Jack Splat versus the field

Jumpin' Jack Wilson from Wikipedia

We took a look at Gene Alley yesterday, and as we were tossing the BS around while gulping down the morning's first coffee at work, my hot stove buds debated how Jack Wilson would stack up against the other tenured Pirate shortstops. So we put together what we considered the top half dozen shortstops to wear the Buc uniform. They spent 63 years and 8,380 games representing this town. Here's a chart we came up with of some selected stats to see how these long time Bucco SS's compared:

             all
player  yrs games avg  obp rs rbi rp field l-avg dp

Wagner  18  2433 .328 .387 88 82  165 .946  +13  49
Vaughan 10  1411 .324 .409 94 76  162 .950   +2  79
Groat    9  1258 .290 .325 62 50  109 .962   +1  97
Alley   11  1195 .254 .310 40 31   65 .970   +6  64
Bell     8  1106 .269 .339 78 53  121 .976   +1  79
Wilson   7   997 .269 .312 65 48  105 .977   +4 102

(The stats are for years as a Pirate, broken down to season average. rp is runs produced = rs+rbi-hr. l-avg is how many percentage points above the league average the player fielded over his career. The fielding stats are for SS only. We didn't show home runs because of the different eras involved, but Jay Bell was the group's top slugger, averaging 10 dingers/year. No A-Rods in this bunch.)

So what's it tell us? Well, we can start with the obvious - Honus Wagner and Arky Vaughan were head and shoulders above the crowd when it came to hitting a baseball. Jay Bell was a pretty good run producer, and in fact fares better overall than we thought he might. Dick Groat was a good stick, but his run production wasn't that great.

The fielding was a surprise, though. The later the era, the better the fielding percentage, with Jack Wilson being the top gloveman and Wagner the worst. That probably has quite a bit to do with the conditions of the fields they played on, and in Wagner's case, the quality of second basemen he played with - he's also dead last in DP's, and it takes two to turn one.

To normalize that, we took the league average and compared it to the individual fielding percentage (l-avg comparison). When we compare apples to apples, Wagner vaults from dead last in fielding to first, finishing his career a whopping 13 points higher in fielding percentage than the league average during his years.

Wagner and Alley also have somewhat deceiving stats because they played for Pittsburgh as their baseball days wound down while everyone else was in their prime as a Pirate. So their numbers may be a bit devalued overall.

To make a long analysis short, we totaled the obp, rp, l-avg fielding comparison and dp's, 1 point for the best, 6 points for the worst. Hopefully this simple formula gives equal weight to glove and bat. Like golf, the lowest score wins. The best of the Bucco's shortstops according to the Green Weenie are *tada*:

Honus Wagner (9)
Arky Vaughan (10)
Jay Bell & Jack Wilson (14)
Dick Groat (15)
Gene Alley (17)

No matter how you slice it, Wagner and Vaughan are the best we've ever had at short. But Bell, Wilson and Groat are so tightly bunched that you can't separate them with a gnat's eyelash. Alley's glove was one of the Buc's better ones, but his bat drops him down to the bottom of the heap.

And to answer the original question, Wilson more than holds his own in some pretty fast company.

Of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't throw one Jumping Jack Flash factoid into the post. When he was a teenager and playing on a summer travel team, Wilson's roommate was his future Pirates teammate Freddy Sanchez. Sanchez played shortstop while Wilson manned second base. Funny how the more things change, the more they say the same. It just took a couple of decades to get them back together and in their right positions.

the greatest buc of them all

The Flying Dutchman, Honus Wagner
from Wikipedia

We tend to only rate players that we've seen with our own eyes or heard our fathers talk about. And when you're looking at a franchise with over a century of rosters to check out, that eliminates a lot of names. But for my money, I'll back The Flying Dutchman, Honus Wagner, as the best player to ever wear a Pittsburgh uniform.

Johannes Peter Wagner was born in 1874 to German immigrants from Mansfield, now a part of Carnegie. He was one of nine children. As a child, he was nicknamed Hans by his mom, which would later evolve into Honus. Wagner dropped out of school at age 12 to help his father and brothers in the coal mines. In their free time, he and his brothers played sandlot baseball. One bro, Albert "Butts" Wagner, played in the bigs for a season.

Legend has it that he was discovered by scout Ed Barrow who had come to watch Butts play. But instead he spied Honus rifling rocks across the Monongahela River and signed him on the spot. Other stories say he was pulled out the stands to replace an injured semi-pro player, won a job on the team, and that's how the scouts found him. In 1897 he began his major league career at Louisville in the American Association, owned by Barney Dreyfuss, recent HOF selection and an early owner of the Pirates.

Dreyfuss took many of his top players, including Wagner, with him to Pittsburgh after the Louisville franchise folded at the end of the 1899 season. Hans would spend the rest of his career with the Bucs, retiring after the 1917 season. Today's owners would have loved Wagner. He never made over $10,000 a year as a Pirate, and resisted several efforts to lure him away from Pittsburgh. Talk about your hometown discount!

