Yaz v. Manny by John Walsh December 10, 2008 It was one of those conversations that starts up in front of the TV, somewhere in the middle innings when the home team has the game in hand, and we can let our concentration lapse a little. Somebody said, “So, do you think Manny will go down as the greatest Red Sox left fielder ever?” Three heads turned and six eyes looked curiously at the speaker, whose name was Steve. “After Williams, I mean.” Ah, okay. The place was a small town in Massachusetts and the time was early August 2008. Naturally, Manny Ramirez, who had been recently traded to the Dodgers after spending nearly eight years in a Red Sox uniform, was on people’s minds. Who was the greater Red Sox left fielder? (Ramirez photo by Icon/SMI) “So, it comes down to Manny versus Yaz,” I said logically. “I dunno, Manny has the offense, but he’s pretty bad in everything else. Carl Yastrzemski, was a good defender, at least that’s what his reputation is. What do you think, Dad? What’s your recollection of Yaz on defense.” The oldest of this little family gathering offered this: “Well, I didn’t follow the American League that much back in those days, but Yaz was known as an excellent defensive player. Rifle arm.” The arm part made sense to me, since I had written an article called “The Best Outfield Arms of Our Time” for the Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2007 and Yastrzemski ranked as one of the top two arms of the last fifty years, together with Clemente. “But Manny is possibly the best right-handed bat in history.” Steve had the floor again. “Plus, I don’t think he’s that bad on defense. He makes some nice plays off the wall. And his own arm isn’t bad. Didn’t he lead the league in assists a couple of years ago?” Uh, oh. The Boston erstwhile 12-run (!) lead was now down to just two runs. Our attention returned to the game and we saved the Yaz vs. Manny debate for another day. Hitting the ball So, who was better, Manny or Yaz? Now, trying to figure out the second-best Red Sox left fielder of all time might seem like an esoteric exercise, but, hey, it’s the off-season and what else is there to do? Besides, when I dig into a topic like this, I often turn up something interesting. Before we dive into the numbers, just one point: I’m going to compare Manny’s career to Yaz’s at the same age, i.e., 36. Both came to the big leagues at age 21, so I’m going to be looking at 16 years of big league play for each player. All numbers shown below for Yaz refer to the period 1961-1976 (he retired after the 1983 season). Let’s tackle offensive production first, since it’s generally the most important aspect for position players and the easiest to quantify. Here are the offensive numbers for our two players: G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG SB CS OPS+ ----+-----+----+----+---+---+---+----+----+----+-----+-----+-----+----+---+----+ Yaz 2421 8848 1402 2559 489 50 338 1343 1428 1118 .289 .387 .470 150 103 136 Manny 2103 7610 1444 2392 507 18 527 1725 1212 1667 .314 .411 .593 37 31 155 Obviously, Manny has the better raw offensive stats. Yaz played more in those 16 seasons, in part because Ramirez did not become a full time player until his third year, whereas as Yaz hit the ground running, getting 583 at-bats as a 21-year-old. But durability seems to be Yaz’s only edge here. Manny’s slash stats are superior across the board and he destroys Yaz in home runs and RBIs. Oh, Yaz has an edge in triples and stolen bases. But what about context? Yaz’s prime came in the offense-suppressed ’60s, while the start of Manny’s career coincided exactly with the offensive explosion that started in 1993. Or to put it another way, the average American League team scored 4.0 runs per game during Yaz’s career, but that number is 4.85 runs per game during Manny’s years. Yaz produced fewer runs, but so did everybody else and it took fewer runs to win ballgames in Yaz’s time. The OPS+ number given above, though, takes context into account. It adjusts for ballpark effects and the level of league offense and even so, we see Manny with a clear advantage, 155 to 136. But OPS doesn’t tell the whole story, so let’s look at a more comprehensive statistic for measuring production: Batting Runs. Batting Runs, also known as “Linear Weights” (a terrible name) was developed by sabermetrician Pete Palmer back in the 1980s. It estimates overall offensive production, taking into most things that a player can do with a bat (not stolen bases, though). The version available at Baseball Reference, which takes into account park effects and league offensive levels, is particularly useful for our purposes. The following table compares Batting Runs for Yastrzemski and Ramirez at the same age: Batting Runs (Yaz through 1976) Age Yaz Manny 21 -8.5 -5.4 22 18.4 11.2 23 42.1 35.0 24 20.2 41.3 25 40.4 39.9 26 18.7 39.7 27 72.3 63.2 28 55.2 62.2 29 28.8 48.6 30 68.0 56.8 31 13.7 54.2 32 13.1 46.3 33 33.8 43.8 34 34.5 49.4 35 11.0 20.9 36 15.9 55.5 Total 477.6 662.7 So, Manny’s superiority in the raw stats is also evident in these context-neutral Batting Runs, where he leads Yaz by nearly 200 runs. But, this isn’t yet the final word on batting, since we still need to translate these runs into wins. Now, a reasonable rule of thumb is that 10 extra runs is worth one extra win. But that rule doesn’t really work in the low-scoring environment of Yaz’s prime. That’s okay, though, Baseball Reference also provides Batting Wins, taking into the effect of the run environment. What you end up with is 49.6 Batting Wins for Yastrzemski and 60.4 for Ramirez, an 11-win advantage for Manny. Ok, that’s the easy part, evaluating the hitting contributions of these guys. But, baseball is more than just swinging the bat. I now turn to three other parts of the game that we can do a reasonable job evaluating statistically: baserunning, defensive range and