Stan Williams, young and a Dodger.

One minute, you’re the man of the hour in a moment of incontrovertible triumph. The next, you’re the man who wants to find the deepest cave in which to hide in a moment of incontrovertible disaster. Few could tell you more profoundly than Stan Williams, who died Sunday at 84 of cardiopulmonary disease, a family friend announcing the passage on Twitter at the family’s request.

In 1959, when his Dodgers tied the Milwaukee Braves into a three-game pennant playoff, that was Williams entering Game Three tied at five and pitching three shutout relief innings, before old  Brooklyn favourite Carl Furillo won it with an RBI single in the bottom of the twelfth.

But in 1962, that was Williams in another pennant playoff, this time against the Giants, relieving Ed Roebuck in the top of the ninth with the bases loaded and a 4-2 Dodger advantage. And he may have been as much a victim of his manager’s momentary judgment lapse as his own wild tendency.

Williams threw an 0-1 pitch Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda lofted for a sacrifice fly, with Felipe Alou taking third on the play. He wild pitched Hall of Famer Willie Mays to second, turning Ed Bailey’s plate appearance into an intentional walk promptly—and walked Jim Davenport on 3-1 to send the tying Giant run home.

Ron Perranoski relieved Williams and was helpless when an infield error allowed Mays home with what proved to be the Giants’ pennant-winning run, as the Dodgers went in order on a ground out (Maury Wills), a fly out (Junior Gilliam), and a line out (Lee Walls) in the bottom of the ninth.

In one way, Williams was a designated fall guy. Dodger manager Walter Alston had him and Larry Sherry throwing in the pen, but Rob Neyer (in The Big Book of Baseball Blunders) notes Sherry had trouble loosening up so Williams it was, with lefty bat Bailey due up after righthanded-hitting Cepeda. “As Williams was leaving the bullpen,” Neyer wrote, “the lefty Perranoski said to him, ‘You get Cepeda and I’ll get Bailey’.”

“Alston decided to give Bailey the intentional walk,” catcher John Roseboro would remember, “to load the bases and set up the force play at any base. This was quite a burden to load on the wild Williams, and he got too careful pitching to Jimmy Davenport and walked him, forcing in the lead run. That was it.”

“It never bothered me that much because I gave it all I had and it didn’t work out,” Williams was quoted as saying later. “Had I let up and thrown a half-assed fastball and the guy had gotten a base hit I never would have forgiven myself. But I walked him at 100 mph, giving my best shot.”

The bad news was that the Dodgers decided Williams’s ability wasn’t always worth the wildness. They traded him to the Yankees for veteran first baseman Moose Skowron, who’d feel heartsick a year later about having helped beat the Yankees in the 1963 World Series sweep. (Skowron’s heart never left Yankee Stadium no matter where he’d play from there.)

Williams pitched for two Yankee pennant winners, then for the Indians, the Twins (for whom he had a career year—as a relief pitcher in 1970, with a striking 1.99 ERA), the Cardinals, and the Red Sox, before calling it a career to become a pitching coach and, by 1998, a scout. (Before his coaching days ended, Williams as the Mariner’s pitching coach once pulled Yankee right fielder Paul O’Neill right out of a bench-clearing brawl.)

He was rather a behemoth righthander for his time at 6’5″ and 230 pounds at prime playing weight. He wasn’t exactly a control master, which probably had as much as anything to do with batters trembling just a little at his presence, but he threw fast enough to finish second in the National League with 205 strikeouts in 1961.

The only reason Williams didn’t lead the league was a Hall of Fame teammate named Koufax choosing that year to smash Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson’s long-standing National League single-season strikeout record.

He looked like he was prepared to clunk you onto the ground with one arm swing, and he threw inside tight with frequency enough to hit 71 and knock at least that many more down, in a fourteen-season career interrupted by arm trouble provoked in 1964 when he slipped on the rubber while delivering.

There were those who thought Williams was a particularly enthusiastic head hunter; the first of Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo’s Baseball Hall of Shame book series claimed the righthander kept a little black book filled with those who were due for a drill.

Yet Williams was also a kind of baseball humanitarian who was known to go the extra ten miles to help a player he thought worthy. When the Indians traded both Williams and Luis Tiant to the Twins in 1970, Tiant ended up being released by the Twins. To Williams, who claimed Tiant his best friend in the game, that was nothing short of a human rights violation.

“I thought what was happening to Luis was a tragedy,” he told Mark Frost, author of Game Six about that surreal 1975 World Series game started by El Tiante. “I knew Luis when he was sound and I was so sure in my heart that he wasn’t finished. He’s the best friend I ever had in baseball; I respected him as an athlete and I loved him as a person. I also knew how much this game means to him, which has nothing to do with cheers and headlines.”

So Williams did something about it, Frost recorded: he worked the phones with every Show team until the Braves handed Tiant a thirty-day contract to try making that team. The Braves let Tiant go on behalf of a youth movement, but the Red Sox snapped him up. “Luis doesn’t want to impress them,” said Williams, by then Tiant’s and the Red Sox’s pitching coach. “He just wants to beat them.”

A native Coloradan who’d be elected to that state’s Hall of Fame for his high school exploits in Denver, Williams told the audience, “I would still want to pitch every day.”

Williams was also something of a practical joker during his playing days, though once in awhile it backfired. On one fine day, then-Dodger behemoth Frank Howard had the day off and decided he wanted to see the game from the bullpen. Williams decided it’d be a kick to grab a rope and make sure Howard couldn’t leave the pen.

