Bush Party Tonight!

Haven't posted since May 24--very productive summer...Sportsnet has been running a seven-part series on the history of the Jays the past couple of months, The Blue Jays Way. I'll just cut-and-paste some notes from Facebook here, where I've been following along; will update after next week's episode, the finale.

-------------------

Two episodes into The Blue Jays Way, and it’s been more or less as good as I’d hoped it would be. Like Ken Burns’ Baseball, which aired during the ‘94 strike, it’s a welcome respite from the here and now if you’re a Jays fan.

Almost every key player is getting duly commemorated: episode two is centred around Steib and Bell, lots of interview time with Moseby and Barfield and Whitt, general agreement that Henke’s arrival in ‘85 was crucial to finally winning in ‘92, and--wasn’t sure how they’d handle this--acknowledgement that Alomar remains their greatest player ever. There has been, I’d say, one guy they’ve shortchanged: Jimmy Key.

I understand the disproportionate amount of attention given to Stieb: he was the best pitcher in baseball from ‘82 to ‘84, and he could easily have won all three A.L. Cy Youngs during that window. (The ‘82 vote was especially egregious.) He’s a great interview subject, and the subplot of his three 26-out no-hitters before finally getting one is irresistible. But here’s how he compares to Key from ‘85 (when Key becomes a regular part of the rotation) to ‘92 (when both move on to new teams):

DS - 93-65, 3.48 ERA, 1.265 WHIP, 1.54 K/BB, 3.97 FIP, 23.5 bWAR

JK - 112-76, 3.38 ERA, 1.179 WHIP, 2.42 K/BB, 3.66 FIP, 30.6 bWAR

Key across the board. He was also--and surely the makers of The Blue Jays Way know this--the subject of my greatest made-up lyric ever, back in I’m not sure which issue of Radio On:

Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, can’t you see?

Sometimes your change-ups hypnotize me

And I just love your Cy Young ways

Guess that’s why you’re out there every fifth day

I don’t know--I may have drifted off for a minute and missed him, but I don’t think he’s been interviewed yet, and if he’s been mentioned, it couldn’t have been more than once or twice.

-------------------

Part 3, covering '92, was quite good. I thought initially they were going to commit the unforgivable faux pas of overlooking the acquisition of Cone at the deadline--to me, on par with getting Winfield, and more important than signing Morris--but they saved that for his start in the World Series. A lot of mythology surrounding Morris--glad Stieb deflated his 20-win season by pointing out how much run support he got. (Stieb obviously not a fan of Morris to this day.) Barely recognized Ed Sprague. Two guys I'd forgotten about: Candy Maldonado and Derek Bell. (Barry Bruner pointed out to me on ILX that the Key-Steib comparison over eight seasons is unfair to Steib, who was out for most of '91 and '92 with back trouble; from '85 to '90 they were as close to dead-even as could be.)

-------------------

Part 4 covers 1993--good year, as you may have heard. Three stories I think the episode shortchanges, or misses altogether:

1) There’s mention of the Jays’ unprecedented 1-2-3 finish in the batting race--Olerud, Molitor, Alomar--but nothing on Olerud’s flirtation with .400, which was easily the biggest Jays story midway through the season. He was still at .400 after the team’s 107th game on August 2. (Olerud finished third in MVP voting, although he was ahead of the winner Frank Thomas in WAR, 7.8 to 6.2. Griffey had both beat at 8.8.)

2) No mention that Ward, the team’s new closer, had arguably the greatest year ever for a Jays closer: 45 saves (still a team record), 2.13 ERA.

3) After being one of the main stories of E3, Jack Morris is barely mentioned (if at all). He was still with the team--had a miserable year and didn’t pitch in the playoffs.

Things I’d forgotten: 1) Dick Schofield was the starting SS before he got hurt and Tony Fernandez was reacquired; 2) Toronto’s Rob Butler was part of the team, including two AB in the WS; 3) Lenny Dykstra’s epic G4 (Jays won 15-14): Dykstra had a double, two HR, a walk, a stolen base, and scored and knocked in four.

Two of the best interview clips: 1) Todd Stottlemyre, still haunted by something else I’d forgotten, his run-in with the Philadelphia mayor; 2) Devon White (probably the best interview subject across the four episodes) talking about Rickey Henderson, how he’d question Henderson about when he planned to run: “Rickey just run.”

