Runs and Bases- the 1970's Part 1

[SWC75]

(continuing the series I started last summer)

THE NEUTRAL PERIOD

During the 70’s and 80’s baseball was much criticized by purists for being mediocre and less interesting than it once was. Part of this was because the writing was being done by people who had grown up in the 1950’s and idolized that period. Bill James, in his 1985 Historical Baseball Abstract, was less romantic about it: “The baseball of the 1950’s was perhaps the most one-dimensional, uniform, predictable version of the game that has ever been offered for sale. By 1950, the stolen base was a rare play, a ‘surprise’ play….In 1920 or arguably earlier powerful trends had gone into motion, trends toward and offense based more and more on the home run and less and less involving anything else….Since every team’s offense was so much the same, a baseball game was not, as it is today and has been throughout most of baseball history, a clash of opposing philosophies or unlike skills, but rather was reduced to a simple test of quality…Perhaps this was exciting baseball if your team was the Yankees or the Dodgers or the Giants and you figured each day that yours would be the fortunate team.”

Integration did a lot to turn this around. In white baseball the advent of the home run killed not only the stolen base but all aggressive baserunning in favor of what Earl Weaver called “outside baseball”: get on base and protect your status there so you can score when your big guy hits the ball over the fence. It’s clear that in black baseball, while they also liked to hit the long ball, they didn’t wait around for it to happen. Some sociological speculation: if you are black in America, (I’m not, so this is speculation), you can’t afford to wait around for something big to happen. You have to scramble to get what you want, (a condition that prevailed for basically everybody in the 19th century, such that running the bases aggressively seemed natural to everybody back then). . Maybe that influenced the way they played baseball. Anyway, when black players started to show up in the major leagues, many of them, such as Jackie Robinson, Sam Jethroe, Minnie Minoso and Willie Mays, were aggressive and innovative base-runners who got baseball moving. With them playing, it wasn’t a batting cage: it was a pinball machine.

The use of Latin players also made the game more exciting. Besides several great hitters, many Latin players were smaller and quicker. They played key defensive positons and they, too, liked to run the bases aggressively. More importantly, the addition of black and Latin players greatly increased the talent base of the game. Their use was experimental in the 50’s, (the Red Sox were the last team to integrate in 1959). There were still not-so-secret quotas in the 60’s. By the 70’s, all that mattered is how good you were, (on the field: the administrative end was twenty years behind). I think any team form the 70’s with a comparable record was probably superior to any team of the 50’s just because they were drawing from a greater talent pool. And I think that talent pool, due to the rapidly increasing population, formalized training from younger ages and the full integration of the game, out-stripped the impact of expansion.

Another big change in this era produced some of the complaints about the game being colorless or inferior. The famous downtown stadiums that had served the game for decades were being replaced, one by one, by new stadiums built in the suburbs and surrounded by acres of parking. They were all built around the same general plan: Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Atlanta, San Francisco, Anaheim, San Diego, etc. If you were in one, you were in all of them. They were fully surrounded with multiple decks and most were built as all-purpose stadiums so they could be used for other sports, especially football. They seemed from the outside to resemble wedding cakes and were thus derided as wedding cake stadiums.

There was some variation: Houston and Seattle had domed stadiums. Montreal played in an Olympic stadium. Los Angeles was nice and had an interesting backdrop and Kansas City had some nice agricultural touches. Shea had an open outfield so you could see what city you were in. But even these fields had regular dimensions: 330 down the lines, 375 to the power alleys and 410 to center. ZZZZZzzz…

A home run in one was a home run in all of them. The old days of the downtown stadiums that were built to conform to city blocks, with deep center fields and short porches in right and or left field were disappearing. The odd architectural features such as the Green Monster in Boston, an incline instead of a warning track, a flagpole in center field, etc. were out of fashion. The purists howled. It was as if every golf course had the same lay-out!

But it was fair. Ideally, a home run should be a home run in every ball-park. An outfielder should be able to predict a bounce off a wall. A pitcher should be able to have the same ERA regardless of who he is playing for. That way players can be evaluated on an even-handed basis. This could be better done in the 1970’s and 80’s than at any other time of baseball history because of all the changes in the game that had come before and didn’t need to come now and the changes that would come in the 1990’s.

The game in the 1970’s and 1980’s had a rather flat statistical profile. Batting championships were won by players who hit in the .320-.330 area, except for high average “specialists” like Rod Carew, Bill Madlock or later Wade Boggs and Tony Gywnn, whose other numbers were not that impressive. Home run titlists were generally in the 35-40 range and usually won by players whose batting averages were well south of .300 but who walked a lot. It was hard to compare a Mike Schmidt (lifetime batting average .267), a Reggie Jackson (.262) or Carew (.328 but with only 92 homers) or Madlock (.305 with 163 homers) to Ted Williams or Hank Aaron. The lack of anybody with Triple Crown numbers contributed to an impression of mediocrity.

I think this is partially due to expansion, which brought in a lot of minor league home run hitters who could hit the long ball but struck out against major league pitching and partially due to TV, which celebrated home runs. Both contributed to a sense that if you could hit a home run, it didn’t matter what your batting average was or how often you struck out. The notion was lost that if you had good natural power, you should concentrate on seeing how many times you could make good contact with the ball, because your natural power would send it over the fence. You didn’t have to take a rip at it as if you were a lumberjack trying to chop down a tree with one blow. Rob Deer, who it .220 lifetime with as many as 186 strike-outs in a season but managed to hit as many as 33 home runs in a season, said “I could cut down on my swing and hit .270 but I’d hit a dozen home runs and be out of the big leagues”. If Rob Deer had hit .270, he’d have hit 50 home runs.

But that was over-shadowed by the tremendous increase in base-stealing. Players like Maury Wills and Luis Aparicio in the 60’s became the first of the era to make their reputation on it. Lou Brock and Bert Campaneris built on that legacy and paved away for Tim Raines, Vince Coleman and the greatest base-stealer of them all, Ricky Henderson. They added new levels of excitement to the game. Even the sluggers looked to steal bases as being a “30-30 man” (30 home runs plus 30 steals signified that you had both power and speed. Too many players with great speed warning track power wasted their talents hitting fly balls to try to become 30-30 men. When they should have been concentrating on hitting line drives or ground balls so they could hit with their legs. This is my one great criticism of this era: There was plenty of athletic talent, but not a lot of intelligence about how to use it.

My biggest frustration as baseball fan in this era was that the hitters didn’t seem to compare to hitters of the past and records such as Roger Maris 61 home runs, Hack Wilson’s 190 RBIs, Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak and Ted Williams being the last man to bat .400 seemed far beyond their reach. Beyond that, I looked at numbers from the 20’s and 30’s, (these are batting averages home runs, runs batted in and runs scored from famous players of that era) and they seemed to be from another planet: .378-59-171-177; .401-42-152-141; .373-47-175-149; .386-40-170-158; .364-58-169-151; .346-46-167-151 and .315-58-146-144. (Open book test: can you determine whose numbers those were and for what years?) But what I eventually came to realize was that those players would not have achieve those numbers in the 1970’s and 1980’s and that the stars of the 1970’s and 1980’s would like have put up numbers similar to them if they’d played in the 1920’s and 1930’s- or the 1990’s and 2000’s.

The pitchers didn’t dominate as they didn’t the 60’s but they were competitive with the hitters and some of the greatest pitchers ever took the mound in this era: Tom Seaver, Jim Palmer, Steve Carleton, Nolan Ryan and others. There was variety, too: Bert Blyleven, the curve ball specialist, the knuckle-balling brothers, Phil and Joe Niekro and Gaylord Perry, a different kind of ‘specialist’, in a time when cheating was thought to be clever. If a game was exciting it was as likely to be because of a great pitching performance as a great hitting performance.

But then a new generation of “retro-parks” started being built, beginning with Camden Yards in Baltimore in 1992, most of which heavily favored hitters. Then there were steroids and other chemical substances designed to build up hitter’s muscles, which became hugely popular among the players, especially when they were erroneously given sole credit for the offensive explosion of the decade. Finally there were the labor disputes which led owners to try to bring the fans back by juicing the ball, (the biggest reason for the offensive explosion), and we started getting historical numbers that dwarfed what the heroes of the 70’s and 80’s could achieve.

I believe that future baseball historians will look at the 70’s, the 80’s (and the 2010s) as a “neutral period” where the game’s numbers were what they should be, not twisted by juiced balls juiced players, juiced ball parks, limited strategies or limited talent pools. Other eras would be judged for their statistical integrity by comparisons to the 70’s and 80’s. Numbers would be judged as anemic or inflated compared to what they were in this period.

