What-ifs are a central part of being a baseball fan. We love to consider how differently things might’ve turned out if a star player hadn’t gotten hurt, or if a team had signed one free agent instead of another. Some what-ifs are the stuff of legend, like the fabled night in the late 1940s when, during a drunken dinner with Tom Yawkey at Toots Shor’s Midtown Manhattan joint, Yankees owner Dan Topping nearly traded Joe DiMaggio to the Red Sox for Ted Williams. Others aren’t revealed until decades later, like when Barry Bonds said on the Opening Night Netflix broadcast last month that he would’ve played for the Yankees instead of the Giants if George Steinbrenner hadn’t given him a take-it-or-leave-it offer.
We all have our own personal picks, too. Here are a few of mine: What if the New York City newspapers hadn’t gone on strike in 1978? What if Eric Gregg hadn’t been the home plate umpire for Livan Hernandez’s start in Game 5 of the 1997 NLCS? What if Dottie Hinson hadn’t dropped the ball, or Jimmy Dugan had just laid off the booze? Some of the most significant what-ifs could’ve had a massive impact on the world beyond baseball. What if the Black Sox hadn’t thrown the 1919 World Series? What if Curt Flood hadn’t challenged the reserve clause? What if George W. Bush had been named commissioner of baseball?
We won’t be examining any of the above what-ifs in this week’s mailbag, but three of the four questions we’re answering below are rooted in an alternate reality, one in which Mookie Betts was always a shortstop, Ford Frick didn’t run Bill Veeck out of baseball, and a starting pitcher was exactly league average at everything except throwing strikes. The lone non-hypothetical question, which is where we’ll begin, looks at whether teams have more success when they hit a grand slam than when they score at least four runs without one. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.
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Hello!
Do teams that hit grand slams in a game have a better winning percentage than teams that score four or more runs without a grand slam? — Matt
Ben Clemens: They absolutely do! This is just a math problem. Teams that have scored four or more runs per game without a grand slam in the 21st Century scored 6.5 runs per game, winning 73% of the time. Teams that hit grand slams scored 9.3 runs per game and won 85% of the time. But while that answer might be technically correct, I don’t think that’s what you’re actually asking, so I sliced the data up a bit differently to get to the core of your question.
I reinterpreted it this way: Holding the total number of runs scored in a game constant, how differently do teams perform depending on whether a grand slam was part of their run scoring? For example, consider teams who scored seven runs a game. That happened without the aid of a grand slam 7,563 times in my sample (the 21st Century), and those teams won 81% of their games. Teams hit grand slams en route to scoring seven runs 342 times and won at an 84% clip. Here’s the whole table of runs, observations, and winning percentage:
| Runs Scored | GS Games | Win% | No-GS Games | Win% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 93 | 51% | 14,669 | 51% |
| 5 | 214 | 61% | 12,686 | 64% |
| 6 | 323 | 79% | 10,116 | 73% |
| 7 | 342 | 84% | 7,563 | 81% |
| 8 | 324 | 88% | 5,476 | 85% |
| 9 | 331 | 91% | 3,765 | 90% |
| 10 | 288 | 95% | 2,630 | 93% |
Add it up and weight it, and the teams who hit grand slams have outperformed very slightly; using the ratio of non-grand-slam games for both sets, the grand slammers have a one-percentage-point lead, 71% to 70%. But I ran the same query for only the most recent five years, and that time non-grand-slam teams had a three-percentage-point lead. In other words, this doesn’t feel like a stable relationship, and most likely the two are the same.
That’s good news for my fundamental understanding of baseball. If these two numbers were meaningfully different, that would call a lot of our assumptions about win probability into question. But as it turns out, the key part about scoring runs is that you score them, not how you do.
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Dear FG Mailbag,
If Mookie Betts had been a shortstop this whole time, how different would his career WAR look?
Truly,
Babip Roberts
Dan Szymborski: Sir BABIP,
These types of theoreticals are always tricky, since they involve a bit of guessing about history that can never be confirmed, at least short of us unlocking some kind of multiverse. We have a few years of data of Betts playing shortstop in the majors now and rudimentary minor league second base data from when he was a prospect. So I asked ZiPS to interpolate defensive values that would make everything line up neatly, since I am not Loki in a Marvel TV show. I also left his offense the same, which is something we don’t really know would be true. After all, perhaps playing right field made his offensive development more effective? But, with everything else the same, if Betts would have been an average defensive shortstop for the entirety of his big league career, as the interpolated numbers suggest, his WAR right now would be 67.1.
