http://www.aarongleeman.com/ (not my site dudes!)

 

What if?

My entry from earlier this week about Albert Pujols segued nicely into one of my favorite subjects, a man by the name of Theodore Samuel Williams.

 

As I've said many times in many places, Ted Williams is my favorite baseball player of all-time. That is probably a fairly strange thing for a 21-year-old who never saw Williams play to say, but it is true. I've read about him, I've heard about him, I've seen him interviewed and I've read his magnificent book on hitting. Everything about him, from his background and upbringing to his life in and out of baseball, is incredibly intriguing to me. Plus, the guy wasn't a bad ballplayer either.

 

Sticking strictly to the baseball stuff, there is so much about Williams that is interesting. For one thing, he is the only guy in the history of baseball who it can be honestly said gave Babe Ruth a run for his money for the title of Best Hitter Ever.

 

In addition to that, there is the fact that he was a two-time MVP and should have won more. He was a two-time Triple Crown winner. He's the last man to hit .400. He won the league batting title in nearly half the seasons he qualified for it. He led the league in on-base percentage in every single one of his full seasons after his rookie year. His career OBP of .482 is the highest in the history of the sport. His career slugging percentage of .634 is second all-time to The Babe, as is his 190 career OPS+. He was a 17-time All-Star.

 

Williams' batting average dropped from .328 as a 39-year-old to .254 as a 40-year-old. Unsatisfied with retiring after a season like that, he came back and hit .316 with a .451 on-base percentage and a .645 slugging percentage at 41, and then called it a career.

 

I could go on and on all day, just as I could stare at his numbers all day.

 

As I said on Wednesday, perhaps the most amazing thing about Williams' career numbers is that he was able to compile them despite missing all of 1943, 1944 and 1945, and the majority of 1952 and 1953, serving in the military. Because of his time in the service, Williams did not play a single game as a 24, 25 or 26-year-old, and played just 43 total games combined in his age-33 and age-34 seasons.

 

Here's another way of looking at it...

 

Everyone knows just how extraordinary Barry Bonds' career numbers are. Here's a look at some of the most impressive ones:

AVG OBP SLG H HR 2B SB RBI RUN BB.297 .433 .602 2595 658 536 500 1742 1941 2070

Now, let's pretend for a moment that Barry Bonds had missed the same time at the same ages Ted Williams missed because he was serving in the military. Here are what Bonds' "new" career totals would look like:

AVG OBP SLG H HR 2B SB RBI RUN BB.303 .445 .627 1909 519 383 334 1270 1458 1592

His average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage actually all go up, but his "counting stats" all plummet. Bonds loses nearly 700 hits, including 139 homers and 153 doubles. He also drops 166 stolen bases and nearly 500 RBIs, runs and walks. The "lost" years obviously don't turn Bonds into anything less than an all-time great, but they do drop him down quite a bit on most of the all-time leaderboards.

 

- He goes from #4 all-time in homers to #16, and he goes from being just 97 homers shy of tying Hank Aaron's record to being 236 homers behind Hammerin' Hank.

 

- He goes from ranking 70th all-time in hits and needing 405 for 3,000, to not ranking among the top-250 all-time hit leaders and needing nearly 1,100 more for 3,000.

 

- He goes from being the only man in the history of the sport to ever hit 500 homers and steal 500 bases, to simply being in the 300/300 Club, along with three other guys.

 

- He goes from being 9th all-time in runs scored and 16th all-time in runs batted in, to ranking 65th in all-time runs and 96th in all-time RBIs.

 

You see what missing all that time would have done to Bonds' numbers, so you can imagine what it did do to Williams'. I thought it might be fun to attempt to figure out what Ted Williams' career numbers would have been like, had he been able to play his entire career without having to step away for years at a time.

 

To figure out what Bonds' numbers would have looked like with him missing time, all I had to do was delete his age-24, 25 and 26 seasons, and then give him only a fraction of his totals from age-33 and 34. To figure out Williams' "missing" numbers, it's a little tougher.

 

If we wanted to be really technical about it, we could try to figure out how Williams would have aged, so that we could have really gotten a handle on his stats from 24-26 year old. And then we'd try to do the same thing for the huge chunks of two seasons he missed in his 30s.

