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Larry Bowa was just as good defensively as Ozzie Smith
1948_Swell_Robinson
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in Sports Talk
Maybe even better.
Just because Smith had more balls hit his way doesn't make him better. Bowa actually had a better glove and made less errors...with just as good as range and a much stronger arm.
There is no way their defenisve WAR disparity is accurate....not even remotely close to accurate...due to the fatal flaws of defensive measurements.
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I think part of Ozzie’s reputation was built on flashy plays and backflips and the cool nickname.
then why doesn't he have a flashy nickname?!
Bowa was a good dependable player. However he had a very "antagonistic" personality. Despite his talent, and many years with the Phillies, the Phillies front office couldn't wait to get rid of him. The Cubs said they'll take him, but only if the Phillies throw-in a particular almost unknown player.
Well the Cubs suckered the Phillies good. That unknown player was Ryne Sandberg, and it turned out to be one of the worst trades in MLB history.
As far as the comparison, certainly Ozzie was the best athlete. I would have thought that Ozzie was the better shortstop based on pundit comments over the years. But I never had any problem with Bowa's fielding.
Larry Bowaconstrictor
I recall reading about Bowa commenting about how he became an excellent fielder, despite his seemingly limited athletic talent. I'm paraphrasing a bit his exact comments but it's not far off.
He said almost every day as he was growing up, his dad would take him to a local baseball field, and literally hit hundreds of ground balls to him each time. Bowa said fielding a ground ball became second nature to him.
So unless you're incredibly gifted, and Ozzie certainly had that over Bowa, that's the type of dedication ya need to get to the bigs as a major league shortstop. Fielding a few balls before little league or high school practice, just isn't going to do it for someone like Bowa.
When WAR puts a hit as good as a walk & you have 600 less with an OBP of exactly .300 - your WAR is going to suffer. 15 All-Star games to 5 also doesn't help. 76.9 to 22.8 - WAR renders his career as average, at best.
I don't agree...
Erik
I'm referring to their defensive WAR.
If that’s how you view the utility of a statistic I would also caution that you are using it incorrectly. Finding where a statistic doesn’t make sense is not the right approach. That’s like wondering why tire pressure doesn’t predict the weather.
I should clarify that I'm not saying it doesn't make sense, but rather the way WAR measures fielding simply does not accurately capture the individual fielders ability/contribution compared to other fielder's ability/contribution.
It does however do a good job of measuring how pitching staffs and sheer luck/chance provided MORE routine fielding opportunities to individual defenders, and giving a false perception or number on who is "producing higher than a replacement."
apologies - I was not responding to estang and didn't do a good job.
defensive war has trouble predicting what would have happened... so... as far as statistics go it's a coarser hint. what I don't follow is why people want to trust their gut because data isn't perfect so they ignore the hint. those same people would generally accept a meterologist's 50-50 rain prediction and bring an umbrella if they're going out.
as far as your opinion on Bowa, I didn't watch him play enough to have a good opinion on his defensive prowess vs. Ozzie - who I did watch often. I think defensive ability is something you need to see first-hand.
The premise - the absolutely essential premise - of your argument is that it is a fact that Ozzie Smith had more balls hit to him than did Larry Bowa. Please share with us the statistical database that documents that this is the case. Or, alternatively, stop saying absurd things like Larry Bowa was fit to hold Ozzie Smith's jockstrap as a fielder. If it weren't so funny when you say things like that, it would be painful. Say Belanger, or Concepcion, or Fernandez, and at least we're talking about degrees of greatness among great shortstops. But Larry Freakin' Bowa? Other than your entirely hallucinated statistics about how many balls were hit at Bowa and Smith, how did comparing these two ever even occur to you? Who was a better hitter, Mickey Mantle or Vic Wertz? However hard you laughed at that question, baseball fans laughed just a little bit harder at your Smith to Bowa comparison.
