Notes and Essays, Week Ending 2/14

2/8 N1: Although his primary positions were catcher and shortstop (in that order), Biz Mackey played every position except pitcher for the Indianapolis ABCs in 1922. By WAR, Baseball Reference has him as the fifth-best position player in the Negro National League that season, behind Oscar Charleston, Dobie Moore, Hurley McNair and Bullet Rogan. The next year, Mackey switched to Hilldale (Philadelphia area) for the inaugural season of the Eastern Colored League. He only played catcher, short, and third, but his .423 average topped everyone by 56 points. A career .328 hitter, with his .369 in 1922 his second-best mark.

2/8 N2: It’s annoying, but you can’t complacently look down at either R/G or RA/G in leagues where there is interleague play and think one is the proxy for the other. To the extent that the league beat the other league, R/G will generally be higher than RA/G, and vice versa. You are very slightly looking at interleague performance and not just offensive environment when you look at an individual total. 2007 National League pitchers gave up 4.78 R/G, but they didn’t go .500, they went 1286-1308. R/G were 4.71. Today, of course, there is still interleague play, and the NL had a 4.47/4.51 split last year off a 14-game sub .500 performance. But there is no real reason you’d ever look at just the NL total for the measurement of offensive environment. When one league had the DH and the other didn’t, though, it was natural not to want to deal with that and to run to the individual league run total. But unless you combined runs and runs allowed, you still really weren’t getting what you were looking for.

I found a larger split, which is what prompted this. 1943 Negro American League teams are shown scoring 4.15 runs a game, allowing 4.38 runs a game. The pitchers’ cumulative record was 110-117, so I guess these teams actually did comparatively well in one-run games not to be more underwater than they were. There may be more going on in Negro League league total disparities than just the effect of interleague play.

2/9 N1: A curious aspect to the 1957 World Series champion Milwaukee Braves, if one looks at their Baseball Reference box, seems to be listed starting first baseman Frank Torre. I would say Torre rather hit like a second baseman, although with no steal attempts and just 7.1% walks from plate appearances, he really hit more like a general backup. He hit .272 with 5 HR in 411 plate appearances. Nine HBP did give him the best rate of anyone in the league who played 100 games and helped his on-base percentage. He never developed power and would homer just once per every 140 PA over his remaining five seasons, which were mostly spent in a part-time role.

In the backup section of the Braves’ box is Joe Adcock, who had long since left his Reds left field days behind and was thoroughly a first baseman. With a .891 OPS, Adock only batted 231 times that year but raked for any position. Although he wouldn’t be 30 until after the 1957 World Series, Adock had already hit 125 career home runs, a mark complemented by a .282 batting average and a 115 OPS+.

Everything says he was the rightful 1957 first base starter, and when we see he missed the last week of June and all of July and August, and didn’t even make a second-half start until September 12, the light bulb goes on, or we trust that it does: Torre wasn’t really the starter, but was just filling in for Adcock when the Louisiana native was injured, it seems.

But the reality is more complex than that. Adcock was in fact not afforded star treatment, or really even starting player treatment, in the way that he was used. Before I unearthed the injury and saw their respective plate appearances, Torre and Adcock seemed like they might have been platooned, as Torre hit left-handed, Adcock right. But both for his career and in 1957, Joe had a better OPS vs. righties than lefties. However, with the Yankees having two of the American League’s best lefties in Whitey Ford and Bobby Shantz, not to mention Tommy Byrne, the Series seemed like it was made for Adcock to get the lion’s share if the action at first base. In fact, Adcock only got four of the seven starts. Torre was trusted with the starts in games 6 and 7, and Adock didn’t register a complete game in any contest. Without fail, manager Fred Haney removed him for defense late. Even if the Braves were behind, Haney would give Adock what he thought would be his last at-bat, then put Torre in for defense.

This practice dated back to 1956. Despite hitting 38 home runs, Adcock only completed 66 games. Stats confirm that he might have compiled a really impressive home run total with more at-bats, as his 8.4 HR% (Ruth career is 8.5%) was best in the National League of anyone with 400 at-bats.

Frank Torre was a rooke in ‘56 but hardly a phenom, past his 24th birthday when he debuted. His career was delayed by Korea and he’d hit .327 in the American Association in 1955, but with only 7 home runs. He had an .809 OPS that year, while the likes of Jim Dyck and Pete Whisenant were over 1.000.

But Torre absolutely posed a threat to Adcock’s job in the first half of ‘56. Through May 20, over about the first five weeks or so, Adcock hit just .197 with 2 home runs and a .366 SLG. My read is that he then sustained a minor injury. Torre came in for him and went 4 for 4 in one game while getting a knock in his six others. Adock was back and available on May 30 and homered as a pinch hitter, but Adcock started both ends of the doubleheader. A 5 for 7 day left him batting .421 (if as soft a .421 as has ever been — .465 OBP, .500 SA). Torre then was given 11 of the next 17 starts, but when both players got the same 9 hits despite Torre having more playing time, their roles crystallized. Torre was reduced to being a caddy, and 72 of his final 76 games would come in this capacity.

And a couple of weeks later, Adcock hit a hot streak worthy of the best of Jimmie Foxx. He hit 15 home runs in 95 at-bats in July, and .358 besides. While teammate Eddie Mathews overshadowed him with 14 home runs and .333 in August, Adcock wasn’t far behind, hitting .317 with 10 home runs.

