Vladimir Guerrero Joins the 400 Home Run and .320 Batting Average Club

by Jeff Zimmerman on Aug 13, 2009 2:37 PM EDT

On Monday, Vladimir Guerrero of the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles hit his 400^th home run and thereby joined an exclusive group of players that hit the 400 home runs and also hit for a .320 batting average or better. The other five people in the group are Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx. Not bad company. Here is how all six rank all time in Win Shares and WAR compared to other hitters.

Name	WAR Rank	WAR	WS Rank	WS
Babe Ruth	1	172	3	660
Stan Musial	8	127.9	8	609
Ted Williams	11	125	11	559
Lou Gehrig	13	118.3	17	494
Jimmie Foxx	23	94	28	430
Vladimir Guerrero	127	56.8	134	307

Tom Tango recently figured out the WAR values for the average values for Hall of Famer is around 67 WAR and replacement level (20% percentile) Hall of Famer is 47. Vlad is definitely in that region where he is currently a borderline Hall of Farmer.

Obviously Vlad ranks significantly lower than the other 5 players and might be tough for him to make up to much ground. The following is chart you might have seen a couple times yesterday since it was already published in some form here at Beyond the Box Score and at The Book Blog. I was going to run this story yesterday and I wake up and there are already 3 articles published (Hard Ball Times, The Book Blog, and Beyond the Box Score) on how to create correct WAR graphs. There has also been one since then at the Hard Ball Times. Through the discussions there have been some improvements made and a possible new look I will call the Sky-Tango look since both have wanted the version for a while. Also there are a couple of definitions to help with explaining the charts and a poll at the end to let us know which version you like the best.

Graphs after the jump

Original Version

Sky-Tango Version

Hall of Fame Grey Area – This is the area where a player's career may or may not justify them getting into the Hall of Fame. I did some previous work for what values to use for the average and replacement level lines for data after 1954. Tom Tango figured out using Rally's complete WAR database good values for Average (starting at 8 WAR and drop by .5 for each year) and Replacement Level Hall of Famers (starting at 6.5 and dropping by .5 each year). A grey area is created on the graph to show this unsure region,

Now for those using a spreadsheet and wantint to create the grey area, start the line at 7.25, decrease each additional value by .5 for each year. Then make the line grey, transparent and wide enough to cover the values of the average and replacement level Hall of Famers.

Wins above Replacement Hall of Famer – This value seems a little complex, but is actually pretty simple. It is the WAR value of player minus the what would be the replacement level HOF WAR value. So with Babe Ruth in his best season he had 14.7 WAR and replacement level HOF value is 6.5 so he is 8.2 wins above replacement level Hall of Famer.

Poll

Which version of the graph do you like better?

Original Version

42 votes

Sky-Tango Version

34 votes

76 votes | Poll has closed

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Comments

Eww, greenish gray?

And the graphs are kinda blurry.

Odd to think of Vlad as a HoFer – he’s always considered good-great, it seems, but never awesome. Well, unless you’re talking about his strike zone. :)

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by bdalebs on Aug 13, 2009 2:42 PM EDT reply actions

SBN is Killing the graphes, let me retry

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman on Aug 13, 2009 2:43 PM EDT up reply actions

I have to import them and they get redone and blurry but look better here:

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman on Aug 13, 2009 2:48 PM EDT up reply actions

Are you making those graphs in OO?

How are you saving them as images?

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by cwyers on Aug 13, 2009 2:51 PM EDT up reply actions

I use Fastone capture, but I found out that SBN story creation interface is making the images larger, thereby blurry.

Let me see if I can get a way around it

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman on Aug 13, 2009 2:56 PM EDT up reply actions

Try using something like Paint.NET to resize the images, instead of letting SBN do it for you.

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by cwyers on Aug 13, 2009 3:07 PM EDT up reply actions

I don't have that option, it is an import function. I am looking for a way around

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman on Aug 13, 2009 3:09 PM EDT up reply actions

Can't you copy and paste a graph into MS Paint?

Excel lets you do it, works pretty well.

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by bdalebs on Aug 13, 2009 5:33 PM EDT up reply actions

My process

I hit the Print Screen button. I then use Gimp (free) and do an Acquire—>From Clipboard. Then I crop it down and save as a GIF. Works well, minimal processing, everything comes out looking pretty crisp.

My blog: Basement-Dwellers.com
Also: Beyond the Boxscore

by JinAZ on Aug 14, 2009 11:14 AM EDT up reply actions

Huh.

I just copy the graph and paste it into Paint. I use PNG files though, just out of personal preference.

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by bdalebs on Aug 14, 2009 12:15 PM EDT up reply actions

Never tried that

But copy ’n pasting from excel works fine too. I just got into the habit of using print screen because it works better for some of my other graphing programs.