And note that this is in no way a defense of WAR, which is pure, unadulterated crap, as I have said many times. But the fact that WAR generates random numbers and people think they mean anything does not change the fact that Ozzie Smith was a very, very, very much better shortstop than Larry Bowa. That WAR captures that does not make it wrong; random number generators give you reasonable results sometimes.
Hurry up and POP
A random number generator should have no relationship between input and output - feed it the same input multiple times and you should expect different output - no signal... only noise.
WAR, good or bad, right or wrong, misused by most, understood by few, is an example of a deterministic function - the same inputs always produce the same output. You may not like the choice of input or the result of the output but "the recipe weights things wrong" is a completely different complaint from "the numbers are random". It's a lot of words which don't make a whole lot of mathematical sense.
The fact that WAR is generally accurate is real evidence that it's tracking something real and not simply producing random outputs. That it's imprecise and debatable is a feature of the nuance of what it is attempting to measure.
"I don't like it and I can't understand it" would have been shorter. However, if this was an example of randomness of thought I apologize and, instead, praise the humor.
I didn't mean "random" in that sense. I meant you can feed it the stats of a great fielder and the results will be that he was a great fielder, an average fielder, or a bad fielder. You'll get the same result every time because it is a formula, but you have no way of knowing whether you'll get the right answer or the wrong answer. The result is, as I said. random. I could explain to you the flaws in the WAR formula, but you wouldn't understand what I was saying, and your response would be physically painful, so I won't try. But thank you for the laugh; that you understand WAR better than I do was hysterical.
Dallas absorbs the blow and punches back. Now if 48swell enters the fray again this thread has serious entertainment potential.
With great hyperbole comes great responsibility. You're labeling imprecision as randomness still so I fail to see why you're so confident that you're king of some hill. I think it's improper to mix WAR and dWAR and you're thrashing someone who was referencing dWAR, which is not WAR., yet you keep saying WAR... while uttering your comprehension of it all.
Since the context of the thread was dWAR I assumed everyone knew that's what I was talking about. I"m pretty sure everyone with crinkles in their brain did understand that; what you smooth-brained folks understand is impossible to know.
BTW, dWAR is the primary reason that WAR is pure, unadulterated crap, but it's not the only reason. oWAR has it's own problems, although they are not nearly as egregious as the ones in dWAR. If everyone wants to compare players hitting by reference to their oWAR, I have no serious objection to that. But dWAR, and by extension WAR, are pure, unadulterated crap and nobody should take them seriously.
I don't think anyone was arguing that dWAR was inherently accurate so I don't really know what you're trying to engage in here other than blasting people without understanding their words.
Saying WAR is bad because the dWAR component is flawed or noisy or inaccurate or whatever... is a pure composition flaw. I understand what you are saying about dWAR being error-prone, even through the charade of bluster, but it has general merit. The key point is that no one is saying dWAR is accurate. The original post called it's accuracy directly into discrepancy. I didn't follow up and say follow the gospel of WAR or dWAR either. I said it's a hint - "generally accurate", and the data backs that up even if you want to just assume victory without substantiating it - which is fine. it is what it is.... unsupported opinion.
I think 1948 brings up an intesting comparison because where there is a substantial percentage of a player's WAR driven by dWAR specifically we should engage that as a filter to inspect closer. Just because an algorithm misleads us from time to time is NO EXCUSE to just return "gut feelings" or "pick your stat".
bottom line: The Wizard of Oz was almost certainly the better fielder. Here's a case where there's a lot of d in that WAR and 44.2 dWAR certainly carries more false precision than that decimal might indicate, but to say it's "unadulterated crap" is quite a leap as it seems largely to be directional precise.
My comment on the usage of certain statistics was regarding the sampling size. I would use the measured imprecision of defensive rating schemes against themselves. In your example of oWAR being OK, while dWAR isn't there are numbers around how OK both of them are and how OK WAR becomes as a function of them both. UZR's year-to-year correlation is ~0.5 and OPS's year-to-year correlation is ~0.7 - so a single year or OPS has the same amount of "signal" as almost 2 years of UZR. So that tells me less than a few seasons is mostly noise, but when you're looking at a full season it primarily washes away that noise. So if you have enough sampling size then the other argument is the key metrics. The main metrics - DRS, UZR, OAA tend to be at odds often over short spans and have only recently (in statcast era) begun to converge. For the Bowa vs. Ozzie period before we had Statcast data I think it comes down to human review because the data we have isn't good enough. I think that conflating bad data with bad models and insulting people about it is kind of a bozo move so chill out bro.