Although he did at one point have a streak of five consecutive games with a home run, this was not the period of Joe’s four-home run, 18 total base game, as would be natural to assume — that came in 1954. Adcock did have five two-home run games in ‘56.

Rfield does have Torre as quite a good fielder — +7 over 1956 and 1957 combined. The pattern of Adcock’s use is quite telling, although in most seasons, he was only occasionally removed for defense; he completed 76% of his starts for his career. But over Adcock’s ten years in Milwaukee, where except for 45 games in left field over 1958 and 1959, he was exclusively a first baseman, his Rfield came out almost dead even, summing to -2.

Indications of Adcock’s baserunning reinforce the idea he was slow and not well-suited to do anything but hit. He never scored more than 77 runs in a year and was thrown out on 31 of his 51 steal attmpts. He advanced a base just 32% of the time during his career, and only beat the overall 46% norm during his career in 1950, his rookie year. He was 6’4” 210 lb., but then Torre was also 6’4”, and 200 lb., so being very large for a 1950s position player does not mean you had to be limited in the field.

That Frank Torre seemed to be given every opportunity made me wonder if Milwaukee knew about Frank’s Joe, if Joe Torre was already with the organization and tearing it up or something. But in fact Joe was 15 on opening day of 1956 and wouldn’t come up with the Braves until near the end of the 1960 season. Maybe there was a family Torre likeability characterictic that played in Frank’s favor, but if there was, Frank did his own work here.

Despite establishing himself in the major leagues early, Adcock very much had a late peak, indicating just what a fine hitter he was over the course of his career (although he could have used some more bases on balls). However, I’m glad I nailed down when that four-home run game of his was, because it may explain the mystery of his strong 8th-place finish in that year’s MVP vote. With a .308/23/87 line, 1954 was his best season before 1956, but voters had to take note of his defense just the same as Fred Haney would. The Braves also finished just 3rd in the NL, 8 games behind the Giants. And how was Adcock 8th, while Gil Hodges (.304/42/130, 14 Rfield at first) was 10th?

2/9 N2: I guess I do have a habit of wanting to qualify goodness or greatness and resist our categorical instincts, as Mike Steele pointed out I did in discussing the history of Cobb’s BB/SO ratio. Another place where some focusing could be in order is in just what made the Yankees the Yankees.

This came through to me when I heard one of my favorites, Slate’s Josh Levin, mention that Casey Stengel won seven World Series. My mind did go right to Tom Brady, yes, but more than that, I thought of how my frameworks for Stengel were either the five straight World Series wins he had from 1949-1953 (his first five years with the Yankees), or the ten pennants he had over his 12-year tenure. But if he “only” won seven World Series overall, then, that meant that he didn’t do so great in the World Series after 1953.

Continuing this train of thought, I knew the Yankees had finished second to the Indians in 1954, and the Dodgers had beaten them in 1955. 1956 was Larsen’s perfect game and a restoration. 1959, the Yankees didn’t win the pennant, I knew, as that was go-go White Sox. And 1960 was the famous loss to Mazeroski and Stengel’s sacking that was the aftermath. Checking, in 1957 and 1958, the Yankees and Braves split.

With apologies to the 1961 and 1962 winners, 1956 could be said to be the end of a Yankees World Series dynasty. I say this remembering that not only did Stengel’s teams win five straight from ‘49-’53, but the ‘36-’39 teams were also all pennant winners who finished the deal.

As none of the Stengel World Series winners won 100 games, it doesn’t seem like it should have been the case that the Yankees were anywhere near as dominant in the World Series as they were. I endeavored to figure out how much of that was a Yankees thing, and how much an American League thing.

Using the framework that a necessary element for Yankeedom was invariably winning the World Series when the team made it has the additional advantage of letting us assert that the dynasty began in 1927, for the team had lost three of the previous four World Series it had played in, with the first coming in 1921. If we can’t quite figure out why the ‘27 Yankees come in for such adulation (and I have developed several theories, all of which I think have some truth to them), this seems like another reason, something that made the team historic in another way beyond just 110-regular season wins and a sweep of the Pirates.

In detailing the overall count, I think it’s best to throw out the war years of 1943-1945. The Yankees actually won the World Series in 1943, and I suppose some players were in the military when the Cardinals beat the Yankees in 1942. But that seems the best division.

This leaves 27 years from 1927-1956, out of which the Yankees won the pennant 17 times. In direct contravention of the crapshoot theory, their World Series record was 15-2.

For the second part of the question, to what extent this dominance was about the Yankees and to what extent about the American League?, the NL beat the AL 6-4 in the non-Yankee World Series (AL winners: 1929 and 1930 Athletics, 1935 Tigers, 1948 Indians. AL losers: 1931 Athletics, 1933 Senators, 1934 Tigers, 1940 Tigers, 1946 Red Sox, 1954 Indians).

Make of that what you will.

It is natural to see the end of this trend as also reflecting a shift of more talent and more aggressive recruitment of Black players in the National League. It is hard to read the World Series results post 1955 or so as easily as it is to read the All-Star game results (where the National League made like the ‘27-’56 Yankees), I suppose because they really were more mixed.

