Archive for Babe Ruth

A.J. Pollock is, at the moment, one of the best fantasy outfielders in major league baseball.  He’s 4th according to the ESPN player rater but since most of you and I don’t REALLY know what that means, let’s say it a different way.  He is one of only four players with at least a .290 AVG, 10 HR, and 15 SB.  Still, whenever I talk with anyone about Pollock’s performance, the consensus opinion on him is more of a resonating question: “Is A.J. Pollock really this good?”  Let’s attempt to answer that.  Dating back to the beginning of 2014,  Pollock has played in 161 games.  We could round that up to 162 games, especially since players rarely play every single game of a season, and call it a full season, but I’m going to go the extra mile here and pull the last game from his 2013 campaign to have a constant 162 games for this exercise.  The stat line he has produced is impressive.

Let’s lower the bar a little bit so that we can find more players in THIS search: how many other players over their last 162 games have hit at the very minimum: .290, 90 R, 15 HR, 60 RBI, 25 SB?  The answer is 1, and that man is Starling Marte.

I’m not sure if that makes Marte a fair comparison.  We can compare them, but Marte delivers more line drives and raw power than Pollock does.  Marte, despite having a paltry 19.3% FB rate, has averaged 312 feet on his fly balls this year, 4th best in the majors, allowing him him to post an absurd 29.5% HR/FB rate – and we’re not even ready to get into park factors yet.  Pollock is just a bit more refined than Marte, posting a better BB rate and K rate than Marte has, by, obviously, swinging at better pitches to hit.

Pollock, too, has a fine average fly ball distance.  It’s 295 (a number he’s increased each year), which is good for 39th overall, smack dab in between Adam LaRoche to the north and Nolan Arenado to the south.  But Pollock has also been incrementally improving his BB/K ratio over the last three years, bringing it from 0.40 to 0.47 this year.  It could be as simple as that – a good player that has made strides in his approach at the plate, but I can’t just leave it at that.  Despite these improvements, albeit, very small ones, his batted ball profile looks right around league average.

Pollock is fast, so hitting a lot of ground balls works in his favor.  He’s been able to have higher than average IFH and BUH percentages in each of the last three years because of his speed.  However, despite being a below average line drive hitter this year, and throughout his career, he is less susceptible to BABIP fluctuations than other high frequency GB hitters like Alcides Escobar, Elvis Andrus, Jean Segura, because Pollock produces a hard hit rate higher than the league average – he is an authoritative hitter.  Curious though, that with his below average LD rate, this is the case.  So his hard hit% is driven by either hard contact on fly balls or ground balls relative to league average.  Since he has an IFFB% above league average I’m going to predict that he’s a high authority GB hitter.  There’s logic in that, right?

He’s right at about league average for hard hit fly balls, but he does seem to have a hard hit ground ball percentage markedly higher than league average.  In fact, his 23.1% hard hit GB rate is 18th best in the league.  The 17 players in front of him have combined for an average line of:

The list also includes names like Tulo, Miguel Cabrera, Posey, Pederson, Upton, Donaldson, Trout, Jose Abreu, and Yoenis Cespedes.  It’s guys that we generally perceive to be hard contact hitters, or I guess, more specifically, power hitters.  But he’s 18th on the list and produced a quality hard hit ground ball rate last year, too.

But, he still has a league average hard hit fly ball rate and a below average line drive rate.  These are reflected in his numbers compared to the league.

Lastly, he plays in Chase Field, which, throughout its history, has been a hitters park.  From 2008-2014 it had an adjusted park factor of +111.  For right handed hitters (and left handed hitters) like A.J. Pollock, it has had only positive affects, but this table is solely for righties:

Put Pollock in a neutral park and his numbers for the last 162 games would theoretically look like this:

I was kind of hoping to see more signs that Pollock is experiencing more luck.  Not because I don’t like Pollock, I love him as a baseball player and I’m sure he’s a fine person, but because of the questions regarding the sustainability of his play in the first half of the 2015 season by many of my peers.  The answer to, “is he really this good”, is that he is pretty darn close and I can see him performing to any of the projection systems’ expectations the rest of the way (ZiPS, Steamer, or Depth Charts).  He should experience some fluctuation in BABIP because of his GB rate, but so far he really hasn’t – and again that’s partially due to the authority with which he hits them.