Show me the number of balls that were hit to Bowa to where "he didn't convert them to outs," where Smith would have.
Ozzie's replacements(in total) during his time(on his same teams) got to the same amount of balls per inning as Ozzie did...so their 'range' was nearly equivalent.
WAR defense measures more accurately how many balls were hit to that positional area than it does how good that fielder's range/ability was.
Just like the Ryne Sandberg double play dilemma that is 100% more about opportunity than it is skill. ...because Sandberg is just a good or better fielder than Mazeroski was...and like Bowa, both more sure handed than Ozzzie/Mazeroski.
In 1971 Larry Bowa led the league with 560 assists while maintaining a league leading .987 Fielding Percentage. So he clearly had the ability, if given enough balls hit his way, to rack up all time assist totals while maintaining elite fielding percentage. For context, Ozzie Smith only surpassed that 560 number just one time in his career.
It is just a matter of getting enough balls hit his way for players who are proven to be capable of fielding them at a high percentage to rack up high defenisive WAR measurements.
Bowa's assist and double play totals moved up and down per year on the same team simply determined by the number of balls hit his way...all while maintaining an elite fielding percentage(leading the league six times). Sometimes he was 'elite' range being well above 500 assists per 162 games, sometimes not close to that....all determined by the number of balls simply hit his way. He didn't forget how to range one year, only to remember the next.
Bowa even threw up a 518 assists per 162 games at age 37 on the Cubs...while leading the league in Fielding Percentage that year.
If the ball was hit in Bowa's vicinity he was turning them into outs at an elite rate.
We do not know how many balls were hit to Ozzie Smith that he turned into outs and assumed that Bowa would not also have...and vice versa. WAR defensive measurements do not know either.
There is NO defensive measurement that can answer that question
We do see that given the elite number of opportunities on a yearly basis that Bowa certainly turned them into elite number of outs and elite defensive war measurements.
What we ALSO do know, is that on the balls deemed playable by the official scorekeeper, that Bowa averaged 15 errors per 162 games and Ozzie Smith averaged 18 errors per 162 games. So Bowa was more likely to convert a field-able ball into an out than Smith was.
In the end, the huge difference in Defensive WAR(or ANY defensive measurement between them) is simp/y not accurate. It DOES NOT measure accurately how good each of them were defensively apart from each other....and it was simply a matter of 'number of balls hit their way' that is the BIGGEST determining factor on how high they scored in the defensive measurements given.
@bgr @dallasactuary
After Dallas commented on crinkle brained and smooth brained people it looked promising but then it took a decidedly more boring mathematical turn.
@Darin is like the daycare worker egging on the toddlers in their care to fight for entertainment purposes. You know it's wrong to have these mental midgets get after each other.
Let's not ever forget that both of these guys have told me for years that Trouty was clutch, perhaps the most clutch hitter of our lifetime, and yet Trouty still hasn't added one hit to his career total of walk off hits of any kind since 2015! Lol
Still hasn't won anything. Still just compiling stats after his HOF career actually ended in relevance on October 5, 2014. Still a choker when it matters.
Speaking of your other thread about 1,000 more strikeouts than walks, adjust your filters to plate appearances in the 7th inning or later, and I bet Trouty is almost there, if not already.
I don't know why anybody takes what these two clowns talk about seriously, at all. They just regurgitate something they read somewhere else and try to sound smart with big words. I doubt either have actually watched a baseball game since the 80s. They just catch highlights in the morning after coming up from mom's (grandma's?) basement for breakfast.
