The team that Calvin Griffith moved to Minnesota featured a player who was rapidly becoming the most feared hitter in the league, Harmon Killebrew. Killebrew’s numbers, and their place in the history of the Twins/Senators franchise, are hardly a well-kept secret. He either leads or places second in nearly every statistical category. The quiet, unassuming Killebrew’s best qualities were thrust back into the spotlight in May 2011 after his passing due to complications of esophageal cancer. Lauded throughout his career as a “team guy,” he proved this label correct even in death, as his funeral serendipitously coincided with a rare Twins interleague trip to Arizona, allowing the front office staff and current players, many of whom were affected both personally and professionally, to attend. Current Twins star Joe Mauer called Killebrew “a family member,” right fielder Michael Cuddyer called him “the most genuine person he ever met,” and team president Dave St. Peter called him the most important player ever to don a Twins uniform.1 Bert Blyleven, in his eulogy, spoke of Killebrew telling players to autograph baseballs with a legible signature, the better for young fans to read whose name they had. 

Famously scooped up by the Nationals out of his Idaho home at the age of 17 in 1954, as a “Bonus Baby” signing, Killebrew was forced to stay on the Nationals’ active roster for at least two seasons, and he rarely saw the field. After just 11 home runs in his first five seasons (with the final three spent more in the minors than the majors), Killebrew busted out in 1959, slugging 42 and leading the American League. It was just in time for Sports Illustrated to brand him the living embodiment of Joe Hardy (the Senators hero in Damn Yankees), but too late to save the Senators, who were destined to move west. So, while Washington fans saw just a glimpse of his potential, he arrived in Minnesota a finished product, on and off the field. A quiet, family-oriented man, Killebrew was the perfect ambassador for baseball in the Midwest. Killebrew’s early life is straight out of “All-American Boy” cliché. He had reportedly gained his strength by lifting 95-pound milk cans while working on his father’s farm. He lettered in three different sports and was a high school All-American quarterback. His first wife, Elaine (the two were married from 1955 to 1985) was his high-school sweetheart. 

Assigned to cover a man whose controversial side seemingly didn’t exist, the media embarked on a career-long quest to attach idiosyncrasies where there were none. When Sports Illustrated writer Barbara Heilman asked him if he had any “curious” habits during a 1963 interview, Killebrew replied, “Doing the dishes, I guess.”2 Nicknames were applied liberally, yet none seemed to capture the man. “Hammerin’ Harmon,” “Harmin’ Harmon,” and “Bombin’ Harmon” were all attempted, as well as the mildly ridiculous (yet oddly fitting) “Charmin’ Harmon.” Early in his career, St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Arno Goethel tried the long-winded “Bashful Basher from Power Alley,”3 but the only nickname that stuck was perhaps the least flattering of all: “Killer.”

After Killebrew’s death, Bob Nightengale of USA Today called the nickname “the most unsuitable nickname in sports.”4 On a personal level this is true, but of course the moniker had more to do with his ability to destroy a baseball. For a franchise that had long made its mark as one of the least powerful teams in the league, the ’60s Twins boasted a lineup of thumpers. As he led the Twins to success in the 1960s, the quiet, unassuming Killebrew was embraced as one of their own by his new hometown.

Rod Carew may have been the greatest pure hitter to put on a Twins uniform. His career average of .334 as a Twin (.328 over his entire career) is 11 points higher than Joe Mauer’s and 16 ahead of Kirby Puckett. Twice he flirted with .400 deep into the season. In 1977, Ted Williams threw his support behind Carew becoming the first man since the Splendid Splinter to eclipse the magical mark, if only so reporters would “stop asking [Williams] if it could be done again.”5 Nevertheless, despite his electric ability, as further evidenced by his 17 career steals of home, Carew’s adoration from the public never reached the heights of Killebrew, Puckett, or Mauer. 

By the 1970s, the relationship between the players and owners was changing. Players were lobbying for greater employment freedom, which they would gain by the middle of the decade, while baseball’s owners were desperately clinging to the last vestiges of their absolute power over the game’s finances. Though owner Calvin Griffith’s cheapness angered the public, players like Carew did not escape the notion that while owners may be tyrannical, the players were becoming increasingly greedy.

The sad reality of Carew’s Twins’ career is that it was played out in nearly uninhabited stadiums. In 1974, the season in which Rod made his first (albeit short-lived) charge at the .400 mark, the Twins drew just 662,401 fans, an average of fewer than 9,000 per game. Few years after their division titles were significantly better. Only in 1977, when Carew had a big season, and in 1979, the year after Carew left and the team stayed in contention until late in the season, did the Twins top one million fans during the 1970s.

Though Carew was not intentionally an unpleasant person, his public persona did him no favors with the few fans that did come to see him play. In his autobiography, Carew, he describes himself as a player who was “moody, intense, lonely, insecure, quick to anger.”6 He further writes that his desire to “jump the club” and quit nearly overcame him several times throughout his playing days, often for what could be described as the mildest of slights. Though the knowledge of Carew’s impoverished upbringing in Panama by an emotionally abusive, distant, and often absent father might go a long way towards explaining Carew’s insecurities, his autobiography would not be published until 1979, after his acrimonious departure from Griffith’s Twins, leaving fans without many of the vital details to understand their star. 

The most notable of Carew and Griffith’s many battles was their last, which destroyed their relationship (later rehabilitated) and fostered Carew’s exit to California. After many seasons of contract disputes, in which Griffith admitted to Carew that he was underpaid yet refused to raise his salary, Griffith gave an (admittedly drunken) speech to a rural Minnesota Lions club in 1978 in which he called Carew a “damn fool”7 for signing a contract that paid him less than he could make elsewhere. He also claimed that he was glad he moved to Minnesota because it had “only 15,000 black people,”8 while claiming that black fans didn’t come to ballgames. An incensed Carew responded by branding Griffith a “bigot” and refusing to be “another slave on his plantation.”9 He was traded to the California Angels in the ensuing offseason.

Carew’s accomplishments did not entirely escape the consciousness of Twins fans. Though he was overshadowed by Killebrew in their overlapping playing days, forced to play the singles-hitting second fiddle to Harmon’s power show, Carew had the attention of the baseball world thrust upon him during his most serious challenge to the .400 mark, in 1977. With Time magazine featuring his pursuit and Ted Williams offering his support, fans took notice, especially on June 26. 

Entering the game with a .396 average and, in front of a crowd of 46,463 clad in Twins T-shirts with his number 29 on the back (the stadium giveaway that day), Carew went 4-for-5 and paced the team to a 19–12 drubbing of the White Sox. With the scoreboard detailing his exact batting average after each hit (his last hit put his batting average at .403), the crowd showered him with four separate standing ovations, the last of which lasted until Carew finally doffed his cap in recognition from first base. Carew recognized the magnitude of the moment in his autobiography, stating, “I had goose bumps, and I kept thinking that the fans had finally accepted me, that they’d finally come over on my side.”10 Years later, Twins broadcaster Dick Bremer summed up the moment well: “It was the first public acknowledgement that this guy was the best hitter [the fans] were ever going to see.”11

It was the next Twins superstar, however, that Bremer labeled “the most electrifying player in Twins history.”12 Few who watched center fielder Kirby Puckett regularly would disagree. Puckett was the first superstar in the team’s Metrodome era and the catalyst for their only two world championship teams. Flashy, brash, and highly quotable, he was the perfect combination of talent and personality to lead the franchise into the era of 24-hour sports television, and his madcap style of hitting and defense was made for fans both in the ballpark and on the small screen. 

Puckett started his professional career relatively late, as he was 22 when drafted out of Bradley University in 1982 and 24 when he debuted in the majors in 1984.Glaucoma robbed Puckett of his playing ability in 1996, but he was already 36 when forced into retirement, and he had reached the 200-hit mark just once after his 30th birthday. In between, he astounded fans with his exploits. Puckett had four hits in his major league debut and his .318 career batting average at the time of his retirement was one of the ten best among AL righties. Moreover, he was the rare great offensive player who may be better remembered for his defense. The elastic centerfield fence was his personal jungle gym for eleven years. In recognition of his stellar career, the Hall of Fame voters elected him into the Hall on the first ballot.

Puckett would be a Minnesota legend even if he had played just one game in a Twins uniform, provided that game was Game Six of the 1991 World Series. Postseason legends are measured lyrically, and Puckett’s Game Six was one of the finest offensive and defensive solo acts in World Series history. Puckett was 3-for-18 entering the game, but finished it a double short of the cycle, and of course extended the series with his eleventh inning home run off Charlie Leibrandt. In true Puckett fashion, however, his fielding in the game may be more famous. His third-inning robbery of Atlanta’s Ron Gant is still a World Series highlight-reel must 20 years later. As Tim Kurkjian put it, “It was the kind of performance that elevates a player to legendary status.”13

What amplifies Puckett’s eternally shining star is not the performance itself, but the details that surround it. First of all, Puckett essentially predicted the outcome. Before the game, in what has now become an oft-retold story, Puckett sauntered into the clubhouse and told his teammates to “get on his back” so he could “carry them.” Perhaps less remembered is Puckett’s second prediction of the night. After Puckett’s death in 2006, Terry Crowley (the Twins hitting coach in 1991) shared a story—possibly apocryphal—that Puckett, when Bobby Cox visited the mound before Puckett’s fateful eleventh inning at-bat, turned to Crowley and said “If they leave this guy in the game, the game is over.”14

Beyond the one box score, Puckett’s impact on the Twins can be measured by the effort the player made to weave himself to the “Minnesota lifestyle.” The man who grew up in the predominantly black South Side of Chicago moved his home to Minnesota and blended himself in with a predominantly white public with little difficulty. He developed a love of fishing, though not ice fishing, once telling a reporter, “I ain’t gonna die on no ice.”15 During the run of two World Series championships, Puckett may have been the most popular and best recognized celebrity in Minnesota. For a populace that has long accepted its place in American culture as a self-contained outpost, far removed from the mainstream, Minnesotans are quick to adopt outsiders who respect their outlook. As Bremer put it, “There’s something very parochial about those of us who live here. We like people who like being here. You don’t have to be from here, but it really matters to fans that you become part of the community.”16 

After his career was over, Puckett fell prey to several personal scandals, suffering through a highly public divorce from his wife, Tonya, amid allegations of violence inflicted upon not only his wife but multiple other women with whom he was involved. Years later, with time to heal the wounds suffered by fans who before his divorce had held Puckett up as an icon, reasonable people who neither condone his private actions nor support his personal choices can separate his failings from his accomplishments that brought them happiness.

Comparing Joe Mauer’s place within the Minnesota’s baseball zeitgeist to three franchise legends is an awkward proposition at this point in time. For starters, Mauer is still a young man (turning 28 early in the 2011 season) seemingly with years to add to or detract from his legacy. At the time of this writing, however, hometown-hero Mauer’s previously golden image is being tarnished for the first time in his career. During the 2011 season he was labeled “soft” after a slow recovery from offseason leg injuries. Aggressive fans altered his Wikipedia entry to strategically add the word “lazy.”17 Writers and fans questioned the sanity of his $184 million contract that kicked in before the season. One ESPN writer questioned whether or not Mauer had, in one season, gone from one of the game’s most productive and popular players to an albatross in his own clubhouse. In fact, in today’s Internet age all superstars are subject to heightened scrutiny. Moreover, advanced metrics are used to measure a player’s value in ways that previous generations of players did not have to deal with, adding another angle for possible criticism.

Mauer’s miniature fall in 2011 testifies to the staggering nature of his popularity in the years preceding it. A brief flirtation with a scholarship offer to play football for Bobby Bowden’s Florida State football powerhouse as well as the suggestion that the Twins take Mark Prior, not Mauer, with the top pick in the 2001 draft might have derailed Mauer’s eventual appearance on the Twins, but in retrospect his selection by Minnesota was the culmination of an unstoppable three-year magnetic attraction between player and community. 

Joining a team in 2004 that already featured Puckett’s heir, Torii Hunter, in center field as well as star hurler Johan Santana and Justin Morneau, a future AL MVP who debuted a year earlier, Mauer’s celebrity instantly trumped them all. Without the need to ingratiate himself to a public that already knew him intimately, and never indicating that any team apart from Minnesota would be a better option for his career, Twins fans became very protective of their home-grown star. Their support was evident on the backs of replica jerseys on a nightly basis at both home and away ballparks. “He is very much one of us,” Bremer stated succinctly.18

As Mauer’s statistical totals rose, so did the interest in his personality. Not once but twice he was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, characterized as the all-American, hometown neighbor with the unique ability to hit .350 at the most demanding defensive position. When the story broke that Mauer struck out just once in all of his high school games, the local alternative newspaper City Pages sought to track down the pitcher who pulled the trick. They did, and Paul Feiner, unwilling to crow about his victory over Minnesota’s golden child, immediately deflected the attention back to Mauer, pointing out that the catcher both homered and singled off of him in the same game.19 His trademark sideburns even achieved a personality of its own, in the vein of Rollie Fingers’ handlebar moustache in Oakland in the ’70s. The team once gave away stick-on replica sideburns at the ballpark as a promotion. 

