Obsessing over baseball statistics is a good thing, actually

An update on last week's nonsense

Last week, I got a little kick out of a baseball statistics rabbit hole a few of us went down. The exercise began when I began wondering how many MVPs played on the same team as Tony Perez. I know, it’s a weird thing to get obsessed about for a little while but this is how my brain works. You love it. It’s why you’ve subscribed to receive these musings in your inbox. And if you haven’t:

Anyway, I received an email from my good friend Joel Luckhaupt, who you may know from his service as the stat guru on Reds games — John Sadak and Chris Welsh love to shout him out — or perhaps from his writing about the Redlegs over the years. Or maybe you hung out with him on Clinchmas, as I did. He’s a good dude.

He’s also more of a perfectionist than I am. I mused about Tony Perez because, hey, it sure seems like that guy played with a lot of good players! Joel took it a step further.* First of all, he corrected me. I concluded that Perez had played with 13 former MVP winners, but he caught one that I missed. The year before he won the MVP with Detroit, Willie Hernandez played a single season with Philadelphia. One of his teammates: Tony Perez.

*I didn’t ask Joel for permission to discuss all this. I hope he doesn’t sue me. Maybe he’ll be satisfied if I encourage each of you to go buy his book. Or his other book. Both are great reads.

But Joel went a step further, and researched the question properly, something I was obviously unwilling to do. He found four players who played with more MVPs than Doug Bair, who played with 16 MVPs (as identified last week by Mo Egger). Goose Gossage played with 18. Both Dick Schofield and Deron Johnson played with 19 MVPs. And then there was Mike Torrez.

Torrez played from 1967 to 1984; I remember him mostly as a Boston Red Sox hurler, but he also played for the Cardinals, Expos, Athletics, Mets, Yankees, and Orioles over the course of an 18-year big league career. Torrez played with — wait for it — 22 MVP winners in his career!

It’s a wild list: Dick Allen, Don Baylor, Vida Blue, Jeff Burroughs, Orlando Cepeda, Dennis Eckersley, Rollie Fingers, George Foster, Bob Gibson, Rickey Henderson, Keith Hernandez, Reggie Jackson, Fred Lynn, Roger Maris, Willie McCovey, Kevin Mitchell, Joe Morgan, Thurman Munson, Jim Rice, Brooks Robinson, Joe Torre, Carl Yastrzemski.

Amazing work, Joel! Honestly, I’m not sure anyone cares about this. Well, besides me and Joel and Mo and Garber and the few crazies who chimed in on the question. But recently, I’ve been reading a lot of Roger Angell, the best baseball writer who ever lived in my estimation. (I dream of crafting sentences like Angell.) Some time ago, I finished The Summer Game, a collection of his essays from The New Yorker about baseball from 1962-1971, and I’m now in the middle of reading Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion, which covers 1972 to 1976. Season Ticket still sits on my nightstand.*

*Well, it’s actually on my Kindle. Don’t sue me like Joel intends to do.

I just finished a segment where Angell wrote about Henry Aaron’s chase for Babe Ruth’s home run record. Before that, he wrote a lot of words about a trio of Detroit Tigers fans in the early 70s who were obsessed with minutiae, especially involving the statistical achievements of Al Kaline. Then he mentioned Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer, and noted that he had won 20 games in four consecutive seasons.

This will probably come across as an old man yelling at a cloud, but I miss the days when baseball statistics were of primary importance in the sporting world. I wish a .300 hitter was still a big deal. I wish we still had 20-game winners. I miss the days when people cared about the home run record or the RBI record or the strikeout record.

I’m legitimately concerned about the future of baseball. I concur completely with this recent piece by Joe Posnanski (the best current-day baseball writer) in which he said that the biggest problem baseball faces is figuring out how to get starting pitchers to go longer and how to get fewer strikeouts and more balls in play. Baseball today is less aesthetically pleasing than it has ever been, despite the fact that today’s players are the most talented in history.

A lot of things have changed about the sport with the analytical revolution (which I have long championed, if I’m being honest). Much of that change is good! I do think there’s a good discussion to be had around the pros and cons of the current game versus the game of 25 years ago, but there can be no question that the baseball we watch in 2024 is unlike the game at any time in its history.

I’m not here to lead that discussion. All I’m doing here is reminiscing over the days when every sports fan obsessed over baseball statistics. When the ink on cardboard on the back of a baseball card was a big deal. When pitchers used to win 20 games and batters used to care deeply about winning the batting crown.

Okay, maybe I am just yelling at a cloud. Sue me.

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This week at Cincinnati Magazine: Get Onboard the Reds’ Elly Experience Thrill Ride

On April 7, the Reds dropped the final game of a series against the New York Metropolitans, scoring just a single run in the process. It was the club’s first series loss of the season, and shortstop Elly De La Cruz went 0-4 in the game, dropping his season numbers to .242/.324/.394 with no home runs. He’d struck out 17 times in 33 at-bats, and his defense was even shakier, with four errors in his first nine games.

Predictably, a certain segment of the Reds fan base was ready to give up on Elly, demanding he be sent back to the minors. There are a few more hot takes from those heady days that have since been deleted. Because, as you probably know by now, De La Cruz has been on an absolute tear since that moment. Read the rest of this week’s Reds column over at Cincinnati Magazine.

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What’s Chad Watching?

Good week, featuring two pretty good films that are in theaters now. Wicked Little Letters stars Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley and is thoroughly delightful. Lots of laughs. Monkey Man is the Indian John Wick, and while the story is a little muddled and it’s over-edited, it’s still a lot of fun and worth watching.

The other two movies I watched this week were installments in my ongoing quest to watch as many film noirs as possible. Where the Sidewalk Ends was a particularly good example of the genre, directed by Otto Preminger (Anatomy of a Murder, Laura) and featuring Dana Andrews (don’t know how he wasn’t a bigger star), Gene Tierney (I don’t entirely understand why she was a star), and Karl Malden (who was kind of a putz in this film, but he’s been in so many movies that I love that I have to give him a pass).