That’s better than Betts’ actual lifetime mark of 62.8, though it doesn’t dramatically change what we think of him. What the Red Sox did made sense in the end. Dustin Pedroia was firmly entrenched at second base, and Xander Bogaerts was an elite prospect who got to the majors before Betts did. Maybe Boston could’ve played Betts at third base, which, if nothing else, would’ve kept the Pablo Sandoval signing from ever happening, and I think that’s something the Red Sox and their fans would love to wipe from history. But history has a lot of interconnected threads, and pulling one might have unexpected negative results elsewhere. The Mookie Betts timeline we got is pretty darn good!
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Good morning Matt,
Thank you again for offering this amazing service. This might be for Michael Baumann. As I understand it, Ford Frick changed the face of baseball with (at least) two monumental moves: He gave Walter O’Malley complete control over Los Angeles, and he allowed the league to force out Bill Veeck.
In a world in which Veeck was allowed to move the Browns to Milwaukee (instead of Lou Perini taking the Braves there) and his ally Hank Greenberg owned the Angels instead of Gene Autry (who was willing to accept O’Malley’s absurd requirements), what of Veeck’s “radical” proposals could have come to fruition, and how would the MLB landscape look today?
Would college baseball have become a minor league system funded by MLB? Would free agency have arrived sooner (or not at all)?
Would an upper middle class individual with wealthy backers be able to own a professional baseball team?
Thank you,
Kevin
Michael Baumann: Thanks for writing, Kevin. I feel a newfound sympathy for the actor on a Comic-Con panel who gets a question from an audience member who’s clearly spent way more time thinking about the character than the actor himself has.
Some of your questions are pretty easy to answer. Would college baseball have become a minor league for MLB? I don’t see how, regardless of what happened to the Browns under Bill Veeck. With very, very few exceptions, the NCAA (or NAIA, or various junior college governing bodies) administrates college sports independent of professional leagues. From what I understand, college cheerleading is its own thing apart from the NCAA, but by the time Veeck came along, NCAA baseball was well established; the College World Series had come into being already…I don’t see how one owner changes the course of history there.
And as for the question about the composition of owners: Indeed, it was only 50-odd years ago that a successful businessperson could get rich enough to own a baseball team. I mean, George Steinbrenner was a Great Lakes shipping magnate. Ted Turner built his father’s billboard business into a chain of local TV stations…you could make millions of dollars by creating something people wanted to buy or use, and spend those millions on a sports franchise.
That hasn’t really been true for decades. Teams cost too much, and are now owned chiefly either by people who inherited them or people who made billions — not millions — moving money around before the tax man could find it. I’d love to blame a specific commissioner or Ronald Reagan or the uniquely avaricious brand of capitalism we have here… but it’s like that throughout the Western world. Soccer teams in England used to be owned by local trucking magnates or newspaper publishers who wanted to do something for the community; now the last of those (at least at the highest level) has been forced out in favor of either American-style owners or Middle Eastern state investment funds. I wish it were otherwise, but it’s a fact of life now.
What could Veeck have changed? Well, my favorite alternate timeline involving Bill Veeck is the one in which he buys the Phillies during World War II and stocks the roster with Negro League stars. There’s some dispute over whether Veeck actually intended to do this and was thwarted by (among others) your man, Ford Frick, or whether this was an exaggeration or fabrication he made up for his own autobiography.
Still, an all-Black Phillies team in the 1940s probably wins the World Series at a canter, strangles the nascent Dodgers-Yankees rivalry in the cradle and either inspires national harmony or sparks an all-out race war. (At the very least, I think it stops certain Eagles fans in the 2000s from saying they’d rather have Kevin Kolb under center than Donovan McNabb. Beyond that, I can’t speculate with any confidence.)
But that’s before the time period in which your counterfactual takes place. I’m going to narrow this down to a hypothetical that’s simple enough for me to digest: Veeck moves the Browns to Milwaukee in 1953, and, crucially, retains ownership. That forces the Braves to remain in Boston. Meanwhile, his ally Hank Greenberg owns the expansion Los Angeles Angels in 1961, rather than Gene Autry. Veeck and Greenberg, rather than Walter O’Malley, then become the game’s most influential owners.
I don’t think free agency comes any sooner. Veeck might’ve been more of a showman than the crotchety, conservative old men he butted heads with at owners meetings, but he was still a small-market owner, and there is no greater tyrant to the worker than a penny-pinching boss. The Seitz decision, which inaugurated free agency in 1975, derailed Veeck’s plans to build up the White Sox during his second stint owning that team.
