You are right, but the problem is most people put zero value on defense.

Outfield Assists
Clemente 266
Aaron 201
Mays 195
Yaz 195
This despite those players playing longer and runners stopping trying to run on Clemente. The number of extra bases he prevented, turning doubles into singles, preventing runners going first to third, scoring from 2b on hits, 3rd base on fly out can't be ignored.

RF put outs
Clemente 4445
Evans 4247
Aaron 4154
Again despite playing fewer seasons, he still caught 200-300 more balls than the best RFS. His unmatched range can't be ignored. How many of those 200-300 or more balls that other RF couldn't get to went to the wall, 2b or 3b resulting in runs?

Total zone runs RF
Clemente 204
Karine 155
Aaron 98
Again players with more seasons, no where close to him.

When you add how much his defense added to what offense he produced despite playing in Forbes Field, the most difficult hitters park in the NL, he is easily top 10 all time.

I think the OP asks a very fair question and only differ with the PC angle he brings in. When Jackie was inducted, we were a long way from PC. And baseball wasn't exactly an island of PC within a broader racist ocean. Reading the book, "After Jackie," you can see just how hard baseball was for guys like Dick Allen and Curt Flood who came up more even with Jackie's election.

But if we limit ourselves only to to MLB stats (which also would exclude nearly all Negro League inductees), Robinson is certainly no Ruth.

I would guess that had a white ballplayer posted identical stats to Jackie Robinson in that same era, played similar positions, and enjoyed similar team success, he would have indeed made the HOF eventually but not as soon.

So yes, I believe that Jackie Robinson's being black impacted his HOF standing. However, I don't think voters were giving charity here; I think they recognized his being black carried legitimate X Factors that supported his case as a HOFer.

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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

Clemente's on base percentage is pretty bad for a hitter of his statute, .359. His OPS is nothing to write home about either. On base percentage is always one of the arguments that Aaron was overrated, and while his wasn't spectacular, it was 15 points higher than Clemente's.

Clemente
 

It is close but for my dollar, at PEAK VALUE, I'll take Robinson.

Clemente
 

Hi Peter it's JoeT and one of your points struck home with me regarding the significance of offense vs. Defense. I have been coaching for nearly 30 years and have coached many professional ballplayers. During that tenure I have had the distinct honor of meeting and building relationships with a myriad of pro scouts and the consensus is ALWAYS THE SAME: "Show me a player who can crush the baseball and we will FIND a position for him"! There is no substitute for a world class slugger who can hit for average and power.

Not the MLB HOF, but the National Baseball HOF.

Jackie, and other Negro League players who played there entire career in those leagues, are well deserving.

I believe Jackie himself, interestingly, played only one season in the Negro Leagues.

Willie Stargell hit 30 HRs once in Forbes Field, 33 in 1966. That season Clemente hit 29. That was the season that Harry Walker asked Clemente to try to hit home runs. Willie Stargell in his first full season in 3 Rivers Stadium hit 48 HRs and went on to hit more HRs than any other player in the 70s. The Pirates moved out of Forbes Field in the middle of 1970.

I agree that Stargell would have hit 600+ HRs if he had played in an average stadium his whole career. I think your estimate is very low for Clemente, I believe he could have hit 500. It has already been posted how far he could hit the ball. The HR of Sandy Koufax was the hardest hit ball and longest hit ball off Koufax, that is from Sandy himself. Clemente hit the only HR that really mattered, in game 7 of the 1971 World Series that led to a world championship. He could hit HRs when he wanted to.

I forget if Bill James addressed the Forbes Field factor. The notion that he could hit HRs when he wanted to, though, strikes me as absurd. Who would NOT want to, ever?

Clemente hit 240 by the way. Changing parks does not get him to 500. No way.

Why did Harry Walker have to ask Clemente to try to hit HRs? Clemente valued hitting for a high average over trying to hit HRs. Just because you think every player should try to hit HRs doesn't mean every player does. Clemente was quoted as saying he didn't want to hit HRs because it would hurt his average because of Forbes Field.

What I find absurd is saying that one player could hit 600 HRs and another only 300 when head to head it was 33 to 29. If Clemente could hit 29 HRs when he tried to in the most difficult park in the NL, why couldn't average that in an average park if he wanted to?

Also in regards to Clemente's fielding percentage, that same argument has been made against Ozzie Smith. Clemente made 23 more outfield errors than Hank Aaron. He also produced almost 300 more put outs and 65 more assists. When you are making that many more plays than other players, those plays are going to be difficult, those are balls Aaron couldn't even get to, and that is not counting hits Clemente fielded that Aaron didn't. That is tremendous value.

