The Eddie Award: Good Things Come to Those Who Walk

As a guy who regularly leads his slow pitch softball team in walks, I have an appreciation for players who find ways to take a leisurely stroll to first base. Ron Hunt‘s maddening ability to get some part of his body in front of a pitched ball, Dale Berra‘s knack for having his bat tick the catcher’s leather, Lance Blankenship coaxing four wide ones while hovering around the Mendoza Line–all are uncanny talents.

This study is designed to identify hitters that had the greatest percentage of their offensive game as a result of walks and hit-by-pitches. This is very different than leading the league in the counting or rate statistics attached to those categories. Ted Williams led the American League in bases-on-balls eight different times, but was such a force at the plate that he still would have been an outstanding offensive player had he walked half as often. The idea is to recognize players who made the slow walk up the first baseline an art form, who were and are somehow able to finagle pitches outside the strike zone despite being less than imposing figures with a bat in their hands.

After monkeying around with various combinations of on-base percentage, batting average and slugging percentage, I tossed them aside and settled on the following formula, calling the result the “Walking Man Quotient” (WMQ):

WMQ = 1.5*(BB+HBP) / (H+TB+1.5*(BB+HBP)+SB)

The denominator is part of the basic formula that Clay Davenport uses to calculate Equivalent Average (EqA). Dividing it into the walk and hit-by-pitch components approximates those components as a percentage of the hitter’s total offensive output. Patient sluggers like Williams and Mickey Mantle will occasionally have a high WMQ in years when their numbers are down, but the players with the best ratios will neither hit for average nor power while still collecting scads of walks and hit-by-pitches.

With that background, here are the Top 20 single-season WMQs of all-time (post-1900, minimum 400 plate appearances):

(Note: In a thinly veiled effort to keep your attention, the player who last year had the 19th highest WMQ in history won’t be revealed until later.)

Eddie Yost‘s 1956 campaign is clearly the gold standard. For some reason, pitchers couldn’t seem to throw him strikes, allowing him to walk 151 times with eight hit-by-pitches, despite a batting average of just .231 and a slugging percentage of just .336. Rocky Bridges played with Yost on three different teams (the Senators, Tigers and Angels). When asked about Yost’s “talent” at a Northwest SABR meeting last year, Bridges said, “he cheated.” Apparently, Yost never got caught, since he owns ten of the top 200 WMQ seasons of all-time. Yost retired with the skill completely intact, posting a .412 OBP in his 1962 swan song with the Los Angeles Angels at age 35. Our measurement tool is named after “The Walking Man.”

Though too lengthy to reproduce here, generating a list of the top 200 WMQ seasons of all-time makes for some strange bedfellows. For example, “Little Napoleon” John McGraw‘s 1900 season (No. 62) immediately precedes Mantle’s 1968 finale (No. 63), and Eddie “The Brat” Stanky’s 1949 campaign (No. 108) rubs shoulders with the icon of the Three True Outcomes, Rob Deer‘s 1991 Motown Masterpiece (No. 109). Immortals like Ron Theobald (1972, No. 47) and Mike Fiore (1969, No. 98) mingle with Hall of Famers Willie Mays (1971, No. 134) and Babe Ruth (1934, No. 104).

For the most part, the methodology captures the hitting profile hoped for–mediocre batsmen with keen eyes. However, some seasons by outstanding hitters are interspersed. Generally, the anomalies are due to off-years for those hitters or seasons that come at the tail end of careers when players still retain the “old player skill” of walking, but their batting average and power numbers suffer.

Philadelphia Athletics’ slender second sacker and leadoff man, Max “Camera Eye” Bishop, makes more appearances in the single-season Top 20 than any other player with five. That’s a particularly remarkable feat considering that he played his entire 12-year career in the highest sustained run-scoring era in baseball history (the 1920s and 1930s), when it wasn’t uncommon for entire ballclubs to hit over .300. Indeed, when the Top 20 career WMQs are calculated (post-1900, minimum 4000 PA), Bishop stands at the top of the heap:

Curiously, “Eddies” hold down three of the top six spots on the list, with the trio’s big league careers overlapping from 1944 through 1953. Eddie Joost actually retired and sat out a year following a dreadful campaign with the Boston Braves in 1945, but 84-year-old Connie Mack dusted him off and inserted him as the Philadelphia A’s starting shortstop for the 1947 season. Two years later, he was named to the All-Star team. Joost, Ferris Fain and Elmer Valo were all teammates on the White Elephants from 1947 until 1952. However, even with those three on-base machines in the lineup, the Athletics never rose above third in the eight-team AL in run scoring because they lacked the complementary hitters to drive them home.