The Yankees last pennant before Steinbrenner came in 1964. The National League went 3 for 5 through 1969 — impressive, I suppose, when you have the Mets beating the Orioles, who would have seemed to have no business doing so. As for the ‘70s, they were all about dynasties — a repeat winner every year from 1973 to 1978, and the Pirates with bookend championships around there.

All of these dividing lines are of course artificial and have no more than a grain of truth to them. One can’t just throw away the four Yankee pennants in the six years from 1921 to 1926 and say they didn’t count for anything, that the Yankees didn’t have a guy named Babe Ruth, that they didn’t have something going on. But in chronicling the history, I noted that the Giants beat the Yankees in both 1921 and 1922, and won four straight pennants from 1921-1924.

Since they didn’t win more than 95 games in any of these seasons, there is an element of Stengel’s Yankees here, except that the split between the Giants’ regular season record and championships is even more extreme. But I couldn’t have even told you that the Giants won the World Series in 1921 and 1922 before today.

So o.k., Bill James, hate on all of those New York Giants’ Veterans Committee Hall of Famers, but those teams were worth celebrating. They also certainly were key in separating McGraw as really one of a handful of the most successful managers of all-time in a way we wouldn’t be able to say if his legacy was confined to the Christy Mathewson teams.

2/9 N3: Some will say that all Teddy Ballgame did in the outfield was practice his swing, but I believe he made brief comment that he privately thought he had quite the knack for positioning and that kind of thing. Rfield has him as a liabilty once he hit his age-39 season in 1958, but a cumulative +12 over his preceding 16 years. So thoroughly competent, I would take it.

I think there was an element that if you didn’t like Williams and didn’t want him to be what his hitting statistics said he was, you cited his defense, where your imagination carried more force, and your opinions more persuasive.

2/10 N1: Teams are now more open-minded to the possibility that pitchers established as relievers can convert or return to starting, but the challenge should not be underestimated. Although Clay Holmes certainly got by last year, with both 1.9 bWAR and fWAR, he was really way off what he’d been with the Yankees (7.0 SO/9 vs. 9.8 SO/9 for his all-relief Yankee career; 3.6 BB/9 vs. 2.9 with the Yankees. Went from a good strike-throwing reliever, where standards are lower, to tied for 4th in the NL in walks). With a 2.08 GB/FB ratio, you’d have to say he was the same pitcher, but I guess partly by design, he wasn’t the ground ball sensation (4.24 GB/FB 2022-2024) he was with the Yankees.

Then there’s Nick Martinez, the swingman whom the Rays just showed definite faith in by splurging for 13 million over 2026. His career splits are perhaps colored by 68 of his 129 starts coming with Texas before he reinvented his game in Japan, but he still shows a career 4.59 E.R.A. as a starter, a 2.87 as a reliever. With Cincinnati, he had a 4.72 E.R.A. in 26 starts last year.

I’m sure the Rays are aware of his record and will go in with their eyes open, wherever they choose to use him. My point is just that performance needs to be graded on a curve, and it should be assumed that relieving is the easier of the two jobs.

2/10 N2: I was looking at the 52 relievers who have pitched in at least 250 relief games over the last five years, and I was thinking, gosh, so many of these guys (18 it turns out) have been with the Mets or Yankees at some point in this window. And I think this points out one reason why the tag-team approach and so many pitchers is hard to defend from the standpoint of fan interest. Relievers are for hire, and generally have no team identication. You hope they do the job for you, but you don’t grow attached. Only four of these 52 have been single-team relievers: Emmanuel Clase, Bryan Abreu, Alex Vesia, and Jose Alvarado.

In contrast to most relievers, these were all young guys their teams could control (i.e., keep): Alvarado is the oldest, and still not 31. I am serious that baseball would be a better game if we could change this point, and have more reliever team stability. How to feasibility do that and give relievers their just economic opportunity, though, even in a theoretical world that didn’t have a player’s union, I have no idea.

The opposite could also be argued, although less persuasively, Namely, that if you to have a million pitchers, it helps for them to be gallivanting from team to team so home-interested fans acquire knowledge of as many as possible. It’s a matter of team identification on the one hand versus pure player knowledge on the other. I can’t say that the rotation really has allowed me to completely master the Genesis Cabreras and Dennis Santanas who have stopped off in New York, anyway (get your cheat sheet!). There is also the element that the short-term nature of relievers just adds to the sense that tag-team pitching is not stable, fair baseball as it should be, baseball where relievers are able to pitch more to their max and more effectively than they would if they had to go through an order multiple times. The modern organization makes for a cheaper experience.

2/10 N3: It was a good winter for Miguel Sano, both leading the Dominican Winter League in home runs and getting a contract with the Japan Central League’s Chunichi Dragons. Sano led the league in home runs despite playing just a half schedule. I wonder if he had his big season, drew the Dragons interest, signed, and then shut it down, although he should have had time to play more than 24 games by his 12/16 signing date, if I am understanding the Dominican schedule correctly. The Dragons haven’t been a .500 team since 2020. Sano turns 33 in May.

Bryan De La Cruz was second in the league in home runs. He seems to have a minor league contract with the Phillies.

