Best Cardinals by Position - Short Stops

by stlfan on Jan 28, 2012 1:17 PM EST

This is the next piece in a series of posts in which I will look at the BEST St. Louis Cardinals of all time. I will do so by position. As always, I will be following a set of criteria. The criteria that affects this the most is that I only took a look at players with 3,000 or more plate appearances AS A CARDINAL. (So, Mark McGwire, Scott Rolen, Darryl Porter, Mike Matheny, and others - sorry, you're out!) From there, I used a very complicated formula involving:

WAR (a mix of fangraphs" and baseball-reference's WAR statistics)
WAR/PA*600 (600 plate appearances is a very near approximation to a complete season, so it's basically WAR/season
batting average
on base percentage
slugging percentage
on base plus slugging
OPS+ (takes OPS and converts it to a comparison to league average for that season or career and adjusts for ballpark)
% of hits that are extra base hits
BB:K (I could not compare 3rd basemen, shortstops, or corner outfielders on this statistic due to lack of data)
XBH:K (I could not compare 3rd basemen, shortstops, or corner outfielders on this statistic due to lack of data)
SB/PA*600 - basically SB/season
for catchers I looked at how many players were caught stealing or picked off compared to how many people stole bases off of them
for outfielders I looked at how many outfield assists that they got per 600 plate appearances (or per season) as well

I then took this data and ranked the players at each position against each other, accounting for small or large differences in each statistic in able to see who the best of the best was.

Without further ado, your top 3 St. Louis Cardinals' short stops of ALL TIME!

Honorable Mention goes to: Marty Marion, Bill Gleason, and Dal Maxvill

3) Garry Templeton has the rap of being a high talent, low brain type of short stop. My dad was a batting practice pitcher while Templeton was in St. Louis. His politically correct take on Templeton is that he was consistently the last person onto the field and the first person to leave the field; all the while, leading the league in errors three straight seasons as a Cardinal. His talent level was enough to land him, not only on the list of shortstops with 3,000+ plate appearances as a Redbird but also, in the top 3 of Cardinal short stops of all time. He comes in at #3 on the list and extremely close to #2 (forty-three thousandths away from our #2, to be precise). The Cardinals got the first 6 seasons of Templeton's career and they were his best - at least in the batter's box. Templeton was a 2 time all-star, one time silver slugger, and twice got votes for MVP while in St. Louis. He led the league in hits once and triples three times, but got caught stealing the most in 1977 and led the league in errors the next three seasons. To be fair, he also led the league in putouts and range factor per game all three of those seasons, so he got to more balls than anyone else.

2) Edgar Renteria was a beloved Cardinal while he was here, and the talent level places him at #2 on the list. I believe a lot of people soured on Renteria because of the way he departed St. Louis (taking the Red Sox's offer, which was less than a million dollars more than the Cardinals' reported offer, just months after the Red Sox beat the Cardinals in the World Series). While Edgar Renteria never led the league in any offensive categories during his time as a Cardinal, he put up numbers that were about league average, while playing a very good shortstop - earning two Gold Gloves. His .420 SLG and .768 OPS as a Cardinal top the list of Cardinals' short stops during their STL careers, as does his 29.5% XBH. Quite amazingly, Renteria never stole less than 17 bases with the Cardinals, averaging 25 a season - amazing because Tony LaRussa hardly ever gives the green light to anybody. (Since Renteria's departure, the clubhouse leader has totaled 16, 11, 10, 24, 16, and 14 steals. Cesar Izturis was the only one to get to 17, Renteria's low.) In addition to Renteria's 2 Gold Gloves he earned as a Cardinal, he also got MVP votes twice, made 3 All-Star teams, and earned 3 Silver Sluggers. His best season, in the 2003 season right before the boom of 2004 and 2005 and the World Series of 2006, looked reminiscent of "the glory days" of baseball - a .330 average with 61 extra base hits, only 13 of them homers, 96 runs and 100 RBI and a 34-7 SB record, all the while walking more than striking out (for the only time in his career.)