Bill James: “Baseball boomed in the 1970’s for one basic reason: We had a great game. On one field at one time, baseball fans could see players who hit over .350, players who hit 40 home runs and players who would steal nearly 100 bases. Every team’s offense was different and thus every game regained that sense that it had had so many years earlier, the sense of not being merely an exhibition but a trial of offensive philosophies: speed against power, big inning offense against one run offense. Not in many years had baseball fans been treated to such a diverse, varied spectacle on the field, and they responded to it with great enthusiasm.”

Yet it was an era that editorialists constantly complained about and one in which baseball found itself increasingly in the rear view mirror of football and, eventually, basketball in the nation’s consciousness.

 

[SWC75]

DESIGNATED HITTERS

The two big developments in baseball in the early 60’s involved designated hitters. One was on the field and the other was off the field.

Growing up, the best player on your baseball team was usually your best pitcher. He was the best athlete and had the best arm. He also had the best legs, the best coordination, the best everything. He’d be your leading hitter, pitcher, base-runner and fielder. On days he wouldn’t pitch, he’d be in center field and bat clean-up. That might be true as far as high school. But when you get into pro ball there’s more specialization and a higher talent level: everybody is a good athlete and players are going to be the best at what they do all the time. The pitchers are the best pitchers, the shortstops are the best shortstops, the center fielders are the best center fielders, etc. And the guys that hit in every game will be better hitters than the guys who don’t.

Some pitchers will still try hard to hit well and few of them will do it. Babe Ruth is always cited as the best hitting pitcher for obvious reasons but there are full-time career pitchers who have hit well. Walter Johnson hit an amazing .433 in 97 at bats at age 37. Red Ruffing was a career .269 hitter who hit over .300 five years in a row. He hit as many as 5 home runs in a season. Wes Ferrell hit .280 lifetime with as many as 9 home runs in a season. In 1935 he hit .347 with 7 homers in 150 at bats. Bob Lemon didn’t hit for a high average by normal standards, (.232) but hit 37 homers in 1183 at bats: the equivalent of two seasons for an everyday player. He often pinch-hit for his regular catcher, Jim Hegan, who hit .228 lifetime with 92 homers in 4,772 at bats. Don Newcombe hit .271 lifetime, including .359 with 7 home runs in the championship year of 1955. George Brett always said his brother Ken was the better hitter growing up. Ken hit over .300 three times before the DH cut him off. These guys would all have been better hitters if they’d had a chance to play every day but they were too valuable as pitchers. You wonder why they can’t play another position when not pitching.

There were many other pitchers who didn’t do as well simply because they weren’t as good at it. But there was another group of pitchers below that who obviously felt it wasn’t part of their job. There seemed like a lot of them in the 1960’s. I remember watching games with my father and how disgusted he’d get with pitchers who would come to the platewith men on base, sometimes with the bases loaded, and take three girlish swings and then go back to the bench as if it was somebody’s else’s job to score runs.

Some examples: Ron Herbel, who put together consecutive seasons of 0 for 47, 1 for 49 and 1 for 38 for a three year batting average of .015. He was .029 for his career. Or Bob Buhl who had the most at bats in a season of anyone in major league history for a player who had no hits when he went 0 for 70 in 1962. Hank Aguirre was a name that always came up when people discussed weak-hitting pitchers. Actually he managed to hit .085 for his career, despite a 2 for 75 season in Buhl’s “big” year of ’62. Then there was Dean Chance a fine pitcher and a handsome young man, he was said to be a hit with the ladies. I guess the ladies never saw him try to hit. He was 2 for 76 in 1966 and 3 for 92 in 1967. He did manage to hit above .100 once in his career: .150 on 12 for 80 early in his career, (1963). After that, he just didn’t seem to care. Imagine if these guy’s teammates put the effort into fielding that they put into hitting?

It was an old problem. People think the DH was some kind of radical conspiracy to destroy the national pastime cooked up in the 1970’s. It was, in fact first proposed in the 1890’s, per Bill James. Per Wikipedia: “The designated hitter idea was raised by Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack in 1906, though he was not the first to propose it. The rumors were that he grew weary of watching Eddie Plank and Charles Bender flail at pitches when at bat. Mack's proposal received little support and was even lambasted by the press as "wrong theoretically". The notion did not die. In the late 1920s, National League president John Heydler made a number of attempts to introduce a 10th man designated hitter as a way to speed up the game, and almost convinced National League clubs to agree to try it during spring training in 1929”.

Baseball began to look at the DH seriously in 1969, in the wake of the offensively anemic 1968 season and challenge from pro football for American sports supremacy. They tried the DH in some spring training games that year and a couple of minor leagues, including the International League, used the rule. I remember liking it because there would be no more of the Aguirre-Chance nonsense and more of good hitters at the plate. You could also keep a good pitcher in game. I was more interested in performance than strategy. I wanted to see players play, not managers think. I liked it when the Syracuse Chiefs got to use a DH, especially when they won two Governor’s Cups, a pennant and a junior World Series in 1969-70 using it.

But the big leagues weren’t yet ready for it. The American League reconsidered in 1973 because, frankly they didn’t have as much talent as the National League: they had a reputation of being behind the NL in integration and use of foreign players. They also had more older ballparks, many of whom had significant parking problems. Per Bill James, in 1972, American league attendance was only 74% of National League attendance. “When the American league adopted the Designated Hitter Rule in 1973, the fans, were, of course, horrified. But for some reason, American League attendance increased by two million that year, bringing them up to 81% of the National league and within a few years the two leagues were virtually even. By the late 70’s offense was at its highest levels in twenty years and baseball was booming.” So the reason the AL had the DH and the NL doesn’t is that the AL needed something to boost attendance and the NL did no, so the pragmatists won out in one league and the purists in the other. Today, when the leagues are no longer administratively separate, all of baseball would have made the same decision. Either there would have been no DH at all or everyone would have one. That might yet happen. But it didn’t need to in 1973 and the National league decided they didn’t need it. .

The basic complaint with the DH was that it eliminated too much baseball strategy. Bill James examined that in an article in his first Historical Baseball Abstract. “What the DH rule actually does…is to eliminate from the game a series of forced, obvious moves which involve, in fact, no option on the part of either manager and thus no strategy. You’ve got a .113 hitter at the plate, a runner on first and nobody out in the fourth and you have to bunt, don’t you? Where’s the strategy? With a DH up there at least you can DO something. You’re down four runs in the seventh with a pitcher leading off, and you have to pinch hit for him, don’t you? What’s strategic about that? The DH rule saves the pinch hitters and thus, in effect, makes the roster larger. As such it creates, not eliminates strategic options for American League managers.”

I was a big advocate of the DH at the time and regarded the complaints of the ‘purists’ as silly. When rules are changed in sports, the change is not usually to create a game we’ve never seen before but to return the game to at least a facsimile of the one we remember. Forces, physical and mental, are operating on the game all the time and they are what change the game from what it was. Usually it has to do either with players getting bigger and more athletic while the field remains the same, allowing the defense to physically dominate the offense or coaches, under pressure to win, micromanaging the game and being unwilling to try too hard to score due to the risk of costly errors. In this case it was the lack of effort from pitchers when it came time to hit and the fact that higher-scoring sports that at least appeared to have more action in them were now competing with baseball for US sport’s fans attention and dollars, especially on television. The idea was to put a batter at the plate with more ability and desire and produce more exciting results to try to regain the positon the game had with every player trying his best to do what they were assigned to do, which was the way the game should be played.

Then came Cable TV. I had been a Pirates fan since my Little League team had that name but I never got their games on TV or radio. I withdrew from the Pirates when they collapsed in the early 80’s and had a bad drug scandal, where street drugs were being sold in their locker room. I was actually off baseball for a few seasons until I started watching Mets games because I had a friend at work who was a Mets fan and I liked their announcers better than the Red Sox, Yankees or Braves announcers, (the other teams I got on cable). So I started watching the Mets games regularly as they got good and then very good and I was a baseball fan again. Watching all these National League games night after night, I discovered something about the DH. I didn’t miss it. It was OK that the team’s worst hitter was the pitcher and that he batted 9th and was often asked to sacrifice and could not be relied on to get a hit. It helped that there were no Dean Chances or Hank Aguirres on the Mets. Everybody really did seem to be trying and with the Mets winning, their games were certainly exciting and entertaining. I eventually calmed down on the DH issue. I could take it or leave it. I still felt that those who were made angry by its existence were a bit silly. I suspected that National League pitchers did really try precisely because the DH threatened to take the bats out of their hands if they didn’t use them to try to get hits.