With the notion that Mauer will always be more of a Carew than a Killebrew offensively, the debate over Mauer’s positional future still rages. Those who maintain that longevity of the 6-foot-5 Mauer will be increased via a permanent move to another less-demanding position clash with those who cite that his new, heightened contract significantly decreases his perceived value elsewhere. From a purely statistical standpoint these arguments are valid, but measuring the value of a star player as merely a player and not an attraction to be connected to by millions of fans who flood the turnstiles is to tell only half of the story. Mauer is the spiritual heir to Killebrew for his humble nature, the statistical heir to Carew through his playing style, and the popular heir to Puckett. As Bremer sums up, “He’s the Ted Williams of catchers. How lucky are [Twins fans] to be able to witness that from the beginning of his career to the end?”20

CHARLIE BEATTIE is a freelance sportswriter and broadcaster based in Minneapolis. His credits include coverage of Major League Baseball, the NFL, NHL, NCAA Basketball and the Olympic Games. His baseball credits include written and broadcast work for the Wilson (North Carolina) Tobs, Bowie Baysox, St. Paul Saints and the Minnesota Twins. He is new to SABR in 2012.

Photo credits

Harmon Killebrew: National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

Rod Carew: SABR-Rucker Archive.

Kirby Puckett and Joe Mauer: Courtesy of the Minnesota Twins.

Sources

Anderson, Kelli. “The Perfect Catch.” Sports Illustrated 105 no. 5 (2006): http://www.sportsillustrated.com.

Bingham, Walter. “The Killer Strikes in May.” Sports Illustrated 10, no. 22 (1959): 55–58.

Carry, Peter. “A Head Fit for a Triple Crown.” Sports Illustrated 33, no. 5 (1970): 14–15.

Deford, Frank. “The Rise and Fall of Kirby Puckett.” Sports Illustrated 98, no.11 (2003): http://www.sportsillustrated.com.

Fimrite, Ron. “Hitters of Singular Skills.” Sports Illustrated 41, no. 1 (1974): 14–17.

Murphy, Austin. “A Better Set of Twins.” Sports Illustrated 67, no. 4 (1987): 36–38, 59.

O’Keefe, John. “Harmon Killebrew: Twins Slugger.” Sports Illustrated 91, no. 18, (1999):16.

Rushin, Steve. “Does the Puck Stop Here?” Sports Illustrated 76, no. 24 (1992): 22–30.

Rushin, Steve. “A Series to Savor.” Sports Illustrated 75, no. 20 (1991): 16–27.

Telander, Rick. “Minny’s Mighty Mite.” Sports Illustrated 66, no. 24 (1987): 46–49.

Verducci, Tom. “Joe Mauer Will Serenely, Politely, Crush You.” Sports Illustrated 110, no. 26 (2009): http://www.sportsillustrated.com. 

Notes

1 Bob Nightengale, “Appreciation: Harmon Killebrew Recalled as Great Player, Person,” USA Today (2011): http://www.usatoday.com. 

2 Barbara Heilman, “Out of the Park on a Half Swing.” Sports Illustrated, 18, no. 14 (1963): 85–92. 

3 Dennis Brackin and Patrick Reusse. The Minnesota Twins: A Complete Illustrated History. Minneapolis: MVP, 2010. 

4  Nightengale. 

5 Ted Williams and John Underwood. “I Hope Rod Carew Hits .400.” Sports Illustrated, 47, no.3 (1977): 20–25. 

6 Rod Carew and Ira Berkow. Carew. Minneapolis: Simon and Schuster, 1979. 

7 Michael Lenehan, “The Last of the Pure Baseball Men.” The Atlantic (1981). http://www.theatlantic.com. 

8 Lenehan.

9 Carew and Berkow, Carew. 

10 Carew and Berkow, Carew.   

11 Dick Bremer of Fox Sports North Television was interviewed at Target Field on August 23, 2011. 

12 Bremer interview, August 23, 2011.

13 Tim Kurkjian, “For 11 Innings, Puckett’s Greatness Took Center Stage.” ESPN.com, 2006. http://www.espn.com. 

14 Joe Christensen, “Goodbye, Kirby.” Minneapolis Star Tribune (2006): http://www.startribune.com. 

15 Steve Rushin, “End of the Fairy Tale.” Sports Illustrated, 104, no. 12 (2003): http://www.sportsillustrated.com. 

16 Bremer interview, August 23, 2011.

17 Johnette Howard, “Is Joe Mauer Dragging Twins Down?” ESPN.com, http://www.espn.com (2011). 

18 Bremer interview, August 23, 2011.

19 Jim Walsh, “The Kid who Struck Out Joe Mauer.” City Pages (2006): http://www.citypages.com. 

20 Bremer interview, August 23, 2011.

That alone would have been an impressive col­­lection of 27-and-under talent, but those four building- block players were also joined by 21-year-old rookie shortstop Zoilo Versalles and 22-year-old southpaw Jim Kaat. Of the 13 players to log at least 200 plate appearances or 75 innings for that first Twins team in 1961 six of them—Killebrew, Pascual, Battey, Allison, Kaat, and Versalles—went on to become among the 25 best players in Twins history.

One inner-circle Hall of Famer and five top-25 players in team history is one heck of a foundation for a franchise making a new start, but remarkably the Twins have continued to consistently stock the roster with star players ever since. Tony Oliva joined the mix in the Twins’ second season, followed by Jim Perry in 1963, Cesar Tovar in 1965, and Rod Carew in 1967. And it didn’t stop when the 1960s did.

In fact, at no point since coming to Minnesota in 1961 have the Twins gone more than five seasons without integrating at least one of the top 25 players in team history. Bert Blyleven, Dave Goltz, and Roy Smalley arrived in the 1970s, followed by Kent Hrbek, Gary Gaetti, Frank Viola, Kirby Puckett, and Rick Aguilera in the 1980s, Chuck Knoblauch, Brad Radke, Torii Hunter, and Corey Koskie in the 1990s, and Johan Santana, Michael Cuddyer, Justin Morneau, Joe Nathan, and Joe Mauer in the early 2000s.

Not only is the steady stream of top-level talent unique, the Twins’ overall level of talent is well beyond the norm for a team with a relatively brief history. In their five decades of existence the Twins have had five Most Valuable Player (MVP) winners and three Cy Young Award winners (including Johan Santana, who won twice), and sabermetrically speaking their star talent is immense.

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) measures a player’s all-around contributions to determine how many runs—and in turn, wins—he was worth compared to a replacement-level player at the same position. For instance, during his MVP-winning 2009 season Mauer led the league among non-pitchers with 7.5 WAR, meaning he provided the Twins with nearly eight more wins than a replacement-level catcher—say one of the Buteras, either Sal or Drew—would have produced.

And to get a sense for what exactly a hypothetical “replacement-level player” looks like, consider that Denny Hocking, Danny Thompson, Luis Rivas, Pedro Munoz, and Al Newman have the most plate appearances in Twins history among players with a negative WAR.

Since moving to Minnesota the Twins have had seven different players accumulate at least 40 Wins Above Replacement while with the team. Of the nine other American League teams that were around in 1961, only the Yankees have more 40-WAR players during that time.

Players with 40+ WAR from 1961–2011

Source: Baseball-Reference.com

When only the Yankees have produced more superstars during a 50-year period, that’s a pretty amazing distinction. Those seven 40-plus WAR players are Carew, Killebrew, Puckett, Oliva, Mauer, Blyleven, and Radke. And all seven of them were originally signed or drafted by the Twins (or, as in Killebrew’s case, the Senators).

Here’s the same list, but with 20+ WAR players:

Source: Baseball-Reference.com

Whether you focus on superstars or above-average regulars, the Twins come out looking very good, with only the Yankees and Red Sox holding an advantage in churning out sustained talent.

WAR isn’t perfect, of course, but it provides a great framework for analysis that can be supplemented further with other measures both objective and subjective, such as Value Over Replacement Player (VORP), Win Shares, postseason performance, peak value, perceived impact, and tenure with the team.

How do you compare, say, Randy Bush’s fairly modest contributions during 12 years with the Twins to Jack Morris’s massive contribution during his one season in Minnesota? I’ve spent the past several years doing just that at my blog, AaronGleeman.com, and what follows is my sabermetric ranking of the top 50 players in Twins history.

• 50. Randy Bush
• 49. Rich Rollins
• 48. Francisco Liriano
• 47. John Castino
• 46. Denard Span

Bush was never flashy and more often than not filled a part-time role for manager Tom Kelly, but he spent a dozen seasons in Minnesota—only eight guys have played more games in a Twins uniform—and he was one of seven players on both the 1987 and 1991 championship teams. He earns a spot on this list, along with other longtime contributors, rather than stars like Morris or Chili Davis who made one- and two-year impacts.

Ranking active players like Liriano and Span alongside long-retired players like Castino and Rollins can be difficult because their cumulative value is always changing and it’s tough to put their impact into proper context without being able to look back. I’ve been somewhat conservative with active players throughout this list.

• 45. Jason Kubel
• 44. Scott Erickson
• 43. Eric Milton
• 42. Jimmie Hall
• 41. Steve Braun

Erickson’s career got off to one of the fastest starts in Twins history, but he went from 23-year-old ace on a championship team and Cy Young runner-up to winning a total of just 61 games in Minnesota. His overall Twins numbers (979 innings, 61 wins, 104 adjusted ERA+) are nearly identical to Milton’s (987 innings, 57 wins, 101 adjusted ERA+) and they also both threw no-hitters, but Erickson went 20-36 with a 5.40 ERA in his final three Twins seasons. [Note that the “+” after a statistic normalizes that statistic for the ballpark and offensive context of the season. A value of 100 is league average; higher is better, so in the context of ERA a value above 100 reflects an ERA below league average.]

Hall flamed out quickly, but his impact on the Twins was significant. He packed 98 homers into just four seasons in Minnesota despite playing at a time when big offensive numbers were rare, and played a passable center field while doing so. Braun is similarly underrepresented in team lore, but ranks sixth in Twins history with a .376 on-base percentage and his raw numbers are underrated by the low-scoring 1970s.

• 40. Dave Boswell
• 39. Matt Lawton
• 38. Greg Gagne
• 37. Al Worthington
• 36. Butch Wynegar

In many ways Lawton, along with Radke, was the bridge from the 1987 and 1991 teams to the current era, and because of that, his contributions are often lost in the Twins’ ineptitude during that time, but his .379 OBP is the fifth-best in team history and he also ranks eighth in steals.

Gagne’s hitting numbers look puny compared to modern shortstops, but he had plus power for the position in the 1980s and was fantastic defensively. Similarly, Worthington was the Twins’ first of many standout closers and because of the way relievers were used in the 1960s his save totals are underwhelming, but he actually led the league with 18 saves in 1968 and had the second-most saves in baseball 1964–1968.

Wynegar was Mauer before there was a Mauer, tearing through the minor leagues to debut at age 20. He made the All-Star team in each of his first two seasons, but unfortunately peaked by 22, was traded to the Yankees at 26, and retired at 32.

• 35. Jacque Jones
• 34. Scott Baker
• 33. Kevin Tapani
• 32. Tom Brunansky
• 31. Larry Hisle

Brunansky broke in alongside fellow rookies Hrbek and Gaetti in 1982 and his walks-and-power approach would have been much more appreciated by modern analysis that doesn’t focus on batting average. Dwight Evans, Eddie Murray, and Dave Winfield were the only AL hitters with more homers than Brunansky 1982–1987, and he smacked the ninth-most homers in Twins history before being traded to the Cardinals for Tommy Herr.

Hisle’s career with the Twins was short and sweet, with 662 games spread over five seasons, yet he’s all over the team leaderboard. Hisle ranks among the top 20 in batting average, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, homers, steals, and RBIs, with a top-10 mark in adjusted OPS+, and his 1977 is one of the top years by any outfielder in Twins history. And all that came in low-offense eras.

• 30. Eddie Guardado
• 29. Michael Cuddyer
• 28. Brian Harper
• 27. Shane Mack
• 26. Cesar Tovar

Guardado went from starter to left-handed specialist to closer, and then Everyday Eddie returned to the Twins for a second go-around as a middle reliever in 2008, finishing with the most appearances and third-most saves in team history.

Hitting was Harper’s specialty, as he batted .306 for the Twins and was arguably the best offensive catcher in the league 1989–1993, and the negative perception of his defense behind the plate isn’t fully supported by numbers. Teams ran on Harper a ton, but he threw out 31 percent of attempted basestealers for his career and often topped his backups (such as Tim Laudner) in throw-out rate.

A tremendous athlete who covered tons of ground wherever the Twins put him in the outfield, Mack hit for big batting averages with great speed and had overlooked power. Among all MLB outfielders to play at least 600 games 1990–1994, only Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Rickey Henderson, and David Justice had a better OPS than Mack, and his .854 mark with the Twins ranks fourth in team history.

While most fans have come to think of a “utility man” as someone like Denny Hocking or Nick Punto who’s a capable backup at multiple spots, Tovar was more like an everyday player who just didn’t know where he was going to play on a given day. And on September 22, 1968, he played literally everywhere in the same game.

