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Rick Reuschel Rookie
PaulMaul
Posts: 4,709 ✭✭✭✭✭
Why has this card skyrocketed in the last couple of years? It was a $30-50 card forever, and now suddenly seems to be commanding $200+ pretty routinely. It sold last week for $260 and one is currently approaching $200. What am I missing?
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Take a look at the JAWS pitchers list, the one where Catfish Hunter is 183rd and Jack Morris is 164th. Rick Reuschel is 32nd, and the only pitchers above him not in the HOF are Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, or are still playing. Reuschel lies immediately below the average HOFer line.
Now, I think WAR is overrating Reuschel, and I don't think anyone believes Reuschel is better than Juan Marichal (47th) or Jim Palmer (43rd), but he was obviously better than Hunter, Morris, Kaat and others, which makes the possibility that he will get in the HOF very real.
Yep, as now its a Hall Of Slightly Above Average (HOSAA)
Unless otherwise specified my posts represent only my opinion, not fact.
Just sold for three bills…
https://www.ebay.com/itm/385234737432?hash=item59b1c79918
The fact that Rick Reushel's WAR is higher than Juan Marichal might be one of the most ridiculous stats I have ever heard of. Even if you discount wins Marichal still blows him away in every other category such as ERA 2.89 to 3.37, ERA+ 123 to 114, complete games 244 to 102, and shut outs 52 to 26.
WAR for pitchers is a bit sketchy because it attempts to incorporate the team's defensive abilities into the calculation.
It isn't even possible to get a valid defensive value for a single position player let alone the entire team's defensive ability and then incorporate that into a pitcher's WAR.
Marichal threw 3,508 Innings with a 123 ERA+
Reuschel threw 3,548 innings with a 114 ERA+
They are closer than one would initially expect, but the WAR stat is certainly misleading by having The Whale in the lead.
IMO, there is some correlation or catch up with regard to card values vs unopened values within the hobby...the values for unopened product from this era have risen so steadily over the past few years that the values of the higher grade cards within the packs coupled with rising submission rates were bound to have some measurable effect.
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
That's happening a lot, and not just with players as good as Reuschel. I am desultorily trying to put together a certain subset of 1977 OPC baseball, and suddenly cards that had been going for $50 are going for $300.
There is a general trend of the last couple years of everything baseball going up. While this is especially true of HOFers and those expected to make it one day, but fan favorite players, too, such as Jim Abbott, Bo Jackson, Darryl Strawberry, and Dwight Gooden. The 1983 Topps Traded Strawberry rookie in PSA 10, for example, was a $50 card for the longest stretch and now it hoovers around $300 on a consistent basis.
BST: Tennessebanker, Downtown1974, LarkinCollector, nendee
Stunning card! I would give it a 10.
WAR is silly.
I actually just bought an ungraded Rick Reuschel rookie a few weeks ago. He's signing at a place in Indiana in a couple of weeks and he was my first favorite pitcher, and I try to get signed rookies of my favorite players. My first favorite players as a kid were Jody Davis and Rick Reuschel. I had no idea his rookie card had increased in value so much.
It is a very difficult card to find with good centering, so maybe that plays a part? I had been trying to get one for quite a while, but the left to right centering on this card is usually pretty bad, and I like to have at least good centering on my cards.
WAR is not silly. If you think WAR is silly, you don't understand what WAR does. WAR attempts to be a "one size fits all" stat to compare players across positions, across leagues, and across eras. I mean it's reasonable to wonder who was better, Teddy Higuera, Chris Spier, or Hunter Pence. How the heck do you come close to making a determination without using a stat very close to WAR?
I agree, WAR is definitely not silly. Two things, though, that bear on the present case:
WAR's defensive metrics don't work. They just don't work. To the degree that those metrics affect a comparison, that comparison becomes suspect. Not necessarily wrong, but suspect; there's really no way to know whether WAR got it right for any specific player. I have no idea how WAR attempted to adjust Reuschel and Marichal for team fielding, but it's possible that it made a difference big enough to throw that comparison off.`
When starting pitchers are ranked by JAWS, they don't use WAR7, they use WAR7adj. The purpose of WAR7adj is to "normalize" pitchers from the modern era with those from the 19th century who threw 400, 500, or more innings in a season. I get that, and it's one reasonable way to handle that, but for reasons I don't understand at all, they decided that 250 innings was the maximum innings for a pitcher, so Marichal gets dinged for pitching more than that in several seasons. If you ranked them by JAWS, without the adj, Reuschel would fall below Marichal (and Palmer).
