Replay League - 100 years of alternate history!

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Meanwhile, at second base, there is a clear top two, and I don't think any active player is knocking on the door.

Lance Blankenship is an interesting player. He basically gets all his value from walks and defense. He is a career .218/.380/.305 hitter with two Gold Gloves. He's not great, but has been around average for a decade, so perfectly reasonable. His 1999 season was maybe his most extreme. He hit .177/.376/.251 with 71 hits (24 for extra bases) and 127 walks. But he also played very good defense, as this was one of his GG years. So even hitting .177 with no power in an offensive era, he was worth 2.5 WAR.

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This list is relatively unsurprising I think. Mazeroski was not only a superior defender, but a pretty good hitter too, much better than his real life counterpart. It was a short career that tanked his Hall of Fame chances. And you can see Lance Blankenship up there on the list too, doing his thing. He'd be higher up if he was a good enough hitter to always play full time.

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There is a very clear top 5 here, with a bunch of guys at/near the HOF borderline. Boggs and Santo disappointed a bit, as did Brett and Mathews. DeCinces had a lot of value at second base as well.

Not many guys here are bound for the top of the list. Edgar is active, but only technically. Magadan is still going but not strong enough to move up too much. Chipper Jones is the one with the biggest potential by far, but he is so fragile that I think his body will give out before he builds a solid career up.

It's an eclectic mix of players on this list, which is appropriate for third base. Do note Clete Boyer ranking a few spots ahead of his more famous brother.

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This list looks, to me anyway, pretty much like you may have predicted. Or at least it doesn't look weird at the top. Brooks Robinson and Clete Boyer are swapped maybe, but that's all about opportunity, both were amazing in real life but Brooks could hit so he played a long time.

Cal Ripken got stuck at third base for various reasons, but was excellent there, which is also what you would expect for a very good defensive shortstop.

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This list has a clear top three, with Sheffield being only 30 years old or so, while Larkin is reaching the end and Tartabull is already there. I would expect John Valentin to match that group by the end, or get very close. He can hit and field quite well, he is a legit star. Alex Rodriguez is on that path too, but he can't hit as well as Valentin, so it's his glove doing the heavy lifting. Thus, he may not make it quite to the top. Nomar is another good active shortstop, but he has already slowed down, so this next year would determine whether he becomes an all-time great or just another player with a streak of brilliance.

I think Jerry Kenney made the list for third base as well, he was a heck of a player. He could do everything but hit for power. He reminded me a bit of Don Buford, which is a major compliment, but with more speed and less power.

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Again, this ranking looks pretty reasonable to me. Robin Yount good defend, and he played forever, but he never hit, thus he was not a star. Hansen could hit some, but had a shorter career. You can see how rapidly A-Rod is flying up the list. I would not at all be surprised if he ends up at the top eventually.

Side note - a number of these guys played for me, which is definitely not a coincidence. I tend to like having strong defenders up the middle, even at the expense of offense, it just tends to be my style. The Braves employed Hansen, Burleson, Bordick, Clayton, Oquendo, and Boudreau for the majority of their careers. That comprises a great deal of the 50 years that this stat covers, plus an extra decade of Boudreau before 1948. Of that list, Boudreau was a very good hitter, but nobody else was much better than average at their best. But I was happy with (hopefully!) adequate offense and great defense.

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Let's talk about corner outfielders. The top of the list has four greats here in left field. There are also a number of guys that played quite a bit in right field, like Valo and Crawford. Rusty Greer is rapidly climbing this list, and has a bunch of time in right field too, but his defense feels like it could become a liability at any moment. Jason Giambi is in a similar boat, but with an even better bat and even worse defense.

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Roy White is king of the defensive corner outfielders. But Duke Snider was probably better, as a good defensive center fielder that got pushed over to left by Mickey Mantle.

Bill Buckner seems to have terrific outfield range in every sim I play with him. I think he could run as a youngster but had leg injuries that sapped his speed. And since he never had any kind of arm, he was forced over to first base.

There are other surprising names on this list. Geronimo Berroa? Dan Pasqua? Nick Esasky? Joe Adcock? John Milner? As far as I know, none of those guys were above average defenders.

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Hank Aaron was no Hank Aaron, if you get me, but as you will see shortly, his defense was exquisite. Overall, there is a clear top 4, plus the guys that played both outfield corners.

Darryl Strawberry is pretty much toast, but Tim Salmon is still in peak form

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This list absolutely looks like what I would have expected based on running the league. The Hammer was the greatest, but also Frank Robinson, Warren Cromartie, Tony Oliva, and so on. Kind of surprised to see Jose Canseco and Merv Rettenmund though.

