BP Unfiltered: The Annie Savoy Exception

ANNIE: … You see, there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring, which makes it like sex. There's never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn't have the best year of his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you just gotta relax and concentrate. Besides, I'd never sleep with a player hitting under .250, not unless he had a lot of RBIs and was a great glove man up the middle. …

For those unfortunates who haven’t seen actual baseball movie Bull Durham, our introductory narrator Annie Savoy is a woman who spends each season spiritually engaged to one member of the Triple-A Durham Bulls. After spending a few weeks scouting the team, picking out the right prospect–”kinda my own spring training,” she tells runner-up Crash Davis–she devotes the season to player development.

Annie’s method of selection is somewhat mysterious, even to her: “I mean, it's all a question of quantum physics, molecular attraction, and timing. Why, there are laws we don't understand that bring us together and tear us apart.” But clearly there’s some balance of tools she gravitates toward: physical and mental attraction, potential and realized baseball prowess. Crash and Nuke, her two finalists, couldn’t be more different on most counts, with Davis the seasoned veteran and LaLoosh the archetypal blank slate, all uncluttered potential. But it’s strange that Annie needs to make that provision, at the very beginning of the film, as to the one type of player who doesn’t fit the preconceived statistical mold.

We shouldn’t be surprised that batting average is the carrying tool for Annie’s heart; this is 1988, the very dawn of modern baseball, and people aren’t carrying Bill James Annuals around everywhere they go. But how many players would even sneak into qualifying through the extra clause?

Here’s a breakdown of players who hit below .250, garnered 90 RBIs and posted at least 1 defensive WAR at an up-the-middle position in a single season, according to Baseball Reference:

Sandberg wouldn’t require Annie’s tutelage: not only is his qualifying season six years in the future, he was 36 that season and had made the decision to retire (for the first time). Parrish can also be voted off: according to the new catching metrics at BP, his defense is overrated by B-R (only 5.3 FRAA, more than half of which comes from his excellent arm, not his glove). Jones was 11 in Annie’s prime, and was thirty by the time his batting average began to crumble.

That leaves Dwayne Murphy, whose career was so thoroughly underrated in his time and ours that, despite his successes (he won the third of his six consecutive gold gloves that year), he’s been essentially forgotten outside the Bay Area. Already in his prime at age 27, however, his time with Annie would prove more conciliatory than educational.

Besides, the heart of this exercise is the minor leagues, which better parallels the film (though transports it beyond the reach of the Play Index). Ideally we would find someone who met the above requirements while advancing, or somehow repeating, Triple-A. In fact, 2015 provides us with exactly one such name.

So Annie has her man, assuming a willingness to travel. If she’s sticking to her hometown of Durham, based on these requirements, the loophole wouldn’t be required, with Justin O’Conner (.231, 53 RBI, plus-defense) the closest approximation. Players like the one she describes simply don’t pass through a minor league system that often.

So why bother with the diversion at all? The only explanation is foreshadowing: we’re never given Crash Davis’s stat line, but given his power and general athleticism, and his 21-day major league career, one has to assume that the hit tool never surfaced. And given how little we understood of catcher defense in 1988, particularly glovework, one can safely assume that Annie is providing herself with the exception she needs to qualify the man she eventually comes to love.