Mr Consistency

I've written about the remarkable baseball career of Steady Eddie Collins with its consistently high level of performance over the years.  I came across another example recently, a player I've long known about but never really thought about it Collins-like terms - Mel Ott.

Growing up in the 1950s with a father who was a New York Giants fan, I certainly knew about Ott - the great slugger for the team in the 1930s, retiring with 511 home runs, at that time the National League record.  Ott first appeared with the Giants as a 17-year old rookie in 1926, retired from the team in 1947 and was a regular from 1928 through 1945.  But it was hard for me to see him as a consistently great player throughout that period when his performance varied from seasons like 1929 (42HR/151RBI/.328BA/1.084OPS) and 1936 (33/135/.328/1.036) to years like 1933 (23/103/.283/.834), 1940 (19/79/.289/.864) and 1943 (18/47/.234/.810).  Moreover, as I learned from reading Bill James in the 1980s, much of his home run total resulted from playing in the uniquely favorable home park configuration of the Polo Grounds where he mashed a remarkable 63% of his homers, using his unique leg kick batting style (see above), and despite not being a big player, even for that era, standing 5'9" and weighing 170.

What caused me to relook at Ott's career was some research on career WAR (Wins Above Replacement).  WAR is a far from perfect analytical tool but it does provide a decent starting point for comparative research as long as you are aware of its limitations.

There have been 19,519 major league players since 1871 and only 31 have accumulated at least 100 WAR over the course of their careers (Albert Pujols being the newest member of the club).  Looking at the data I realized Ott was #22 with 107.8 WAR (all figures based on the Baseball-Reference definition of WAR).

The top five in career WAR are Babe Ruth (182.4), Walter Johnson (164.3), Cy Young (163.6), Barry Bonds (162.8) and Willie Mays (156.4).  Illustrating the dominance of Babe Ruth in baseball history, the difference between the Babe and Ott is greater than that between Ott and the #715 player in career WAR, Bobby Thomson, who hit the famous home run for the Giants in the 1951 playoff against the Dodgers.

I decided to take a deeper look at Ott's career and quickly realized that one aspect I'd underestimated was the impact on his traditional states of his career starting in the high offense context of the National League in the late 1920s and very early 1930s, a context that soon changed when league offense first tapered, and then dropped, off the cliff during the war years (1942-45), so that his comparative performance throughout his career actually remained strong.

As mentioned above, Ott was a regular player for 18 seasons; 1928 through 1945.  In every one of those years he finished in the top ten in On Base + Slugging Percentage.  Even in 1943 when he hit only .234 with 18 homers, he was 8th in the league, and he finished in the top five on 13 occasions, including in 1945, his last year, when he was 3rd!

Ott also finished in the top ten in each of those seasons in adjusted OPS (15 times in top 5), home runs (16 times in top 5), and AB/HR (15 times in top 5).  His lowest adjusted OPS was 134 (meaning 34% better than the average) and his highest 178.

He was also in the top ten for 16 years in On-Base %, Slugging, and Walks.

Ott was consistent in other aspects of his work, hitting .305 in night games and .304 during the day.  He hit .302 against flyball pitchers and .300 against groundball hurlers; .302 against power tossers and .300 against finesse pitchers.

His batting average was .306 in April, .300 in May, and .302 in both June and July.  August (.330) and September(.284) showed some variation.

Mel hit between .289 and .317 against each of the seven opposing teams during his career (an unusually small variation) and between .288 and .325 (including .297 in the Polo Grounds) in seven of the nine ballparks he played in during his career.  The two exceptions were the Philadelphia Phillies parks of the era - Baker Bowl with its short right field fence, very inviting for a lefty hitter like Ott, until 1938, and Shibe Park for the remainder of his career.  At Baker Bowl, Ott assembled Ruthian stats, in 119 games hitting 40 home runs, driving in 161, hitting .415 with an OPS of 1.282.  But in 71 games at Shibe, Mel failed to hit a homer, drove in only 33, batting .220 with an OPS of .605.

And how about the Polo Grounds as home park and all those home runs?  Mel hit 323 of his 511 taters in his home park but what the Polo Grounds gave in four-baggers it took away in doubles and triples.  Ott had 181 doubles and 21 triples in his home park but 306 doubles and 51 triples on the road, giving a total of 525 extra base hits in New York and 545 in away games.  He also hit .311 on the road compared to .297 at home and, in another example of consistency played 1367 games at home and 1363 away.

My dad was right - Mel Ott was a great ballplayer.

By all accounts, Mel was a soft-spoken and nice guy who, after his playing and managerial days were over, was having a successful career as a baseball broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers.  Unfortunately, in November 1958 he was back home in Louisiana and driving on a fog-bound road at night when an oncoming car crossed over the center line and hit his car head on.  Mel died a week later at the age of 49.