And third, to give credit where credit is due, Rick Reuschel was an outstanding pitcher. That was largely hidden by terrible teammates and a hitters park, and stats like WAR show it while most other don't. Win Shares doesn't work particularly well for pitchers, either, but while it ranks Reuschel far below Marichal and Palmer, it does rank him among Saberhagen, Hershiser, Blue and Smoltz. If you think John Smoltz belongs in the HOF, then you can still debate whether Reuschel belongs, but if you don't see that there is a real debate to be had as to who was better, Reuschel or Smoltz, then you're missing a lot of stuff that WAR is seeing.
WAR is silly. Defensive metrics are sillier.
Compare Jimmy Foxx to Mickey Mantle thoroughly without using WAR
WAR is silly
Short version? Foxx looks better than Mantle to someone who doesn't understand that the '30s were very different from the '60s.
Longer answer: Foxx OBP .428 vs. .362 for his league. SLG .609 vs. .422 league. Mantle OBP .421 vs. .329, SLG .557 vs. .386. Foxx good but not very good defender at the least important position, Mantle bad but not very bad at an upper middle important position.
Most defensive metrics are silly. All metrics that can be calculated by an eight-year-old using a four function calculator are silly. Knowing that Dave Kingman hit more home runs than Nolan Ryan (or Ozzie Smith) tells you nothing about which player was better. Fielding percentage is a terrible stat. Number of gold gloves is even worse. Things like Range Factor aren't much better. But there are good defensive metrics out there.
Assuming that Foxx really is as good as or better than (not sure what @Goldenage 's argument was going to be) Mantle simply shows that WAR evaluates two players incorrectly. And no one will say that if you take any two players the one with the higher WAR is better. It doesn't make it silly.
In the same vein, compare Pedro Martinez 2000 to Bob Gibson's legendary 1968 (and, just for fun, Dean Chance's 1964).
https://stathead.com/baseball/player-comparison.cgi?request=1&sum=0&player_id1=martipe02&p1yrfrom=2000&player_id2=gibsobo01&p2yrfrom=1968&player_id3=chancde01&p3yrfrom=1964&type=p#compare_pitching_standard
It's pretty clear which season was best, but if you only look at the metrics you and your eight-year-old neighbor can calculate on that four function calendar, you'd be likely to confuse which one it is.
I looked at Reuschel/Marichal and if there's a stat that says those two are similar, throw it out.
In looking at their top 13 seasons where they both threw 165 or more innings, Juan has an ERA+ of 127, while Rick comes in at 110. WHIP Juan also wins at 1.12 to 1.24.
If you look at each one's 7 year peak, it gets ridiculous. Juan's ERA+ from 1963-69 is at 146 while Rick's 1973-79 is at 117. WHIP for Juan is 1.10 and Rick 1.30
Rick did pitch a couple of more seasons, but these two are not close.
Rick Reuschel was money in RBI Baseball for NES
saucywombat@hotmail.com
Reuschel’s HoF candidacy was something I had never considered prior to this thread. And i kind of liked it that way.
I know exactly how you feel. I had never considered Jack Morris being in the HOF until he was in the HOF. And Rick Reuschel was much, much, much better than Jack Morris.
Really? It seemed to me that I had heard Morris mentioned for the HoF for at least ten years as the best pitcher of the '80s. I just don't understand how anyone could have followed baseball from, say, 2008 to 2018 and not at least considered Morris' candidacy.
If you'd used Jim Kaat above I would have completely agreed with you.
Smoltz got votes for being dominant as starter and a closer. His total numbers are less than the sum of the parts if that makes any sense. While he would not have had my vote he certainly is borderline - again due to dominance for a time in 2 different money pitching roles.
Unless otherwise specified my posts represent only my opinion, not fact.
WAR! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (sorry, couldn’t help myself)
The problem with defensive WAR is that very little television footage exists for the majority games prior to 1980 so metrics from that time period are just guesses.
If someone comes up with footage of all of Jimmie Foxx and Mickey Mantle’s games they played during their career, I could be convinced to jump on the WAR bandwagon. Until then, WAR is just another modern statistic unfairly applied to previous generations.
WAR and OPS+ and a few others are not really a statistic. They are adjustments made to attempt to equalize differences that occur over time. I'm sure they even work sometimes
Somebody makes a guess at what to deem important. Somewhere recently it was posted that one of the stats "decided" that 250 innings was what was being used to measure part of a starting pitchers numbers. HELLO! No wonder Juan Marichal's numbers look worse. Somebody just decided he gets no extra credit for 6(?) years of fantastic 300 innings pitching than the guy throwing 250.