“Williams comes around a dirt pile with a noose, and Howard just picked him up and threw him over the dirt pile in the bullpen,” said Sherry to Pen Men author Bob Cairns. “Howard didn’t even get mad.” If the gentle giant had gotten mad, he could have swung an arm and clunked Williams into the ground. Bet they would have had a few belly laughs over it.

Now, if only his Angels could build a team their .675 batter can be proud of . . .

Few things in baseball are beyond true debate, but one of them is this: As I write, Mike Trout’s major league career could end this instant, and he would be a no-questions-asked Hall of Famer. With the minimum ten major league seasons to qualify on his jacket, Trout has credentials that mark him objectively as the fifth best center fielder ever to play the game.

If you’re my age and you, too, remember seeing Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle still within their primes, you probably thought you’d never see anyone better. Until Barry Bonds, before that other stuff compromised his image, his reputation, and his true value in the eyes of many still. Then, you might have thought you’d never see better than Bonds, until you saw Trout.

For the decade of 2012-2020, Trout joined the arguments over the greatest player who ever suited up for a major league team. His achievements are laid out in enough black ink to fill a regular-size bottle for a fountain pen. One of them isn’t, however. The minute I say it, you’re probably going to sense a few million tempers—including your own, possibly—throwing the kind of tantrums that would make Earl Weaver resemble Edmund Burke:

Mike Trout at this writing is a lifetime .675 batter.

And only one member of the Hall of Fame who played all or most of his career in the post-World War II/post-integration/night baseball era batted higher than Trout.

Trout is a lifetime .304 hitter, of course. For those comparing him to incumbent or should-be Hall of Famers, he’s one point ahead of a guy who’d be there if he hadn’t treated Rule 21(d) like an unwritten rule. He’s also two points ahead of a guy once thought to have the cleanest shot at pushing Babe Ruth out of the career home run leadership until age caught up to him a little too soon.

I hope you noticed I began by saying Mike Trout is a lifetime .675 batter but continued by saying he’s a lifetime .304 hitter. As Edward R. Murrow used to say, I can hear it now: What manner of brain damage prompted you to do that? you may ask. What manner of brain damage prompts you to continue placing a badly-flawed, even fraudulent statistic, on the highest pedestal from which you judge a player? I would ask in reply.

The brain damage is actually not with either you or me. You’ve been misled. The “batting average” to which you still plight your measurement troth deceives you. You’ve known for a lifetime that it’s calculated with hits divided by official at-bats. You may or may not notice that to qualify for the “batting title” a player must have 3.1 plate appearances per team game; or, 501 plate appearances in a full 162-game season.

Perhaps it didn’t cross your mind before that something’s wrong right then and there. You didn’t think to ask, and it’s not even close to your fault, what is the logic or common sense when you need X number of plate appearances to qualify for the “batting title,” but your “batting average” divides only your hits by your official at-bats?

The 2019 National League “batting title” was a dead heat between Arizona’s Ketel Marte and Milwaukee’s Christian Yelich: they each hit .329. Marte had 569 official at-bats and Yelich had 489 official at-bats and 580 plate appearances. Between them, there were 150 times (Marte: 59; Yelich: 91) that they didn’t exist at the plate according to official at-bats.

Except that they did exist at the plate those 150 additional times. You saw them there. Unless mine eyes have been deceived, I saw them there. They had bats on their shoulders. They didn’t exactly plan to leave those bats on those shoulders, either. They also did things other than making 734 outs between them (Marte: 393; Yelich: 341) or bagging 348 hits between them (Marte: 187; Yelich: 161)—and those hits weren’t all a pile of singles, either.

“Batting average,” Branch Rickey once wrote, “is only a partial means of determing a man’s effectiveness on offense.” (1) Partial, my foot. Not only does it reject everything else you do at the plate when you’re not making outs, it says, essentially, that all hits are equal. Unless you and me both have been deceived more deeply than I suspect, all hits are not equal.

You may be the most stubbornly pigheaded clinger to “batting average” as the alpha and omega of prowess at the plate, but quick. Tell me a single equals a double. Tell me a double equals a triple. Tell me a triple equals a home run. Tell me a solo home run equals a two-run homer. Tell me a two-run homer equals a three-run homer. Tell me any of those bombs equal a grand slam.

Remember when you played baseball growing up? Remember hearing your coaches hollering while you were at the plate, “A walk’s as good as a hit?” Well, if a walk’s as good as a hit, why doesn’t it factor into the “batting average?” The last time I looked, a batter who took a walk or accepted an intentional walk didn’t return to the dugout until or unless he was out further along on the bases.

If you can tell me yes about the hits, I still have a beach club for sale below market rate—in Antarctica. If you know in your heart that you can’t tell me yes, with a straight face or otherwise, then I feel safer telling you that, in 2019, Mike Trout was a .745 batter. I feel just as safe, too, telling you that Pete Alonso, the New York Mets’ 2019 Rookie of the Year, was actually a .600+ batter. (Come to think of it, what first baseman Alonso was in 2019, Hall of Fame first baseman Jim Thome was for his entire career: a .sub-.280 hitter but a .600+ batter.)

Welcome to my world of Real Batting Average.

This is the world in which I determine, as best I can with what I have, the total value of everything a man does to reach base from the batter’s box. The world in which I satisfy myself—and hope to satisfy you, dear reader—that there just might be teams who haven’t lost their minds signing “dinky” .260 hitters to luminous lucre because those teams know those players are run creative and productive above and beyond enough to be. 400, .500, or even .600 batters. Even if they don’t yet refer to Real Batting Averages. The world in which the “batting average”—which shall be called a hitting average from this point forward—is sent to jail. Directly to jail. Do not pass Go, do not collect $20,000. (Ever wonder why Monopoly has never adjusted for inflation?)

