By Pepper28
Editor’s note – This article originally appeared on AstrosConnection.com on July 6, 2001.
It’s All-Star time again. You know what that means: three days with no meaningful baseball, two of which are the only days in the year on which there are no professional sporting events in America; hype increasing at an exponential rate as the quality of the product decreases at an even faster speed; and, of course, idiot fans electing the wrong players.
I won’t get into the Mariners debate for two important reasons: 1) Rob Neyer, a professional writer, already did it better than I ever could; and 2) I don’t give a rat’s…er…tail about the junior circuit. No, I think the fans’ major lapse this year was closer to home. You all know about whom I’m talking – Lance Berkman. Or, as I usually say, “Nanny-nanny-nanny-nanny-BERK-MAN!” The Berserkman came in fourteenth in All-Star National League outfielder balloting, with about a tenth of Barry Bonds’s votes. I won’t say I didn’t expect that, since the average MLB fan’s intelligence is on par with Bud Adams’s; but I will say that I think it’s a shame, and Berkman deserved better.
So I decided to prove it.
These men are the top 15 NL OF vote-getters:
1. Barry Bonds, SF
2. Sammy Sosa, CHC
3. Luis Gonzalez, ARI
4. Larry Walker, COL
5. Ken Griffey, Jr., CIN
6. Jim Edmonds, STL
7. Vladimir Guerrero, MTL
8. J.D. Drew, STL
9. AndrUw Jones, ATL
10. Tony Gwynn, SD
11. Moises Alou, HOU
12. Steve Finley, ARI
13. Gary Sheffield, LA
14. Lance Berkman, HOU
15. Jeromy Burnitz, MIL
Ordinarily, when I judge between players, I take into account offense, defense, baserunning, leadership ability, and character. For outfielders, I generally also consider speed and range, especially when they play in a park like EFUS. The average All-Star voter, however, takes into account only offense and knows nothing of adjusting for park effects. Certainly, I could use my own standards to judge between these players, but since I’m biased as all getout, I decided to use offensive statistics only. This method has the additional fillip of proving All-Star voters wrong according to their own standards. (I did, however, find it interesting that Bonds is fourteenth among these fifteen in fielding percentage. Berkman is eighth.) The statistics I used were as of morning on July 3, 2001.
The primary statistic I used was OPS. While I admit to the flaws in OPS, I still consider it the best measure of a player’s offensive ability, and I don’t think batting average measures much on its own. I was tempted to use batting average by itself anyway so Berkman would get some additional points, but I changed my mind in the interests of fairness.
My other statistic consolidated batting average, runs per at-bat, RBI per at-bat, and the walk-to-strikeout ratio. Basically, I was trying to measure the productivity of the players. There are a lot of factors contributing to these numbers, such as the player’s place in the batting order, the park in which he plays, the productivity of the teammates before and behind him, and so forth, so my results are by no means perfect. That’s also why I consolidated them–I wanted to minimize their impact. I did not include stolen bases because of their waning importance to average fans. My method was to find the given ratio for each player, then assign a point value based on his rank. For instance, Steve Finley ranked fifteenth in RBI per at-bat. (Steve Finley ranked fifteenth in everything–by a lot. Why did people vote for him at all?) I gave him a score of 1, with Barry Bonds, who ranked first, getting a score of 15. The man who ranked second scored 14 points, and so forth. When I had assigned point values for each statistic, I totaled the points for each player and arrived at an overall ranking for the consolidated statistics.
Next, I drew a graph plotting the rank in All-Star voting on the x-axis versus the ranks in the two offensive statistics on the y-axis. The results were interesting, with the data points nowhere near the one-to-one ratio that one would expect were the brains of All-Star voters not peanut-sized. I used the graph to rank the players from best to worst, offense-wise. The results I got were pretty reasonable, as you can see below. (Remember, these results are based purely on this year’s numbers. Also, I’m sure there are players who deserve to be on this list but aren’t because of voting incompetence.) Note the discrepancies between the actual ranks and my proposed ranks. The number by the name is actual rank-proposed rank; therefore, a positive difference means the player didn’t get as many votes as he should have, and a negative difference means the player got more votes than he deserved.
1. Bonds: 0
2. Gonzo: 1
3. Berserkman: 11
4. Walker: 0
5. Sosa: -3
6. Mo Alou: 5
7. Drew: 1
8. AndrUw: 1
9. Sheffield: 5
10. Vlad: -3
11. Burnitz: 4
12. Gwynn: -2
13. Edmonds: -7
14. The Red Messiah: -9
15. Finley: -3
According to the standards that All-Star voters use, Lance should have been third. Instead, he was fourteenth. Eleven places away is more than anyone else, and by far the highest positive discrepancy. Griffey has, in terms of absolute value, the greatest negative discrepancy, of course. We all know why.
Here’s what I think is the most impressive. Lance has less major league service than anyone else on that list. Drew is the closest, having broken in a year earlier. Most of the others broke in in ’89 or ’90, except for Bonds (’86) and Gwynn (’82, which is also the year I was born. Scared yet?). Two others debuted in ’93, and two more in ’96. Lance, who broke in on July 16, 1999, has the least major league service by far. I think it’s pretty darn impressive for someone as relatively inexperienced as Lance to be in the top ten in every offensive category (except stolen bases and strikeouts) in the National League. Yes, the entire National League, not just these fifteen players.
The question becomes, why didn’t the voters pick Lance? As Occam would have it, “The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.” They’re a bunch of idiots. There you have it.
Seriously, playing in Houston is not exactly the road to fame. That, and the fame of players such as Griffey, Bonds, and Sosa, is why Berkman did not make it with the fans. Another reason is that although the All-Star Game is supposed to honor the best performers of the given season, many fans vote based on the performance of last season. That’s probably why Finley is on that list. Personally, I think the players and managers should get to vote, and the fans not at all. It would still be a popularity contest, but the players who deserved the nominations would be more likely to get them. Unfortunately, few fans would settle for such a system. I do think MLB should definitely eliminate online voting, though. I could vote 200 times if I so wished. That’s not right.
I was surprised that Valentine picked Berkman as a reserve, but glad he got, in some measure, the recognition he deserves. Why don’t you all help me give him some more recognition? Join me in singing, “Nanny-nanny-nanny-nanny-BERK-MAN!” whenever he does something really cool. And don’t pretend you don’t love Adam West.