When it comes to fielding, I'll go with Fielding%, Gold Gloves and the eye test, if I can. I also read biographies on the best players and take other players opinions into account .
What does television footage have to do with defensive WAR?
Wow! Three almost completely worthless metrics. WAR is by no means perfect, but how else can you attempt to compare Marichal to a Pud Galvin or a David Cone.
Besides, that's not what was said. JAWS is based on the adjusted rate of the pitcher's 7 best seasons, so Galvin's goes from 61.9 to 28.5, Marichal from 51.9 to 43.4, and Cone from 43.4 to 43.3. If we don't make these adjustments, JAWS loses some of its value because every pitcher in the top 10 7 peak seasons would otherwise have not pitched an inning after 1930 except Clemens, and Grove is the only other one after 1915. I'm sure Jim McCormick was a fine pitcher, but I'm much more comfortable thinking that, at his peak, he was closer to the 121st best pitcher in history, not the 7th.
I get why they wanted to cap innings, but a cap of 250 is flat out too low. Rick Reuschel was playing a different game than Pud Galvin, yes, but he was not playing a different game than Juan Marichal. More directly on point, Rick Reuschel in 1976 was not playing a different game than Randy Jones was playing in 1976. A statistic that says that the 55 innings that Jones pitched more than Reuschel - in the same year in the same league - had literally zero value is wrong. Not problematic, not arguably wrong, just flat out wrong, and significantly so.
If at some point in the future starting pitchers start pitching, at most, 100 innings, I think the absurdity of what WAR is doing with WAR7 would be too obvious to ignore if they used the same logic. I guess I'm saying the absurdity of what they're doing at 250 innings is too obvious for me to ignore already.
The assumption underlying the adjustment is that current baseball is real baseball and how it is played today is ideal. It's a not terribly subtle way of putting a thumb on the scale to make modern pitchers look more valuable than they are. The fact that they pitch fewer innings makes them less valuable and also allows them to throw 100% for longer since they know they're not going to be pitching come the 6th or 7th inning. Tell Marichal that he's capped at 100 pitches and who knows how much better he might have been.
Bottom line, Marichal in his seven best seasons was very much more valuable then Reuschel in his seven best seasons. There were pitchers throwing 300 innings in a season long into Reuschel's career. That Reuschel was never one of the pitchers good enough to do that is something any worthwhile stat simply has to take into account.
I'll grant that readily, but I'm much more comfortable with Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez. Seaver, Maddux, and Gibson among the top ten peak pitchers than John Clarkson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, the aforementioned McCormick, Charlie Radbourn, and Tim Keefe. YMMV.
I haven't thought this through, and maybe it's a dead end, but I think the adjustment level itself could change over time, rather than pick 250 out of thin air and apply it to everyone. Maybe the max level is equal to the maximum number of innings pitched (by any single pitcher) in each year or over each n-year period, and then "normalize" that somehow. (I think it breaks down at that last step and devolves to what they're already doing, but there might be a way.)
Alternatively, maybe the normalizing could be done to a 4-man rotation, which was the standard for about a century. This brings Charlie Radbourn way down, as it should, and it also brings down modern 200-inning pitchers in 5-man rotations, as I also believe it should. The switch from a 4-man to a 5-man rotation made pitchers less valuable. It just did. WAR7 tries to hide that by taking value away from pitchers in 4-man rotations, but they have it backwards. In any event, modern pitchers, with their girly-man pitch counts, get to go all out for six innings and are therefore more effective per inning. That's an advantage they still get to keep in their stats, so normalizing to a 4-man rotation seems much more fair. In the end, this might be equivalent to raising the 250 limit to 350 or something in that ballpark. All I know for certain, is that any negative adjustment can't apply to one pitcher in any given season that doesn't apply to every pitcher in that season. That takes the value of being able to pitch more innings than most pitchers and throws it out, and the result is nonsense.
“daltexdaltex Posts: 2,691 ✭✭✭✭✭ December 5, 2022 6:34PM
@rbsalezman said:
The problem with defensive WAR is that very little television footage exists for the majority games prior to 1980 so metrics from that time period are just guesses.
If someone comes up with footage of all of Jimmie Foxx and Mickey Mantle’s games they played during their career, I could be convinced to jump on the WAR bandwagon. Until then, WAR is just another modern statistic unfairly applied to previous generations.”