2/10 N4: Brandon Lowe has gone back a step since 2021, at the end of which he owned a career 135 OPS+ and an .859 OPS in 1314 plate appearances. I know his Defensive Runs Saved are poor, but the more I look at his offensive statistics, the more I like them. His OPSes the last three years are .785, .783, and .771 —wonderfully consistent. Both in 2025 and for his career, his OPS is better on the road than at home, something I might not have expected from a left-handed power hitter who’s only hit as many as 20 doubles one time. Yes, he’s much better against righties, but is still something of a power threat against his own kind (.420 SLG) and his rates stats haven’t been greatly inflated by never facing lefties — a reasonable 23% of his plate appearances have come against them. He’s 33 for 38 in his career stealing, takes the extra base a bit more than average, and has grounded into just 7 double plays per 162 games.

2/10 N5: Relative to what average players in their respective sports are paid, it seems baseball manager contracts now lag far behind football coaches. I actually think coordinators compete with managers, although that might be close enough the verdict depends on whether we do in fact adjust for the average player salary. I’m looking at Dave Roberts getting just 8 million a year, and Joel Sherman saying Tony Vitello will be well-paid at 3.5 mil a year. For a football head coach, that would be chump change.

Really, so many variables in player pay that it’s hard to speak categorically,, and even an average player salary in one sport versus another is just a part of the picture. The biggest variable of course is going on the open market versus being under control. Then quarterbacks make much more than tight ends and running backs, for instance, but in baseball today, you’d also rather not be a first baseman.

Hmmm, does this line of analysis, since relievers no longer command the biggest bucks, mean that they are rather the placekickers of baseball?

2/10 N6: Fernando Tatis Jr. came up in 2019. Looking at these comps, his overall numbers are still greatly enhanced by his pre-steroid performance. Slash lines since 2019:

Tatis Jr.: .277/.354/.513

Rafael Devers: .279/.356/.516

Jose Ramirez: .276/.351/.514

Adjusting for Boston does knock Devers down, but his OPS+ of 134 is still in the same ballpark as Tatis Jr. and Ramirez (136 for them).

2/10 N7: One thing Bryce Harper has done extremely well since joining the Phillies has been hit doubles. He came in 2019, and since then, of the 119 players with 2300 at-bats, only Freddie Freeman has a better rate per at-bat. And between them, it almost could not be closer. Harper’s 218 2B in 3129 AB project to 261.82 in Freeman’s 3758 AB. Freeman has 262 2B.

To some extent, this prowess of Harper’s is obscured by his regular injuries; in total doubles, he falls to 5th, with Rafael Devers, Jose Ramirez and Nick Castellanos jumping him. He has just the 39th most at-bats since 2019, and his high in games since 2020 is just 145.

Harper’s overall OPS+ (145 from 139) and OPS (.912 from .900) are up from his Washington days, but he appears to be a marvelous fit for Citizens Bank. Apart from last year, contrary to general belief, it has not played in recent years as a hitter’s park, but you wouldn’t know that from Bryce’s statistics. His home numbers (.299 with 39.0 HR/575 AB) dwarf his road numbers (.263 with 27.0 HR/575 AB) in just about every respect. About the only place they don’t is in doubles, where Harper has hit the same 109 at home and on the road. To speak of one Washington Harper really isn’t right, as his first three OPS+ there were just 118, 133, and 111, but on the road, Washington Bryce (.886 OPS vs. his .833 with the Phillies) was still a better hitter than Philadelphia Bryce. The doubles lift, random as it is, is for real, though; Harper hit only 48.1% of his doubles with Washington on the road, and over 20% less overall per at-bat.

With 7665 career plate appearances, and very close to half of his career now with both teams, each of the splits has a good sample behind it, with a minimum of 1850 plate appearances. Yet Harper’s Philadephia “home walk” advantage per plate appearance of +3.2% is much greater than the +0.7% he had in Washington. That plays into the total OPS home/road split, and it’s something that is hard to explain by referencing the actual effect of the ballparks. It also grows (from 2.5% to 3.4%) rather than shrinks if intentional walks are removed.

Demonstration, Harper Home/Road Walk Rate

Philadelphia: 15.6% home, 12.4% road

Washington: 15.1% home, 14.4% road

2/11: Ted Lyons, impressively elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955 when only 1946 had been his last season, has an interesting final stat line in that season. The knuckleball had something to do with how he was able to post a 2.32 E.R.A. at age 45, certainly, but Lyons was not close to exclusively a knuckleball pitcher, I believe.

I am not giving an accurate picture because Lyons actually did this in only 5 starts that year. His last game came on May 19, so I guessed he had just decided he had had enough and walked into the sunset, or sustained an injury he couldn’t come back from. In actuality, he became the team’s manager right afterwards and that is why he retired (SABR Bio). That didn’t take, with Lyons only lasting three seasons, and the 1948 White Sox losing 101 games.

Lyons 1946 stat line also seems exceptional because he had just 1 win and 4 losses with that 2.32 E.R.A. But there were six unearned runs in there. His “run average” was 3.59, and he gave up 4 runs in each of his last three starts. So, for hard luck pitching, this was perhaps not exceptional. He did go the distance in all five starts, however, although he completed three of them in fewer than 9 innings, however, because they were road loses.

Before serving in the Marines, Lyons pitched to an AL-best 2.10 E.R.A. in 1942, remarkably completing all 20 of his starts. 20 starts — I think we can see how he got the nickname Sunday Teddy! He was one of the all-time great contact pitchers, so complete games presumably generally did not require a special effort.