This coming from a guy who thought it was a revelation that MLB players make more outs than they get hits, then proudly went at bat by at bat thinking you knew what you were talking about, ignoring a HR, then highlighting two outs and thinking it was a bad game because it was TWO negative events compared to just one positive event.
Yes, when your only playing experience is Little League(when you sat and watched the best hitters bat .650 while you moaned to your parents wondering why you only got one at bat a game,) then maybe hitters are supposed to get more hits than outs, otherwise, lol.
Or maybe you are still mad that Brett cost the Royals the 1980 World Series on both defense, while Schmidt was hitting, then hitting by striking out in the pivotal 8th of the pivotal game 5. You know, when it matters most according to you. Then he was carried to his lone title by Bret Saberhagen and Buddy Biancalana, whom without, would be right there with Trout looking for his first title.
Or maybe it is all the errors Brett made in the ALCS that cost his team from going to the World Series.
I don't watch every game now, I have better things to do. I've watched and played enough.
The funny thing is you sit and watch every game, get all emotional and crampy when someone strikes out...don't understand what you are seeing, and still can't even throw or catch.
Not my thread moron....but in innings 7-9 Trout has 377 walks to 511 strikeouts....that is why the numbers matter most so pea brained-biased-ignorant-opinioins and perceptions don't mean anything when it is clearly contradicted.
In extra innings, 35 walks to 29 strikeouts. LOL. Any more bright ideas?
Tell me, what is so special about having just one title like Brett??? And he was carried in that World Series by Saberhagen and the umpire. Brett is one correct umpire call away from having zero titles and you get all wet talking about him while ripping someone who has zero? LOL.
I don't watch every game now, I have better things to do. I've watched and played enough.
The funny thing is you sit and watch every game, get all emotional and crampy when someone strikes out...don't understand what you are seeing, and still can't even throw or catch.
I watched about 25 full games this year and several innings of multiple games. In fact, while watching the Sox/Yankees game yesterday, I saw Benintendi hit a go ahead grand slam in the 9th, and as I sat with another person watching, I would have to tell them that there is this guy that calls himself the Count who would say that HR isn't clutch because it wasn't a walk off, lolololol.
Forget about explaining to him the value of the two HBP with two outs to load the bases that this Count guy doesn't even consider because they are not hits to help the batting averages.
You see, a smart baseball person recognizes that walk off events aren't very common and that games are usually decided in the innings before, and that go ahead HR's in the sixth inning can win games, and do win games.
An even more astute baseball fan recognizes those two HBP as extremely key events before that go ahead grand slam, especially the one with an 0-2 count and two outs. An astute fan recognizes the value of getting on base and what goes toward creating runs as that is part of the beauty of the game. Sure, a HR is the absolute best event, but a base on balls before that event is important too, and the astute fans recognize that.
A walk off is exciting to see everyone jump around, and ironically, that is what a seven year old would only recall in that inning, prolly like what you see since that is all you focus on.
You just see the home run because ironically again, that is what they would show on the highlight. Me? I recall the creation of the runs in that inning and give the credit to all of the events to load the bases before that HR even occurred...even if you still consider the HR meaningless because it wasn't a "walk off" LMAO.
I don't even want to get into Volpe's bad baserunning play trying to stretch a double hit to LF into a triple when the game was 1-1 BEFORE the 9th inning( even happened....there is a reason they play 9 innings and not just the 9th inning. That changed that inning tremendously and possibly lost them the game before the 9th inning events even happened...and it was a basereunning blunder that doesn't show up in your batting average or caught stealing....but does show up in other measurements that are both accurate with how the game works and a pair of eyes with some common sense.
No, sir, it was you who stated as fact that Smith had more balls hit to him than Bowa did. So it is on you to back up that statement. I made no such claim, so it is not on me to prove your hallucinations.
But if, as appears to be the case, you are judging fielding quality by adding up assists, put outs, and errors then I take back my demand that you back up your statement because the entire argument is pointless.
