Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael J. Schell is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina and Director of the Biostatistics Core Facility in the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is the author of Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters: How Statistics Can Level the Playing Field (Princeton).

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"The way these things work, I don't suppose that Michael Schell's book will be the final word on ranking hitters. What I do know is that anybody who wants the final word will have to read this book first. And that will be the easy part."--Rob Neyer, ESPN.com

"Michael Schell has expanded on his original study of Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters to include all aspects of batting. He has written a well thought out and soundly based book, taking into account sophisticated time, age, park and positional adjustments to reach valid conclusions. There is plenty of math, but it is not necessary to understand the intricacies of the equations to appreciate the results."--Pete Palmer, co-editor ofThe Baseball Encyclopedia (with Gary Gillette) and co-author of The Hidden Game of Baseball (with John Thorn)

"Some say it's impossible to compare hitters from different eras. In this book, Michael Schell meets that challenge head-on, using modern statistical methods to adjust for differences in eras, ballparks, and the level of competition. It may not settle every argument about the game's best all-time hitters, but it's sure to raise the quality of those arguments."--Tom Tippett, Principal Designer,Diamond Mind Baseball

"Well-written and organized. Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggersstrikes the right balance between the statistical lingo of the professional statistician and the more familiar verbiage of baseball books."--Daniel Levitt, co-author, with Mark Armour, of Paths to Glory: How Great Baseball Teams Got That Way

"A significant contribution to the sabermetrics field. This book will be a fun read for any baseball fan."--Jim Albert, Bowling Green State University.

"Everyone knows that batting .300 in the major leagues is much harder than batting .300 in the minors. Although baseball rules and equipment change over time and parks differ, such differences in difficulty are ignored regularly by those who compare batters who played in different decades and/or in different stadiums. Michael Schell has painstakingly made the needed adjustments for eras, for park factors, for players' ages, and for variability in performances, so as to determine which batters really have been most dominant. There are many other treasures to be found here, and many methodological lessons to be learned and enjoyed by baseball enthusiasts and by those who think about player evaluations."--Carl Morris, Harvard University

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"The way these things work, I don't suppose that Michael Schell's book will be the final word on ranking hitters. What I do know is that anybody who wants the final word will have to read this book first. And that will be the easy part."--Rob Neyer, ESPN.com

"Michael Schell has expanded on his original study of Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters to include all aspects of batting. He has written a well thought out and soundly based book, taking into account sophisticated time, age, park and positional adjustments to reach valid conclusions. There is plenty of math, but it is not necessary to understand the intricacies of the equations to appreciate the results."--Pete Palmer, co-editor ofThe Baseball Encyclopedia (with Gary Gillette) and co-author of The Hidden Game of Baseball (with John Thorn)

"Some say it's impossible to compare hitters from different eras. In this book, Michael Schell meets that challenge head-on, using modern statistical methods to adjust for differences in eras, ballparks, and the level of competition. It may not settle every argument about the game's best all-time hitters, but it's sure to raise the quality of those arguments."--Tom Tippett, Principal Designer,Diamond Mind Baseball

"Well-written and organized. Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggersstrikes the right balance between the statistical lingo of the professional statistician and the more familiar verbiage of baseball books."--Daniel Levitt, co-author, with Mark Armour, of Paths to Glory: How Great Baseball Teams Got That Way

"A significant contribution to the sabermetrics field. This book will be a fun read for any baseball fan."--Jim Albert, Bowling Green State University.

"Everyone knows that batting .300 in the major leagues is much harder than batting .300 in the minors. Although baseball rules and equipment change over time and parks differ, such differences in difficulty are ignored regularly by those who compare batters who played in different decades and/or in different stadiums. Michael Schell has painstakingly made the needed adjustments for eras, for park factors, for players' ages, and for variability in performances, so as to determine which batters really have been most dominant. There are many other treasures to be found here, and many methodological lessons to be learned and enjoyed by baseball enthusiasts and by those who think about player evaluations."--Carl Morris, Harvard University

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Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

Why Adjustments Are Needed

King Arthur's quest for it in the Middle Ages became a large part of his legend. Monty Python and Indiana Jones launched their searches in popular 1974 and 1989 movies. The mythic quest for the Holy Grail, the name given in Western tradition to the chalice used by Jesus Christ at his Passover meal the night before his death, is now often a metaphor for a quintessential search.

In the illustrious history of baseball, the "holy grail" is a ranking of each player's overall value on the baseball diamond. Because player skills are multifaceted, it is not clear that such a ranking is possible. In comparing two players, you see that one hits home runs much better, whereas the other gets on base more often, is faster on the base paths, and is a better fielder. So which player should rank higher?

In Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters, I identified which players were best at getting a hit in a given at-bat, calling them the best hitters. Many reviewers either disapproved of or failed to note my definition of "best hitter." Although frequently used in baseball writings, the terms "good hitter" or best hitter are rarely defined.