-------------------

Episodes 5 and 6: Almost finished…the highlights of E5 (call it “The Wilderness Years”; forget what the actual title is) were Delgado, as effusive an interviewee as Devon White, and--a surprise--Vernon Wells, who’s ready for a career in standup. His incredulous deadpan in describing the details of the Shea Hillenbrand (I remember that one) and Ted Lilly (no recollection at all) blowups was pitch perfect. Outside of Delgado, especially the season where he was chasing a Triple Crown, I paid very little attention to the Jays during these years (1995-2014). There was always stuff to follow elsewhere--usually some otherworldly (i.e., PED-fueled) hitting performance--but the Jays were just overmatched by the Yankees and Red Sox (and later, by the Rays)…E6, of course, was devoted to 2015/2016, the details of which everyone knows by heart. Russell Martin was probably the best interview there, and nice to see Marco Estrada, Aaron Sanchez, and Ryan Goins, all integral to those teams (surprisingly, no Marcus Stroman; I’m sure they went to great lengths to track down Munenori Kawasaki, but evidently still living on some other planet). The captioning was often a source of amusement--at one point, Rougned Odor was identified as Al Gore.

That was then: talking about the 2015 lineup, Estrada said he didn't much care when he gave up a couple of runs, he knew the team would respond with five or six of their own. It's just so exhausting to watch this year's model try to eke out the three runs that might conceivably put them in a position to win.

-------------------

Part 7: I learned I’m still not ready to enjoy anything from last year’s playoff run. Springer’s HR, Bo’s, Clement and Barger and Yesavage--when you know where it’s all headed, that same queasiness persists. All the interview clips with Vlad are especially dispiriting against the backdrop of 2026. I did get one notion I’ve been carrying around for the past 10 months corrected. I’ve been saying that the Jays were one out from winning the WS when Hoffman gave up the Rojas HR. Wrong--Rojas was supposed to be the gimme that would get him to Ohtani, and then they would have been one out from winning.

I suppose that one tangential benefit of 2025 is that the playoff debacles of 2023 (Gausman) and 2024 (Berrios), which once loomed large in Jays’ lore, felt like blips revisiting them this time. Those teams weren’t going anywhere. So that’s all it will take to put 2025 in the past too: winning a World Series.

Just Grab Your Stuff and Leave

Never occurred to me to do this until I was driving home from my sister’s this morning and my mind was lost in wandering driving thoughts: a list of my favourite punk albums, prompted by Rolling Stone’s list of their Top 100 punk albums last week. Forty years ago, I would have been all over that the same day—not really; there was no internet—and with great certitude I would have complained about all the albums they left out or ranked too low. Today, not just their list but also my own generate about the same level of detachment. I’m not saying that’s a good thing.

I do think it’s still very possible to make a great punk album, something I wouldn’t say of doo-wop or garage or rockabilly, three other genres I found myself immersed in at various points in my life. As Greil Marcus has written more than once, people who make great punk albums long after the fact usually sound like they’re inventing punk rock for the first time, or at least like they believe they’re inventing punk rock—and chances are they won’t sound anything like the Ramones or the Damned or even the Raincoats. Whereas with contemporary attempts at doo-wop or garage or rockabilly, the goal always seems to be to sound as true to the form as possible. If someone pulls it off really well, they'll end up with a replica almost (but not quite) as good as the Flamingos or the Seeds or Johnny Burnette; if they don’t, they're closer to Richie and Potsie and Ralph Malph’s Happy Days band.

I think these are all punk rock, or at least they started out as somebody’s idea of what that means—that’s something else I don’t have enough interest to argue about anymore. (Beat Happening are probably the most specious pick here.) I’ve arranged them alphabetically because I haven’t done any relistening, a necessity for ranking them, and I’ve included 21, because that’s when I ran out of ideas. If I could make up my own Sonic Youth compilation of a dozen or so songs, that’d be here for sure. But I just don’t like any of their regular-issue albums quite enough; like Jethro Tull and the Archies, they’re a greatest-hits-type band.

Angry Samoans: Back from Samoa (1982; #89 on Rolling Stone’s list)
Beat Happening: Jamboree (1988)
Flipper: Album Generic (1982; #60 on Rolling Stone’s list)
Hole: Live Through This (1994)
Husker Du: Flip Your Wig (1985)
Jesus & Mary Chain: Psychocandy (1985)
Kleenex/LiLiPUT (1983; #58 on Rolling Stone’s list)
Knight School: The Poor and Needy Need to Party (2009)
Meat Puppets: II (1984; #73 on Rolling Stone’s list)
New York Dolls (1973; #15 on Rolling Stone’s list)
The Raincoats (1979; #25 on Rolling Stone’s list)
Ramones: Leave Home (1977)
Replacements: Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? (2006)
Scrawl: Smallmouth (1990)
Shop Assistants (1986)
Stooges: Funhouse (1970; #8 on Rolling Stone’s list)
The Way of the Vaselines: A Complete History (1992)
Vivian Girls (2008)
Wire: Pink Flag (1977; #6 on Rolling Stone’s list)
X: Los Angeles (1980; #14 on Rolling Stone’s list)
X-Ray Spex: Germfree Adolescents (1978; #2 on Rolling Stone’s list)

But Not Everyone Sees It

One of the bigger stories of the 2026 season thus far was what Mike Trout did during a four-game Angels-Yankees series earlier this month: 19 PA, 8 R, 9 RBI, 6 H, 5 HR, 3 BB, a .375/.474/1.313 slash line. It was only the fourth time a player had hit five HR against the Yankees in one series.

