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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Wednesday, December 30, 2020Baseball Lost A Team Of Legends This Year
RoyalsRetro (AG#1F)
Posted: December 30, 2020 at 01:37 PM | 37 comment(s)
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1. Rennie's Tenet Posted: December 30, 2020 at 02:38 PM (#5996648)*This is listed as "Batters," but I think includes pitchers who never had a plate appearance?
Only 3 players who were HOFers on that day are still alive:
Aaron, Mays, and Koufax
#2: That was 38 years ago and, with a few exceptions (some related to an early death), you don't become a HoFer before age 42 and usually a good bit older. It's depressing but not surprising.
Mays (1931)
Aaron (1934)
Aparicio (1934)
Koufax (1935)
Mazeroski (1936)
Cepeda (1937)
Marichal (1937)
Brooks Robinson (1937)
G. Perry (1938)
Billy Williams (1938)
Yastrzemski (1939)
Koufax must have the record for the longest time alive as a "Hall of Famer", right?
Heck of an All-Star team of living HOFers 80 or older:
1B - Billy Williams
2B - Mazeroski
SS - Aparicio
3B - Brooksie
OF - Aaron, Mays, Yaz
DH - Cepeda
SP - Koufax, Perry
We'd need a catcher. The oldest HOF catchers still alive were both born in 1947, and they're pretty awesome: Bench and Fisk.
Good luck getting a ground ball through that infield...or a fly ball over the CF's head...or a base hit if you are left-handed...that's a pretty special group of 10 players left who are 80+.
I believe that old-timer would only have two cards left in the "living" pile - Eddie Robinson and Willie Mays.
who knows what happened to the second guy, but Robinson - who just turned 100 - recently started recording a regular podcast about his baseball memories
Exactly. Posting this article when there are still days/minutes left in the year seems to be tempting fate. 2020 might decide it needs a better catcher and first baseman, and *poof*, Johnny Bench and Miguel Cabrera have a head-on collision on their way to a New Year's Eve party in the Bahamas.
My goodness, that's a strong rotation. Whitey Ford as the #4 starter?!?
Bob Feller was inducted in 1962 and died on December 15, 2010 (48+ years). Koufax was inducted in 1972, so depending on when exactly the induction dates were in 1962 and 1972, he either just passed Feller or should pass him very soon.
The main contributor to the run of no pennants with all that frontline talent (because the core stayed together for a while) is Hal Lanier.
That said, he was not horrendous in 1964. Jose Pagan picked up the slack (Schofield and Pagan were worse in 1965 which is impressive). Jesus Alou hit for a very empty average (he was a fair amount better in 1965).
They usually had two real open wounds in the lineup as well as often a less than stellar back half of the pitching staff.
Like the (prime) Mathews/Spahn/Aaron braves it's a team that could have cruised to multiple (more in the case of the Braves) pennants with an honest look at the talent.
Pretty much giving away an awful lot of talent didn't help. Lindy McDaniel was a pretty good reliever but Bill Hands and Randy Hundley should have got them more. They got essentially nothing for Matty Alou. And Ray Sadecki wasn't much of a haul for Orlando Cepeda.
Bill James commented on this in one of the Abstracts. His take was that they were so good at finding talent and refining that talent that they just didn't evaluate what they had properly. Doesn't hurt to give away a guy who turns into an all-star because first of all he wasn't Willie Mays (the standard they seemingly judged everybody by) and second, there's more where he came from.
To put it into even more perspective, only three of the seven HOFers who died in 2016-19 were voted in by the writers. All seven HOFers we lost in 2020 were BBWAA selections
Had to look up the last one. I thought it would be a pitcher but no. Another old OF. Zack Wheat.
EDIT: Of course it's not exactly prime HOFers we're talking about. Obviously Cobb, Speaker, Collins and Wheat were well past their prime. Foxx wasn't yet Foxx (Joe Hauser was pretty good though)
I don't know how good of a number that is. One thing I'm sure of is that some guys born after 1920 would have died without it being reported, but I don't know whether that number's 100 or 1,000. Also, it feels like 10,100 guys between 20 and 100 should produce more than 110 deaths in a year.
Wouldn't deny that. But in 1927, Cobb, at age 40, still hit .357, fifth highest average in the league...
I'm not sure how to track down why but, for 2020, the b-r main MLB stats page has 1,291 "batters" and 735 "pitchers" (some of whom might have been position players) but the basic Stathead batting page gives just 618, only 37 with no PAs. The basic pitching page agrees on 735 pitchers (all with at least one BF).
