Jim McKay famously uttered this catchphrase at the opening of the weekly TV sports anthology program, Wide World of Sports. In the opening film sequence, the “agony of defeat” was portrayed as a ski jumper losing his balance and falling off the ski jumping tower (ouch). But, what does agony of defeat look like in baseball?

In fact, there have been players to play their entire careers without ever appearing in a game for the winning side. Not surprisingly, all of those players are relief pitchers. None had a long career, of course, but probably longer than what you might guess.

After the jump, more on these most unlucky of ballplayers.

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Josh Hamilton‘s new contract covers age 32-36. So I set out to find players from the live-ball era who were comparable to Hamilton from age 26-31, and see how they had performed at age 32-36.

Before proceeding, there’s one point that I failed to state clearly in the Greinke post: I am not analyzing the financial side of Hamilton’s contract. It’s too soon to gauge the impact of the recent revenue surge on the average cost per WAR on the free market, and there are too many other value factors specific to the situation. I’m just looking at on-field performance.

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Deacon White, voted into the Cooperstown Hall of Fame less than two weeks ago, was professional baseball’s first “greatest-ever hitting catcher”. From 1871 through 1879, which was White’s final season before shifting to other positions, the following (after the jump) were the top career Batting WAR numbers (or as it is referred to in various places in the baseball-reference Play Index, “WAR Runs Batting”, “runs_bat”, “Rbat” or “the number of runs better or worse than average the player was as a batter”) for players who had played at least half their games at the catcher position: Continue reading →

This is an attempt at my first post at High Heat Stats without any baseball stats.  Rather than digging through WAR leaders, I’d like to take a moment to tackle a prejudice that irks me too often in sports arguments.  Yesterday, I read this Sports on Earth piece by Jonathan Bernhardt, which explains why Barry Bonds was the best baseball player ever.  A comment in response to the piece included this gem:

“…to argue that Bonds is better than Mays is, well, simply ignorant, something that I will ascribe to the writer’s youth”.

No, what’s “simply ignorant” is dismissing another’s opinion without any defense of one’s own argument other than an age difference.  Is there a sorrier phrase in the English language than “back in my day…”?

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Over the last 5 years combined (age 24-28), Zack Greinke pitched 1,036 innings with a 123 ERA+, amassing 23.0 WAR by the Baseball-Reference method (rWAR) and 28.4 by FanGraphs (fWAR). His new 6-year contract covers age 29-34. I’m no forecaster, but I thought it would be interesting to find pitchers who were broadly similar to Greinke during age 24-28 and see what they did over their next six years.

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Fred Clarke via Library of Congress

I just finished the Honus Wagner biography and I’ve been thinking a lot about Fred Clarke.

You know, naturally.

Clarke, of course, is a Hall of Fame outfielder. But I’ll bet you don’t hear about him very much, do you?

If a player doesn’t deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, you hear about that all the time. (How many times have you heard the names Bill Mazeroski or Chick Hafey? More than Clarke, right?). If he’s one of the all-time greats, he becomes immortalized. Clarke is stuck in between—not good enough to be remembered today and not bad enough to have his spot questioned.

Something else struck me about Clarke. Even if he never stepped up to the plate, he probably would have been a Hall of Famer. Completely independent of his Hall of Fame playing career, he was a Hall-worthy manager.

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You may have seen our big project launch yesterday, and then seen it was promptly canceled about an hour into it. I came to realize that even though I think our proposed work didn’t break any laws I was likely in for some massive headaches nevertheless. This is pretty devastating for me, as I spent a couple hundred hours and a lot of money prepping that project. At this point, I am going to resume my retirement. I don’t know what this means for the future of High Heat Stats, but without a funding source the site cannot continue as I am currently paying out of pocket.

By all means keep up the voting and discussion in the first Circle of Greats round of voting, but you can also mull the question: What feat has been accomplished in major league history only by Raul Ibanez and Tris Speaker? Clue: It has nothing to do with post-season play.

This past Tuesday I posted a proposal for a series of votes to elect members to a circle of baseball greats, with competitive elections organized by player birth-year. The post seemed to generate enough interest to try out the voting in practice to see how it goes. The comments to that thread offered a number of creative and productive suggestions regarding changes to the rules that I had initially proposed, and this first vote will incorporate several of those proposed changes. I’ll review the rules, as now amended, after the “Read the rest of this entry” thingamabob.   Continue reading →

This is a different sort of quiz, to recognize unusual accomplishments in  2012, many of which have probably not been remarked upon. Until now.

After the jump, you’ll see a table of batters and a table of pitchers. For both the batters and the pitchers, the table contains two lists, one of active players and one of players retired for at least 25 years. Your job is to match the active batters to the retired batters, and the active pitchers to the retired pitchers.

So, how do you match up the players? Pretty simple, really. All you need to know is that each active player accomplished a season or career feat in 2012 that had not been accomplished since one of the retired players did the same thing.

Thanks to everyone for playing the game. I admit this was pretty tough. The solution is after the jump.

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