Because of Trout’s nightmarish run of injuries the past few seasons, he’s earned a lot of goodwill from fans, a collective desire to almost will him back into the player he was 10 years ago; “Trout is back!” has become baseball’s equivalent of rock critics reflexively declaring “Dylan’s back!” through the ‘70s. He’s already more than secured his place in history, but still, like Ken Griffey Jr., what-could-have-been looks like it will be an unfortunately central part of his legacy.

In response to someone posting about Trout’s Yankees series on the I Love Baseball message board, I responded “Would still like to see him get his average up, but he's been great otherwise,” then quickly acknowledged that I was dating myself by caring about batting average. It’s not that I don’t understand BA’s limitations; that’s pretty much the first thing you internalize from the moment you start reading Bill James, so I’ve been aware of that for 40 years now. As caught up as I was in Luis Arráez’s half-season flirtation with .400 three years ago, I also realize that when Arráez supplements his always impressive batting average with 50 extra-base hits and 40 or 50 walks, he’s a really valuable hitter to have around; when the extra-base hits and/or walks disappear, like they mostly have ever since, he’s Bill Buckner. And that’s why he’s on his fourth team in four seasons.

Batting average is important as a measure of how many outs you’re making--another sabermetric principle you internalize early is that outs are the most precious commodity* an offense has--but we know now, beyond question, that a .250 hitter with walks and HR is more valuable than an empty .300 batting average (again going back to the foundation of sabermetrics, call it the Gene Tenace Rule, or the Darrell Evans Rule). So it’s not value, or at least not only value, that makes me want Trout to get his batting average back above .300; it’s a matter of aesthetics.

I’m one of those baseball fans who, for as long as I’ve been watching, approaches the game like a mathematician: I find beauty in numbers. I’ve had a friend tell me that statistics are antithetical to baseball’s beauty--which has to do with old ballparks, the rituals of the game, etc.--but to me, the two are inseparable. Put that down to the first Zander Hollander guide I bought in 1970, which had entries for each player both in words and numbers--I found the career statistical boxes much more interesting than the ellipsis-heavy bios--and especially to the first “Big Mac” (the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia) my parents gave me as a gift a few years later, 1974’s second edition. Along with Ball Four and the 1983 Baseball Abstract, no baseball book ever had a greater impact on me.

There were three things I found especially beautiful as I would comb over the lifetime statistical records of players I’d never heard of going back almost 100 years:

1) The players who never had even a bad partial season, something very common early or late in a player’s career. By “bad,” I probably meant a season where a player hit under .250, regardless of how many AB. If a guy was a September call-up and began his career going 1-12 (.083), he automatically became less interesting to me; ditto if someone hit .221 the season before he retired. Those career boxes just weren’t as aesthetically pleasing to the eye--they were like near-perfect movies with one clunky scene, or a favourite song with a stray lyric that made you wince. Two beautiful career boxes: Ted Williams (one season at .255, the other 18 all above .300--usually well above) and, a more recent example, Tony Gwynn (.289 as a 22-year-old, 19 straight seasons above .300 after that--and again, usually well above).

2) Lots and lots of “black ink”; numbers that meant you led the league that year. Ancient example from the 1920s and ‘30s: Lou Gehrig. More recent example: Aaron Judge. (Who, by the way, fails the first aesthetic test because he hit .179 in 27 games the year he came up.) 

3) The third thing I loved couldn’t have happened with the Big Mac, which--I only realized this when I went downstairs and checked--didn’t carry on-base percentages for individual players. I probably started to pay attention to that with James…they’re definitely included in Pete Palmer’s Total Baseball,** which eventually came to supplant the MacMillan encyclopedia. In any event, when it came to what would eventually be designated as a player's “slash stats,” I quickly gravitated to .300/.400/.500 seasons: a .300 BA, a .400 OBP, and a .500 SA. Putting park factors and the context of what era somebody played in aside, a .300/.400./.500 season has a beautiful symmetry to it; you have to do everything as a hitter to reach all three.