2/13 N1: Some of these players the Rockies put out do boggle the mind! The team’s .460 winning percentage in 2021 stands as their best since 2018, but they gave 284 plate appearances to Joshua Fuentes. Despite the benefit of a 111 Batting Park Factor behind him, all he make out of it was a .257 OBP and a .608 OPS. Nolan Arrenado’s cousin, he was a very good defender (10 DRS at third base) and had been brilliant the year before in the pandemic season, playing mostly first (9 DRS in 24 total starts).

Maybe he got the defensive ability from the Arenado genes. You gotta hit better than that if you’re going to play first, though.

Fuentes has continued professionally and has continued to hit at a very low level of performance. With well over 200 plate appearances in both seasons, the best average he has been able to compile in the Mexican League the last two years has been .231, and the best OPS, .634. If you wanted to find a better place to hit than the Rockies, you’d go to the Mexican League, where the average was .295 last year, the OPS .844, so those numbers again quite boggle the mind. Then, playing at Gwinnett (Braves, Intenational League) in 2023 and batting 274 times, Fuentes had a .235 average and a .647 OPS.

Apparently undrafted out of college, he did hit in his early minor league stops, although he was 23 and still in A ball in 2016. Although he led the Pacific Coast League with 180 hits in 2018 and his .327 average was 42 points better than Albuquerque’s .285, 103 strikeouts versus 21 walks perhaps served as a warning sign, not to mention that his 14 home runs represented a rate just below the league average.

Ultimately faring better were a couple of 2015 first-round draft picks who also posted pleasing numbers in this league. Taylor Ward only registered 227 AB for the Salt Lake City Bees before he made his major league debut with the Angels in August, but shows up first on the PCL batting roll with his .352, and second with his .442 OBP.

A high school signee unlike Ward, Kyle Tucker is three years younger, and his 2018 season very much showed what he would be (at least if you adjust for PCL padding), as he hit .332 with 24 home runs and 20 steals in 407 AB. That was his age-21 season. A top-20 prospect for MLB, Baseball America, and Baseball Prospectus coming the year, he apparently retained that reputation (MLB’s #8 2019 prospecr), even though his own late-season call-up was a rude awakening — a .141 average and a .203 slugging average in 64 at-bats.

2/13 N2: In connection to Bo Bichette’s new career at third base, Mets’ Manager Carlos Mendoza noted that there is no time to spare when a third baseman starts a double play, so that is something Bichette will have to get used to. I don’t know how much they mean, but double play counts at third are fun, existing in the relatively low numbers that they do that make 30 a strong showing and easy to remember. To go one better, I thought I would look at the Rdp count in Baseball Reference, which is part of Total Zone Rating runs. As opposed to total double plays, this is a differential based on opportunity.

Over the last five years, there is no question who is the best — Matt Chapman. There have been 12 performances altogether of +2 Rdp, and Chapman qualified every year from 2021-2024. He didn’t last year, but no one else did, either, although 15 third basemen were +1, including Chapman.

This seems to be going pretty much according to form, with double plays perhaps often consistent with overall play, because Ke’Bryan Hayes has perhaps the second-best record. Both he Arenado are alone in having two +2 seasons from the last five, but Hayes’ seasons sum to +6, Arenado’s to +4.

The best individual season is Austin Riley’s +3 in 2023, but that was coming off a -2 season. Riley didn’t build on the +3, and in fact was -1 last year.

“-2” seasons are rare; there have been only been seven over the last five years. Ryan McMahon, oddly to at least those of us not in the defensive weeds, was the only such offender last year. That was in conjunction with a +12 Rtot season, McMahon’s best. Defensive ratings emerging from other systems have flattered McMahon even more over his career, but unlike Riley’s +3 in 2023, McMahon’s score last year on double plays was not an aberration. He was -1 in 2021, 2023, and 2024, 0 in 2022. His Baseball Savant percentile for arm strength last year was 58, so that doesn’t provide an easy explanation. His velocity was also very much in line with the numbers he has typically had.

Also revealing is that, despite being -1, McMahon turned 33 double plays in 2024, tied for the second most in baseball. I don’t know how the +-s for runs translate to plays, but with the run values being as low as they are, the implication is probably that total double plays per 9 innings and so forth are probably not worth putting much stock in, and that opportunity is really driving the variation in the overall numbers.

One theory I entertained as to why McMahon’s Rdp is consistently poor is that maybe he fields some hot shots other guys wouldn’t at all and then is penalized because he is off balance and can’t complete the double play. I’m not sure if the baseline is relative to balls fielded, or to balls in your area in the first place. But if there is this downside to good plays, it should also be rearing its ugly head for excellent third sackers Chapman, Hayes and Arenado, and it isn’t.

By the way, sometimes third baseman Mark Vientos has set a low bar for Bichette — he’s been -1 each of the last three seasons, despite only starting as many as half of the Mets games there in 2024.

