Position Players by WAR: Expansion Era
Baseball Prehistory | Deadball Era | Liveball Era | Post-War
Expansion | Free Agency | Modern Era
The Expansion Era saw the Major Leagues grow from 16 teams in 1959 to 24 teams in 1975. The Washington Senators moved to Minnesota in 1960, and MLB decided to expand earlier than planned at risk of losing its anti-trust exemption. The new Washington Senators would become the Texas Rangers in 1972. They were joined by the Los Angeles Angels in the same year. 1962 saw the Houston Colt .45s and the New York Mets join the Majors, followed by the Kansas City Royals, Seattle Pilots (later to become the Milwaukee Brewers), San Diego Padres, and the international addition of the first Canadian Team, the Montreal Expos.
I cut off the Expansion Era at 1975, right before Free Agency took hold, but there were two new teams formed in 1977: the Seattle Mariners, and the Toronto Blue Jays.
If you looked at a map of the MLB in 1950, this is what it would look like:
The same map in 1977 after Expansion was finished would look like this:
The Expansion era also saw a couple rule changes. The pitching mound was lowered in 1968, and the Designated Hitter rule was introduced in 1973. Baseball looks more and more like the modern game. Integration sees the rise of all-time great non-white players like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. Let’s take a look at those players:
Part II:
Who jumps out to you?
Player list (career WAR in parentheses):
References:
- Fangraphs Career WAR Leaders
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Willie Mays was a 10 WAR player 6 times in his career.
Pujols has never had a 10 WAR season.
Incredible.
Willie Mays gets a huge positional bonus for playing CF, and I can only assume he rates quite well defensively on top of playing CF.
are you saying that’s a negative thing?
I think he’s saying that’s why Pujols probably never had a 10 WAR season.
no, he’s saying its easier to post 10 WAR out of CF than 1B, which is fact, especially since by any measure mays was an outstanding fielder and albert is slightly above average at best
or what albert said
Yet their cumulative WAR totals are equal through their age 30 season:
http://www.fangraphs.com/graphsw.aspx?playerid2=1008315&playerid3=1177&playerid4=&playerid5=
Willie played a long time – we’ll see if Albert can keep piling up enormous value for the next 10-12 years.
also, per rWAR, albert has had 1 10+ season and 3 others above 9 whereas mays has 3 each 10+ and 9-10
Very cool. Super. Certainly makes you appreciate Ron Santo and wonder why he isn’t in the Hall of Fame. And it looks like Graig Nettles has a case too.
I’m surprised to see the name of Ron Hansen on that list. I never would have expected it.
Hall of Famers:
List one- Mays, Aaron, Clemente, Kaline, Robinson, Killebrew, Brooks Robinson, McCovey, Williams, Yastrzemski, Santo, Stargell, Torre, Allen
List 2- Morgan, Nettles, Smith, Carew, Jackson, Bench
20 in all
By the way, you’re old links at the top for the last two articles are broken. For some reason, they go to position-player-by-war instead of position-players-by-war in the URL. You might want to fix it.
Also, starting two posts ago (Liveball Era), I began thinking that, if there were to be an “automatic cutoff” for HOF induction, 68 fWAR would be a pretty good spot to do it – what I’m saying is not that no one below that threshold should get in, but rather just that, if a player reaches that level, it should be a no-questions-asked, virutally-unanimous induction. Anyone have any thoughts on that?
Sorry, I’m trying to get someone to fix the links now because I’m out and about.
On the 68 WAR plus note, I can take a look at it later, but it would totally ignore peak performance, and reward long careers accumulating stats. 8 seasons of 8 WAR doesn’t make it, but 23 years of 3 WAR does.
I very much like the idea of a automatic induction level. However, I think 68 WAR is on the low side. Bobby Wallace is above 68 and he shouldn’t be in the hall. Willie Randolph has 69.7 and Darrell Evans has 67.8. Neither of them should be in. There are too many borderline guys that would be included on the list, I think you have to raise it to a level where only the truly GREAT players are being automatically inducted.
If we raise it to 70 there are still too many borderline guys including Graig Nettles, Zach Wheat, Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker. Those players were very good but never had tremendous peaks as Joshua was saying. Even guys like Tony Gwynn, Paul Molitor, and Dave Winfield are borderline guys who would be automatically in the HOF if the cutoff was 70.
I think 75 is the perfect number. There is really only one person over 75 WAR that you can make case against their inclusion into the hall and that is Eddie Murray.
Joe Torre.
Had no idea. So I looked him up on baseball reference:
1971 !!! Yowzers! 1970 no slouch either.
How close did his Hall campaign come ?
Also noticed that Kansas City migrated further west of the Mississippi with expansion. Was this a function of the shifting center of population density ?
Actually that dot just east of the river in the old map is the Cahokia ballclub. The team moved to KC due to Cahokia’s mysterious decline and eventual disappearance in the 14th century.
My guess is that it’s a function of my poor geography and map-making skills. I’ll take another look and make sure it’s right when I get home.
The red dot in map one is the Browns. They went to Balt and the red Phillie dot is the A’s.
Kansas City isn’t on the Mississippi, you are looking at the St. Louis NL and AL team. There was no KC team pre-expansion.
Not quite correct… The A’s were there for a few years.
Your correct, but not in 1950, as the map says.
Always funny to see a guy like Joe Morgan, who will forever be synonymous with anti-Sabremetric thinking due to a certain blog, be such an absolute force when measured in WAR.
The thing that jumped out at me was how well Joe Morgan aged. Pretty sick to do what he did from age 35 to 39, especially given that a major chunk of his value was defense.
No buddy ever said Joe wasn’t the best.
The trouble was he agreed.
Mark Belanger had a near 6 WAR season in a year where he OPSed .662. That’s amazing
Jim Fregosi. Sheesh!
Bill Mazeroski is in the Hall of Fame if i do recall…
yeah, he is
Sorry about that, I’ll fix it and update the graphs. I wonder how I missed that?
well his paltry WAR totals and VC induction kind of have him as a bit of a ‘sleeper’ HoF guy, but i think he earned it for 1960 alone
It was easier to amass huge war totals in the years following expansion becuase the talent pool gets thinned out and the “tails” of performance become more extreme. I think that is evidenced here.
Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with it. And when you think about it, more players means a lower replacement level, and more WAR for the players who were talented. I don’t know if that’s how it actually works, but in theory it would work that way.
Do you think that players from this era should be discounted because of it?
Not discounted, but put in context. Example is the Mays v. Pujols debate at the top of the thread. It also suggests that any arbitrary WAR standard for HoF consideration would make HoF voting biased against players of other eras.
baseball reference has Belanger down for 11.6 offensive WAR and 20.9 defensive WAR. That’s awesome.
He was awesome, as a defender! Easily the best fielding shortstop I ever saw. I’m suprised his oWAR is above zero.