Of (A)symmetry and (In)consistency: Stan Musial’s Home/Away Splits

Stan Musial doubled, then scored by sliding past catcher Ernie Lombardi on Walker Cooper’s sixth-inning single at Braves Field on September 16, 1942. The Cardinals won, 6-2. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

 

One of the most celebrated facets of Cardinals historical lore is Stan Musial’s remarkable home/away symmetry of career base hits: 1,815 at home and 1,815 away. In his book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, George Will found this phenomenon significant: “Stan Musial may have been baseball’s most consistent hitter, at least as measured by this stunning statistic.”1 On the perimeter of its current Busch Stadium, the Cardinals placed 3,630 bricks in the ballpark’s western boundary sidewalk, evenly divided by the location of Musial’s statue (and labeled HOME and AWAY on either side), to invite visitors to draw the same conclusion, that he didn’t care where he played: Bat met ball with equally positive results. Lee Allen, then the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s historian, contributed a career statistical summary as an appendix to Musial’s autobiography, in which he offered a more agnostic interpretation: “Through a fantastic coincidence, Musial made exactly as many hits on the road, 1,815, as he did in St. Louis.”2 Which is it, then, a statistic that provides a window on The Man’s remarkable consistency and focus, unwavering in the face of diverse playing environments? Or merely a happy statistical accident?

The question is easily answered, unromantically favoring Allen’s prosaic interpretation. The Donora Greyhound recorded a nontrivial home/away difference in batting average: .336 at home and .326 on the road. How was this possible, to produce the same number of hits? Did he sit out more home games, thereby coming to the plate less often? No, actually Musial drew a staggering 14.6 percent more bases on balls at home than away (857 versus 748). As a result, his fairly even division of plate appearances (6,332 home to 6,386 away, the difference likely reflecting fewer ninth-inning plate appearances at home) turned into a significantly uneven split of at-bats: 5,402 versus 5,569. With that difference in the denominator for calculating batting average, 1,815 hits at home produced .336, and the same number on the road .326, for a 3.1 percent advantage.

Other career statistics reveal further home advantages in Musial’s performance: on-base proportion .427 versus .407 (4.9 percent better), slugging .582 and .537 (+8.4 percent), and consequently OPS 1.009 versus .944 (+6.9 percent). But he indeed hit very well both at home and on the road. A lifelong Musial fan can understandably feel guilty about drawing attention to these differences, so perhaps there is salvation in discovering that his home/away statistical splits still were more symmetrical and consistent than his contemporaries’. Were they?

MUSIAL’S HOME/AWAY SPLITS COMPARED TO HIS CONTEMPORARIES

To quantify offensive productivity, we employed OPS (on-base plus slugging), an imperfect but useful and universally understood statistic. We used adjusted OPS, written OPS+, to normalize a player’s OPS against a season’s offensive context and to correct for his home ballpark characteristics, thus enabling more accurate comparisons among players and seasons. (A value of 100 matches the league average.) And when we explore Baseball-Reference.com’s splits for each player’s career and individual seasons, we find the highly useful tOPS+ (with the catchy name “OPS for split relative to Player’s Total OPS”) to quantify the magnitude of performance difference between, say, home vs. away, facing right-handed vs. left-handed pitchers, month of the season, batting order position, and so forth. A perfectly symmetrical scenario for a binary split would produce tOPS+ values as 100 and 100, e.g., exactly the same at home as away; whereas a slight difference might be, say, 103 and 97, and a more extreme pair of values 110 and 90. For simplicity’s sake I present only Musial’s Home tOPS+ values.

Musial’s career Home tOPS+ is 107. At first blush, that seems close enough to 100 to suggest that his legendary offensive neutrality regarding a game’s location is indeed supported, albeit imperfectly. But testing that premise requires comparing Musial’s tOPS+ to overall major leaguers’ splits (not including contemporary Jim Crow-era Black ball) for his primary seasons, 1942-1963, omitting 1941 (he played only 12 games) and 1945 (his World War II service). Over that time, baseball’s overall Home tOPS+ was 105. That suggests that “The Man,” with his Home tOPS+ of 107, actually favored playing at home vs. on the road even somewhat more than did his contemporaries, on average.