1) Ozzie Smith started his career with the San Diego Padres. Many people forget that nowadays. His first four years were spent in SD, but his last 15 years were spent as a Cardinal. Like so many of the others finishing #1 on their respective lists, Ozzie is truly a Cardinal great. Young Osborne Earl "Ozzie" Smith showed glimpses of his potential in San Diego, making possibly the best play defensively that I have ever seen, as a rookie. Diving up the middle for a scorched ground ball off the bat of Jeff Burroughs, the ball hit a rock and took a bad hop, so bad that the ball caromed over and behind his head. Ozzie throws up his bare hand (since his glove hand has absolutely zero chance of getting it), and grabs on while plummeting quickly to the ground. Then, he gets up and is able to still throw out the runner, Burroughs, from well behind second base, still on the short stop side of the bag. (*link below) That play in just his tenth game as a big league baseball player was just a glimpse into the athleticism and the future of one Ozzie Smith. In the offseason between the 1981 and 1982 seasons, the Cardinals had a still young, All-Star short stop that was seen as someone not giving them enough effort. Ozzie had already won two (of his thirteen straight) Gold Gloves and was an All-Star in 1981 as well. However, San Diego wanted some pop in their lineup, and the Cardinals wanted a fair return, so San Diego agreed to acquire (#3 on this list) Garry Templeton from the Cardinals in exchange for the man who would come to be known as "The Wizard." Never known for his bat (an OPS+ of just 66 in SD - and 87 for his career, Ozzie was able to become serviceable with the bat - he had a 9 year stretch where 8 of the seasons were at least a 95 OPS+. He was also quite the speedster, averaging 35 steals with only 8 caught during his first dozen years as a Cardinal. He had a high of 57 steals in 1988 (also getting 57 once in SD). Besides the 13 straight Gold Gloves, Ozzie was a 15 time All-Star, the 1985 NLCS MVP (more on this later), 2nd in MVP voting in 1987, and earned MVP votes in a total of 6 seasons. As a Card, he never once struck out more than he walked, having a Cards career total of 2.07 BB for every K. In fact, while not earning a ton of extra base hits in his career, Ozzie had nearly one XBH per strikeout; he was so adept at making contact. Lastly - not so much about Ozzie himself but in speaking of him - his home run to help the Cardinals to the 1985 World Series and win him 1985 NLCS MVP was called by Jack Buck and is one of my favorite calls of all time - "Go crazy folks, go crazy!" (**Also linked to later)

Congratulations to those 3 great Cardinal short stops!

The next post in the series will be Cardinal center fielders.

1) Ozzie Smith - 11.851

2) Edgar Renteria - 10.556

3) Garry Templeton - 10.513

4) Marty Marion - 9.293

5) Bill Gleason - 8.222

6) Dal Maxvill - 5.897

**Ozzie's great play

**Buck's call (about 45 seconds in to the podcast at the bottom of the article)

Just missing out: Solly Hemus (2494 PAs, but 22.0 gWAR), Dick Groat (2055 PAs, but 12.0 gWAR), Bobby Wallace (1873 PAs, but 13.25 fWAR), and Charlie Gelbert (2653 PAs, but 10.5 gWAR).

Tweet Comment 10 comments | 2 recs |

Do you like this story?

Comments

Somehow I think your formula may need a tweak to compensate for eras.

Not sure how, but I think you’re giving short shrift (ugh … I wrote it before I thought about it …) to Marty Marion, and that likely results from the fact that shortstop attracted very different players, with different skill sets, than in the modern era. Was Marion as good a player as Templeton? No. But he may have stood higher among his fellow 1940s shortstops than Templeton did 40 years later. Or maybe not, but intuitively, it seems that way.

This objection aside, you’re doing really good work here.

"That’s what a baseball player does: he uses the glove half of the time." -- Rick Horton regarding the DH.

by StanTheManFan on Jan 28, 2012 11:52 PM EST reply actions

I actually have a very large personal bias against Templeton

My father threw batting practice for the Cardinals back in the late 70s for a season. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, Dad would tell me about Keith Hernandez and Ken Reitz taking hundreds of balls at first (and then becoming a gold glover in the future), Lou Brock shagging flies forever (and while not great out there, improving defensively), and Ted Simmons hitting line drive after line drive in practice (already having multiple all-star appearances).

Dad said that Garry Templeton was the only player on the Cardinals that he would consider lazy. Templeton did not give a crap about improving himself, at least that season. He would come out at the requisite time, take the requisite amount of ground balls, take the requisite number of swings in the cage, then head back into the locker room minutes or even an hour before others – and would have gone home well before some had even left the field. He was (apparently) one of the worst defenders in the league at shortstop, and that told me why – he didn’t care to make himself better. My father always said that was why Templeton was run out of St. Louis.

