Baseball Evolution - Asher - A Place at the Table for Rafael Palmeiro

A Place at the Table for Rafael Palmeiro – But Which Table?

by Asher B. Chancey, Baseball Evolution

A couple of years ago, I was watching a ballgame on Fox Game of the Week, and the camera panned over to the Indians dugout where hitting coach Eddie Murray sat, studiously examining the field as his players warmed up between innings. As he watched, some sportscaster made reference to Murray's 3000 hits and 500 home runs, and maybe even his 1900 RBIs, and called Murray "one of the All Time Greats." Eddie Murray was a very good, very consistent ball player. He is a top 100 ball player. But he is, in my mind, a bit overrated.

Now that Rafael Palmeiro has reached 3,000 hits, the talk begins about his place in baseball history. We all know he is headed into the Hall of Fame, and rightfully so, but where does he rank among the great players is the question everyone will be asking. The answer really won't officially come until Palmeiro reaches some other milestones - 600 home runs, 2000 RBI, 600 doubles being the main ones which come to mind. While none of these milestones is a sure thing, a funny thing happened to Rafael Palmeiro this season on the way to hit number 3,000 – he has actually not been playing too badly. It is possible that Palmeiro will stick around long enough to get the remaining home runs (34) RBI (174) and doubles (17). What will happen to his career AVG, OPS, and K/BB ratios as he holds on to reach these milestones is what I am curious to see.

The 600 doubles and 600 home runs would really be an impressive feat. Only four players have ever hit 600 home runs, and only 12 players have ever hit 600 doubles, but only one player has ever done both – Hank Aaron. Here is the list of the top home run and doubles combinations[i] in history:

Player		2B	HR	Total
Hank	Aaron	624	755	1379
Barry	Bonds	563	703	1266
Babe	Ruth	506	714	1220
Stan	Musial	725	475	1200
Willie	Mays	523	660	1183
Raphael	Palmeiro	583	566	1149
Frank	Robinson	528	586	1114
Carl	Yastrzemski	646	452	1098
Eddie	Murray	560	504	1064
Ted	Williams	525	521	1046
Cal	Ripken	603	431	1034
Lou	Gehrig	534	493	1027
Reggie	Jackson	463	563	1026
Dave	Winfield	540	465	1005
Mel	Ott	488	511	999
Jimmie	Foxx	458	534	992
George	Brett	665	317	982
Mike	Schmidt	408	548	956
Andre	Dawson	503	438	941
Ken	Griffey Jr.	423	518	941
Fred	McGriff	441	493	934
Sammy	Sosa	351	583	934

If Palmeiro does in fact reach the 600/600 plateau, he will not only join Hank Aaron as the only member of that club, but he will also join Aaron, Bonds, Ruth, and Musial as the only members of the 1200 HR+2B club. Still very select company.

The Runs Batted In issue is another one altogether. If Palmeiro gets to 2000 RBI, he will join a club that only has two members – Ruth and Aaron. That is legend stuff. You don't take the third seat at a table that Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron are sitting at without everyone in the restaurant turning to look and ask themselves, "who is THAT?!?!" To have a list, any list, which reads "Aaron, Ruth, Palmeiro" would say quite a bit.

Unfortunately for Palmeiro, if he gets to 2000 RBI, he may become the poster child for RBI cynicism. There are plenty of RBI critics out there, Bill James I suppose being the most visible, who think that RBI are overrated because they depend more on the team a player is on than the player's actual abilities.[ii] As Palmeiro moves up the RBI list, passing Ted Williams, Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, Willie Mays, Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, and Lou Gehrig, there will be no shortage of people who will point out what a meaningless accomplishment this is because Palmeiro is clearly inferior to all those players. This would, of course, also be unfortunate for the RBI.

Unfortunately for Palmeiro (and the fact that I have begun two straight paragraphs with those words should give you an indication of what I think of him), he is a career milestone horse, like Aaron, Yastrzemski, Ripken, and Murray, to name the more prominent ones.[iii] While his career milestones will certainly be impressive in the end, his individual season dominance and his career averages tell us more about Palmeiro than his career milestones.

