There were 6 future HOF pitchers who threw at least 191 innings in the NL in '65, Morgan's rookie year. Koufax, Marichal, Drysdale, bunning, Gibson AND Robin Roberts. Sheesh. Gibson, BTW, had a 1.16 WHIP, whic was the highest in that group!
Felix, Cliff Lee, Price, C.C., and Verlander is a pretty dang impresive group...but not quite of the same level. At least Ackley won't have to hit against one of those guys!
And, for all the younger guys here....a lesson in guys who you might not have heard much of but were great back in the day. Check out the numbers put up by Morgan, Jimmy Wynn and Rusty Staub in the Astrodome from '65-'67 & '68.
Dang, those were great players.
Anyway, Ackley, during the 2nd half of 2011 is gong to put up Morgan type numbers...before he became the next level (greatest 2B ever) Morgan. .270-.370-.400 Bank it.
Some might not realize that before Joe Morgan was the #3 hitter for the Big Red Machine of the 1970's, he was a terrific young second baseman for the 1960's Astros. Jim Bouton played with him in 1969 and Joe is in his Ball Four.
Moe, audaciously, compared Joe to Ackley's targets:
Joe Morgan, Rookie year, 1965: .271-.373-.418 14 HR's
Joe Morgan, Third year, 1967: .275-.378-.411 6 HR's
Joe Morgan, Sixth Year, 1970: .268-.383-.396 8 HR's
Composite (if PA's were equal during each season..they weren't..but it is close)
.270-.378-.410 9 HR's
What do you think? Does Ackley better that during his rookie or 2nd season? I'm willing to be that during the post-All Star portion of 2011 Ackley's numbers aren't too far from that.
Will he be another Morgan? Nope (Hey, Morgan had 6 seasons in a row where his OBP ranged from .406-.466! And he hit more than 20 taters in all but one of those seasons. And he won 5 Gold Gloves in those 6 seasons. And he won two MVP's!!!) Ackley won't be Morgan. But he'll be pretty dang good...pretty dang soon.
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I kind of chuckled and waved ths off, but the laugh was on me. Sez Dr. D:
Of course,.Joe Morgan's .270/./320/.420 in 1965 Was the equivalent of 310/420/500 in Cleveland or Milwaukee these days. :- )
Translated, Little Joe hit 20-38 homers in twelve different seasons...
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[As to your broad point, yes] Morgan is probably an example of a plateau-consolidate player. He leaped a big plateau at 28, and leaped another big one at 31.
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So Moe politely axs,
Good point. It took a special hitter to mash in the Astrodome (see Jimmy Wynn). How much more detrimental was the Astrodome to hitters than Safeco is?
and I still think the raw numbers of .270-.370-.410 are reachable in the 2nd half of Ackley's rookie season.
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Of course, it's not just the Dome... the big difference is that This was the NL in 1965, Sandy Koufax, Juan Marichal, Bob Gibson, strike zone to the shoulders, high mound, etc and all the trimmings.
And, yeah, the Astrodome had a batting index of 92 back then; it wasn't built for baseball, any better than the Kingdome was.
Until the last two years, Safeco's batting index was 97% of normal -- which I always pointed to as an obvious demonstration of the imprecision of park factors. It's 93 the last couple years. But the point is, the Astrodome was essentially more of an airport even than Safeco is.
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=== Just the Fa'ax, Ma'am ===
So we looks it up, and .... a batting line .260/.320/.360, in Houston 1965, would have contributed to a .500 season by the Astros. That was about the 100 OPS+. If the Astros had hit .260/.320/.360, and had average pitching, they'd have been about .500.
The 2010 M's would have had to hit ... what? ... about .260/.320/.400.
Whaaaat?! No. Bloomin'. Way. (The M's pitching staff was exactly 100 ERA+ and allowed that batting line; feel free to adjust for unearned run delta-to-average and etc.)
Now that I look it up, I'm flabbergasted by how similar the raw 2010 Safeco 100 OPS+ numbers are to the 1965 Astro numbers.
There's got to be something weird here. You know that scoring in the AL in 2010, even in Safeco, isn't comparable to hitting Bob Gibson in the NL in 1965.
The M's pitching was 100, and they allowed 698 runs... the Astros' hitting was 96, and they scored 612.
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Am a little bleary-eyed at the moment, a little work-punch-drunk :- ) so we shrug it off to you guys as an interesting little puzzle. Why are Safeco's 100 OPS+ numbers showing up as so similar to the Astrodome 1965 ?!
First suspicion here is: Park factors (driving OPS+) are "flexed" far too much to explain away lousy seasons by the home players. Seems to me, intuitively, that a lot of times ---- > pitchers have a terrible season together and boom, we figure it's a hitters' park that year...
I realize of course that the road performance is supposed to be the "control" data, but that's not always fair. Lots of players perform differently home and road.
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At any rate: if there's a petition to move Safeco's home plate out towards the fences, SSI is second blog in. Pitcher-friendly home park is good. Warped home park is bad.
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BABVA,
Dr D
Comments
Only one player hit over .290. One player. Yaz, who led the league with a .301 AVG.
In 1968-69, Bob Gibson had 11.9 and 11.0 wins above replacement -- everybody else was 7 and down, like today.
Gibson's 11 WAR got him #30 in the MVP voting.
