Knocking on Ted Williams
by Asher B. Chancey, BaseballEvolution.com
July 11, 2008

I am going to have to knock Ted Williams down a few spots. As much as I hate to do it, I think that I have some solid ground to stand on here. I’ll give you ten reasons why I am dropping Ted Williams.

Jackie Jensen, Carl Yazstremski, Rico Petrocelli, Tony Conigliaro, Carlton Fisk, Jim Rice, Dwight Evans, Wade Boggs, Mo Vaughn, and David Ortiz.

What do these guys have in common? They all starred with the Boston Red Sox for all or a significant part of their careers, we have split stats for all of them, and they all derived a significant advantage from playing their home games at Fenway Park, as demonstrated by their significant home/road splits in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and OPS.

The problem with Ted Williams is that we don’t have complete home/road splits for him. Baseball-Reference.com only has splits as far back as 1956, and retrosheet.org only goes back to 1954. Additionally, Ted Williams only played for the Red Sox; if he had switched teams halfway through his career, at least then we could say that once he left the Sox, he was exposed as a lesser hitter than we assumed him to be. Nevertheless, I think we have enough to go on.

We have the numbers, for example, of other Red Sox greats, the aforementioned fellows. Let’s take a look at their Fenway Home/Road splits. We’ll use batting average and OPS as proxies for the other statistics:

		Home Avg	Home OPS	Road Avg	Road OPS	AVG diff	OPS diff
Jackie	Jensen	0.297	0.896	0.273	0.818	0.024	0.078
Carl	Yazstremski	0.306	0.904	0.264	0.779	0.042	0.125
Rico	Petrocelli	0.272	0.843	0.230	0.667	0.042	0.176
Tony	Conigliaro	0.271	0.833	0.256	0.773	0.015	0.060
Carlton	Fisk*	0.300	0.908	0.265	0.776	0.035	0.132
Jim	Rice	0.320	0.920	0.277	0.789	0.043	0.131
Dwight	Evans	0.283	0.885	0.261	0.798	0.022	0.087
Wade	Boggs*	0.369	0.991	0.302	0.781	0.067	0.210
Mo	Vaughn*	0.308	0.952	0.278	0.859	0.030	0.093
David	Ortiz*	0.320	1.025	0.268	0.919	0.052	0.106

As you can see, every single one of these guys had batting averages and OPS significantly higher at Fenway Park than away from Fenway Park over the course of their careers. If it happened to these guys, why wouldn’t we expect it to happen to Ted Williams?

The Curious Case of Manny Ramirez

If you pay attention to baseball and/or the Boston Red Sox at all, then by now you have asked yourself, “What about Manny Ramirez? Why haven’t you put Manny’s splits here yet?” The answer is, because they don’t support my hypothesis. See for yourself:

		Home Avg	Home OPS	Road Avg	Road OPS	AVG diff	OPS diff
Manny	Ramirez*	0.315	1.005	0.311	0.987	0.004	0.018

Turns out, Manny (being Manny), doesn’t do much better at Fenway than he does away from Fenway. There are two theories for this, one of which makes Ted Williams look good, the other of which doesn’t. First, there is the theory floated by Keith that modern ballparks have trended so dominantly towards smaller hitter parks that Fenway no longer plays like a hitter’s park. Tell that to David Ortiz. The second theory is, Manny Ramirez, being the elite hitter that he is, doesn’t need ballpark advantages to boost his numbers. He just hits. Well, if this is true for Manny, we would also expect it to be true of Ted, wouldn’t we? Point for Ted.

Anecdotal Evidence – Ted’s Teammates

We don’t know how Ted Williams would have done playing for another team in another ballpark because he played for the Sox his entire career. Thus, we can’t frame an argument along the lines of “look much his numbers dropped off when he wasn’t with the Red Sox,” like we can for guys like Fisk, Boggs, and guys like Fred Lynn and Reggie Smith.

But Ted did have teammates, and we can look at those guys as analogies.

First up on the Ted’s teammates list would be Jimmie Foxx, who played for the Philadelphia Athletics from 1925 to 1935 before joining the Red Sox from 1936 to 1941. Foxx is another point for Williams, because his numbers pretty much stayed the same after he switched teams. In fact, his four years before joining the Red Sox were better than the four after making the switch.

It would be unfair to not mention Joe Cronin here, who played with the Senators from 1928 to 1935 before joining the Red Sox. But Cronin’s stats with the Senators seem to be classically aided by the high-offense era of the late-twenties and early-thirties, such that the era could have been inflating his numbers before Fenway, and then Fenway could have been after. Actually, the same could be said for Foxx.

Bobby Doerr and Dom DiMaggio are two guys, like Williams, whom it would be nice to have splits for, since they were also exclusively Red Sox, and lost time due to the War.