Doing so over the course of a career has been accomplished by 14 players:

The list is almost as noteworthy for who isn’t on there: Mays and Aaron and Mantle, whose batting averages and OBPs were suppressed by the pitcher-dominated ‘60s; Pujols and Cabrera, who faded towards the end; Barry Bonds, who fell two points short on BA because of his first three seasons; Joe DiMaggio, two points short on OBP because of his last two; Wade Boggs, Hank Greenberg, Ken Griffey, and others who missed in one category or who came close but just missed in all three. I suppose the two biggest surprises on the list are the last two; Edgar squeaked by on slugging, Chipper on BA.

There are no active .300/.400/.500 players, or at least nobody with a few seasons on his resume. First of all, there are only two active .300 hitters--besides Arráez, Jose Altuve still makes the cut at .303, but even Altuve’s mid-range power leaves him well short of a .500 SP (a mark he has reached five times seasonally--his OBP is also under .370). If you move down the BA average a bit, you get Trout at .293/.407/.570 and Judge at .292/.412/.614. Again, Trout looked like a cinch early on--with even a shot to join Ruth, Williams, Gehrig, and Foxx in the ultra-rare .300/.400/.600 club--but, if he can hang on re OBP, he’ll finish with two of the three. Judge shocked everyone by winning the batting title last year, so who knows? Eight points of batting average is still a lot to make up at the age of 33; even if Judge gets close or dips above in the next couple of seasons, I expect he’ll slide below after that (cf. Pujols and Cabrera; Thomas just barely hung on). Juan Soto also has two of the three safely covered (.417 OBP, .531 SA), but his lifetime BA is .282; Shohei only has slugging covered, with no real chance, at 31, of getting to .300/.400 in the other two categories. Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Jose Ramirez--HOF hitters all of them, but not destined for the .300/.400/.500 list. Again: this is about beauty, symmetry, and my own old-school obsessions.

I’ve intentionally bypassed one name so far, probably my favourite hitter this decade: the Astros’ Yordan Alvarez. I started an I Love Baseball thread on him in 2023, naming it after the famous description of Kevin Youkilis: “Yordan Alvarez: The Greek God of ‘I'm the Best Hitter on the Planet Right Now.’” (Someone on the board said they misread “Hitter” as “Hitler”--that was grimly funny.) Outside of Houston, Alvarez doesn’t get anything remotely approaching the media coverage or fan adulation enjoyed by Judge and Ohtani, and he’s much less written about than Soto, or Vlad, or Bryce Harper, or any number of players. Purely as a hitter, though, he’s right there near the top of the list. Here are the active leaders in OPS+, along with their slash stats (at the moment, Alvarez is 15 PA shy of the 3,000 needed to appear on Baseball Reference’s career leaders list; he’ll jump onto the list in a week or two):

1. Judge - 178+, ..292/.412/.614

2. Trout - 169+, .293/.407/.570

3. Alvarez - 166+, .298/.392/.580

4. Soto - 160+, .282/.417/.531

5. Ohtani - 159+, .281/.374/.579

(There’s a big drop-off from the leaders to Freddie Freeman in sixth place.)

Of the five, I’d say Alvarez is the only one with a decent shot at finishing his career as the next and 15th name on that .300/.400/.500 list. He’s got a lot of baseball from here to there still to play--he doesn’t turn 29 until June--so although any of those numbers could head south, he also (unlike Judge or Ohtani, I’d say) has enough time left to edge his BA and OBP to where they need to be. Key to all that is that Alvarez appears to be just entering his prime: before the start of play today, he leads the American League--leads both leagues, in fact--in BA, HR, and RBIs. (He also leads in SP, OBP, hits, total bases, and a number of more esoteric analytic categories.) Early indications are that he’ll be pursuing a Triple Crown over the summer, another select group of players--18 TC seasons, 16 different players (Hornsby and Williams did it twice)--of almost exactly the same number of members, with Miguel Cabrera the most recent addition in 2012.

And there’s nothing the least bit surprising about that. When Judge won a batting crown last year, that was disorienting. When BA/OBP savant Wade Boggs hit 24 HR in 1987, even in a big hitter’s year that seemed to come out of nowhere. But Alvarez, like Cabrera and Frank Thomas before him, was put on this Earth to win a Triple Crown. And, if you count the slash-stat Triple Crown as a thing unto itself, he might just win two this year.

Three obstacles:

1) A history of injuries: since becoming a regular in 2021, Alvarez’s GP log reads 144, 135, 114, 147, 48. 2025 was a write-off, he missed a third of the 2023 season, and there have been other, shorter interruptions. Even as a DH, he’s an injury risk.