Bob Gibson was incredible. I never saw him in person but watched the Cards on Saturdays once in a while. Did you know he was a Globetrotter? And only 6'1". Chalk one for the under 6'3" and able to pitch with the big boys.
Okay, do you remember what year they lowered the mound?
I was at game 1 of the world series that year. I was only 5 so I don't remember the details of the game but I can say I was there when Gibson struck out 17. So I got that going for me.
1969, I believe, as a reaction against the absolute dominance of pitching in 1968, highlighted by Gibson's 1.12 ERA for an entire season.
DaddyO is right...mound went down in '69. And Gibson's dominance (along with Denny McClain's 31-win AL performance) probably was the deciding factor...but pitchers had dominated for a few years, already. NL league ERA went from 2.99 in '68 to 3.59 in '69. AL numbers were nearly identical, going from 2.98 in '68 to 3.62 in '69. gibson was dominant in both years. But his ERA rose more than the league increase. Going from 1.12 to 2.18. McClain went from 1.96 in his 31-win '68 to 2.80 in an excellent '69 (CY's in both years). So it looks like the lowering of the mound actually effected the dominant pitchers more than the league average guys.
To get an idea of how dominant Gibson was in '68 check this out. He appeared in 34 games, starting them all. He threw 28 complete games with 13 shutouts!!!!! In those 34 appearances he threw 304 innings. He averaged 8.94 innings every start. In essence, he averaged a complete game every time out. The Card's offense was a bit tepid. With a 1.12 ERA and a .853 WHIP AND 13 shutouts, he was still only 22-9. Assuming he won all the shutouts, he was 9 and 9 in his other 21 starts. 9 and 9 with an estimated ERA of 1.85 (or thereabouts) in those 21 starts. Sheesh!
Oh...in '68, McClain only threw 336 innings with a WHIP of .905! Can you say K-O-U-F-A-X?
The stuff I cut my teeth on!
That is what I was thinking. It is a shame that so many today think the new guys somehow have a patent on great. I loved watching those guys pitch growing up. And yes, Gibson was special.
Yabba-dabba-doo!
Though growing up my family did not have the means to see a lot of games, despite tickets at $1.50 for bleacher seats, $3.00 for loge level, and $4.50 or so for field level, I had the privilege of seeing in person these all-time great pitchers of that era and a little later:
Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Don Sutton, Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry, Whitey Ford, Nolan Ryan, Steve Carlton, Tom Seaver, Phil Niekro, Bert Blyleven, Ferguson Jenkins, Jim Bunning, Luis Tiant, Tommy John, Jerry Koosman, and Frank Tanana,
all of which (except Koufax due to a shortened career) rank in the top 60 all time in career WAR. In regards to the baseball world, I have been truly blessed.
Years agon, in one of the first Old-Timer games that coincided with the All-Star Break, Gibson gave up a homerun to Bill Mazeroski (you guys will remember the shortened fences for those games). The next year, same game, and facing Maz for the first time since that homerun, Gibson plunked him with the first pitch!
Now that's a competitor.
You're acting like .260/.320/.400 and .260/.320/.360 are the same. They're not. They're about 50 runs different over the course of a full season for a team. That's not a minor difference. And yes...if the Astros in 1965 had hit for a 100 OPS+ they'd have scored about 50 runs fewer than the Mariners pitchers gave up in 2010.
Guys, completely enjoying those stories - THANKS. I heard Gibson interviewed when Barry Bonds was hitting all his homers. When asked how he would pitch to Bond with all the hardware on his left arm/elbow, Gibson just said, "Hit him!"
To boot, Gibson was a pretty decent hitter (.209 lifetime, 24 career home runs), and he was such a good baserunner he was used on occasion as a pinch runner. 1965-69 he totalled 11 stolen bases.
but I still thought that there was more than 0.3 runs per game difference. We're talking about one of the great moon surfaces in MLB run-scoring history :- )
Safeco last year was only +0.3 over the worst park in the 1960's NL? Is that how you had it pictured?
Safeco played unusually tough last year because the average temperature at gametime was abotu 1.5 C cooler than normal, the average wind speed was abotu 6 mph faster than normal, and the average relative humidity was 8% higher than normal. None of those may sound like a lot, but what it means is that all of the weather factors that make the ball fly some heavily at the Safe were worse than normal. 2010 and 2009 for that matter both played pretty anti-hitter at the Safe. And oh BTW, the offensive environment of 1965 wasn't THAT different than the offensive environment of 2010 as a whole. The NL in '65 was heading toward the big tank...but it wasn't there yet. For example, league batting average in the NL through that period went something like .267/.262/.251/.239/.244/.260 (65-70). The extreme pitcher/fielder spike of the late 60s was pretty short lived.
And the extreme hitter years of the 90s/2000s are over...2010 played about average by MLB scoring standards all time.
...you could legitimately question the validity of one-year (or even three-year-averaged) park factors...you know, Doc, that I have essentially zero faith in ratio park factors...I believe the correct approach is to view parks as adding or subtracting X number of runs per game per side...not some ratio of the number of runs per game per side, because the ratio approach assumes that the park's influence is dependent on the scoring context...which is a blatantly stupid assumption. Coors field's park dimensions and altitude, weather conditions etc are not going to have a different impact on run scoring as run scoring increases.