The one thing that bothered me is the two leagues weren’t playing the same game. This seemed absurd to me. It was as if the NBA East had the three pointer and the NBA West did not. Or the NFC East had the two point conversion and the NFC West did not. I was wholly in agreement when Commission Peter Ueberroth had a plan to have the fans vote on whether to have the DH or not and apply the result to both leagues. Unfortunately, the purists opposed this plan because it might put the DH in the National League, which they regarded as heretical. They obviously were not confident they could win the election, which would have eliminated the DH entirely. The plan died and Ueberroth was booted out even before his term was up. We’ve been stuck with the two leagues not playing the same game ever since.

This became really problematic when interleague play started. It was agreed that both teams would use the DH in American League parks and neither in National League parks, (an arrangement that already obtained for the World Series). This changed the make-up of each team, depending on which park they were playing in. But this didn’t break up the logjam. The issue came up again earlier this year and I heard Mets broadcaster Gary Cohen deliver an editorial and how anything that would put the DH in the National League was terrible because the DH was so unnatural to the game and the strategy of the game was so important, etc. etc. I guess it will never end, unless maybe generations not born yet when the DH was created completely take over and fix it. Those who are concerned that the DH would ruin the game need to explain why, 42 years in, the game hasn’t been ‘ruined’ yet.


But the groundwork was being laid for something else that would “ruin” the game- and hasn’t yet. In 1966, one of the greatest labor lawyers in history and a big baseball fan, decided for his next crusade, after going to battle with the auto workers and steelworkers, he wanted to get the Major League Baseball Player’s Association in gear. In 1966 Marvin Miller went around to spring training camps and talked to the players, who were so impressed with him they voted him their executive director by a 489-136 margin. He held that position for the next 16 years, an era of great change in player’s rights and compensation.

I heard an interview with Miller once in which he said that before free agency, 21% of baseball’s revenue went to player compensation. He said that the average business in America spends 52% of its revenue on labor costs. After free agency, with all the huge salaries people complained about, baseball was still spending only 48% of its revenue on the players. And the players aren’t just the ‘labor’ of the game, (most of it, anyway). They were also the raw materials and capital investment of the game. The only other raw materials were the bats, balls and gloves and the stadiums and spring training facilities were built and maintained by the cities that hosted them, placed in competition with each other by the teams and their constant threats to move and take a chunk of the local economy and self-image with them when they went.

That interview was probably 30 years ago but if anything has changed, it is the revenue of baseball, which has grown exponentially with cable TV and all the various products MLB endorses. The value of franchises has skyrocketed. I know players contracts have also skyrocketed but I haven’t heard of a check bouncing. I wonder if the players are still at 48%? It’s not like the owners wouldn’t be doing so much to make money if the players weren’t demanding so much. I think the players will always be fighting to get their fair share of what the owners are trying to make anyway. They would have had no shot without Marvin Miller, the Union’s “designated Hitter”

Wikipedia: “Miller negotiated MLBPA's first collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the team owners in 1968. That CBA, covering the 1968 and 1969 seasons, was a short document. It won the players a nearly 43 percent increase in the minimum salary from $7,000 to $10,000, as well as larger expense allowances. More importantly, the deal brought a formal structure to owner-player relations, including written procedures for the arbitration of player grievances before the commissioner.

The next CBA, a three-year deal signed in 1970, built on this gain. For the first time, owner-player disputes not involving the "integrity of baseball" could be arbitrated not before the commissioner, an employee of the owners, but before a three-member arbitration panel with a neutral chairman selected jointly by the players and owners. …

Meanwhile, Miller took his union on a "lightning" strike on April Fools Day 1972. From April 1 through April 13, the ballplayers simply stayed away from the ballparks while Miller negotiated with the owners. Baseball only resumed when the owners and players agreed on a $500,000 increase in pension fund payments. Owners agreed to add salary arbitration to the CBA. “

It was that arbitration panel that would make all the difference. Curt Flood and his predecessors had tried to get rid of the reserve clause, which said that a team could retain a players services for a year after the player’s contract ran out under the terms of that contract of no agreement on a new contract had been made, by legal action in civil court. But they always lost. In fact the reserve clause is still in every player’s contract.

The problem was the interpretation of the contract. I remember when I was working our union negotiated a new contract and our representatives were surprised that the negotiations went so smoothly. They got most of what wanted from what appeared to be a suddenly enlightened management. When the contract was put in place, management’s true colors were revealed. Each office manager had a ‘book’ in a loose-leaf binder containing management’s “interpretation” of the contract, line by line. The interpretation consisted of everything management wanted and nothing the union wanted, even if the actual language of the contract contained nothing supporting management’s ‘interpretation’. When management was asked to explain their interpretation the manager simply referred to the book and said that that was their interpretation of the contract. Each violation of the actual contract had to be the subject of a grievance and each grievance had to go to arbitration to get a neutral party to see that that management’s positon had nothing to do with the contract they signed. Then management would insist that each arbitration decision applied only to that case and when the same thing came up, they’d point to their book and say their actions were based on their interpretation of the contract and the whole process would have to start all over again. The idea was that management had more time and resources than the union to deal with these things and they wanted to wear the union down so they would get what they wanted, despite the contract.

I’m sure that’s not the first time such a tactic was used and it explains why guys like Miller are wily and tough when dealing with management. They’ve come to expect nothing less. In this case, It had always been the owner’s positon that the reserve clause could be repeatedly invoked as long as they still wanted a player and thus all they had to do is to be intransigent and parsimonious in their dealings with him. He wouldn’t agree to a new contract and they would invoke the reserve clause- until he was past his prime and then they could just let him go. In the meantime, they could trade him any time they wanted to.

But now Miller could convince players to challenge the reserve clause not for its existence in the courts but for its interpretation through this new arbitration committee. He got Andy Messersmith of the Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Orioles to play the 1974 season without signing a new contract and then file a grievance arbitration. Arbitrator Peter Seitz “declared that both players had fulfilled their contractual obligations and had no further legal ties to their ballclubs. This effectively eradicated the reserve clause and ushered in free agency.” But the clever Miller then offered something to the panicky owners, who felt their iron control of the game slipping away. “As an economist, Miller clearly understood that too many free agents could actually drive down player salaries. Miller agreed to limit free agency to players with more than six years of service, knowing that restricting the supply of labor would drive up salaries as owners bid for an annual, finite pool of free agents.” It pays to have the smartest guy in the room on your side.

Of course there were predictions of doom. Salaries would skyrocket and only the rich clubs could pay them. They’d buy the contracts of the best players on every other team and everybody else would go out of business. We’ll discuss how that worked out in the next chapter.

 

[SWC75]

RUNS AND BASES

Runs Produced = Runs scored plus runs batted in – home runs because they are the same run being scored and batted in by the same guy.

Bases produced = Total Batting Bases (1 for a single, 2 for a double, three for a triple, 4 for a home run) + walks + steals.

