Examining Stan Musial’s Batting: Consistently Uncoiling ‘An Explosion of Power’

Stan Musial looks forward to another game at the Polo Grounds. Musial smashed 49 home runs at that ballpark, more than he hit at any other opposition park. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

 

Jan Finkel begins his SABR biography of Stan Musial with a quote from the great broadcaster Vin Scully: “How good was Stan Musial? He was good enough to take your breath away.”2 For more than 20 years, with a bat in his hands, Musial left us gasping for breath again and again and again.1

The On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS) statistic combines getting on base with power, offering insights into a batter’s offensive potential to help his team win.3 More recently, Wins Above Replacement (WAR) measures the number of wins the player added to the team above what a replacement player would add.4 A WAR value can be scaled for a single season or be used to compare players over their entire careers. When analyzing Stan Musial’s batting statistics to understand winning, we gain more insight by studying his types of base hits (not just his OPS or WAR).

First, the obvious. A deserved first-ballot Hall of Famer, Musial is sixth in career Offensive Wins Above Replacement (125.1).5 The Offensive WAR career list names the best of the best batters. The only five batters above Musial on the list are Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, and Henry Aaron. Great company.

It is easy to admire Musial’s career statistics: a .331 batting average, a .417 on-base percentage, and a .559 slugging percentage. He ranks fourth in career base hits (3,630), split amazingly with 1,815 hits at home and 1,815 on the road. That’s consistency. His 1,377 extra-base hits,6 fourth-best of any player in history, reinforce his legacy of power. He led the majors in seven different seasons in extra-base hits.7 In fact, Musial was in the majors’ top 10 of extra-base hits in every season from 1943 to 1957 except one (he did not play in 1945, due to military service). It was precisely his ability to produce extra-base hits that correlates directly with more wins.

Musial is one of only 15 players in the history of the game to have collected 100 or more extra-base hits in a single season.8 He ranks tied for sixth-most all-time, when he had 103 extra-base hits in 1948. When he accomplished that rare feat, he was only the 10th player in history to have at least 100 extra-base hits in a single season, and he was the first since 1937 (when Hank Greenberg broke the century barrier). Musial missed winning the Triple Crown by one home run,9 but he did win his third (of three) National League Most Valuable Player Award that season. He also placed second in the NL MVP balloting four more times. In 1950 he was runner-up to a pitcher, indicating that Musial was presumably the best hitter in the National League.

Back to how could Musial influence a game offensively. In 1948 he had 230 hits, giving him a percentage of extra-base hits of 0.4478 (close to one-half). How can we think of this in a practical sense? If Musial was 2-for-4 in a game in 1948, we could expect one of those hits to be for extra bases – a double, triple, or home run. With a runner on base, there is a high chance that the runner could score (maybe from first on a double but much more likely if a runner was on second or third). In addition, Musial would then put himself in scoring position (if he didn’t hit a home run), waiting to be driven home by his teammates, leading to another run. We know that in his career he scored 1,949 runs and drove in 1,951, creating a run in every 5.6 at-bats. Again, that’s consistency.

Musial had two other seasons with 90 or more extra-base hits. In 1949 he had 90 extra-base hits as part of his 207 total hits (43.49 percent). He also hit for the cycle on July 24, 1949, banging out three different extra-base hits with a single, while scoring three times and adding four RBIs. Four seasons later, in 1953, Musial had 92 extra-base hits in 200 total safeties (46 percent). For his career, Musial’s percentage of extra-base hits is 0.3793.10

Musial’s career slugging percentage of .559 translates roughly into five total bases for every nine at-bats, or, in a simpler way, at least one base in every two at-bats. His career percentage of extra-base hits (0.3793) means he would get at least a double in every third base hit. From a power point of view, Musial drove in a run, or got into a position to be driven in, with every third base hit over his entire career.

