Baseball, Joe Mauer, Brett Butler discussed on Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast

Automatic TRANSCRIPT

He has a little bit of pop like not a ton. Obviously. But it's a really rare combination of skills like looking at his war, which is just right around 6, according to both fan graphs and baseball reference. I did a little stat head. This is not even a sponsored stat head search, which will maybe come a little later in the program. This is just an organic I was curious and I used stad heads because it's good and not even because they sponsored the podcast sort of search, but I was looking for seasons that were this high, so he's at 5.8 at baseball reference, so war of 5.8 or more. And then I limited the fielding runs. He's at 6 fielding runs above average according to baseball reference. So I limited it to 6 or below because I didn't want to get a bunch of seasons where someone had a really extreme defense here, which can maybe sometimes be a bit suspect or more so than the equivalent value on offense at least, just not to say that you can not be that much above average on defense, of course, but sometimes if someone is not that big of that and they end up having a 5 or 6 worst season or something and it's because they were like plus 20 or plus 25 or something on defense, you know, you raise your eyebrow and you think are they really that good or is it just some wonky, smallish sample defensive stat fluke so I limited it to where he is on defense where he is on war and then home runs less than ten because he has 9 homers. And that's a really rare combination of skills and value in today's game or even like going back a bit because to be that good overall to be like a 6 win player essentially without an outlier defensive rating and without a double digit home run total that's really rare like you have to hit for a high batting average which he does, especially considering the era. So the last player to fit those criteria was Joe mauer in 2010. So it's been a while and he was kind of that same sort of player offensively too who would hit for high averages sometimes and other than that one year generally not hit a lot of homers. He was a catcher, of course, which was immensely valuable, but 2010 with the last McNeill season like this one. And then ichiro in 2007, and then before each, you have to go all the way back to Roberto Alomar in 1992. Wow. It Roberts in 1990 and then some 80s guys wade Boggs Brett butler Rickey Henderson, Tim raines. So he's kind of like an 80s style player. He's sort of like a throwback. It's a strange skill set for this day and age, but a really fun and entertaining and pretty consistent one, like people have doubted whether he was actually this good, he wasn't like this highly touted coming up as someone who would be this sort of start, but he is quite good. Yeah, he's quite good. You know? You're not wrong. How about that? Yeah? Yep.

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