“What does television footage have to do with defensive WAR?”
According to MLB.com, the formula for determining WAR for position players is: (The number of runs above average a player is worth in his batting, baserunning and fielding + adjustment for position + adjustment for league + the number of runs provided by a replacement-level player) / runs per win.
Batting and base running statistics have existed for most of baseball history but fielding statistics (besides errors which is a flawed stat because you can’t make an error if you don’t try) didn’t exist prior to the start of the sabermetric era. It’s possible to retroactively go back and figure out the fielding component of WAR if footage exists for an entire season by rewatching the games (which is essentially since teams started airing their entire schedule versus select games) but how do you figure out fielding WAR when video footage doesn’t exist
For example, fielding WAR incorporates things like which player’s has more range in fielding their position or who had the ability to turn obvious doubles into singles because of the strength of their arm?. Without footage to retroactively go back and review the games, how would you know how good of a defensive player an all-time great like Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Mickey Mantle was outside of just guessing?
I get what you're saying. I really do. But I don't understand how watching every single game would help. I mean we have people who watched at least the vast majority of Kirby Puckett's career insisting that it's not true that he became a very different player between the 1984 and 1986 seasons, suddenly able to hit for power, but 50 pounds heavier. He was a brilliant defensive CF in 1984 and good in 1985, but below average to awful the rest of his career. And all that can be shown using advanced metrics. But if you only remember, like all of us do, him stealing home runs in game 6 of the 1991 Series, you're bound to think he's far better than he really was.
Again: how would watching every single game in baseball history tell you how well someone fielded his position? I mean wouldn't any results you get be terribly subjective?
Oh, that would be a tedious project to review all MLB games played and record fielding data necessary to run new metrics.
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That's what it would take.
If you read Jim Bouton"s "Ball Four", he didn't like the way ERA made relief pitching look. He created a different way of rating his performances that made a lot more sense for a reliever.
I love looking at statistics, but in no way "worship " them like many here.
If you are going to come up with any metric that boils a performance down to a single number, I haven't seen it yet.
As you math guys know, if you have an error in your equation, then you start throwing in thousands more numbers, you are going to get a less accurate result.
Two examples;
1973 Bert Blyleven had an awesome year, I mentioned he got screwed by the Twins offense that year. A stat guy (correctly) pointed out that the Twins scored the league average for him, PROVING me incorrect. I then took a look at his games and saw that the Twins scored 14 runs for him once an 9 and 8 runs a couple times, and not much a bunch of times. So, while yes, the Twins scored for him at the league average, they did it in a way that cost him a lot of wins. He should have won the Cy Young that year.
Second is the ridiculous comments about Puckett. His assist numbers dropped pretty dramatically after his first couple of seasons, indicating that his fielding had dropped. Incorrect! Runners got tired of being thrown out trying to take an extra base against him and stopped doing it. Then you get the "50 pounds" statement, somehow claiming that gaining that weight (mostly muscle) made him worse as a fielder. Incorrect. As gigantic as he became, he could still (at 5'8" no less) leap far up off the ground to make spectacular catches. Not too many 'in shape' guys had that ability. He did it a lot. You would know it if you SAW it. Living in Minnesota, you got to see it quite often. Up until his last few years he was a superb fielder!
Sometimes you have to take the time to actually watch the games and STOP relying on statistics as your only source of information.
“I get what you're saying. I really do. But I don't understand how watching every single game would help. I mean we have people who watched at least the vast majority of Kirby Puckett's career insisting that it's not true that he became a very different player between the 1984 and 1986 seasons, suddenly able to hit for power, but 50 pounds heavier. He was a brilliant defensive CF in 1984 and good in 1985, but below average to awful the rest of his career. And all that can be shown using advanced metrics. But if you only remember, like all of us do, him stealing home runs in game 6 of the 1991 Series, you're bound to think he's far better than he really was.
Again: how would watching every single game in baseball history tell you how well someone fielded his position? I mean wouldn't any results you get be terribly subjective?”
This thread started with Rick Reuschel’s card’s 1973 Topps card prices increasing. The argument made was that people were looking at his career JAWS and WAR scores and that they stood out as Hall of Fame potential so people might have been speculating on his RC.
Without footage of most of Reuschel’s 1970’s starts or for that matter anyone who played some or all of their career prior to 1980, how do you figure out the career totals of past players using modern statistics (WAR AND JAWS) without going back and watching them play to calculate the statistics (specifically fielding statistics) not measured in box scores because they didn’t exist at the time the game was played.
