A Jim Rice Post (sorry)

I really don’t want this to be about Jim Rice or the Hall of Fame, but you may not believe me if you keep reading. What I really want to do here is make a point, and Rice just happens to serve as the example. However, the Hall of Fame debates are near the forefront of the baseball scene right now, and one writer’s argument about Rice has inspired me to write this piece.

Another disclaimer: this is not a good post. It just isn’t. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

I also don’t want to make this about the writer in question, Peter Abraham. I cannot claim to be familiar with his work, but my first impression is that he seems to be reasonably thoughtful and intelligent. However, he happened to raise a particular point, which I have seen broached elsewhere in different forms, explicitly and openly, and thus it is easy to respond to. It is a lot more difficult to respond to “Some people say…” as it seems as if you are setting up a strawman piñata to bash with a Louisville Slugger.

This is what Mr. Abraham wrote in his blog at LoHud.com:

But here’s the problem, the Hall of full of players who were elected based on those standards. So should Jim Rice suffer or Bert Blyleven be elevated because smart people came up with better, more revealing statistics?

Nobody cared about on-base percentage in the 70s and 80s. Rice’s job was to swing for the fences. But now we know OBP matters. But Jim Rice can’t get in the DeLorean and take more pitches because it would make the Baseball Prospectus guys respect him more.

I have four points I would like to make in response, and I will take the lazy route and make a list:

1. Jim Rice had a low walk rate for a big slugger, even for a benighted era. I looked at the relative walk rates (W/(AB + W) relative to the league average of the same) for all of the 350 HR men in MLB history who started their careers in 1974 or earlier; Rice started his career in 1974, so these are all players who presumably would not have been affected by external pressure to take more pitches:


As you can see, most of these hitters drew a lot of walks relative to their peers, regardless of whether it was “their job” or not. Rice, walking at just 79% of the league average, is 38th of 41 on this list.

I could see this argument if Rice was not unique, and all of the big sluggers of the benighted era were not drawing walks. That’s just not the case.

In fairness, you can pick apart this list in a couple of ways. For one, the 350 homer minimum puts Rice, with 382, near the bottom. He’s being compared to a bunch of players who are better than him. A true group of his comparables would set the line lower, so that Rice was near the middle of the group. On the other hand, since the Hall of Fame is the overarching subject of this whole discussion, these are the guys he should be compared to. Also, eyeballing similarity, I would say the most similar players (in terms of career length, era, and production) on this list would be Dwight Evans, Dick Allen, Norm Cash, Rocky Colavito, Frank Howard, Graig Nettles, Billy Williams, Tony Perez, Dave Kingman, Orlando Cepada, and Lee May--all of whom walked more than he did except the last two. You don’t need to compare him to Ruth, Foxx, and Mantle to see that he didn’t draw a lot of walks for a slugger.

Another complaint is that by requiring the players to have embarked on their careers in 1974 and earlier, I am cutting out players who are essentially contemporaries of Rice while including many others who are clearly not his contemporaries (Ruth, Gehrig, Ott, etc.) Rice belongs in a group with Andre Dawson, who’s excluded here, much more than he does with them.

Caveats aside, I think the claim that sluggers of Rice’s era didn’t walk (or weren’t expected to walk) and thus it doesn’t matter should have to establish that contention. It flies against common sense and it flies against a cursory look at the evidence, and I am trying to be generous.

2. I let it go in my first point, but I don’t believe there was a benighted era (Abraham does not explicitly state that there was, but it is hinted at). Sure, baseball people (and writers, and fans, etc.) generally have a better or more complete understanding of the value of OBA and walks now than they did in 1980 or 1920. But I think it’s just a little bit condescending to pretend as if it was a revelation to them. Perhaps to some; but there have always been Earl Weavers and Branch Rickeys out there who understand the importance of getting on base/avoiding outs as well as anybody in any time.