I think what knocks some of the infielders on my lists here is that I really had no way to account for defense, other than outfielder assists and SB/CS for catchers. I also had no way to account for effort. I am looking at these completely statistically…and when you get further back than “x” years, there is no UZR – just fielding percentage (which I don’t trust), Total Zone (which I know nothing about), and Gold Gloves (which I also do not trust to an extent) to go on.

by stlfan on Jan 29, 2012 9:49 AM EST up reply actions

There were several good reasons to run Tempy out of town

but the claim that he was “one of the worst defenders in the league at shortstop,” although commonly made, misses some things. Yes, he committed a lot of errors. But he also got to balls that no other shortstop in the league, not even the guy who replaced him, would have reached. The Mark-I eyeball saw that at the time, and subsequent statistical analysis confirms it; his Range Factor was exceptionally high over his career, almost as high as Ozzie’s despite losing ground as he aged (as, of course, did Ozzie). “Erratic” defender, I’ll give you. “Worst,” not so much.

I remember some of the stuff that got him run out of town, and he had it coming; all indications are that he could be a real ass. But Templeton the ballplayer, rather than Templeton the pariah, was a pretty decent ballplayer in St. Louis. (His biggest shortcoming, incidentally, wasn’t defense, it was inability to draw a walk.) I think he’s undervalued by those who mainly remember what a PITA he was. I still think Marion should rate higher than he does.

"That’s what a baseball player does: he uses the glove half of the time." -- Rick Horton regarding the DH.

by StanTheManFan on Jan 29, 2012 11:53 AM EST up reply actions

Marion

Out of the 6 shortstops who were able to be included in this exercise, here are Marion’s ranks:

gWAR/600 PAs – 3rd
gWAR – 2nd
AVG – 5th
OBP – 5th
SLG – 3rd
OPS – 4th
OPS+ – 5th
%XBH – 3rd
BB:K – 2nd
XBH:K – 3rd
SB/600 PAs – 5th

Like I said – I think it was lack of statistical data for defense and effort that hurt him.

by stlfan on Jan 29, 2012 2:08 PM EST up reply actions

For over 40 years

Marty Marion set the standard by which shortstops were measured.
Amoung teammates he was called “slats” and “the occotupus” but to
other teams in the majors he was called “Mr. Shortstop.”

I only saw Marion play in a couple of games at the end of his career,
so I can’t fairly judge but from news reel highlights I saw at the
movies (before TV the movies covered MLB with the old “this week in
baseball”) between features and I did see some real plays by Marion.
I can still hear Mel Allen saying, on more than one occasion, “and
Mr. Shortstop turned in another gem as the Cardinals beat Brooklyn,”
Cubs etc. and then the play would be shown. I also know that Marion
was considered to be better defensively, than any other SS that had
preceeded him. That was not a argued much.

Marion’s career was cut short by knee injuries and in his day the did
not have the medical proceedures of today or he would have been
aroung longer. Marion was ofter mentioned a lot on TV and radio
broadcasts a lot on up until Ozzie Smith really established himself
and then Marion was kinda’ forgotton as it should be when a new
generation comes along, but even today if you enter “Mr. Shortstop”
in Google search you will come up with Marty Marion. I have linked
to an article on Marion below.

As for templeton, he is one of the few Cardinals I never liked or
respected an I rejoiced when he was traded for Ozzie.

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/article_dc85504a-cce1-5491-9954-257f9f472e16.html

by ridgesee on Jan 29, 2012 2:45 PM EST reply actions

Great project

Your project is terrific, and i agreed with your 1b and 2b analysis. However, although I accept the importance of methodological consistency, and the problems in intergenerational comparison, add me to those who would rate Marty Marion above Garry Templeton. I never saw Marion play, but my father praised him, and didn’t think much of Templeton.

Templeton seemed to me a bit less valuable than his stats suggested.

by madridbend on Jan 29, 2012 9:07 PM EST reply actions

another great post

some Gary Templeton and Ozzie Smith pics:

"young man, when you throw a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know"

by Cards Fan in Chitown on Jan 29, 2012 9:47 PM EST reply actions

If I'm remembering right

the final straw with Templeton and the Cardinals was when he gave the old middle finger sign to some fans behind the Cardinal dugout who were razzing him a bit as he came off the field after dogging it on several plays during the inning.

Seems like I can remember a photographer caught it on film and it was published in some papers and magazines. I’m sure I remember a picture of it.

by ridgesee on Jan 29, 2012 10:30 PM EST reply actions