Ozzie Smith was the greatest SS of my time from the late 1970's through the mid 1980's. I state that as fact, and a fact with which 100% of the people who have tried to measure "fielding" (and have a clue where to look) agree. He was good after that, even very good, but nothing special. This is one of those things that serves as an anchor to any attempt to measure fielding, as is Johnny Bench's fielding ability. if you try something (add up 2Assists + PO - 3E, just to make up a silly example), and your result is that Ozzie Smith (or Johnny Bench) wasn't an absolutely great fielder, then your formula is wrong. And it is precisely because fielding is so hard to measure that the anchors are so vital. Pete Palmer's Linear Weights method rated Johnny Bench as one of the worst fielding catchers to ever play the game. It took balls to publish the Linear Weights fielding measurements because they were so obviously worthless, but publish them he did, for years.
WAR isn't quite as embarrassingly bad as Linear Weights, but it's bad. And we agree on that. But the reason that it's bad is that it is doing the same thing you are doing - it's adding up this and that and weighting them one way or another and whatever comes out the other end is whatever comes out the other end. Sometimes it's reasonable, sometimes it's absurd. That Larry Bowa was anywhere near as good a SS as Ozzie Smith is absurd. If you saw them play, and I assume you did, then you simply have to know that. If you know that and you're trying to concoct a formula that says otherwise.... why? If you don't know that, then you missed a very special shortstop. It saddens me that there are people who appear to have missed Joe Morgan being, by far, the best player on the Big Red Machine, and saddens me more that people not only missed the entire career of Mike Trout, but are so proudly vocal about their ignorance. Don't be one of those people; appreciate that you got to see one of the greatest shortstops, if not the greatest shortstop, ever.
I win. You lose. Doyle rules.
Show me the measurement where the number of balls hit their way is properly accounted for. There is none for those guys.
Any measurement you use will be heavily influenced by assists, putouts, and errors...the Total Baseball formula is entirely that. WAR tries to take it into account, but fails. Whatever you are using is too, because unless you have video of every play, it is all a guess.
It isn't incumbent upon me to show what you are asking...it is incumbent upon you and the ones who view the defensive measurements at anywhere near 100% validity to show it.
Every defensive measurement used to compare those guys has the same fatal flaw that as long as you are fielding above league average percentage, it is the number of balls hit your way that will influence your 'rating' more than anything.
I would feel comfotable that putting Larry Bowa on the same team's Smith played on, that Bowa gets 98% of the balls Ozzie got and converts them to outs as well.
@dallasactuary show me the balls Ozzie got that you are 100% certain Bowa would not have also gotten.
On the flip side, show me the balls that rolled past Bowa that you are 100% certain Ozzie would have.
Bowa had great range, was sure handed(more so than Ozzie), and had a stronger arm. So even on the few balls Ozzie might have gotten to, Bowa would get more outs via his arm.
Bowa was not as good offensively as Ozzie and that was a factor in him not playing as many innings in his career.
Yeah Oz was spectacular at the plate. 1 home run his first 4 seasons in 583 at bats then he turned on the power with 2 dingers his 5th season. From then on it was a complete power surge finishing with an astonishing 28 career round trippers to almost double Bowa’s total.
Ozzie was better offensively than most people give him credit for. Everyone blasts him due to his low batting average and lack of power, both of which are true...but when you account for his elite baserunning, his career Run Expectancy is actually slightly above league average at 16 runs above league average for his career.
Intuitively that should make sense as he does have a lifetime OPS+ of 87, which is below average obviously(but not as bad as Bowa's 71 or Belanger's 68)...but when you add his 580 stolen bases to 180 CS, and his excelelnt overall baserunning, he was above water offensively.
So when compared to the other elite defensive SS of his time, Ozzie was clearly better offensively. An elite defender at SS providing above league average Run Expectancy offensively....damn, I just made a legit HOF case for Ozzie belonging with no question.
An elite defender often compared to Ozzzie Smith is Omar Vizquel. Even if you call it a draw defensively, here is their run expectancy for their careers:
Ozzie 16 Runs above league average.