I’ll pause so you can stop laughing.

Good. Catch a breath. Now hear (well, read) me out.

For one thing, I don’t know for dead last certain if I actually invented Real Batting Average. I’ve read exquisite arguments against the hitting average by Branch Rickey, Keith Law, Brian Kenny, and other analysts, in which one and all of them referenced the elements that go into Real Batting Average . . . without putting them into a formula and giving the result the name I’ve given it.

But since I’ve put it into a formula and given it a name, you might as well credit me or blame me, depending on your point of view. I will hand Law a tip of the beak; it was while reading his imperative book, Smart Baseball, that I first thought of the term Real Batting Average. Law’s leadoff batter was a takedown of “batting average” in which he mentioned the elements I’d put into a formula for tabulating it but never suggested such a formula himself. (If you think you’re going to be P.O.ed at me, you should know that Kenny, writing Ahead of the Curve, titled one chapter, “The Tyranny of the Batting Average.” Bless him.)

Dick Allen, .612 batter.

At the time I finally began reading Smart Baseball, I had concurrent occasion to review the late Dick Allen’s Hall of Fame case. (Two words: He belongs. I will show you soon enough that Allen, too, was a lifetime .600+ batter.) The review was instigated by a fellow online forum participant who said he didn’t want to see the Hall of Fame open to men like Allen who fell short of 3,000 lifetime hits. The fact that there are legitimate Hall of Famers who fall short of the Talismanic Three Thousand tends to elude recall on many occasions. (Feel free. Tell the world you think Babe Ruth has no business in the Hall of Fame because he didn’t reach the Talismanic Three Thousand, either.)

The Hall of Fame is (or should be) about greatness, and not compilation. So I looked closely at Allen’s record as it actually was. Yes, it’s true: Allen and his great contemporary, Tony Oliva, who also deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, came up short of 3,000 hits. What the hell, Allen and Oliva each came up short of 2,000 hits. Their careers were compromised enough by injuries that they didn’t get to experience the natural, expected decline phase great hitters usually experience.

What Allen did when healthy was beyond extraordinary. It only began with his rookie season comparing with extreme favour to Joe DiMaggio’s. We don’t consider Hall of Famers by what they could/might/would have done, but a fair calculation would tell you that injury-free Allen would likely have hit over 500 home runs and injury-free Oliva would likely have hit more than 300. But I digress.

Thus I began my review by asking myself what might be everything we should want to know about Allen at the plate. What did he bring to the table by himself that wasn’t team-dependent, as runs scored and runs batted in are? What was he doing during 983 trips to the plate that didn’t exist because they weren’t “official” at-bats?

(Down, boy/girl. You can’t score without hitting home runs unless the guys behind you in the lineup can drive you home. You can’t drive anyone home if the guys ahead of you can’t reach base in the first place—except yourself, when you hit one out with the bases empty. If you think you can, I’ve just taken a couple of grand off the price of that Antarctican beach club.)

I saw that we ought to look at Allen’s total bases, since that is the number that treats hits the way they should be treated—unequally. If you agree, right then and there you should hold the hitting average in contempt and sentence it to a couple of nights in the clink.

I saw that we should look at Allen’s walks, never mind the poor souls who think even today that they are either cheap, lazy, or both. It doesn’t seem to cross their minds that the batter with the eye acute enough and the concentration strong enough to stop him from swinging at pitches that can’t be hit—because they’re filthy enough to tie even a Hall of Famer into knots, because they’re out of the strike zones, because he lacks the reach, because he’s a batter and not a golfer or a tennis player—is superior to the batter who’ll swing at anything within sight, unless the latter is named Yogi Berra or Vladimir Guerrero.  He’d rather reach base, anyway, than strike out swinging or whack into an out. Who the hell does he think he is?

I saw, too, that we should look at Allen’s intentional walks. Of course those are folded into his walk totals. But I believe, and so should you, that a batter should get all due extra credit when the other guys would rather he take his base than their pitcher’s head off.

I saw further that we should look at Allen’s sacrifice flies. They mean runs crossing the plate. Unlike the sacrifice bunt, a batter isn’t going up to the plate determined or under orders to hit into an out. He wants to rip a base hit or even a home run. Ted Williams didn’t spend his baseball career and afterlife preaching the virtues of sacrifice flying. (Except, most likely, after he agreed by implication to perform such flying when necessary as a Marine pilot.)

And, I saw even further that we should look at the times he was hit by pitches. If the pitcher is willing to drill him, or if the pitcher isn’t trying to drill him but an inside pitch collides with his assorted anatomy anyway, let it be to his credit and on the other guy’s head for letting him reach base on the house. Sure it shows up in his on-base percentage. But he didn’t take one for the team because he took a wild one off his globe in the on-deck circle. (Unless Dr. Anthony Fauci was pitching.)

When I first tinkered with Real Batting Average, I included sacrifice bunts. Then, I thought twice. Why on earth should I give credit for a deliberate, pre-meditated out, regardless of what that out is designed to accomplish? Because 1) there’s no guarantee that the man you just sacrificed is going to end up scoring. And, 2) I am against wasting outs. Outs to work with in baseball are commodities as precious as jadeite is on the mineral exchange. ($3 million a carat; yes, you can look it up.)

Give the other guys an out on the house, and you give yourself one less piece of extremely important wiggle room to put runs on the scoreboard. (Bunt in the ninth inning, when outs make jadeite look about as precious as aluminum foil, and someone should be beaten senseless—except that you can’t beat someone into a pre-existing condition.)

