Written by: Jack Hinde
Edited by: Jovan Popovic
If you keep up with baseball news daily, it often appears that the baseball community of fans, analysts and writers has been separated into two distinct groups; the traditionalists, the contemporary, or the statistical baseball minds. Summed up, the traditionalists are those who believe that baseball is an old game and baseball should be preserved as it once was; from the mid 19th century through to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when there began somewhat of a change in the way that “America’s Game” was thought of.
Enter Bill James. Though baseball has always been a sport supplemented by numbers and many more statistics (the earliest known examples of a box score appeared as early as 1858 by the sportswriter Henry Chadwick). The way that the game was interpreted was turned on its ends when James started publishing his Baseball Abstracts in 1977. He hypothesized that the way that we examined baseball wasn’t entirely correct and the tools that we were using weren’t nearly adequate. James and many others published a great number of books and articles pioneering what we know now, thanks to Bill James himself, as Sabermetrics.
This idea sought out to prove that there existed supplementary, and sometimes even more informative statistics than the traditional stats (runs, batting average, strikeouts, runs batted in, home runs, pitcher wins, etc) that appeared not long after baseball stats started being recorded. Though the significance of these stats are still enormously prevalent, and for good reason, they often didn’t reflect the full story of what encompassed a baseball player. So as a natural result, many events and players ultimately slipped through the cracks of public perception.
Flash forward to the year 2020, and now the ordinary fan of baseball has seemingly more stats than they could possibly imagine. The only caveat being that one must be able to sift through the numbers, making conscious decisions on what is useful information and what isn’t to form opinions on any given season (or entire careers) by a given player.
If you were to pull up the MLB.com or baseball-reference.com page on your favorite player, of course the first statistics you would likely see are those of the traditional stats. Their career batting average and their career home run total will likely stick out; as these numbers have huge historical meaning; Ty Cobb’s career batting average of 0.366 hasn’t been bested since his career finished in 1928. As well, though it is a controversial number due to his confirmed performance enhancing drug (PED) use, nobody has ever hit more home runs in a major league uniform than Barry Bonds, who famously passed Hammerin’ Hank Aaron, who in turn famously passed Babe Ruth’s career home runs record on April 8, 1974. All of these numbers have had meaning assigned to them and they all correspond to exceptional accomplishments, but Sabermetrics has shown that perhaps these aren’t the best way to judge a career.
Scroll down a player’s page and you will find many advanced statistics, such as wins above replacement (WAR), or fielding independent pitching (FIP), and adjusted weighted runs created (wRC+). It’s through these more advanced statistics that the more Sabermetrics-savvy baseball fans have found ways to compare players who may have never even played a game against one another. So what does any of this have to do with Larry Walker?
A large issue in interpreting baseball statistics stems from different ballparks and their dimensions. After all, the MLB has never regulated the dimensions of a ballpark and teams are left to put their outfield fences seemingly to whatever distance they prefer, as in the case with the Texas Rangers’ new ballpark (which pays homage to many of the notable figures in Rangers’ history), and many other teams do the same.
There are many requirements concerning distances on a baseball diamond (the pitcher’s mound from home plate, the length of the baselines, to name a few). This discrepancy in outfield fence lengths has led to many quirks in terms of ballparks, such as Boston’s Green Monster, or San Francisco’s McCovey Cove. Relevant to statistical issues, is how these distances have affected the games played there and the numbers produced. This is quite a contrast to the other Major League sports in North America and around the World. Any hockey rink has a regulated rink size, same with a football field, and same with a basketball court, and so on. Due to these differences in MLB ballparks, numbers called park factors were created to quantify how a team’s park affected the number of runs and hits allowed in said park, and this is where we can safely tie Larry Walker into the conversation.
