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| | Monday, April 17 Ripken among the elite | |||||
| By Rob Neyer ESPN.com With Cal Ripken now among the 3,000-hit club, we might reasonably ask where he ranks among history's shortstops, purely as a hitter. While it's true that Ripken is now in his fourth season as Baltimore's full-time third baseman, he did play shortstop for 15 seasons (1982-1996), so he certainly qualifies. The list of candidates for Best-Hitting Shortstop is a short one. Submitted for your approval:
Games Hits Runs RBI OBP Slug OPS
Honus Wagner 2792 3415 1736 1732 .391 .466 857
Ernie Banks 2528 2583 1305 1636 .333 .500 833
Cal Ripken 2798 2996 1567 1576 .344 .451 795
Given just those raw numbers, as hitters they would seem to rank Wagner-Banks-Ripken, just as they are ordered chronologically.
Yet the career numbers above are missing something. Or rather, they're missing a lot of things: league context, ballpark effects and, most important, they're missing the fact that all of these shortstops spent significant time at other positions.
Addressing that last issue first, let's look only at the seasons in which these players saw more action at shortstop than at any other single position. And let's introduce another statistical measure, Adjusted Batting Runs (BR/A). Adjusted Batting Runs measure how many runs a player contributes, relative to a league-average player and adjusted for home ballpark. I've also tacked on the Adjusted Batting Runs per 154 games, the length of the schedule prior to 1961.
Years Games BR/A BR/A per 154
Honus Wagner 15 2088 492 36.3
Ernie Banks 9 1216 243 30.8
Cal Ripken 15 2218 213 14.8
Cal's not even close to the top two! Ah, but Banks has a big advantage here. It's a dirty little secret of baseball history that Mr. Cub actually played more games at first base than he did at shortstop, since he switched to the former position in 1962, when he was still only 31 years old. Thus, we're looking at Wagner's and Ripken's decline years, but not Banks'.
Discounting his first season, 1953, in which Banks played in 10 games, he was a shortstop for only eight seasons. So let's reproduce the chart above, but looking only at each shortstop's best eight-year run. And in case you thought we were asleep here at ESPN.com, I'll throw in another name worth considering:
Years Games BR/A BR/A per 154
Honus Wagner 8 1120 372 51.2
Arky Vaughan 8 1176 293 38.4
Ernie Banks 8 1206 241 30.8
Cal Ripken 8 1293 183 21.8
Arky Vaughan always gets left out when people discuss the great shortstops. By some accounts, he wasn't much of a defensive player. But man, could he ever hit. Vaughan led the National League in on-base percentage three straight years, and in 1935 he paced the NL in on-base percentage and slugging percentage.
But no matter how you play with the numbers, Honus Wagner still comes out on top, at least relative to his peers. It's true whether you look at career value, or peak value.
Where does everyone else fit? In terms of peak offensive value -- assuming we define "peak" as best eight seasons -- then it looks like the qualitative order is the same as the chronological order: Wagner, Vaughan, Banks, Ripken. While it's true that it's gotten progressively more difficult to dominate a league since Wagner's era, the differences between the four are simply too large to justify moving one ahead of the other on that basis.
Assessing the career values is more difficult. Wagner and Ripken were both productive shortstops for 15 seasons, Vaughan for 11 seasons and Banks only eight.
Based on that, I would leave Wagner and Vaughan in the No. 1 and No. 2 slots, but move Ripken ahead of Banks. So here are the five best-hitting shortstops of all time (and yes, there are two new names here):
Career Peak
1. Honus Wagner Wagner
2. Arky Vaughan Vaughan
3. Cal Ripken Banks
4. Ernie Banks Ripken
5. Joe Cronin Robin Yount
Cronin is rarely remembered, but he was sort of Vaughan's American League equivalent in the 1930s. Cronin would have been included in our discussion of peak value, but his best eight years were cleaved by a strange three-year stretch of less than brilliant hitting. As for Yount, while he did play shortstop for 11 years, he was a productive hitter in only six of them. Barry Larkin is also worth mentioning, but he missed too many games through the years to rank with these guys.
| ALSO SEE 3,000 hit club Ripken becomes 24th member of 3,000-hit club Cal's legacy established long ago | |||||