There’s only one time you and me should really want to see a bunt—when there’s one of those defensive overshifts in play, and the batter has acres and acres of yummy real estate offered up as a free gift. I’ll say it again: show me the batter who shenks the Sacred Unwritten Rules and pushes a bunt onto that terrain just begging to be homesteaded, and I’ll show you a man on first on the house.

Total bases. Bases on balls. Intentional bases on balls. (Never mind the still-new rule about just handing the man first base without having to throw four wide ones.) Sacrifice flies. Hit by pitches. Add those, and divide by total plate appearances. Recorded in math, the formula for this Real Batting Average (RBA from now on) isn’t extraterrestrial calculus:

TB + BB + IBB + SF + HBP
PA

A baseball editor of my acquaintance suggested that I was really headed toward just another way to measure weighted on-base average. But then I looked at the wOBA formula and noticed two things:

Thing One—wOBA assigns assorted numbers to unintentional walks, singles, doubles, triples, and home runs that aren’t the bases gained but are intended to suggest their value toward runs. (They fluctuate yearly, depending upon each season’s actual run creation, seemingly.) I get that.

Thing Two—wOBA removes intentional walks from the divisor that equals plate appearances. Remember: Extra credit if they want to put you on first instead of their pitcher into the mausoleum. (Grant that, as a formula, wOBA is a fruit cup compared to the chopped number salads Branch Rickey developed over half a century ago. But still.)

RBA addresses how the batter reached base in the first place. It goes deeper than the hitting average doing so. In that regard, why should a walk, a hit by pitch, or a single be fractions of bases or less than the bases gained with each act?

Now comes the fun part. I’m going to show you all 2019 players who qualified for the “batting title” in each league. (Why not 2020? Short season. Equivalent, more or less, to the first two-fifths of a full season, and wanting a full-season analysis I chose the most recent full season.) Now we’re going to see who the real batting champions were, based on the same 501 plate appearances required to qualify for the “batting title.”

First, the National League, in which 69 players had 501 plate appearances or more in 2019, and sixteen batted .600 or better:

Now, the American League, in which 63 players had 501 plate appearances or more in 2019, and sixteen batted .600 or better:

Go ahead and say it. RBA says it. There were three .700+ batters in the Show in 2019. Maybe it’s time to quit saying baseball’s a game of 70 percent failure because RBA says baseball can be and sometimes is a game of 50, 60, 70 percent success.

When the Washington Nationals let Bryce Harper walk as a free agent and won the 2019 World Series in their first season without him, enough Nats and other fans crowed as if according to a script that lo! we were right, the Nats were better off with the guy who replaced him in right field to reach the Promised Land.

Oh? Aside from Harper hitting better in high leverage situations than Adam Eaton hit that year (Harper: 1.037 OPS; Eaton: .638 OPS), RBA says otherwise, too:

Harper’s detractors love to carp about his .276 lifetime hitting average. They loved snorting that the Philadelphia Phillies overpaid squared for him when he signed that $330 million/thirteen-year contract. Well, snort this:

RBA says Harper is better than his detractors think, and that’s despite the injuries that often compromise his seasons. It also says that, sure, the 2019 Nats won the World Series without him, but they’d have had an easier time doing it with him. Harper’s not exactly Mike Trout’s level of all-around great (and Trout has dealt with a few injury issues himself), but a healthy Harper entering his age 28 season, and an on-base machine still, could find himself back on the Hall of Fame track soon enough.

How about some truly mad fun? Let’s examine through RBA all the Hall of Fame position players who played all or most of their careers in the post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball era.

For the sake of Dick Allen, who deserved the honour before his death in December 2020, I’ll include him and his great contemporary Tony Oliva. I’ll include Minnie Minoso—like Allen, he should have been elected to Cooperstown during his lifetime. (I would love to have Minoso’s complete Negro Leagues numbers to factor in, but the complete statistical story isn’t available yet.)

I’ll also include one man who would be in the Hall of Fame, if not for (ahem) the other stuff, including him among the men who played the position where he was actually the most valuable among the several positions he did play throughout his career. I’ll even include another man who would be in the Hall of Fame, if not for his other stuff, actual or alleged; I’ll consider just the seasons that even his most tunnel-visioned detractors acknowledge would have made him a Hall of Famer if he had just those seasons to show. (Please try to resist cracking wisenheimer when you see the result.)

And, just for fun, I’ll include further that certain Angel who’d be a no-questions-asked Hall of Famer if his career ended unexpectedly, right now, since his peak and career values a) are both higher than the average Hall of Fame center fielder; and, b) rank him the number five center fielder ever. You’ll see Allen, Oliva, Minoso, Mr. Other Stuff, Mr. Other Other Stuff, and That Certain Angel in bold.

There’s one catch, however—sacrifice flies. The sacrifice fly wasn’t made an official statistic until the 1954 season. Several of the following Hall of Famers played a third or more of their seasons prior to the rule coming on line. How to  overcome that hole?

I tinkered with a few ideas until I tripped over a best-case scenario. I took those players’ numbers of recorded sacrifice flies and divided them by the number of seasons they played under the rule. Then, I took that result and multiplied it by the number of Show seasons they actually played. The formula is sacrifice flies (SF) divided by sacrifice fly-rule seasons (SRS), multiplied by MLB seasons. Or, if you insist on seeing it in mathematese:

SF / SRS x YRS

Thus I had as best as I could get to the total number of sacrifice flies you could have expected those players to hit all career long. I marked their sacrifice fly numbers with (*).

