Sabermetrics or moneyball relies less on traditional triple crown metrics and more on advanced statistical measures to assess a baseball player’s value. While some of these advanced measures, like WAR, have their own limitations, they can identify cases where a player contributes more to his team’s success than might appear at first glance. Some players may also adjust their game to compensate for declining skills. Willie Mays’s 1971 season provides a good case in point.
Mays rates as one of the game’s all-time greats, whether you use traditional or advanced metrics. His wins above replacement (WAR) ranks third all-time among position players and he led the National League in that category ten times. But his traditional Triple Crown statistics were nearly as impressive. An “average” year for Mays meant a .301 batting average, with 36 homers and 103 RBIs. A player putting up those kinds of numbers would contend for the MVP most seasons. While Mays’s Triple Crown stats weren’t quite as good as Hank Aaron’s (.305, 37, 114), his WAR was a little better, thanks to outstanding defense and baserunning.
Mays’s 1971 season was different. He turned 40 that year and put up pedestrian (for him) Triple Crown statistics, with a batting average of .271 with 18 homers and 61 RBIs. But his WAR that year was 6.3, better than that for NL MVP Joe Torre (5.9). The table below compares Mays’s various performance metrics and their league ranks. What explains the apparent discrepancy? That was the year Mays played moneyball.
Bases on Balls
Mays showed good plate discipline throughout his career, and he walked a bit more often than Hank Aaron and a lot more frequently than Roberto Clemente. But he walked a lot less frequently than, say, Mickey Mantle or Eddie Mathews. Until 1971, his high for a season was 82, while Mantle averaged 117 over the course of his career. In 1971, however, Mays led the league with 112 walks in only 136 games. The walks also boosted Mays’s on-base average (OBA) to a league-leading .425.
Moneyball loves walks (if you’re a batter). OBA treats a walk as good as a single. Weighted OBA, which goes into the WAR calculation, assigns as somewhat lower value but it’s still significant. Excluding defense, the propensity to walk is most likely to account for differences in triple crown statistics and WAR.
Did opposing teams pitch around Mays? The Giants’ cleanup hitter, Willie McCovey led the league in OPS (OBA plus slugging percentage)for the three preceding years. However, McCovey played in only 105 games in 1971 and his production when he was in the lineup fell noticeably. McCovey’s OPS fell 180 points from the previous season. On the other hand, Bobby Bonds had a fine season that year, hitting .288 with 33 homers. While Bonds usually batted leadoff, he hit cleanup 35 times that season and fifth an additional 14 times. It’s hard to see pitching around Mays to get to either McCovey or Bonds. At the same time, Mays was no longer batting ahead of the league’s best hitter, as had been the case the previous few years.
Mays got off to a great start in 1971, hitting .336 with 11 homers through May before tailing off. That strong start may have influenced opposing teams to pitch around Mays as well. Strikeouts provide further evidence. Mays was a tough man to strike out for most of his career, especially for a power hitter. Prior to 1971, his high for a season was 90 and had never finished among the league’s top ten. In 1971, however, he struck out 123 times in only 132 games. That year, Mays was nearly four times more likely to strike out than free-swinging Manny Sanguillén. This suggests that Mays wasn’t just trying to work walks, but also that opposing pitchers weren’t giving him much to hit.
While sabermetrics doesn’t exactly treat strikeouts as a good thing, they are viewed today as much more benign than they were in the 1970s. Statistics like WAR don’t see strikeouts as necessarily worse than most other outs, and a lot better than grounding into a double play.
Baserunning
Another strong point of Mays’s game that year was baserunning. Although Mays had lost a step or two, he stole 23 bases in 1971, his highest season total since 1960. Moreover, he was caught stealing just 3 times, for a league-leading stolen base percentage of 88.5%. WAR gives credit to stolen bases but also imposes a large penalty on getting caught. WAR attributes 6 runs to Mays’s baserunning that year (tied for second highest in his career), while league SB leader Lou Brock (64 steals) was assigned just 5 runs. Brock was caught stealing 19 times that year, but his stolen base percentage remained a very respectable 77%.
Defense
Mays is considered one of the game’s greatest defensive center fielders, but by 1971 his best defensive days were behind him. Mays won the last of his twelve Gold Gloves in 1968. By 1971, he was splitting his time between Center Field (84 games) and first base (48 games). His defensive WAR that year was -0.2. That rating appears quite generous. As I noted in an earlier post on Ernie Banks, defensive WAR doesn’t appear to be a very reliable metric for first basemen.
Although Mays played barely half a season in center field, he committed six errors, fourth in the league. More notably, he committed 11 errors at first base in only 48 games, tied for second worst in the league. His fielding percentage at first base of .974 was 18 points below the league average. For reference, Mays’s fielding percentage was lower than Marvelous Marv Throneberry’s in 1962 and Dick Stuart’s in 1963.
Fielding percentage doesn’t tell the whole story, of course. But there didn’t appear to be much in the way of contrary statistics. Mays made only three assists and one double play in the outfield that year. A good first baseman can prevent errors by middle infielders by catching or digging out errant throws. We don’t have that level of detail available, but both shortstop Chris Speier and second baseman Tito Fuentes led the league in errors at their positions, with 33 and 23, respectively. Erratic throwing can also lead to more errors by first basemen, with the path of the ball much less predictable. That may be part of the story here.
The Bottom Line
Whether Mays tried to draw more walks in 1971 or other teams merely pitched around him, the fact remains that he got on base a lot that year and scored an impressive 82 runs. It’s also worth looking at his team’s performance. The 1971 Giants made the postseason for the first time since 1962. True, divisional play started only in 1969, and the Giants were solid contenders for most of the 1960s. But the 1971 season was good enough win Charlie Fox Manager of the Year. The Giants also finished third in the league in runs scored, even while hitting only .247 as a team.
Before Billy Beane became a GM; before Bill James started writing about baseball; smart players and managers were figuring out ways to win. Their approaches may have been more intuitive than systematic, but the effect was similar. Although Mays’s skills had faded, his baseball savvy was stronger than ever. A sharp eye at the plate and opportunistic baserunning meant that he remained productive and helped his team win.