All-Time All-Mariner Roster: Third Base
Derek:
I wanted Edgar, I really did. I was prepared to refute my own Olerud-Davis arguments on playing time and argue that Edgar’s 140-some games at third in 1991 were so good offensively they overcame any defensive edge.
But I can’t have Edgar at DH and at 3B, which means that I have to pick. And the gap between Edgar at DH and the second-best DH is much greater than he gap between Edgar 1991/1992 and Beltre 07.
There are other reasonable candidates here if you’re looking just at raw offensive stats. Purely on offense, I’d rate the non-Edgars as
Presley 85, .275/.324/.484
Beltre 07, .276/.319/.484
Blowers 93, .280/.357/.475
There’s maybe ten runs of difference between those. And I see Beltre’s defensive advantage easily making up the slight gap between him and Presley, leaving Blowers way back.
It’s interesting as I look at my giant sheet of Mariner position-seasons… Besides Edgar, Adrian has two of the top four Mariner 3B-seasons (06,07) and his 05 isn’t quite top ten. Even with Edgar, he gets in the top ten twice. And it’s not as if he’s set the team on fire, as much as I’ve been a fan. It’s that unlike, say, shortstop, where you get to pick Alex and there’s some nice Omar seasons in there too, or centerfield where we got Griffey Jr. and some wildly (and previously discussed) underappreciated Mike Cameron seasons, third base has really been weak for the M’s historically. You get a few years of Mostly Edgar and then what? Besides Beltre, the third basemen the M’s have had for more than a season or two are few: Jim Presley, Blowers, Russ Davis, Dave Elder, Bill Stein…
Anyway. Beltre 07.
Dave:
Since I like to talk about defense a lot, this gives me a chance to do it again, so I’m taking it.
Even though we’re not going to consider Edgar here because he’s got the DH spot locked up, let’s compare 1992 Edgar (his best offensive season at 3B) to 2007 Beltre.
1992 Edgar hit .343/.404/.544 in 592 plate appearances. Obviously, it was a pretty awesome season – he won a batting title, was 5th in the league in OBP, and 2nd in the league in SLG. He was a great hitter, and his offensive contributions were worth about 47 runs over an average hitter that year. That’s a lot of runs.
2007 Beltre hit .276/.319/.482 in 639 plate appearances. It wasn’t nearly as impressive of an offensive season. He didn’t finish anywhere near the league lead in BA, OBP, or SLG, and he was only a slightly better than average hitter. His offensive contributions were worth about 9 runs over an average hitter. That’s not that many.
So, the offensive difference between 1992 Edgar and 2007 Beltre was about 38 runs or so. That’s a big gap.
However, clearly ,the two weren’t equal caliber defensively. We know that the boundaries of defensive value generally fall in the +20 to -20 range, where teams will almost always take a guy who is worse than -20 runs at a position and move him to an easier spot, and very few players get miscast defensively at a position where they can put up a better than +20 mark. We know Beltre’s good with the glove, and the advanced defensive metrics we have now tell us that his defense is worth something like 10 runs a year, which sounds about right since he’s good but not the absolute best. So, let’s say we give ’07 Beltre a +10 credit for his defense.
What do we do with 1992 Edgar’s defense? We don’t have good defensive data for way back when, and as we discussed in the Olerud/Davis argument, even the proxies such as playing time and such don’t really give us an idea for how well a player handled the position. However, I think we all watched Edgar play the field and would agree that it’s pretty likely that he didn’t do particularly well at helping his pitchers. I love Edgar, but he wasn’t much to write home about defensively.
So, just for sake of argument, lets say that Edgar was the Manny Ramirez of third baseman in 1992 – a guy who should have been DH’ing and had no real business playing the field. If we give him the -20 penalty, then combined with Beltre’s +10, we’d have closed almost the entire gap between their offensive seasons. If that assumption was true, the “disappointment” that everyone likes to write about as an underachiever would be nearly as valuable as the guy who was the 3rd best hitter in the league.
I’m not saying Edgar was that bad, but I wanted to highlight again just how much defense can effect value. A really good hitter who plays really terrible defense is worth about the same as an average hitter who plays good defense. Repeat this to yourself until you believe it, because it’s a vitally important concept to understand.
So, yea, ’07 Beltre gets the nod here. Edgar will get his time when we do the DH post, and the rest of the candidates can’t hold a candle to Beltre’s value. Just like with Mike Cameron, I’m afraid that Beltre’s always going to be unappreciated until he’s gone, because people just don’t value the things he does well correctly.