1970 National League

Runs
Billy Williams CHI 224
Johnny Bench CIN 200
Tony Perez CIN 196
Bobby Bonds SF 186
Jim Hickman, CHI 185
Willie McCovey SF 185
Wes Parker LA 185
Henry Aaron ATL 183
Willie Davis LA 177
Bobby Tolan CIN 176

Bases
Bobby Bonds SF 459
Billy Williams CHI 452
Willie McCovey SF 440
Tony Perez CIN 437
Johnny Bench CIN 414
Rusty Staub MON 407
Bobby Tolan CIN 399
Jim Hickman CHI 392
Lou Brock STL 391
Pete Rose CIN 390

1970 American League

Runs
Carl Yastrzemski BOS 187
Roy White NY 181
Tony Oliva MIN 180
Frank Howard WAS 172
Tony Conigliaro BOS 169
Harmon Killebrew MIN 168
Cesar Tovar MIN 164
Reggie Smith BOS 161
Boog Powell Bal 161
Brooks Robinson BAL 160

Bases
Carl Yastrzemski BOS 486
Frank Howard WAS 442
Tommy Harper MIL 430
Harmon Killebrew MIN 416
Roy White NY 407
Boog Powell BAL 394
Cesar Tovar MIN 369
Tony Oliva MIN 366
Amos Otis KC 364
Reggie Smith BOS 349

1971 National League

Runs
Joe Torre STL 210
Willie Stargell PIT 181
Lou Brock, STL 180
Bobby Bonds SF 179
Rusty Staub MON 172
Hank Aaron ATL 166
Cesar Cedeno HOU 156
Roberto Clemente PIT 155
Matty Alou STL 152
Billy Williams CHI 151

Bases
Joe Torre STL 419
Lou Brock, STL 412
Bobby Bonds SF 405
Willie Stargell PIT 404
Hank Aaron ATL 403
Billy Williams CHI 384
Rusty Staub MON 372
Joe Morgan HOU 365
Dick Allen LA` 358
Deron Johnson, PHI 357

1971 American League

Runs
Bobby Murcer NY 163
Frank Robinson BAL 153
Harmon Killebrew MIN 152
Roy White NY 151
Reggie Smith BOS 151
Merv Rettenmund BAL 145
Sal Bando OAK 145
Amos Otis KC 144
Rico Petrocelli BOS 143
Brooks Robinson BAL 139

Bases
Bobby Murcer NY 392
Reggie Smith BOS 376
Reggie Jackson OAK 367
Harmon Killebrew MIN 349
Graig Nettles CLE 349
Rico Petrocelli BOS 348
Roy White NY 346
Amos Otis KC 338
Frank Howard WAS 338
Paul Schaal KC 336

1972 National League

Runs
Jim Wynn HOU 183
Billy Williams CHI 180
Joe Morgan CIN 179
Johnny Bench CIN 172
Bobby Bonds SF 172
Al Oliver PIT 165
Cesar Cedeno HOU 163
Bobby Tolan CIN 162
Nate Colbert SD 160
Pete Rose CIN 158

Bases
Joe Morgan CIN 413
Billy Williams CHI 413
Cesar Cedeno HOU 411
Johnny Bench CIN 397
Bobby Bonds SF 383
Jim Wynn HOU 375
Nate Colbert SD 371
Lou Brock STL 354
Pete Rose CIN 352
Lee May CIN 345

1972 American League

Runs
Dick Allen, CHI 166
Bobby Murcer NY 165
Joe Rudi OAK 150
John Mayberry KC 140
Carlos May CHI 139
George Scott BOS 139
Reggie Smith, BOS 128
Tommy Harper BOS 127
Carl Yastrzemski BOS 126
Lou Pinella KC 126

Bases
Dick Allen CHI 423
Bobby Murcer NY 388
John Mayberry KC 333
Carlos May CHI 331
Roy White, NY 331
Joe Rudi OAK 328
Tommy Harper BOS 308
Reggie Smith BOS 305
George Scott BOS 305
Reggie Jackson OAK 304

1973 National League

Runs
Bobby Bonds SF 188
Willie Stargell PIT 181
Ken Singleton MON 180
Dusty Baker ATL 179
Darrell Evans ATL 177
Bob Watson HOU 175
Pete Rose CIN 174
Joe Morgan CIN 172
Al Oliver PIT 169
Lou Brock STL 166

Bases
Bobby Bonds SF 471
Joe Morgan CIN 462
Darrell Evans ATL 461
Willie Stargell PITT 417
Lou Brock STL 400
Ken Singleton MON 393
Dave Johnson ATL 389
Cesar Cedeno HOU 379
Tony Perez CIN 374
Pete Rose CIN 372

1973 American League

Runs
Reggie Jackson OAK 184
George Scott MIL 181
Sal Bando OAK 166
Dave May MIL 164
John Mayberry KC 161
Carl Yastrzemski BOS 158
Amos Otis KC 156
Bobby Murcer NY 156
Rod Carew MIN 154
Frank Robinson CAL 152

Bases
Reggie Jackson OAK 384
Sal Bando OAK 381
Rod Carew MIN 376
John Mayberry KC 369
George Scott MIL 365
Carl Yastrzemski BOS 364
Amos Otis KC 358
Tommy Harper BOS 354
Bobby Grich BAL 349
Dave May MIL 345

1974 National League

Runs
Johnny Bench, CIN 204
Mike Schmidt, PHI 188
Steve Garvey LA 185
Jim Wynn LA 180
Cesar Cedeno HOU 171
Al Oliver PIT 170
Ron Cey LA 167
Willie Davis, LA 163
Willie Stargell PIT 161
Richie Zisk PIT 158

Bases
Mike Schmidt PHI 439
Joe Morgan Cin 431
Lou Brock STL 421
Cesar Cedeno HOU 402
Johnny Bench CIN 400
Jim Wynn LA 392
Bobby Bonds SF 382
Darrell Evans ATL 369
Pete Rose CIN 361
Ralph Garr ATL 359

1974 American League

Runs
Jeff Burroughs TEX 177
Sal Bando OAK 165
Carl Yastrzemski BOS 157
Bobby Grich BAL 155
Reggie Jackson OAK 154
Ken Henderson CHI 151
Joe Rudi OAK 150
Amos Otis KC 148
Bobby Murcer NY 147
Hal McRae KC 144

Bases
Rod Carew MIN 379
Jeff Burroughs TEX 372
Reggie Jackson OAK 371
Ken Henderson CHI 359
Bobby Grich BAL 358
Carl Yastrzemski BOS 345
Don Money MIL 342
George Scott MIL 329
Dick Allen CHI 324
Joe Rudi OAK 323

Cumulative Runs produced rankings (10 for 1st in a league, 9 for second, etc.)

Honus Wagner (1897-1917) 137
Ty Cobb (1905-28) 126
Cap Anson (1871-97) 119
Stan Musial (1941-63) 119
Lou Gehrig (1923-39) 111

Babe Ruth (1914-35) 109
Hank Aaron (1954-76) 105
Willie Mays (1951-73) 100
Sam Crawford (1899-1917) 96
Rogers Hornsby (1915-37) 89

Ted Williams (1939-60) 89
Mel Ott (1926-47) 85
Mickey Mantle (1951-68) 82
Tris Speaker (1907-28) 81
Joe Medwick (1932-48) 79

Frank Robinson (1956-76) 78
Joe DiMaggio (1936-51) 77
Nap Lajoie (1896-1916) 77
King Kelly (1878-93) 76
Hugh Duffy (1888-1906) 75

Eddie Collins (1906-30) 74
Dan Brouthers (1879-1904) 73
Jimmie Foxx (1925-45) 72
Sherry Magee (1904-19) 68
Minnie Minoso (1949-64) 67

Comment: Only two guys on this list were still active when the period ended and both Hank Aaron’s and Frank Robinson’s primes were long over. Aaron settled in at #7, behind Wagner, Cobb, Anson, Musial Gehrig and Ruth. Robinson is far behind at #16. So it will take another generation of players to change these standings.

Cumulative Base Production Rankings

Ty Cobb (1905-28) 129
Hank Aaron (1954-76) 127
Babe Ruth (1914-35) 125
Stan Musial (1941-63) 121
Lou Gehrig (1923-39) 120

Willie Mays(1951-73) 118
Ted Williams(1939-60) 115
Honus Wagner (1897-1917) 112
Tris Speaker(1907-28) 110
Mel Ott (1926-47) 107

Rogers Hornsby (1915-37) 98
Jimmie Foxx (1925-45) 96
Mickey Mantle(1951-68) 96
Cap Anson (1871-97) 91
Billy Hamilton (1888-1901) 89

Eddie Collins (1906-30) 89
Harry Stovey1880-93) 88
Sam Crawford (1899-1917) 86
Dan Brouthers (1879-1904) 83
Ed Delahanty (1888-1903) 79

Frank Robinson (1956-76) 79
Carl Yastremski (1961-83) 76
Jim O’Rourke (1872-1904) 73
Max Carey (1910-29) 73
Harmon Killebrew (1954-75) 73

Comment: I was surprised that Aaron, despite the strong ending to his career, could not quite catch Cobb. The only year he made the top ten was 1971, when he finished 5th with 403 bases produced, just behind Willie Stargell, (404) and Bobby Bonds (405). If Hank had produced just three more bases, (or two more with fewer games or at bats than Bonds), he’d have tied Cobb.

The most productive player of the early 70’s was not Aaron or Reggie Jackson or Johnny Bench or Dick Allen or Willie Stargell, as you might have guessed. It was Bobby Bonds who earned 30 ranking points in run production and 38 in base production. His big problem was that the Giants teams he played on didn’t win anything. But his combination of power and speed produced more runs, (962, 192 per year) and bases, (2,100, 420 per year) than anyone of the period.

