Another Rainout

Good golly Miss Molly. The entire series against Binghamton was washed out. Next up, the Sea Dogs travel to Norwich to play the Navigators. Here's a Press Herald article about how everybody is sick of the rainouts, and how they are costing the Sea Dogs quite a bit of revenue.

What's a blogger to do? How about I share with you a post that I made on the STATLG-L "Baseball (and Lesser Sports)" discussion list. One of the list members was looking into home run stats when Manny hit #400, and was marvelling about how Jimmy Foxx appears to be a better slugger than he was giving Foxx credit for. So we did a couple of different looks at it. I finanlly decided to look at what I call Isolated Power Plus (IsoP+). Isolated Power is simply slugging % - batting average. It looks at a hitter's ability to gather extra-base hits. IsoP+ compares a batter's Isolated Power vs. the league average IsoP, as adjusted for park factors. I took all of my numbers from Baseball-reference.com. Here's (most of) what I wrote there:

OK, I did a non-exhaustive study of Isolated Power andIsoP+, looking at just the top 100 guys in slugging % and top 100 HR guys. I didn't do the calcs for everybody, just the ones wholooked like they'd be in play. The condensed list (everybody over 190, I believe), in order of IsoP+:

SLG IsoP IsoP+
690 348 303 Ruth
632 292 230 Gehrig
588 325 223 McGwire
634 290 220 Williams
605 292 220 Greenberg
611 311 214 Bonds
609 284 214 Foxx
562 250 207 Mize
527 260 205 Schmidt
577 219 203 Hornsby

The next 10 (IsoP+ only)
Allen 198
Mantle 198
Stargell 198
Dimaggio 197
Kiner 196
Ott 196
Wilson 193
McCovey 193
Kingman 191
Killebrew 190

Kingman is the only guy on this list with a career slugging % below 500 (478), due to his very low batting average (236). McGwire, Schmidt and Killebrew are the only other guys on the list whose BA isn't above the league average (well, McGwire is at 263 vs. the league avg. of 262, but it's basically even).

Aaron and Mays are just below at 187 and 186 (along with Strawberry). Dan Brouthers was at 179, Manny at 174, Wagner 167, ARod 164, Vlad Guererro and Cobb 159, and Todd Helton pulled up the rear of those I calculated at 155. His slugging percentage (616, fourth all time!) benefits both from Coors and a high batting average vs. the league average.

So, Foxx indeed is one of the top sluggers of all time, no matter how you look at it, as is Hank Greenberg, who probably gets talked about less than Double X does. And it usually goes without saying, but Ruth's numbers are mind-boggling.