Derek:
I understand why more fans don’t evaluate defense enough to appreciate the contributions of a Beltre, though. For one, it’s almost never covered, and when it is, it’s covered badly. When Richie Sexson is described as being a good or even solid defensive first baseman, what does it mean to say that Beltre’s outstanding?
Moreover, we’re constantly given information about a hitter’s triple-crown stats. Every time they’re up, you get at least their average, and so everyone understands a .200 batting average is bad and a .300 is good, and so on, and the stat itself is easily comprehendable. Even OBP makes sense (I actually find that when I explain batting average to baseball newcomers, people are sometimes surprised to find it doesn’t include walks).
So it’s easy for a casual fan to evaluate the relative hitting value of players, while defensively you have to work a lot harder, and unlike with hitting statistics, you can’t work backwards.
Take UZR, for instance. You can’t reverse-engineer it, and it’s too complicated for easy explanation. To use it, you wind up saying “Ichiro is ten runs better in right field than the average player over a full season” and leaving it at that.
So Beltre’s 07 is predictably underappreciated: his counting stats didn’t look that great, he’s punished as a RH in Safeco Field, and while his defense is acknowledged as good, everyone’s fed the same line about every other player.
I don’t know that there’s an easy solution to this. Do you remember at one of the feeds, someone asked if there was a stat that incorporated defense into hitting statistics? We ended up pointing them towards some of the overall player measures, but I really wish in cases like this that there was some readily accepted shorthand we could use, like
“Beltre hit x/y/z, which is about n runs better than an average third baseman, and he took away n hits with the glove, so credit those to his line and you can think of him as a total a/b/c player.”
And a large part of this problem comes from almost all games being broadcast by baseball teams themselves acting as PR for the franchise, which in turn means that educating the fan base on how much worse Betancourt is getting defensively each year won’t ever be done.
I do wish though that among all the chatter we could at least get some of that commentary on the standout players. All Dave Sims has to say after a nice Beltre play (and he won’t have to wait long) is “You know, people who study this, the serious statheads, they figure that Beltre saves ten, twenty runs a season with his glove over an average third baseman.”
And then Blowers can say “No question about it, Beltre is one of the best defensive third basemen in the game right now…” or whatever.
Anyway, I’ve gone off on a tangent. I agree with you entirely: Beltre’s defense puts him at the top.
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I love Beltre, but objectively speaking, it looks like Edgar’s 1992 season was a little better overall. Why not have Edgar seasons at both 3rd and DH? It’s not like these two versions of Edgar are actually going to be on the same team. If Alex had stayed with the Ms and moved to 3rd, you’d have to have him as having the best seasons at both short and 3rd.
Speaking of Blowers and Sims, are you going to have a Mariners’ all-time announcer?
Blowers and his signature “No question about it” have got to be given strong consideration.
I LOVE the focus on defense. It would have been way too easy to make Edgar the choice here based on the fact he’s the best hitter to play third for us, so I appreciate even aside from the DH-default cop-out that you made it much more interesting by comparing AB to Presley and Mike “NQAI” Blowers. How is Beltre’s defensive advantage over those two mitigated or affected (if at all) by playing home games on grass instead of the the cartilage-devouring monstrosity that was the Kingdome turf?
Speaking of Blowers and Sims, are you going to have a Mariners’ all-time announcer?
Since the announcer isn’t on the roster, I would guess not, but really there isn’t anything to debate there anyway.
[ot]
I would have thought that Presley’s year would compare better to the league average than it did.
AVG OBP SLG OPS+
Presley 85 .275 .324 .484 118
85 LG AVG .261 .327 .406
Beltre 07 .276 .319 .482 112
07 LG AVG .271 .338 .423
In that light, Presley’s is actually a better offensive year, but I agree that Beltre’s + defense (though, I don’t know if is a whole 10 runs) gives him the nod.
You know, that was all perfectly aligned….Grr.
’92 was the year Edgar messed up his shoulder. He had an impingement on the top of the shoulder, and at one point messed it up further diving on the Kingdome cement. Apparently it hurt all year to throw (even with several cortisone shots) and only began to affect his swing at the end of the season, ending in surgery in September.
what are they up to, 120? 130? alltime?
I don’t think this is all that hard to do. I think it would just depend on how you want to scale the numbers. First thing that comes to mind to me is to keep the relative ratios of AVG/OBP/SLG constant and just move them up/down until you end up with a offense value that equals the offense+defense value.