When comparing players with a combined batting average of at least .300, an on-base average of at least .400, and a slugging percentage of at least .500 (in the same season), Musial ranks second-most in major-league history, with 15 such seasons.11 The last time he accomplished this triple-stat mark was in the 1962 season (.330 BA, .416 OBP, .508 SLG), when Musial was 41 years old. For comparison, the 15 seasons stand three behind Ted Williams and one ahead of both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who each had 14 such seasons. Since Musial’s performance spans a 22-season career, interrupted by military service, all we can say is, “Wow! This is consistently impressive!”

We can combine Musial’s career batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and percentage of extra-base hits to define a typical series for him. Hypothetically, if Musial got 15 at-bats in a four-game series, he would reach base at least six times (with at least five hits), with about two extra-base hits, each leading to a potential run or two. He would drive in two to three runs and score two to three himself. In every series. For every season. Obviously, his numbers were higher during his peak seasons. What manager wouldn’t want that consistency?

Finally – just imagine! – if we could put nine Stan Musials batting on the same team, that team would win 77.9 percent of its games.12 Musial’s Offensive Win Percentage ranks 15th all-time (tied with Tris Speaker), out of every baseball player who ever swung a bat in the big leagues. The only other players above Musial on this list who played in roughly the same era as he did were Boston’s Williams (his career Offensive Win Percentage was 85.7 percent) and New York’s Mickey Mantle (80.4 percent). Babe Ruth is first on the list (his 85.8 percent edges out Williams), and Barry Bonds is fourth (81.5 percent), but nine of the top 14 players come from the 1910s-1930s (representing some of the game’s greatest hitters – Ruth, Oscar Charleston, Rogers Hornsby, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Turkey Stearnes, Ty Cobb, Mule Suttles, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx).13 That means that for the entirety of his 22-season career, Stan the Consistent Man Musial contributed to his team’s winning more games than all but two other players, out of the thousands who played in that stretch of time. That should take your breath away.

MIKE HUBER is professor emeritus of mathematics at Muhlenberg College, where he routinely taught a course titled Reasoning With Sabermetrics. He also sponsored several undergraduate research projects involving simulating and predicting rare events in baseball, such as pitching a no-hitter or hitting for the cycle. He joined SABR in 1996 and enjoys writing and fact-checking for the Games Project.

 

NOTES

1 Jan Finkel, “Stan Musial,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/stan-musial/. In his bio, Finkel cites a quotation from a Paul Warburton article that appeared in the 2001 SABR Baseball Research Journal. See Paul Warburton, “Stan Musial’s Spectacular 1948 Season,” Baseball Research Journal. 30 (2001), 99-104.

2 Finkel.

3 John Thorn and Pete Palmer, The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics (New York: Doubleday, 1984).

4 See https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/WAR_career.shtml.

5 Musial is tied with Tris Speaker and Ted Williams for sixth place in Offensive WAR. See https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/WAR_bat_career.shtml. When fielding statistics are included (giving career Position Player WAR), Musial ranks eighth; Tris Speaker and Honus Wagner move ahead of him. Williams dropped to 11th-best.

6 Of Musial’s 475 home runs, 252 came at home while 223 came away, in 12 different ballparks. See Finkel for more details.

7 Musial led the majors in extra-base hits in 1943, 1944, 1946, 1948, 1949, 1950, and 1953.

8 See https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/XBH_season.shtml. As of the end of the 2023 season.

9 In 1948 Musial had 46 doubles, 18 triples, and 39 home runs – 103 extra-base hits. His 39 homers were one behind both Ralph Kiner and Johnny Mize, who led the majors.

10 In fairness, the percentage of extra-base hits statistic does not take any pitching or ballpark factors into account.

11 See https://www.statmuse.com/mlb/ask/most-seasons-with.300-batting-average.400-on-base-percentage-and.500-slugging-percentage. Accessed April 2024.

12 See https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/offensive_winning_perc_career.shtml. According to Baseball-Reference, this statistic “uses the Pythagorean win pct formula with the player’s RC/G for runs scored and the league’s R/9 as runs allowed.”

13 Dan Brouthers makes the list as the only nineteenth-century player above Musial. As of the first month of the 2024 season, active player Mike Trout jumped to the 13th spot on the list (78.9 percent).