In a July 1997 Sports Illustrated article, Tom Verducci called Tony Gwynn "the best hitter since Ted Williams" while considering only batting average. With the likes of Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle as candidates to rival Gwynn, it is clear that Verducci used best hitter in the same, limited way.

Best Batters and the Offensive Events Used to Determine Them

A broader category is best batters. These are the players with the best all-around ability to produce runs based on events emerging from their plate appearances. Those in the "holy grail" category would be the best players, the players who are best in all-around play.

The goal of Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers is to identify the best batters in baseball history. Consequently, neither pitching nor fielding is considered in this book.

When a player steps up to the plate, one of more than a dozen events can happen. Here are the major ones. The player can get a single, double, triple, or home run, based on the number of bases earned on a hit. Home runs can be either inside or outside the park. Players also make outs. Outs, like hits, can be divided into several categories, including strikeouts, groundouts, and flyouts. Another major event is a base on balls, sometimes subcategorized into intentional or nonintentional. Additional events include sacrifice flies, sacrifice hits, hit-by-pitch, and reached-base-on-an-error.

The currency of baseball is runs. Since scoring more runs than one's opponent wins ballgames, a batter's primary role is to produce runs. A value could be placed on each offensive event, based on how it contributes to or hampers run scoring. A batter's overall value would then be calculated by multiplying the values of these events by the rate at which he gets them.

This concept, known as linear weights, dates back to the early 1960s and the pioneering work of George Lindsey. In the 1980s, John Thorn and Pete Palmer expanded on this idea with their "Batting Runs" formula, which plays a central role in their "Total Player Rating" in Total Baseball. Batting Runs has adjustments for both era-of-play and ballpark effects.

The study in this book extends the work of Thorn and Palmer. The basic formula, called Event-Specific Batting Runs, is developed. For the adjustment process, we will look at 10 basic offensive events: batting average, doubles-plus-triples (the sum of doubles and triples), triples, home runs, runs, RBIs, walks, strikeouts, stolen bases, and hit-by-pitches. Four adjustments are applied to these events: the effects of aging, ballpark effects, and two factors based on the era of play, as described later in this chapter.

Seven offensive events are used to rank the batters-the four kinds of hits, walks, and total outs. Four of these-triples, home runs, walks, and hit-by-pitches-are basic offensive events. The other three are derived from basic offensive events.

Singles are obtained from subtracting Extra-Base Hits (doubles-plus-triples plus home runs) from hits, where hits equals the batting average multiplied by at-bats. Doubles are obtained by subtracting triples from doubles-plus-triples. Total outs are obtained by subtracting hits from at-bats.

The reasons why doubles-plus-triples (DPTs), rather than doubles, are considered a basic offensive event are discussed in Chapters 4 and 8. In brief, a double is a hit intermediate between a single and a triple, but more like a triple in nature. The answer to the question of which batted balls become doubles versus triples is blurry, and depends significantly on the speed of the batter. Thus it is better to apply the four adjustments to doubles-plus-triples and to triples and obtain adjusted doubles by subtracting the latter from the former.

Why not use the other four basic offensive events in the Event-Specific Batting Runs formula? Individual run and RBI totals depend on the ability of one's teammates and the batter's position in the lineup, not just on the relative abilities of pitcher and batter. Batters fortunate to have teammates on base more often can garner RBIs more easily; a single hit with a man on third nets an RBI, but a bases-empty single doesn't. Hence runs and RBIs are not used in the best- batter ranking system. They are used, however, to build a case for the existence of clutch hitters, with Yogi Berra, Pie Traynor, and Joe DiMaggio all ranking among the top 10.

Strikeouts, like other outs, hurt run scoring. They haven't been shown, however, to have a significantly different negative value from non-strikeout outs. Consequently they are not needed in the valuation.

Stolen bases are not used for two reasons. First, although they are an offensive event, they are not a batting event. Second, to evaluate stolen bases fairly, one also needs caught stealing data. Caught stealing data, however, have been consistently available only since 1951. Thus it becomes difficult to compare players from before and after that time.

Rankings are also provided for five additional derived offensive events: OBP, slugging average, OPS, Event-Specific Batting Runs (ESBRs), and Career Batter Rating (CBR). The first three events are popular ways to evaluate players, while the final two are the main formulas developed in this book-to identify the best batters and get a preliminary ranking of baseball's best players. Finally, position-adjusted results are also given for ESBRs and CBR.

Philosophy of Player Comparison Over Time

It is a tall order to develop a method that can compare athletic performance fairly over time. For most running and swimming events, race times have progressively declined over time. Does this mean that recent world record holders are better than their forebears? Not necessarily. To ensure fairness, the philosophy of this study involves a complete time-transport of players. In other words, the athlete from bygone times needs to have all the modern advantages today's stars enjoy-such as current equipment, today's sports medicine, training advances, new techniques, and nutritional advances. How can this be done?

The basic...