2) Even if he is able to play a full season, there’s that Judge fellow from New York. Staying ahead of him in HR is just about the toughest thing you could ask of any hitter today.

3) Alvarez is used to playing on good-to-great teams; early indications are that the Astros are anything but this year, sitting at 10-16 and in last place in the A.L. West at the moment. Could just be a slow start, but they have had a long run of success that was destined to end eventually. The problem right now, though, isn’t their hitting: they lead the A.L. in runs (admittedly, primarily because of Alvarez, so that’s circular evidence). If that holds, his RBI opportunities shouldn’t be too reduced.

Whatever public attention Alvarez has received in his career is largely attributable to some memorable post-season HR he’s hit (what first drew my attention, too), topped by an upper-deck walk-off against the Mariners in 2022.*** That, and his swing, one of those classic, picture-perfect left-handed swings--Ruth, Williams, Mattingly, Griffey, Olerud--that, for reasons I’ve never understood, have a majesty that just doesn’t translate to right-handed hitters. Which brings everything full circle, back to the realm of aesthetics, and for me, that will always cut both ways. There’s the beauty of watching Alvarez hit, absolutely, and if I were John Updike, I’d spend a few pages talking about that. But when configured just right, there’s also beauty in the numbers that document that hitting. And, very quietly, Yordan Alvarez has been configuring them about as well as almost anyone in the history of the game these past few years.

*So much so that I think I’m plagiarizing the phrase “precious commodity” from somewhere.

**Discovered that my red second edition must have suffered water damage or something--the pages are all crinkly--so I tossed it; still have the green seventh edition, though.

***Alvarez's regular season numbers are closely mirrored by what he's done in the playoffs: .294/.393/.551 over 252 PA. That was something else that fascinated me flipping through the Mac, players who had the same carryover across the board come October (in smaller sample sizes than today's expanded format). Ruth: .342/.474/.690 vs. .326/.470/.744 in the postseason. Foxx: .325/.428/.609 vs. .344/.425/.609 (only three World Series and 73 PA--uncanny).  Clemente: .317/.359/.475 vs. .318/.354/.449. Almost as if great hitters are great hitters--but of course, exceptions are numerous and sometimes infamous.

We Do This Every Day (part 3)

Part 3, following up on earlier posts here and here. I’ve been looking at the near-decade that the Dodgers’ infield of Garvey/Lopes/Russell/Cey was able to stay intact as a unit, wondering if that could conceivably happen today. I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that I was a Reds fan when L.A. was putting their streak together (and then, when the Reds fell off a bit, rooted for the Yankees over L.A. in the ‘77 and ‘78 World Series). From ‘72 to ‘79, the entire duration of Joe Morgan’s tenure in Cincinnati, the Reds’ infield was also unusually stable, anchored by Morgan and Dave Concepcion in the middle. They never made more than one change from year to year, most famously moving Rose in from left field in ‘75 to play third. Starting in 1972-’73, the Reds line reads 0-1-1-0-1-0-1; 4 changes over 7 seasons vs. the Dodgers’ zero changes over eight-and-a-half. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the second most stable infield of the past 75 years over a seven-year stretch.

1977: as the Reds took a step back and the Yankees took over as the best team in baseball, that’s also when the Jays came into the league (delayed by a year, as Toronto’s attempt to move the Giants here collapsed at the last minute). So I thought that would be another way to look at the question, to study one team for the entirety of their existence. The Jays, besides soon becoming my favourite team, of course (how soon? not until 1983, when they started winning; bandwagonism is wired into my DNA when it comes to sports), present a couple of other advantages as a test case. First, with a lifetime lasting exactly 50 years (48 for the purposes of what I’m doing, lopping off 1977 and the current season), you get a sample size larger than the more recent expansion teams, but not as daunting as the teams that go back 100 or more years. That’s good; I’m lazy. Second, the Jays have been about as close to a .500 team over the long haul as you can get. Going into play tonight, they’re 3,862-3,866, four games under (but rounded to .500). They first reached .500 on April 9, 1977 (1-1),* again on April 27, 1977 (9-9), then it took them until September of 1993 to get back there. They’ve crossed over and under a few times since…the point being, looking at the entirety of their existence, they’re neither noticeably good, like the Yankees (.570 going into the 2026 season), nor noticeably bad (the Rockies/Marlins/Padres are all under .470; among older franchises, the Orioles--because of how bad the St. Louis Browns were--are at .475). So that shouldn’t tilt their ability to retain players in one direction or the other.