Perhaps the first bona fide Ted teammate from whom anything can be gleaned would be Johnny Pesky. Pesky hit .331 with a .791 OPS in 1942, went to War, then came back in 1946 and hit .335 with an .828 OPS. From 1946 to 1951, with Boston, he hit below .312 only twice, and his OPS dropped below .785 only once. In 1952, he left Boston and joined the Tigers. From 1952 to 1954, the end of his career, he hit .225, .292, and .246, with OPS of .634, .743, and .616. This is hard t learn anything from, however, since he played so briefly after he left Boston.

Bob Johnson never played with Williams, because Williams was at War, but he joined the Red Sox for the 1944 and 1945 seasons at the end of his career after playing for the A’s for 10 years and for the Senators for a year. In 1944, his first with Boston, at the age of 38, he hit a career high .324 with 40 doubles, the second most of his career. He drove in 100 runs for the first time in three seasons, and scored 100 runs for the first time in six seasons. His .959 OPS was the highest he’d had in six seasons, and his 174 OPS+ was the highest of his career. He played one more year and retired. The problem with these numbers, of course, is that they are war years.

In 1946, Ted’s first year back from war, Rudy York joined the Sox after ten years in Detroit. His batting average did not jump much from his career numbers, but his on-base percentage was a six year high. The following season would be his last.

In 1948, Birdie Tebbetts joined the Sox, and posted a career high in homeruns (5), RBI (68), runs scored (54), doubles (26), walks (62), and OBP (.371). At the age of 35. Tebbetts would match the five homeruns the following year, then hit eight in 7 games in 1950.

In 1948, the Sox also added Vern Stephens from the St. Louis Browns. After a solid career in St. Louis, during which he hit 20-plus homerun sthree times, once drove in 100 runs, and had a career high batting average of .307, Stephens joined the Sox and became a terror. From 1948 to 1950, Stephens hit 29 or more homeruns each year with 137 or more RBI and 113 or more runs. He posted his three highest OPS years with the Sox, and hit .269, .290, .295, and .300 in hit first four years. In 1951 and 1952, at the age of 30 and 31, he suffered injury plagued years and then left the Sox. He last three more years, but his career as an offensive threat was over.

Billy Goodman came up with the Sox ni 1948 as a 22 year old. From 1948 to 1956, he never hit lower than .293. He was traded to Baltimore in 1957, hit .299 for the White Sox in 1958, and then never hit about .255 again in four remaining part-time seasons.

Al Zarilla played one full season in Boston, in 1950, during which he set career highs for runs scored, triples, OBP, SLG, and OPS. When he went to Chicago the following year, his batting average dropped 68 points.

In Walt Dropo’s first season, he had 34 homeruns, 144 RBI, and 101 runs, while hitting .322 with a .583 slugging percentage. The next year he was a part timer and struggled before being traded to Detroit the year after that. He never again came close to the numbers he put up in 1950.

In Clyde Vollmer’s one full season in Boston, he set a career high wuith 22 homeruns, 85 RBI, 66 runs, and 55 walks.

George Kell had the second best season of his career, including a career high in homeruns, with the 1953 Boston Red Sox.

In the twilight of his career, Grady Hatton put up a .399 OBP in 99 games with the Red Sox in 1955, the best numbers he’d posted since the 1940s.

And last but not least, Jackie Jensen, shown above, had a career high of 10 homeruns, 84 RBI, and .765 OPS before going to Boston where, in seven seasons, he hit 20 or more homeruns six times, including 35 in 1958, put 100 plus RBI five times, and never saw his OPS drop below .830 until his final season.

What We Do Know About Ted, and Compared to his Team

In 1954, Ted Williams hit .345. His AVG split was .371/.320, and his OPS split was 1.240/1.061.

In 1955, he hit .356, with AVG split of .390/.318, and OPS split of 1.254/1.134.

In 1956, he hit .345; AVG split: .361/.328; OPS split: 1.123/1.042.

In 1957, he hit .388; AVG split: .403/.374; OPS split: 1.195/1.318 (get that!)

In 1958, he hit .328; AVG split: .329/.328; OPS split: 1.036/1.047 (something’s happening)

In 1959, he hit .254; AVG split: .276/.232; OPS split: .783/.798 (weird)

In 1960, he hit .316; AVG split: .329/.301; OPS split: 1.129/1.058.

So, why the strangely high road OPS? Because Williams, in the years we have splits for, 1954-1960, he hit 81 homeruns at home but 103 on the road. Nevertheless, despite the homerun disparaity, he hit almost twice as many doubles at home, he walked a lot more at home, and he struck out a lot more on the road. Plus, he CLEARLY hit for a significantly lower batting average on the road than at home.


Questions? Concerns? Comments? Asher lives in Philadelphia, PA, and can be reached at asher@baseballevolution.com.