• 25. Zoilo Versalles
• 24. Gary Gaetti
• 23. Camilo Pascual
• 22. Dave Goltz
• 21. Rick Aguilera

In recent years it has become fashionable to suggest that sabermetric analysis wouldn’t agree with Versalles winning the MVP in 1965, but one of the hallmarks of good sabermetrics is being able to adjust raw numbers for historical context, and once you do that, Zoilo led the league in WAR and VORP. Versalles’ career fizzled shortly after the MVP campaign, but his place in Twins history is only amplified by a deeper look at the numbers.

More than any other player, Pascual’s standing on this list suffers because his pre-1961 work with the Senators isn’t included. He debuted at age 20 and bounced back from some early rough patches to post ERAs of 3.15, 2.64, and 3.03 in his final three seasons in Washington, finishing with 14.4 WAR for the Senators and 16.1 WAR with the Twins. If combined, he’d likely rank in the top 10. Little Potato was a helluva pitcher and his .607 winning percentage ranked first in Twins history until Santana came around.

Aguilera lost his spot atop the Twins’ all-time saves list in mid-2011, but it’s worth noting that his saves were longer and more difficult than Joe Nathan’s. Aguilera inherited four times as many runners as did Nathan and recorded 55 more outs in his 254 saves than Nathan did in his first 254.

• 20. Earl Battey
• 19. Corey Koskie
• 18. Joe Nathan
• 17. Roy Smalley
• 16. Justin Morneau

Battey ranked among the AL’s top five catchers in VORP during each of his six full seasons with the Twins, but as good as his bat was, it couldn’t compete with his amazing arm. Battey allowed just 226 steals in 6,700 innings for the Twins despite playing in the run-heavy 1960s, throwing out 40 percent of attempted basestealers. He also led the AL in pickoffs four times, including 15 in 1962. That season Battey allowed only 34 steals and picked off or threw out 42 runners.

Koskie turned himself into a quality fielder at third after initially being banished to the outfield by manager Tom Kelly, and his combination of power and patience at the plate added up to an adjusted OPS+ of 115 that ranks ninth in Twins history among hitters with at least 3,000 plate appearances. Gaetti generally gets the nod when picking the best third baseman in Twins history, but a deeper look at the numbers suggests Koskie is a deserving pick.

Smalley was acquired from the Rangers for Blyleven and then, like Bert, returned to the Twins for a second go-around late in his career. His spot on this list is largely due to the six-season run he had as their starting shortstop 1976–1981. During that time he logged 3,330 plate appearances with a 104 adjusted OPS that led all MLB shortstops, with only Garry Templeton (104), Dave Concepcion (101), and Robin Yount (100) also above 100.

• 15. Jim Perry
• 14. Frank Viola
• 13. Torii Hunter
• 12. Jim Kaat
• 11. Chuck Knoblauch

Advanced defensive metrics aren’t nearly as kind to Hunter as his nine Gold Glove awards, and by the time he left the Twins his range and instincts had certainly diminished, but at his peak no center fielder was more spectacular and fearless. And he could hit a little, too, ranking among the Twins’ top 10 in homers, doubles, runs, RBIs, and hits. If you’re convinced that Hunter’s glove was truly spectacular rather than merely very good, he’d move up a couple spots.

Knoblauch left the Twins on horrible terms and remains hated by most fans, but during his seven seasons in Minnesota he ranked second among all MLB second basemen in WAR, between Craig Biggio and Roberto Alomar. His 1996 season—in which Knoblauch hit .341 with a .448 OBP and .517 slugging percentage while scoring 140 runs—is the second-highest WAR total in team history behind Carew hitting .388 and winning the MVP in 1977. Mauer (.403), Carew (.393), Knoblauch (.391), and Killebrew (.383) are the only Twins hitters with an OBP above .380 over their career with the Twins.

• 10. Bob Allison
• 9. Brad Radke
• 8. Kent Hrbek
• 7. Johan Santana
• 6. Joe Mauer

Radke was never perceived as a star, but better support from the lineup, defense, and bullpen on those awful 1990s teams would have upped his win totals enough to potentially change that. WAR cares about his performance rather than his win-loss record—or a raw ERA that was inflated by one of the highest offensive eras ever—and Radke joins Blyleven and Santana as the only pitchers in Twins history to top 5.0 WAR in at least three seasons.

Santana is the only pitcher in Twins history with multiple Cy Young awards, winning the honor in 2004 and 2006, and he deserved a third in 2005. That year Santana led the league in strikeouts, opponents’ batting average, and adjusted ERA+, yet Bartolo Colon won the award despite throwing 9 fewer innings with an ERA that was 0.61 runs higher. Santana is the all-time Twins leader in winning percentage, adjusted ERA+, strikeouts per nine innings, and strikeout-to-walk ratio.

Believe it or not, that number six ranking is conservative for Mauer. Not only did he lead the AL in WAR among non-pitchers during his MVP season in 2009, he also had the league’s top WAR in 2008 and finished second in 2006. Among position players Mauer already has three of the top dozen single-season WAR totals in Twins history, along with three batting titles, three Gold Glove awards, and an MVP.

• 5. Bert Blyleven
• 4. Tony Oliva
• 3. Kirby Puckett
• 2. Rod Carew
• 1. Harmon Killebrew

Blyleven played nearly half of his Hall of Fame career elsewhere, but still rates as the best pitcher in Twins history. He threw 325 innings with a 2.52 ERA in 1973 for the team’s best single-season WAR among pitchers and also holds the fourth, ninth, and 15th spots on that list. He’s the only pitcher to crack 45 WAR for his Twins career and also leads in complete games, shutouts, and strikeouts.

When it comes to choosing the greatest player in Twins history it’s tough to go wrong. Do you pick a Gold Glove center fielder with a .318 batting average and unforgettable postseason heroics? Or how about a .334-hitting second baseman with seven batting titles and an MVP award? Or maybe an MVP-winning, five-time home run leader who ranked among the AL’s top 10 in OPS for 10 of his 12 seasons in Minnesota?

Puckett is the clear-cut number three choice based on WAR, VORP, Win Shares, and various other metrics, although certainly it would have been a different story had his career not been cut short coming off one of his best seasons at age 35. There’s no shame in finishing behind two of the greatest hitters in baseball history, of course, and it’s possible that advanced defensive metrics underrate Puckett’s work in center field somewhat compared to his collection of Gold Gloves and sterling reputation.

Ultimately the choice between Carew and Killebrew is a toss-up. Their skills couldn’t have been any more different, but they each contributed massive value on a consistent and sustained basis. Carew was a second baseman for most of his career in Minnesota before shifting to first and a line-drive machine with great speed and bat control who rarely struck out but with only limited power. Killebrew was one of the greatest sluggers of all time and drew walks in bunches to go along with his high strikeout totals as a corner infielder.

Carew had a .334 batting average for his Twins career, while Killebrew hit .260, yet in terms of overall production Killebrew had a .901 OPS compared to an .841 OPS for Carew. Carew’s speed cancels out some of that OPS difference and he also had the edge defensively, although the size of that gap draws mixed opinions. Killebrew played 300 more games and logged 1,000 more plate appearances for the Twins, which was a big factor in my giving him the ever-so-slight nod.

Killebrew is the only player in Twins history to hit 40 homers in a season … and he did it seven times (plus one more when the team was in Washington). He also drew 100 walks seven times, while Allison is the only other Twins hitter to do it even once. He hit 475 homers in a Twins uniform, while no one else has 300. He drew 1,321 walks and no one else has 850. And he did all that mashing in the low-scoring 1960s and 1970s, producing an adjusted OPS+ of 148 that stands atop the Twins’ leader board ahead of Carew (137), Mauer (133), Oliva (131), Allison (130), Hrbek (128), and Puckett (124). In their fifty year plus history the Twins have turned out more than their fair share of talent, in particular among position players. While only one Hall of Fame pitcher spent an important portion of his career with the team, in Puckett, Carew and Killebrew the Twins could boast three of the best players of their eras, each of whom spent all, or at least the bulk, of his career in Minnesota.

AARON GLEEMAN is a baseball writer at NBCSports.com, a senior editor at Rotoworld, and a lifelong Minnesotan who has written about the Twins on a daily basis at AaronGleeman.com since 2002.

Of course, fielding position and especially batting position can change daily for some, and players change numbers throughout their careers, so I set out to document the number of games for each player where their three numbers (uniform, batting order, and fielding position) were the same, in the history of baseball. I limited this study to the players in the starting lineup, at their starting fielding position. Pinch hitters, relief pitchers, defensive replacements, and fielding position changes were not considered. I looked at only regular season games for the ninety-year period of 1929–2018. The convention of players wearing numbers began in earnest in 1929, after a few brief experiments, and was completely phased in by the mid-1930s.

This is a very unlikely feat for pitchers. In fact, according to Retrosheet, only one starting pitcher batted leadoff in this period: Cesar Tovar, on September 22, 1968, the day he duplicated Bert Campaneris’s feat of playing all nine positions in a game. He wasn’t wearing number one, however, thus no pitcher (or anyone wearing number one or anyone batting leadoff) has ever been Cubic. Of course, we can also eliminate players wearing a number greater than nine, or less than one, and Designated Hitters.

I employed the Uniform Number Tracker database at the Baseball-Reference website. To identify games in which a player’s batting order position matched his fielding position, I used Retrosheet’s Game Log files, which provide starting lineups and initial fielding positions. Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference are wonderful resources and I am grateful that they make their information available for download free of charge. It would be beneficial, however, if there were a standard for player identification. For instance, Hank Aaron is identified as “aaroh101” by Retrosheet and “aaronha01” by Baseball-Reference (and by Sean Lahman’s Baseball Database, another wonderful free resource). Checking to ensure that the files from the two sources were merged correctly added a lot of time and created an opportunity for errors. Cases like the two players named Abraham Nunez, who played concurrently, required careful handling.

Methodology

My results are not perfectly correct, though they are close as possible under the constraints. Here is why I could not achieve perfection:

1. I relied on Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference exclusively as the source of the data for this study (and again, I am forever grateful to them). Any errors or incomplete information, however, in either source, could have created errors in my results.
2. I already mentioned that the two sources use different IDs for players, creating opportunities for errors.
3. Baseball-Reference provides the numbers a player wore by year and team. It does not provide daily detail. If a player wore more than one number for the same team in the same year, I had no way to tell at what point during the season that the change was made. For instance, in 1972, Bobby Grich started the year wearing number 16, which he had worn since he first reached the majors in 1970. At some point during the year, he switched to number 3, which he wore for the rest of his Oriole career. I considered these cases to be indeterminate and removed them, since I could not verify what uniform number such players wore on a particular day in those years.
4. No source that I am aware of tracks numbers worn by players to commemorate special occasions, such as Jackie Robinson Day, and I made no attempt to identify such days and the players who wore special numbers for a single game.
5. The final source of errors is me. I attempted to automate this to as great an extent as possible but could not do so entirely. Baseball-Reference’s database provided player, team, uniform number, and year, but the downloaded data were not in a usable tabular format. I managed to reformat them into a table, but without the team. I merged the two source files by player and year. Then, for each player who appeared to satisfy the cubic criteria, I looked up their Baseball-Reference page to check that the player actually wore the right number for the right team. For instance, in 1979, Oscar Gamble wore number 7 with the Rangers and number 17 with the Yankees. His only games that year in left field, batting seventh, came with the Yankees, however. Thus, I had to remove those games. I spent a great deal of time checking these cases, but I can’t be sure that errors weren’t made.

Confucius said, “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.” No, I don’t think he was talking about baseball.

Results by Position

There have been 10,180 instances of a cubic player-game. This works out to be about 113 times per year. Only 335 players have played a cubic game.

As I’m sure you have realized, the frequency of this is vastly different by number. Looking at it through the lens of fielding position, it is far more likely to be accomplished by an infielder than an outfielder; and far more likely for an outfielder than a catcher, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Cubic Player-Games by Position Category

Breaking it down further, we see in Table 2 that among infielders, the feat is far more likely to be accomplished by fielders at the corners. In the outfield, the frequency declines as we move from left to right. Cubic right fielders are relatively new, the first one appeared in 1978. On June 1, 1920, right fielder Sammy Vick batted ninth in the Yankee lineup (pitcher Babe Ruth batted fourth). It wasn’t until the Designated Hitter rule was established that a right fielder would bat ninth again.

Table 2. Cubic Player-Games by Position

Of those 63 right field player-games, 61 occurred in the American League. Perhaps as National League managers bat their pitchers eighth, we’ll see more cubic NL right fielders, joining Ryan McGuire and Brandon Nimmo.

When we look at the 335 cubic players by position, in Table 3, we see:

Table 3. Cubic Players by Position Category

Table 4 provides the position detail.

Table 4. Cubic Players by Position

Careful readers will note that outfielders account for only about 10% of cubic player-games (Table 2), yet about 43% of the cubic players have been outfielders (Table 4). Infielders, and particularly first and third basemen, exhibit the opposite relationship. It’s not unusual for a left fielder to bat seventh, for instance, in a particular game. But left fielders who bat seventh don’t tend to have long careers. We will see that cubic records are driven by a few prolific players, and they are infielders, generally first or third basemen.