There are certainly people throughout baseball, past and present, who didn’t properly appreciate the value of getting on base. And there are many more that, while recognizing the theoretical value of getting on base, have ignored or undervalued it when using statistics to judge a player. That’s a far cry from believing that this belief was so overwhelming that it prevented Rice from displaying patience, and the walk rates of other big home run hitters doesn't support such a position.

3. Even if someone threatened to fine Rice for every pitch he took, I don’t care. In the end, I am only interested in assessing value. If Rice’s lack of selectivity was caused by the conditions of his time, and made him a less valuable player in his own time and place than he might have been had he played in 2005, I don’t care.

Generally speaking, the same things that won baseball games in 2005 won baseball games in 1975. Evolving metrics just allow us to better quantify reality--they don’t change it.

This is where the discussion crosses into opinion territory of course--"value rules all" does not have to be the underlying philosophy that you use when evaluating players. I happen to believe that the only truly fair way to evaluate a player is to estimate how many wins he contributed to his team in the unique context in which he actually performed. Anything else is judging him on what he might have been or could have been and ultimately, what the individual thinks he could have been, rather than what he was. From reading the arguments of other writers over the years, it is my observation that straying too far off the value reservation often results in a mess of countering what-ifs and contradictions. It is much easier to just judge the player’s achievements as they relate to winning baseball games in the environment in which he actually performed.

Perhaps Rice would have taken more pitches if he had played today…but perhaps his aggressiveness enabled him to hit some of his home runs. Perhaps he would have gotten frustrated as a rookie when his hitting coach tried to impose this upon him, pressed, and gotten labeled as a AAAA player. Perhaps he would have been Manny Ramirez instead. The point is, you cannot possibly know what would have happened with any degree of certainty. Sabermetric estimates of Rice’s value in his own time and place are certainly not without flaw, weakness, and oversight, but they also are grounded in the principle of assessing what Rice actually did, and estimating its value.

I would even go so far as to say that Abraham’s argument, taken to its extreme, glorifies statistics above winning. One of the common complaints about sabermetricians is that all we care about is the numbers. Of course, the reason we look at certain statistics and interpret them as we do is because they correlate with wins. If you throw up your hands and say “In Rice’s time, people valued BA, HR, and RBI” and look at these despite agreeing that they are less telling than other metrics, aren’t you in fact saying that putting up statistics (specifically, statistics that are in vogue in a given time and place) is what matters?

4. Even if one accepts Abraham’s premise, I can’t imagine using it as an argument against a player. He cites Rice and Blyleven as two sides of the coin; one whose standing has been hurt by the proliferation of sabermetric ideas and one who has benefited from it.

Abraham suggests that perhaps Rice would have played the game differently if he played today. As I have spent the rest of this post explaining, I don’t buy it and even if I did, it wouldn’t change my mind on my opinion of him. But if you do, you may accept Abraham’s argument and view Rice’s relatively low OBAs (for a Hall of Fame corner outfielder) as a product of environment.

I have to ask, though, how would Blyleven’s performance be affected? Blyleven looks better when you evaluate him by runs allowed instead of by win-loss record. Had the observers of the time thought more about his ERA instead of his W%, he would have been better regarded in his own time. But how would it have affected what he did on the field? Blyleven was trying to prevent runs and win games. Are we to believe that he would have been able to allow less runs (or that he would have allowed more) had his contemporaries not paid attention to the “W” and “L” columns? Since I have to assume that just about everyone would answer “no”, then what good does it do to evaluate Blyleven in an outdated light? At least in the case of Rice, Abraham has offered a possible cause and effect relationship between contemporary views of statistics and performance. I don’t see any offered for the case of ERA v. W-L.

I have tried to avoid mentioning the Hall of Fame, because I don’t want to get into that debate (“that debate” being the one about which specific players should be in/out, not the election process itself or how a theoretical Hall might look). The same issues that come up in relation to the Hall are relevant for the general discussion of player value down through the years. My opinion of the Hall will be the same after Rice’s induction as it was before Rice’s induction, and while you can probably tell what I think of Jim Rice as a player, my intent really was just to use him as a vehicle to touch on the larger issues.