2/13 N3: Unless the rest of his 30s are as kind to him and then some as they were to new Hall of Famer Jeff Kent, the newly released Nick Castellanos isn’t going to join him in Cooperstown. Among other things, people would pass out holding their breath for fear of what he might say during the induction ceremony. But Dan Martin of the New York Post describes his Philadelphia career not only as “tumultous” but as “disappointing,” and I wonder if that isn’t being a little harsh. For isn’t Castellanois really going to be remembered more as a Phillie than for his work with any other team? Couldn’t you make a case that, were he to be a Hall of Famer, his plaque should bear a Philadelphia cap? It’s an effort that ultimately falls short, I think. Detroit is probably a better choice for Castellanos. But Castellanos’s career record as a starter right now reads 826-826, and it’s only due to his time with the Phillies that it got to .500. The Tigers were 82 under .500 in his 812 starts with them.

Castellanos certainly had his postseason moments, like his catch in game 1 of the 2022 World Series, and his two home runs that made the difference in the clinching game 4 of the 2023 NLDS versus the mighty Braves. But the case that his uneven play could be forgiven in light of the Phillies’ success would be stronger if his career postseason OBP with the Phillies was better than .255 in 38 games.

By the way, from the time of Castellanos’s current age forward, Kent had 1052 hits and 161 home runs. You add those numbers to Nick’s current ones of 1742 hits and 250 home runs, you get 2794 hits and 411 home runs. I’d say my statement is pretty much right on. At his defensive positions, not quite Hall of Fame stuff, even if he’d been an average fielder, which of course he hasn’t been.

2/13 N4: I had an earlier note about Nick Martinez starting versus relieving. I just came across the fact that of the 204 pitchers with 500 innings since 2016, Martinez’s hard hit rate allowed, 27.4%, is best. Ryan Yarbrough is 4th, however, and the Yankees signed him for something like 1.5 or 2 million this offseason — just one thing that might make you wonder how important this stat is. Martinez is in the bottom 15% in strikeouts in the group, Yarbrough in the bottom 20%, and that may be more important than hard hit rate. Second and third were Justin Steele (63rd of 204 in SO PCT) and Zach Wheeler (39th of 204 in SO PCT).

2/13 N5: I’m sure a comprehensive study of this has been done, but is there any reason to look at home run rate instead of a pitcher’s fly ball rate? Are a certain percentage of home runs inevitably going to fly over the fence, no matter how expert the pitcher?

There is more to this question than just this one component, as not all pitchers of the same type are the same; some fly ball pitchers throw 85 MPH, some 100. But what I was specifically interested was whether ground ball pitchers get all the savings in home runs that those ground balls imply.

To get some insight, what I did was to sort those 204 pitchers with 500+ IP from 2016-2025 by the FanGraphs category HR/FB. It was led by Kenley Jansen, 9.1%, trailed by Jorge Lopez, 16.4%, and represented in the middle at 12.9%.

What were the GB/FB ratios (an overall 1.18 median) for the extremes in HR/FB?

In terms of median GB/FB ratio

Best 10 HR/FB: 1.00 GB/FB

11th thru 20th HR/FB: 1.18 GB/FB

185th thru 194th HR/FB: 1.29 GB/FB

Worst 10 HR/FB: 1.49 GB/FB

So there certainly is a trend, and the high ratio of the 10 worst HR/FB rates perhaps stand out even apart from that trend.

One explanation is that, when a ground ball pitcher has the ball hit in the air against him, he’s made a mistake, and anything (specifically a home run) is liable to happen. Conversely, if a pitcher us generating those fly balls by design like a Chris Young used to (career 9.1% HR/FB, like Jansen), then those fly balls are less dangerous. I suppose, technically, the launch angle of them is likely to be such that they can’t go out of the ballpark.

Never reaching 88 MPH in a season over his last 10 years in the game, I think Young rather argues against this, but the alternate theory would be that fly ball pitchers give up fewer home runs on fly balls just because they are better pitchers, or at least nastier. That they throw harder, etc. And that what we are seeing in the numbers is a manifestation of correlation and not causation.

2/13 N6: The informal correlational test of GB/FB ratio wasn’t fraught, but I hesitate to say too much about individual pitchers and their respective HR/FB ratios until we adjust for ballpark. The differences between pitchers’ rates are small enough that that might well be the determining factor. Recently, Logan Webb and Brad Keller have defied the possible rule that more ground balls means a higher HR/FB ratio, but then when I look at where they’ve been pitching, I reserve judgment. If the data can be cleaned for ballpark, though, someone who can clamp down on both ends stands out as potentially really special and obviously a home run eraser.

Many of these guys going back to 2016 have hung up their cleats, so to bring things more up to the present day, I looked at pitchers with at least 850 batters faced on the road from 2023-2025. My concept was to pull pitchers with about 400 total innings. This was a list of 56, from Logan Webb, Mitch Keller, and Jose Berrios at the top in batters faced, to an oddly elite group at the bottom in Chris Sale, Cristopher Sanchez, Zach Eflin, Tarik Skubal, and Bryan Woo, the last three of which all had 873 road batters faced exactly.

The five best HR/FB rates belonged to Kevin Gausman, Sale, Michael Wacha, Drean Kremer, and Zack Wheeler, in that order. Gausman is curious because his hard hit rate in this dataset of road games was the second worst in the whole group. This seems odd first from the perspective that low home runs per fly ball almost certainly means a low number of home runs generally, and home runs are normally balls officially classified as hard hit. Then it would also be unusual, I think, to see any fly ball pitcher give up very high average exit velocity, as we see so many wasted 105 MPH ground balls and so forth. Based on the other study, the assumption is that if you have a very low HR/FB rate, you probably throw a lot of fly balls. But that’s not really Gausman, with a 1.00 GB/FB ratio from 2023-2025 on the road. Even today, with the rate ever lowering, most pitchers threw a few more ground balls than fly balls. So Gausman is technically on the fly ball side. But even counts do not make you a classic fly ball pitcher. We know that Gausman has evolved his approach, but I was still curious how he fared in the the more comprehensive look from 2016-2025, home and road, and Gausman with the 50th best HR/FB out of 204 pitchers in that study.

