Aaron Judge Would Win a Literal Heart & Hustle Award

Every year since 2005, the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association (MLBPAA) has selected one player for what’s known as the Heart & Hustle Award. The distinction is intended to honor “an active player who demonstrates a passion for the game of baseball and best embodies the values, spirit and traditions of the game.” The idea is to recognize traits such as “determination” and “desire” and other qualities one appreciates in ballplayers but abhors in friends.

These considerations are, of course, typically absent from the pages of FanGraphs dot com. That’s the case for a number of reasons, but mostly because — as critics of the site have long suspected — our mothers never loved us. Indeed, certain employees of FanGraphs never even had mothers, but instead emerged fully formed from an algorithm devised by Billy Beane and Bill James when they co-wrote Moneyball. The author of this post can admit to shrinking merely at the thought of human touch.

No, it is typically the province of FanGraphs not to celebrate baseball’s humanity but to snuff it out wherever it emerges, like a game of compassion whack-a-mole. If a certain corner of the media landscape is to be believed, we have conducted our work with great success. Baseball, in the opinion of some, has been rendered an almost entirely joyless husk of its former self.

But the job isn’t yet complete. Some people appear still to be deriving pleasure from the game. And so, in this publication’s great tradition of joylessness, I present the current document — one in which I endeavor to answer a question that nobody has asked. That question, specifically? Something along these lines: “What if, instead of honoring the most passionate of ballplayers, the Heart & Hustle Award were presented based on the literal size of one’s heart and also a very obscure, technical definition of hustle?”

Let us go then, you and I… to a tedious summary of the author’s process for answering that question.

First, the matter of hearts. While CEO David Appelman ensures that his writers are awash in all manner of data, FanGraphs has hitherto been unable to procure the measurements for all major leaguers’ vital organs. While this probably constitutes a victory for concerns like “privacy” and “basic dignity,” it renders an endeavor such as the present one more difficult. One must arrive at a creative solution. One must, in other words, find a proxy for heart size.

In this case, research of basketball players by David J. Engel, Allan Schwartz, and Shunichi Homma for the American Medical Association’s cardiology journal appears useful. Summarizing the work, Dr. Mark Link writes that the “study of professional basketball players demonstrates what all of us think is rational but has not previously been convincingly shown: Cardiac dimensions are directly and linearly related to body size.”

Specifically, the thing to which cardiac dimensions are linked is what’s known as “body surface area” (or BSA), with a linear relationship existing between the two. In other words: the larger the BSA, the larger the heart. BSA is actually relatively easy to calculate. All one needs is a combination of height and weight. The results are expressed in meters squared. Roughly 1.83 m² is average for an adult male.

So that accounts for the Heart. What about the Hustle, though?

Hustle is a thing both related to but also different than speed. To say that one “has hustled” is to suggest that he has not only moved somewhat quickly but also exhibited some effort while doing so. This creates a bit of a challenge for one endeavoring to measure it. Merely sorting by sprint speed is insufficient. Some players are naturally fast; others less so. Of relevance here isn’t a player’s raw speed, per se, but the efficiency with which he’s applied it. Ideally, it’d be possible to identify baserunning performance over and above a player’s mere “speed talent.”

In this case, I’ve endeavored to do just that. Running a regression, I produced an “expected baserunning runs per 600 plate appearances” for every player (with 300 or more PA) based on his sprint-speed figure. I’ve then subtracted that mark from each player’s actual baserunning runs (again, prorated to 600 PA). The difference — the “residue,” as it were — is (very hypothetically) a measure of how well a player has used his speed, not simply a record of how fast he is or isn’t.

With our two metrics having been established, BSA for Heart and something like “baserunning runs above expected” for Hustle, it is then possible, through the use of z-scores, to arrive at the answer to a question no one ever cared to ask — namely, how would one objectively calculate baseball’s Heart & Hustle Award?

Aaron Judge is huge. He possesses a body surface area of roughly 2.67 m², a figure that’s not only 3.7 standard deviations above the mean in this sample (2.20 m²) but also almost a full standard deviation above the next-biggest player, Evan Gattis (2.56 m², 2.9 standard deviations above mean). All things being equal, there’s good reason to assume that Aaron Judge has baseball’s biggest heart.

As for hustle, that title belongs to Jose Ramirez. His sprint speed of 27.5 feet per second places him just 259th among the 549 players who’ve recorded at least 10 opportunities to be measured. By the algorithm calculated for this study, he “should have” produced 0.5 baserunning runs per 600 plate appearances. In reality, though, he recorded 10.3 runs per 600 PA. Relative to his observed footspeed, Jose Ramirez was the most efficient baserunner in baseball this year (again, among those players to record 300-plus PAs).

Aaron Judge acquitted himself just fine in terms of baserunning runs above expected, though — and, because he’s so big, “just fine” is all that was required to distinguish himself as baseball’s top overall player in terms of both heart and hustle. The Giants’ Brandon Belt is the runner-up to Judge — he was pretty valuable on the bases this year, actually — and Jason Heyward was third.