Now, on to those Cooperstown RBAs.

Ted Williams–The Red Sox didn’t have too many teams for their .740 batter to be proud of, either.

You notice that there’s only one among the Hall of Famers of this era who batted .700+ lifetime. Twenty-one others (including Trout) batted .600+ lifetime. The middle-infield Hall of Famers average to sub-.500 RBAs. The center fielders and right fielders are tied for the most .600+ batters among them (five each). But am I the only one shocked to see three .600+ batters among third basemen, who play one of the harshest positions around the infield?

You might notice, too, that the largest distinction for any position between the average RBA and the lowest RBA is Richie Ashburn (-113), while the highest such distinction is Ted Williams (+177). But I’ll bet you didn’t think Mike Trout’s first ten Show seasons would finish with him owning the second-highest RBA among all incumbent or in-waiting Hall of Famers, including the untainted version of Barry Bonds.

There are other factors to consider when measuring these players objectively. Some players are in Cooperstown as much or more because of their defense as their work at the plate. (See Bill Mazeroski, Ozzie Smith, and Brooks Robinson.) Several have bucketfuls of black ink. A few got there as much because of what they did after reaching base as what they did at the plate and/or in the field. (Jackie Robinson turned baserunning into guerrilla warfare whether or not he stole a base; Luis Aparicio returned the stolen base as a prime weapon in the mid-1950s; Lou Brock swiped Ty Cobb out of the career stolen base record; and, Rickey Henderson did likewise to Brock.)

We may also ponder the point that Roy Campanella, Ryne Sandberg, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Billy Williams, and Duke Snider might lose RBA points if only through total bases if they played more of their careers in homes other than bandbox ball parks. So might Larry Walker if his six seasons in Coors Canaveral had been played elsewhere, even in a neutral park, though observed fairly those plunks he took for his teams probably inflate his RBA, too.

We might see likely RBA spikes for Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, and Joe Morgan if much of their home cooking wasn’t served in the Astrodome. Or, for Gary Carter, if so much of his wasn’t served in two killer kitchens named Olympic Stadium (Montreal) and Shea Stadium (New York). Maybe even for Trout, who is devilishly close to being the same in both hitter-unfriendly Angel Stadium and on the road:

Did you realise that Frank Robinson, Henry Aaron, and Vladimir Guerrero could be that exact a trio of matches when it came to their whole pictures? It should also be comforting that—bandbox home park or otherwise—RBA helps settle once and for all an argument that was stupidity personified no matter when it was waged, and it was waged too damn often in the past: Jackie Robinson would be a Hall of Famer even if he was white.

You may have noticed that the so-called Hit King—if he hadn’t written the script himself that keeps him out of the Hall of Fame—would be the second-lowest RBA among Hall of Fame left fielders. You may have noticed, too, that the guy who’s blocked from Cooperstown because of continuing suspicion about actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances would have the number two RBA among the left fielders behind Teddy Ballgame.

Christian Yelich and Ketel Marte led the 2019 National League with their .329 hitting averages.  Tim Anderson led the 2019 American League with his .335 hitting average. But Yelich in the National League and Mike Trout in the American League were the true 2019 batting champions.

Says who? Says Real Batting Average, says who.

—————————————————————–

(1) Branch Rickey, “Goodby to Some Old Baseball Ideas”; Life, 1954.

One full season worth of elite-level play makes Fernando Tatis, Jr. almost as valuable as the entire Marlins franchise. Sort of.

Pan-damn-ic or no pan-damn-ic, spring training has arrived at last. The coronavirus is trying its best to butt into our fun and succeeding in several ways. But not even COVID could butt in when the Padres decided to make Fernando Tatis, Jr. wealthier than an island nation’s economy. Or, two thirds the value of the entire Marlins franchise.

It seems on the surface a little on the ridiculous side to give a young man who’s played only two partial seasons money usually reserved for the Mike Trouts of the game, right? Not to mention the longest contract (fourteen years) in baseball history?

Actually, in two major league seasons Tatis has played just about one full season. (2019: shortened by injury. 2020: COVID compelled a short, irregular season. But what a season. He’s made himself the most must-see baseball player this side of Mike Trout and Mookie Betts. Sometimes it seems as though he’d get a standing ovation in a full ballpark just by ambling up from the dugout and kneeling in the on-deck circle.

His work at shortstop is improving though still a bit in the negative column for run prevention. But at the plate he’s somewhere between a machine and a Jolly Green Almost-Giant. And, a .600+ batter while he’s at it.

Say what?!?

Say this. I don’t truck in the traditional batting average, never mind that Tatis has hit .301 in his season-over-two. It’s misleading and incomplete. Counting all hits as equal, which is what the traditional batting average does, is deceptive right away. You can even call it fraud. You think all hits are equal? I’ll see you on line waiting to buy a pulled pork sandwich at a kosher delicatessen.

Now, look at Tatis by way of Real Batting Average (RBA):

Add total bases (which treats hits they way they deserve to be treated: unequally), walks, intentional walks (damn right you deserve extra credit if they’d rather you take your base than their heads off), sacrifice flies (you get an RBI for them, you damn well deserve credit for hitting them in the first place), and hit by pitches. (They plunk you, let it be to your credit and on their heads.)

Now, divide by total plate appearances. Tatis in 2019-20 had 629 of them. He also had 558 “official at-bats.” As if he just didn’t exist during 71 trips to the plate. Last I looked, he had a bat on his shoulders, and he wasn’t up there to be disappeared like the hapless audience volunteer in a magic act.