Is there any advantage to PNG’s? I’ve been using GIF’s since the early 90’s, and haven’t had a reason to switch. :)
-j

My blog: Basement-Dwellers.com
Also: Beyond the Boxscore

by JinAZ on Aug 14, 2009 12:33 PM EDT up reply actions

It keeps backgrounds clear if you don't give them a color.

Which is good for when you don’t want a big white rectangle with a picture in the middle of it. GIF’s can look kinda bad when zoomed in close, while PNG’s stay pretty sharp. Unfortunately, I forgot that Paint doesn’t do transparent. Pasting the graph into Powerpoint works though – once it’s pasted, right click and select “Save as Image.”

Oh, and if you choose to trust Wikipedia:

Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to improve upon and replace GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) as an image-file format not requiring a patent license. It is pronounced /ˈpɪŋ/ 1 or spelled out as P-N-G. The PNG acronym is optionally recursive, unofficially standing for "PNG’s Not GIF".2

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by bdalebs on Aug 14, 2009 7:28 PM EDT up reply actions

thanks

For the info. I’ll think about using them. -j

My blog: Basement-Dwellers.com
Also: Beyond the Boxscore

by JinAZ on Aug 15, 2009 2:15 PM EDT up reply actions

the WAH graph is a PNG, fwiw. :)

My blog: Basement-Dwellers.com
Also: Beyond the Boxscore

by JinAZ on Aug 15, 2009 2:16 PM EDT up reply actions

Here's a WAH graph of the same data.

Here’s my spreadsheet, which now does both WAR and WAH graphs from the same input data. Everything except the pasting and sorting is more or less automatic.

I’m still not sure that I like the WAH graphs. But I dislike them less than I used to.

I also saw the comment at the Book Blog about sorting the WAH values and then plotting them. So instead of the first season being that individual’s best, it’s the season they most exceeded the “replacement” HoF line. That would help appearances, but I think it just gets too far from the source data and would cause lots of confusion.

Just my two cents.
-j

My blog: Basement-Dwellers.com
Also: Beyond the Boxscore

by JinAZ on Aug 14, 2009 1:11 PM EDT up reply actions

Agreed.

@bs_uf15bosox9be The Original Gameday; Learn to use SB Nation

by bdalebs on Aug 14, 2009 7:35 PM EDT up reply actions

Why not just ditch the relative size html?

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by Sky Kalkman on Aug 17, 2009 10:55 AM EDT up reply actions

Other

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman on Aug 13, 2009 2:57 PM EDT up reply actions

Is there any way to find what players career averages were at when the hit #400? Because it’s hard to know if Vlad will end up with a .320 avg after his decline phase…

by lar on Aug 13, 2009 2:47 PM EDT reply actions

Not 100% acurately

Babe hit 400 in 1927. After that, he hit .332. Before, he hit .349
Musial hit 400 in early 1959. After that, he hit about .283. Before, he hit .340.
Williams hit 400 in 1956. After that, he hit about .329. Before that, he hit .348.
Gehrig hit 400 in the middle or 1936. After that, he hit about .319. Before that, he hit .344.
Foxx hit 400 in the middle of 1938. After that, he hit about .296. Before that, he hit about .335.

All numbers are estimates and are probably off but a little bit, due to the lack of play by play data for Babe, Gehrig and Foxx (somebody else can do Williams and Musial accurately). And this isn’t a very good way to predict, because the worst players here are miles better than Guerrero.

by KMils on Aug 13, 2009 3:06 PM EDT up reply actions

Although it's a little odd

to see a WAR graph that doesn’t slope downward, I think the Sky-Tango graph makes it a lot easier to differentiate individual lines.

That being said, surely we can come up with a better Y-axis label than the abbreviated equivalent of “Wins Above Replacement Above Replacement Hall of Fame Wins Above Replacement”. The words “above” and “replacement” have now lost all meaning to me.

I think labeling the axis “Wins Above Replacement HOF” and adding a small definition explaining replacement HOF would be a lot better than a label where over half of the words are used more than once.

by jwiscarson on Aug 13, 2009 3:19 PM EDT reply actions

Good point on the label

Jeff Zimmerman - Protecting the world from RBI's and Wins from my mom's guest house.

by Jeff Zimmerman on Aug 13, 2009 3:22 PM EDT up reply actions

I think you can do without the first WAR

Truthfully, we’re just moving the baseline, so it’s not necessary to say “WAR above replacement” because the “replacement” in the first WAR is no longer relevant in the graph. So maybe just Wins above Replacement HOF?

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by SFiercex4 on Aug 13, 2009 3:25 PM EDT up reply actions

I thought about that as well.

You could go with that and just explain the idea of replacement HOF, perhaps including a short blurb about WAR (or a link to a definition of it).

I’ve said it before, but I think it’s worth repeating: if we want other people to understand what we mean, we have to take the extra effort to explain ourselves in easy to understand terms.

by jwiscarson on Aug 13, 2009 3:46 PM EDT up reply actions