And Babe Ruth could have hit .750 if he weren't swinging for the fences. It's a meaningless argument. If Clemente intentionally sacrificed home runs for his batting average he was a very selfish player, and I don't believe that.

That argument is a fallacious one. Human beings do not evolve over a few decades; the tools they have to work with did. You cannot take athletes out of historical context and compare them across eras because training, medicine and nutrition have evolved so dramatically over the decades. In 1924 it was frowned upon to allow professional coaches to train Olympic athletes and the athletes were not full time athletes. Medical techniques were primitive and nutritional concepts were laughably wrong. Today, elite athletes do nothing but train and have access to a coterie of professional trainers, consultants and coaches. Strip Bolt of all of the advances of the last 70-80 years and see where he is; he might very well be the fastest man alive but I do not think that he would have blown by Jessie Owens Secretariat style.

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/12/...erto-clemente/

On more than one occasion, Clemente told sportswriters about the absurdity of trying to hit home runs in Forbes Field. In 1964, for example, Clemente told a sportswriter that “As long as I’m in Forbes Field I can’t go for home runs; line drives, yes.”

Walker was the manager of the Pirates in 1966. Before the season started, he went to Clemente and told him (according to the Wagenheim bio) “Roberto, I wish this year you would go for power, hit 25 homers and get 115 runs batted in. We will need it for the pennant.”

This all started a few years ago when Hall of Famer Duke Snider was on a New York radio station talking about, among others, the great Clemente. Clemente has always been considered an all-time great player, EXCEPT for that one fact — he didn’t have power. When the interviewer said what everybody has repeated through the years – that Clemente didn’t have power, that he only hit 240 home runs – Snider interrupted and said, with surprise in his voice, “Clemente had power. HE PLAYED IN AN AIRPORT.”

Kiner played one year, his first, at Forbes Field when it was an airport (the year before Hank Greenberg came to Pittsburgh). In that first year (old dimensions), Kiner hit 23 home runs. Then, with the advent of Greenberg Gardens, Kiner hit 51, 40, 54, 47, 42 and 37 in his next six seasons.

Kiner, according to The Baseball Biography Project, only hit eight home runs (of his 23) at Forbes Field in 1946.

Let that last one sink in. Ralph Kiner who led the NL in Home Runs for 7 straight years could only hit 8 HRs playing in Forbes Field with the dimensions Clemente faced, but you think he should have tried to hit more home runs. Sorry, but I have to agree with Roberto Clemente.

I think this is the absolute truth and reality of the matter. But like everything else in life it's in degrees. Look at old school boxers Jack Dempsey train like a beast and believe in it . He ate well with a lot of protein. I have no doubt that Dempsey would still be a world class champion today . Even with the same training and technics.

The Olympics do not put asterisks when the record is broke 5year from now. There is no statement saying well he train better. Or due to modern advance in sports science he won the gold. They keep the times and records for this reason. So we can compare and know who is the best. Not so we can say well if this or that. Whatever the reason is evolution , food,training,water quietly etc. the fact is the current record hold is better.

He played half his games on the road. What happens if you double his road home runs?

Peter, this is obviously one that we'll have to disagree on. I think Clemente was one of the best of all time. Also, just for kicks, I googled "best outfielders of all time". I don't recall the author but it was on the first page of the search and it was extensive. Anyone care to guess who was number #1? You got it, Clemente....

Clemente hit 138 of his 240 home runs on the road, so if you double that, you get 276.

That whoever wrote that gives any play to runs scored and RBI as the most important stats really stretches my ability to give him much credibility. Both stats are very dependent on other players and to some extent a players place in the lineup. As I've learned more about some of the more complex stats I've come to regard RBIs and Runs Scored as almost irrelevant stats.

I could buy slugging percentage and on base percentage as important.

Steve B

For what it's worth, there's a few sources that would make me believe it's was and is common to not try to hit home runs. Either by the players choice, or because of the attitude of the manager or the organization.

The biography I read of Hank Aaron (admittedly a 70's paperback so it may be a bit inaccurate) Said that one manager he had early on believed home runs were fortunate accidents and wanted the players to focus on line drives.

And more recently one of the bios of David Ortiz mentions that when he came to the Sox he was trying to hit opposite field line drives until Francona asked him why. The answer was that that's what the Twins wanted so he figured that's what every team wanted.

Steve B

I promised myself, I would not post on this thread. But, I just couldn't take anymore. Without, at least, saying my two cents.

