THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

My all-time favo(u)rite position player.  However, I am not at all confident that Olerud will attract the necessary 5% of the votes needed to remain on the ballot. 

Mark Grace didn’t get 5%, despite having a superficially similar profile of counting stats and much higher visibility within the game. 

Cecil Cooper didn’t even attract a single vote when his name appeared on the ballot, coincidentally in Olerud’s vintage season of 1993.

Grace:  4 GG, 3 ASG, 303/383/442, 2445 H, 173 HR
Olerud:  3 GG, 2 ASG, 295/398/465, 2239 H, 255 HR
Cooper:  2 GG, 5 ASG, 298/337/466, 2192 H, 241 HR

I’m not arguing that Olerud isn’t better than Grace or Cooper—BRef WAR has Olerud > Grace > Cooper, which seems completely correct.  However, in the eyes of the HoF electorate, I expect the three players would be viewed very similarly.

I got to see him play at WSU since I was in grad school there in the 1980s. What a great college player.

He is 131st in WAR at Sean Smith’s site. Grace is like 196th and Cooper is 360th. Olerud had two great years, when hit .363 with the Blue Jays and when he hit over .350 with the Mets. With some power and high OBP. I doubt he will make it but I am surprised how high he ranks. A case can be made for him.

On both B-R WAR and F-WAR, another close comparable is Keith Hernandez - who was on the ballot for 10 years but never got significant support.

#2/Cyril—What were your impressions of Olerud as a collegiate pitcher?  I was re-reading an old (early 1990s Baseball Book) Bill James piece last week, in which he said there was no credible evidence to suggest that Olerud could pitch at the MLB level and that the possibility he could be used as a 2-way MLB player had been blown way out of proportion.  That assessment didn’t jibe with my 20-year-old memories.

I think I only saw him pitch once in person and he had a bad outing. He had some pretty good stats. Here is what Wikipedia says. It is about what I recall:

“In 1988, Olerud hit .464 with 23 HR, 81 RBIs, 108 hits, 204 total bases, and a .876 Slugging percentage. As a pitcher, he had an undefeated 15-0 season, and threw 113 Ks with a 2.49 ERA. He was a consensus All-American as both 1B and Pitcher and Baseball America College Player of the Year.”

The game I saw where he pitched, the other team hit into a triple play. Alot of the WSU guys played in Pullman in some kind of semi-pro league. The park was only a few blocks from where I lived. It only cost a dollar to get in. I remember lots of booming line drives off his bat for HRs or doubles in the gap. But I just don’t recall seeing him pitch that much.

I meant that they played in that semi-pro league in the summer, in addition to playing during the school year.