Results Over Time

I had a hunch that this feat has become more unusual, for three reasons.

1. When uniform numbers were first assigned, they were often assigned based on the player’s position in the batting order, thus creating a systemic link between two of the three figures.
2. Single digit numbers are being retired. Since numbers are seldom un-retired, this factor will have an increasingly strong effect as time goes on. The Yankees have retired numbers one through nine, ensuring that no Yankee will ever play a cubic game again. The last Yankee to do so was Tony Fernandez in 1995.
3. The use of set lineups seems to have become extinct, making it more unlikely for an individual player to amass a high number of cubic games (and perhaps also leading to more cubic players).

To check if this is actually true, I grouped the ninety years in the study into nine ten-year periods: 1929–38, 1939–48, etc. As I expected, I found that the number of cubic player-games, and ratio of cubic player-games to total games played (which is a more meaningful measurement as it normalizes for expansion and a longer regular season schedule), had been steadily declining. However, the trend has reversed and the frequency has increased in the two most recent decades, as shown in Table 5. I believe that the decade 1989–98 is the outlier. We’ve reached a relatively steady state of about 3% to 4% of games played over that last fifty years. By chance, in that one ten-year period, it seldom happened. Prolific cubic players, like the immortals, don’t come around on a regular schedule.

Table 5. Cubic Player-Games by Decade

Table 6 provides the number of cubic players in each decade.

Table 6. Cubic Players by Decade

Table 7 is a matrix of the number of cubic player-games by decade and number. It’s interesting that most of the occurrences for first basemen and shortstops happened in the earlier years, while most of the occurrences for second basemen (due to one player who we will meet in the next paragraph) and outfielders happened in more recent years.

Table 7. Cubic Player-Games by Decade and Number

Player Records

Brandon Phillips is the all-time leader in career cubic games played. Table 8 provides the top ten.

Table 8. Top 10 Leaders in Career Cubic Games

Appendix A shows the top ten players in lifetime cubic games at each number. In Appendix B you will find the top ten players in cubic games in each decade.

Pinky Higgins established the career mark in 1937 and held the record for thirty-three years, until Brooks Robinson eclipsed him in 1970. Robinson held the record for forty-six years until Brandon Phillips passed him in 2016.

The record for most cubic games in a single season is held by Bill Terry. In 1934 he played 153 cubic games (every game that the Giants played that year). The top ten seasons are shown in Table 9.

Table 9. Top 10 Single Seasons

Table 10 provides the single season records for each number.

Table 10. Single Season Leaders for each Number

Brooks Robinson holds the record for most years leading all of baseball: nine. Brandon Phillips led in eight years. No one else led in more than four years.

Brooks Robinson also holds the record for most years with at least one cubic game: seventeen. Harmon Killebrew had eleven such years, and Brandon Phillips had ten. No one else had more than eight.

Franchise Records

Table 11 provides the total player-games for each franchise. I’ve grouped the oldest sixteen and the fourteen later expansion teams separately.

Table 11. Number of Cubic Player-Games for each Franchise

It wasn’t surprising to me that Yankees are last among the original franchises, given their proclivity for retiring single digit numbers. Incidentally, Babe Ruth was the first cubic Yankee, in 1931. It was his only cubic game.

For no systemic reason, 57% of the cubic player-games have been recorded by teams that were in the American League at the time. However, in the last four decades, 76% of the incidences have been by National League teams. As you’ve seen, one prolific cubic player can leave an imprint on the totals. As shown in Table 8, the top ten most prolific players account for 44% of all the cubic player-games.

Table 12 lists the leaders for each franchise. Notice that Brandon Phillips, the Reds second baseman for eleven years (2006–2016), and Brooks Robinson, the Orioles third baseman for more than two decades (1955–1977), are far ahead of everyone else. Pinky Higgins, next on the all-time list, amassed cubic games for the Athletics and Red Sox. Mickey Vernon, fourth on the list, tallied cubic games for the Indians and Senators.

Table 12. All-time Franchise Leaders

Anomalies and Hall of Famers

There are nine players who have played a cubic game at more than one position, as shown in Table 13.

Table 13. Players who have played a Cubic Game at more than One Position

There have been many players who played a cubic game for more than one team, but Hank Majeski is the only one who did it with four different clubs. Mark DeRosa and David DeJesus did it with three teams.

Many players have played a cubic game in each league.

Matt Duffy leads all active players with twenty-seven lifetime cubic games, again, through the 2018 season. Eduardo Escobar is a close second with twenty-five. So, Brandon Phillips’s career record is safe for a while.

Nineteen Hall of Famers have played at least one cubic game, as shown in Table 14. Interestingly, many of them played cubic games at a position other than the one for which they are most renowned. I expect that Adrian Beltre and Albert Pujols will be added to this list.

Table 14. Cubic Games by Hall of Famers

There have been many games where multiple players were cubic. For instance, the last one in the period occurred on April 9, 2018, the Rays versus the White Sox, both third baseman, Matt Duffy and Yolmer Sanchez, batted fifth and wore five. The record for most cubic players in a game is three, accomplished sixteen times. The most recent occurrence was a game on April 16, 1969, Baltimore at Boston. The three players were Brooks Robinson (5) for the Orioles, and George Scott (5) and Rico Petrocelli (6) for the Red Sox.

The record for most cubic players for one team in a game is also three. On July 20, 1949, in a game in which he singled, doubled, and was hit by a pitch in five plate appearances, the Indians all-star center fielder Larry Doby was thrown out trying to steal home with the bases loaded and no outs. Doby was fined and benched for the next five games by player-manager Lou Boudreau.1 In those five games, Cleveland’s lineup included Mickey Vernon batting third, Joe Gordon batting clean-up, and Lou Boudreau batting fifth. These are the only five games where as many as three teammates were cubic.

Coming Home

I suppose Babe Ruth was the greatest of all cubic players, but special mention should go to football star D. J. Dozier. He played just one season in the big leagues and appeared in 25 games, yet he tallied five cubic games in his 14 starts.

Fewer than 2% of all major league players have played even one cubic game. The 335 who have form a special fraternity. A few are enshrined in Cooperstown; others didn’t have much more than a cup of coffee. All are bound by this special trait, having played the game in perfect harmony.

RANDY KLIPSTEIN has been a SABR member for thirty-five years. A Yankee fan, he lives happily in Dobbs Ferry, New York, with his wife Lisa, a Red Sox fan. Randy hopes to see an alphabetical batting order. Contact Randy at rbk65@optonline.net.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the peer reviewers who made this a better article and welcomes requests for more information, such as a complete listing of cubic players.

Notes

1 “Doby Fined By Boudreau After Boner,” Evening Independent, July 21, 1949.

Appendix A: Top 10 players in lifetime cubic games played at each number

Appendix B: Top 10 players in lifetime cubic games played in each decade

On September 30, 1967, a Saturday afternoon, the Minnesota Twins played the first of a two-game season-ending series against the Red Sox at Boston’s Fenway Park. The Twins led the Red Sox and the Tigers (who had to play two doubleheaders) by a single game. A Twins victory would eliminate the Red Sox, while the Tigers had to win either three or (if the Twins beat the Red Sox in both games) all four of their games against the Angels.

On the pitching mound for the Twins would be Jim Kaat, who had already posted a 7–0 record with a 1.57 ERA in 63 September innings. If he could win on the 30th, he would become just the second pitcher since 1946 (joining Whitey Ford) to win eight starts in a single month. The Red Sox would counter with Jose Santiago, making just his 11th start of the season. The Twins had 20-game-winner Dean Chance available on Sunday, but they had to like their chances to finish off Boston on Saturday. Of course, the season had been nothing if not unpredictable.

Heading in to the 1967 season many observers had conceded the pennant to the powerful Baltimore Orioles. After romping through the AL in 1966, the O’s had summarily swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. The club had a few middle-aged stars—Frank Robinson (30), Brooks Robinson (29) and Luis Aparicio (32)—who had shown no signs of slowing down. The rest of the starting lineup was in their early 20s, and Steve Barber, at 28, was the old man of a deep and talented pitching staff.

The toughest challenge, it was reasoned, would come from the Twins, who had won the pennant in 1965, finished second to the Orioles in 1966, and had as much front-line talent as any team in the league. The Twins were led by two star hitters—third baseman Harmon Killebrew, who had already won four home run titles, and right-fielder Tony Oliva, who had two batting crowns—along with a deep and flexible pitching staff. 

The Twins regression in 1966—from 102 wins to 89—was completely due to a drop-off from their hitters. The team’s offense dropped by 111 runs, while their pitchers allowed 19 fewer runs, more than the league wide average drop of 11 runs per team. While Killebrew (39 home runs, 110 RBI) and Oliva (.307, 25 home runs) were among the best hitters in the league, no other regular was any better than league average for his position. Among many setbacks, shortstop Zoilo Versalles, the league’s MVP in 1965, dropped from 76 extra base hits to just 33 and provided very little offense from his leadoff spot. Meanwhile Jim Kaat won 25 games with a 2.75 ERA, and Mudcat Grant, Jim Perry, Dave Boswell, and Jim Merritt also provided solid starting pitching. 

Right after the 1966 season, Twins manager Sam Mele parted ways with pitching coach Johnny Sain, an innovative thinker who got results from his pitchers but generally did not get along with his bosses. Sain demanded complete control over the pitching staff, a power his managers were usually reluctant to surrender. Jim Kaat in particular loved Sain, and in response to his mentor’s dismissal wrote a critical open letter to the Minneapolis Tribune. The letter ran on page one, and said, among other things, “If I were ever in a position of general manager, I’d give Sain a ‘name-your-own-figure’ contract to handle my pitchers. (And, oh yes, I’d hire a manager that could take advantage of his talents.)” Not surprisingly, these comments did not sit well with Mele. Twins owner Calvin Griffith, who acted as his own general manager, spoke with Kaat and mostly seemed bewildered that Mele could not get along with his coaches.1 Clearly the pressure was on Mele, and new pitching coach Early Wynn, to succeed in 1967.

Though the Twins had more pitching than hitting, this fact was largely misunderstood at the time due to the friendly hitting environment of Metropolitan Stadium. As an illustration, at the 1966 winter meetings the Twins traded Don Mincher and Jimmie Hall (likely their third and fourth best hitters), along with relief pitcher Pete Cimino, to the Angels for pitcher Dean Chance. After a brilliant 1964 season, Chance remained a good pitcher (12–17, 3.08 ERA in 1966), though not noticeably better than the five good starters the Twins already had.

To replace Mincher, Mele moved Killebrew to first base full-time (he had been playing there against left-handed pitchers), and returned Rich Rollins to full-time duty at third. To replace Hall, the Twins were counting on the return of Bob Allison from a broken hand, and were planning on playing the versatile Cesar Tovar in center field. With Earl Battey at catcher, the Twins hoped they could hit enough to make up for what they lost in the Angels trade.

On the mound, the Twins were set with Kaat, Chance, Grant, Boswell, and Merritt as starters, Jim Perry as the swingman, and Ron Kline and Al Worthington as the capable short relievers. It was a fine pitching staff, one of the best in the league.

When the season opened, the Twins played poorly for the first month. On May 15 Minnesota stood tied for eighth with an 11–15 record, 7 1?2 games behind the first-place White Sox. They could take solace in being tied with the defending champion Orioles, but the White Sox and Tigers (just one and a half games out) were good teams who were threatening to leave other clubs behind. Although there were many culprits, the biggest disappointments were Battey, Oliva (.183 through May 20), Jim Kaat (1–6, with a 6.66 ERA through May), and Grant (who lost his first three starts and was battling a sore knee).

The one Twins player who started the season hitting well was Versalles, hitting over .350 in early May and briefly among the RBI leaders. Unfortunately, this success proved fleeting, and his average steadily plummeted for the next five months until it fell to .200 at the close of the season. Versalles stayed in the lineup all year and provided a steady drain on the offense with a dreadful 52 OPS+. American League MVP just two years earlier, the 27-year-old Versalles was finished as an effective major league player.

On the other side of the keystone, Griffith had been an early proponent for the promotion of Rod Carew. “Carew can do it all,” said Griffith in March. “He can run, throw, and hit. He could be the American League All-Star second baseman if he sets his mind to it.”2 Pretty bold words about a 21-year-old fresh from the Carolina League. But Carew would fully justify Griffith’s confidence, and would do so immediately. Carew’s five hits on May 8 brought his average up over .300 for the first time, and he spent most of the summer among the league leaders. On June 15 his average reached .335, and he trailed only Al Kaline and Frank Robinson in the American League. It was therefore no surprise when Carew fulfilled Griffith’s prediction and started that summer’s All-Star game as a rookie.

The person most affected by the emergence of Carew was Cesar Tovar, who many observers felt would otherwise be the best all-around second baseman in the league. Tovar had won the job from Bernie Allen during the 1966 season, but with Carew on board Tovar was moved to center field to start the season. In the event, Tovar’s versatility and the struggles or injuries of many of his teammates caused the club to move him around the diamond repeatedly throughout the next few seasons. By mid-May of 1967 he’d already seen action at six positions. This likely did not help Tovar’s development, but he was a fine player, generally hitting at the top of the order and scoring 98 runs in 1967 (the third highest total in the league). 