The Toronto Blue Jays’ yearly infield turnover from 1978-2025:

1) for the 48 seasons, the Jays have averaged 1.77 infield moves per year. Divided into three windows of 16 years each,** the number of changes have steadily increased (what I suggested in the previous post, that players simply move around more today than in the past), and the increases don’t march in lockstep with overall winning percentage: 1.38 for 1978-93 (.512), 1.69 for 1994-2009 (.492), 2.25 for 2010-25 (.508).

2) five times (1984, 1992, 2001, 2003, 2007) the Jays were able to keep their infield completely intact; once (2006) they changed everybody. (Odd--whole new infield in 2006, exactly the same four players in 2007.)

Five times in 48 seasons...5/48 raised to the seventh power is 78,125/587,068,342,272, or about 7.5 million to one. Much, much less than what I got looking at all 30 teams for the past five seasons--20 billion to one--but still: it just ain’t happening. I’d say the same thing of the Dodgers’ infield streak that I would about Cy Young’s 511 wins: unless the game were to change drastically in some fundamental way--pitcher usage for someone to take a run at Young’s record, player movement in the free agency era for some team to match the Dodgers’ streak--it’s a record that simply won’t be threatened. (I’d also note that all the zeros for the Jays came in 2007 or earlier; since then, they’ve averaged 2.28 changes per season, even higher than the MLB average for 2021-25.)

It was fun scrolling through all those long-gone seasons. Since Toronto’s ‘83-93 heyday, when they were in contention every single year (including ‘84, yes; even with the Tigers’ 35-5 start, the Jays had closed the gap to 3.5 games on June 6, and to 7.5 games as late as Sept. 4…no wild card then), I’ve followed closely and watched games when they win, tuned out when they don’t. So I’ve missed a lot of team history, especially during that middle 16-year window. As I looked at the yearly turnover in the infield, it was funny coming across names I drew a complete blank on: Chris Gomez…Russ Adams…Joe Inglett…Juan Francisco. It’s not even that I can’t put faces to the names; I can’t put names to the names.

Twenty billion to one, 7.5 million to one: I began by wondering if the sky is blue, and three thousand words later, I have my answer. Yes, the sky is blue.

*Actually, they won their very first game, so that's the first time they reached .500.

**I’m providing a question to fit the answer, but I like how each arbitrarily drawn block of 16 years tells a story:

1978-1993: from expansion to the back-to-back WS

1994-2009: the wilderness (zero playoff appearances)

2010-2025: rejuvenation (the Bautista/Vlad years)

We Do This Every Day (part 2)

The question: How likely is it that some team will be able to match what the L.A. Dodgers did in the ‘70s when they ran out the same four infielders (Steve Garvey at first, Davey Lopes at second, Ron Cey at third, and Bill Russell at short) for eight consecutive seasons? (Eight-and-a-half, to be precise; if they ever make a film about those teams, I’ve got just the title.) Explanations and clarifications are here, in part one, as is the data for both the A.L. and N.L.

What I’m getting from those numbers is exactly what I expected to get: to say “extremely unlikely” doesn’t even begin to capture the magnitude of just how unlikely it is. Looking at data for all 30 teams from the last four seasons prior to this one, 120 data points in all, a few basic findings:

1) no team kept the same infield intact for all four seasons;

2) no team kept the same infield intact for three seasons in a row;

3) four teams--the 2023 Guardians, both the Braves and the Angels in 2024, and the 2025 Phillies--managed to keep their infields intact for two consecutive seasons.

So, with four teams pulling it off in 120 opportunities, the odds for any one team maintaining their infield in any one season-to-season changeover are 30 to 1. That’s for keeping an infield together across two seasons; to do it three seasons in a row, it’d be 1/30-squared, or 1/900; 1/30-cubed for four seasons (1/27,000); all the way up to eight seasons (we’ll forget about the half-season the Dodger four were together in 1973), where the odds would be 1/30 raised to the seventh power, or 1/21,870,000,000--20 billion to one, basically.

There are no doubt all sorts of mitigating factors I’m missing that would reduce those odds. The Dodgers had the good fortune of having four good young players arrive at the same time; maybe those are the odds that need to be calculated, the odds of that happening, and you proceed from there, instead of looking at a bunch of teams that are throwing random players together who are all at different points in their careers. If I cut some slack and changed the 2024 Padres (the team where the same four infielders returned, but with two of them swapping positions) to a 0 instead of a 2, the odds would be 1/24 raised to the seventh power, or 4,586,471,424 to one. Only four-and-a-half billion to one; the difference between winning a worldwide lottery and winning, I don’t know, an intergalactic lottery.

