Sydney or the Bush!
dallasactuary
Posts: 4,333 ✭✭✭✭✭
You have to be old like me for the thread title to be familiar, but it means "all or nothing", and it came to mind when I decided to look at who the postseason heroes and bedcrappers had been. And I didn't look at more than a small fraction of what I could have looked at, but I think the results are at least interesting. I looked only at HOFers, and only those HOFers who had a meaningful career in the 1960's or later. And for measuring Sydney or the Bush, I looked only at postseason WPA.
And I refuse to anoint anyone a hero or a bedcrapper simply because they played a ton of games marginally above or below average, so all of these rankings are per game, not gross totals. And because pitchers are, by their nature, much more important per game than hitters, I ranked pitchers and hitters separately.
First, the hitters:
The only hitters to make both the playoff and WS hero lists were Aaron and Kaline. You hear a lot more about others - Reggie and Lou Brock especially - but Reggie had some "off" years, and Brock got a ton of hits when it didn't really matter.
Then, the pitchers:
You will immediately notice that I didn't list 10 bedcrapping pitchers. I didn't because I thought it was ridiculous to list someone with a positive WPA as a bedcrapper, and only a handful of HOF pitchers have a negative postseason WPA.
And you'll also notice, because I'm pointing it now in case you didn't notice on your own, that the only pitcher on both the Playoff and World Series "Heroes" lists is Bert Blyleven. Jack Morris, the patron saint of the postseason to the mentally challenged, makes the WS hero list, but the playoff bedcrapper list. Overall, ain't nothin' special about Jack Morris in the postseason.
Disclaimer: the vast majority of what separates one person on a list from another on the same list is random noise. If Player A is listed above Player B on a hero list, it does not follow that Player A was "better than" Player B. Overall, the players in the heroes lists were "better than" the players in the bedcrapper lists in the playoffs, WS, and/or total postseason. Making more of it than that is on you, it was not my intention.
Comments
DA, please make a clarification. Does your playoff category include WS performance?
Al Kaline was in a single non WS playoff series in 1972 when he went 5 for 19 with a .263 BA and .421 slugging average. Decent but not earth shattering.
Fold in the series numbers (1968) and he bats .333 with a .563 slugging percentage.
The playoffs do not include the WS. Kaline's numbers aren't earth-shattering in the 1972 ALCS, but the hits he got were important ones, at least potentially. Kaline hit an 11th inning HR that should have won game 1, and several other hits/walks that mattered, or could have mattered. For the Series, Kaline had +.35 WPA, second on the TIgers only to Norm Cash with 0.38. The big winner in that series was Gonzalo Marquez, the guy who got the hit in the bottom of the 11th in game 1 that won it for the A's.
Ted
My sincere apologies. But rest assured that whenever anyone here thinks of crap, they think of you, and that kind of name recognition is worth more than money.
Pretty high % of Reds in the Total Hitters column. I don't think I see a single A's player listed. Hmmm ...
ETA: Is that Papa Griffey or Junior? Similarly, which Johnson in WS Pitching?
I see the legendary bed crapping Joe Morgan didn't make the list.
And he just happens to be one of Dallas' favorite players.
Well that's a completely unbiased list!
Reggie is on the WS list, and Henderson just missed, and they're the only A's HOFers (Fingers and Eck are on various pitchers lists). I have to check people one at a time, so checking everyone wasn't possible. FWIW, Gene Tenace would be on the WS heroes list, too, if I threw him in the mix.
And that's Junior Griffey; only HOFers are listed; and Randy Johnson, because I didn't go back as far as Walter.
Joe Morgan has a positive WPA in the WS (better than average), so he couldn't make that bedcrappers list. If I listed a top 12 he would have made the playoff bedcrappers list (top 15 gets Brett on the WS bedcrappers list), but his overall postseason WPA is positive so he couldn't have made the total list either. Don't get hung up on batting averages; focus on what wins baseball games.