 

[SWC75]

THE PLAYERS

With the post-war generation of baseball stars ending their careers, a new generation was taking hold. But somehow it didn’t seem the same. BOBBY BONDS was supposed to be the next Willie Mays. Instead he was the first Bobby Bonds. That wasn’t enough for some people but it was actually pretty impressive. Bobby’s problem was that the Giants slipped from contention during his tenure there and the future of the franchise was in doubt. Whereas Walter O’Malley had been given his choice of locations for the Dodgers’ new stadium in Los Angeles, Horace Stoneham was conned into a spot local businessmen wanted to sell to him. They took him out to Candlestick point in the morning when it was sunny and warm and the view was great. He didn’t realize that at night it could get as cold as winter with a stiff cross-wind that forced Mays to adjust his swing to hit opposite field home runs. Meanwhile the fans shivered and by the 70’s the team was struggling both on the field and at the turnstiles. Bonds couldn’t be blamed but it was a poor vehicle for his stardom, especially being on the west coast where the eastern press rarely saw him. But he was a great player.

He scored 120/134/110/118/131 runs in consecutive seasons. He hit best as a lead-off man so his RBI totals were not as impressive but he had 102 RBIs in 1971 and 115 in 1977. He was a tremendous combination of power and speed and hit over 30 home runs six times, with a high of 39. He stole 40 or more bases seven times. In 1973 he came within one home run of being the game’s first 40-40 man. He was a 30-30 man five times, a record only matched by his son Barry. He set a record with 35 lead off home runs, 11 in one season. He was the first 20th century player to hit a grand slam in his major league debut.

He wasn’t normally a high average hitter but hit .302 in 1971 and he struck out way too much, setting a record with 189 the year he hit .302 That lack of efficiency is probably another reason why he didn’t get the credit he was due but he was a highly productive offensive player in any case.

From Baseball Reference.com:
"He was as fast as anyone I've ever seen. He had great power, and he was a terrific outfielder with better arm strength than Barry." - Sonny Jackson, talking about Bobby Bonds
"They said I was supposed to be the next Willie Mays. . . I probably had more success than anyone they ever put that label on." - Bobby Bonds, talking about the pressure to reach maximum potential

Bill James has an interesting description: “Bonds was probably a better athlete than his son, although obviously Barry is a greater player. Bobby was muscular: he had long limbs and an almost unnaturally wide frame, giving the impression that he was huge when standing still, but small when in motion. He was 6-1 but took a long, quick stride, low to the ground, not wasting any time in the air but eating up the ground. Running, he looked so much like Mays in the outfield that occasionally, when they crossed, you could confuse them and lose track of which was which, although they didn’t look anything alike in the face or build. He was immensely strong and a good hitter, although he made no compromise: he had one swing and he used the whole thing every time. He had a much better arm than Barry.”

Bonds, who wasn’t Willie Mays, was traded to the Yankees for Bobby Murcer, who wasn’t Mickey Mantle. At that point he became a vagabond, playing for seven teams in as many series, prompting Terry Cashman in his iconic “Talkin’ Baseball” song to sing “And Bobby Bonds can play for everyone.” His career ended somewhat early at age 35, preventing him from climbing the all-time lists as far as might be expected. He then became a hitting coach. He died of lung cancer and a brain tumor at age 57. I’ve always wondered if that might have been a reason his son was willing to risk his own health by taking steroids to set home run and hitting records: like Mickey Mantle he might have felt that he would die young, as his father did so he might as well live life as he wanted to.

BOBBY MURCER was from Oklahoma. He played outfield for the New York Yankees. He could hit for average with power. Of course he wasn’t the next Mickey Mantle. Instead he was the first Bobby Murcer, and that was plenty.

It took him awhile to make it to the majors, getting cups of coffee in 1965 and 1966, then was in the service for two years before sticking with the Yankees three years later, the year after Mantle’s retirement. Bobby got off to a great start but faded to .259 but had 26 home runs. He was on the covers of all the magazines as the next Yankee superstar. Hit was the first of seven 20+ home run seasons in nine years, with a high of 33 in 1972. He hit .331 in 1971 and .304 in 1973 but wasn’t a threat to win the batting title otherwise. He walked a lot- as many as 91 times in a season- and didn’t strike out often. He never had 100 RBIs but had 90+ five times. He did score 102 runs in ’72. He fielded his positon well, winning a Gold Glove in 1972.

Wikipedia: “He was noted for excelling at the delayed steal in which, as the catcher catches the ball or is about to throw the ball back to the pitcher, the runner on first base breaks for second base. The thought is that the second baseman and shortstop will be back on their heels and slow to cover the bag. After working with Mickey Mantle, he was also known as an excellent drag bunter.”

He was a ‘nice’ player in more ways than one. But he wasn’t a superstar and somehow became a symbol of the fact that the Yankees weren’t what they used to be.

He got traded to the Giants in that strange trade of players who weren’t as good as their predecessors and performed well for the Giants but he wasn’t Bobby Bonds, either. He eventually wound up back with the Yankees and found his true niche as a solid player on a championship caliber team, although he never did play on a World Series champion, coming back to New York in 1979 and missing the 1977-78 titles. Nobody cared that he wasn’t Mickey Mantle any more. In fact, he was a lot better than Mantle at living life, being a strong family man, good friend and teammate. He became a popular broadcaster for the Yankees until a brain tumor took him in 2008.

“He was a big fan of comedian Robin Williams, artist Picasso, writer Norman Mailer, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, boxer Jerry Quarry, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Chaos Theory, Harry Houdini and the Beatles.” Life wasn’t just about baseball for Bobby.

He’s probably best remembered for getting the walk-off hit, a two run single, (after earlier hitting a 3 run homer), in the first game after his friend Thurman Munson died. “Murcer gave one of the eulogies his funeral on August 6, in Canton, Ohio in which he quoted the poet and philosopher Angelo Patri: "The life of a soul on earth lasts longer than his departure. He lives on in your life and the life of all others who knew him."


CESAR CEDENO caused a sensation when he came up in 1970 to the Houston Astros. He’d ripped up the American Associaiton, hitting .373 with 14 home runs, 61 RBIs and 47 runs scored in 54 games. Then with the Astros he hit .310-7-42-46 in 90 games for a combined .335-21, (with 26 steals) -103-93. He was long, lean, (6-2 175) and a fast and graceful outfielder. I remember Curt Gowdy talking about him with great admiration, obviously pleased that another superstar- one for the next generation- had arrived on the scene. It was exciting stuff. Comparisons were made to Willie Mays . You had to be the “next somebody” in those days.

And he had some great years in Houston, hitting .320 two years in a row with 22 home runs and 55 steals, then 25 and 56 in 1972-73. The next year he slumped to .269 but had 25 homers and 57 steals, driving in 103 runs. He had an outstanding arm and won 5 gold gloves. Bill James rated him the fourth best center fielder up to age 25 in the game’s history, behind Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle and Tris Speaker and just ahead of Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio.

His power numbers were clearly held back by the Astrodome, one of the worst home run parks in big league history. Cedeno also became too acquainted with the outfield fences around the league and suffered many injuries that didn’t threaten his career, ala Pete Reiser, but reduced it, ala Vada Pinson. He was also involved in an incident where his gun accidentally discharged, killing his girlfriend. He was charged with involuntary manslaughter. He once got in trouble for attacking a fan in the stands who kept calling him a “murderer”. The second half of his career just didn’t measure up to the first half. He began to get traded around the league. I recall an incident in Cincinnati where he got in a fight over where he should sit in the team bus. It was criticized as an example of “superstar behavior” from someone who no longer was one.

But had one more moment of glory. Bill James: “In 1985, with Jack Clark hurt, the St. Louis Cardinals picked up the aging Cesar Cedeno for the pennant race. Cedeno played 28 games for the Cards, hitting .434 with 6 homers, 19 RBI. The practice of picking up a veteran for the pennant race goes back at least to the 1920’s- But that may well have been the greatest late-season pick-up of all time.“ He wound up hitting .285 with 199 home runs and 550 steals for his career. 87 of his home runs came at home, 112 on the road. In his years in Houston, it was 64 at home and 98 on the road, a difference comparable to DiMaggio’s at Yankee Stadium.


