1972 Third Basemen Strat-O-Matic Ratings

Trying to reverse engineer Strat-O-Matic’s fielding ratings. I got the 1972 card set for my birthday last year. I love it. It was not a season I was familiar with, but am enjoying learning about it. The Yankees of the late 1970s and early 1980s, much to my Mets fandom chagrin, were the first team I loved. Graig Nettles was my favorite player. In fact, Steinbrenner trading Nettles to the Padres in the spring of 1984, when I was not yet 12 years old, was the reason I renounced my Yankee fandom (for the first time), and went initially with the Padres for a year, then the Mets. (I came back to the Yankees from around 1989 through 1998, rejecting them after they traded David Wells for Roger Clemens, then flirted back-and-forth through the early 2000s, when I really followed hockey more than baseball, finally and fully rejecting the Yankees upon the closing of the old Yankee Stadium; with all the talk about Yankee tradition, etc., the bullshit of building a new stadium – a mallpark at that – was the final straw. Fully embracing the Mets from 2009 onward has been a fulfilling experience, proverbial warts and all. But I digress.).

So, the 1972 Strat set, reissued by Strat with Super Advanced features in approximately 2020. And Graig Nettles. I couldn’t figure out how Strat could rate Nettles, then in his final year playing for the Cleveland Indians, as a 2e22 at third base. Well, actually, the error rating is easy to calculate. It’s the number of errors a player makes pro-rated over a 162 games. With Nettles making 21 errors in 150 games at third in 1972, that jibes. But a “2”? That rating covers range and ability to turn double plays. It was only a year earlier that Nettles set the Major League records for third basemen with 412 assists and 54 double plays. This in Brooks Robinson’s era.

So I compared Nettles’ 1972 rating with two 1-rated American League third basemen: Robinson and Aurelio Rodriguez, both once and future Gold Glovers. Turns out, Strat’s ratings, as usual are spot on. Brooks was rated at 1e11, turning 27 double plays, with 333 assists and 129 putouts. Aurelio turned 33 double plays, with 348 assists and 150 putouts. Nettles, like Brooks, turned 27 double plays and had more assists (338), but also had more innings played (by 11 innings) and fewer putouts (114)

I don’t love most modern stats, especially those that I can’t calculate myself easily. I like Range Factor though. It’s simply putouts + assists divided by innings played, and you can figure it per 9 innings played (which I like) or per game played, which I suppose includes extra innings or playing less than a full game. To make it useful, Baseball Reference posts the league average next to the individual player’s range factor.

So here are there 1972 Range Factors per 9 innings:

• Brooks: 3.14
• Aurelio: 3.36
• Nettles: 3.01
• League average: 2.98

So maybe Nettles is a tick below Brooks Robinson and Aurelio Rodrigues in 1972, giving him a 2 vs. a 1. Start-O-Matic famously guards its secret sauces, and the fielding rating are both the most subjective but largely the most talked about of Strat’s ratings. Glenn Guzzo’s excellent book “Stat-O-Matic Fanatics” goes behind-the-scenes with Hal Richman and team with their fielding ratings, without giving anything away. In a nutshell: the ratings are devised by field observations by team followers (largely reporters) along with stats and Strat’s subjective committee discussions. It’s a system that has proven to work.

“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”

—Moneyball, Michael Lewis, p. 158