2024 Baseball Hall of Fame Tracker

[cgjackson222]

Originally Posted by Tabe

Which years are you calling "amazing" for Hernandez? Or "great"?

So 5 seasons that were great or better?

If you rank them in order by slugging, Hernandez's 5th best was .449. Is that great? His 5th best season in homers was 13. His 5th best season in hits was 171. By WAR, his 5th best season was 5.0. Heck, his best was 7.6 - below the 8.0 that is generally deemed "MVP level".

Even Hernandez's best season, 1979, was it really "amazing"? .344 with 11 homers? .340 with 11+ homers was done 10 different times in the 1970s - twice by Rod Carew. If something is done basically every year, is it really amazing?

Yeah, I would call a 7.6 bWAR year, where a guy wins MVP "amazing."

Let's rank the top 14 seasons by Mattingly (M) and Hernandez (H) by bWAR.

1)H: 7.6 2)M: 7.2 3)H: 6.7 4)M: 6.5 5/6) M/H: 6.3 (tie) 7)H: 5.5 8)M: 5.1 9)H: 5 10)H: 4.6 11)H:4.4 12/13)M/H: 4.2 14) H: 4.1

That's 9 for Hernandez and 5 for Mattingly.

Now you will say, but Hernandez didn't hit for power. This is true, but he was arguably the greatest fielding first baseman ever.

Now you will say "But I'm smarter than WAR, and I, unlike WAR, know that being a good first baseman doesn't matter."

I would say that usually it is hard to have a large fielding impact as first baseman, unless you are Keith Hernandez. He was just that good.

An accepted standard for defensive value is total zone defense (Rtot). Though, imperfect, Rtot shows the importance a first baseman can have. Keith Hernandez' Total Zone Defense was 117. He is 40th all-time of any player ever going back to the 50s when the stat measures to.

By comparison, Bill Mazeroski's Total Zone Defense (rTot) was 147, Omar Vizquel's 129, Mike Schmidt's 127, Don Mattingly 33, and Will Clark's was 2.

[Tabe]

Originally Posted by cgjackson222

Yeah, I would call a 7.6 bWAR year, where a guy wins MVP "amazing."

Let's rank the top 14 seasons by Mattingly (M) and Hernandez (H) by bWAR.

1)H: 7.6 2)M: 7.2 3)H: 6.7 4)M: 6.5 5/6) M/H: 6.3 (tie) 7)H: 5.5 8)M: 5.1 9)H: 5 10)H: 4.6 11)H:4.4 12/13)M/H: 4.2 14) H: 4.1

That's 9 for Hernandez and 5 for Mattingly.

Now you will say, but Hernandez didn't hit for power. This is true, but he was arguably the greatest fielding first baseman ever.

Now you will say "But I'm smarter than WAR, and I, unlike WAR, know that being a good first baseman doesn't matter."

I would say that usually it is hard to have a large fielding impact as first baseman, unless you are Keith Hernandez. He was just that good.

An accepted standard for defensive value is total zone defense (Rtot). Though, imperfect, Rtot shows the importance a first baseman can have. Keith Hernandez' Total Zone Defense was 117. He is 40th all-time of any player ever going back to the 50s when the stat measures to.

By comparison, Bill Mazeroski's Total Zone Defense (rTot) was 147, Omar Vizquel's 129, Mike Schmidt's 127, Don Mattingly 33, and Will Clark's was 2.

I'm not sure why you're mentioning Mattingly since I didn't ask about him or mention him in any way.

A WAR of 7.6 is really good. But amazing? Nah. He finished FOURTH in WAR that year in the NL, 3rd among position players.

But, I'll go with that incredibly loose definition of "amazing" and concede his 1979 was amazing. What was his other amazing season? His three great ones?

And, yeah, I basically don't care about defense at first base. It's importance is very, very low when evaluating 1B.