Alex for the Ages

Dave Paisley

Now that Alex Rodriguez has established himself as a bona fide power threat by reaching the 100 HR plateau, it's time to take a look at his budding career against the best shortstops of all time. Possibly the most impressive thing about Rodriguez is not his pure physical talent but his mental attitude. Nobody works harder at the game or hustles more than this guy. Even as a 19 year-old he displayed remarkable poise and a great respect for the game.

But those are intangibles, and we all know you can't measure those. What we really need are numbers.

And yes, we're gonna need a chart.

First, we need to select the comparison players. The first criterion is that these should be the best offensive players to play short. We could throw in any amount of Rey Ordonezes from down the ages, but that's not terribly special. Even Ozzie Smith doesn't count, as his batting was generally below league average. No, we're looking for shortstops who were in the top few percent of their league for hitting, while being able to hold down the shortstop position in the field.

The first candidate is Honus Wagner. With a twenty-year career from 1897 to 1917, Wagner just missed the live ball era, but was consistently one of the top players of his time. From the Twenties and Thirties, we have Arky Vaughan, from the Fifties and Sixties, Ernie Banks, and finally, our current-day icon, Cal Ripken Jr.

Using the criterion of PRO+, which compares a player's park-adjusted OPS to the league average, we can compare these shortstops across the ages and see how A-Rod stacks up.

I've taken each player's career up to age 32 and calculated his cumulative PRO+ year-by-year by weighting each year's performance by the number of at-bats. Thus it's easy to see how a player's cumulative career value builds up or declines. A league-average player ranks a 100 in the PRO+ scale. 120 is pretty good, and 150 and up is excellent. I've omitted data from most players' first-year numbers, as it's usually based on few ABs.

The highest career value here is that of Honus Wagner. he finished his career with a cumulative 150 PRO+, and it's easy to see from the chart that his career value built up steadily from age 23 to 32.

Ernie Banks started lower and peaked out at 140, ending his career at 122. Another knock on Banks is that he only spent the first half of his career as a shortstop. He got started at age 22, but really didn't get rolling for a couple of years.

Arky Vaughan isn't a name you hear a whole lot of, but he certainly started his career off with a bang, much as A-Rod has. He had a monster year at age 23, but and kept up a steady pace until he retired early, after an acrimonious 1943 season with Leo Durocher. A modest comeback in '47 helped Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers to a pennant, but a sub-par '48 campaign prompted him to retire for good.

Cal Ripken's career matches Vaughan's in shape, but instead of being 40% better than the average player, Ripken is more like 20%. It sure looks like that playing-every-day thing is gradually removing the sheen from his career numbers.

Meanwhile, Alex Rodriguez has had as good a start to his career as any of these guys. His '98 campaign will undoubtedly be better than 140 PRO+, so he should hang in right around Vaughan's early career numbers. If he can keep it up and develop the way Wagner did, he could be the best shortstop of all time.

Dave Paisley loves math almost as much as he loves Lemon Chills, but wishes ballpark vendors could sound a bit more manly when hawking them. Greet Dave with a "Lemon freaking Chill, Dammit!" at drdjp@strikethree.com.