You could even factor in the positional bonuses as well to compare across positions. So Beltre ’07 goes up 15 runs. 10 for the glove, 5 for playing 3B. Using wOBA, it would move Beltre’s line from .276/.319/.482 to .295/.341/.516 (non park adjusted)
I don’t quite get it…basically, to make the argument that Beltre’s 2007 was better than Edgar’s 1992, you have to make the assumption that Edgar was the Manny Ramirez of 3rd basemen. Sure that is is the realm of all possibility, but how likely is that? I’m all for trying to understand how defense affects the total value of a player; I agree that it is important. But it sure seems like you guys have to reach here. Your argument is to make the worst possible assumption about Edgar’s defense. Perhaps what is missing is the discussion of how much Safeco hurts Beltre, essentially how many more runs would Beltre be worth hitting in a hitting environment comparable to Edgar’s. That will bring the offensive differences a bit closer, at which point I think the defense argument will become more valid.
M’s Fan in Red Sox Nation
I think Dave and Derek were making the argument for argument’s sake. Because they are going to put Edgar in at DH, they can’t use him at 3B also. They drew up the rules so they can apply them however they like.
While I agree with Derek that defense is harder for fans to quantitatively evaluate, I don’t understand how the “Sexson is good” bit passed the smell test with the PR folks. Even a casual fan can see he’s terrible with the glove. He’s slow coming off the base if he’s holding a runner on, and -whether it’s his height or what- he can’t get his glove down to stop a grounder. Just can’t. Balls hit three feet to this right routinely go under his glove and into the outfield as he does a shoulder roll in the dirt. The ball comes off the bat and you think “that’s an out” only to remember “oh, crap, Sexson’s over there”. Of course, the local media commentators describe Cairo as one of the best defensive 1Bs in the league, so I guess Derek has a point after all.
Beltre on the other hand clearly makes lots of unexpected plays. (As did Cameron when he was here.) By “unexpected” I don’t mean “spectacular” a la Derek Jeter (or Raul Ibanez), whereby a routine play for anyone else is a near run thing making Web Gems on Baseball Tonight. “Unexpected” is the ball coming off the bat and looking like trouble, only to be gobbled up and turned into an out. Sure, it’s still annecdotal, and no complete substitute for good numbers, but I think a fan who’s watched enough baseball will develop a pretty good feel for the ball coming off the bat and can make some qualitative judgements, at least on the extremes. Beltre makes a lot of unexpected plays = Beltre’s a very good defender. Sexson fails to make a lot of routine plays = Sexson’s a very bad defender.
But the homerism certainly gets in the way. I guess I got suckered onto the same tangent, so I’ll just say I think Derek’s idea about Sims occasionally throwing in the “defensive runs” stats would be awesome.
Maybe I’m being all misty-eyed here, but I don’t think Edgar was a terrible defender before he got hurt. Is it possible that you’re applying a little-known corollary of Sheri Nichols’s Law of Catcher Defense here, calling him a bad defender in the absence of evidence either way simply BECAUSE he was such a great hitter?
I think that in the absence of real evidence you don’t start at the Manny end of the scale; you start at zero. After all, Edgar was not moved to DH because his defense was terrible; he was moved because he got hurt, on that terrible day in Vancouver. He was never the same after that, but that’s no reason to just assume that he was league-worst, minus-20 kind of a player in the season we’re actually talking about.
I love Beltre and his glove as much as anyone, but I think Edgar blows his doors off here. You’re talking almost a hundred points of on-base percentage, to go with a hefty amount of SLG as well. How much would we like to see that now?
I don’t much like seeing those unadjusted BA/OBP/SLG numbers up there; in terms of OPS+ it’s Edgar 164, Beltre 112. Even Blowers’ ’93 was a very respectable 121 OPS+; I don’t see where Presley, for instance, leaves him “way back”, not with 35 points less on-base.
Looking at defense in terms of plays made actually makes it quite easy to adjust offensive numbers. Every play is the difference between a hit and an out — so just make the same move on the offensive side. For middle infielders, every play is basically a single. For 1B and 3B, you’d want to assume some doubles/triples in there.
To paraphrase Crash Davis, saving one hit per week is like turning a .250 hitter into a .300 hitter.
Total anecdotal evidence, but I did watch a lot of Mariner games back then, and I recall seeing a lot of double clutch throws by Presley. So I would say it could easily by 10 runs or more.
I’m not sure what rudimentary defense measures exist from those long ago times, but maybe those throws would show up in any measures of Presley’s fielding?