Vizquel was 210 runs BELOW league average
I think the general feeling that Ozzie wasn’t very good offensively was exacerbated by Cal Ripken Jr. coming along shortly after Ozzie. Of course Cal was a sensation and I think he was looked at as the blueprint for future shortstops. Ripken’s offensive prowess just made other shortstops look bad.
True.
Yount too.
You're trying to back away from the foolish statement you made. Not on my watch.
YOU are the one who said Ozzie had more balls hit to him than Bowa did. You not only said it, you had no semblance of an argument without saying it. Now you've backed off to the more reasonable statement that you have no idea whether Smith had more balls hit to him than Bowa did, or fewer balls hit to him than Bowa did, because they didn't keep those stats back then. Pro Tip: lead off with the statement that is true and not with one you pulled out of your nether regions: it's much more productive.
Now that we are on the same page and in complete agreement that your OP was beneath both of us, do you honestly believe Bowa was anywhere near as good a fielder as Smith, or are you now just saying there's no way, looking at the available statistics to know? You've said both, so you can understand my confusion, but I would like to formally pin you down on which argument you are making so I can just ignore it if you try to flip-flop back to the other one.
I am not aware of any serious attempt by anyone ever to measure fielding skill that did not show Smith being orders of magnitude better than Bowa, and having watched both of them it would have been shocking if there were a way to reach any other conclusion since Smith was, obviously, orders of magnitude better than Bowa. If you have made a serious effort to quantify their fielding and reached this jaw-dropping conclusion, please share it. If your only point is that fielding is too hard to measure so we can never prove it one way or the other, then just say that. But you are dressing up your odd opinion about Bowa being better than anyone else on the planet ever noticed with a veneer of statistics; but the statistics you are using don't exist, so all we have is your odd opinion (assuming it is actually your opinion and you weren't just trolling).
Ozzie had 12,905 chances to Bowa’s 11,279.
The bigger number is the more. From a statistical perspective, dWAR aside, they line up fairly well on paper.
Oooo. That’s a nice hill to die on.
Fielding percentage could be considered a “serious effort to measure fielding skill” and that has Bowa at .980 and Ozzie at .978.
I think Ozzie was magical so I don’t render an opinion based on that by itself but it is a metric which seriously measures fielding skill.
I mean Ozzie did have more balls hit to him than Bowa did. I believe that is fairly certainly a fact.
The Phillies were more of a strikeout team than Ozzie's teams' so there were simply less outs in play for Bowa...plus Schmidt was a vacuum cleaner at third so less balls there for Bowa too.
In 1980 Smith had over 640 verified balls hit to him. In 1974 Bowa had 472 verified balls hit to him. We both know that Smith wasn't The Flash and getting to nearly 200 more balls than Bowa was because he was The Flash, but rather he simply had more balls hit to him because the Padres staff struck out only 723 guys while the Phillies were 892, and looks like they simply threw more ground balls or just plain chance.
That scenario repeated itself several years in each of their tenures on their teams.
Of course we both know that isn't the key fact in determining how close they were in range and skill or not.
The question still remains as to if Bowa was simply getting less balls and that no matter who played in Bowa's spot that their assists would be similar because you can't field a ball that isn't there to get 600 assists like Smith did in SD that one year.
Reason I brought up Bowa is because I saw an interview the other day and he was on my mind...and it made me think of the old days...and like BGR said early on, there was a little bluster in my post, lol.
In the end, it got you Dallas back to posting and giving some classic arguments, so it was a win.
For me, I'm still about 40% validity on those fielding stats. They matter and count, but in the end, there is no way to truly decipher if a proven defender is getting those ratings because he is being spoon fed more easy plays over his peers or because he is THAT good,
When he’s proven incorrect he wafts away like a fart in the night… but sometimes he returns… also like a fart in the night.