Ranger Suarez is late of the Phillies, but the Phillies stood out on account of his 9th-place placing in HR/FB, and for Christopher Sanchez being 6th, in addition to the excellence of Wheeler, which I already mentioned. The Phillies’ dominance would be notable under any circumstances, but both Suarez and Sanchez ranked highly and were decided ground ball pitchers. Sanchez, in fact, had easily the highest GB/FB ratio of the qualifiers, and so emerged as what I thought Webb might be.

Put it all together, Sanchez gave up the fewest home runs in the dataset by a count of 4 over Sale. He did give up double the number at home, not likely a manifestation of the honest home run increasing qualities of Citizens Bank. But we can safely say that Sanchez’s stingy 0.7 HR/9 over the last three years is legitimate.

Aaron Nola was 54th of the 56 in HR/FB, so did not join his brethren. This wasn’t a surprise, as in general Nola’s road pitching over the past three years has been poor.

I can’t be too hard on Webb. Or hard on him at all, actually. He threw the third most ground balls per every fly ball (Framber Valdez 2nd) and still placed 13th in adjusted home run rate. He is behind Sanchez in both categories, but opting for his combination or Suarez’s (8th in GB/FB at 1.68, if well behind Webb’s 2.24) is simply a matter of taste, at least before applying the analytical screws.

Brandon Pfaadt had the worst HR/FB rate, 17.5%. He also threw an above-average percentage of fly balls, too, with his GB/FB ratio of 0.98 making him more fly ball-prone than Gausman. So he does not fall into the pattern of the other post. One could say that this just bodes very poorly for him, but the overall support of the theory is less clear in this dataset, something Pfaadt exemplifies. Bryan Bello, however, 15.7% HR/FB (5th worst) and a high 1.78 GB/FB ratio, does conform, and eye balling, the overall trend between the variables is there, if it in no way leaps out at you.

2/14 N1: Trea Turner apparently needs to be up there hacking. The 69 walks he drew in 2018 stands as a real anomaly, as he’s never drawn more than 45 walks in any other season. Turner also only chased 23% of the time. His best since then is only a 26% chase rate, and he’s been at 30% or higher the last four years. Yet, of his 10 seasons, his .760 OPS in 2018 is his worst. He was just 25 and still rather filled up the stat sheet, leading the NL with 43 steals, hitting 19 home runs, scoring 103 runs, and not hitting worse than .257 in any month. Few would have thought anything was wrong, but he clearly changed his approach, and since then, he’s hit .300 with an .837 OPS.

It certainly is hard to figure, and I suspect his slightly off performance in this year was prevented from being more extreme by his greater selectivity. His 81.2% contact rate was something he only matched in 2020, and his chase and contact rates over his career have been inversely correlated, indicating he gives away more at-bats (or at least pitches) when he chases. It would certainly be interesting to hear Turner’s analysis, but one hopes he didn’t irrationally make himself a 45-walk guy instead of an 80-walk guy, because I suspect that would have been put him over the top and right behind the Judge and Ohtani level for all-around contributions. to speak nothing of how pretty he would be sitting if he hit even better than he does now in addition.

2/14 N2: Man, the Gabriel Arias experience is ugly. 34.4% strikeouts last year. That was 37.0% when he played shortstop, and he started 102 games there, but Bryan Rocchio had a strikeout rate of less than half that and made 49 starts, so the Guardian shortstop total reached just 182.

2/14 N3: Damn, I was sure Kevin Seitzer was the 1987 Rookie of the Year. But I was forgetting Mark McGwire. Not too much doubt about that one, although bWAR does prefer Seltzer (5.5 and Devon White (5.6). (Just 5.1 for McGwire despite rookie-record for home runs and league-best slugging percentage). Even in the current day, McGwire would have gotten this award. It would have been a game of chicken for the sticklers.

2/14 N4: Did you ever focus on the fact that the single-season hit record (Ichiro, 262) and single-season walk record (Bonds, 232) both came in the same year, 2004? If we want to get things between Ichiro and Bonds on a more even footing, we could also access Ichiro’s 225 singles, a step forward in that record of almost Bonds-like proportions.

I noticed that the two records happened in the same year because I was looking at baserunning stats for last year on Baseball Reference. Aaron Judge was on first for 57 singles, 8 more than any other player (William Contreras, 49). In the walk category, Judge was no Bonds, over 100 behind the number Bonds had in 2004. So that got me wondering what Bonds’s 2004 number for 1st-to-3rd single opportunities must have looked like. For the league leaders I found

(1) Bonds 70 (2) Suzuki 69 (3) Jason Kendall 58 (4) David Eckstein 55 (4) Mark Loretta 55

This momentarily threw me for a loop. I knew he racked up the plate appearances, but Ichiro didn’t get on base nearly as often as Bonds, whose 376 times on base that year are second only to Ruth’s 379 in ‘23.

