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I'm conducting a little experiment.

A few days back, I mentioned that, when I was in college, I had a personal project idea - go through the best teams in baseball and look for their best player that I hadn't heard of before (no hall of famers, no players famous for other reasons) and look him up. I would peruse his statistical profile, his photographs, written histories, and media commentary, and give that forgotten star some love, just for the sake of showing appreciation for the rich history of the sport.

I now wonder whether this crew might find such a project, reprised and updated, to be interesting.

So I'm gonna run a little experiment - a one-player pilot post - to see if the group finds such commentary useful and interesting. I may attempt to do a little Dr. D style analysis when it is possible. :)

Here's how the selection process will work. Each time I do one of these posts (if there is interest), I'll randomly select a year/league, find the best team in that league, find the best position player and pitcher who might be forgotten on that team, and look them up. One player per post, so, if y'all find this interesting, a second post would cover the pitcher for this first team, after the position player is taken here.

With that, I rolled six D20s to select a year and flipped a coin for the league. The ranges are 1897 to 2016 just to get 120 choices on the list, and AL/NL only...we'll ignore the Federal League for now.

This first post, I got the 1932 NL - whose best club was the Chicago Cubs (they got swept by the Yankees in four because, at that time, the NL was very thin compared to the AL)

Perusing their WAR leaderboard for position players, I get Billy Herman (HOF 2B known for his stellar defense, he is 19th all time in dWAR for a 2B, and solid hitting).

But, player number two is a man I've never seen on any of my ranked lists in all of the years I've been analyzing statistical history - Riggs Stephenson, LF

Having taken a look at his context-adjusted, Weibull-fitted career numbers, a comparable player would have hit approximately .285/.375/.415 in the modern game, which makes him somewhat comparable to Shin-soo Choo. A major star when he was healthy, though a subpar fielder and a bit prone to low line drives, rather than raw power.

You can easily see why when you look at him swinging a bat.

Look at how low he gets in his followthrough in the mugshot I included. This guy was five foot nothing, a hundred and nothing (a slightly less beefy Choo there again), but maximized his offensive value by getting very low in the box, a la Rickey Henderson, to shrink his strikezone, and by sticking his nose out over the plate to get a reeaaaaaally good look at the ball. One of his many nicknames was "eagle eye" specifically because he had a great batting eye and looked like an eagle honing in on a target. One thing that's unclear to me is whether he would have handled the very high velocity of today's game very well. With his body that scrunched over and his swing plane very low in the zone, he would have been vulnerable to high heat, if a pitcher could hit his tiny strikezone.

He definitely never had Choo's power (180 pounds dripping wet vs. 210 pounds of steroidally enhanced iron muscle will do that), but the hitting approach and height aren't the only similarities. Both Choo and Stephenson had noodle arms. Like...it was a serious problem. The Cubs wisely hid him in left field and accepted that they weren't going to be preventing guys from scoring from second on hits to Riggs. Both Riggs and Choo had many injury problems - in fact similar types of injuries. Lots of leg issues, connective tissue pulls...short, stalky guys often suffer from those sorts of issues. Stephenson was a -5 to -10 run defensive left fielder in his prime. He was bad enough that his first manager, Tris Speaker (one of the best defensive players of all time) got so annoyed with it that he fired Riggs. Poor guy got Hargroved. :\ Just like Choo. He also had modest speed even as a youngster (though he was reasonable smart on the bases) and was downright sluggish by 1932...just like Choo).

Personality-wise, Stephenson was viewed throughout the game as a gentleman's gentleman, a real professional, and extremely humble. He grew up in the town of "what town"...that is to say...the middle of nowhere, Alabama, and spent his childhood chasing his father around on his pony-express-style mail delivery routes through the countryside, so his expectations were pretty low and simple and his exposure to Chicago was never particularly comfortable to him, but you'd never have known it. He was too polite to complain.

In 1932, Stephenson was having his last "big" season, after enjoying seven years of job security with the Cubs. His eighth came on a pennant winner with him playing a central role lengthening the lineup (he tended to hit fifth at the end of his career). In the world series that year, he went eight for eighteen...all but one hit a single. The Cubs did a reasonable job offensively against the Yankees, but their pitching completely imploded - not that that is surprising given who they were facing. Yowza.

Anyway, I think stuff like this is endlessly fascinating, but it's not for everyone. What do we think...is this the kind of thing that the denizens would enjoy on a recurring basis?