MLB: Roberto Clemente Made Too Many Outs When He Won His Batting Titles

In 1965, Willie Mays led the National League in home runs with 52. Roberto Clemente won the batting title with a .329 average.

The New York Times headline read "Clemente and Mays Share National League Batting Honors for the 1965 Season."

The article presented Clemente winning the batting title in the second paragraph, relegating Mays' home run championship to the fourth paragraph.

How could one of the most respected, prestigious newspapers possibly make such a mistake?

How far we have come since 1965 and how much we have learned.

Mays and Clemente didn't share batting honors. Winning a home run title trumps winning a batting title because we now know that batting average is a poor measure of a hitter's effectiveness and contributions to his team.

The batting title was Clemente's second in a row. He led the league with a .339 average in 1964 and had won it in 1961 when he batted .351. Clemente would go on to lead the league again in 1967 with a .357 mark.

His 209 hits were tops in the league.

Fans, "experts" in the media and players thought that winning four batting titles was a great accomplishment. Why, in 1967, National League batters hit .249 or 108 points lower than Clemente.

When Clemente's average is removed, the league's batting average drops to .248.

What was the big deal? 

Over the last few years, we have been told that the primary goal is to prevent outs. Those of us who thought that the primary goal was to outscore the other team have been enlightened.

When he hit .357, Clemente had 632 plate appearances and 585 at-bats.

He had 209 hits, 41 walks, 17 intentional walks, three sacrifice flies and three hit by pitches. His on base average was  .400.

To the unenlightened, that was a fantastic season, but many among today's "experts" don't think it was such a big deal because Clemente made 376 outs.

What an albatross around the Pittsburgh Pirates neck, that Clemente.

The fact that Clemente hit safely 35.7 percent of the time he was charged with an official plate appearance misleads. Clemente had 632 plate appearances with 209 hits, which means that he had a chance of getting a hit only 33.4 percent of the time. 

Why, he was twice as likely to make one of those valuable outs as he was to get a hit.  What an overrated player.

One would think that in 2011,  teams have learned from what modern statistical methods have discovered but that may not be true.

In less that two months, Jose Reyes will be in a position to demand a "Carl Crawford" type contract ($142 million for seven years). Doesn't anyone in charge realize that Reyes is among the leaders in using up his team's outs?

In 2005, Reyes made 536 outs, which tied him with Sandy Alomar for the fourth most outs ever made in a season . In 2007, Reyes was responsible for 523 outs and in 2008, he made 516 outs.

Reyes health has been cited as a drawback to his receiving an obscene contract, but just think of how many outs he'll make if he remains healthy.

The six players who have the most career outs in baseball history are Pete Rose (10,328), Hank Aaron (9,136), Carl Yastrzemski (9,126), Cal Ripken (8,893), Eddie Murray (8,569) and Rickey Henderson (8,510).

Throw them all out of the Hall of Fame (except for Pete because he did bad things and will never get in).

I know that the above players made so many outs because they had so many plate appearances. Let's create a statistic to measure the chances they will hit safely when charged with an official at-bat.

Wait a minute. we already have such a probability statistic. It's called batting average.

Reference:

Clemente and mays share national league batting honors for 1965 season. (1965, Dec 05). New York Times (1923-Current File), pp. S2-S2. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/116804475?accountid=46260