National treasure David Laurila offers up his weekly notes column, and this part caught my eye:
I’ve since run another poll, and while it garnered nowhere near the number of votes, the result was notable. The far-better defender was trounced. Willie Randolph (65.9 WAR) received just 27.7% of the vote, while Jeff Kent (55.4 WAR) got 72.3%.
Why the polar-opposite results? My best guess is that most fans tend to credit superior defense more than they debit inferior defense. Jones’s nothing-to-write-home-about 111 wRC+ got a pass because he was jaw-droppingly good with the glove, while Kent’s not-so-good glove got a pass because he was a prolific hitter for his position.
Or maybe Willie Randolph is simply way underrated.
FanGraphs.com
Randolph taught me about OBP before I knew there was a term for the ability to get on base. The young me knew there was a relationship between his walks and his runs scored, but didn’t quite know how to express it until I started reading Bill James in the 1980s. No one talked about OBP during broadcasts back then.
Randolph was a classic good offensive second baseman when the position was starting to move a bit toward power. His career is surround by Joe Morgan and Bobby Grich, too players who added power to Randolph’s skill set. Those two delivered great defense, great OBPs, and pop to boot. Randoph remains one of my favorite players, but he would have likely rated higher if his career had occurred ten or twenty years earlier.
No one talked about OBP on TV, and average was still king, but even in Little League, and Babe Ruth, and American Legion and even two years of JV high school, we often said a walk was as good as a hit and we valued OBP. Not as much as batting average. Coincidentally, Willie and I were born the same year. I was a sports reporter at the SI Advance when we were both seniors in high school (he was in Brooklyn – Abrhama Lincoln? – and I was on Staten Island, and I have a vague memory of having heard of him in schoolboy baseball circles.