On Thursday, January 4, 1996, Neal Traven (baseball@WORLDPATH.NET) posted the following to the Pirates e-mail list. I have edited it and placed it here with his permission. Neal has taken a unique approach to his all-time list. Be sure that you review his methods so that you can fully understand his results. You may find a few surprises on Neal's list; I found it to be a very interesting post. I have included links at the bottom of the page to several of my other Pirate pages that may include some brief biographies on some of these players. I have also included, for some of the lesser known Pirate players, a list of the years they played in Pittsburgh. Now, get ready for the fur to fly....
I presented the Pirate Sabrmetric All-Time Team at last year's SABR national convention (the convention was held in June 1995 in Pittsburgh). Using methodologies that have appeared on rec.sport.baseball (and as little personal belief as possible), I reviewed the 108 years of the Bucs through the 1994 season. I evaluated the players only on what they did in a Pirates uniform.
Data source: Pete Palmer (editor of Total Baseball and author of The Hidden Game) gave me a diskette containing the standard year-by-year data for every single man who ever played for the Bucs between 1887 and 1994.
Eligibility:
Methods: Hitters were evaluated on offense plus fielding. Pitchers were evaluated on pitching plus offense plus fielding. The offensive measure is Clay Davenport's Equivalent Average (EqA), a park- and season-adjusted statistic. Fielding Runs (FR) were estimated by either Dale Stephenson's adaptation of Sherri Nichols' Defensive Average (since 1987) or Palmer's linear weights-based FR as calculated in Total Baseball II; raw FR were adjusted for park and year using the same factors as in EqA, then added to the yearly totals used for EqA, and something I'll call EqA/F was the result. Non-pitchers were ranked, within position, by this quantity, which has a range quite similar to that of batting average.
For pitchers, Davenport has begun to develop park- and season-adjusted pitching lines using an approach similar to what he uses for hitting. This process produces adjusted career ERA figures. I then calculated (hitting plus fielding) for pitchers, as described previously. Under the assumption that a run is a run, I then subtracted these 'runs' from the pitcher's earned runs allowed, and computed ERA/A -- ERA adjusted for the pitcher's own hitting and fielding.
I hasten to add that this process is undoubtedly flawed. One comment at the presentation is that I should have prorated the hitting/fielding adjustment factor by the proportion of earned runs among all runs allowed. This would decrease the effects of hitting and fielding for long-ago pitchers compared with more recent ones, and perhaps resulted in having fewer 19th century pitchers at the top of the Starting Pitcher rankings.
Results: I actually chose 26 players for my team: the top two at each position, five Starting Pitchers (SP), and five Relief Pitchers (RP). For hitters, I present the career EqA/F for the leaders at each position, along with the values calculated for all Pirate HOFers and other interesting players. For pitchers, the ranking is by ERA/A, separately for SP and RP; I also mention particularly good/bad hitting/fielding players.
C: Gibson - 13th out of 13 qualifiers; he couldn't hit or field.
1B: Stargell - he's a left fielder; Willie would have been tied with Fletcher if you had put him here.
2B: Maz - I'm still on the fence about the HOF for Maz.
3B: Traynor - 5th out of 16 qualifiers at third base; he had no power and took no walks at the height of the offensive explosion.
SS: Wagner - Unquestionably, Honus is the best SS in history.
LF: Kiner - Mike cheats by moving Bonds to CF.
CF: Bonds - Yes, he'd be a fine one, but he actually played nearly all his games in left.
RF: Clemente - Mike and I agree on two spots in the starting lineup.
Bench: Sanguillen (C), Suhr (1B), Glenn Wright (SS; 1924-1928), Vaughan (SS), Parker (OF), Carey (OF), P. Waner (OF)
Overall, Mike and I agreed on 8 non-pitchers.
SP: Drabek, Candelaria, Phillippe, Cooper, Friend, Law
RP: Face, Giusti, Tekulve, Haddix (SP/RP)
I'm not sure that I fully agree with what my numbers said about
pitchers.