(side note, I always refer to the statue in front of Safeco, the one of the glove with a hole in it, as the Russ Davis monument).
The fact that so many of these discussions are coming down to two seasons where defense is the primary deciding factor really highlights how rudimentary our tools to evaluate defense still are.
That being said, I agree with those who are saying that it might be a bit of a stretch to say Edgar’s defense was the equivalent of Manny at third base (is that even possible, since there’s less running involved?); but then again, I didn’t see him play.
Hi — again, I want to point out that neither Dave or I argue that Beltre’s 07 was better than your favorite Edgar season. In fact, you’ll note that at the start, I want to pick Edgar 91 for my third-base season.
We’re not running down Edgar’s defense needlessly, and it’s not that we didn’t consider it.
It’s that – and we’ll get to this when we hit DH – Edgar at DH is so huge that he goes there instead of here.
That we can only have one Edgar is just an artificial constraint, like the bench/bullpen rules, which we’ll get to in good time.
I think folks might be over-estimating Edgar’s liability at third base. Here are his runs prevented at 3B from Sean Smith’s pseudo-play-by-play fielding system:
Year Pos Runs Games
1987 3B -2 12
1988 3B -4 13
1989 3B 6 61
1990 3B 8 143
1991 3B -6 144
1992 3B -8 103
1993 3B -5 16
1994 3B 4 64
Certainly nothing conclusive, and I might bet this system is a tad conservative, but…
A fielding % of .94-.96 sucks, doesn’t it? 32 errors in 245 games started (not sure how many weren’t at 3B). Maybe he wasn’t the worst in the world, but combined with the fact that he was slow even before his knees fell apart, is it safe to say Edgar was a slightly more than nominally subpar 3B?
Yep, it’d seem weird to have the same player at multiple positions, and who else are you going to put at DH if you put Edgar at 3B? Turbo? 🙂
Well, we’ll get to that in good time too.
Ken Phelps ’87 would be a good candidate for DH if Edgar was put at third. Edgar’s ’95 is sick, though.
Some predictions: Given the stress on defense, Randy Winn ’03 is the left fielder on the all-time roster. Jay Buhner will be kept out of the starting lineup by Ichiro ’04 and be relegated to the bench. But our hosts will get to that in good time, too.
I’m just happy to watch Adrian over at third.
Derek/Dave…Not much was really discussed about Blowers or Presley. They seemed to have comparable offensive numbers that would put them into discussion with Beltre. Were they just terrible defensively or are their offensive numbers discounted for hitting in the Kingdom during the “offensive” era?
Too funny! I was beginning to wonder where the love was for Deputy Dawg. 🙂
I know it is your game and you made the rules, but why did you guys limit a player to one position? If Edgar played a full season at 3B and that was the best why eliminate him? Just a way to get more players into the discussion?
A way to have your final list be at least different from Rob Neyer’s book at one position:-)
Fair enough; only one Edgar.
Jim Presley was a GODAWFUL 3B, by the way; I don’t remember the double-clutch throws, nor do I care. I do remember his close resemblance to a Bozo the Clown punching bag, the kind older readers might have had as a kid, inflateable with a weighted base, that would tip over to the ground if you punched it in the face. Presley had no range whatsoever, and routinely dove for balls hit within three feet of him. He was almost as bad in that respect as Carney Lansford, down in Oakland, who was the worst good-reputation 3B I ever saw.
One of the finer moments in Mariners Pop Culture– Russ Davis bad-dancing.
I’d say Presley gets nixed for keeping Edgar in Calgary for three extra years. Can anyone explain how Presley ended up getting MVP votes in 1986? A whopping .766 OPS from 3B, and someone thinks he deserves mention on the MVP ballot? Must’ve been the chemistry he brought.
Anyway, Derek did point out that Blower’s and Presley’s best seasons with the bat were only worth a handful more runs than Beltre’s 2007. Park-adjusted, Blowers ’93 is worth about +11 RAA with his bat, and Presley ’85 is worth about +14. Beltre ’07 is +8 or so. Plus, I suspect that park factors undercredit RH pull hitters like Beltre. And (as has come up before in this series) the Kingdome wasn’t the bandbox it’s often remembered as.
As the penny shockers say, we anticipate… But you’re not going back far enough. Hint, look at one of Presley’s teammates.
SMB @20 — fielding percentage doesn’t mean diddly. It has about as much to do with fielding ability as the curvature of your cap brim. Errors are assigned by a blind man with an ulterior motive, and no fielder in history has ever gotten an error on a ball he should have caught but couldn’t come near enough to touch, while many, many great fielders have gotten charged with errors on balls they barely got to but couldn’t quite nail, but which more perfect fielders couldn’t have gotten within a mile of.
