Brad's Brawn
What SS power means, historically

Miller has 78 games under his belt now as a Major-League baller, and I'm not sure whether everyone really appreciates how impressive it has been.  I mentioned some of it in the morning summary, but I thought we might wanna break it out and talk a little more about it.

Miller’s career line (78 games total): .266/.318/.434/.751, 11 2B, 6 3B, 10 HR, 54 K / 24 BB in 316 ABs, with 4 multi-HR games, 5/8 in steals.

Don’t want to make too much hay off of half a season, but unless Miller pulls a swan-dive like Ackley… We all think he looks pretty good for maintaining a line somewhat like this one, right?  Some significant ideas to take from that line:

1) Miller is now the ALL-TIME leader in multi-homer games for lefty shortstops.  They’ve been playing the game for over a century, and it took Miller exactly half a season to set the record. Only 21 lefties in history even have ONE multi-homer game, and just 7 have multiple games. Miller holds spot #1 all by himself.

2) Miller’s per-162 averages are 23 doubles, 12 triples and 21 HRs. Number of lefty SS to ever hit even 15 HR and 5 triples in a season: FOUR. Dick McAuliffe, Stephen Drew, Arky Vaughn and Solly Hemus.  The only one to do it in the last 50 years is Drew.  Miller’s gonna be #2. Vaughn is a HOFer, McAuliffe was a 37 WAR player, Hemus was “only” a 25 WAR one, and Drew is the worst of the bunch.

3) Even among shortstops as a whole, that line’s impressive.  9 shortstops EVER have hit 20 HRs and had 10 triples in a season: Banks, Rollins, Nomar, Yount, Drew, Carlos Guillen, a couple of Roaring 20s players (Wright and Jackson), and Zoilo Versalles, who won an MVP in 1965 and then fell off the earth. If you drop it to 8 triples then Tulo and Jeter and Michael Young show up (among others), but it’s still fewer than 20 players.  Speed and power from the SS position is rare, and as we’ve seen Miller seems to have both.

4) Miller’s speed is pretty spectacular, but his steals are lacking. Since 1975, here are the players who have 10 or fewer steals, and 10 or more triples (as Miller’s pro-rated line would have him at): Tyler Colvin, Stephen Drew, Kelly Johnson, Vlad, Al Martin, Steven Finley, Mike Devereaux, Ruben Sierra, Bobby Bonilla (!), Harold Baines, Darrell Porter, Jim Rice. It’s hard to have the speed to get all those triples and not steal bases along the way. To go back before ’75, Roberto Clemente used to do it all the time.  He had 9 years with double-digit triple totals, and just one year with double-digit steals. I would take Clemente’s power totals (29 / 11 / 16 per 162) for Brad Miller, without question. That's 56 XBH per 162. Let other people steal bags. ;-)

5) Speaking of extra bases Dept. Miller’s 162-game power totals (again, way too early for this, but…): 56 extra-base hits, or the same as Clemente. It’s not exactly Nomar (74 per 162 career) or Tulo (68) or Rollins (64).  But the next tier? Tejada finished his career at 60 XBH per 162, with a couple of peak years well above that.  Ripken had 58.  JJ Hardy is at 55 with his decline phase still to come. Yount had 54, and Derek Sanderson Jeter is at 53 career. 55 XBH per 162 is pretty magical for a SS.  Miller’s got that magic right now.

6) Back to lefty shortstops: Left handed SS (3000+ career PAs), OPS over .600 (not .800 but just .600): Ten.

Total SS, same minimums: One Hundred Sixty Seven. Just BEING a left-handed SS makes Miller a bizarre anomaly. A modern day Arky Vaughn if he's completely successful.  BTW, Arky leads all LH shortstops who ever played in HRs with 96. Stephen Drew should be the first lefty SS to hit 100 HRs, probably this year. Miller, with a similar career length to Drew, would be aiming to be the second.

Lots of numbers, not a lot of career yet – but for the TL;DR crowd: Miller has a chance to be very, very special.  And thankfully for the fortunes of the 2014 Mariners, he’s already started.

~G

Blog: 

Comments

1

After a bit of checking, it turns out that Cano (204 HR) is only 64 behind Joe Morgan for the all-time HR lead for left-handed second basemen, which he ought to smash through in the next three years and he also ought to cruise into second place overall by passing Rogers Hornsby's 301 (he needs 97).
That would leave him behind only Jeff Kent (377), and would need to average 17.3 per year over 10 years to get there.

2

G,
I've written before that 50 XB hits is the magic number. Teams that get 4 guys to that number are offensively impressive, almost always. Getting a SS there means that you have 8 positions that are generally much more bat-first to get 4 50 XB totals. That's still hard, but doable.
Cano regularly gets to 70! Seager's been north of 50, two years running. That's three guys.
Ackley? Smoak (never been to 40?) Hart/LoMo platoon?
4x50 is a magic number. We will be in the ballpark!

3

Cano is already the all-time leader in SLG for a LH-hitting 2b with .505.
Hornsby and Kent are the only other 2b with career SLG over .500.
This could be quite the historic middle infield.

4

We'll mosh off just a single datapoint there.  Not to disrespect its brethren datapoints :- )

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