We throw words around a lot. Two of them that invaded the world of sports from show business are “star” and “superstar”. A star was a performer whose presence in a show or movie could sell tickets. The derivation of ‘superstar’ was the over-use of the word star by hopeful press agents. When they started calling people ‘stars’ who really weren’t you have to have a word for those that really are. So they started calling them ‘superstars’. When that word got over-used they came up with the word ‘megastar’ but that didn’t take: things were getting a bit ridiculous.

But I think the first two terms are useful in the world of sports. To me a ‘star’ is a player who does one thing so well he becomes famous for it and can sell tickets based on that skill. A superstar is a performer who does everything that well.


REGGIE JACKSON was cut out to be a superstar but never quite made it to that level as player. It didn’t prevent him from becoming the most famous player in the game: just ask him. He was a certainly a superstar in high school, showing a high degree of talent in several sports and admirable courage and determination.

Wikipedia: “Jackson graduated from Cheltenham High in 1964, where he excelled in football, basketball, baseball, and track and field. In his junior year of high-school, Jackson, a tailback, tore up his knee in an early season game. He was told by the doctors he was never to play football again, but Jackson returned for the final game of the season. In that game Jackson fractured five cervical vertebrae, which caused him to spend six weeks in the hospital and another month in a neck cast. Doctors told Jackson that he might never walk again, let alone play football, but Jackson defied the odds again. On the baseball team, he batted .550 and threw several no-hitters.”

“In football, he was scouted by Alabama, Georgia, and Oklahoma, all of whom were willing to break the color barrier just for Jackson…Jackson declined Alabama and Georgia because he was fearful of the South at the time, and declined Oklahoma because they told him to stop dating white girls.” He went to Arizona State to play both football and basketball. I’ve heard him say he was timed at 9.5 in the hundred yard dash. But he dropped football after his freshman year because Frank Kush wanted him to play defensive back. Several major league teams offered him scholarships: the Giants, Dodgers, Twins, Phillies and Orioles, but he turned them down because his father wanted him to get a college education and he didn’t want to give up his scholarship. He replaced Rick Monday, the first player drafted in the first common draft, in center field. The next year, the New York Mets had the first pick but picked Steve Chilcott, a catcher who never made it to the major leagues, over Jackson, supposedly because he had a white girlfriend, which George Weiss didn’t approve of. Jackson was selected second in the draft by the Athletics.

He made his major league debut with a cup of coffee in Kansas City the next year, which prevented him from being the Rookie of the year in 1968, when he hit 29 home runs. Then he exploded in 1969 by hitting 47 and showing Mantle-like power. He drove in 118 runs and scored 123.

Bill Jenkinson ranks him as the #10 power hitter of all time. “Ask this question to a group of middle-aged baseball fans: What is the longest ball you ever saw hit? The most common answer might be: Reggie Jackson’s 1971 All-Star shot in Detroit”. Here it is on You-Tube:
It was one of many legendary shots off Reggie’s bat. “He combined power and showmanship like no one else since Babe Ruth. “ In 1968 he hit a 489 footer “high into the right field bleachers” in Anaheim. In 1969, he twice hit the second deck in Oakland, 450 feet away and “cleared both the inner and outer fences in Kansas City on June 16 when his 480 footer landed on Brooklyn Avenue. It was outstanding work but it was about 30 feet short of Reggie’s even mightier blow in the same park on April 20. …The moon shot collided with the top of the scoreboard in deep right center field at a linear distance of 440 feet. .. Reggie smashed another drive on July 5 in Minnesota that was remarkably similar…Jackson’s blast struck a beer sign just a few feet below the top. These two classic four-baggers…traveled about 510 feet and 520 feet, respectively. “

On the Detroit home run: “Reggie lined one with all his might toward the 90 foot high grandstand roof in right center field. The ball gave the appearance of rising until ti struck the light tower on the roof, before ricocheting back onto the field. Many seasoned observers instantly labeled this blow as the longest they had ever witnessed. It’s impossible to know exactly how far the ball would have traveled if left unimpeded, but the best estimate is about 540 feet. “

He was an under-rated baserunner. Bill James: “Early in his career, he was fast, (he stole 20+ bases four times) and late in his career he was smart a baserunner as you’ll ever see.”

His nickname was “Mr. October” due to his great World Series performances. He missed the 1972 series with an injury. In 1973, he hit .310 with a home run and 6 RBIS in 7 games against the Mets. In 1974 he hit .286 but had another homer and 3 runs scored in a five game win over the Dodgers. But he’s most famous for the 1977 World Series when he hit .450 with 5 home runs, 8 RBIs and 10 runs scored in six games against the Dodgers, three of those home runs coming in the final game, all on the first pitch vs. three different pitchers. A year later he hit .391 with 2 homers and 8 RBIs in another 6 game win over the Dodgers. In losing to those Dodgers in six in 1981 he hit .333 with another homer and 3 runs scored. All told, he hit .357 with 10 home runs, 24 RBIs and 21 runs scored in 27 World Series games. Compare that to Joe DiMaggio who hit .271 with 8 home runs in 51 World Series games. Mickey Mantle hit 18 World Series homers in 65 games but hit only .257. Reggie was a much more mortal.227 with 6 homers in 45 AL Championship Series games, so his light shone brightest in the series all of America was watching.

It’s important to Bill James that there no such thing as clutch hitting, (it’s an important part of his statistical analysis), so he says “I’ve never thought there was any evidence that he was a good clutch hitter”. He does admit “There are about twenty players who, in my opinion, should be rated up or rated down a little bit because of their clutch performances. Yogi Berra, Joe Carter, George Brett, Steve Garvey, Reggie Jackson. It’s a dangerous area to get into because when you reach into the bullshit dump, you’re not going to come out with a handful of diamonds. But if a player really does come through in big games or fail in big games, I don’t think we can afford to ignore that” He says that Reggie “doesn’t need a bonus points to be called a great player.”

And he played on great teams. The Athletics won five straight Western Division titles from 1971-75 and three straight pennants and World Series from 1972-74. Then, in his tenure with the Yankees from 1977-81, they won four divisional titles, three pennants and two more World Series. Reggie was far from the only good player on those teams but he was the most famous and the most consistently productive hitter.

So why is he a star and not a superstar? For one thing, his batting averages. He hit only.262 lifetime. He reached .300 once- exactly in 1980. Like Bobby Bonds, he struck out way too much, an all-time record 2,597 times, with a high of 171 in one season. He once set a record with nine consecutive strike-outs. James, in his first Historical Baseball Abstract, defends Reggie on this point, saying that he “played his best years in the Oakland Coliseum, the worst ‘average’ park in the American League”. In 1973 he hit .259 at home and .321 on the road. In his new HBA, James adjusted Jackson’s 1972-74 numbers to a 1990’s statistical context and says he would have hit .327, .315 and .280 in those years. He points out that Jackson’s road batting average was 15 points higher than Carl Yastrzemski’s, .279 to .264. Of course .279 is not a superstar batting average. Reggie offered the explanation that it’s harder to concentrate on hitting for an entire regular season than it is for a World Series. He also criticized players who went for singles to hike their batting average with runners on base instead of trying to hit for power and drive in runs. It was a response to criticism that he went for home runs when a single might drive in a run.

Jackson’s fielding was often jeered at. He had good speed early and a good arm but seemed to lack the instincts to be a great fielder. I mostly saw him in his Yankees years, when he seemed awkward and unsure of himself in the field.
But then it may have been a case of people seeing only his faults. He wasn’t a popular guy among his teammates:
Graig Nettles: “The best thing about being a Yankees is getting to see Reggie Jackson play every day. The worst thing about being a Yankee is getting to see Reggie Jackson play every day.”
Catfish Hunter on the Reggie bar: “I unwrapped it and it told me how good it was.”
Anonymous teammate on his reaction to the OJ Simpson case: I was shocked. I always thought it would be Reggie”.
Jackson had a somewhat higher opinion of himself: “If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.” …”I didn’t come to new York to be a star. I brought my star with me.” ,… “I’m the straw that stirs the drink.” Then there’s this interesting clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIUe7XzpiTQ
He was a divisive character both for his teammates and the fans, (not unlike his distant cousin, Barry Bonds), and his detractors naturally focused on his deficiencies and failures while his fans focused on his big plays. So did Reggie. My interpretation of him is that he was a great athlete who decided to play baseball and focused on the most spectacular things he could do and on the biggest stage: long home runs and the World Series. He didn’t have the day-to-day dedication to the game to do everything well and be a superstar. But he was famous as any superstar and maybe that was what he really wanted.


