He Talks Softly and Carries a Big Stick, by Neil Caudle -- Endeavors, Fall 1999

LINKS

Society for American Baseball Research

He Talks Softly and Carries a Big Stick
by Neil Caudle

Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters: How Statistics Can Level the Playing Field. By Michael J. Schell, Princeton University Press, 295 pages, $22.95.

He is not as big and strong as Mark McGwire. He does not run bases with the murderous, high-spiking intensity of a Ty Cobb. He is a round, softly padded man whose arms seem ideal for cradling small children, not for ripping line drives. But Tony Gwynn, a 39-year-old right fielder for the San Diego Padres, is the greatest hitter of all time. Not one of the greatest. The greatest. And Michael Schell has the numbers to prove it.

Schell, a statistician at UNC's Lineberger Cancer Center, has always been a numbers junkie. On the job, he analyzes treatment options for cancer patients. But he has never lost his childhood fascination with baseball, which oozes numbers from every box score and baseball card.

Schell has been salting away ideas for his baseball book since high school, when he and his brothers, Kevin and Pat, played simulated games using statistics to draft their teams. The brothers were skeptical when they found that, based on career batting averages alone, most of the best hitters were dead and gone. Was it true that Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were not among the best 100 hitters of all time, but that Baby Doll Jacobson, who hit .311 in the 1920s, was?

"It just didn't make any sense," Schell says.

When, in 1969, the pitching mound was whittled down from 15 inches to 10, batting averages in the American League soared 16 points from an anemic average of .230 the previous year. If a simple change in the rules could have such a dramatic effect, Schell wondered, how could anyone rank players by comparing raw batting averages alone?

And there were many other factors that raw averages didn't take into account. The designated hitter rule, for instance, had culled weak-hitting pitchers out of American League lineups. And the talent pool in the major leagues, once populated by low-paid white men willing to knock around the country by bus, had gradually expanded as salaries and prestige increased and as racial barriers broke down. If today's stars didn't seem to tower above their peers as the heroes of yesterday had, Schell reasoned, it was probably because the average player had gotten better.

So he and his brothers settled on a statistical adjustment that assumed that the best hitters in one year were roughly as good as the best in another. When they redistributed the batting averages based on this assumption, modern players scampered up the list.

The lesson stayed with him. "When you work with statistics about cancer patients, you learn very fast that you can't put everyone in the same group," Schell says. "For example, you can't expect relapsed patients to respond to treatment in the same way as those who are newly diagnosed. The same is true for groups of baseball players."

After graduate school, as he began writing his book in earnest, Schell made other statistical refinements. While requiring 4,000 career at bats for a player to be considered, he ignored any at bats past 8,000, to include only the performance of players in their prime. He also calculated the effects of different ballparks. Coors Field, for instance, in the thin air of Colorado, inflates Rockies players' batting averages 30 to 40 points.

For Schell, calculating such "ballpark effects" is nothing new. "When you look at the success of cancer treatments, a lot depends on the characteristics of the hospital or clinic where the patient goes for treatment," Schell says. "For a statistician, calculating the ballpark effect is very much like calculating the hospital effect."

Schell has learned, after a few peevish reactions to his book, that baseball loyalties run deep. He is careful to remind wounded fans of Ted Williams or Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb that he has made no pronouncements about the best players of all time. His next book will factor in walks, power, and run production to arrive at a list of most valuable batters. But for the first book, Schell's goal was simply to determine who was best at getting hits.

When he began running the numbers, Schell had no idea who would finish first, he says. But he was pleasantly surprised when the final tallies placed Gwynn, one of baseball's true gentlemen, in first place, well ahead of the notoriously nasty Ty Cobb. Last season, just after Schell's findings had hit the California papers, Schell wore his press pass into the Padres' dugout. And there he told Gwynn, face to face, that he was pleased to congratulate the greatest hitter of all time.

"I really appreciate that," the soft-spoken Gwynn said with a shrug. "But all I do is go out every day and try to get a hit."

Michael Schell recently has joined SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. At this writing, Tony Gwynn's unadjusted career batting average stands at .338.