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

Cheering for baseball

It’s been a long time, maybe 25 years, to be honest, since I cared this much about baseball, since I followed every single game of one team. Why else would I listen to an afternoon game on a transistor radio in my office on the Friday before Labor Day for a sub-.500 team 12½ games out of first place?

Why else would making a pilgrimage to a stadium make me as giddy as a 10-year-old (and as disappointed as a petulant child when an earlier trip was canceled)?

It’s baseball.

The Mets pennant may be over, but that hardly diminishes my enthusiasm for my adopted team. Perhaps it’s the relative newness of following a National League club. Perhaps it’s still the early stages of a love affair, where everything bad is viewed through rose-colored glasses and notice only the good. Either way, I’m going to be sad when the Mets season ends in a month.

(Originally published at The Icepick Cometh)

On dodging career bitterness to become the ‘other guy’ and escape ‘the depths of Mordor’

In what has become a disaster of a Mets season after so much promise in June, R.A. Dickey remains a highlight and perhaps the most inspirational story to come from on-field performances in this baseball season.

Dickey’s story has been well-told: born without (or perhaps it atrophied as a youngster) an ulnar collateral ligament — the primary tissue that stabilizes the elbow — in his pitching arm, he shouldn’t be able to turn a doorknob without pain, let alone pitch.

He was drafted out of college by the Texas Rangers, but a team doctor discovered the oddity in his arm, and the team downgraded a promised $800K offer to $75 grand.

After wandering through the majors and minors and through several organizations for more than a decade — the very definition of a journeyman — Dickey has found success in his first season with the Mets this year by mastering the unpredictable knuckleball, a pitch so rarely used that only two Major League hurlers use is as a primary weapon (Dickey and Boston’s Tim Wakefield). Dickey is doing this at 35, an age when most professional ballplayers are in their decline stage (though some top-level pitchers do throw into their 40s, as do many knuckleballers).

Oh, and by the way, in the world of monosyllabic jock quotes, Dickey was an English major in college, is an avid reader, and is a thoughtful quote.

But what continues to strike me, and what gives me inspiration as a 38-year-old former English major with what feels like a stalled career and little understanding of what to do about it, is R.A. Dickey’s attitude about his own career, which saw such promise (and promise of riches) turn to a kind of professional wandering in the desert, and then to an eventual career reboot that is well on the way to redemption.

As he told the New York Times in 2008 (while still working on, but not yet perfecting, that knuckleball):

“‘Imagine winning the lottery and then losing the ticket,’ said Dickey, who signed with the Rangers because he assumed no team would give him a chance again. He reported to the minor leagues knowing that precious little was keeping his elbow together, that each day pitching could be his last.

“‘Every day I had to decide whether I was going to be bitter, if I was going to be that guy — woe is me, you know?’ Dickey said. ‘I had to choose every day to be the other guy.'”

Or, as Keith Hernandez said in the Mets’ SNY broadcast earlier tonight (in a bit of coincidental and unfortunate timing, just before Dickey gave up a game-tying home run), Dickey’s career was “in the depths of Mordor,” and now he is a candidate for comeback player of the year.