In terms of finding a player closest in comparison to Pollock, Marte might be a pretty decent choice.  If I can just brainstorm using the cloud technique, I would probably have, with A.J. Pollock’s name in the middle: Starling Marte, Jason Heyward, Christian Yelich, Charlie Blackmon, Brett Gardner, and Lorenzo Cain as smaller clouds extending off the big, middle cloud.  Here are stats based on the last 162 games played.

This group kind of works as a spectrum.  I see the players on the extreme north and south columns least like Pollock and the players in the middle most like Pollock.  There is no one player to compare A.J. Pollock with that is playing currently, although Mitch Webster would be a pretty good historical comparison using his ages 26 – 28 seasons.

Mitch Webster ages 26-28 162 G AVG:

Probably too high of a walk rate, but that looks pretty good.

The average season of the group above would look like this:

A little too high of a K rate, but that also looks pretty good.

And finally A.J. Pollock ages 25-27 162 G AVG

In conclusion, A.J. Pollock is very close to this good if he’s not actually THIS GOOD and I think these players are pretty good comparisons.  And hopefully Pollock has more long lasting success than Mitch Webster.  In a time when speed/power combo players are in decline, what Pollock is doing is clearly elite in that sense.  What I really would like to see would be the history of authoritative ground ball hitters with good speed who have played in parks that have buoyed their power numbers.  Unfortunately, I don’t have access to batted ball profiles for hitters throughout history – how many Pollocks does it take to gather that information?

I’m speaking about one instance in general, the famous or infamous alleged “called shot” by Babe Ruth at Game 3 of the 1932 World Series.

Stimulated by ESPN Chicago NOT calling that the No. 1 moment in Wrigley Field’s 100-year history (more on that later), I got curious.

The “called shot” game from the 1932 World Series has the mythos of whether or not Ruth did point at center field while at bat in the fifth inning, after making some sort of gesture before that, it seems, at Cubs pitcher Charlie Root (sic, per Baseball-Reference, Wikipedia and elsewhere; FanGraphs’ “Charley” is much less attested) after he got 2 strikes on him.

To me, this is the No. 1 event not just because of gray-area questions about what Ruth did and did not do, but also from Root’s vociferous denial that Ruth was calling anything, claiming he would have beaned him if he was.

Really? Let’s first look at quotes from the Wikipedia link above on the “called shot.”

• “Don’t let anybody tell you differently. Babe definitely pointed.” — Cubs public address announcer Pat Pieper (As public address announcer Pieper sat next to the wall separating the field from the stands, between home plate and third base. In 1966 he spoke with the Chicago Tribune “In the Wake of the News” sports columnist David Condon: “Pat remembers sitting on the third base side and hearing [Cubs’ pitcher] Guy Bush chide Ruth, who had taken two strikes. According to Pat, Ruth told Bush: ‘That’s strike two, all right. But watch this.’ ‘Then Ruth pointed to center field, and hit his homer,’ Pat continues. ‘You bet your life Babe Ruth called it.'”)

• “My dad took me to see the World Series, and we were sitting behind third base, not too far back…. Ruth did point to the center-field scoreboard. And he did hit the ball out of the park after he pointed with his bat. So it really happened.” Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, United States Supreme Court

• “What do you think of the nerve of that big monkey. Imagine the guy calling his shot and getting away with it.” – Lou Gehrig

• The Commissioner of Baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, attended the game with his young nephew, and both had a clear view of the action at home plate. Landis himself never commented on whether he believed Ruth called the shot, but his nephew believes that Ruth did not call it

• Washington Post legendary columnist Shirley Povich, detailed in an interview with Hall of Fame catcher Bill Dickey. “Ruth was just mad about that quick pitch, Dickey explained. He was pointing at Root, not at the centerfield stands. He called him a couple of names and said, “Don’t do that to me anymore, you blankety-blank.”

So, hard to say, but it adds to the mystique, right? And, of the collected quotes, three say he called the shot, and the others are kind of ambivalent.

So, can we explore further?

Relatively recently discovered footage leans more toward the idea of Ruth pointing his bat at the Cubs dugout, Wikipedia claims. That said, even that and him reportedly holding two fingers up to Root, or pointing at him, would have been something halfway like saying “here it comes.” In other words, short of Ruth pointing to the centerfield scoreboard, Root arguably had reason to bean him anyway. Beyond the above, Ruth had already homered off him earlier in the game.

And speaking of …

Let’s look at Baseball-Reference’s play index for that game, to further question Root’s claim.

First, the game was tied 4-4 entering the top of the fifth. Root wouldn’t want to jeopardize that lead. And, beaning Ruth with 1 out would have brought up Lou Gehrig who, like Ruth, had already hit one homer in the game and by this point was a more dangerous batter than Ruth.