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I am actually glad I made this entry, because it's a pretty convincing argument for Dykstra and Van Slyke being HOF players. There is a big gap between them and anyone below them. Guerrero and Dawson are both HOFers as well, Guerrero because he accumulated his value in such a brief career (he was truly great) and Dawson because this only represents half of his career.

It also demonstrates how good Shane Mack and Ray Lankford have been. Mack probably won't do too much more, but Lankford is still pretty good and might eventually make a case for being an all-time great. There are actually a lot of active guys on this list - Kenny Lofton, Bernie Williams, Darin Erstad are all still in their prime, while Gerald Young, Roberto Kelly, Lance Johnson, Marquis Grissom are all in the later stages of their careers. This list makes me think that the 1990's were a golden age for center fielders. Even Carlos Beltran and JD Drew are already in the top 100 after just a few seasons.

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I don't know much about Rod Gaspar, but my hypothesis is that in real life he was an excellent defensive center fielder, but his hitting was so bad that he never played much. But in Replay League he got more playing time and became the greatest defensive center fielder in league history. I imagine that's not totally unreasonable, that any number of truly outstanding defensive players never got much of a shot because they just couldn't hit. I personally like that about baseball, that a broad skill set is needed to be a useful player. That's part of why I dislike the DH.

Otherwise I think this list is pretty much what you might expect. Keith Miller is a bit weird, since I think he played more middle infield in real life (though I could be getting confused, since I think there were two simultaneous Keith Millers) but he was definitely an excellent defender in RL, without too much else to offer.

Coming soon: I will track down the single season leaderboards to share.

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Here are some guys from 1922-1930, a smaller number from 1994-2000, and a few high average guys scattered about. Note that Edgardo Alfonzo plays in Colorado. That Todd Helton 2000 season will show up a lot on these leaderboards, but then again so will a lot of those older live ball seasons too.

Orlando Merced! Johnny Grubb! Mike Redmond! Jeff Stone! All of them were actually pretty darn good, for a while at least, but still. I suppose we will see more fluky names on these leaderboards than on the career total ones.

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Here is where you see the real superstars shine. There are not many flukes here. That's Jason Giambi's crazy rookie season there with the .500 OBP. And somehow his brother Jeremy made the bottom of the list. But really it's the same two eras mostly, but with more variety here.

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Once again there is Jason Giambi's rookie season. And Mark McGwire's crazy rookie season when he hit 84 home runs. And David Ortiz's rookie season when he won the Triple Crown. Hmmm....

Also, Babe Ruth was good. This *is* a solid list of big time hitters for sure.

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I wish I had OPS+ leaderboards, but this is all I got, and the era bias is still reflected here. FYI, Jim Thome and Junior Felix both play(ed) for the Milwaukee Brewers, so those marks at #15 and #16 were not just the same year, but the same team. Also, Mo Vaughn plays for ... the Colorado Rockies. But really, these are a combination of the greatest seasons in league history, and flukishly good seasons in high offense eras. [*cough* David Dellucci *cough*]

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This record was just broken after 78 years! But like many of the counting and rate stats, the leaderboard is full of years with high offense.

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That Matt Williams season...he mashed so many home runs (72) and had obviously a lot of RBI. But he wasn't as great as you might infer, was not in the top 3 in MVP voting, not in the AL top 5 in WAR, and was not an All Star. He finished 3rd in the AL slugging that season! Things were nuts in 1994 American League.

How nuts? AL MVP Jim Thome hit .339/.448/.683 with 54 HR, 158 RBI, led the league with 147 runs and 121 walks, had an OPS+ of 194, and won the Gold Glove at first base. His 9.7 WAR were third in the AL that year, behind the superior hitter Jeff Bagwell and overall best player Junior Felix.

The RBI record was 71 years old when Williams broke it.

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Another record recently broken thanks to the '90s offensive explosion, and in this particular case, to baseball in Denver. The hits record was 74 years old when Alfonzo broke it. The similarity of those times is not a coincidence!

This list has a little more variety of years on it, since hits are a little more dependent on the player as opposed to the offensive context, and maybe a little more subject to luck. The bottom of the list has an abundance of lucky seasons from players that were otherwise not superstars.

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You'll see a lot of overlap between this leaderboard, the slugging percentage leaderboard, and the upcoming home run leaderboard. All of that is expected of course.

You can see that huge Curt Blefary season interrupting our ~70 year gap trend between big offensive records. I personally wondered if anyone other than Babe Ruth would ever get to 400 bases until then. And then came the 1994 American League...

Some of the players toward the bottom of the list not only were not superstars, but their seasons on the list may not have been superstar seasons. For example, Henry Rodriguez had plenty of power, and his seasons down there were very good of course. But he didn't do much other than hit for power - he drew few walks and played poor defense. Joe DiMaggio was actually similar to be honest, though he had a good batting average for a while. Still, this is a really good list to be on, better than most.