Here’s Tatis so far, according to RBA:

The Padres probably don’t have a clue about RBA, but if they did they’d think to themselves, they’ve got a .633 batter on their hands and wouldn’t it be wonderful to make and keep him a Friar for life, or for fourteen years, whichever comes first. But for $340 million? The kid hasn’t poked his nose out of his hole during more than two Show seasons, and the Padres are handing him Trout Machado Harper money?

Well, it’s their money, and they can spend it any old way they choose it. The Padres these days aren’t exactly shy about opening the vault. They want to give the defending world champion/National League West behemoth Dodgers a run for it. Not necessarily for a single season, either.

But TMH money for a 22-year-old shortstop, even with Tatis’s likely higher ceiling and being a .600+ batter as it is so far? Maybe we ought to have a look at the all-time top Show hitters through age 21, based on 600+ plate appearances, men who played all or most of their careers in the post-World War II/post-integration/night ball era, and see where Tatis rests. He rests rather well in that company, in fact:

Tatis through age 21 is fourth in a crowd of nine that includes six Hall of Famers, two more who will be, and one who’s on the track at bullet train speed so far. By the way, RBA says Tatis through 629 plate appearances so far is an intriguing match to Mike Trout’s 639-appearance Rookie of the Year campaign. (Tatis is a few points higher for one good reason: Trout hit nine fewer home runs.)

Nobody’s saying Tatis is the second coming of Mike Trout just yet, and there are those people who still look at Trout’s career to date and can’t believe they’ve been watching a transdimensional talent the Show still can’t figure out how to elevate. In fairness, Trout himself doesn’t help: it’s great to let your work speak for itself, and Trout’s shouts. But he settles for being Mr. Nice Guy off the field and asks little enough more. Mr. LED he isn’t.

The Padres are laying a $340 million bet that Tatis will be as close a match to the astonishing Angel as you can get by the time he reaches his age 29 season. They’re also laying the same bet that Tatis is going to be one key piece in something the Angels—for whatever perverse reasons—have refused to allow their once-a-century man: championship teams.

You can’t win it all with just one player, but if you can put a solid team around and astride him the Promised Land isn’t as far across the river as it usually looks.

“Beyond the fact that he is very, very good, the projections remind us of several facts. First, that Tatis Jr. is still developing, a necessary reminder in a period when so many prospects seem to come to the majors fully formed . . . the shortstop is developing at the major league level,” writes Baseball Prospectus analyst Ginny Searle.

There’s no reason to think the 22-year-old won’t make further gains at the plate: While between seasons he made just a minor gain in swinging at off-the-plate offerings (31.8 to 29.6%), he made a huge leap in making contact on such swings (46.3 to 63%). Scary as pitchers might find it, he could tap into further ferocious power at the plate. One obvious way would be hitting the ball on the ground less than his 47.3 percent career rate—though it’s hard to imagine asking the major league scion to make any changes, given his production. If we’re due to get him at a typical aging rate, as PECOTA expects, Tatis Jr. may be better yet, and could keep it up into next decade.

You might take a moment to consider this, too: Tatis’s landing his fortune may have such other young titans as Juan Soto and Ronald Acuna, Jr. ringing their accountants and agents soon enough.

Just hope and pray that they didn’t make one error Tatis made: as a minor leaguer, he signed a deal with Big League Advance, an outfit that makes minor league life a lot more bearable financially in return for a portion of a player’s Show earnings. How much hook BLA has into Tatis isn’t known yet. But he won’t be getting every one of those 340 million dollars as a result, and that’s before the California tax man helps himself to part of Tatis’s dinner plate.

Beyond that, though, suppose the Padres’ maneuverings, investments, and developments don’t translate to the threshold of if not the taking of the Promised Land? Mookie Betts got his transdimensional payday from the Dodgers last year, and they opened spring training as the defending world champions. But Trout himself, the very essence of a team player and loyalist, has let himself speak softly but firmly about how little fun the Angels falling short or losing plainly has become.

If the Padres end up in the Angels’ mire by the time Tatis reaches age 29, they may hear similar whispers from him. They won’t sound like sweet nothings, either.

Like the Angels may with their franchise face, the Padres with theirs may discover in due course that there may have to be life without them, after all. The kind of life that makes the unthinkable now thinkable to come, seeing Trout and/or Tatis in alien fatigues. Love Tatis while you have him, Friarland.

If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.—Yogi Berra.

The morning-after talk seemed divided evenly between two subjects. 1) The Tampa Bay Buccaneers demolished the Kansas City Chiefs so profoundly, if slightly controversially (debates about bad refereeing abounded), that the 55th Super Bowl became a stupor unless you rooted for 2) Tom Brady, the 43 year old quarterback now winning his seventh Super Bowl ring.

Subject one dissipated swiftly enough, it seems. Subject two, not so fast. Brady’s seventh Super Bowl ring provokes debate on whether he’s the greatest of all time in any team sport. Individual sports, after all, have Serena Williams and her 23 tennis Grand Slam wins, Jack Nicklaus and his eighteen major golf tournament wins, and Michael Phelps with his 23 Olympic swimming gold medals.

Some of the competition raised in the debate include Bill Russell and his eleven NBA Championship rings, Bart Starr and his six NFL Championship/Super Bowl rings, in an earlier and far less high-tech/climate-friendly football era, and Henri Richard and his membership on eleven NHL Stanley Cup winners.