So, especially with two strikes on Ruth, from quick-pitching or whatever, no Root wouldn’t have beaned him. He would have tried to strike him out. Beaning him with a two-strike count to know he would face Gehrig next in a tie game would have been stupid. Root needed the out. The Cubs needed the win. A strikeout of Ruth would have given the bench-jockeying Cubs dugout more ammunition, too.

In actuality, Root didn’t and couldn’t strike out Ruth. Gehrig then hit another homer too, at which point Root got yanked.

So, Root may be right, but I kind of doubted it. He had reasons for his statement, of course. Root’s not a HOFer, but he is arguably a member of the Hall of Very Good, winning more than 200 games and posting nearly 40 career WAR. And he’d like to be remembered for that rather than for getting shown up, getting “faced,” by Babe Ruth. Who wouldn’t?

Beyond that, as I talk about in more detail at my blog, about the history of Wrigley, besides the “called shot” dethroning the Bartman game from the top spot, I’m not even sure I’d rank that game at No. 2 on Wrigley’s Top 100. That’s in large part because I’m not a Cubs fan, I know.

One of the best features of the wins above replacement (WAR) statistic is that it allows us to compare the greatest single-season performances across different eras in baseball history.  Anyone who has browsed the FanGraphs Leaders page should know that Babe Ruth had the top-five WAR seasons in history, all in the 1920s.  In terms of offensive runs added (batting and base running), Ruth’s 1921 season ranks as the best ever, followed by Barry Bonds’ 73 home run “asterisk” season of 2001.  But what about fantasy baseball?  Were these also the greatest (read most valuable) rotisserie seasons ever recorded?  That’s the question I set out to answer.

Using a slightly modified version of Zach Sander’s fantasy value above replacement (FVAR) system for valuing fantasy players, I estimated the auction value for every hitting season from 1920-2013.  First, I determined every player’s position eligibility based on some simple assumptions (meant to reflect Yahoo’s approach) whereby a player is eligible for a position if they meet any of the following criteria:

• Played at least 20 games at the position in the previous season.
• Started at least 5 games at the position during the current season.
• Played at least 10 games at the position in the current season.

With that established, I proceeded to calculate the z-scores, FVAR and  auction values (FVAR$) for roto leagues.  Based on a 5×5 12-team mixed league with $260 budget per team (and quite a few other assumptions) here are the ten most valuable fantasy seasons for hitters since 1920 (5×5, 12-team mixed):

At this point you’re probably asking: “What, A-Rod?!?!”  I know, as a Red Sox fan and sentient being I was not happy to see A-Rod at the top of the heap.  As much as you may like or dislike A-Rod in real life, if you drafted him first overall in your 2007 fantasy league you were not disappointed with his across-the-board production.  But, you might also be asking, as I did, how was A-Rod’s 2007 season worth $5 more than Babe Ruth’s 1921 season?   Ruth’s hitting and base running in 1921 added 119 runs compared to 75 runs added for A-Rod in 2007, so what gives?  As best I can tell, here are some reasons why A-Rod-2007 had a higher FVAR$ than Ruth-1921:

• Ruth’s replacement in 1921, Ralph Miller, was much worse than A-Rod’s replacement in 2007, Melky Cabrera.
• As a result Ruth-1921 had a much higher FVARz score than A-Rod-2007, but the average above-replacement player in 1921 also had a higher FVARz than the average above-replacement player in 2007.
• As shown in Zach Sanders’ third post on FVAR, the auction values are a function of FVARz divided by the average FVARz for above-replacement players.  Hence, Ruth’s FVARz was divided by a larger number to calculate FVAR$.

Does this make sense?  Yes actually, I think it does.  What it means is that in 2007 A-Rod and Melky Cabrera together were worth more than Babe Ruth and Ralph Miller together in 1921.  In a fantasy auction in 1921 it would have been unwise to spend too many fake dollars on the best players like Ruth and Hornsby (or drink in public because of that Prohibition thing) because you would have been stuck with the bottom players, like Ralph Miller, who were really, really bad (there were only 16 teams back then and no DH).

For fun, below is a dream fantasy lineup with the best hitters since 1920 at each position (5×5, 12-team mixed).  Enjoy.

I’m hoping to write more posts like this using historical FVAR, especially if readers/commenters think it worthwhile.

Twitter: @FVARBaseball

Website: fvarbaseball.wordpress.com