 

I'm more interested in getting a good rough estimate though, so we'll try to keep things fairly simple. To figure out his missing numbers from 1943, 1944 and 1945, I am simply going to take the average season from the two years prior to his absence and the two years after he returned.

 

So, we take 1941 and 1942 and add them together with 1946 and 1947, and then figure out the average of those four years that surrounded his missing seasons.

 

Here's what the average season from 1941, 1942, 1946 and 1947, combined, looks like:

G AVG OBP SLG H HR 2B 3B TB RBI RUN BB150 .360 .509 .669 182 36 36 6 338 124 136 153

Not a bad average season, huh?

 

Then what we do is simply take that average season and plug it into Williams' career three times - in 1943, 1944 and 1945. That takes care of filling in the blanks for ages 24, 25 and 26, but it still leaves ages 33 and 34.

 

This part is a little more complicated, because Williams actually did play parts of both the 1952 season and 1953 season. In 1952 he played six games, hitting .400/.500/.900. Then he came back in 1953 and played 37 games, hitting .407/.509/.901 with 13 homers. I think you're starting to see why I think Ted Williams is so amazing now.

 

I'm sure there are several intelligent ways to try to figure out what he might have done in 1952 and 1953, but we're going to go for simplicity over preciseness. All I am going to do is add up all his numbers from the two years prior (1950, 1951) and the two years after (1954, 1955), plus the stuff he did in the 43 games he did play in 1952/1953. Then I'm going take that and make two full seasons out of it. We'll make the "full seasons" just 135 games, since the schedule was shorter then and Williams did often miss games later on in his career.

 

Those four total years surrounding his second group of missing time and the 43 games from the years he missed time add up to a total of 495 games. So, if we take the per game averages and make two 135-game seasons out of them, we get two seasons that look like this:

G AVG OBP SLG H HR 2B 3B TB RBI RUN BB135 .337 .483 .641 153 35 28 3 292 118 104 129

So, we just plug that "season" into both 1952 and 1953 and...PRESTO!...Ted Williams has a full career without any interruptions.

 

Ready to see the new final numbers?

 

(Drum-roll please...)

TED WILLIAMS (1939-1960) AVG OBP SLG H HR 2B TB RBI RUN BB.345 .485 .637 3465 685 683 6391 2410 2395 2717

Those are simply monstrous numbers across-the-board.

 

Here is where he would rank among the all-time leaders in each stat with his new numbers, along with where he actually ranks with old numbers:

NEW OLDGames 11 91Batting Average 6 7On-Base Percentage 1 1Slugging Percentage 2 2OPS 2 2Hits 6 62Home Runs 3 14Doubles 5 30Total Bases 2 19Extra-Base Hits 2 12Runs Batted In 1 12Runs Scored 1 16Walks 1 4

By my rough estimation, Ted Williams lost 677 games while serving his country. In those games, he lost 811 hits equaling 1,507 total bases. Included among the lost hits were 158 doubles, 23 triples and 164 homers. He also lost 571 RBIs, 597 runs and 696 walks.

 

By giving him credit for all that missed time, he shoots up to the very top of almost every all-time list that he isn't already at the top of.

 

Williams would rank first all-time in on-base percentage, RBIs, runs and walks. He would rank second all-time in slugging percentage, OPS, total bases and extra-base hits. He would move from 30th all-time in homers to third, behind only Aaron and Ruth, and would move from 62nd all-time in hits to sixth.

 

 

"A man has to have goals - for a day, for a lifetime - and that was mine, to have people say, 'There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.'"

--- Ted Williams

wow his numbers now are impresive but with the time missed stats added those are some unbeleivable stats...

oh and am also in my 20's and my favorite players are Babe Ruth and mickey mantle so dont sweat it that u never got top see him play its what u know about the player that counts...

very interesting. too much math for me, my brain would fry.

I did my own math to adjust for Babe Ruth if he never pitched an hit instead:

 

What If Babe Ruth Hit His Entire Career?

 

Fueled by steroids, Bonds will soon pass Babe Ruth?s homerun record and will triumphantly say, ?I am better than Ruth.?

