I'm trying to catch up, as Bill's been publishing these long articles just about every day and I've had to take a little time off lately, due to a pretty serious medical situation. Last week, one of those articles included a long digression (from fielding stats) about pitchers who lost the best game they ever pitched, and another about what Bill calls Extremism-1 and Extremism-2. Interesting for sure, but out of our current purview.
I do want to mention Bill's list of the 25 best-fielding first basemen ever, according to his methodology.
As I already mentioned, Travis Lee is No. 1. As someone pointed out, Lee's got an advantage here: His career was relatively short. With 1,018 games at first base, he just barely makes Bill's cutoff of 1,000 games. He played his last game in the majors at 31, so doesn't have the "tail" to his career that most good players have. If he'd played another five or six seasons, it seems unlikely that he'd be No. 1 on this list.
So there's that.
What really surprised me was Keith Hernandez, who's 12th on the list. That's obviously quite good, but it's also behind Todd Helton, John Olerud, Mark Teixeira, Steve Garvey, Mark Grace, and Pete O'Brien. I think all those guys were (or are) regarded as excellent first basemen, but none had the reputations of Hernandez.
Which doesn't mean the method's not working. It might mean that. It might mean Hernandez wasn't quite as good as the other guys. It might mean something else. The great thing about what Bill's doing? It's open source, or will be. So if somebody really cares, they can get into the weeds and figure out what it all means.