If batting average made you a super star, than ROD CAREW was a superstar. He hit .328 lifetime in an era when very few players batted .300. He had consecutive seasons of .332, .366, .307, .318, .350, .364, .359, .331, .388.333, .318, .331, .305, .319 and .339. He was the opposite of Reggie Jackson, hitting only 92 homers in his career. He wasn’t a free swinger but didn’t walk a lot, 78 was his high). He drove in exactly 100 runs, exactly once, the year he hit .388. That was also the only year he scored 100 runs, (128). You’ve got to wonder how great of an offensive player he was when he wasn’t scoring or driving in 100+ runs, the normal benchmark for a superior offensive player. Jackson drove in 100 runs six times and scored 100 once. Carew’s teammate Harmon Killebrew was also the anti-Carew, a .256 lifetime hitter who hit 573 home runs and walked as many as 145 times in a season and drove in 100 runs nine times, with a high of 140 and scored 100 runs twice. So those high batting averages were pretty, but how much did they really mean?

Carew was also criticized for his defense. Bill James: “His arm wasn’t good, plus his footwork was never good and he never could improve it: he couldn’t get across the bag and get rid of the ball quickly, which eventually forced his move to first base.” After a knee injury in 1970, Carew also had trouble turning double plays.

But maybe Carew was as much underrated as over-rated. James’ assessments of him in his two HBA’s are mostly a defense of Carew’s defense. “But his range at second base was pretty good and he didn’t make a lot of errors….plus he was very smart, which counts because the second basemen is in the middle of the diamond and has to make decisions about which way to go with the play more often than anyone else does”. At first base, “he was an exceptionally mobile defensive player in the first few years at that position.”

When I discussed Harmon Killebrew earlier, I made this comparison: “He hit only .256 lifetime and never more than .288 but he walked 100 times seven times and led the league four times, giving him a career on base percentage of .376 Rod Carew hit 72 points higher at .328 but his on base percentage was only 17 points higher at .393. Rod drove in 100 runs once- 100 even in 1977, the year he hit .388. He also scored 128 runs that year- his only time over 100. Harmon scored 100 runs twice. Interestingly, even though they exact opposites as players, their career number sin the categories I am using are almost identical: Harmon played 2,435 big league games and produced 5,721 bases and 2,294 runs. Rod played 2,469 games and produced 5,369 bases and 2,347 runs. No wonder they called them the “Twins”. I guess they were fraternal but hardly identical.”

Catfish Hunter said of him: ““He has no weakness as a hitter. Pitch him inside, outside, high, low, fast stuff, breaking balls-anything you throw he can handle. He swings with the pitch; that is why he’s so great, He has no holes.” Part of his problem is that the Twins declined badly as a team in the 70’s and didn’t give him too many opportunities to score or drive in runs. He finally left Minnesota after an incident at a banquet in which Calvin Griffith told the audience that he was glad to have moved the team from Washington DC to the Twin Cities, which were “full of hard-working white people”. Carew, a black man of Panamian decent, was seated next to him.

My enduring memory of Carew is from the 1982 ALCS. It was still a best of five series and the Angels had won the first two games, only to lose the next two and fall behind to the Brewers 3-4 in game five. Carew was the last one up with the tying run on third. I figured that there couldn’t be anyone in baseball you’d rather have up there when you need just a single to tie the game and stay alive. Carew grounded the ball right to the shortstop. What would Reggie Jackson have done?


Or what would DICK ALLEN have done? He was Reggie Jackson before Reggie Jackson- without the showmanship. He had tremendous home run power. Bill Jenkinson got into the business of charting the distances of home runs because he was a Dick, (originally “Ritchie” but he didn’t like that, as he didn’t like most things), fan and he wanted to prove that his hero- not Babe Ruth and the others- hit them farther than anybody. Allen had my favorite hometown of all time: Wampum, Pennsylvania. He sure wamped ‘em.

Like Jackson he was an all-round athlete: “Starting as a youth in Western Pennsylvania, where he was a spectacular basketball talent as well as an enormously gifted basketball player, Dick could do anything in the arena of sports….Richard Anthony Allen could pound a baseball like few other men in the history of the history of the national pastime.” Allen hit two 500 foot home runs as a 17 year old semi-pro game in 1959 and was signed by the Phillies.

Like Reggie’s hometown of of Wyncote, Pa., outside of Philadelphia, Wampum was mostly white, (Wyncote 80%, Wampum 97%) and both young men would have seen examples of racism but also of the races getting along with each other, a circumstance that leads to more intolerance of racism than someone who has seen only racism. They know it doesn’t have to be that way. Allen found himself in 1963 in Little Rock, Arkansas playing for the Phillies’ farm team, the Arkansas Travelers. “Although most Arkansans were kind to Allen, he was still subject some intense racial bigotry and suffered the emotional scars.”

SABR: “Governor Faubus attended the season opener, and the opening night crowd waved placards that read, “Let’s not NEGRO-ize our baseball.” The very first pitch of the game resulted in a routine fly ball to Allen, who promptly dropped it. The racially charged atmosphere frightened young Allen. He came from a small town where blacks and whites got along and socialized to some degree. He heard racial taunts from the crowd and found threatening notes on his car after games. Allen told a writer in 1964, “I didn’t want to be a crusader. I kept thinking, ‘Why me?’ It’s tough to play ball when you’re frightened.” Allen was harassed at a local store and by a policeman, and was afraid to walk around town. Things got so bad that he considered quitting the team. His older brother, Coy, went down to Little Rock and told Allen that if he quit, he would have to get a job in one of the mills in Wampum. Allen stuck it out.”

The Phillies in that era had a reputation for racial incidents and Allen developed the reputation as a moody, confrontational guy. What he lacked was Jackson’s flair for showmanship and media savvy. He wasn’t fun to be around. But like Reggie, Jackie Robinson, Curt Flood and others, he responded by playing baseball hard and hitting baseballs hard. He led the International league with 33 homers in 1933 and was named league MVP. In his rookie seasons in Philadelphia, he hit .318 with 29 homers . 38 doubles, 13 triples, 125 runs scored and 91 driven in and the previously moribund Phillies almost won the pennant and Allen won Rookie of the Year. “Despite the Phillies' collapse, Allen hit .438 with 5 doubles, 2 triples, 3 home runs and 11 RBI in those last twelve games.”

Two years later he had perhaps his best season, hitting .317 with 40 home runs, 110 RBIs and 112 runs scored, despite missing 21 games. But his surly attitude and some run-ins with teammates and the press got him traded to St. Louis in the Curt Flood trade. In Busch Stadium, a difficult home run park, he had probably the best season a Cardinals hitter had between Stan Musial and Mark McGwire hitting 34 homers with 101 RBIs in only 122 games. But he got traded again, first to the Dodgers and then to the White Sox, where he became the best hitter in the American league, hitting .308 with 37 homers and 113 RBI in 1972, .316 with 16 homers in only 72 games in 1973 and .301 with 32 homers in 128 games in 1974. He was MVP of the league in 1972. Wikipedia: “Allen's feats during his years with the White Sox—particularly in that MVP season of 1972—are spoken of reverently by South Side fans who credit him with saving the franchise for Chicago (it was rumored to be bound for St. Petersburg or Seattle at the time). His powerful swing sent home runs deep into some of cavernous old Comiskey Park's farthest reaches, including the roof and even the distant (445 ft) center field bleachers, a rare feat at one of baseball's most pitcher-friendly stadiums.”

Jenkinson lovingly documents some of those blasts. In the IL, in ’63 he hit a ball over the scoreboard in Indianapolis. During spring training 1964 he actually hit a light tower, ala “The Natural”. The ball hit the pole of the tower 360 feet away and 96 feet high. It might have been a 500 footer. Then in Connie Mack Stadium, (formerly Shibe Park), he pulled a Reggie and hit a transformer atop the left field grandstand, 100 feet up and 380 feet from home plate. The next year he hit one over the Coca-Cola billboard in left center , landing on Woodcock Street, 529 feet away. 12 days later he hit one over the Cadillac billboard next to the transformer he’d hit the year before. That one was measured at 504 feet. In his 40 home run year of 1966, he hit twelve blasts of more than 450 feet, including one that hit halfway up the centerfield backdrop in Shea Stadium, 460 feet away. On 6/6/67, Dick’s teammate and one of his few friends, Bob Uecker, was traded. He channeled his anger into “smashing a ball over the Philco billboard near the center field end of the grandstand roof” in Philadelphia. “Unfortunately, no witness to the landing could be found. The ball disappeared over the roof 420 feet away at a height of about 90 feet and was described by all onlookers as a line drive…No one knows the exact distance but 540 feet would be a good guess.” Coach George Myatt had seen Mickey Mantle’s famous 1953 blast in Washington that was supposed to have gone 565 feet and declared that this one went farther. On 6/17/69, Allen hit a drive against a stiff wind over the Coke sign in left center at Connie Mack that seemed impossible. Willie Stargell “rated this drive as the longest he ever saw, despite having a hard time believing it actually happened”. On 7/3/70 he hit one at Montreal’s Jarry Park that “landed in a camera platform that was high above the ground and 448 feet away in center field.” He hit the Comiskey Park rooftop on 5/1/72 and hit the roof façade in deep left center in Detroit on 7/6/64. It “may have been the second longest home run ever hit in Detroit”. It’s estimated that one would have gone 535 feet.