Adjusting to the team’s slow start, Mele benched Battey in favor of Jerry Zimmerman, but the production from the catcher position remained inadequate. With Tovar moving to the infield to deal with slumps and injuries, Mele eventually played Ted Uhlaender full-time in center. He moved Jim Merritt into the rotation, turning away from Mudcat Grant. As for Kaat and Oliva, Mele kept playing them in hopes they would turn things around.

Meanwhile, the Twins managed to slog their way to .500 in mid-May and stay near that level for a few weeks. After a tough loss on June 8, when the Indians scored four runs in the ninth to win, 7–5, and drop the Twins to 25–25, Griffith fired Mele and replaced him with Cal Ermer, who had been managing their Triple-A club in Denver. The winner of four pennants as a minor-league manager, the 43-year-old Ermer’s major-league resume included a single game, in 1947, and a year as a coach with the Orioles in 1962. Griffith had expected the team to be contending for the pennant, not floundering in sixth place. After splitting their first 16 games under Ermer, the team got hot in late June and was back in contention by the All-Star break.

AL standings, July 10, 1967

With the Orioles nine games back, it looked to have turned into a three-team race, as no one expected either the Angels or Red Sox to be able to hang with the front runners. 

One Minnesota player who revived at about the time of the Mele firing was Jim Kaat, who had publicly called out his manager the previous winter. Coincidence or not, Kaat had been 1–7 with a 6.00 ERA at the time of the switch, but won his first three starts and pitched as well as ever under Ermer. His victory on June 10 was the 100th of his career but came after nine winless starts. “There never has been any bad feeling of any kind between Sam and myself this year,” Kaat said. Either way, with Chance, Boswell, Merritt and Perry, the Twins had an excellent starting staff the rest of the season.

The biggest change for Harmon Killebrew in 1967 was that the club stopped moving him around the diamond to accommodate other players. With Mincher traded, Killebrew was a full-time first baseman for the first time in his career, and he responded with an excellent season, even by his lofty standards. It took him a few weeks to find his power stroke, but he hit 12 home runs in June on his way to 44, his sixth season over 40, and he coaxed a league leading 131 walks. Also important was the comeback of Bob Allison, after his lost season in 1966. Allison hit 24 home runs and provided valuable production hitting fifth behind Killebrew and Oliva. “This club definitely has the feeling we had in 1965,” said Killebrew.3

As quick as the Twins had gotten hot, they lost six in a row in mid-July, just as the Red Sox were winning 10 straight and getting into the thick of the race. At the end of July, the Twins were five games back and looking up at Chicago, Boston, and Detroit. 

Tony Oliva was a remarkably consistent ballplayer over his first eight major-league seasons, but he never started slower than he did in 1967. Although Oliva’s hitting had steadily improved after his poor start, his average was still just .256 at the end of July. Fortunately, no one did more during the pennant race than Oliva, as he hit .333 the last two months with 6 home runs and 18 doubles. 

Although Mele made changes to his lineup and rotation, Griffith did not make any moves to fix the holes on his club. The Red Sox picked up Jerry Adair, Gary Bell, and Elston Howard, all quality veterans who played a large role in the team’s pennant drive, and then signed Ken Harrelson as a reaction to Tony Conigliaro’s August eye injury. The White Sox acquired Don McMahon, Ken Boyer, and Rocky Colavito, and all were given important roles. The Tigers obtained veteran Eddie Mathews, and he played a key role down the stretch at both third and first base. With the closeness of the race and at least two poor hitters in the lineup every day (at shortstop and catcher), the Twins could have used another bat. 

In early August, the White Sox went through their first rough patch of the season, and relinquished first place after two months at the top, the longest any team would hold the lead that season. All of the contenders went through a bad stretch at one point during the season, and as August ended it was difficult to separate the first four teams. 

AL standings, August 31, 1967

The standings for every day the rest of the season were a slight variation of the above, with the teams dropping from first to third or rising from fourth to second regularly. No first place team would lead by more than a single game on any day hereafter. On September 6, there was a virtual four-way tie at the top.

The Twins held at least a share of the lead from September 2 through September 14, and looked to be the favorite when they went to Chicago to play three games. They lost all three, including a crushing defeat on the 16th when Dean Chance entered the ninth with a six-hitter but allowed three hits and his own error and ultimately lost the game 5–4. Just like that, the Twins were tied for third place. Never fear: a four-game sweep in Kansas City and they were back on top with eight games to go.

The Twins’ outstanding pitching continued in September, with their third straight month with an ERA under 3.00. For the season, the team finished at 3.14, second best in the league despite playing in a hitter’s park. The reason the Twins did not run away with the pennant was their imbalanced offense, a problem which only grew worse in the final month. In September, Killebrew, Oliva, and Allison hit .317 with 17 home runs. The rest of the team hit .216 with four round trippers. Still, a pennant was within reach.

It is interesting to note how Ermer used his pitchers in September. Beginning on September 9, the day after their final doubleheader, he used Kaat-Boswell-Chance-Merritt in rotation four straight times. After Kaat’s seventh consecutive September victory on the 26th gave the Twins a one-game lead with three to play, Ermer switched up and went with Chance on two days rest on Wednesday the 27th. Dave Boswell, who was passed over, had not pitched well in his previous start but had three complete game victories in September. Chance, who had won his 20th game on Sunday, could not get through the fourth on Wednesday, and the Twins dropped the game, 5–1. This was huge, but then again, weren’t they all?

In the latter stages of this great pennant race, the Red Sox had become the dominant story. Everyone loves an underdog, and while the other contenders had been good teams for several years the Red Sox had finished ninth in 1966 and had not really been in a pennant race since 1950. It was the Red Sox, and their star Carl Yastrzemski, who were featured on the cover of Life and Newsweek that September. Their loss of local favorite Tony Conigliaro to a brutal eye injury in August only heightened the drama of their story.

The Red Sox and Twins would have two days off to prepare for their two-game series, while the Tigers and Angels were rained out on both Thursday and Friday, necessitating consecutive doubleheaders over the weekend. The White Sox, who had led the race for more days than any other team, finally dropped out with their loss on Friday night. The remaining three teams all had a shot at winning the league outright.

AL standings, September 29, 1967

Though the final games would be played in Boston, the two days off allowed Ermer to pitch Kaat (with seven September wins) and Chance (20–13, 2.62 ERA, 18 complete games) on their regular three days of rest. Though just 28-years-old, Kaat had been a dependable workhorse for many years, averaging 17 wins since 1962, including 25 in 1966. For good measure, he had already won five Gold Gloves, and was one of the game’s top hitting pitchers (nine home runs in the past six seasons). He was the man the Twins wanted on the mound.

As it happened, Kaat got through the first two innings, and led 1–0 heading into the bottom of the third. While striking out opposing pitcher Jose Santiago to lead off the inning, Kaat felt a “pop” in his elbow and had to leave the game a few pitchers later, a game-changing break for the Red Sox. After throwing a heroic 66 innings over 30 September days, with a 1.51 ERA for the month, Kaat was done. A succession of normally excellent Twins pitchers—Perry, Ron Kline, and Merritt—failed to shut down the home team, and Killebrew’s 44th home run in the ninth was not enough as the Twins fell, 6–4.

Heading into Sunday, the Twins and Red Sox were tied, while the Tigers were a half game back with a doubleheader to play. If the Tigers swept, they would tie the winner of the game in Boston, necessitating a three-game playoff series beginning the next day. The Fenway matchup featured two 20-game winners—Dean Chance and Boston’s Jim Lonborg, both of whom had pitched Wednesday on two days rest and lost. The Twins seemed to have the pitching advantage—Chance had been 4–1 with a 1.58 ERA against the Red Sox, including a five-inning perfect game, while Lonborg had gone 0–3, 6.75 against the Twins. 

The Twins scratched out unearned runs in the first and third innings, and led 2–0 after five. Chance had scattered four hits and looked to be cruising. Leading off the sixth, Lonborg dropped a perfect bunt down the third base line to reach first. Singles by Jerry Adair, Dalton Jones, and Yastrzemski tied the score, and the go-ahead run scored on a ground ball to Versalles that the shortstop elected to throw home rather than to second base to try for the double play. 

Al Worthington came in and threw two wild pitches, Killebrew contributed an error, and suddenly it was 5–2, Boston. The Twins managed a run in the eighth, but lost the game and the pennant shortly thereafter. In Detroit, the Tigers dropped the second game of their twin bill, giving the Red Sox their miracle pennant.

Forty-five years later, this remains one of baseball greatest and most historic pennant races. Many books have been written about the season, most focused on the winning Red Sox. Looking back, it is obvious that none of the contenders was a great club. The Red Sox’ winning percentage was the lowest ever for an American League champion prior to divisional play. Each of the teams had notable flaws, and the three teams that fell short could point to a game or two that should have been won and could have made a difference. For the Twins, Kaat’s injury on September 30 is the most common lament.

On October 1 the Twins boarded an airplane which took them back to Minneapolis and 1,200 waiting fans. Cal Ermer promised the gathered faithful a pennant in 1968. “We’ve got to give Boston credit,” said Kaat, “but I think the best team and the best fans will be watching the Series on television.”4

MARK ARMOUR is the author of “Joe Cronin: A Life in Baseball” (Nebraska, 2010) and the director of SABR’s Baseball Biography Project. He writes baseball from Oregon, where he resides with Jane, Maya, and Drew.

Notes

1 Max Nichols, “Sain’s Exit Puts Mele on Win-or-Else’ Spot,” The Sporting News, October 22, 1966, 15.

2 Max Nichols, “Rookie Rod Carew Stakes Out Claim To Twin Keystone,” The Sporting News, March 25, 1967, 27.

3 Max Nichols, “Allison Regains Hot Touch With Stick— Harvest for Twins,” The Sporting News, August 5, 1967, 9.

4 “1,200 Greet Twins, Hear Ermer Promise 1968 Flag,” The Sporting News, October 14, 1967, 27.

This article reports on MLB “played-with” relationships for the time period 1930 through 2016. We define player A as having played-with player B if the two appeared in the same major league game for the same team. This doesn’t necessarily mean both players stood on the field at the same time. We also include cases where one player had already left the game when the other player entered.

This analysis uses event files as provided by Retrosheet.1 These contain information on starting players as well as in-game substitutions. For most years prior to 1930, only starting players are available, so the analysis only goes back to the 1930 season. By processing the event files, a graph was built containing 13,298 players as nodes (vertices) and 831,835 played-with relationships as edges. We are then able to extend the played-with relationships by including paths from player A to player B via intermediate players.

To quantify this, we define the distance between players A and B as follows:

• distance(A, B) = 0: A player has distance 0 only to himself (A=B)
• distance(A, B) = 1: Players A and B played-with each other as defined above
• distance(A, B) = 2: Player A didn’t play-with player B, but there exists (at least one) player C who played-with A and played-with B (in different games)
• And so on. For example, for distance(A, B) = 3: Player A didn’t play-with player B, and there is no single player C who played-with both players A and B (in different games), but there exists (at least one) pair of players C and D, who played-with each other and one of whom played-with player A, the other with player B. In other words, there is a chain of three played-with steps to get from player A to player B.

In the next step, distances for each pair of players were calculated using a standard algorithm from graph theory known as the Floyd-Warshall algorithm.2 The purpose of this algorithm is to find the shortest path for each pair of nodes (vertices) in a graph. The length of the shortest path then gives the distance measure for each pair of players as defined above. The running time of the algorithm is proportional to the third power of the number of nodes (number of players in our case). There are faster algorithms for finding the shortest path between a specific pair of players or for one specific player to all others, but for this analysis, we need the distance measure for every pair of players, so Floyd-Warshall is the appropriate algorithm.

After running the algorithm on the data set, a number of interesting results can be extracted from the graph and its associated distances.

MAXIMUM DISTANCE

As a first result, we report the distribution of player-player distances for the complete data set as Figure 1.

Figure 1: Histogram of the distance between any two players in the data set. The x-axis represents the distance while the y-axis shows the respective relative frequency. Distance is as defined in the main text.

(Click on any figure image to enlarge.)

The histogram shows a value of three as the most common distance (i.e. as mode of the distribution). The maximum distance is seven. It’s a remarkable result: For any pair of major league players in the time period 1930-2016, we are able to construct a played-with path of no more than seven. There is no pair of players that isn’t connected via a played-with path!

Typically, a maximum-length path includes as one endpoint a player with very few major league appearances, a Moonlight Graham-type career. For example, one such path is:

• Owen Kahn played-with Rabbit Maranville for the Boston Braves vs. the Brooklyn Dodgers on May 24, 1930.
• Rabbit Maranville played-with Danny MacFayden for the Boston Braves vs. the Cincinnati Reds on June 17, 1935 (second game of doubleheader).
• Danny MacFayden played-with Mickey Vernon for the Washington Nationals vs. the Philadelphia Athletics on May 11, 1941.
• Mickey Vernon played-with Harmon Killebrew for the Washington Nationals vs. the New York Yankees on September 20, 1955 (second game of doubleheader).
• Harmon Killebrew played-with Jamie Quirk for the Kansas City Royals at the Texas Rangers on September 26, 1975.
• Jamie Quirk played-with Steve Finley for the Baltimore Orioles at the Toronto Blue Jays on September 29, 1989.
• Steve Finley played-with Robb Quinlan for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim at the New York Mets on June 12, 2005.

