The Backup Catcher

Bill James wonders if David Ross set some kind of record for fewest games in a long career.

After floundering around, I finally realized that the way to measure this is to multiply the years by 90 and subtract the games played, so that if a player plays 90 games a year or more he doesn’t show up in this category, but if he has a long career playing LESS than 90 games a year, he will register. 90 games, 100, 80, 110. . .it doesn’t matter; the same guy is going to show up as the leader in this category no matter how you figure it, because he is way ahead of everybody else.

The guy who is going to win this no matter how you figure it is Tom Prince. Tom Prince played 17 seasons in the majors, but only 519 games. He played fewer games than anyone else who played 16 seasons (except pitchers), or 15, or 14. He is the absolute king of this category, the Prince and the King. There was a player in the late 1990s named Mike Frank, which gives us a name string: Mike Frank Thomas Prince Fielder Jones.

The most interesting bit to fall out of the research, however, was this:

Of those 23 players, at least ten are great human interest stories, but anyway, the other thing that struck me about the list is: This does not change over time. Everything in baseball changes over time, right? Rosters are different, playing styles are different. . .everything changes. When you make a list like this, it is almost always dominated by the players from one era, because some era always has a relevant edge.

But not here. The role of a backup catcher is EXACTLY the same now that it was in 1900 and before, basically.

What’s even more interesting is this changed despite teams carrying one less catcher. When teams carried just nine or ten pitchers, two catchers were often on the bench. That allowed managers to pinch hit for catchers as often as they did pitchers, and protected the team against in-game injuries to the backstops.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2kc7UpL