Brady, Richard, Russell, and Starr are not exactly a cast of extras. But there’s one man in any team sport whose championship presence still eludes by a fair margin. Quick: Name the baseball Hall of Famer who played on fourteen American League pennant winners and won ten World Series rings while he was at it.

Hint: Ninety percent of this game is mental and the other half is physical.

It’s still somewhat difficult to believe that a little more than five years have passed since Yogi Berra was taken home to the Elysian Fields at 90. He passed on the 69th anniversary of his first game as a Yankee and two days before the birthday of his wife, Carmen, who passed over a year and a half before her husband. “Gramp wanted to be with Gram on her birthday,” their sportswriting granddaughter Lindsay has said.

There’s still something to be said that Berra’s personality and character loomed so much larger than his actual baseball greatness as the years went passing by. Making himself the nation’s friend sometimes made Berra perhaps the nation’s most underrated among the game’s genuine greats. I’ve run it down in the past, but I wish to God the underrating stopped now.

Perhaps the sobering reality that so many of our sporting greats were (and are) found wanting as people makes us forget often enough that there can be such greats who are as admirable if not more so as men and women as they were when they played their games.

So let’s forget Yogi the beloved and address Berra the arguable greatest all-around catcher who ever played in the Show, including even Johnny Bench, Berra’s extremely close second, and possibly pending the final exhumation of Josh Gibson’s actual statistics. You can pick among several points to open, but let’s open with Yogi at the plate.

He didn’t exactly look like a hitter compared to the wiry musclemen who preceded and followed him. But only two men in Show history hit 350+ home runs and struck out fewer than 500 times, and one was named Yogi. (The other was named Joe DiMaggio.) He never struck out 40 times or more in any season. In five of his seasons, his home runs outnumbered his strikeouts. He averaged 32 strikeouts per 162 games lifetime.

For any hitter, that’d be an impressive achievement. For a classic bad-ball hitter who’d swing at anything he could see and was anywhere within Yankee Stadium’s geographic coordinates, Wee Willie Keeler living  to see Yogi (who was born two years after Keeler’s death) would have re-thought his watchword about hitting ’em where they ain’t.

Berra joined the Yankees the same year Jackie Robinson broke the disgraceful old colour line in the Show. From that year until the first year of expansion (1961), only one man drove more runs home than Berra: Stan Musial. (Here’s a classic for you: Happening upon a conversation of American League All-Star pitchers talking about how to pitch Musial, Yogi cracked as if he’d been in on it all along, “Forget it. You guys are trying to figure out in fifteen minutes what nobody’s figured out in fifteen years.”)

Bench’s greatness is no questions asked, but behind the plate he led his league in putouts twice, assists once, defensive double plays once, and fielding percentage once. Berra led his league in putouts eight times, assists five, defensive double plays six, and fielding percentage twice, and Yogi played in a time when the season was eight games shorter and the opposition running game was re-born almost kicking and screaming.

Robinson’s virtuosity at baserunning as guerilla warfare would be met midway through the 1950s by Luis Aparicio restoring grand theft bases to the game. Both before and after that, Berra was probably the most adept at neutering whatever running game there was. He threw 49 percent of the would-be larcenists who did run against him out, in a time when the league average was 45 percent.

Bench’s caught-stealing average was 43 percent—eight points higher than his league average but two points lower than Berra. There’s little reason to believe Yogi wouldn’t have been just as good shutting the running game down in a more incessant atmosphere for would-be thieves. But how did they handle their pitching staffs?

The pitchers who threw to Bench posted a collective 3.52 ERA, twelve points below the league average. Those who threw to Berra posted a collective 3.41 ERA—67 points below the league average. OK, there’s a bit of a ringer in there: Yogi’s pitchers as the regular Yankee catcher included Hall of Famer Whitey Ford for the first decade of Ford’s career, not counting the two seasons Whitey missed in military service.

So let’s remove Ford from the equation. Berra wasn’t catching a band of nobodies, of course, but there’s something to factor you may not believe. Almost everyone else who pitched in Yankee pinstripes for the eleven seasons Berra was the regular Yankee catcher did better with Yogi behind the plate than a) throwing to other Yankee catchers when the main man needed a day off or was injured and b) when they weren’t Yankees.

Maybe it’s not entirely fair to compare other catchers who didn’t have Berra’s circumstances and pitching talent to work with, but the opportunities mean nothing if you don’t seize them. “They didn’t have the chance; Yogi did,” wrote a Berra biographer, Allen Barra, “and he won—seasonal games, pennants, World Series rings—more than any other catcher. In fact, he won more than any other baseball player of the (20th) century.”

Bill James’s Win Shares system (to define it properly would take a book, and James did just that in 2002), which says a Win Share is worth about a third of a team win, has Berra ahead of fellow Hall of Famers Carlton Fisk by seven (375-368) and Bench by nineteen  (375-356). That’s in terms of career value.

Berra’s great contemporary Roy Campanella didn’t make the top ten for reasons hardly his own making. Campanella wasn’t allowed to play in the Show until the colour line was broken, and his January 1958 road accident left him a quadriplegic. Campanella joined the Dodgers a year before Berra became the Yankees’ regular catcher. Using Campanella’s career from 1949-57, how do the two really compare?

Well, each of them won three Most Valuable Player awards, both in 1951, Campy in 1953, Yogi in 1954-55, and Campy also in 1955. Campanella anchored five Brooklyn pennant winners and a World Series champion. Yogi, of course, anchored eight pennant winners and six World Series champions in the same span.