throwing arm. Baserunning Proficiency on the basepaths is an aspect of offensive production that is not included in Batting Runs. Neither of these players were fast and it shows in their stolen base numbers. Yaz would run occasionally, although not at a high success rate. In the period we are considering, he stole 150 bases in 253 attempts. Manny on the other hand rarely attempts a straight steal, and many of his 68 attempts, 37 of which were successful, were likely hit-and-run plays. We can assign a run value to the stolen base (.22 runs) and the caught stealing (-.38 runs) to find that these stolen base attempts amounted to -.7 wins for Yaz and -.3 wins for Manny. But running the bases is more than just attempting steals—there is the whole business of taking the extra base on a hit or an out. Although several people have worked on baserunning metrics, including Dan Fox (here at THT and later at Baseball Prospectus) and Bill James in his Baseball Annual, I was unable to locate any baserunning results for Yaz (beyond stolen bases) and I haven’t seen full data for Manny, either. So, I decided to analyze the Retrosheet data myself to get an estimate of the baserunning skills of both of them. I don’t have the space here to go into a detailed description of my method, perhaps I’ll do that in a future article. The basic idea is to measure how often a player goes first-to-third or second-to-home on a single, first-to-home on a double or moves up a base on a flyout. An average run value is assigned to each outcome (e.g. extra base taken, thrown out, etc.) for each of these situations and a player is compared to a league-average baserunner. The end result is a measure of baserunning expressed in runs above average. As an example, consider the following table, which shows the base reached when the runner was on first base (with second base unoccupied) and a single was hit: Runner final destination, starting on 1B, Single +----------+------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+ | Player | Opps | ThrownOut | 2B | 3B | Home | +----------+------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+ | Yaz | 443 | 0.032 | 0.589 | 0.348 | 0.032 | | Manny | 314 | 0.016 | 0.707 | 0.268 | 0.010 | +----------+------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+ In this situation, Manny was more cautious than Yaz — he stopped at second 71 percent of the time, while Yaz was content with second base only 59 percent of the time. However, Yaz was thrown out twice as often as Manny. Interestingly, there’s a small chance of reaching home on this play and Yaz did it three times more frequently than Manny. However, we cannot compare Manny directly to Yaz, because over the years runners have become less willing to take risks on the basepaths. This is seen in the next table, which shows the results for the league as a whole, for the Yaz years and the Manny years: League averages, starting on 1B, Single +-------------+-------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+ | Era | Opps | ThrownOut | 2B | 3B | Home | +-------------+-------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+ | Yaz years | 81318 | 0.019 | 0.626 | 0.343 | 0.012 | | Manny years | 97858 | 0.013 | 0.675 | 0.300 | 0.012 | +-------------+-------+-----------+-------+-------+-------+ Here we can clearly see that in Yaz’s time players took more chances on the bases, taking the extra base more often, but also getting thrown out more frequently. So, we must compare Yaz and Manny not to each other, but to an average baserunner during the era in which they played. We end up with the following: Baserunning runs +----------+-------------------+------+------+ | Player | Situation | Opps | Runs | +----------+-------------------+------+------+ | Yaz | runner 1B, single | 443 | 1.5 | | Yaz | runner 1B, double | 155 | -0.3 | | Yaz | runner 2B, single | 273 | 1.5 | | Yaz | runner 2B, flyout | 254 | -0.1 | | Yaz | runner 3B, flyout | 173 | -0.7 | +----------+-------------------+------+------+ | Yaz | Total | 1298 | 1.9 | +----------+-------------------+------+------+ | Manny | runner 1B, single | 314 | -2.0 | | Manny | runner 1B, double | 167 | -8.8 | | Manny | runner 2B, single | 277 | -5.4 | | Manny | runner 2B, flyout | 194 | 1.1 | | Manny | runner 3B, flyout | 147 | -2.9 | +----------+-------------------+------+------+ | Manny | Total | 1099 |-18.0 | +----------+-------------------+------+------+ We see that Yaz was about average on the basepaths, while Manny was below average, but not at all terrible (remember, this is 16 seasons’ worth of baserunning). Adding in the stolen base runs and converting to wins, we get for Yaz -.5 wins and for Manny -2 wins. Frankly, I thought that Manny would fare worse in the baserunning analysis. He isn’t fast and doesn’t look particularly good on the basepaths. The fact that he also stands at home plate and watches his long fly balls doesn’t really help his baserunning rep. It’s noteworthy that my baserunning analysis does not (and cannot) measure how often a single is stretched into a double (or a double “shrunk” to a single). In any case, we see here that baserunning has only a tiny effect on our evaluation of these two players. This is generally true, although of course some players are so good (or so poor) on the basepaths, that their baserunning performance becomes important in their overall evaluation. Where we stand We’re about halfway done with this little exercise, so let’s take stock. After accounting for batting and baserunning, here is how our two heroes stack up: Wins Above Average Yaz Manny ------------------------------ Offense 49.6 60.4 Baserunning -0.5 -1.9 Range ? Arm ? ------------------------------ Total so far 49.1 58.5 Manny has almost a 10-win lead and I think we can safely conclude that he was the better offensive player. Next time we’ll tackle defense to see if Yaz can close the gap.