Evan Longoria Likely (Did Not) Have The Best Rookie Season By a Third Baseman. Ever.
by R.J. Anderson on Mar 3, 2009 6:00 AM EST
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Did you know, Evan Longoria's season was the third best by a rookie third baseman who played at least 100 games in history? Well, it's true. The filtering statistic of choice is OPS+ since raw numbers would leave us with the offensive eras rather than the players who truly stood out from their peers.
The Milwaukee Brewers' Ryan Braun is the leader with an OPS+ of 153(!) and Cincinnati Red Grady Hatton (128 OPS) from 1946 are the top two. Braun is a contemporary, but now plays the outfield. Easily one of the better offensive players in the game, Braun saw quite the improvement moving to left field this season. Pretty close to average.
Meanwhile Hatton had an interesting career. His final season came as a 37-year-old with the Chicago Cubs in 1960. In between Hatton spent time with the White Sox, Red Sox, Orioles, and Cardinals, but never found a way to top his 23-year-old season. Hatton's career line isn't all too impressive by today's standards either: .254/.354/.374. For comparison, Akinori Iwamura's career line is .279/.353/.394. Alas, that is why context is important.
The rest of the non-Longoria top five features Jim Finigan (1954 Philadelphia Athletics, 120 OPS+), Art Devlin (1904 New York Giants, 120) and Eric Hinske (2002 Toronto Blue Jays, 119 OPS+). Finigan was 25-years-old during his rookie season with the Athletics, and while he was an All-Star the following season, he never posted an OPS+ above 95 again and was out of the league after turning 30. Devlin had a solid career during the early 1900's with the Giants.
Hinske, well you know him. Oh, and the other Rays connection is Iwamura's 2007 season, which ranks 15th.
Now I certainly was not around to see Hatton play - and I doubt many - if any - of you were, and while I don't want to take away from the highlight of his career, well...we all know Braun was quite poor defensively. We all also know that Evan was pretty damn fine with the leather. FanGraphs' UZR has Braun worth -25 runs(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in exclamation marks) and Longoria worth 15 runs. Even if those numbers are not exact, Braun only had about an 18-run advantage in offensive production. Was Evan at least 18 runs better defensively? The numbers certainly suggest it.
That means there's a realistic chance that Evan Longoria is the owner of the best rookie season by a third baseman in league history.
Edit: Or not. As RGlass brought up:
Baseball-reference did not offer a “rookie” qualifier, so this data may be a bit incomplete. These are players who’s first years were their rookie years, and any player who had a cup of coffee prior to his true rookie year is not in this discussion. If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d look to see second year guys that had better seasons and find out if they still qualified as rookies. So, in this context “rookie” means first-year player and not all players that were rookie eligible.
I missed that disclaimer, and also missed Dick Allen, as Rob Neyer notes. My apologies, and if nothing else, important life lesson learned: look into classifications better.
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This was interesting....
"22-year-old"
Also, I used B-Ref’s PI features. Suck it.
by R.J. Anderson on Mar 3, 2009 9:21 AM EST up reply actions
No, it took me 15 minutes with a PI subscription.
by R.J. Anderson on Mar 3, 2009 9:31 AM EST up reply actions
"Batting season finder"
It’s beneath age. Something like “Experience”. You’ll notice because it says “First” and “Last”.
by R.J. Anderson on Mar 3, 2009 9:34 AM EST up reply actions
That doesn't mean rookie necessarily...
In the first post I linked see this caveat:
Baseball-reference did not offer a “rookie” qualifier, so this data may be a bit incomplete. These are players who’s first years were their rookie years, and any player who had a cup of coffee prior to his true rookie year is not in this discussion. If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d look to see second year guys that had better seasons and find out if they still qualified as rookies. So, in this context “rookie” means first-year player and not all players that were rookie eligible.
I wish I would've seen that before.
Doubt it affects too much though.
by R.J. Anderson on Mar 3, 2009 9:40 AM EST up reply actions
Some guys that were missed:
Hornsby in 1916
Frank Baker in 1909
Pinky Higgins in 1933
Jim Delahanty in 1904
All of MLB, 3B in their 1-3 years that qualified as rookies. All have OPS+ higher than Longoria.
Gotcha.
But defense matters. Obviously we have no idea how they were.
How much higher?
by R.J. Anderson on Mar 3, 2009 11:14 AM EST up reply actions
Already exited.
I mean just do another BI with it. Hornsby crushed it (like 170), but he’s one of the greatest ever. I think Baker was 150+.
Hornsby – 150 OPS+ (presumably decent defensively, since he spent half his games in the middle infield and the rest of his career at 2B, although at the time 3B was considered to be a more defensive-oriented position than 3B)
Baker – 147 OPS+ – His .447 slugging percentage was 4th in the majors, and was considered a decent defender at what was at the time considered to be the premier defensive position. That said, he still had 42 errors (that was about average at the time, but also does seem to indicate that the overall level of play was lower then, although it was in the infancy of modern glove use).
Delahanty – 129 OPS+ – No grey ink, not sure I’d qualify this season as being anything too special considering the number of teams and overall quality of play at the time.
Of course, all three of those were in the dead ball era, so it makes it tough to compare. Not only that, but you get into all the quality of play issues.
Higgins – 128 OPS+ – wasn’t known for his defensive prowess
Vogt early, Vogt often.