[I promise we’ll get to all the positions in time]
Thanks, Steve T. So it’s completely useless, not even marginally useful. I am still learning.
Derek, re your idea about x/y/z, but taking away n stats from opposing hitters with his defense, he’s actually more of an a/b/c player:
Couldn’t this be done? I mean, it’d be incredibly time intensive, but couldn’t you reverse engineer each play. For example, Beltre dives and grabs a line drive at the gap, that an avg fielder wouldn’t make, that would’ve been a 1b or 2b, with a runner on 3. Then (disregarding WHO the actual batter was) basically add the value of that plate appearance to his line. Again, ridiculously tedious/complicated, would require absurd video viewing by real scorers. But it would sort of be like “actual” runs prevented instead of avg.
Edgar has a bad defensive reputation from the moment he got his first full time gig… Even if you slide Edgar’s defense up, he still only played 108 games at third.
Put Beltre ’07 in the Kingdome, and I bet you could slide his rate stats up 20-30 points.
*I had no idea Edgar was second in slugging in 1992.
I mean, it would only work for individually saved plays, like my example, over an avg fielder, but it’s a start.
The best thridbaseman of the year does not win the Edgar Martinez Award. You can’t possibly put him at any other position besides the one with the award named after him.
third base has really been weak for the M’s historically
That got me to thinking about left field, and trying to guess whether 3B or LF has given the M’s more seasons of weakness. And that got me to thinking about the opposite of this project: the worst full seasons (or perhaps opening day starters) at each position in Mariner history. If you think about it, that’s a much more challenging task: not only are you digging up memories you’re probably trying to suppress, you have so many choices at every position.
And, you know what, he was also the greatest toreador in Mariner history — since nobody could dart out of the path of danger (i.e. sharply hit grounders) better than ole’ Russ.
Sigh…I know David Bell wasn’t exactly a HOF’er, but after watching RD flail away for four years, he was like watching Mike Schmidt by comparison.
from USA Today in April of ’91:
“The defensive problems [in ’90] puzzled the Mariners because the scouting reports all said Martinez was a consistent defensive player. Martinez won the regular job at third base in mid-April of last season, and he was so excited about getting the chance, he kept his injured right knee to himself. “The knee is not an excuse for my defense,” Martinez said.
But Seattle manager Jim Lefebvre says the injury affected Martinez more than he will concede. Martinez had arthroscopic surgery and missed the final week of the season.”
Have to say I think the rules are kind of tough too. Think it’ll probably make the centerfield discussion a bit easier since you can exclude Ichiro.
My recollection has Edgar as a pretty good 3B too. I don’t recall any Beltre-like throws from behind the bag, but it seems like he was pretty good to his left and right and I seem to remember him being very consistent in catching balls in his zone.
Bradley ’85 for LF!
You said it, Scott19. Especially considering what immediately FOLLOWED David Bell’s turn at third–my friends and I have had a running joke similar to “Adam Jones would have got to that” where any Cirillo/Speizio flailing, either in the field or at the plate, would have been quickly followed by a variant on this phrase:
To think, we once had David Bell…THE GREATEST BALLPLAYER TO HAVE EVER PLAYED THE GAME.
It’s sad to see, in the cold hard statistical light of reality as presented here in this thread, that this simply isn’t true…but I was always surprised by how often a post-Mariners David Bell ended up on SportsCenter, winning games with his bat or making WebGems with his glove–far beyond his actual abilities, it seemed–and how often I raised a glass in his direction.
(That said, my vote goes to Beltre.)
Pgreyy (42) — And, actually to be fair, I always thought Cirillo was above-average defensively — it was his suckitude at the plate and personality conflicts that soured the fan base on him.
Thus, we see how many light years AB is ahead of all those who came before him at 3B.
That seems depressingly true of most post-Mariners. But David Bell is fondly remembered.
How disaterous was dumping him for Cirillo? In 2002, Bell posted an OPS+ of 104, good for about +4 RAA. Cirillo put up a 70 OPS+, or -20 runs. Oh well, that was only about a 2 win difference, and the M’s were 6 wins out of the playoffs that year. I guess we have to blame James Baldwin.
I’ve got zone rating data back to 1987 available here.
Edgar’s defense in 1992 was about 8 runs below average. Overall, I have him as -10 total career. He was very good in 1989 and 1990 according to zone rating.
Neat.