On the one hand, you had infielders who defied gravity, power pitchers out of Marvel Comics, a postseason for the ages, and stolen bases dominating the game at a level they never did before or would again.
On the other hand, you had collusion by greedy owners watering down the game, recreational drug use wrecking careers and lives, and a growing realization our national pastime was losing ground to football.
Fortunately, Bill James was still producing annual Abstracts to lend his analytical perspective and a touch of humor to the situation.
The pleasure of reading the Baseball Abstracts years after the games are forgotten and their heroes faded into dust can be deeply nostalgic for those of us who still hear the echoes. This is especially the case in 1986, which saw the New York Mets plow through the regular season like a Terminator T-800 for the only time in its six-decade-plus history.
James points out this was very much a group effort. Like the championship Detroit Tigers of 1984, none of the Mets stars had career years in 1986. Rather, they played at a consistently high level and relied on key contributions from a well-stocked bench:
Probably no team in the history of baseball has been above average at every position – but the Mets were as close as any team has come in maybe twenty years.
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| James pushes back on criticism leveled at Darryl Strawberry, his pick for best right fielder in the National League: "Over the last three years Strawberry has a .232 average with the bases empty, but .292 with men on base. A beautiful, graceful athlete, he should not be judged as a player by what anybody imagines to be his potential." Image from https://news.sportslogos.net/2016/02/03/new-york-mets-will-wear-1986-throwbacks-multiple-times-this-season/baseball/ |
While the position players included consistent All-Stars Keith Hernandez, Darryl Strawberry, and Gary Carter, the strength of the Mets in 1986 remained their pitching. While the best pitcher, Dwight Gooden, fell off his ridiculous peak from the year before, Gooden and two other Mets starters (Bobby Ojeda and Ron Darling) make James’s National League top five.
The secret to enjoying the 1987 Abstract has a lot to do with a different approach James calls out in his introduction. “I have always been interested in issues, not in details,” he writes. In past Abstracts, this meant a lot of digressions on favorite hobby horses and bugaboos when it came time to discuss team performances. In this Abstract, he devotes two pages detailing why each team performed the way they did in 1986 and what can be expected in 1987.
This emphasis on results makes for a more grounded and engaging result. James’s take on the falloff of the St. Louis Cardinals focuses on one player’s departure:
I question in particular the decision to let [catcher] Darrell Porter go and acquire Mike Heath. Porter isn’t as old as people think; he just came up young and has had so many ups and downs that he seems old. Even hitting .221 in 1985, Porter was an effective player, a capable handler of pitchers with an excellent secondary average. Mike Heath is only three years younger, is suspect as a handler of pitchers, has never hit well in artificial turf and doesn’t match Porter in power or strike zone judgment.
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| "Fernando-mania" had come and gone five years before, but Fernando Valenzuela of the Los Angeles Dodgers remained a premier pitcher, behind only Houston's Mike Scott in the National League by James's reckoning. His 21-11 record included 20 complete games. Image from https://www.truebluela.com/2020/5/11/21254632/greatest-seasons-in-dodgers-history-fernando-valenzuela-1986-mlb-news |
With another National League contender in decline, the Chicago Cubs, James is more brutal:
The Cub outfield was easily the worst in baseball. I mean, you think that any team could come up with one outfielder who is either a good hitter or a good fielder. Among the Cub outfielders, all were below average both offensively and defensively. The best Cub outfielder was Keith Moreland – the best, on the basis of the fact that he does have some offensive strengths and some defensive strengths. To be honest, he’s pretty terrible.
These takes are more sweeping than justified but sensible in the main. Also, they underscore a recurring theme, that a single weakness can undercut a lot of strength when it comes to taking championships.
James does spend time on trends such as the growing dominance of base-stealing and the validity of Game Winning RBI as a stat. (James acknowledges the value of the latter, though over time it has been discontinued as an official statistic.) A lengthy, absorbing section analyzes all-time best rookie seasons, by players as well as by years.
He questions the prominence of wins in measuring pitching success, noting that a lot of timely hitting goes into them: “Some people put a lot of stock in a won-lost record. Over a period of years, you should. In one year, you can’t.”
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| Among high-impact stars called out by James for contagious intensity in his 1987 Abstract is Joe Carter of the Cleveland Indians. "Carter personified the in your face attitude of a player who didn't intend to accept any role except lead dog in the pack," James writes. Image from https://x.com/JDaniel2033/status/1832105250011881939 |
There is also a lengthy section that ranks key statistics of the game by their relative importance, which speaks to James the insatiable sabermetrician. It’s insightful if heavy material I found myself skimming through. “Earned Run Average is the only basic statistic in baseball that does a reasonably accurate job of summing up the total effectiveness of the player,” he writes, thus putting it first on his list.