No, fielding percentage does not seriously measure fielding skill. It's one component, but fielders with limited range - who only field the balls hit right at them - have inflated fielding percentages. Greg Luzinski led the league in fielding percentage one year and, not to put too fine a point on it, Luzinski is a legitimate candidate for the worst outfielder of all time. If he had to break a sweat to get to a ball, he just didn't try. I don't mean to imply Bowa was the Greg Luzinski of shortstops - because he wasn't - but he was also not the Ozzie Smith of shortstops - who tried to field everything between the second and third basemen. Bowa was an average shortstop; no shame in that, but comparisons to Ozzie would make Bowa blush, and baseball fans laugh.
Fielding Percentage has more merit for INF than OF, and by a lot. I believe you are short changing Bowa by a lot. Nothing average about him. Put Bowa on a non strikeout pitching staff that feeds ground balls to their SS, then watch his league leading assist totals come in leaps and bounds.
What makes you think so concretelyt that Bowa was average? If you say on the one hand there are clearly limitations in the fielding metrics, then you have to leave room that Bowa was not merely just average, but in a situation where no SS would be racking up fielding metric points.
You brought up Belanger, and I believe Belanger was more of a product of his pitching staff and guys like Palmer were feeding a lot of easy routine outs to his fielders to convert into outs...outs that any competant MLB fielder would convert into an out.
Palmer's ERA would not get one bit worse with Bowa replacing Belanger on those teams...and it would be Bowa being proclaimed as the sure handed GOAT candidate.
While fielding percentage, before statcast, rewards immobility it doesn’t translate to a career because many of those players didn’t stick at SS long enough. In statcast era we see a stronger correlation in fielding percentage and stats like DRS and OAA because players who have weak range at premium positions just don’t last. I don’t know is Luzinski is a prime example as he played LF.
As I said I didn’t see Bowa play so I can’t render an opinion. And I’ve said I thought Oz was great. Great.
You ignored my prime as well. Point conceded I guess.
If a shortstop dives for a ball and stops it, no matter what happens next, if the batter reaches first base safely it’s almost always ruled a base hit. Unless possibly it’s a very slow runner. SS can bobble, stumble getting up, have trouble transferring ball to throwing hand, etc. and it’s a hit. So those kind of plays don’t hurt his fielding percentage. A bigger factor would be balls hit at them that take a tough hop and the official scorer doesn’t take the bad hop into account and rules error.
I don't begin to understand dWAR and I really don't care to delve into it.
I go back to the overall WAR number and that Ozzie Smith walked about once more every 4 games and his overall WAR dwarfs Larry Bowa.
The three best shortstops of the 1970s (off the top of my head) were Concepcion, Bowa and Bill Russell. They played for winning teams and made all-star teams. Ozzie came along late in the decade & flashed greatness in the field, while flipping around like one of those wind-up toys.
I just cannot look at the overall WAR between Smith & Bowa and draw a conclusion from that single number that Ozzie was more than 3 times better than Bowa. It's absurd and doesn't pass the sniff test...
Erik
sitting here playing the what-if game while watching this comparison play out. can't help but think about how drastically history would have been rewritten had Garry Templeton not been a mercurial tool and gotten injured, because neither one of the guys mentioned in this thread could carry his jockstrap a handful of years into their respective careers
The Garry Templeton that had 40 errors one season, stole 28 bases while thrown out 24 times one season, and a lifetime OBP of .303 ?
reading comprehension, Darryl Motley. i said first 5 years. he wasn't the defensive SS those two were, but he more than made up for it with his bat. a better hitter than the two of them combined by a healthy margin. he had as many triples his first handful of full seasons as Ozzie Smith did his entire career. to your point, he didn't walk a lot. but his OBP was still higher than Ozzie's in their first 5...........before St Louis had had enough of his antics and before he had chronic knee issues.
Whitey Herzog called him the most talented player he had ever managed and the best he had seen since Mickey Mantle
ask any Cards fan who followed the team back then -- they envisioned a SS of their own entering the Hall one day, but it wasn't Ozzie Smith
hell, ask Dallas how good he was and the potential he had if you don't believe me
Here’s a tip on how to use WAR - don’t use it as an answer.
I don’t know about Templeton. Compare his peak to J.J. Hardy and let me know what you think.