The most surprising name on the career list is Ted Williams. The Splendid Splinter drew an incredible 2021 walks in less than 10,000 career plate appearances, and probably nobody in baseball history has had a better understanding of the strike zone than Williams. His showing up on the list demonstrates how heaping helpings of walks can overpower the WMQ formula and propel high-average sluggers towards the top of the rankings.

With that clear bit of foreshadowing, and as a tribute to Stanky, Yost and Joost, the time has come to announce the recipient of the 2002 Eddie Award. And the winner is…

…Barry Bonds? After hauling home virtually every other piece of hardware with his otherworldly 2002 season, maybe it’s fitting that he wins the inaugural Eddie Award, too.

To provide some perspective on how implausible it was for Bonds to fashion the 19th highest WMQ of all-time, you have to scroll down to the 62nd best single-season WMQ to find someone who finished in the top ten in their league in either batting or slugging (McGraw’s .344 batting average ranked fifth in the NL in 1900). Bonds topped the majors in both categories, pacing the competition with a .370 average and posting the fourth-highest slugging percentage (.799) in history last year. Nevertheless, nearly 40% of Bonds’ offensive value was due to reaching first base 207 times via walks and hit-by-pitches in one season. Incredible.

Since we have grown accustomed to Bonds’ mind-blowing accomplishments on the diamond, perhaps more surprising is that the other nine names on last year’s Top 10 list are all discriminating power hitters, with the possible exception of Doug Mientkiewicz. Any list of the highest WMQs for a particular season will have a solid smattering of sluggers in the upper reaches because they are pitched to carefully. However, the complete absence of the prototypical “Eddie” in last year’s Top 10 is disconcerting. Twelfth-ranked and 37-year-old Mark McLemore is the first player who clearly fits the mold. It begs the question of whether we are witnessing the extinction of a species.

To try to get a handle on this, let’s sort the Top 200 WMQ seasons since 1900 by decade, and also calculate what the average slugging percentage was for those selected seasons:

There is no obvious trend in the number of Top 200 WMQ seasons in each decade. For the most part, any dips can be explained by the offensive environments of the eras. As mentioned earlier, the period from 1920 through 1939 was marked by sky-high batting averages, which depress WMQs. While it might seem that the low-scoring environment of the 1960s would boost WMQs, the large strike zone (in effect from 1963-68) that caused run production to drop also slashed bases on balls, lowering WMQs.

On the other hand, the slugging percentage of Top 200 WMQ seasons has steadily increased as the years have passed, indicating that the performance shape of those players has changed. The battling, banjo-hitting middle infielder at the top of past WMQ lists is gradually being shoved aside by lead-footed, high secondary average players that inhabit the left end of the defensive spectrum. Whether that is due to pitchers realizing they should go right at weaker batters, that players are bigger and hit the ball harder, or some other possible explanation is left as an exercise for the reader.

It’s too early to tell if 2002 was an aberration or a harbinger of things to come, but it is looking more and more like it was our last chance to watch the best example of a modern day Eddie. Rickey Henderson registered five Top 200 WMQs in the past seven years, falling short only in his “last hurrah” 1998 campaign and in 2002 due to not enough playing time. Henderson is how I visualize the classic Eddie, and I’ll miss the most recent version of Rickey as much as the one that terrorized opponents with his bat and legs.

Run scoring has decreased in Major League Baseball in each of the past two seasons. If a trend towards less offense can reverse the decline of a vanishing breed of hitter, count me in with both feet. It’s certainly a more real benefit than getting home from the ballpark sooner.