Quote:
Originally posted by OldGiants
Looking at stats in a vacuum in is just as dangerous as listening to the gripes of old timers. Jason and other sabremetricians (and I like Jason's opinions and analyses, despite disagreeing with him about Santo) are impressed with Santo's OBP. But as I thought it that some more, my old memory tells me the Cub batting order was usually Williams, Banks and Santo. Thus many of Santo's walks were of no real value to his team since it simply brought up a poor hitter who ended the inning.
|
Actually I missed this part.
Santo scored 1138 runs and knocked in 1331 in 9396 plate appearances, which comes out to 0.263 R+RBI/PA, which is pretty good considering no one else on the team could get on base or hit for power.
Robinson, in 11782 plate appearances, scored 1232 runs and knocked in 1357. That comes to 0.220 R+RBI/PA, playing on vastly superior teams and playing half of his career in the 70's when runs were much easier to come by than they were during the 60's, adjusting for Wrigley or not. (Wrigley's park run factor was about 101 anyway).
I'd say without giving much more thought that Santo's walks were pretty damn important to his team, as were his doubles, triples, and homeruns. On a team with a much lower OBP and SLG than Robinson's while also playing in a hitter's park (which makes those team numbers even less impressive), he still managed to score and knock in runs at a much higher rate.
Just for curiosity's sake, I checked Mike Schmidt's R+RBI/PA stats, which obviously will be slightly inflated since he played during a much better hitting period than Santo, had better teammates, and was quite frankly a better player. His ratio is .299. That's pretty damn good, by the way - the odds of Schmidt scoring or knocking in a run everytime he came up to the plate were nearly as good as Alfonso Soriano's odds of getting on base this year.
Jason