Still, he had to work to get that. Before the 1908 season, he missed spring training and told the team and media that he "was tired" and was thinking of taking the season off. Now everyone in the business knew that he was holding out for a bigger salary, but he never came right out and blustered for the money, and eventually got his paycheck doubled to $10K - Ty Cobb held out the same year and only got $4,800 - without losing the fans in a spitting contest with the team.

The players should appreciate him, too. In 1905, Wagner signed the first endorsement contract with a bat company. His deal with Hillerich & Bradsby, Co. called for them to supply Wagner with Louisville Slugger bats made to his specs. In return, the bat company added Wagner's name to their bats and sold them to starstruck fans. Since then, more than 8,500 players have done business with Louisville Slugger.

Wagner had a lifetime batting average of .327 (he hit .300 or better for 17 straight seasons) and collected 3,415 hits. He led the NL in batting 8 times, RBIs five times and stolen bases five times (he swiped 722 sacks in his career despite having bow legs that made him look like a Popeye caricature.) He also led the league in slugging percentage six times, on-base percentage four times, total bases six times, doubles seven times and triples three times. Wagner hit for the cycle once and stole second, third and home three times. He only hit 101 homers, but in the deadball era before Babe Ruth started mashing them, that was a decent show of power.

The rangy shortstop is considered by many to be the greatest gloveman at his position of all time, while others will only admit to him being the best of his era. He was so gifted with the leather that he played every position on the field except catcher during his career, even pitching a couple of times. He walked six batters in his eight innings on the mound, but Hans did not allow a run. He has a perfect 0.00 career ERA.

Wagner won a series ring in 1909 after bombing in his first series in 1903, hitting only .222 while playing hurt. The series win was against Ty Cobb and the Tigers. Hans redeemed himself by hitting .333 while stealing six bases, a series record, and Cobb's thunder. He had waited six long years to shed the rep as a choker, ala Barry Bonds, on the big stage, and came through in spades.

When the Baseball Hall of Fame held its' initial election in 1936, Wagner tied for second in the voting with Ruth, trailing only Cobb. On the 100th anniversary of professional baseball in 1969, a vote was taken to pick the greatest players of all time and Wagner was selected as the shortstop. In 1999, after 82 years had passed since his last game and 44 years since his death, Wagner was voted Number 13 on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Players, making him the highest-ranking shortstop on the roster. That same year, he was selected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.

Not enough proof? Modern sabermetrician Bill James rates him as the second best player of all-time, right behind Ruth. Statisticians John Thorn and Pete Palmer rate Wagner as ninth all-time in their "Total Player Ranking" in their book Total Baseball.

The Pirates honored him by retiring #33 (although he played in the days before numbers were worn, that's the one most often associated with him) and hauled his statue from Forbes Field to Three Rivers Stadium to PNC Park, where it now rests a stone's throw from his original playing grounds, Exposition Park.


Honus Wagner's Statue from Wikipedia

There's are a couple of baseball tales about Honus, a clean living dude by all accounts except for his tobacco chaw. One involves Cobb in the 1909 World Series. During game two, Cobb told the "krauthead" Wagner of his plans to steal second on the next pitch. Wagner's response was to tag Cobb squarely in the mouth, resulting in three stitches and Cobb's lasting respect. It also effectively shut him up for the rest of series.

Once he was caught with his glove hand in his back pocket reaching for a tobacco chaw when a ball was spanked to short. He fielded the sharp grounder with his bare hand and easily threw the runner out, literally with one hand behind his back.

On another occasion, he used his wits to keep a runner from stealing second after a wild throw from the catcher. Wagner timed his leap for the wayward toss so that he came down on the clueless runner short of the base. As the players picked themselves up, the centerfielder threw the ball back in to Wagner, who tagged the embarrassed runner out.

Another story involves his famous player's card, the holy grail of collectors the world over. It's said he made American Tobacco Company pull the card because he didn't want kids to have to buy tobacco products to get it. At least that's what Cooperstown says. More cynical observers said he wasn't paid, or at least paid enough, by the company for the right to use his image, and that's why Wagner made them quit producing it. Either way, the card, like the player, is the best of its' kind. It sold for $2.8M in September 2007.

After Wagner retired, he took it easy by hunting and fishing, two of his passions, before coming back as the Pirate hitting coach from 1933-1952. He opened several Honus Wagner Sporting Goods stores, and though they lost money for him, one still exists on Forbes Avenue in town. Honus barnstormed with a local semi-pro team called the Wagner All-Stars well into his fifties. He was a county deputy sheriff for awhile.

He still lived in Carnegie in the Beechwood Avenue house he built for his wife Bessie and himself in 1916, and he was a popular and gregarious figure in his hometown. They named the Carlynton High football field Honus Wagner Stadium after him. He died on December 6, 1955 at the age of 81. Honus Wagner was buried at Jefferson Memorial Cemetery in the South Hills.

Sometimes you don't have to leave home to make it. As Honus said "There ain’t much to being a ballplayer, if you’re a ballplayer."


Lineup for Yesterday
W is for Wagner,
The bowlegged beauty;
Short was closed to all traffic
With Honus on duty.

Ogden Nash, Sport Magazine (January 1949)


Honus Wagner Card from Wikipedia