So the path from Owen Kahn to Robb Quinlan includes six intermediate players, two of whom (Killebrew and Maranville) are in the Hall of Fame. Of course, typically there are several or even many other paths of the same length between two endpoints, in this case, Kahn and Quinlan. Also, it should be noted that Hall of Famers typically have long careers (22 and 23 years for Killebrew and Maranville, respectively), so they play with a lot of other players and therefore act as “hubs” in the network of played-with connections. This is especially the case if they switched teams repeatedly. Maranville, as a case in point, played for five different teams in his career—including the Boston Braves, whom he left after the 1920 season and returned to in 1929.

To further illustrate the difference between Hall of Famers and the bulk of other players, we show as Figure 2 a modified version of Figure 1. This time the data of Figure 1—all player pairs—are shown as black bars while pairs of players who are both in the Hall are shown as dark gray bars. Pairs in which at least one player is in the Hall are represented by light gray bars.

We clearly see that the distribution of pairs of players who were both Hall of Famers (“Both HoF”) is leaning to the left, toward lower distances, compared to the “All players” distribution. The weighted average distance between all players is 3.38, while for pairs of Hall of Famers it’s 2.67. Hall of Famers have smaller average distances than the mean of all players.

Figure 2: Distribution of the distance between any two players in the data set. The x-axis represents the distance while the y-axis shows the respective relative frequency. Distance is as defined in the main text. Black bars represent all player pairs, dark gray bars represent pairs where both players are in the Hall of Fame (inducted as “Players” as defined at Baseball-Reference.com) and light gray bars represent pairs where at least one player is in the Hall.

Returning to the length-7-path shown above, Robb Quinlan appeared in a fair number of major league games (458). Owen Kahn, on the other hand, appeared in only one. He entered the game on May 24, 1930, as a pinch-runner, scored his run, and never played in the major leagues again.

DIRECT CO-PLAYERS

We define a direct co-player for player A as any player who has a distance of one to player A, i.e. who played-withplayer A. First, we’ll have a look at the overall distribution of the number of co-players per player. We restrict ourselves to players who debuted between 1930 and 2006 (instead of 2016)  to eliminate noise from the partial-career data of the many players active in 2016 who debuted in the last decade.

Figure 3 shows a histogram of the number of co-players for each player.

We see a large peak for numbers of co-players below 100. The reason for that is the large number of players who only had a “cup of coffee” in the major leagues and therefore only had a relatively small number of co-players.

Figure 3: Histogram of the total number of co-players in a career for each player in the data set. The x-axis gives the number of direct co-players (i.e. players with distance = 1) while the y-axis shows the count of how often that number of co-players occurs in the data set.

The highest entry is at 671 co-players (equivalent to about 27 full 25-man rosters). This entry belongs to Rickey Henderson, an inner-circle Hall of Famer who played in the majors for 25 seasons for nine different teams—including four separate stints with one of them, the Oakland A’s. A few other players in the data set have in excess of 600 co-players: Matt Stairs, Terry Mulholland, Carlos Beltran, David Weathers, and LaTroy Hawkins. None of these players is active anymore (Beltran retired following the 2017 season), so none of them will match Rickey-being-Rickey.

At the low end of the distribution is a single player with only eight direct co-players in his career—eight being the minimum possible number. He is Whitey Ock, who played only one game. Owen Kahn, who was mentioned in the previous section for having a distance of seven from Robb Quinlan, has 11 direct co-players from his lone big-league game. A relatively modern player near the low end is Bob Davidson, who played in one game in 1989, with 12 co-players.

Because of the expansion of the major leagues starting in the 1960s and greater mobility of players in the wake of free agency, there is reason to expect a trend of an increasing number of co-players with time. To make that explicit, we look at the mean number of co-players as a function of the debut season of the player in question. See Figure 4.

Figure 4: Mean number of direct co-players for a player who debuted in a specific year. The x-axis shows the debut year while the y-axis gives the mean (average) value of direct co-players, i.e. players with distance equal to one, for each player with that debut year. A regression line is shown that is fitted to the data points. The arrow indicates the uncorrected data point for the 2007 debut year while the asterisk shows the corresponding corrected data point. See main text for more information.

We see a clear upward trend, though with some season-to-season fluctuations. This is to be expected as the number of teams has grown via expansion. In addition, a sharp increase is seen in the 1980s with free agency coming into full effect, and therefore much greater mobility of players across teams. Also, a pronounced decline is visible during World War II, when rosters were much more stable than usual. Whether a stabilization takes place in the 2000s is not yet clear because many players from that period haven’t finished their careers.

In order to get a handle on this, an analysis was done taking into account all Hall of Famers (inducted as “Players” as defined at Baseball-Reference.com) who debuted between 1930 and 1989 (so their complete careers are covered by the available data).3 It was then calculated how the number of their direct co-players evolved with the Hall of Famers’ respective age. Figure 5 shows some results for Hall of Famers debuting in four different decades.

Figure 5: Time evolution of the fraction of direct co-players as a function of the player’s age for Hall of Famers (elected as “Players”) who debuted in a given decade: 1930s (upper left panel), 1950s (upper right), 1970s (lower left) and 1980s (lower right). The x-axis shows the players’ age in years, the y-axis represents the fraction of direct co-players the player ended up with at the time of his retirement who had already directly played with him at that age.

Figure 5 shows evolutions that are close to linear for the age bracket between about 20 and 40 years, i.e. the main part of a player’s career (few players play beyond age 40). It’s therefore, as a first approximation, possible to extrapolate the number of direct co-players for a given player age for an active player. A caveat applies here because the analysis represented in figure 5 was restricted to Hall of Famers (because of technical limitations, Retrosheet does not provide player birth year data, so the analysis software had to be extended to automatically fetch birth years from Baseball-Reference.com) and, of course, not all current players will end up in the Hall.

Keeping this in mind, an exemplary correction was done for players who debuted in 2007. For them, 10 years of major league playing time was represented by the available data set. If they didn’t play in 2016, they were assumed to be retired (introducing a possible small error for players who weren’t retired but missed 2016 because of injury). If they were still active in 2016 and at most 40 years old, their number of direct-co players accumulated by then was corrected by an age-dependent factor that was taken from the lower right panel of figure 5. For example, if the player was 37 years old in 2016, his number of direct co-players was divided by 0.785, because that’s the fraction taken from the Hall of Famer analysis shown in figure 5.

Without this correction, the mean number of direct co-players for players debuting in 2007 was about 131 (see figure 4, data point indicated by arrow). With the correction, the number is about 178, which is closer to the regression line in figure 4 (see data point accompanied by an asterisk). This indicates, taking the rough correction into account, that the trend of an increasing number of co-players is still unbroken in recent years. Because the correction was done based on Hall of Famers’ careers, a certain overcorrection was to be expected because Hall of Famers typically have long careers.

HUBS AND OUTSIDERS

For every player, we took the mean value (average) of the distances to all other players in the data set. Let’s then define players with a large mean distance as outsidersand players with an especially small mean distance as hubs. So outsiders are players who are relatively isolated on the outskirts of the player connection graphs, while hubs are players who are central to the graph, with many other players “close by.”

The top 10 outsiders are:

These players all are situated at the early end of the data set, which automatically generates a relatively large distance to the (many) modern players. We’ve encountered Owen Kahn, who has the largest mean distance, already as one endpoint of a path with a distance of seven.

Now let’s look at the top 10 hubs:

This table shows players with debut years between 1964 and 1982, during a period when major league baseball was expanding and free agency was coming into being. Even if we look at the 50 smallest mean distances, the most recent debut year is 1983 (Otis Nixon). For more modern players, the distance to the 1930-era players gets too large, bringing up the mean. In a sense, Harold Baines (22 years of service, five teams, including three separate stints with two of them) is the “best-connected” player in the data set.

VISUALIZATION

Once a player-connection graph is built, it is possible to visualize it by using a tool like Gephi.4 Of course, visualizing a graph with more than 13,000 nodes and more than 800,000 edges is a hopeless task. To make this tractable we created graphs for two particular seasons, 1951 and 2004. See Figure 6.

Figure 6: Player connection graphs considering only games played in the 1951 (left panel) or 2004 (right panel) season. Players are shown as small dots while edges of the connection graph are shown as curve segments connecting the dots. The closer that players are clustered together, the smaller the distance between them. Teams are indicated, and their players are, of course, clustered together. A player switching teams midseason (player names in a paler font), like Larry Walker in the 2004 graph, will connect two team clusters.

To create the visualization, the graph was loaded into the Gephi tool. The tool uses a “force atlas” method to create node-to-node distances.5 Also, a modularity analysis was done and nodes were shadedaccordingly. We annotated the generated image with team names.

In a paler font we annotated a few individual player’s names. These are players who switched teams during the season and therefore connect the clusters of nodes (players) for different teams. These examples are, for the 1951 season:

• Barney McCosky was purchased by the Cincinnati Reds from the Philadelphia Athletics on May 4, 1951.
• Hank Edwards was selected off waivers by the Cincinnati Reds from the Brooklyn Dodgers on July 21, 1951.
• Tommy Brown was traded by the Brooklyn Dodgers to the Philadelphia Phillies on June 8, 1951.

Two (or more) teams get clustered close together by the tool if there are strong, i.e. multiple, connections between them. One example is the Dodgers and Cubs, who exchanged multiple players via trade during the 1951 season. Another example is the 1951 Browns, who were involved in multiple player exchanges with several teams and so are right in the middle of the clustering.

The graph for the 2004 season looks more complex than the 1951 graph because there were more major league teams and players in the later season.

In the 2004 graph, we clearly see three teams that are only connected via one player to the bulk of the other teams:

• St. Louis Cardinals (acquired Larry Walker from the Rockies)
• Detroit Tigers (traded Mike Difelice to the Cubs)
• Anaheim Angels (signed Raul Mondesi as a free agent after he was released by the Pirates)

In general, the 2004 player connection graph is more “crowded” than the 1951 graph because of the higher mobility of players, i.e. more player exchanges between teams. This leads to relatively small played-with distances between numerous pairs of teams. In the end, more than half of the teams from the 2004 season are clustered so close together that it’s barely possible to resolve them in the visualization.

So the visualization tool gives us a lot of insight into who played with whom and which teams were connected via in-season player exchanges.

As a further example, we show the connection graph for Hall of Fame players.

Figure 7: Player connection graph for Hall of Famers, i.e. players who were inducted as “Players” into the Hall of Fame.

We see some clustering, which stems from teams with multiple Hall of Famers. For example, the Los Angeles Dodgers of the 1960s at bottom center, with Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Duke Snider et al. Also, there is a timeline-like component to the graph, with modern players such as Greg Maddux, Jeff Bagwell, and Tim Raines on the right and old-timers on the left.

The graph, even restricted only to Hall of Famers, is still quite crowded. So as a final illustration, the graph for Hall of Fame pitchers only is presented as Figure 8.

Figure 8: Player connection graph for Hall of Fame pitchers. Please note that Gephi draws connecting lines only for a certain threshold of “closeness,” meaning that, for example, Ted Lyons and Red Faber were not really isolated from the rest of the Hall of Fame pitchers.

SUMMARY

We presented a novel approach to analyzing major league player connections as defined in the played-with sense. In this way, we were able to track historical developments that impacted the structure of on-field personnel, such as expansion and free agency. By using appropriate tools, we presented intuitive visualizations of player connections for selected subsets of the data.

It would be interesting to extend the analysis back in time if more detailed game data (including in-game substitutions) became available for seasons prior to 1930.

PETER UELKES has been a SABR member since 2001. He’s from Germany and became an overseas member of Red Sox Nation in 1990. After receiving a Ph.D in physics, he worked in the finance and telco industries. Living with his wife and their two sons in Germany, Peter spends his time on topics like MLB, soccer, cryptography, astronomy, mathematics, and education.

Notes

1 www.retrosheet.org. The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet.

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd–Warshall_algorithm

3 www.baseball-reference.com/awards/hof.shtml

4 Bastian M., Heymann S., Jacomy M. (2009). Gephi: An open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force-directed_graph_drawing

Metropolitan Stadium: Memorable Games at Minnesota’s Diamond on the Prairie
Edited by Stew Thornley
Associate editors Len Levin, Bill Nowlin, and Carl Riechers
Publication Date: March 28, 2022
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-970159-67-7, $9.99
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-970159-68-4, $34.95
8.5″ x 11″, 287 pages

Metropolitan Stadium was right on time. It wasn’t built too early, using a cantilever construction that eliminated the need for posts between decks. It wasn’t built too late, staying ahead of the much-maligned “cookie cutter” multi-purpose stadiums of the 1960s.

