Look at Baseball's All-Time Best
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
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1. John (You Can Call Me Grandma) Murphy Posted: March 20, 2007 at 12:45 PM (#2314534)1934 Ballot Discussion
Center Fielder Positional Thread
If you know of any others, please let me know.
Speaker's teams did have better players on average than Cobb's, though. With that said, The Grey Eagle would have been a lot easier to get along with, that's for sure.
But in fantasy land, you do. I think most HoM voters would probably take Speaker for the reasons mentioned above.
As HoM voters, we are sworn not to give the so-called character issues much consideration, however. And Spoke's defense alone doesn't, IMO, make up for Cobb's offense. You need the character issue to get to Speaker. And, again, HoM voters have agreed not to appeal to the character issue except in extraordinary cases.
The teams being more successful remark isn't necessarily that true. Both played for the same number of pennant winners... but Cobb went 0-3 and Speaker 3-0 partly due to the difference in their own postseason play.
BP WARP1 has Cobb's career edge at 11.6 WARP, 232.0 to 220.4. Cobb also played 246 more games. Expressing the career numbers as a rate per 154 games (i.e. a typical 154 game season), Speaker leads 12.2 to 11.8. Using WARP, one could build a case for Speaker without recourse to the character issues.
I feel like a cranky curmudgeon taking the Cobb side in a Speaker thread. :-)
As much as there is no shame in finishing second to Ty Cobb, I will concur that Speaker is indeed an all-time great. He would have been a unanimous #1 most other years.
Tris Speaker has some incredible home/road splits. Far larger than any 'park effect' adjsutments would sugest. And this occurred in both of hte parks he caled home for over 1000 games. Either the man was so smart he figured out how to adjsut his swing to two home parks, or they were similar enough that his natural swing worked for both, or the data Bill Deane gave me is hosed up (I doubt that one!), or some other reason. But here are Speakers career home/road numbers:
.AB ....R ....H ...2B .3B .HR BB HB AVG .OBP SLG OPS
5007 979 1827 469 115 59 713 48 .365 .449 .540 .989
5188 902 1687 322 108 58 668 54 .325 .408 .462 .870
The extra amount of doubles he hit at home amazes me. I've never seen any bio of Speaker that suggests why it might be so. But he did take far more advantage of his parks than most great players. Don't know if he could pul this off in some other pace and time; and this beocmes my tie-breaker to relegate him to "only" fourth among MLB's great CFers.
The Indians & Sox both regularly lead the league in doubles when Tris was with them. Fenway & League Park had huge centerfields (though I don't know how huge relative to other parks). This was 20-25 years before the funny ground rule that helped Earl Webb get 67 doubles in Fenway, no?
Plus, I haven't been a big fan of looking at home/road splits outside of the PF. Maybe Speaker didn't like to travel. I'm going to side with Tris on this one. There, I feel less curmudgeonly now. :-)
Duffy, GVH and Ryan seemingly are doomed to be relegated to the HoVG.
Tris would be either #3 or #4 on my all-time CF team behind Mays, Cobb and tied/ahead of Mickey.
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