Might elite batsmen show home/away splits that are consistently different from ordinary players, and thus serve as an alternative basis for peer comparison? Fifteen elite hitters who overlapped Musial’s career by at least six seasons were selected: Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, Roy Campanella, Joe DiMaggio, Ralph Kiner, Ted Kluszewski, Mickey Mantle, Ed Mathews, Willie Mays, Johnny Mize, Bill Nicholson, Frank Robinson, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, and Ted Williams. Remarkably, they too averaged 105 for Home tOPS+, as we found for the majors as a whole. So Musial still appears to have favored his home ballpark more than most players.

Musial often is compared with Williams, as the two finest hitters in their respective leagues at that time. Their two career Home tOPS+ values are close, 107 vs. 106. But Teddy Ballgame’s splits are more “normal,” with a 10.1 percent home BA advantage (.361 to .328) and only 4.5 percent for walks (1,031 to 987), resulting in a 12.2 percent home edge in base hits (1,403 to 1,251).

Thus it is clear that Musial actually preferred home cooking even more than did his contemporaries, whether everyday players or his elite peers. He also showed greater than average season-to-season variation in his home/away splits, another mark against his purported offensive consistency.

MUSIAL’S FOUR MOST PECULIAR SEASONS

Four of Stan Musial’s seasons stand out as having markedly anomalous Home tOPS+ values: 1948 (tOPS+ of 83), 1957 (84), 1961 (148), and 1963 (134). Plausible explanations are presented for three of those seasons, leaving only 1957 as an unfathomed mystery.

The 1948 campaign was Musial’s best offensive season, and one of the best in baseball history, featuring an OPS+ of 200 and an offensive WAR of 10.8, as well as 429 total bases and a near-Triple Crown. He began crouching lower and gripping the bat down to the knob, which contributed to his doubling his previous high in home runs (19) to 39.4 So why, in such a successful season, would he have performed so much better on the road? In general, Musial was not prone to either marked hot streaks or prolonged slumps, gauged by eyeballing each season’s game logs. But from May 19 through May 28, 1948, he went on a remarkable tear: 9 games in four road ballparks, 47 plate appearances, 27 times reached base, and 53 total bases (including walks). Unlike today’s schedules, with typically single-digit homestands and road trips, schedules in those days featured very long homestands and road trips: In 1948 the Cardinals had four homestands of 12 to 20 games against 4 to 7 teams each, and four road trips of 12 to 22 games against 5 to 7 teams, plus several shorter stints. Consequently a hot or cold streak of, say, 10 games would very likely fall completely or primarily within one home or away stretch. Therefore even if the streak was caused by factors unrelated to home/away playing environments – such as freedom from injury, seeing the ball well, or locked-in hitting mechanics – it could contribute to a misleadingly high or low home/away split for the season. All that suggests that his tOPS+ of 83 was an artifact of dumb luck regarding the timing of his hot streak, although Musial himself noted in his 1977 autobiography, “If I could have played the 1948 season on the road, I might have hit .400 and ripped the record book apart.”5

The 1957 season, with another away-favoring tOPS+ of 84, featured no such prolonged streak or slump, except that on August 18 to 21 Musial might have been launching a streak (5 games, 22 PA, 14 OB, and 26 total bases) in Milwaukee (normally a tough offensive ballpark for him) and New York (a typically easy ballpark) before he was injured on August 22 in Philadelphia.6 So, contrary to 1948, in 1957 we see a season-long overperformance on the road compared with home; but nowhere in his biographies was this pattern recognized, much less a cause suggested.7

At the opposite end of the split spectrum were 1961 and 1963, with Home tOPS+ values of 148 and 134, sandwiching a more normal split (tOPS+ 107) and successful 1962, with an OPS+ of 137, fourth in the National League at the age of 41. In 1961 he played 61 games at home, with 15 excellent offensive games, vs. a road record of 62 games with only six outstanding games, and no evident streaks or slumps. The 1963 season showed a similar pattern, with 64 home games, of which 14 were excellent; and 58 road games, of which only four were outstanding.8 But Musial’s two autobiographies indirectly address why 1961 and 1963 were so home-skewed: he noted that his greatest challenge in those later years was concentration, which he often found lagging.9 He had been so embarrassed by his 1961 performance (OPS+ 119 and offensive WAR 2.1) that he worked especially hard the following offseason on his conditioning and adapting his stance and swing, thereby producing a gratifying comeback in 1962.10 One may infer that he improved his concentration at the plate throughout the season, both at home and on the road, in order to produce more Musial-like numbers. But it would be natural for concentration to lag again in his final season, especially away from his home fans.11

WRAP-UP

Stan Musial’s base hit home/away symmetry of 1,815 reflects no deep truth about his consistency, but rather is a statistical accident that distracts from the fact that he actually performed better offensively at home, even more so than most of his hard-hitting peers and major-league batters overall. But two mysteries remain, for future creative hypothesizing and analysis: (1) Why did his home/away offensive splits fluctuate so wildly and apparently so randomly during his career?12 And (2) why did he walk so much more frequently at home? Was he more selective at the plate? And/or did he have a superior visual hitting environment in his home ballpark?