Roberto is a HOFer with out discussion. I was 10 win he was killed in the plane crash. I remember it said on the evening news (there was local news, then national news at 7pm). I knew his was a great player who had died. Later, as I grew older, I learned how and why it happened.

The same argument can be made about Mickey Mantle (though I don't support it). Hit didn't hit 300 for his average, and when he retired, held the record for most strike-outs.

I understand the OP. JR should be in the HOF. But MLB reached too far in retiring his number from all teams. That is ridiculous. Then, having a JR day were everyone wears 42. Just my opinion, that like your, means nothing.

Isn't there also a story about Cobb in his latter years wanting to show the world he could hit HRs if he wanted to...and then he hit 2 or 3 that very game?

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There you go. So much for Forbes Field being the reason.

Regardless of these posts (some of which make no sense), Clemente in my mind ranks as one of the top 10 players of all time overall that ever played.

makes sense to me!

I figured as much from you....Ice fishing slow??

Clemente clearly was thinking of his team. I think there is something to be said about a player being quite unselfish when they're going up there trying to get a runner home, and not going for the glory of a home run.

If you compare Clemente's productivity with runners in scoring position to the other names that have been mentioned: Aaron, Mays, Kaline, Mantle, Robinson, and Dimaggio...Clemente, for his career, was the best hitter with ducks on the pond (.327 AVG), and he had the third-best rate of driving in runners on a per plate appearance basis. He also had, by far, the best BAbip (AVG on balls in play). Yes, as has been alluded to, Clemente did not have the OBP that some of these other guys did. A career .359 OBP is good, but not great. But look how that hyper-aggressive approach at the plate paid off for the Pirates on the scoreboard.

Lifetime hitting performance with runners in scoring position.

http://i.imgur.com/wbSJOfw.png

That should actually be plate appearances per RBI, or PA/RBI. I goofed. :p

Compare his production to somebody like Mickey Mantle. They had basically the same number of plate appearances with runners in scoring position for their career (Clemente had 107 more PAs in total playing ten more games in his career than Mantle). Even though Mickey Mantle doubles his home run total with RISP, Clemente drove in 54 more runs. Mantle's OBP was better with RISP (.455 to .395), as was his SLG (.556 to .486). Yet, Clemente got more runners across.

Of these hitters, only Joe DiMaggio (whose teams had a spectacular .637 winning percentage) and Hank Aaron (the all-time RBI king) drove in RISP at a better clip than Clemente, who did it without the benefit of the home run ball.

Look at Clemente's career clutch stats.

http://i.imgur.com/ZZo5zyt.png"]http...om/ZZo5zyt.png

He became a better player when his team needed him most. With 2 outs and runners in scoring position, his productivity increased by 18% (tOPS +). In "late and close" situations, when the game was still in doubt, Clemente was a .341 lifetime hitter.

He rose to the occasion.

Why is Jackie Robinson in the HOF?
 

Agreed. To me, Biggio should be the bottom of the barrel for the HOF. But there's probably 20 or 30 questionable names.

And of course I agree that Jackies brief MLB stats combined with his negro league career make him a no brainier for the hall. Larry doby would be easier to pick on for statistical credentials.

Even if it isn't in the rules, I do prefer that the hall lets in a few outlier cases of players who's greatness extended beyond the numbers . There aren't many examples of this. But the ones that are in are pretty incredible and make the hall an even more interesting place to explore baseball history .

You might want to double-check your math. If Clemente's .973 is 12.5% below average that would mean the average was 1.112 - not exactly possible.

Not sure exactly how 64 career plate appearances in the Negro Leagues enhances his Hall of Fame credentials.

Men were men in those days. Not my stat anyhow as was clear I cut and paste that opinion of Clemente.

I love this analysis. Thanks for teaching me something today. Very cool.

Imagine if we had threads like this for every guy who actually probably shouldn't be in the Hall of Famer. I thinka lot of Goudey/ Diamond Star fans would be pretty disappointed in that.

"Show me a player who can crush the baseball and we will FIND a position for him"! There is no substitute for a world class slugger who can hit for average and power.

Except for Pedro Alvarez....

That is inaccurate. Many games have no recorded box scores. This is a function not only of there not being box scores but also some of the newspapers which kept the box scores simply were not archived in the same way other newspapers were.

That said, it was still only one season.

First, yes - his name is Joe Gordon. And he is rated as #15 all time 2B. Robinson rated at #10. But maybe Gordon deserves it more since he had 12 more career hits.

Second, Robinson was more than "a great man." He was a monumental man, a transcendent man; his play, his impact, changed the game forever.