Walker played nine and a half of his Major League seasons with the Colorado Rockies, good for over half of his career. An obvious roadblock to bringing baseball to Denver was the fact that the city is in the Rocky Mountains, and is at least 600 metres higher in elevation from sea level than any other major league city. At a higher elevation, the air is much thinner, and this makes baseballs stay in the air longer when they are hit, and curveballs don’t have the same amount of break that they do in other parks. To combat this, the Rockies realized that they couldn’t use average field dimensions; as it would be unnaturally easy to hit a home run, so they moved their fences back. This comes with its own set of repercussions, as this created huge amounts of fair territory in the outfield, so a fielder will have to cover more ground to record an out, so more singles, doubles and triples will get down and become hits. Coors Field can almost be viewed as a balancing act between trying to moderate both home runs, and fair territory for extra-base hits.
Considering the effects of the “mile high city”, it's no surprise that Coors Field is an offensive paradise, and from this the notion of the “Coors Effect” was coined. When examining the stats of a player who played for the Rockies, their numbers; namely in the traditional hits, home runs and runs batted in, are considered lesser. Ultimately, their numbers across the board are considered to be discounted.
Since these park factors have been made public, statistics were created to adjust for whatever home park the player called home for the season. Some of these stats that are weighted to their home ballpark include OPS+ (on-base slugging percentage, in the context of a league average), wRC+ (runs created, in the context of a league average), and wOBA (on-base average).
For nine of his ten eligible years on the Hall of Fame ballot, voters examined Larry Walker’s traditional stats through the lens that he played the majority of his career in the most hitter friendly ballpark. Many voters came to the conclusion that although impressive, his offensive stats weren’t enough to convince them that he was a hall of fame talent. It was considered that similar numbers could be achieved by any above average player playing nine and a half years in the Rockies’ purple and black. Cooperstown is notoriously exclusive, so that means a player must be at the absolute top of the game to be inducted.
Below are Larry Walker’s career batting statistics, and how they rank among the best in baseball’s approximately 150 year history. Also of note is the fact that Walker played during MLB’s steroid era, where many of the game’s top hitters’ numbers were inflated due to factors much greater than a home ballpark. Stats are per baseball-reference.com.
It’s clear that almost all of Walker’s numbers have been in the top hundred in the history of baseball by most categories. Of the 235 Major League players (granted roughly half are pitchers) as of 2019 that have been enshrined, Walker’s numbers put him in that range of qualifying above many players who are considered amongst the game’s best. However, taking into consideration the “Coors Effect”, where these numbers are most heavily inflated, should we even consider them?
With these ballpark-adjusted stats, we can get a look at his career numbers in a general ballpark, answering these questions about what would have happened had he played in a less friendly ballpark. Below is a collection of some of Walker’s adjusted stats, and how he ranks among players all time. All ranks have minimum qualifiers of 500 games or 1000 plate appearances. The first three stats are per baseball-reference.com and the last three are per fangraphs.com.
Amongst Major League Baseball’s storied history of players, Larry Walker is one of the best players in the game’s history. He had tremendous power, clearly shown by his OPS+, and then his wOBA showed that he was in the upper echelon of players who were able to get on base. His bWAR and RAA show that these two talents provided his team with tremendous value. While there are many stats tracked in a game, the only two that really matter at the end of the game are your team’s runs and the other team’s, and Walker’s wRC+ shows that he was amongst the best at keeping his team on the winning side. He was clearly one of the top players of his era, and the advantage of using these adjusted stats is that it is possible to better understand Walker’s stats if he hadn’t spent so many seasons in a hitter’s paradise, as we can regulate the offensive environment of his career. Since philosophies in baseball change, and certain eras were more friendly to pitchers while some were more conductive for scoring runs, understanding the relative value of a run, hit, strikeout or a home run seems like an obvious advantage of using statistics that can handle these many factors.
When Larry Walker is officially inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame, it will be a huge win for Canadian Baseball. The Maple Ridge, British Columbia native will join Fergie Jenkins as the only Canadians in Cooperstown. It will also represent a change in the ever-conservative mindset that baseball has utilised. Truthfully it is difficult — if not impossible — to know whether a single voter even looked at one of these contemporary statistics, or whether the levee just broke open to the fact that Walker deserves to be recognized as one of the game’s all-time best. Walker could be the first advanced stat-driven induction in the history of the Hall. For the people who spend their free time thinking of the game in these advanced stats, they are changing the way present teams operate, and changing perception of past players is a huge sign of progress.
Comments