 

 

 

But hey Bonds, Ruth was a great pitcher before he started becoming a full time hitter, and when you take into account his statistics compared to his peers at the era, he is a million times the player you are now.

 

 

 

So that raises a very good question...What if Ruth was always a hitter? Would Aaron still have the all time record? Would Ruth be untouchable? Well, let?s analyze this.

 

 

 

Ruth could have started about 12 games up to bat in 1914 with about 40 at bats. From 1915 to 1919, Ruth could of averaged 147 games a season (the average between his first 2 full seasons as a starting outfielder) and about 500 at bats. If we were to pretend that increased at bats would no further develop Ruth?s skill (which it most certainly would) and just simply multiply the statistics he really put up, we can see what is ?new? career numbers would be.

 

 

 

Note (because walks cannot be ascertained through at bats and Ruth?s walking rate was different then, it will not be calculated.)

 

 

 

Ruth (in reality)

 

1914 AVG .200 OBP .200 SLG .300 H 2 BB 0 2B 1 3B 0 HR 0

 

1915 AVG .315 OBP .376 SLG .576 H 29 BB 9 2B 10 3B 1 HR 4

 

1916 AVG .272 OBP .322 SLG .419 H 37 BB 10 2B 5 3B 3 HR 3

 

1917 AVG .325 OBP .385 SLG .472 H 40 BB 12 2B 6 3B 3 HR 2

 

1918 AVG .300 OBP .411 SLG .555 H 95 BB 58 2B 26 3B 11 HR 11

 

1919 AVG .322 OBP .456 SLG .657 H 139 BB 101 2B 34 3B 12 HR 29

 

 

 

Ruth (adjusted)

 

 

 

ABAj= 500 supposed at bats / real at bats

 

Remember each real number is merely multipled by ABAj

 

 

 

1914 H 8 2B 4 3B 0 HR 0

 

ABAj=4.00

 

 

 

1915 H 157 2B 54 3B 5 HR 22

 

ABAj=5.43

 

 

 

1916 H 136 2B 18 3B 11 HR 11

 

ABAj=3.68

 

 

 

1917 H 163 2B 24 3B 12 HR 8

 

ABAj=4.07

 

 

 

1918 H 150 2B 41 3B 17 HR 17

 

ABAj=1.58

 

 

 

1919 H 161 2B 39 3B 14 HR 34

 

ABAj=1.16

 

 

 

He would certainly have the most career RBIs in history, more than Hank Aaron and more BBs than Rickey Henderson, but Bonds is surely going to pass that mark. Nevertheless, how are his career totals now?

 

 

 

Ruth climbs spectacularly in all categories.

 

 

 

443 more hits

 

3316 career hits, 10th all time

 

 

 

98 more doubles

 

604 career doubles, 12th all time

 

 

 

29 more triples

 

165 triples, 30th all time

 

 

 

43 more homeruns

 

758 career homeruns, 1st all time

 

 

 

The scary part is that this does not take into account it took Ruth about 680 at bats to become vintage Babe Ruth. That means if he would have been an everyday outfielder for about a year and a half, it is very possible he could of started slugging about 40 homers and then more a season, about 4 seasons before he actually did. If this would of occurred, Ruth would of acquired even more incredible statistics, possibly cracked about another 100 homers (assuming his skills would become about 1919-1920 levels at 1916.) That puts Ruth at about 860 career homers?860!!! That?s a mark Bonds will not touch and it is 100 greater than Hank Aaron?s all-time record. Bonds will not beat this mark and as of now and it appears only Alex Rodriguez and Sammy Sosa are in the race for 860, in an odd way, the ?true? homerun record.

 

 

 

860, imagine that.

 

 

 

Let me close saying that I fully understand if Babe Ruth lived now and did not take the supplements or anything else that technology has granted players of today, he would be creamed. Pitching today is superior, the fences back then were ridiculously short at the foul poles, and if Sosa, Bonds, Gwynn, or Rodriguez appeared with their conditioning in the past, they would absolutely destroy the legends. However, with time travel being impossible, all we can do is compare how one compared next to their peers at a given era, and at no era was any man better than Babe Ruth.

 

:hat http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=craigr...gs&uid=58604054

On the forum board, this topic reads: Ted Williams Comprete Car...