Another section in the back is more difficult to fathom, titled: “Measuring Runs Created: The Value Added Approach.” If you thought nerds never flexed their muscles like stereotypical beach boys, think again:
Observe that the 1000 to 0100 transition causes outs to decrease, and so is impossible according to baseball rules. Nevertheless, there is nothing stopping our evaluating this contrafactual state transition, and indeed there is a necessity to do this to properly evaluate the error.
It must be added that this section is attributed not to James but someone named Gary R. Skoog. But James chose to include it without even an introductory paragraph of explanation so must share the blame.
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| Nearly a decade before he became the butt of a Seinfeld meme ("What the hell did you trade Jay Buhner for?"), Ken Phelps of the Seattle Mariners was the focus of his own All-Star team assembled by James of players who "get stuck with a label - the label of their limits" but had the potential to break out on the right team. Image from https://tht.fangraphs.com/cooperstown-confidential-seinfeld-sabermetrics-and-ken-phelps/ |
James’s main foibles in past Abstracts remain in effect here, like a tendency to pick on people. He calls out a couple of Mets outfielders for ugliness, something you can’t do now and probably shouldn’t have done then. He also gloats over the end of Omar Moreno’s career. Moreno was a decent player for a number of years but basically a slap hitter and speedster who annoyed James for not drawing enough walks.
But his tighter focus on team performance, along with his signature ability to make informed judgments off statistical data, give the 1987 Baseball Abstract enhanced readability. So does the way he breaks off to offer short meta-style think pieces, like whether minor-leaguers get rushed to the majors too quickly, or if good teams have a greater tendency to win one-run games. There is a funny section calling out absurdities in the scoring of the 1986 postseason games, and a funnier one presenting a mock boardroom meeting of the San Diego Padres, which had displayed greater ineptitude than normal that season.
The role of the manager comes up a lot. In 1986, the American League Manager of the Year was John McNamara of the Boston Red Sox, a solid if not spectacular skipper who would come under much scrutiny in the World Series. For James, McNamara’s success was a matter of not getting in his team’s way, like letting Wade Boggs with his .450 on-base percentage hit leadoff. An easy call, James says.
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| Bobby Valentine's brash style as manager of the Texas Rangers rubbed many the wrong way. James, however, was impressed: "There are few people in any business who think for themselves and have the damnable arrogance to act on their own judgment - and whatever the business, you can find those people at the top of the form charts." Image from https://rangerstoday.com/t-r-s-memoirs-the-bobby-valentine-era-part-ii-hope-fades-and-v-ball-comes-to-an-end/ |
On the other hand, there was Earl Weaver of the Baltimore Orioles, a hero of James and other sabermatricians for the way he played his bench and valued power and glovework over everything else. The Orioles cratered in 1986, and James sees Weaver’s tinkering as a major culprit:
In general, I prefer a manager who attacks problems to one who waits for them to solve themselves – but in 1986, Earl Weaver attacked the Orioles’ problems and made them worse, while John McNamara successfully waited out the Red Sox’s problems.
A more positive surprise among managers in 1986 was the only player-manager, Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds were solid in 1986, and James sees Rose as a difference-maker by deploying a young core which included future stars like Eric Davis, Barry Larkin, and Mario Soto. An emotional leader, James says of Rose, but sound, too. “He gives the kids a chance to show something, with an understanding that they are expected to show him something,” James writes.
There were a lot of young kids with big futures that season. The 1986 Abstract was the first time James had cause to mention Barry Bonds, Greg Maddux, and Bo Jackson, whose emergence prompts a digression on how soon is too soon in calling rookies up. There were also wizened veterans, many of them pitchers like Nolan Ryan and Don Sutton who had been winning in the majors since the 1960s and were still winning.
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| James compares the starting Toronto Blue Jays outfield of George Bell (left), Lloyd Moseby (center) and Jesse Barfield (right) to great starting outfields of baseball's past. "If they're better in 1987 than they were in 1986, you'll have to say that they're as good as any outfield as ever been." Bell would be the American League MVP in 1987. Image from https://calltothepen.com/2022/02/02/5-greatest-outfielders-toronto-blue-jays-history/ |
Another old veteran, Phil Niekro, was let go by the New York Yankees at the start of the 1986 season despite two solid seasons culminated by his 300th career win. Niekro went on to pitch another solid season for the Cleveland Indians, while a lack of reliable starting pitching sunk the Yankees, despite them having one of the best lineups in baseball. James’s take is delicious:
My feeling is that if you release a 16-game winner, you deserve to come up short of starting pitching and the odds are overwhelming that you’re going to get what you deserve.
The Yankees in 1986 were led by on-base leaders Rickey Henderson and Don Mattingly, the latter being a contender for the American League Most Valuable Player title, which went to Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemens. James spends a lot of time justifying this selection and comparing it to another MVP race in 1978 between a position player, Boston’s Jim Rice, and a pitcher, the Yankees’s Ron Guidry.
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