But he was complaining of fatigue.He may have been emotionally worn down more than physically:
"He was just emotionally and mentally just beaten down, to where he just said . . . 'I've had enough, I've had enough, I've had enough.' " - Hank Allen, remembering how his brother Dick expressed his suffering from racism during the 1960s.” (Baseball Reference.com)
He’d also had several injuries over the years: a separated shoulder, two lacerated tendons in his right hand from a car accident, a broken left leg. He announced his retirement but was persuaded to come back by the Phillies and then the A’s. But he just didn’t have it any more, hitting only .246 with 32 homers in 258 games from 1975-77. He was only 35 years old when he hung it up for good. Mike Schmidt credited him with being a mentor for him. "The baseball writers used to claim that Dick would divide the clubhouse along racial lines. That was a lie. The truth is that Dick never divided any clubhouse.”

Willie Stargell: “"Dick Allen played the game in the most conservative era in baseball history. It was a time of change and protest in the country, and baseball reacted against all that. They saw it as a threat to the game. The sportswriters were reactionary too. They didn't like seeing a man of such extraordinary skills doing it his way. It made them nervous. Dick Allen was ahead of his time. His views and way of doing things would go unnoticed today. If I had been manager of the Phillies back when he was playing , I would have found a way to make Dick Allen comfortable. I would have told him to blow off the writers. It was my observation that when Dick Allen was comfortable, balls left the park."

Bill James has a more jaundiced view: “Allen had baseball talent equal to that of Willie Mays, Hank Aaron or Joe DiMaggio and did have 3 or 4 seasons when he was as good a player as anyone in baseball, but lost half of his career or more to immaturity and emotional instability.”

He was a throwback to the era when top hitter hit for average and power. Besides his 351 home runs on 1749 games, (33 per 162 games), he hit over .300 seven times, winding up at .292. Unlike Reggie he never played in New York and never played on a championship team. He also never played to the press. But he may have been a better player.

Bill Jenkinson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulOidZWrB-M


BILLY WILLIAMS was another throwback: a power hitter who hit for average. Like Hank Arron he had a late career explosion in the early 70’s that made him the most productive hitter in the National League for several years. He had his greatest year at age 32 in 1970: .322 with 42 home runs with 129 RBIs and 137 runs scored. That’s 224 runs produced, the most of the decade, in fact the most in baseball between 1963 and 1995. Two years later he won is only batting title at 34, hitting .333 with 37 home runs and 122 RBIs. Age finally caught up with him after that.

He wound up with career numbers similar to those of Ernie Banks, superior in many categories:
EB 2528g 2583h 763w 407d 90t 512hr 50sb 1636rbi 1305rs = 5519 bases & 2429 runs produced
BW 2488g 2711h 1045w 454d 88t 426hr 90sb 1475rbi 1410rs = 5754 bases & 2459 runs produced.
Ernie was bothered by injuries that slowed his production and forced a positon switch. As a shortstop (1953-61), Banks hit 298 homers and drove in 858 runs- and he was a shortstop, which makes those numbers, (33HR and 95RBI per year), stand out all the more. As a first baseman, (1962-71), he hit 214 homers and drove in 778 runs, (21 and 78), a much more pedestrian output. Billy’s first full season was 1961 and, playing through the Frick Era when batting numbers shrunk due to the Commissioner’s finagling, he hit 247 homers with 846 RBIs from 1961-69, (27 homers, 94 RBI per year). He then had his great stretch from 1970-72 before tailing off.

Bill James: “Billy Williams was Ernie Banks without the PR….When a reporter asked him why he didn’t get as much publicity as some other players, he said “That’s up to you guys. I can’t write about myself.”…He enjoyed playing in Wrigley Field, enjoyed playing day baseball, enjoyed hitting, enjoyed playing the field. But unlike Banks, he wouldn’t go out of his way to tell you about it.”

Between them Banks and Williams played from 1953-76. Hank Aaron played from 1954-76. My idea of fantasy baseball is to do something like this: What would Banks and Williams’ combined numbers look like if I picked their best stats in each category each year? Here’s what I came up with:
1953 10g 35ab 11h 4w 1d 1t 2hr 0sb 6rbi 3rs .314ba 24bp 7rp
1954 154g 593ab 163h 40w 19d 7t 19hr 6sb 79rbi 70rs .275ba 299bp 130rp
1955 154g 596ab 176h 45w 29d 9t 44hr 9sb 117rbi 98rs .295ba 409bp 171rp
1956 139g 593ab 160h 52w 25d 8t 28hr 6sb 85rbi 82rs .297ba 343bp 139rp
1957 156g 594ab 169h 70w 34d 6t 43hr 8sb 102rbi 113rs .285ba 422bp 172rp
1958 154g 617ab 193h 52w 23d 11t 47hr 4sb 129rbi 119rs .313ba 435bp 201rp
1959 155g 589ab 179h 64w 25d 6t 45hr 2sb 143rbi 97rs .304ba 417bp 195rp
1960 156g 597ab 162h 71w 32d 7t 41hr 1sb 117rbi 94rs .271ba 403bp 170rp
1961 146g 529ab 147h 54w 22d 7t 29hr 6sb 86rbi 75rs .278ba 330bp 132rp
1962 159g 618ab 184h 70w 22d 8t 37hr 9sb 104rbi 94rs .298ba 412bp 161rp
1963 161g 612ab 175h 68w 36d 9t 25hr 7sb 95rbi 87rs .286ba 374bp 157rp
1964 162g 645ab 201h 59w 39d 2t 33hr 10sb 98rbi 100rs .312ba 412bp 165rp
1965 164g 645ab 203h 65w 39d 6t 34hr 10sb 108rbi 115rs .315ba 431bp 189rp
1966 162g 648ab 179h 69w 23d 7t 29hr 6sb 91rbi 100rs .276ba 378bp 162rp
1967 162g 634ab 176h 68w 26d 12t 28hr 6sb 95rbi 92rs .278ba 384bp 159rp
1968 163g 642ab 185h 48w 30d 8t 32hr 4sb 98rbi 91rs .288ba 379bp 157rp
1969 163g 642ab 188h 59w 33d 10t 23hr 3sb 106rbi 103rs .293ba 372bp 186rp
1970 161g 636ab 205h 72w 34d 4t 42hr 7sb 129rbi 137rs .322ba 452bp 224rp
1971 157g 594ab 179h 77w 27d 5t 28hr 7sb 93rbi 86rs .301ba 384bp 150rp
1972 150g 574ab 191h 62w 34d 6t 37hr 3sb 122rbi 95rs .333ba 413bp 180rp
1973 156g 576ab 166h 76w 22d 2t 20hr 4sb 86rbi 72rs .288ba 332bp 138rp
1974 117g 404ab 113h 67w 22d 0t 16hr 4sb 68rbi 55rs .280ba 254bp 107rp
1975 155g 520ab 127h 76w 20d 1t 23hr 0sb 81rbi 68rs .244ba 294bp 126rp
1976 120g 351ab 74h 58w 12d 0t 11hr 4sb 41rbi 36rs .211ba 181bp 66rp
Total: 3536g 13484ab 4006h 1446w 629d 142t 716hr 126sb 2279rbi 2082rs .297ba 8639bp 3645rp
Aaron: 3298g 12364ab 3771h 1402w 624d 98t 755hr 240sb 2297rbi 2174rs .305ba 8498bp 3716rp

Billy Williams was the second half of Ernie Banks career that he never got to have. And together, they were Hank Aaron.