One Team Careers
Since the 1980's it's been a popular refrain from some baseball quarters that the players of the past thirty years just don't stick with one team their entire careers anymore. Such a statement is usually accompanied by a rant directed at the era of free agency and how it has reduced the number of one-team careers.
My hunch is that this is not the case and I intend to prove it through a number of methods. The first method of study that I wish to explore will be to take the top one-hundred players in career games played (through 2004) and determine how many of them played their entire careers with just one team. To be in the top one-hundred of all-time in career games played means that you have probably had a very successful or at least a very good career due to the fact of your longevity. These are, more often than not, the all-time stars and superstars of the game.
Once those players have been noted the second part of the study will be to bucket those one-team players into eras during the one-hundred year history to see whether my hunch is borne out or not.
We'll begin with baseball's all-time top ten players in games played.
Pete Rose ------------------- 3,562 games
Carl Yastrzemski ---------- 3,308
Hank Aaron ---------------- 3,298
Rickey Henderson --------- 3,081
Ty Cobb --------------------- 3,035
Eddie Murray -------------- 3,026
Stan Musial ---------------- 3,026
Cal Ripken ----------------- 3,001
Willie Mays ---------------- 2,992
Dave Winfield ------------- 2,973
Every player is an official hall of famer except for the soon to be HOF'er, Cal Ripken. The first hit in the study is Carl Yastrzemski. From 1961 through 1983 Yaz played all of his games as a Boston Red Sox. The man following Yaz, Hank Aaron, just misses joining him on the list. He spent the last two years of his career (1975-76) back in the Milwaukee the Braves had left for Atlanta in 1966. By the time Aaron returned Milwaukee hosted an American League team, the Brewers.
Rickey Henderson traveled prolifically over his long career and Ty Cobb spent his last two years in the game with the second and final organization of his career ala Aaron.
Stan Musial is our second ballplayer to play his entire career with one ballclub. He was a member of the St. Louis Cardinals over a twenty-two year career that spanned from 1941 through 1963. Right after Musial comes Cal Ripken who is the third and final player in the top ten to play his entire career with one club, the Baltimore Orioles from 1981 through 2001.
So in the top ten list of career games played three players played their entire career with one organization.
If we attribute one point to each year in a decade these players played then our chart would look like this:
DECADE ------ Years Represented
1900-1909 ---- 0
1910-1919 ----- 0
1920-1929 ---- 0
1930-1939 ---- 0
1940-1949 ---- 8 (i.e Musial 1941,'42,'43,'44,'46,'47,'48 and '49)
1950-1959 ---- 10
1960-1969 ---- 13
1970-1979 ---- 10
1980-1989 ---- 13
1990-1999 ---- 10
2000+ -------- 2
With this very small sample size we see no years before 1940 represented and a majority of the years concentrated between 1950 and 1999.
The next post will use this same methodology to review the players who played in the 11th though the 20th most games in history.
posted by The Hook @ 9:08 PM
4 Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Allen Barra wrote about the subject of "player loyalty" in That's Not The Way It Was a few years ago. Among other things, he discovered that of the 127 players inducted into the Hall of Fame before 1980, players unaffected by the free agency era, 70 percent (89 players) played for more than one team and 14 such players played for at least five teams. I decided to look up the Hall of Famers inducted after 1980 and who played the bulk of their careers in the free agency era, or played long enough into the era to have been able to declare free agency and potentially switch teams, to see how many of these were one-team players. They are:
Johnny Bench
George Brett
Jim Palmer
Mike Schmidt
Robin Yount
Forty-seven Hall of Famers inducted since 1980, including several pre-free agency players, played for more than one team. (Technically it is 48, but Ryne Sandberg barely had a drop of coffee with the Phillies before he was dealt to the Cubs.) Of the 47 inducted since 1980, at least thirty of them---including thirteen from the pre-free agency era, and including such stalwart names as Red Schoendienst, Richie Ashburn, Juan Marichal, Luis Aparicio, Frank Robinson, Enos Slaughter, Hoyt Wilhelm, and Nellie Fox---played for three or more.
Barra: Okay, now, the degree of "loyalty," or, as it's usually referred to in the press, "team loyalty," does not, as you might suppose, indicate a team's loyalty to the player but rather the other way around. This is indeed a modern problem; it almost never came up when owners swapped popular players. This isn't to say fans didn't resent it . . . But when it's an owner or general manager doing the swapping, the bitterness doesn't seem to last as long . . . all too seldom brought up is the baseball owners' blatant lack of loyalty and responsibility to the fans . . . Before the advent of free agency, players had no chioce as to where they played; loyalty never entered into the picture. You might make a case thaat such players as George Brett, Kirby Puckett, and Ryne Sandberg, who have played their careers with one team when they might have gone elsewhere, have brought the concept of loyalty into baseball.
I look forward to your next results. :)
Your post-1980 inductees one teamers coming in at 5 for 47 (10%) is quite a contrast with the 38 for 127 (30%) pre-1980 inductees.
I like Barra's mention of the hypocrisy of how the public holds players to a different standard of loyalty than the owners. I agree!
Post a Comment
<< Home