That may just be some sort of temporary error but 2019 doesn't quite agree: 1,410 "batters" at b-r; 1,287 at stathead but at least we are now up to 297 with no PA (probably still not enough but closer than 37 in a dual-DH league even if it was 40% of a season). So first guess is there is some different criterion about how a pitcher with 0 PAs gets to be a "batter." Then if you're looking over time, as long as that pitcher qualified as a "stathead batter" at some point in their career, they'd be in the global stathead database. So probably 839 pitchers who never qualified as a "stathead batter" but did as a "b-r batter" ... and possibly there are some pitchers that didn't qualify as a "batter" in either database.
I believe that old-timer would only have two cards left in the "living" pile - Eddie Robinson and Willie Mays.
I've got the repro set, and there are 8 more who are still with us:
Carl Erskine
Bobby Shantz
Cloyd Boyer
Charlie Maxwell
Wayne Terwilliger
Bobby Morgan
Johnny Groth
Bob Kelly
Bobby Brown would've made it, but he was drafted early in the 1952 season and never got a Topps card that year.
who knows what happened to the second guy, but Robinson - who just turned 100 - recently started recording a regular podcast about his baseball memories
What a great find! That makes up for consigning 8 players to early graves.....
wait, wouldn't that have meant he wouldn't have gotten a 1953 card? [update, he is in the 1952 set]
heh, however many there were
:)
buddy of mine of a certain age was a Terwilliger fan for reasons he says he still can't explain...
George Spriggs got added to the list of 2020 deaths, at age 83. He died on December 22. Another outfielder from the Pirate system in the 60s, he was a teammate of both Al and Bob Oliver at Columbus in different years. Spriggs signed with the Pirates in 1963, and was one of the last players to move from a Negro League team (Detroit Stars) to a National or American League organization.
Guess that makes Bobby Shantz the oldest MVP, coincidentally 1952.
wait, wouldn't that have meant he wouldn't have gotten a 1953 card? [update, he is in the 1952 set]
Maybe Brown is included in some newly released "improved" set, but you can't find his name on the original set's checklist.
buddy of mine of a certain age was a Terwilliger fan for reasons he says he still can't explain...
I'd thought Terwilliger had played in the first MLB game I ever went to (May 7, 1952), but it turns out he spent that year in St. Paul.
It seems somewhat random which pitchers appear in the batting database and which don’t (if they have zero career PA), but I think I have figured it out.
For example, Stan Thomas pitched only in the AL during the DH era, before interleague play, and has no batting stats page on BB-Ref. I assume he’s not in the Stathead batting database.
However, his Yankees teammate Ed Figueroa also had no career PA, but he is listed as having two Games Played as a batter and is presumably in the batting database. One of those games was this one. Thurmon Munson was removed for pinch hitter George Zeber, and DH Cliff Johnson was moved into the field at catcher. However, because Johnson moved from DH, for some reason the PBP shows Zeber replacing Figueroa in the lineup rather than Munson. So Figueroa gets a game as a batter, even though he had no batting line.
If you’re looking for the number of living players and you only use the batting database, you will miss guys like Stan Thomas. But if you simply add the pitching and batting databases, you will doublecount guys like Figueroa (and any pitcher who had a PA).
I think the closest solution is to add the pitching and batting databases, but then remove guys in the batting database who played at least one game as a pitcher.
So: we know that there are 19,902 total players on bb-Ref.
There are now 9,699 deceased players in the batting Db, and 4,389 deceased players in the pitching Db. But 4,358 deceased batters appeared at pitcher in at least one game, so presumably those are doublecounted. So I think there are 9,699 + 4,389 - 4,358 = 9,730 deceased players, and 19,902 - 9,730 = 10,172 living players. Assuming BB-Ref accurately tracks when players have passed away.
Your original tally of 10,100 was pretty close!
Yes, you do. Look at the 2020 Braves, for example. Mark Melancon is shown on the batting stats list with one game played and everything else zeros, while the other pitchers are shown with zero games played and everything else blank. That's because Melancon appeared in the batting lineup in a game where the Braves moved the DH onto the field. The other pitchers wouldn't have entries in many batting databases based on 2020.
Thanks for reviewing! I re-checked it on the most recent Lahman database, and came out at about 10,300. There were about 50 players who were born before 1920 who had no death date, so I presumed them dead.
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