Veeck did, however, advocate for the pooling of all TV revenue among teams, and he did so at the dawn of baseball on TV, while he was still the owner of the Browns. My, what a coincidence that the cash-poor owner of the second-most popular team in one of the league’s smallest cities would come up with such an idea! No wonder he got shouted down and run out of the game.
But had Veeck prevailed, it’s hard to argue that pooled TV revenue (decades before the current revenue sharing system came into force) wouldn’t have been good for the game. I don’t know how MLB’s owners keep selling the fiction that they’re independent competitors rather than shareholders of a single corporate entity, but baseball would be more competitive if the league spread the wealth among its various franchises.
However, I’m most interested in how the relocation and expansion timeline changes if Veeck moves the Browns to Milwaukee. That keeps the Braves, who were on the verge of insolvency, in Boston and at least delays the establishment of the current iteration of the Baltimore Orioles.
One of the first pieces I wrote for FanGraphs involved a proposal to expand Major League Baseball massively, because expansion and relocation had not kept up with trends in population growth and redistribution in the United States in the second half of the 20th Century. And that’s before relocation and expansion stopped completely. (You should read the piece, it won an award.)
It was then, and is now, a massive missed opportunity that MLB didn’t put a team in the Southeast until 1966, and didn’t add a second team to the region until 1993. If Veeck’s Browns beat the Braves to Milwaukee in 1953, my best guess is the Braves move south, either straight to Atlanta, or to Houston or Miami. If Veeck found Milwaukee as inhospitable as the Braves did in our real timeline, he’d probably be in hot pursuit. Maybe we have a team in Charlotte or New Orleans by now, or more than two teams in Texas, which is what the size and growth of those cities would warrant.
Ultimately, most of Veeck’s innovations as an owner, or owner-promoter, eventually got adopted anyway. I’d certainly rather live in a world in which he was more powerful than he ultimately became, but I don’t think that timeline would be too terribly different from our own.
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Hypothetically, let’s say there was a starting pitcher who was completely average (for a starting pitcher) in every way but one: He literally never throws a pitch outside the strike zone. His stuff is exactly average. His command is exactly average (all misses are misses in the zone). His durability is average (assume no injuries). Assume the team sticks with him in the rotation for the full season no matter what. What do you estimate his full season stat line would be? — Keith
Michael Rosen: Can we say Zac Gallen is, roughly, this sort of pitcher? Blah fastball, four pitches, averageish walk rates. Perhaps the stuff is a little below average, and the command a bit above average. It’s hard to know what exactly to call “average” because most established big league pitchers are doing something exceptional; otherwise, they wouldn’t be big leaguers. A guy like Michael Wacha could maybe be considered to have average stuff and command; he also throws a freaky one-of-a-kind changeup. Chris Bassitt and Seth Lugo could be said to have some claim to “average” stuff; they also throw a billion pitches, and so the rules don’t really apply. (For the purposes of this post, I’m going to also say that the arsenal grades need to be roughly average.)
So let’s pretend it’s Gallen. Or Gallen’s alter ego, Gac Zallen. What if Gac threw every single pitch in the zone? To maximize his chances of getting outs, he’d want to go full random number generator on his pitch selection. Zac throws four-seam fastballs 40% of the time. Gac would throw his fastball 25% of the time, and his changeup 25% of the time, etc. etc. Every pitch is thrown 25% of the time now.
What does “average command” look like for a guy who throws every pitch for a strike? The location models would love Gac Zallen and likely consider him to have the greatest command of all time. For this exercise, let’s assume that each pitch takes on something like a normal distribution of miss distance from the intended target, where the largest miss results in a pitch precisely in the middle of the plate, and the modal location is halfway between there and the target.
Given these assumptions, I believe that Gac Zallen would not be a viable big league pitcher. Even with perfectly random pitch selection, I think that hitters would be able to fix their sights on the middle of the plate, not hunting any particular pitch but instead a fixed location in the hitting zone. Of course, Gac would not walk anybody, but I think he’d probably break the single-season record for home runs allowed. Let’s give Gac 140 innings pitched; I think he’d allow 40 homers. Strikeouts are the toughest consideration here. There would, presumably, be a ton of 0-2 counts. But because batters would be able to rule out balls, they’d be making a ton of contact. I’m inclined to give Gac something like a 17% strikeout rate.
Plugging all that into a FIP calculator spits out something like a 5.50ish FIP, which feels still too low. I’ll bump the ERA projection up from there because the BABIP situation is going to be a catastrophe. So I’ll say Gac Zallen posts a 6.00 ERA if his team is required to start him every five days when he’s healthy and also is not allowed to take him out of the game until, like, five innings have elapsed.
* This article was originally published here
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