You are wrong about Puckett. Not going to try to change your mind. I saw it, I know enough about baseball to know what I saw.
He was a SUPERB defensive player for most of his career. Gaining muscle does not mean he got worse.
He made very few errors and had a Good accurate arm. IF he played a little deep and "allowed" a few measley singles, robbing batters of extra base hits is better.
I saw it, I know it
You read it and it's incorrect.
Yeah, other than WAR, which is pretty much useless for evaluating defense, I don't know what evidence there is for Puckett being less than a very good outfielder for most of his career. Win Shares has Puckett deserving a Gold Glove in 1984, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1991, and 1992. Based on WS per 1,000 innings, he's rated - for his entire career - as an A+ outfielder. To the objection that Win Shares also don't work, I note that the other modern OFers rated A+ are Richie Ashburn, Ken Berry, Paul Blair, Jim Busby, all 3 DiMaggios, Jim Edmonds, Curt Flood, Andruw Jones, Darren Lewis, Kenny Lofton, Garry Maddox, Willie Mays, Omar Moreno, Otis Nixon, Amos Otis, Jimmy Piersall, Pete Reiser, Bill Virdon, Rondell White, Bernie Williams, and Willie Wilson.
I listed all of them to show that pretty much everyone that is considered a GOAT caliber OFer is there, and everyone who is there has never been called "bad" (until now). In other words, to show that at some level Win Shares works when used to evaluate OF defense. Is it possible that while it was evaluating every other OF correctly, or at least close to correctly, that it completely dropped the ball when evaluating Kirby Puckett? Sure, anything is possible. Is there any reason to believe that Win Shares dropped the ball when evaluating Kirby Puckett? No, there isn't. Certainly, Win Shares isn't perfect, but it simply does not hand out A+s to below average outfielders. I agree that Puckett was a great outfielder; I strongly disagree that he was anything less than good.
Thank you for the input.
Few know about it but Virdon was as good or better defensively as Willie, Mickey and the Duke.
In other news; water is wet.
That is all.
This list seems pretty random to me. Great, good, to the downright terrible.
What are the criteria Win Shares uses for defense?
For defense, Win Shares uses stats and fomulas that would take me hours to transcribe and which I don't understand well enough to express completely in my own words. Here's a very simplified summary:
First, the team's WIn Shares get split into offense and defense.
Second, the defensive Win Shares get split into pitching and actual defense, which process includes a stat called the defensive efficiency rating (DER)
Third, the team's outfield gets it's share of the total defensive Win Shares based on four factors:
1. Putouts (adjusted for strikeouts and infield putouts) compared to league average
2. Park-adjusted DER
3. Assists + DP + SF compared to league average
4. Error percentage
Those four elements are, from the top, weighted 40%, 30%, 20%, 10%.
All of the above generates the total Win Shares for the team's entire outfield.
Each individual outfielder then gets his share of the total based on his percentage of "claim points". For outfielders, claim points are determined as PO + 4A - 5E +2*RBP, where RBP (Range Bonus Plays) is another complicated formula that estimates how many plays the player made more than expected. Each individual outfielder then gets a percentage of the OF Win Shares equal to that outfielders percentage of the total claim points for the entire OF.
Again, this is simplified so don't shoot me if it turns out I left out something. But the system works, at all positions, to a degree that no other system I've seen even comes close to. The key point, at all positions, is to back out things outside of the player's control (such as strikeouts and infield outs), and in all cases compare not raw numbers but numbers as they compare to league averages. The park-adjusted DER even tries to adjust for park differences, although doing that completely is probably not possible. And note that it is not possible to calculate Win Shares for any player without first collecting data for every player in the league. They are an accounting/allocation stat, not in any way, shape or form, a counting stat.
You, and every single person who cares about these things, absolutely need to read Win Shares (Bill James, 2002). It's very "mathy", but every worthwhile statistic is.
Now, on what basis have you determined that any player on that list was terrible? Because whoever he/they may be, I think you're the only person I have ever heard call any of them "terrible" (you are the first, and only, one I've ever heard refer to Puckett that way).
Book ordered.
I never called Puckett "terrible". Puckett was elite in 1984, still good in 1985, and bad after that. Otis was OK, but not great, until he hit the magic 30. But he played CF so long after that that he became the second worst CF of his era. No one was nearly as bad as Monday.