And, obviously, if I was going to put my thumb on the scale in these lists, Schmidt wouldn't have been on the bedcrappers playoff list. But I didn't, and he is.
DA's threads take a while to get rolling, some are epic. I am trying to figure out how particularlysmall samples (Kaline's playoff 19 at bats for example) can qualify one as either a hero or a crapper.
By Sunday I'll have some more logical stuff to say.
Some have gone on to be epic, but this one won't, and isn't worthy of it. First, it is simply a compulsion of mine to post anything here that I spend more than an hour investigating, whether it's terribly interesting or not. Here, all the talk about this or that player "crapping the bed" in the postseason just got me curious about where exactly the line was for HOF-level players. Since as we all know (all of us who think for a living) the difference between most any player's regular season and postseason performance is just random, I wondered if there really were players whose postseason performance was significantly better or worse than average. And, as expected, the answer was "no, there aren't many".
That Kaline could rise to the top playing in one playoff series and one World Series more or less shows how clustered everyone is around the average, and his victory here means about as much as George Brett's crappy WS performance or Mike Schmidt's WS MVP. It's all just random noise.
In any given postseason series, someone shines. Sometimes it's Mike Schmidt or Bill Mazeroski or some other HOFer, and people credit their performance in that one series as a HOF qualification. But more often it's a Gene Tenace or a David Freese getting hot at the right time, and nobody talks about Cooperstown. I didn't check more than a handful of non-HOFers, but one of the ones I did check - Lance Berkman - towers so far over everyone on all of my lists the HOFers can't even see him. I wish someone would make the mistake of thinking how great Berkman was in 3 or 4 postseason games should get him in the HOF, because I'd like to see him in the HOF for how great he was in thousands of regular season games.
Dallas doesn't explain why Brett isn't on the playoff heroes list.
Despite 9 HR, 19 RBI in 30 games with a multitude of clutch hits, Brett doesn't make the list. LOL.
But McCovey and Puckett with a handful of at bats do make the list.
Yes, definitely a completely unbiased list!
And Brett with his .375 world series avg. almost crapped the bed! LOL.
I explained exactly why; that you are too lazy to look it up yourself or too stupid to understand what I posted is hardly my fault. Per game, Brett didn't make the top 10; players who didn't have the opportunity to play as many games as Brett did, but who made a greater contribution than Brett in the games they did get to play, did make the top 10. If you were to look at everyone in history, ignore the per game aspect and just add up totals, then you'd get a list full of Yankees who appeared in a hundred or more postseason games. Per game, they might have been barely above average - or barely below average - but by sheer volume of games played they would dominate any postseason list. I think that's the wrong way to look at it, but if you disagree you are invited to make those lists yourself.
But at least you focused on the playoffs where Brett did make meaningful contributions. Your cerebrally deficient doppelganger wants to put Brett on the WS heroes list despite Brett contributing more to his team's losses than to its wins. I mentioned Brock, but what I said about him applies to many others, including Brett (and to the entire career so far of Aaron Judge). Getting hits when the game is already decided might make your batting average look purty, but it doesn't win any games. Since the premise of putting excess weight on the postseason is that "winning the World Series is what it's all about", I used WPA as my measure. If the argument is (as it now appears to be) that getting meaningless singles in the 9th inning of a blowout is what matters, then that's a different list, and Brett would no doubt be a lot higher on that list. My lists are of those recent HOF players who contributed the most, per game, to winning playoffs and World Series. And the only reason I created them is because I was curious; they don't really mean anything. If you are upset that any player didn't make a list, then you are missing that important point.
Your lack of self-awareness is both amazing and amusing.
While hitting a 100 MPH fastball is not easy, I can more easily accept the randomness of the batter's performance in the post season than the pitcher, who at least in the golden era of the game was tasked with 7 or 8 (or 9) innings of difficult work against generally better hitters than he faced in the regular season.
Where he may have mailed it in a game or three during his regular rotation, I believe the best pitchers could perform at a higher level aware that the championship was on the line and that they would soon have a long layoff.