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Player Value Posts
To avoid spamming the general blog page with the Player Value posts for each season/team, this blog page will serve as a separate listing of all of the Player Value posts for each season/team. These posts will be less detailed, mainly just listing out the top players each season and including the necessary files.
Well, by "all-time", I really mean from 1912-2021, as that is currently the span of years that I have the data for. As the headline suggests, these rankings are according to my Player Value metric as of the date listed above. You can read my initial Player Value post here and its addendum here. Since then I have used Retrosheet play by play data to better fine tune the run value weights of the various events, but haven't been able to write up a post detailing them yet. Rather than listing them out again in this post, you can view them towards the top of my latest Hall of Fame post here. When we're discussing positional rankings, there's a couple of ways we can decide what a player's primary position was. One approach is to do it based on games played, which is the easiest but results in guys like Pete Rose and Ernie Banks being first basemen. I instead elected to take the approach of using the position that a player accumulated the most Player Value at. This way, Rose is a left fielder and Banks is a shortstop. I still list out their main position by games played in the data files below, but that's not what I went off of. There's also the matter of if we should take a player's total Player Value for their career and then just group them by their main position, or should we only use the Player Value that a player accumulated at this specific position. This choice is a little trickier, so I've gone ahead and listed out the top rankings for each option. So, without further adieu: Top 25 Second Basemen From 1912-2021, Based On Total Player Value At All Positions
Second base has less nuance than catchers and first basemen when it comes to Player Value, especially on the fielding end, so I have less need for commentary on justifying the rankings you see above. I think they are pretty believable, but I will make the following notes:
Top 25 Second Basemen From 1912-2021, Based On Total Player Value As A Second Baseman
Hornsby had a few seasons where he mainly played SS or 3B, so as solely a second baseman, Joe Morgan actually produced the most value. So the "best second baseman" argument here is kind of inconclusive, as it depends on how you want to format it. Top 25 Second Basemen From 1912-2021, Based On Batting Value At All Positions
Top 25 Second Basemen From 1912-2021, Based On Fielding Value At All Positions
Top 10 Second Basemen From 1912-2021, Based On Baserunning Value At All Positions
From the span of 1912-2021, I have just 535 players that contributed most of their value as second basemen. This is very interesting, considering there are 8,646 total position players in this span. If you go based off of games played, however, there are 1,033 second basemen in this span. This makes sense, as any second basemen that were negative for their careers would have been assigned to a different position, based on value. So to be in the top 1%, a player would have to be among the top 10-11 second basemen during this span. To be in the top 1.18% (the general Hall of Fame mark), a player would have to be among the top 12-13 second basemen during this span. There are currently 19 second basemen in the Hall of Fame, but that includes the mainly pre-1912 players Bid McPhee, Johnny Evers, and Napoleon Lajoie, whom we don't really have Player Value for. That 19 assumes that we exclude Rod Carew, who we consider as a first baseman. Miller Huggins, Bucky Harris, Sparky Anderson, and Tony La Russa were all primarily second basemen (by games played) during their playing careers, but were inducted as managers. So if we want to actually match the Hall of Fame numbers, that leaves us with 16 second basemen to work with. If we look at the top 16 second basemen according to Player Value, 12 of them are in Cooperstown. The exceptions are Joe Gordon, Red Schoendienst, Jackie Robinson, and Tony Lazzeri, who rank 17th, 18th, 20th, and 30th, respectively. Three of those four second basemen were inducted by a Veteran's Committee as well, rather than through the BBWAA ballot. The exception is Robinson, who obviously has a cultural impact to his Hall of Fame case due to his breaking of baseball's color barrier. Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker, Robinson Cano, and Jeff Kent should presumably take their places, but Cano has yet to appear on the ballot and may have his reasons for not being inducted due to his PED use. Next in line would technically be Willie Randolph, but he ranks behind Gordon and Schoendienst. But it is important to note that second basemen are getting in at a higher rate than all positions in general. Of the 1,033 second basemen in my dataset based off of games played, 18 are in the Hall of Fame. That's 1.74%, larger than the "top 1%" idea that many people think of the Hall of Fame as, as well as the top 1.18% that the Hall actually operates at. Based on this, there should either be less second basemen in Cooperstown if we think 1.75% is too lenient (which I don't think it is), or there should be more players inducted at other positions so that this 1.75% rate holds across all positions. Below you can graphically see how all of our second basemen compare in terms of Player Value, along with the black line denoting which players provided positive value, the gold line denoting the Hall of Fame mark, and the blue dots denoting the actual Hall of Fame members: The Hall of Famer with the extreme Fielding Value on the far right is Mazeroski, while the Hall of Famer with the extreme Batting Value in the top left is Hornsby. The two highest non-Hall of Famers above the Hall of Fame line are Grich and Whitaker. The non-Hall of Famer with the most Fielding Value to the right is Frank White, who see sits below the Hall of Fame line of 1.18%. The non-Hall of Famer with the least Fielding Value to the left is Andy High. The two lowest Hall of Famers here are Evers and Lajoie, who both played mainly before 1912 and therefore have a substantial amount of their value unaccounted for. The actual most egregious Hall of Famer looks to be Tony Lazzeri, who is the blue dot that stands out with a Fielding Value of ~0 and a Batting Value + Baserunning Value of ~250. Below you can graphically see how the top 25 second basemen compare in terms of Player Value. Below is the dataset of primarily second basemen from 1912-2021, as determined by which position the player provided the most Player Value at. There are 535 players in this dataset.
Below is the dataset of primarily second basemen from 1912-2021, as determined by which position the player played the most games at. There are 1,033 players in this dataset.
Thanks for checking out this second base rankings post. I plan to update it whenever I develop new Player Value iterations, and hopefully we'll get closer and closer to some rankings that we can more firmly support. I'd say the main takeaway for now should be that players like Grich, Whitaker, Kent, and Randolph were vastly underrated and should be seriously considered for future era committee inductions, as they appear more deserving than current Hall of Famers like Lazzeri, Gordon, and Schoendienst. Upcoming players like Utley and Kinsler should be considered, but no active player is pushing obvious induction so far. Lastly, second basemen seem to be inducted at a higher clip than other positions, so we should contemplate why that is and whether that should be the case. I believe that all positions play important roles in baseball and that they should all be equally represented in the Hall of Fame; in the case of second basemen, I think we allow our obsession with their defense to alter our perception of the best players, ignoring some of the best offensive second basemen in history.
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