CLEM HAMILTON began his career as a professor of horticulture and botany at the University of Washington (Seattle) and Claremont Graduate University in California, conducting fieldwork in Thailand, Panama, Chile, and Costa Rica. From 1992 through 2017 he served as chief executive officer and VP of research at botanical gardens and arboretums in Seattle, Claremont, Chicago, and Cleveland. In his retirement Clem conducts research focused primarily on Black baseball and presents at each year’s SABR Jerry Malloy Conference. He also works for the St. Louis Cardinals as a part-time tour guide, museum docent, photographer, and instructor of energetic third- through sixth-graders. In 2022 he won the Jim Rygelski Research Award from SABR’s Bob Broeg (St. Louis) chapter. Clem resides in St. Louis with his wife, Karen, and in close proximity to his daughter and granddaughter.

 

SOURCES

Musial’s statistics and those for his contemporary players, including home-away split statistics, are gleaned from Baseball-Reference.com.

 

NOTES

1 George F. Will, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 176.

2 Lee Allen’s statistical summary appeared first in Stan Musial, Stan Musial: “The Man’s” Own Story as Told to Bob Broeg (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1964), 315, and then in Stan Musial, The Man Stan: Musial, Then and Now … as Told to Bob Broeg (St. Louis: Bethany Press, 1977), 244.

3 By season, Musial’s Home tOPS+ values are 114 (1942), 99 (1943), 96 (1944), 107 (1946), 100 (1947), 83 (1948), 104 (1949), 113 (1950), 109 (1951), 91 (1952), 121 (1953), 109 (1954), 118 (1955), 121 (1956), 84 (1957), 112 (1958), 104 (1959), 103 (1960), 148 (1961), 107 (1962), and 134 (1963).

4 Musial, Stan Musial, 110; George Vecsey, Stan Musial: An American Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 201.

5 Musial, The Man Stan, 123. Musial noted also his extraordinary performance at Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, but that tendency prevailed most years, not just 1948.

6 Musial’s career tOPS+ values were 67 for Milwaukee County Stadium (104 games, 1953-63) and 118 for the Polo Grounds (171 games, 1941-57).

7 Cf. all biographies already cited plus Irv Goodman, Stan The Man Musial (New York: Bartholomew House, 1961); James N. Giglio, Musial: From Stash to Stan the Man (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2001); Wayne Stewart, Stan the Man: The Life and Times of Stan Musial (Chicago: Triumph, 2010); St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Stan Musial: Baseball’s Perfect Knight (St. Louis: St. Louis Post-Dispatch Books, 2010).

8 Musial’s games were evaluated in an ad hoc manner as “excellent” or not in the context of their particular seasons, e.g., (on-base plus total bases) divided by plate appearances greater than or equal to 1.5 in 1961 and 1963, relatively poor seasons; greater than or equal to 1.75 in 1962, a much better season; and greater than or equal to 2.0 in his peak seasons.

9 Cf. Musial, Stan Musial, 244-245 regarding the importance of concentration and the challenge to maintain it; Musial, The Man Stan, 221 regarding his difficulties particularly in 1963. Cf. also Giglio, Musial, 238-239 and Post-Dispatch, Stan Musial, 90.

10 Musial, The Man Stan, 208; Giglio, Musial, 258; and Post-Dispatch, Stan Musial, 97.

11 Post-Dispatch, Stan Musial, 105.

12 Baseball changed significantly during Musial’s career, e.g. the ascent of the slider; as did his approach to hitting, e.g. changing his bat characteristics and swinging more, then less in later years, for power; and his occasional injuries and the effects of aging. Cf. Musial, Stan Musial, 247, 301-306; Musial, The Man Stan, 115-116, 168-169; Giglio, Musial, 252.