Quote:
Originally Posted by rats60
No one cared about how many runs Mantle hypothetically created. No one was playing fantasy baseball in 1952. If it was Willie Mays or Eddie Mathews on the Yankees, hitting 500 Hrs and winning 12 pennants and 7 championships in 14 years, their card would be the million dollar card and Mantle would be much less.
It is the first major set for a company making baseball cards for 65+ years aligning with a 2nd year card of the star of the greatest dynasty in baseball history.
|
They care about analytics now, and have a great deal since Bill James began to publish his Baseball Abstract in the '80's.
Come on in out of the 1950's--in addition to Mantle's superiority over Mays and Aaron during the time they were all active (which goes to quality, rather than quantity established through longevity), it certainly didn't hurt that Mantle's teams won the pennant in 12 of the first 14 years of his career, or that he averaged a home run every 12-point something times at bat FOR TEN, YES TEN, YEARS! And for educational purposes, Mantle's runs created are certainly not "hypothetical." James' arrived at a formula for predicting the number of runs a team would score by an extremely thorough mathematical consideration of both positive and negative events in relation to run scoring which was proven to be incredibly accurate. He then concluded that there was no reason the same formula could not be applied to individual players. wRC+ performs a similar function, while OBPS comes close to doing the same thing in a somewhat shorthand manner.
For your information, Eddie Mathews is ranked as the second greatest third baseman of all time (third by Bill James, behind Schimidt (#1) and Brett (#2)) and may well have become number one but for a significant shoulder injury he suffered in 1962. He had 370 HR's before he was 30, prior to that injury.
Study the game's history (reading about it should be enjoyable and not work), which becomes even richer as SABER and analytics advance with time, and learn something! You might even want to watch a little "MLB Now" on your cable network, a show which devotes quite a bit of time to baseball analytics. The latter will have an even greater, not lesser, impact over time.
Regards,
Larry