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Bobby Grich was one of the greatest second basemen to ever play, and for the position, one of the two most egregious omissions by the hall of fame (Lou Whitaker is the other). According to Baseball-reference.com, Bobby was worth 71 wins above a replacement player for his career. This rating is based on stats originally published on my website. I had Grich at 68, with the difference most likely resulting from bbref chosing a different baseline from which to measure replacement level. Either way, it doesn't make a difference to the HOF case. Virtually every player who had that much value made it into the hall of fame, except for the ones who were connected to steroids. Bill James apparently doesn't agree with this. He's posted a bit comparing the ratings of Grich and Dave Parker. In his Hey Bill mailbag of 5-20-2022 he wrote: I think that (Win Shares) is a vastly better logical pathway toward defensive value, because, by its structure, it CAN'T go off the rails and start saying stupid stuff like Bobby Grich is an obvious Hall of Famer because we just love his fielding stats so much, and Dave Parker, fifth in the NL MVP voting in 1986, is really just a replacement level player because we hate his defensive stats so much. DEFENSIVE ANALYSIS IS NOT RELIABLE ENOUGH TO SUPPORT THOSE KIND OF CONCLUSIONS. So I thought I'd take a look at how Bobby compares to other second basemen using Win Shares, and not using baseball-reference WAR. Bobby Grich had 329 Win Shares. How does that compare to the top second basemen of all time? First trick is what players to compare to. I'm not selecting by WAR, so I decided to look at all second basemen who had 1500 or more hits in their careers. There are a few very good second basemen who did not make it to 1500 hits, guys like Eddie Stanky and Max Bishop who got their value from walks, but there's nobody below that level who has any kind of a reasonable HOF case. I do get players who mostly hit singles and stuck around for a while, but were not great players, like Manny Trillo. That's OK. I just want to see where Grich ranks on this list, compared to the Hall of Famers and the best ones left out. I looked at 20th century or later players. My criteria were: Your first year must be 1900 or later, and your final year must be 2016 or before. This means everybody has a chance for at least one vote on Cooperstown. The selection of 1900 means that Nap Lajoie is excluded, even though he played mostly after 1900. That's OK. He's not a marginal HoFer. He was better than Grich. But I wanted to avoid comparing to 19th century players. In addition, to be considered a second baseman a player had to have played 50% or more of his career games at second. Let's start with seeing where his 329 win shares ranks. He's 11th. Of the 10 guys ahead of him, 8 are in the hall. The exceptions are Lou Whitaker (who this article could just as easily be about if I had grown up a Tiger fan instead of an Angel fan), and Jeff Kent. There are 56 total players here. Nine players with fewer win shares than Grich are also in the Hall. Ranking in the middle of the pack among guys who are in is a pretty good indicator you belong as well. But maybe not definitive. What about losses though? Zack Greinke won 19 games in 2015. LaMarr Hoyt won 19 in 1982. I know we're supposed to not pay attention to pitcher wins anymore and just look at what their Fielding Independent Pitching stats say, but hang with me here. Greinke was 19-3, Hoyt was 19-15. Doesn't that suggest that Greinke was better? Grich had at least 1000 fewer plate appearances than all of the guys ahead of him on the list. If he's close on wins, but has many fewer games, then he must have fewer losses. Here's a simple way to calculate loss shares. First you need game shares. In the Win Share system, about 64% of Win Shares go to position players, and 36% to pitchers. For every 162 games, 486 Win Shares are awarded, with 311 to position players. A typical team in a full season has about 6200 plate appearances, so game shares = PA * .05. Bobby Grich,with 8220 plate appearances, is responsible for 411 game shares. Once you do that, loss shares is simply game shares - win shares. That makes Grich's record 329-82. That's a winning percentage of .800, good for 5th best on this list. The only guys ahead of him are the big 3 (Hornsby, Morgan, and Collins - virtually everyone would pick one of these three as the greatest) and Jackie Robinson. With Hornsby, we find that he actually has fewer game shares than Win Shares. So he's got negative loss shares. He's the only one on this list, with a record of 502 - (-28). Negative loss shares aren't any easy concept to accept. I do think Tango Tiger gave a good explanation so I'll quote him here: There is no "though" in there. Negative Loss Shares are a necessity. You simply can't make this thing work without it, not unless you climb mountains to make it happen.
If let's say Barry Bonds has negative 5 losses to go with 16 wins, then you have to add 5 wins and 5 losses to give him a 21-0 record.
AND then you have to subtract 5 wins and subtract 5 losses spread out over every player to balance it out. And of course, you might have someone who had 0 losses, who then gets into negative losses because of it, then you have to repeat this cycle. There are compromises between choosing between total wins and winning percentage. You can choose a baseline and look at how many wins a player is above that. For example, you can choose a .500 baseline, like Pete Palmer did in the Hidden Game, and rate them by wins above average. If you do this, Grich also ranks 5th, behind the big 3 and Charlie Gehringer. I looked how Grich would rank using a variety of baselines. Most are in 0.025 increments, but I threw in .294 as well, since that is what baseball reference uses. One interesting find is that using a .294 baseline, Grich is 69 wins above it (full wins, not win shares). This is nearly identical to the 71 on baseball-refence. Here's how Grich ranks depending on the baseline used:
In conclusion, using Win Shares, Bobby Grich is somewhere between the 5th and 11th best second baseman since 1900. A full list of the players used, their win shares, loss shares, and game shares is provided below.
This page was last modified 05/21/2022 |