Creamer as New-Age Baseball Thinker

This past summer I read Robert W. Creamer's excellent biography on Babe Ruth. This winter my attention turned to reading his second definitive baseball biography, Stengel: His Life & Times . Written in the mid-1980's and a little over ten years after the writing of his Ruth book the steady, detailed writing style of Creamer is still very apparent. The book is nearly as enjoyable an overall read as the Ruth book.

Near the end of chapter seven there resides an enlightening passage where Creamer explains his take on Stengel teammate Jake Daubert's 1913 season. It stands out as an early sabermetric nugget, a precursor to one of the many strains of the present day new-school statistically based baseball scholarship.

Daubert at first base was one of the stars of the league - he hit .350 in 1913 to win the batting championship - although he wasn't nearly as good as his reputation made him out to be. He was given the "Chalmers Award" (a new Chalmers automobile) for being the outstanding player in the National League, although in retrospect it's obvious that Gavvy Cravath, the hard-hitting outfielder of the Phillies, was a far more valuable player. Cravath hit .341 to Daubert's .350, batted in 128 runs to Jake's 52 and scored 78 runs to the Brooklyn star's 76. And the Phillies finished second, compared to Brooklyn's sixth. Daubert's reputation reflected baseball thinking: His high batting average year after year dazzled people. He looked good at bat, and he looked good in the field. He had quick hands, could bunt amazingly well, and very seldom made an error. But he had little power at bat and little range in the field. No one noticed. He was Brooklyn's captain, and it's star.

Creamer singles out Daubert's batting average as being the statistic that overrated his individual offensive accomplishments. Behind the gaudy batting average was a player with "little power", Creamer's implication being that unlike the powerful Cravath, Daubert's hits did not create as many runs or positive game-altering events for his team. Up until the mid-1990's rarely had the use of batting average as a central signifier of a player's hitting contribution been questioned. New-school statistical thinking pooh-poohs the use off batting average as an important statistic and looks more to high on-base percentage and slugging percentage players such as Cravath as the offensive standard-bearers of baseball.

On the fielding side Creamer mentions the low error rate of Daubert but immediately notes that he lacked the necessary range at first base to be considered a very good fielder. But it was the low error rate that old-school thinkers were drawn to when they supported the notion that Daubert was a fine fielder. Creamer seems to be implying (like new-schoolers) that perhaps Daubert's low error rate is due to the fact that he's not getting to many balls in the first place, therefore lowering his fielding chances and lessening his error total.

I find Creamer's intuitive reasoning about Daubert to be quite impressive and an example of someone possessing high baseball intelligence. In all of my reading of baseball from the pre-Bill James period I can't remember another writer ever exhibiting strains of new-school statistical thinking like Creamer does here. Creamer's intuitiveness on the subject is made all the impressive by the fact that he was principally a writer, not a baseball statistician.