But I should have been focusing on just singles, walks and HBP. The other times on base are irrelevant to this. Which makes it seem kind of odd that Judge was the clear MLB leader last year. One tends to think he doesn’t hit singles, and we know he walks more as a result of pitchers not pitching to him than because he is really from the Jim Thome or Soto school.

Of course, Judge hit .331 last year. And of the 30 players who walked 70 or more times last year, he actually hit the ninth-most singles. Put it together, and he did reach first more than any other player. Those with 200+:

Judge 225

Geraldo Perdomo 219

Juan Soto 218

TJ Friedl (underrated!) 210

Rafael Devers 203

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. 202

Fernando Tatis 200

With 189, William Contreras wasn’t one of the logical ones to be high up; Manny Machado (167 1st-base reaches, but 3rd with 46 1st-to-3rd opportunities), even less so.

Having recently compiled players who reached base 300 times in a season, my mind then went to Wade Boggs, who did it in 1983 and 1985-1989. Boggs hit at least 40 doubles in each of those years, but by and large, it seemed like he was a superior candidate. Almost a candidate made in a lab for this.

Indeed, in each of those seasons where he had 300 times on base, I found that he led or tied MLB in his singles witnessed from first base. I have to put in “tied” because he and Kevin Seitzer had 54 in 1987, but in every other year, Boggs had at least five more 1st-to-3rd opportunities than anybody else.

The really staggering years were 1985, when he had 80, and 1988, when he had 78. Remember that Bonds led MLB with just 70 in 2004, and Judge had just 57 last year. Boggs was 17 up on his teammate Dwight Evans in 1985, and 24 up on Jack Clark in 1988.

Boggs also was on base 292 times in 1984, and he tied Robin Yount that year with 55 singles witnessed. So he led or tied seven straight years. I confirmed that the streak was in fact broken in 1990; Brett Butler witnessed 56 singles from first, and Boggs was fifth with 49.

Although he was never seriously threatened, Boggs’s MLB-leading totals I haven’t mentioned were lower, ranging from 58-61. Both Boggs’ 240 hits in 1985 and his 125 walks in 1988 were far and away his best in each category, but it also seemed worth looking into the particular circumstances on these Red Sox teams that were the backdrop.

It only makes sense to focus on players who hit behind Boggs, while those hitting in front of him can be ignored. In 1985, he made 113 starts as the #2 hitter. I found that John McNamara shuffled and tinkered, but it was a lot of Jim Rice, Bill Buckner, Tony Armas and Mike Easler in the 3-5 slots.

Looking at the team stats, one is almost left thinking Boggs could have had a higher total, by a good 10 or so, The Red Sox didn’t have a great offensive year. No one else hit .300. But Buckner almost certainly had the most singles of those 80. He hit .299 overall, hit .329 with men on, and hit .337 with men on first only, and he wasn’t a home run hitter.

Offense was down an average of 33 runs in the AL in 1988 compared to 1985, and the Red Sox themselves were only up 13 runs, but the opportunity on that team seems like it was greater. Boggs hit leadoff 91 times and hit third 63 times. Marty Barrett wasn’t a good offensive player (.666 OPS) but he was ensconced in the second spot and hit 140 singles, which is what matters here. The late Mike Greenwell got a lot of run at cleanup and finished second in MVP. 123 singles weren’t what his 7.5 bWAR was mainly about, of course, but is a good number. Dwight Evans hit third or fourth 123 times and balled out as usual, although 105 singles more humored than harassed.

If you came to baseball in New York in 1985 as I did, your mind probably goes to Rickey Henderson and Don Mattingly when you think of tag teams and first to third. Henderson scored 146 runs, Mattingly drove in 145. I’m not sure what Boggs was doing, but he only scored 107 runs. But Henderson, it turns out, was way, way down on the list of singles witnessed. He was tied for 55th with 32. He stole 80 bases, and the total of 32 just shows how little he was waiting around.

Appropriately, one of the guys he was tied with in 55th was Vince Coleman, who stole 110 bases and was thrown out another 25 times. Just imagine how low Coleman’s total might have been if Willie McGee hadn’t hit behind him the majority of the time and hadn’t have hit 160 singles, the most in the NL (if 27 fewer than Boggs had).

By the way, Coleman himself was third in the NL in singles, and Tommy Herr was sixth. So it seems like the Cardinals must have hit an historic number of singles, or at least planted a flag for that era. In fact, while they did edge the Dodgers and hit the most singles in the league, they hit 75 fewer than Boston, who had the highest total in the majors. The early 1970s Cardinals teams, who never did better than second in the NL East, were in fact “the great” singles-hitting ones. They comprise four of the 11 highest totals from 1970-1989, American League or National, with the 1971 Cardinals having the most of any National League team. The Cardinals had more singles every year from 1970-1977 than they had in 1985. They also had more in 1980, 1982, 1983, and 1988 than they had in 1985.

Mostly, I fnd this a riddle, but getting caught stealing 96 times didn’t help. Each one takes away an at-bat. Then, every time you win at home and don’t walk, that is a half inning where you don’t bat, and the ‘85 Cardinals were 54-27 at home. More than anything else, even if a team is in the singles and not the home run lane, a .264 average, which is what the Cardinals did, just won’t cut it for a huge number of singles.