 

I thought it was going to say : Ted Williams Complete Carcass put back together.

 

 

I know, I'm sick

i dont care how many homeruns Bbonds hits to me he will never be better than the babe...and sadly when bonds does pass the babe this year or next i hope he does it with class and doesnt make stupid statments like he's done in the past towards Ruth...

http://www.aarongleeman.com/ (not my site dudes!)

 

What if?

My entry from earlier this week about Albert Pujols segued nicely into one of my favorite subjects, a man by the name of Theodore Samuel Williams.

 

As I've said many times in many places, Ted Williams is my favorite baseball player of all-time. That is probably a fairly strange thing for a 21-year-old who never saw Williams play to say, but it is true. I've read about him, I've heard about him, I've seen him interviewed and I've read his magnificent book on hitting. Everything about him, from his background and upbringing to his life in and out of baseball, is incredibly intriguing to me. Plus, the guy wasn't a bad ballplayer either.

 

Sticking strictly to the baseball stuff, there is so much about Williams that is interesting. For one thing, he is the only guy in the history of baseball who it can be honestly said gave Babe Ruth a run for his money for the title of Best Hitter Ever.

 

In addition to that, there is the fact that he was a two-time MVP and should have won more. He was a two-time Triple Crown winner. He's the last man to hit .400. He won the league batting title in nearly half the seasons he qualified for it. He led the league in on-base percentage in every single one of his full seasons after his rookie year. His career OBP of .482 is the highest in the history of the sport. His career slugging percentage of .634 is second all-time to The Babe, as is his 190 career OPS+. He was a 17-time All-Star.

 

Williams' batting average dropped from .328 as a 39-year-old to .254 as a 40-year-old. Unsatisfied with retiring after a season like that, he came back and hit .316 with a .451 on-base percentage and a .645 slugging percentage at 41, and then called it a career.

 

I could go on and on all day, just as I could stare at his numbers all day.

 

As I said on Wednesday, perhaps the most amazing thing about Williams' career numbers is that he was able to compile them despite missing all of 1943, 1944 and 1945, and the majority of 1952 and 1953, serving in the military. Because of his time in the service, Williams did not play a single game as a 24, 25 or 26-year-old, and played just 43 total games combined in his age-33 and age-34 seasons.

 

Here's another way of looking at it...

 

Everyone knows just how extraordinary Barry Bonds' career numbers are. Here's a look at some of the most impressive ones:

AVG OBP SLG H HR 2B SB RBI RUN BB.297 .433 .602 2595 658 536 500 1742 1941 2070

Now, let's pretend for a moment that Barry Bonds had missed the same time at the same ages Ted Williams missed because he was serving in the military. Here are what Bonds' "new" career totals would look like:

AVG OBP SLG H HR 2B SB RBI RUN BB.303 .445 .627 1909 519 383 334 1270 1458 1592

His average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage actually all go up, but his "counting stats" all plummet. Bonds loses nearly 700 hits, including 139 homers and 153 doubles. He also drops 166 stolen bases and nearly 500 RBIs, runs and walks. The "lost" years obviously don't turn Bonds into anything less than an all-time great, but they do drop him down quite a bit on most of the all-time leaderboards.

 

- He goes from #4 all-time in homers to #16, and he goes from being just 97 homers shy of tying Hank Aaron's record to being 236 homers behind Hammerin' Hank.

 

- He goes from ranking 70th all-time in hits and needing 405 for 3,000, to not ranking among the top-250 all-time hit leaders and needing nearly 1,100 more for 3,000.

 

- He goes from being the only man in the history of the sport to ever hit 500 homers and steal 500 bases, to simply being in the 300/300 Club, along with three other guys.

 

- He goes from being 9th all-time in runs scored and 16th all-time in runs batted in, to ranking 65th in all-time runs and 96th in all-time RBIs.

 

You see what missing all that time would have done to Bonds' numbers, so you can imagine what it did do to Williams'. I thought it might be fun to attempt to figure out what Ted Williams' career numbers would have been like, had he been able to play his entire career without having to step away for years at a time.