The Met followed the trend of other post-war stadiums, sprouting in open areas that were well-served by highways and surrounded by plenty of parking. It became apparent to Minneapolis business and civic leaders that a new stadium would be needed to join the other cities luring major-league baseball to their areas. By the time the Met opened in 1956, the first wave of shifting teams had passed, and Minnesota was snubbed by the New York Giants. The parent team of the minor-league Minneapolis Millers — the stadium’s first tenant — the Giants bypassed Minnesota by switching coasts completely. Eventually, expansion came to the majors and with it the relocation of the Washington Senators, rechristened the Twins.

Ultimately, Met Stadium served the Millers for five years and the Minnesota Twins for 21. In this book, 45 different authors chronicle the significant, memorable, and unusual games that took place in a ballpark that grew out of a cornfield in a southern suburb of Minneapolis. Outdoor baseball in Minnesota often meant postponements and delays because of rain, snow, and even a tornado. (A list of postponements of games for the Millers and Twins is one of the features in this book.) But delays were caused by other reasons, including a bomb threat and a drunk fan climbing the foul pole, and those games are also covered in these pages, as well as memorable performances on the field from players such as Jim Kaat, Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, and Bert Blyleven, as well as Cesar Tovar, Camilo Pascual, Tony Oliva, Bob Allison and many more.

• E-book: Click here to download the e-book version of Metropolitan Stadium for $9.99 from the SABR Store. Available in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB/Kindle formats.
• Paperback: Get the paperback edition of Metropolitan Stadium from the SABR Store ($34.95 includes shipping/tax; delivery via Kindle Direct Publishing can take up to 4-6 weeks.)

SABR Biography

 Harmon Killebrew takes a swing at Metropolitan Stadium (Courtesy of Howard Thornley)

Click here to read the SABR biography of Metropolitan Stadium at the Baseball Biography Project

Game Recaps

Contributors: Rich Arpi, Nathan Bierma, Thomas J. Brown Jr., Frederick “Rick” Bush, Ralph Caola, Alan Cohen, Richard Cuicchi, Greg Erion, T.S. Flynn, Brian Frank, Gordon J. Gattie, Steve Ginader, Gene Gomes, Bruce Harris, Tom Hawthorn, Paul Hofmann, Mike Huber, Sarah Johnson, Norm King, Dave Lande, Len Levin, Dan Levitt, Mike Lynch, Jim McKernon, Tom Merrick, Dave Mona, Chad Moody, Bill Nowlin, Joe O’Connell, Tim Otto, J.G. Preston, Carl Riechers, Joel Rippel, Bill Schneider, Peter Seidel, Andrew Sharp, Doug Skipper, Steve Smith, Mark S. Sternman, Bob Tholkes, Stew Thornley, Bob Webster, Steve West, Gregory H. Wolf, Bob Wood, Brian Wright, and Dana Yost.

Avid baseball fans now have at their disposal a new way of measuring a player’s combination of power and speed with the  Power/Speed Number or PSN. Bill James, in his 1983 Baseball Abstract, developed the PSN by using the following formula:

2(HR x SB)
HR+ SB

To demonstrate this formula, you will find that Dale Murphy, who had 36 home runs and 30 stolen bases in 1983, comes up with a Power/Speed Number of 32.7. This is good, but doesn’t rank quite near the top for a season’s effort. By this formula, it doesn’t mean that both totals – home runs and stolen bases – have to be equally high. In 1973 for example, Joe Morgan of the Reds had 26 homers and 67 stolen bases for a PSN of 37.5. Willie Mays in 1955 had 51 four-baggers and 24 thefts for a PSN of 32.6. Here are the season leaders (dominated by Bobby Bonds) who had PSNs of more than 30.

On a career level, Joe Morgan in 1983 ran his total home runs to 262 and thefts to 681. This gives him a career PSN of 378.4 and moves him past Henry Aaron (755-244 for 358.9) into third place behind the leader Willie Mays (660-338 for 447.1) and Bobby Bonds (332-461 for 386.0).

Murphy’s balanced season totals of 36 homers and 30 steals raise the question about the most unbalanced totals. In the Lightning Only category, Alan Wiggins moved near the top in 1983 with no four-baggers and 66 thefts. Only Maury Wills with 0 home runs and 94 steals in 1965 demonstrated a greater imbalance. In the Thunder Only department, Roger Mans did the ultimate in 1961 when he hit 61 roundtrippers and didn’t steal a base. The season leaders in the two categories follow:

On a career basis, using players with at least 200 home runs or stolen bases, Frank Taveras is the Lightning Only leader with two four-baggers and 300 steals. The Thunder Only is generated primarily by Dr. Strangeglove, Dick Stuart, who hit 228 homers and stole two bases.

It is always good to conclude on a balanced note. The final grouping in this brief analysis is the Double Negative category (some might call it dishonorable mention). These are players who had a season of play (more than 420 at bats) without hitting a home run or stealing a base.

Hal Lanier extended this seasonal nothingness into a ten-year career which included eight home runs and 11 stolen bases in 3,703 at bats. In a longer career, Dick Groat was 39 and 14 in 7,484 at bats.

Three tables accompany this article. The first lists the season leaders in IBB in the American and National Leagues, 1955-79, plus the total number of IBB each year. The second lists the top 50 batters based on IBB received. These batters are also ranked by the ratio of IBB to total plate appearances. The third table is a listing of the 50 pitchers who have faced the most batsmen since 1955, ranked according to the frequency with which they yielded IBB.

There have been 27,543 intentional bases on balls in the major leagues, 1955-1979. This works out to an average of one for every 116 plate appearances. There is quite a marked difference between the two leagues, however. In every season, the National League has had more IBB than the American League. This gap had widened markedly since the introduction of the Designated Hitter in the AL in 1973. On the average, one out of every 99 plate appearances in the NL is an IBB, while only 1 out of every 140 AL batsmen is purposely passed. Because of the fact that in four seasons (1961, 1977-79) the AL has operated with two more teams than the NL, the AL has had 50.7%, and the NL 49.3%, of all major league plate appearances over the last 25 seasons. In addition, the AL has had 52.1%, and the NL 47.9%, of major league bases on balls during this period. However, the AL has only had 42.0%, and the NL 58.0%, of all intentional walks. One out of every 12.3 AL BB is intentional, but one out of every 8.2 NL BB is, which shows quite a dramatic contrast between the leagues in the incidence of intentional walks.

Both Frank Robinson, while playing with Cincinnati, and Willie McCovey of San Francisco, have led the major leagues four times in IBB. Robinson’s span was consecutive, from 1961 to 1964, although he was tied with Bill Mazeroski, the only NL second baseman to appear among the league leaders, in 1962.

In the American League, three players, Ted Williams of Boston and Harmon Killebrew and Rod Carew of Minnesota each led the league for three seasons. Williams’ seasons were consecutive, 1955-57; it is likely that his string might have been longer if IBB had been recorded before 1955. Killebrew is the only third baseman to lead either league, in 1966, and tied with Reggie Jackson in 1969; he also led while playing first base in 1967. Carew led while playing first in 1977-78, and is the only second baseman to lead the AL, in 1975.

All of the 16 original franchises have had at least one player lead the league in IBB except Cleveland. The Angels, Pilots-Brewers, Mariners, and Blue Jays, all expansion teams, have never had a league leader. In the NL, the expansion Mets, Houston, and Montreal have never had a league leader. Dave Winfield of San Diego became the first player from a National League expansion team to lead the league, with 24 in 1979.

The highest season total of intentional walks is 45, by Willie McCovey in 1969. He had quite a margin over runner-up Hank Aaron, who had 19, and AL co-leaders Killebrew and Jackson, who had 20. McCovey also had 40 IBB in 1970. These are the only instances of any player receiving twoscore or more IBB in a season. Ted Williams’ 33 in 1957 is the highest AL season total. Williams had his 39th birthday during that season, in which he won his second last batting crown. No other player in either league has achieved a season total of 30 or more IBB.

McCovey had 5 seasons, including four in a row (1968-71, and 1973), of 20 or more IBB, a major league record. Three American Leaguers have been able to reach the 20 plateau twice: Harmon Killebrew turned the trick in consecutive seasons, 1969-70, as did Frank Howard, 1970-71; Reggie Jackson did it in 1969 and 1974. Jackson’s 20 in 1974 marks the highest total of IBB received while the DH was in effect.

Hank Aaron had 16 seasons during his long career in which he received 10 or more IBB, the best record of any major leaguer. Tony Oliva accomplished this nine times, for the AL record. Willie Stargell had a string of ten seasons with 10 or more IBB from 1965 to 1974, the major league mark, and Boog Powell had seven such seasons from 1968 to 1974, the best such streak in the AL.

No player has ever received more than one intentional pass in an inning. Aside from Ott’s l929game, no player has received more than three IBB in a nine-inning game in either major league. Roger Maris received four IBB in a night game on May 22, 1962, that went 12 innings. Maris only received 42 IBB in his entire career. Interestingly enough, he received none in 1961, although he did walk 94 times. This probably can be explained by the awesome Yankee lineup that season, particularly by the fact that switch hitter Mickey Mantle followed Mans in the batting order. It is also possible that, as Maris’s assault on the home run record began to attract publicity, no pitcher wanted to be criticized for deliberately depriving him of a chance to hit a homer.

McCovey and Williams hold the league records for left-handed batters for IBB received in a season. Frank Howard, with 29 in 1970, and Adolfo Phillips, with the same total in 1967, hold the AL and NL records for most IBB in a season by right-handed batters. Phillips’ total is rather remarkable. He was not a good hitter for average or power, and he played on a team with Billy Williams, Ernie Banks, and Ron Santo. He also managed 20 for the Cubs in 1968. Ted Simmons, with 25 in 1977, and Mickey Mantle, with 23 in 1957, have achieved the highest totals in the NL and AL respectively for switch hitters. The best totals achieved by rookies are 14 by Willie Montanez of the 1971 Phillies, and 13 for George Scott of the 1966 Red Sox.

Cesar Tovar had 726 plate appearances in 1967, including 46 walks, without receiving any IBB. His teammates included Killebrew, Carew, Oliva, and Bob Allison. Larry Bowa had 23 walks among his 720 plate appearances in 1974, but none was intentional. These are the league records for most plate appearances with no IBB in a season for the AL and NL respectively.

As might be expected from the distribution of IBB between the leagues, most of the leading batters in IBB are primarily identified with the National League. The first seven players on the list are also the first seven Black ball players to hit 400 home runs. Hank Aaron, the all-time home run leader, is also the IBB leader. It is not surprising that so many of the top players in IBB are also power hitters. The top AL players, Carl Yastrzemski, Harmon Killebrew, and Boog Powell, are also known for their power.

The best lifetime totals for right-handed batters have been achieved by Aaron, whose 293 include the National League record of 289, and Killebrew, who achieved his 160 in the AL. The best left-handed batters are McCovey, who achieved 257 of his 258 in the NL, and Yastrzemski, who holds the AL record of 169. Ted Simmons, who has the most IBB of any player with fewer than 200 homers, has also recorded more IBB than any other switch hitter. Mantle currently holds the AL record for switch hitters with 127. The career totals of Aaron, Banks, Mays, Kaline, Musial, Mantle, Mathews, Snider, Del Crandall, and Ted Williams do not include pre-1955 performances. Leo Cardenas, with 122 IBB and 118 HR, has the most IBB of any player with more IBB than HR. Rod Carew, with 106 IBB and 77 HR through 1979, should eventually exceed this level. Carew, of course, currently has the best lifetime batting percentage since Ted Williams.

On the right of the table is the frequency of plate appearances to intentional walks, and the ranks of the players listed. Only four American Leaguers rank in the top 20: Ted Williams, who has the best batting and slugging averages of the last 40 years, and the best on-base average of all-time; and Tony Oliva, Frank Howard, and Boog Powell among the second ten. Stan Musial was the most feared batter in the NL, based on how frequently he was purposely passed. Ted Simmons has the best rate among switch hitters, and Del Crandall, among right-handed batters. None of the top eight was a base stealing threat. Aaron has the highest frequency of any player with 200 or more SB. The top 25 players include eight catchers: Simmons, Crandall, Edwards, Haller, Roseboro, McCarver, Sanguillen, and Bench. Catchers are usually not frequent base stealing threats, and have less time to relax between innings if they should be left on base.

Since 1955, there have been ten IBB received by players who were primarily pitchers, although some were received when these men pinch hit. Only two of these occurred in the NL; Juan Pizarro (1958), and Don Newcombe (1959). In the AL, Gary Peters received three (1963, 1967, 1968), Mickey McDermott, two, both in 1957, and Tommy Byrne, (1956), Dick Donovan (1956), and Jim Kaat (1970), one each.

When it comes to not receiving IBB, the record is probably held by pitcher Bob Gibson, who had 1489 plate appearances with no IBB. Gibson was a good all-around athlete, and an aggressive baserunner (13 SB in 23 attempts), not a slow-footed hurler who could be counted on to clutter up the basepaths. Phil Niekro, who has 1391 plate appearances, including 134 in 1979, has never received an IBB, and may pass Gibson.