The only pitcher Mike and I have in common is Tekulve. I'm sure
we do agree,
however, that the Bucs never built their success on
pitching."
[end of Neal Traven's Pirate Sabrmetric All-Time Team]
"I agree that catcher is a weak position historically for the Bucs. I'll talk more about defense below. Pat (another list member) asked if Lopez is the same Al Lopez who later became a genius manager? Yep; he played for the Bucs in the twilight of his career (1940s). The fact that an aging Lopez shows up so high on the Bucs' career list is an indication of how weak the position really has been over the years.
Pat also asked if catcher was an improved position over the years. I have a real problem with trying to compare players who played in different eras, when offense and defense are included. I don't think most of the current statistical methods for evaluating defense accurately reflect changes in the way the game was played across different eras.
Don Slaught rated 1st in Neal's data. George Gibson rated 13th. Would Don Slaught have been able to play during Gibson's era? Would Don Slaught have been the first catcher to catch large numbers of games in a season on a regular basis, as Gibson was? Would Don Slaught have kept the Tigers' running game (featuring Ty Cobb) under control in the 1909 World Series to the extent that Gibson (admittedly aided by the Bucs' pitchers, to be sure) did? In Fred Lieb's book about the Pirates, this was mentioned as one of the key factors in the Bucs' win that year.
In his historical book, Bill James recognized the need to develop different runs created formulas for different eras to reflect the different weights of various offensive events. Clay does this as well when developing EqAs (indeed, the reason he did so was to evaluate how well Honus Wagner and Ty Cobb would have hit today). I see a similar need for this when evaluating defense, as well. If the Stolen Base carries so much more weight in 1909 than it does today, the ability to PREVENT the SB should also carry that much more weight.
Neal's method (as nearly as I understand it), by using the factors used for EqA to adjust raw fielding runs, tries to do that. I'm still skeptical about that because I don't know to what extent Palmer's fielding runs formula adjusts for cross-era impacts. Because teams ran so much, he impact of allowing 10% fewer stolen bases per game would be much greater than it is now, as would be the impact of turning 10% more DP per game (since there were fewer DPs). I'd expect an accurate cross-era FR formula to weight these events appropriately in the context of the era.
I selected Gibson as my starting catcher because:
LF: Again, Pat asked "Is this the same Frank Thomas who believes Forbes Field cost him his shot at 500 home runs?" Why, yes it is.
RF: Pat also asked, "How did you adjust for era? Clemente hit in an offense depressed era, Waner in a offensive happy era." EqA does about as good a job as any method I've seen in removing cross-era biases on offense, because Clay Davenport has made a real effort to look at offensive events in the context in which they occurred and to adjust for all possible biases as a result. While I'm not sure about defense (as I indicated above), I'd be *really* surprised if any defensive measure implies that Waner is anywhere close to Roberto defensively. :)
I wonder if there's an RF/LF bias in defense numbers in Forbes similar to the *Green Monster* effect in Boston? After all, RF was a lot closer to home plate in Forbes than LF. Could Clemente actually have been BETTER defensively than his numbers? :)
Neal said, "Mike cheats by moving Bonds to CF." Yes, I admit it :) I also cheated by puttting Willie at 1B; I knew he'd played more games in LF during his career in Pittsburgh. But both Bonds and Kiner (and Willie for that matter), IMO, belong on any all-time Pirates team ahead of any of the *pure* CFs.
Neal also said, "I'm sure we do agree, however, that the Bucs never built their success on pitching." Yes, we sure do agree on that last...
I differ with Neal on the criteria for relief pitchers. 60G/150IP; that's basically one or two season's worth at the most, where the criteria for starters was 4 season's worth (at 150 IP/season). I never would have considered Bill Landrum (for example) because he didn't come close to pitching long enough as a Buc.
One of these days I'm going to do a comparison on the Bucs, Giants, and Cubs of the 1900-1910 time frame. Just because I'm curious to see how the Bucs stack up pitching-wise there."
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