@dallasactuary
BTW, curious as to what grades Pettis, (Devon) White, Mike Cameron, and Willie Davis earned. Also Chet Lemon.
It will change your life. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
OK, you called him "awful" not "terrible", but either way I'd still like to know why you think so. And on what specific list is Nixon the second worst CF of his era?
And your mention of Monday reminds of something I probably should have made clear earlier. The grades are assigned to outfielders, without regard to which spot in the OF they play. Which means that even a "bad" CF is going to get a decent grade, because he is, by definition, better than the two other guys playing OF with him. Now there's nothing inherent to WS that requires that outcome, but the CF is going to make a lot more plays than the others, and thus have a larger "claim" on the Win Shares for the OF. If there were a team dumb enough to put Greg Luzinski in CF and Garry Maddox in LF (for example), Maddox would no doubt claim more Win Shares, but in the real world, the CF always gets the most. Which is preface to saying that Nixon being graded A+ surprises me, too, but, being good enough to play CF for as long as he did means that he was a very good outfielder. Even a "bad" career CF is not going to get a bad grade.
Also, the grades are for career averages. If an OF is great enough for a long enough time, then even several bad seasons late in his career will not change his grade much. If Nixon became really "bad" for a few years, he was still good enough to play CF so he's not going to fall any lower than a "C" for those years, and his overall grade may not be affected much, if at all.
Was daltex referring to Amos Otis or Otis Nixon? My impression is the former and your assumption was the latter.
Yes, the former. Mr. Nixon and I are not on a first name basis.
A Wheel of Fortune before and after (after) - Famous Amos Otis Nixon
Amos Otis was a great CF, so I'm not sure why he got mentioned as out of place. He won three Gold Gloves and Win Shares shows him deserving four. The only stat that points to a different conclusion is RField, a component of WAR, which is yet another piece of evidence that WAR doesn't work.
Perhaps this was missed the first time I posted, or perhaps there is a list of defensive Win Shares that is publicly accessible?
Sorry, I did miss this, and there is no public access to Win Shares as far as I know. Win Shares, the book, goes through the year 2001; after that I got nothin'. My guess is that there is a way to get them for a fee, but I've never looked into it.
Grades for Pettis, White, Cameron, and Davis: A, A, Post-2001, A
Win Shares Gold Gloves for these four: 1,2,2,3
Note that Cameron isn't graded but has 2 GG. He gets credit for the seasons he played, but he had not met James' arbitrary cutoff for innings played yet when the book was published, so he isn't listed in the grade section.
Also note that in many years James lists more than 3 OF, when 4 and 5 are very close to #3. Pettis and White have multiple 4/5 placements. James would be the first to say that a difference of a small fraction of a Win Share is statistically meaningless. Which is all to say, within the margin of statistical error, this group could have anywhere from 5 to 15 GGs between them.
Puckett defense update;
Comparing him to Center fielders from 1984-1995.
Players in comparison; Yount, Pettis, Wilson, White, Burks, L. Johnson and Ken Griffey Jr. (I excluded guys like Brian McRae and Chad Curtis etc, who might have had a couple of big years, but didn't last long).
Used the old fashioned stats; put outs, assists, errors, double plays, fielding% and games played. 1994 &1995 Puckett played RF, but I still compared him to CF.
1984 and 1985 it seems to be agreed he was the best, so I'll just take those two years.
1986 Kirby was about #4 behind Yount, Pettis and Butler. A seemingly "down" year, he was still top 5 in the big categories.
1987 he was 2nd behind Wilson.
1988 he was tied for best with Yount.
1989 he was best with White just behind.
1990 third behind Pettis and Burks.
1991 White and Johnson were #1 Kirby and Griffey were #3 (or#4).
1992 him and Griffey were the best.
1993 Kirby above Loften.
1994 RF, as good as Loften who was #1 CF.
1995 RF, Edmonds #1, Puckett next best.
These are all the numbers you need.
It becomes obvious if you take the time to to look. I didn't need to, but I did.
Looks like he "deserved" a GG in every year but 1986 and maybe 1991.
If anyone's interested (and why would you be?), I'll show you what I looked at in a given year.
Superb defender from day 1 until he retired!
@JoeBanzai I claim that using stats that an eight-year-old can calculate with a four function calculator is incredibly inadequate for hitting and pitching, and even worse for fielding. As to specific players, I'm withholding comment until I receive the book @dallasactuary refers to above. It is possible I misunderstand something, and I want to be sure I understand the methodology that says that Puckett (and Amos Otis) were elite defenders.