Players move around too much nowadays for any team to come even close to what that Dodger infield managed to do. For all 30 teams from 2021-2025, there was an average of 2.05 changes per season; half of every team’s infield turned over. (The N.L. was slightly more stable, averaging 1.93 changes per team against the A.L.’s 2.17.) I was thinking of breaking down the numbers according to team success, but I’m not sure even that matters (plus it would be a lot of work…) Of the four infields that stayed intact, the 2023 Guardians were coming off 92 wins, the 2024 Braves 104, the 2025 Phillies 95…and the 2024 Angels, 73. One great team, two that were very good, and one lousy one. The Dodgers, easily the best team over that stretch, made 9 changes in total, over the league average; same as the White Sox and more than the Rockies, both of whom have been terrible the last couple of seasons. It does look like bad teams make more changes overall, as you would expect--the A’s (14) and Marlins (13) made the most--so maybe those astronomical odds are much lower for good teams. However: success also creates changeover in today’s market, as the good teams with the good players inevitably lose some of them to free agency, since you can’t afford to re-sign everybody in perpetuity. This year’s Blue Jays are a perfect example of what routinely happens: you have two guys facing free agency at the same time, in Toronto’s case Vladimir Guerrero and Bo Bichette, so you commit to one and--even when making a nominal attempt to retain both--accept that the other will move on. The most successful teams don’t necessarily keep all their best players, they’re just really good at finding new (and generally cheaper) ones to replace those who leave.

There’s another way I want to look at this, more of a fun thing appealing to the Blue Jays fan in me. I should have that ready in a week or so.

We Do This Every Day (part 1)

“You could study that”--as I mentioned in my intro to the first “Hey Bill” post, that was like a mantra with Bill James. It’s how he approached the kinds of basic questions baseball fans were always asking, many of which had answers that seemed so self-evident, no one had ever bothered to see if they were true or not…”Who should be the MVP this year?” (In the ‘79 Abstract, he wrote a long thing comparing Jim Rice’s case to Ron Guidry’s, based on their relative contributions as a hitter vs. a pitcher--which was, above all else, a refutation of the idea that a pitcher simply couldn’t be the MVP pitching once every four or five days.) “Are the _________ for real this year?” (In the ‘85 Abstract, prompted by the 84 Tigers’ 35-5 start, he tried to figure out at what point a fast start became meaningful--very early on, it turned out.) “That guy is so over/underrated”--he once tried to systematically figure out what causes a player to be over- or underrated. (I remember him concluding that Steve Garvey was like a perfect storm of overrated-ness.) That was the foundation of what eventually became sabermetrics; ask a question, figure out a method for addressing it, start collecting data.

With that in mind, I thought I’d test out something I posted on Facebook in connection to Davey Lopes’ death last week. Lopes was a solid player, just the kind of player that James identified as often underrated (working from memory here):

1) his batting average was ordinary (.263), but he took a lot of walks (74/162 games), so his on-base percentage (.349) was better than many other guys who’d hit .280 or .290, the Bill Buckner type of hitter;

2) his contributed defensively as much as he did offensively (harder to quantify, but he did have a lifetime dWAR in the positive range, one GG, and had an errorless streak of 28 games once);

3) he played on a team filled with stars;

4) he had (what was then) good medium-range power for a middle infielder; 10-15 HR a year, with a high of 28, and a slugging percentage of almost .400;

5) more important than being a base-stealer, he was a smart base-stealer; his success rate of 83% put him well above the 75% that you needed to make stealing bases worthwhile;

6) he was Black.

The most amazing thing to me that turned up in his obituaries--something I knew but had forgotten--was the 8-1/2 consecutive seasons that the Dodgers’ infield of Lopes (2B), Garvey (1B), Bill Russell (SS), and Ron Cey (3B) remained intact. Their first game together was June 23, 1973, and they stayed together as a unit until 1982, when Lopes left for Oakland. That doesn’t mean that they all played every single game, but every year from 1974 through 1981, they are listed as the Dodgers’ primary infield on Baseball Reference’s team page. I’m not sure how they determine that, but my guess is that each of them played more games at their given position than anyone else. Example: Russell was injured for much of the ‘75 season, but he still played more games (83) at short than Rick Auerbach (81). (Incredible: there was a season where the Dodgers split shortstop duties between a Bill Russell and an Auerbach.) All told, I’m pretty sure they were all playing 140+ games in almost all of those years.

What I wrote on Facebook: “That just couldn't happen today. As an experiment, think of the most successful teams this century, and I'd be surprised if you could find an infield that stayed intact for more than three seasons. Even the Dodgers from 2020-2025 did not go two seasons without at least one infield change.”