 

To figure out what Bonds' numbers would have looked like with him missing time, all I had to do was delete his age-24, 25 and 26 seasons, and then give him only a fraction of his totals from age-33 and 34. To figure out Williams' "missing" numbers, it's a little tougher.

 

If we wanted to be really technical about it, we could try to figure out how Williams would have aged, so that we could have really gotten a handle on his stats from 24-26 year old. And then we'd try to do the same thing for the huge chunks of two seasons he missed in his 30s.

 

I'm more interested in getting a good rough estimate though, so we'll try to keep things fairly simple. To figure out his missing numbers from 1943, 1944 and 1945, I am simply going to take the average season from the two years prior to his absence and the two years after he returned.

 

So, we take 1941 and 1942 and add them together with 1946 and 1947, and then figure out the average of those four years that surrounded his missing seasons.

 

Here's what the average season from 1941, 1942, 1946 and 1947, combined, looks like:

G AVG OBP SLG H HR 2B 3B TB RBI RUN BB150 .360 .509 .669 182 36 36 6 338 124 136 153

Not a bad average season, huh?

 

Then what we do is simply take that average season and plug it into Williams' career three times - in 1943, 1944 and 1945. That takes care of filling in the blanks for ages 24, 25 and 26, but it still leaves ages 33 and 34.

 

This part is a little more complicated, because Williams actually did play parts of both the 1952 season and 1953 season. In 1952 he played six games, hitting .400/.500/.900. Then he came back in 1953 and played 37 games, hitting .407/.509/.901 with 13 homers. I think you're starting to see why I think Ted Williams is so amazing now.

 

I'm sure there are several intelligent ways to try to figure out what he might have done in 1952 and 1953, but we're going to go for simplicity over preciseness. All I am going to do is add up all his numbers from the two years prior (1950, 1951) and the two years after (1954, 1955), plus the stuff he did in the 43 games he did play in 1952/1953. Then I'm going take that and make two full seasons out of it. We'll make the "full seasons" just 135 games, since the schedule was shorter then and Williams did often miss games later on in his career.

 

Those four total years surrounding his second group of missing time and the 43 games from the years he missed time add up to a total of 495 games. So, if we take the per game averages and make two 135-game seasons out of them, we get two seasons that look like this:

G AVG OBP SLG H HR 2B 3B TB RBI RUN BB135 .337 .483 .641 153 35 28 3 292 118 104 129

So, we just plug that "season" into both 1952 and 1953 and...PRESTO!...Ted Williams has a full career without any interruptions.

 

Ready to see the new final numbers?

 

(Drum-roll please...)

TED WILLIAMS (1939-1960) AVG OBP SLG H HR 2B TB RBI RUN BB.345 .485 .637 3465 685 683 6391 2410 2395 2717

Those are simply monstrous numbers across-the-board.

 

Here is where he would rank among the all-time leaders in each stat with his new numbers, along with where he actually ranks with old numbers:

NEW OLDGames 11 91Batting Average 6 7On-Base Percentage 1 1Slugging Percentage 2 2OPS 2 2Hits 6 62Home Runs 3 14Doubles 5 30Total Bases 2 19Extra-Base Hits 2 12Runs Batted In 1 12Runs Scored 1 16Walks 1 4

By my rough estimation, Ted Williams lost 677 games while serving his country. In those games, he lost 811 hits equaling 1,507 total bases. Included among the lost hits were 158 doubles, 23 triples and 164 homers. He also lost 571 RBIs, 597 runs and 696 walks.

 

By giving him credit for all that missed time, he shoots up to the very top of almost every all-time list that he isn't already at the top of.

 

Williams would rank first all-time in on-base percentage, RBIs, runs and walks. He would rank second all-time in slugging percentage, OPS, total bases and extra-base hits. He would move from 30th all-time in homers to third, behind only Aaron and Ruth, and would move from 62nd all-time in hits to sixth.

 

 

"A man has to have goals - for a day, for a lifetime - and that was mine, to have people say, 'There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.'"

--- Ted Williams

he's the second greatest leftfielder of all time

Show's just how important that time off was, Bonds is nowhere near his league and this just goes on to prove it.

 

And if anyone is still willing to say that Pete Rose is somehow better, :lol