Perhaps the jumping off point for any discussion of career averages would be OPS+ (although I think Keith would refer to batting runs). For those just joining the party, OPS is on-base percentage plus slugging percentage, a formulation that Peter Gammons discovered in 1999[iv] which is a very accurate gauge of a player's ability (though again Keith would refer to batting runs). OPS+ is OPS adjusted over the course of time for era, ballpark, and some other things. Basically, a player with a 100 OPS+ is an average player, a player under 100 is below average, and a player above 100 is above average (. . . the snozzberries taste like snozzberries . . .).

The all time leader in OPS+ is none other than Babe Ruth at 207. This means he is more than twice the average player. He is the only player over 200, with Ted Williams at 190, Barry Bonds at 184, and Lou Gehrig at 179. Whenever you see an OPS+ over 150, you know you have a genuinely good player on your hands – Piazza, Bagwell, Lajoie, Thome, Delahanty, Aaron, Ott, DiMaggio, Frank Robinson are all in the 150-ish range – and a player over 160 is pretty fabulous.

Coming into the 2005 season Rafael Palmeiro had an OPS+ of 132. While this is certainly solid, it is nothing to write home about. He's at the table with Aaron and Ruth, but he just used to his entrée fork to eat his salad, he ordered White Zinfandel while Ruth and Aaron sipped single malt, and the tablecloth is tucked into his pants. OPS+ 132 does not place in the Top 100 of all time. Players with higher OPS+ include Pedro Guerrero, Larry Doby, Bill Terry, and Denny Lyons. Nice guys, good ballplayers, but not elite by any stretch.

To be more pedestrian for a moment, we can look at career batting average. Palmeiro was once a solid hitter, hitting over .300 five times from 1988 to 1995. But as his career progressed, Palmeiro became less of a hitter for average and more of just an average hitter. From 1996 to 2004, Palmeiro hit over .300 exactly once, going for .324 in 1999 in probably his best season. In that same period, he hit .260 or lower three times, hit .273 exactly twice, .288 once and .296 once. As it stands, his career average of .289 is solid, but doesn't get him through the door of any of the cool clubs.

One stat that I like to look at is BB/K. It’s a relatively arbitrary stat, as many very productive players have had terrible BB/K ratios, and many mediocre players have had very good BB/K ratios. Nevertheless, it is always interesting to see where a player ranks in BB/K, and a ratio over 1.0 is pretty much the only thing I look for.

Palmeiro currently has a BB/K ratio over 1.0, but only barely (1343/1337). Of the twenty players in the 500 home run club, plus Lou Gehrig and Fred McGriff, the only players to have a BB/K ratio over 1.0 are Aaron, Ruth, Bonds, Mantle, Foxx, Williams, Ott, Gehrig and Palmeiro (8 out of 22 players). Obviously, this distinction puts him in select company, though it does not really impact how we look at his career if he should strike out 6 more times than he walks from here on out. Still noteworthy.

Once career averages are more or less explored, the next logical step is to look at single season dominance. One of the things that Barry Bonds fans like to point at is his seven MVPs (which, by the way, that IS amazing, and it really does feel like he went from 3 to 7 overnight), and the fact that he spent a significant portion of his career as the game's best player. Whenever we judge a player, we look at how many MVPs he owns, and how many times he was one of the league's best players.[v]

Well, Palmeiro's best season was probably 1999, when he went 47-148-.324 with 96 runs, 1050 OPS (160), and a 97/69 BB/K. It was his second time as a 100-pluser[vi], and his career high for HR, RBI, AVG, OBP, SLG, OPS, and OPS+. However, that season Palmeiro did not lead the league in any single offensive category. Not that you have to, but it says a lot that he did not. He finished second in several categories, but could hardly be considered the league's best player that year.

1999 was actually an infamous year in terms of post awards for two reason, only one of which was directly related to Rafie. That was the year that Ivan Rodriguez edged out Pedro Martinez for the MVP become some dude who thought pitchers shouldn't be eligible but still somehow managed to be allowed to write about baseball didn't put Pedro anywhere on his ballot. Pedro ended up losing by 13 points despite taking 8 first place votes to IRod's 7.