Just an intuitive, off-the-cuff remark. “You could study that,” I thought, so I have.

Immediate disclaimer: me studying something (you’ll find a handful of other such things elsewhere on this blog: Triple Crowns, the ‘92 Jays’ pitching staff, Dave Stieb’s bizarre 1985 season) is not Bill James studying something. I’m working with Baseball Reference and an ordinary desktop computer; I don’t pay for their Stathead feature, where, if you know how to set up a query, you can hit a button and generate a list of left-handed hitters who hit between 35-40 doubles while playing more than one position; and even if I were a paid subscriber, I doubt I’d know how to set up a query for what I wanted in this case. So I have to really narrow things down, and I have to search manually, skipping from screen to screen. I’m in a better place than if it were 1975 and I was using the MacMillan Encyclopedia, a Texas Instruments calculator, and a pad of graph paper, true; let’s say I’m about halfway between here and there.

I thought of two relatively manageable ways I could look at the question of how likely it is that a team could put together that kind of streak today. The first would be to take all teams this decade and track their yearly turnover in the infield. I eliminated the 2020 season because of COVID, leaving four seasonal changeovers for each team: 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24, 2024-25. That gave me 120 data points to look at. Compared to the whole history of baseball, that’s a small sample size. But: in trying to figure out the likelihood of doing today what Lopes’s Dodgers teams did in the ‘70s, only the most recent data seems relevant anyway. Patterns of player movement in 2026 are obviously not the same as those patterns were in 1936 or 1956, before free agency. They’re probably not even the same as in 1996, when Albert Belle signed a five-year contract for $55 million with the White Sox; Shohei makes almost that much per year now. Anyway, I think the recency of data here is more important than the quantity. As Cyndi Lauper and the Brains said, money changes everything.

The A.L. data:

The N.L. data:

Pretty straightforward what the numbers mean…that 3 under 2022 for the Yankees means that the 2022 team had three different players manning the infield when compared to the 2021 team. Actually, that was the first team I looked at, and I immediately encountered a situation that would turn up now and again: a player who stayed in the infield but switched positions from season to season, like Gleyber Torres did when he went from SS in 2021 to 2B in 2022. I counted that as a change. Lopes, Garvey, Russell, and Cey didn’t move around; they played where they played and stayed there.

All the 0s (no changes) and 4s (someone new at every position) are highlighted in yellow. There’s a 2 under the 2024 Padres highlighted in blue: the 2024 team had the same four guys in the infield as the 2023 team, but Xander Bogaerts and Ha-Seong Kim flip-flopped at second and short.

The really hard part of doing this, and where I’m just a softball-league/armchair version of James, is drawing conclusions from whatever data you assemble. (And also knowing when not to draw conclusions--realizing that you have to reframe the question to arrive at something meaningful, or when you have to discard it all together.) I’ll get to that part in a follow-up post.

I Heard You Looking

Now that Tripod's gone, a lot of images I posted for polls I conducted on the I Love Music message board are gone with it. I did save them on my hard-drive, though, so with the help of Google Photos, here are all the images for four different ILM polls (I didn't, unfortunately, save the images for a music-video poll I ran in 2022):

1) A World of Constant Strangers (Neil Young, 2012)

2) The Lights Are on at Shea (Yo La Tengo, 2015)

3) Getting Away from Things That Get Bad (road movies, 2017)

4) Certain Rules and Regulations and Procedures (political films, 2019)

The results of each poll are actually embedded in the images, and once I figured out how to move things around, they now function as ordered countdowns--you could also go to ILM or ILX for the results. (The Yo La Tengo poll was given a different name by the guy who helped me, one that followed ILM's weird obsession with poll titles constructed from awful puns on the world "poll." As was explained to me at one point, the puns are intentionally awful, that's the idea. Oh.) I never much cared about the results of any ILM/ILX poll; if it was someone else's, the interest was in putting my own ballot together, and if it was mine, the fun was in the images. If a movie poll, I'd look for the most evocative still I could find, avoiding as much as possible images that were overly familar; now and again, I'd take a screenshot from a YouTube clip if I couldn't find exactly what I wanted. Music polls were different, more conceptual. For Yo La Tengo, '70s baseball cards seemed like a perfect fit (if you know the band or at least the meaning of their name, that won't need any explanation). With Neil Young, it was more like "What does 'Cowgirl in the Sand' look like?" 100% intuition--and sometimes I went with a disconnect that made me laugh.

As I always loved pointing out, I used state-of-the-art software--Microsoft Paint--to lay the text onto the images. Microsoft Publisher will be disappearing this fall; I expect Paint will follow eventually.