Expanding on the greatest 1-2 punches of all time; The introduction of GOO
| 15
|
by user Steaksammich
There were a couple of articles a week or two ago about the greatest 1-2 punch and the greatest 1-2-3 punch in baseball history. David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez probably sparked the converstation, but it was obvious that Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were the top duo in the history of the game. But by how much? How do we compare a pair or trio of batters to another? You can't just say that the guys with the most homers wins. Or the highest AVG. So how about runs created? That could work, but someone brought up the singles hitters playing in the dead ball era. When Ty Cobb broke into the league in 1905 teams in the AL averaged 3.69 runs a game compared to the 4.76 they scored int he AL last year or the 5.12 runs a year that the AL averaged in 1921 when Ruth started to show the world that the longball had plenty of benefits. So how to compare batters over different eras?
What I did was rank guys by GOO. I didn't come up with the stat, GOO, I got it from Bill James who used it when comparing players from different eras in his historical abstract. But I think I might be the first to call it GOO. Not exactly a claim to fame, but for a guy like me, I take what I can get. What is GOO? Games of offense. I came up with the runs created for some of the more famous duos and trios by using the best formula I could from the Runs Created page here on ArmchairGM. Not all the stats are always available. Then I compared a team's runs created to their actual runs scored and adjusted the player's runs created based on that. Then I took the player's adjusted RC total and divided it by the average runs per game total of a team in that player's league that year to find out how many games worth of offense that single player created on his own.
Let's look at the duo that probably produced the most in the NL in 2005, Miguel Cabrera and Carlos Delgado. With the formula I used I can see that Cabrera created 128.8 runs and Delgado created 121. As a team the Marlins created 764.8, but actually scored just 717, 93.7% of their RC total. So I adjusted Cabrera and Delgado to 120.7 and 113.4, 93.7% of their unadjusted totals. The average NL team scored 4.45 runs in '05 so Cabrera created 27.1 games worth of runs and Delgado created 25.5. The total GOO for the duo is 52.6.
Make sense?
| Year | Player | GOO | Player | GOO | Total |
| 1927 | Babe Ruth | 40.3 | Lou Gehrig | 41.8 | 82.1 |
| 1921 | Babe Ruth | 47.4 | Bob Meusel | 24.5 | 71.9 |
| 1948 | Stan Musial | 46.2 | Enos Slaughter | 25.3 | 71.5 |
| 2001 | Barry Bonds | 44 | Rich Aurilia | 24.8 | 68.8 |
| 1961 | Mickey Mantle | 36.8 | Roger Maris | 30.8 | 67.6 |
| 1932 | Jimmie Foxx | 41.2 | Al Simmons | 27.4 | 66.6 |
| 1906 | Frank Chance | 29.9 | Harry Steinfeldt | 31.8 | 61.7 |
| 1930 | Chuck Klein | 33.8 | Lefty O'Doul | 25.1 | 58.9 |
| 1982 | Robin Yount | 31.6 | Cecil Cooper | 27.2 | 58.8 |
| 2005 | Alex Rodriguez | 33.2 | Gary Sheffield | 23.9 | 57.1 |
| 2005 | David Ortiz | 30.5 | Manny Ramirez | 25.9 | 56.4 |
| 2005 | Miguel Cabrera | 27.1 | Carlos Delgado | 25.5 | 52.6 |
This is far, far from a comprehensive list. This is just 3 good combos from last year and 8 mostly random that I grabbed from the game's history. It'd take a little bit short of forever to make a comprehensive list and while I do have a lot of free time, I don't have that much. Feel free to suggest a combo that you think may be just as good. I'll likely come up with another 10-20 soon.
The conclusion? Ortiz/Ramirez and Rodriguez/Sheffield are very good combos, but they are not great. The great combos seem to create 60 games worth of offense. Most of the greatest 1-2 punches played long before I was born. Why? I'm guessing that a big reason is because there were fewer teams. Right now there are 30 teams with all the players spread out amongst them. When Ruth was getting going in the 20's there were 16 teams. It was more likely that two great players were going to end up on the same team simply because there were fewer teams trying to get their services.
A few random notes...
- It's entirely possible that some of these guys didn't hit back to back in the batting order. I checked retrosheet.org for the teams that I could, but I have no idea where Musial or Slaughter batted in the Cards order in '48 or where Klein and O'Doul hit in '39
- The Chance/Steinfeldt duo combined to hit just 6 homers for the '06 Cubs, the winningest team in MLB history, but still managed to rank amongst the top thanks to a league where the average team scored just 3.57 runs a game. There are likely many more combos out there that we wouldn't think of because they didn't put up gaudy numbers, but would still rank up there because they produced in a less offensive time.
- The 1930 Philadelphia Phillies scored 944 runs...and they lost 102 games to finish last in the division. I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that they have outscored any other last place team in the game's history. How did they do that? Their team ERA was 6.71. They allowed 1199 runs. John Milligan was their only pitcher with an ERA under 4. He pitched 28.1 innings. Phil Collins was their only other pitcher with an ERA under 5. His was 4.78. Ray Benge led the team in starts (29) and was the only other player to post an ERA under 6.00 with a 5.70 mark. It's quite possible that that is the worst pitching staff ever assembled.
Date
Mon 06/12/06, 6:41 am EST