How do they look according to my Real Batting Average metric? On the surface, Campanella looks a little better:

On the surface, that is. Campanella has a far more glaring home-road split than Berra, since Campy played in the Ebbets Field bandbox at home and Yogi played in far more cavernous Yankee Stadium. I suggest that if they’d played in home ballparks with approximately the same conditions, Campanella’s RBA would probably be within a point of Yogi either way.

Don’t go there about that yummy Yankee Stadium short porch in right field: the further blessing in Berra’s bad-ball hitting was that he wasn’t anchored to pull hitting. Their OPS+es, which adjust to all the parks in which a player hits, are still quite different: Berra’s (130) is seven points higher than Campanella’s (123).

Ralph Branca (center) in on the fun between Yogi and Campy, the friendly rivals. (The Sporting News.)

Don’t think about their strikeouts, either, because Campanella’s going to lose big. From 1949-57, Yogi struck out 215 times . . . but Campy struck out 501. And Campanella was more prone to hitting into double plays than Berra during the same span: 143 for Campy, 89 for Yogi. Neither man was particularly fast on the bases, but somehow Yogi managed to take extra bases on followup hits 49 percent of the time he reached base while Campy did it 39 percent of the time.

Handling pitchers? We’ve given a look at Berra’s Yankee pitchers. Campanella’s Dodgers had good pitchers, a couple of whom had Hall of Fame talent—Don Newcombe and Carl Erskine were probably the two top examples; Campy also got to catch Hall of Famer Don Drysdale for Big D’s first season as a regular starter—but never posted Hall of Fame numbers.

The pitchers who threw to Campanella posted a 3.78 ERA. That’s 31 points higher than the pitchers who threw to Yogi. These were the Show’s two greatest all-around catchers of their time, handling pitching staffs of roughly equivalent talent if you remove Whitey Ford from the equation. (And, in the cases of Eddie Lopat and Preacher Roe, roughly equivalent, shall we say, wile and guile—and anything else they could apply to the ball.)

Berra led his league in catching putouts seven times during Campanella’s career span, while Campanella led his league six. Berra also led in catching assists three times to Campanella’s one. He led his league in catchers’ double plays eight times during Campanella’s career span; Campanella did it only twice. Yogi also led his league in defensive runs saved above the league average (total zone runs) three times; Campy never did.

Berra’s Yankees were better teams than Campanella’s Dodgers, and Campanella’s Dodgers were the best team in the National League cumulative from the year Yogi became the regular Yankee catcher until Campy’s final season. They got to tangle in five World Series against each other in the span in question. Oops.

Yogi’s tough Yankees had to beat Campy’s tough Dodgers in four out of five World Series against each other in that span and—even with the 4-1 Yankee win in 1949—the Dodgers were no Series pushovers. The Yankees also won five straight Series—including three against the Dodgers plus one each against a fluke team (the 1950 Phillies’ Whiz Kids) and a cheating team (the 1951 Giants)—from 1949-53. Guess who was behind the plate anchoring and calling the Yankee program on the field.

“Everyone regarded me as a cocky kid when I came up,” Whitey Ford once told Barra, “and that’s the way they continued to see me throughout my career”

I acted that way ’cause I figured it gave me an edge. I didn’t throw as fast as some guys and I didn’t have as big a curve as some, but I acted as if I was confident, and that’s the way people regarded me, especially the hitters, the ones I really wanted to impress. Well, I wasn’t confident, not really. It was Yogi who was confident, and Yogi that made me feel that way. With anyone else as my catcher, I wouldn’t have been the same pitcher.

Barra has written that catching is “the toughest position to find a good player at in baseball—and maybe in all three major sports.” Assuming he meant baseball, football, and basketball, we should note that finding good goalies in professional hockey isn’t exactly ice cream, either.

Well, now. Three goalies (Jacques Plante, Charlie Hodge, Ken Dryden) are tied for playing on the most Stanley Cup winners—with six. Two (Turk Broda, Grant Fuhr) have five; seven (Clint Benedict, Terry Sawchuk, Johnny Bower, Gump Worsley, Michel Laroque, Billy Smith, Patrick Roy) have four.

Between the Red Sox and the Yankees, Babe Ruth played on ten pennant winners and won seven World Series; as a Yankee, it was seven pennants and four Series winners. Lou Gehrig played on seven pennant winners good for six Series titles. Joe DiMaggio played on ten pennant winners and won nine Series rings. Mickey Mantle played on twelve pennant winners and won seven rings.

That’s not fourteen pennant winners and ten World Series rings.

None of those men played as tough a defensive position requiring as much brain as brawn power as that squat, comical-looking fellow from St. Louis, who told you it wasn’t over until it was over, who could have seen a pitch sailing toward the press box and hit it down the line one way or the other when not hitting it over the fence one side or the other, and who out-coloneled everyone else at his position.

Love or loathe Tom Brady (it seems to be spread about evenly between the two), congratulate him for seven Super Bowl rings. But if you’re judging team sports players according to how many world championships their teams won when anchored by them,  Brady and the others have to answer to someone else before you think of them as the greatest and/or most valuable team players.

Hint: It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

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* What would have happened if Roy Campanella could have continued his career in Los Angeles.

Carl Erskine once swore that playing in the insane asylum that was a baseball field shoehorned into the Los Angeles Coliseum, with its Green Monster-like high left field fencing and short foul line, might have given Campanella a revival as a hitter. Perhaps; perhaps not. He would have been 37 in his first Coliseum season.

Campy would have been 40 and likely retired by the time the Dodgers moved into Dodger Stadium; the years of beatings he took behind the plate in the Negro Leagues and then in Brooklyn might have finished him a little sooner.

But we’ll never know.