That was the same season that Rafie managed the dubious distinction of winning the Gold Glove at first base AND the Silver Slugger at Designated Hitter. I know what you are thinking – maybe he spent enough time at both to qualify for both (which, by the way, means you are stupid, because even if he split it evenly, he shouldn't qualify for either). But, unfortunately for the voters, it wasn't close – Rafie played exactly 28 games at first base, the only season of his career to that point in which he played more games at DH. This really cast a pall on the Gold Glove voting process, because it showed that apparently voters don't even look, they just vote on instinct, and calls into question all the players that have won many gold gloves, and whether they earned it or whether dinner was getting cold at the voter's houses, and they didn't have time to look in the "games played" columns of the various candidates.[vii] But I digress . . .

Fact is, Rafie has really never been the league's best at anything. In 1993, he led the league in runs. In 1990, he led the league in hits and singles. In 1991, he led the league in doubles. He narrowly missed leading the 90s in hits, a distinction that went to Mark Grace.

When doing my Top 100 the last few years, I have generally considered Rafael Palmeiro to be the 1990s version of Eddie Murray, and I think this is still true. Bill James points out that it is difficult to pinpoint Murray's best season, but they were all good, and very consistent. The same can be said of Palmeiro. A brief look at their career stats:

Player	R	H	2B	HR	RBI	BB	SO	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS	OPS+	BB/K
Murray	1627	3255	560	504	1917	1333	1516	0.287	0.363	0.476	839	130	0.88
Palmeiro	1656	3001	583	566	1826	1343	1337	0.289	0.371	0.516	887	132	1.00

Now, Palmeiro is slightly better than Murray in several categories, there differences are very much explained by era. For example, Palmeiro currently has 62 more home runs than Murray. But over the course of his career, Murray led the league in home runs once, and finished in the top five 5 times. Palmeiro has never led the league in home runs, and has finished in the top five 6 times. Not much of a difference.

Taken one step further, in 1984 Eddie Murray finished ninth in the league with 29 home runs. In 1996, Rafael Palmeiro finished ninth with 39 home runs. Sure, Palmeiro hit ten more home runs than Murray did, but they were both the ninth best home run hitter in their league. In this one specific example, the 1996 version of the same player in 1984 has ten more home runs.

This is, of course, simply an anecdotal example, but they are very similar players. You can see Murray's career stats above – they are very good. But Murray, like Palmeiro, also had a little trouble leading the league in things (to the extent that such a thing is indicative of anything at all). He led the league in OBP, BB, and games in 1984, HR and RBI in 1981, and intentional walks three times. And, again a possibly insignificant stat, Murray was the highest paid player in the league in 1990. Palmeiro was never the league's highest paid player.[viii]

The biggest deal that people generally tend to make over Rafie is his eight straight seasons with 38 or more home runs, a feat he accomplished from 1995 to 2003. This is, to say the least, a very impressive feat. But it lends itself to a little experiment. What if we take Rafie's season totals for those years, and push them back ten years to 1985 to 1993. We can look at where he ranked each season in home runs from 1995 to 2003, and then see how many home runs he would have hit if he had ranked in that place from 1985-1993:

Season	HR	Rank	Season	HR	Rank
1995	39	4	1985	35	4
1996	39	9	1986	31	9
1997	38	6	1987	34	6
1998	43	6	1988	27	6
1999	47	2	1989	35	2
2000	39	8	1990	27	8
2001	47	3	1991	34	3
2002	43	3	1992	35	3
2003	38	5	1993	37[ix]	5
	373			295

So, the transposition results, first of all, in 78 fewer home runs, but more importantly, Rafie's feat of hitting 38 or more home runs in eight straight years becomes the feat of hitting 27 or more home runs for eight straight years.[x]

Now, this is actually still impressive. 27 home runs over eight straight years in nothing to sneeze your nose at. But again, it does not exactly get him into all the cool clubs.

In the end, whatever his stats ultimately finish out at, and whatever milestones he ultimately reaches, Rafael Palmeiro will be remembered by many as a pretty good player. And someday, just like Eddie Murray, he will become some team's hitting instructor, and someday, the Fox Game of the Week will be in the city where Rafie is working, and the camera will show him looking studiously from the dugout, and some sportscaster will refer to him as one of the All Time Greats. And, as it was with Murray, this will be an exaggeration.