Typo on Hornsby
Meant to say that 3B was considered a more premium defensive position than 2B at the time (so a worse defender would have been moved to 2B).
Vogt early, Vogt often.
Yep.
I completely missed Allen for reasons mentioned above.
Inexcusable on my part.
by R.J. Anderson on Mar 3, 2009 12:14 PM EST up reply actions
moar like win shits amirite
Brad Ziegler had a scoreless inning streak. Brad Ziegler had not met BJ Upton.
moar like win shits amirite
Brad Ziegler had a scoreless inning streak. Brad Ziegler had not met BJ Upton.
It's the only measure that purports to account for defense that cuts across all eras
Vogt early, Vogt often.
Back through 1955 there's TotalZone
I know that’s not ALL eras, but at least you can avoid using Win Shares for over half of relevant baseball history.
Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.
Corrected
(Mike Sweeney was in the skit however)
by GomesSweetGomes on Mar 3, 2009 6:27 PM EST up reply actions
Sucks to be called out by Rob Neyer nationally,
but he makes it sound like blogging has been around for 100 years. You did go a bit over-the-top on this post, but I think your blogging history suggests that you are no rookie, either. Everyone makes their fair share of mistakes, including Neyer.
At least being corrected nationally shows the power that is growing behind respectable blogs like SBN. And even then, I don’t know how much credibility Bill James’s win shares hold anymore. Tom Tango’s WAR seems to be the new standard. So Neyer may have been correct, but he needs to better stats to back up his material. (And you being an author over at FanGraphs, you know more about this than I do.)
Free publicity doesn't hurt
Honestly when I read RJs original work I kind of got a different take on it than most. It wasn’t that RJ was really pushing Longo for the greatest rookie season as a 3b moreso than that Longo’s season was really underrated given the elite defense that he played. The Braun comparison really highlighted that.
Free pub is great
But I think that post was pretty over the top. Let’s face it – ESPN doesn’t exactly put out solid contact day in and day out. While I’m normally a huge fan of Neyer, I do not recall him ever taking a colleague to task for inaccuracies. The response comes across as someone threatened by the blogosphere – which is an attitude that Neyer himself fought long to crack as he worked to get onto the BBWWA for HOF voting.
Not that I’m anywhere near Neyer, but if I see something odd in another fantasy writer’s work, I’ll take the time to reach out to him personally to discuss the matter before calling him out in one of my own pieces. Neyer’s behavior in his response is what I’d expect from RaysIndex, not a major media mogul.
I think that was written somewhat sarcastically
I hope so, anyway. Correcting a point while making a joke about “young bloggers”? That’s how I see his story, anyway. If not, then that was kinda jerkish.
The artist formerly known as jihad.
My two cents
It was a slow day news for Neyer, and he decided to go FJM with material he read on BBTF.
by GomesSweetGomes on Mar 3, 2009 10:18 PM EST up reply actions
Not FJM in the sense he went line-by-line
But more in the sense that when hard up for material, it’s easy to criticize what you read elsewhere. Granted no site, including this one, is free of this device. So long as it isn’t the main focus of content, I’m fine with it.
by GomesSweetGomes on Mar 3, 2009 10:22 PM EST up reply actions
drawback of the intertubes
Tone is tough to pick up sometimes. When I read it this morning, didn’t think much of it. When I re-read it tonight, it came across as heavy-handed IMO. Then again, the headline this morning was (I think) Greatest rookie 3b ever?? whereas now it says young blogger needs more seasoning.
by Jason Collette on Mar 3, 2009 10:22 PM EST up reply actions
The parallel of the title to "gritty veteran" or "unproven blogger" is what sets of the sarcasm-dar for me
It is hard to tell. I thought it was jerkish earlier and it looks like a satire to me now.
The artist formerly known as jihad.
While I criticized Neyer for the blog entry elsewhere, I don’t think he did it to be a jerk- it’s completely not Rob’s style. He’s always struck me as a pretty humble, unassuming guy (even moreso in person). He’s possibly too nice to really pull off sarcasm well.
--
Dan Szymborski
dan@baseballprimer.com
The whole point is to get it right. The problem is with the way he did it.
However I can see the problem for Neyer. If he was just “nice” about it, then his post would have been pretty boring. He might as well have just called up RJ and told him about his inaccuracies. He had to make his correction somewhat interesting to the ESPN masses. So he tossed in something he percieved as sarcasm when others thought it was a bit heavy handed. No harm no foul IMO mainly because the whole goal should always be to get it right.
I guess no one cares about the 19th century
Jimmy Williams, Pittsburgh, 1899.
Not even a cuppa coffee before he played 152 games at 3B, recording a .355/.417/.535 season. Scored 126 runs and knocked in 116, 219 hits, led the NL with 28 triples. Even so, his OPS+ fell just short of Dick Allen’s in 1964 (Williams 161, Allen 162).
Williams soon moved to 2B, and never had another season like that one. But still, he was a rookie 3B in 1899, and his rookie season was orders of magnitude better (offensively) than Longoria’s.
Postscript
Tom Tango wrote a piece about how this is how the blogging community is supposed to work, and that it works out much better for peer review than other formats.
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/peer_reviewing_bloggers/#comments
and BBTF up in arms…
Vogt early, Vogt often.
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