Among regulars, Glenn Beckert, who played with Adolfo Phillips, Billy Williams, Banks, and Santo, received only 3 IBB in his entire career, the same total as pitcher Peters. Beckert received an IBB in 1967, 1972, and 1973. He had 5572 plate appearances, a 1/1857 ratio. Johnny Temple, a second baseman, the same as Beckert, had 5 IBB in 5239 plate appearances since 1955 a 1/1048 ratio. Both men had lifetime batting averages over .280. By contrast, Dal Maxvill, a .217 hitter who kept his job with his glove, had 49 IBB. For players with very long careers we might expect American Leaguers with little power and lots of speed to have the fewest IBB. Bert Campaneris has only 15 IBB in 9149 plate appearances, a 1/610 ratio, and Luis Aparicio had 22 in 11229 p.a., a 1/5 10 ratio. Aparicio hit 83 homers; Campaneris has hit 76.

PITCHING LEADERS

A glance at the pitchers who have been most active since 1955 finds American League pitchers, as would be expected, giving up IBB far less frequently than their National counterparts. The first ten positions on the BFP/IBB table are held by pitchers who worked entirely or primarily in the AL. Jim Palmer, Luis Tiant, and Nolan Ryan have the best ratios among the righthanders, and Al Downing, Whitey Ford, and Vida Blue lead the lefties. Larry Dierker, Phil Niekro, and Bob Buhi have the best records of NL righties, and Sandy Koufax, Warren Spahn, and Ken Holtzman lead the NL lefties.

It is difficult to say how significant these figures are. Let us compare Jim Palmer and Tom Seaver, the best pitchers in their leagues during the 197 Os. Seaver has given up 2½ times as many IBB as Palmer, yet he faces only 4.00 batters each inning; Palmer faces 4.05. The extra IBB do not seem to have been very damaging.

Relievers tend to pile up high totals of IBB yielded, but they often are brought into situations not of their own making, so their totals of IBB allowed are not very meaningful. The table lists pitchers who did most of their work as starters.

CONCLUSIONS

Since 1955, there have been 29 all-star games, including two each in the years 1959-62. These games range the best talent of each major league against the other. Of those games, the NL has won 23, the AL, 5, and I ended in a tie. The NL has come out on top 82% of the time. Perhaps one reason that the IBB occurs more frequently in the NL is that the NL has had better hitters, players pitchers would be more inclined to avoid in possible intentional-walk situations. The DH, which takes the pitcher, the “automatic out,” out of the lineup, has resulted in a further reduction of IBB in the AL, but the junior circuit has never employed the IBB at the level of the National League.

RATIOS OF INTENTIONAL BASES ON BALLS TO BATSMEN FACING PITCHERS, 1955-79
(For the 50 Pitchers Recording the Most BFP Since 1955)

BATTERS RECEIVING THE MOST INTENTIONAL BASES ON BALLS, 1955-1979
*A if active in 1979

Batters Receiving Most Intentional Walks Each Season, 1955-79, and League Total Each Season

American League

Summary: Total IBB, American League, 1955-79, 11,575. AL accounted for 42% of major league total of 27,543. In the AL, 1/140 plate appearances is an IBB compared to 1/1 16 for the majors.

National League

Summary: Total IBB, National League, 1955-79, 15,968. NL accounted for 58% of major league total of 27,543. In the NL, 1/99 plate appearances is an IBB compared to 1/1 16 for the majors.

As practically every baseball fan knows, Aaron closed out with 755 roundtrippers. He hit 385 on the road, and 370 at home, both of which are new career records he has taken over from Babe Ruth.  The key to his over-all performance was consistency over a long period.  He hit 341 homers in his twenties (trailing only Jimmie Foxx, Eddie Mathews, and Mickey Mantle); he hit 372 in his thirties (trailing only Ruth and ahead of Mays); and he hit 42 in his forties (trailing only Stan Musial and Ted Williams). Note that except for Aaron, the cast changes in each decade. He hit 10 or more for 23 consecutive years, easily a record.

Aaron’s chief home run victim was Don Drysdale of the Dodgers who was reached for 17 roundtrippers. The number off one hurler is not a record as Ruth hit 18 of Rube Walberg, Mays 18 off Warren Spahn, and Foxx 18 each off Red Ruffing and Al Crowder.

Henry hit extra inning homers 13 times, but trailed several in that department. Mays hit 22 after the 9th inning, Ruth and Frank Robinson 16, Foxx and Mantle 14, and Ted Williams also hit 13.

With his 755 home runs, Aaron knocked in 1240 runs, a new record. This averages out to 1.64 runs per homer, compared to 1.69 for Ruth. As might be expected, Aaron hit the most home runs with the bases empty, 399, compared to 365 for Mays and 350 for Ruth.  When it came to belting with Braves and Brewers on base, Henry could not quite get out of the shadow cast by the Bambino. The Babe edged him in 2-run homers 249 to 243, and in 3-run blasts 99 to 97, and they were locked in fourth place with 16 grand slams. Ruth’s slugging mate Lou Gehrig was out in front with 23.

A review of the career records of the top 50 or so home run hitters reveals that roundtripper run production by Ruth and Aaron was pretty typical of their different eras. Great power hitters of the 1920s and 1930s usually hit more than 50% of their fourbaggers with one or more runners on base. Sluggers of the last 25 years usually hit less than 50% of their homers with bases occupied. The main reason for that disparity is because there were more base runners and fewer homers hit in the l920s and 1930s. The reverse has been true in the last generation.

There are exceptions in both eras and I suppose clutch hitting on an individual basis might be one of the factors. Batting third or fourth also would make a difference over a career in the number of runs batted in with homers. And then certain teams have a higher on-base average.

In regard to the exceptions, it might come as a surprise that Rogers Hornsby, a central figure in the heavy-hitting era, connected slightly less than 50% of the time with men on. Bob Johnson of the Athletics, a good RBI man on a weak team, was another. Gabby Hartnett and Dolph Camilli are two more from that era.

Since Ted Williams retired in 1960, there have been very few sluggers who could connect 50% of the time with anyone on base.  Yogi Berra and Vic Wertz, who hit their last homers in 1963, did it, and Wertz was particularly productive. The pitchers decade of the 1 960s was quite rough on run production. Two batters who got through that period in pretty good shape were Harmon Killebrew and Boog Powell, neither of whom hit much for average but connected with men on base. Killebrew was the most consistent of all sluggers in hitting 2-run homers. I don’t know if it was Tony Oliva or Rod Carew who was getting on base for the Twins, but Harmon hit 223 or 39% of his 573 homers with one man on.

Two other modern players who deserve mention as productive home run hitters are Johnny Bench and Tony Perez. Both connect slightly more than 50% of the time with men on. As is well known, the Reds have had a strong batting attack with players like Pete Rose and Joe Morgan getting on base quite frequently. Bench is producing 1.74 runs on homers, which is tops among active sluggers and is almost a throwback to the old days.

At the end of this article is a breakdown of the home runs hit by the top career leaders through the 1976 season. As it is not very meaningful to compare totals when you have a spread of 500 home runs-from 755 for Aaron to 256 for Bench-it would be best to summarize on a percentage basis the top and bottom figures. For example, it might be interesting to know that among the players considered, Ted Williams connected most frequently with men on-whether it was 1, 2, or 3.  Conversely, only 44.5% of his 521 homers came with the bases empty.  At the other end of the run-producing spectrum is Jimmy Wynn, who is connecting 58% of the time with no one on base. But Wynn is only the modern reflection of a “bases empty” syndrome which includes such names as Reggie Jackson, Norm Cash, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Orlando Cepeda, and Al Kaline.

Kaline hit the fewest grand slams, only 3 out of 399, while Gehrig was hitting 23 out of 493, or 5%. Rudy York was next with 12 out of 277 (4.3%). On 3-run homers, York and Jimmie Foxx topped the list with 18% while Norm Cash was down to 8%. On 2-run homers, Killebrew leads with 39%, followed by Del Ennis, Tony Perez, and Ted Williams. Orlando Cepeda hit only 27% of his homers with one man on.

On over-all run production with home runs, Vic Wertz averaged 1.80 RBIs per homer, York 1.78, and Gehrig 1.77. At the other end, Ted Kluszewski averaged 1.55, Wynn, Cash, and Kaline 1.56. Henry Aaron is in the mid-range with 1.64. Here is the full list.

A ballot was sent out to the SABR membership asking them to list the top players by positions since 1947 in three categories — North American Negro, Latin American, and North American White. Two pitchers would be selected with no reference to the way they threw, and the outfielders would be selected generally rather than by specific field. Then after the three separate teams are named, the voters should select a consolidated team of the best major league players since 1947. SABR members were asked not to vote for white stars who had played most of their games prior to 1947, even though they might have had some good seasons after that. This restriction was well observed, as there was only one vote cast for Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Mize, Bobby Doerr, and Lou Boudreau.

Fifty-nine members of the Society responded to the survey. Many showed initiative in going beyond the sample names offered on the player ballot. Many juggled their line-ups to get the strongest possible team. This could be done with players like Ernie Banks and Stan Musial, because they have played enough games at two or more positions to compete legitimately at those posts. Logic apparently dictated that with the outfield so strong, why not use Musial at first base?  After all, he played more than 1000 games there.

Most of the selections on the individual teams were reasonably easy to make. Such players as Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Juan Marichal, Bob Gibson, and Ted Williams were practically unanimous choices. Shortstop Luis Aparicio lost only one vote to Bert Campaneris on the Latin team, and Manny Sanguillen, even with his short period of play, still had no competition from fellow Latin catchers like Joe Azcue. One of the closest races was for the Latin 2B position, where two-time bat champ Rod Carew beat out one-time bat champ Bobby Avila 29 to 20.

As might be expected on the consolidated team, there were several close races. Pitchers Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, and Bob Gibson almost finished in a dead heat, with the two southpaws getting the edge. Catcher was a three-way race with Berra, Campanella, and Bench finishing in that order. Ted Williams was on the most consolidated ballots, 47 out of 59. Stan Musial was on 46, either at first or in the outfield; Jackie Robinson was on 43, and Willie Mays 41½. There were a few split votes by some who couldn’t make up their minds, and this resulted in the ½ figure.

Here are the players selected for the various teams, with the votes for the leaders and chief contenders listed.

North American Negro

• 1B: WILLIE McCOVEY 34, Ernie Banks 14, Dick Allen 6
• 2B: JACKIE ROBINSON 54, Jim Gilliam 4
• 3B: DICK ALLEN 33, Jim Gilliam 12, Maury Wills 10
• SS: ERNIE BANKS 38, Maury Wills 21
• OF: WILLIE MAYS 59
• OF: HANK AARON 57
• OF: FRANK ROBINSON 47½, Billy Williams 12
• C: ROY CAMPANELLA 53
• P: BOB GIBSON 57
• P: FERGIE JENKINS 48, Don Newcombe 10

Latin American

• 1B: ORLANDO CEPEDA 54, Vic Power 3
• 2B: ROD CAREW 29, Bobby Avila 20, Felix Millan 5
• 3B: TONY PEREZ 51, Aurelio Rodriguez 8
• SS: LUIS APARICIO 58
• OF: ROBERTO CLEMENTE 58, Rico Carty 4
• OF: TONY OLIVA 50, Felipe Alou 6
• OF: MINNIE MINOSO 46, Matty Alou 12
• C: MANNY SANGUILLEN 59
• P: JUAN MARICHAL 57, Camilo Pascual 5
• P: MIKE CUELLAR 43, Luis Tiant 11

North American White

• 1B: STAN MUSIAL 33, Gil Hodges 14½, Harmon Killebrew 9½
• 2B: NELLIE FOX 34, Bill Mazeroski 9½, Red Schoendienst 7
• 3B: BROOKS ROBINSON 37, Eddie Mathews 17
• SS: PEE WEE REESE 33, Phil Rizzuto 14, Dick Groat 4
• OF: TED WILLIAMS 57
• OF: MICKEY MANTLE 48, Duke Snider 11
• OF: AL KALINE 30½, Stan Musial 22
• C: YOGI BERRA 42½, Johnny Bench 15½
• P: WARREN SPAHN 43, Early Wynn 11½
• P: SANDY KOUFAX 40½, Whitey Ford 13, Robin Roberts 6½

Consolidated Team

• 1B: STAN MUSIAL 34, Gil Hodges 10, Harmon Killebrew 6
• 2B: JACKIE ROBINSON 43, Nellie Fox 8, Red Schoendienst 3
• 3B: BROOKS ROBINSON 36, Eddie Mathews 15
• SS: LUIS APARICIO 29, Ernie Banks 19, Pee Wee Reese 5
• OF: TED WILLIAMS 47, Mickey Mantle 11½
• OF: WILLIE MAYS 41½, Stan Musial 12
• OF: HANK AARON 37, Roberto Clemente 21
• C: YOGI BERRA 26½, Roy Campanella 17, Johnny Bench 15
• P: WARREN SPAHN 36, Bob Gibson 29, Whitey Ford 4½
• P: SANDY KOUFAX 32½, Robin Roberts 5, Early Wynn 4

Note: In addition to the above totals for the individual ream members, there was a scattering of votes for other players. Receiving at least two votes were Bobby Richardson 6, Carl Yastrzemski 3½,  Alvin Dark 3, Pete Rose 2½, and Bill White, Tony Taylor, Cookie Rojas, Cesar Tovar, Ralph Kiner, and Ron Santo 2 each.