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GIDP: The Underrated Production Killer

Earlier in the week, I wrote a post about how grounding into double plays erased 16.5% of Jim Rice's career offensive value. Of course, Rice isn't the only player I looked into, but the story really evolved to go into Rice further. Today, I'll share a few graphs of some other players of interest.

One player who was similar to Rice is Joe Torre. Torre actually was worth more offensively than Rice (300 runs above average to 279) and his double plays were just a tad less damaging (-43 runs compared with Rice's -45). As a result, the double plays cost him 14.3% of his career value, by far the highest total of any player with 300+ batting runs above average (Rocky Colavito was second at 8.5%).


Torre_medium

Among the players with the worst GIDP runs in history, George Scott also stood out to me because he had far fewer batting runs than Rice and Torre. As a result, 36.4% of his offense was erased.

Scott_medium

The highest active player (though he did announce he's now retired) is Mike Lowell.

Lowell_medium

Think that's bad? How about poor Eric Karros? A full 40% of his offense was wiped away by the ol' 6-4-3.

Karros_medium

Lastly, this one was even tough to visualize in the same manner as the others. Brooks Robinson, of course, is a Hall of Famer with his glove. But he still collected 2848 hits and 268 home runs, which would make you think he was a pretty darn good offensive player. The problem is, it took him forever to do this, and he didn't have much plate discipline while doing it either. It all adds up to a marginally above average offensive player, according to both batting runs (+20) and OPS+ (104).

Sadly, all of it (and then some!) is wiped away by double plays. The GIDP knocks Brooks Robinson into a slightly below average offensive performer.

Robinson_medium

Here's the table that I used (from Rally's WAR database, then hand-updating the active players from Baseball-Reference). I used players with -20 GIDP runs or worse, then sorted by percentage of offensive value erased.

Name PlApp Bat DP WAR Pct
Gus Triandos 4368 2 -21 12.9 1050.00
Deron Johnson 6546 11 -21 5.1 190.91
Brooks Robinson 11567 20 -35 69.1 175.00
Larry Parrish 7716 16 -23 35.7 143.75
Frank Thomas 6820 46 -26 16.7 56.52
Lance Parrish 7363 42 -20 13.9 47.62
Eric Karros 7024 63 -25 9.0 39.68
George Scott 8185 118 -43 30.9 36.44
Lou Piniella 6266 58 -21 11.4 36.21
Mike Lowell 6498 67 -21 29.1 31.34
Ivan Rodriguez 10133 71 -21 67.7 29.58
Dick Stuart 4320 68 -20 6.1 29.41
Bob Bailey 6951 98 -25 24.9 25.51
Lee May 8145 118 -26 22.7 22.03
Cecil Fielder 5893 123 -26 15.3 21.14
Willie Horton 7976 151 -28 24.3 18.54
Jim Rice 8959 279 -46 41.5 16.49
Julio Franco 9632 169 -27 40.6 15.98
Paul Konerko 6831 194 -30 22.1 15.46
Joe Torre 8738 300 -43 55.6 14.33
Tony Perez 10746 255 -36 50.5 14.12
Cal Ripken 12746 181 -24 89.9 13.26
Ted Simmons 9574 208 -27 50.4 12.98
Rico Carty 6261 251 -30 31.4 11.95
Joe Adcock 7217 204 -24 34.2 11.76