Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
Can't find Bill James online but this is similar.
Taking on an icon is always dangerous, and I apologize up front for any feelings I offend. Also, let me acknowledge the obvious--i.e., that Roberto Clemente was a tremendous humanitarian who died by far the most heroic death of anyone in the MLB Hall of Fame, and probably of anyone in the history of baseball.
But is he an "overrated PLAYER"? Absolutely. In fact, I think that by current standards, he's the most overrated player of all time. And I am more than ready to make my case.
As Bill James says in his recent magnum opus--which rates the Top 100 of all time at each position, and the Top 100 of all time total, including Negro Leaugers (see Oscar Charleston)--Clemente never hit 30 HR's in a season, made a ton of throwing errors and had horrible strikeout-to-walk ratios. Yes, his batting average was often very high, but he would not take a walk, so his lifetime on-base-percentage was a mediocre .359.
Do you have any idea how many players, including nobodies like Gene Tenace and Mickey Tettleton, had better lifetime on-base percentages than .359? If you made a list of everyone, it would be enormous... probably over 500. And since Clemente averaged fewer than 14 HR's per season in his 18-year career--he played over 100 games in every season, too--he didn't make up for his mediocre on-base percentage with great power stats. Indeed, although he had the second-highest career triples total since WWII (behind Musial), his career slugging percentage was .475, miles behind Mays, Mantle and Aaron, which makes those oft-heard comparisons frankly a little difficult to swallow for those of us who saw and remember Mays, Mantle and Aaron.
And it doesn't end there.
Most experts consider either runs scored and RBI's, or slugging percentage and on-base percentage, the two most important stats in baseball. If you add up the number of times Clemente led the National League in any of those four stats, do you know what number you get? Try zero. That's right: Clemente never led the NL in ANY of those categories. Not once.
Now, for those of you not old enough to remember Forbes Field, let me acknowledge it gave Clemente a lot of his triples and cost him a lot of HR's. It was second only to Griffith Stadium (Washington's home park) as a bad park for hitters. But if you compensate for that, Clemente gets what, maybe 60-80 more HR's, for a career total of 300-320, and loses a bunch of those triples. It will not significantly alter his career numbers, except to perhaps give him a slugging title--whereas it would have hugely altered the numbers of the more powerful Willie Stargell, probably giving him 600 HR's.
So I think I've pretty well established that "Clemente the fearsome slugger" is hugely overrated, as are his batting titles. Don't you agree, in light of everything I've shown? I mean, assume that all the facts I've set forth above are accurate--which they are--and how do you deny that Clemente was not that great offensively?
As for baserunning, yeah, Clemente got his 166 triples, but he got only 440 doubles, and his career ratio of stolen bases to caught stealings was 83-46, which is less than 2-1 and not worth the effort--a fact not understood then, but well understood now.
That leaves Clemente the right fielder. First off, NO right fielder can be worth as much to a team as people make Clemente out to have been. Bill James and others have conclusively shown that hitting is more important than fielding, even for middle infielders. Read them. I didn't believe it at first, either, but it's inarguably true. Second, at left field, right field or first base, it isn't even close. Take the hitter over the fielder every time.
And Clemente wasn't as phenomenal and flawless a fielder as people make him out to have been. In fact, he may only have been the third best defensive right fielder born in the year 1934. His career fielding percentage, .973, was 12.5% WORSE than the league average. Hank Aaron's was 16.7% higher than the same league's average. Al Kaline's was 30% higher than the AL's average.
Now, I was around and a rabid fan back then, and I can assure you that yes, a lot of people really did stop at second or stop at third because of Clemente's arm. It was well worth the extra 12.5% of errors he made, and then some. There is a good case to be made--and James accepts the case--that Clemente was a better fielder than Kaline or Aaron. But certainly not by much. And James himself explains, at length, how limited the value of a right fielder's arm is, in the context of runs prevented per year. Take that number, subtract the number of runs allowed by the excess throwing errors, and we're not talking about that big a deal.
Meanwhile, in the case of Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson and Mel Ott, we're talking about guys who created 5 to 10 times the number of extra runs on offense that Clemente saved in the field. It is my opinion that Tony Gwynn, Pete Rose (who played more games in RF than anywhere else), Reggie Jackson and Paul Waner were also clearly superior to Clemente as players, and that Dave Winfield and a couple of others probably were as well.
I will grant that Jackson, Waner and Winfield are matters about which reasonable baseball fans could disagree. I don't think Gwynn and Rose are, and I'm certain the first four aren't, and that's just in right field. In center field, not even counting some extremely talented current players, you have guys like Cobb, Speaker, Dimaggio, Mays and Mantle (chronologically arranged), none of whom Clemente was within 10 miles of as a player.
I hope someday I am as great a human being as Clemente was. I'm sure most people who read these things feel the same way about themselves. But the idea Clemente was one of the 10, 20 or 30 greatest players of all time is just silly, and a review of all relevant stats leaves no room for rational debate on the subject.
Was he a very good player? Yes. Does he belong in the Hall of Fame? Yes, but he's probably a below-average Hall of Famer, albeit nowhere NEAR as bad as Frankie Frisch's many pals, Lloyd Waner, Phil Rizzuto, etc., etc.
MLB has it right. They give an annual Roberto Clemente Humanitarian Award. That is as it should be. But if they are going to give awards for great right fielders, they must start with Ruth, Aaron, the greatly underrated Frank Robinson, Ott, at least a few others, and only then get to Clemente.
Sorry, but it's an inescapable fact.
Baseball History Nut
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