Why Run When You Can Jog?

When I was younger in school, a popular card game that made its way through my social circle was called MLB Showdown.  The cards featured players that my friends and I loved to watch, the game employed a die to mimic the outcomes of batter-pitcher face-offs, and the statistics featured on each player card corresponded roughly with that players production/reputation.  There are many iterations of dice games to simulate baseball games, but this particular card/die hybrid game utilized a 20-sided die.

In MLB Showdown, position players had results listed 1-20 that directly reflected an outcome; the higher the roll, the better the outcome.  In a complex game like baseball, boiling down outcomes based on twenty individual possibilities led to often overly general odds.  For instance, Mark McGwire and Ken Griffey Jr.’s cards indicated that, in a case where they had an advantage over a pitcher, they hit doubles when the die landed on 15 and home runs when its landed on 16-20.  

This always irked me.  Were Ken Griffey Jr. and Mark McGwire really five times as likely to hit a home run as a double? Yes, they were generational power hitters, but five times as likely? 

MLB Showdown then might be the inception point for this post.  Here, we address which power hitters historically have had the most top-heavy homerun : double ratios, and which power hitters have been more balanced, or feature an oppositely tilted ratio.

Below is a scatter plot comparing career doubles and home runs for all MLB players who hit 300 or more home runs in their careers.  These data were taken using Baseball References leaderboards.

Overall, its a pretty spread out and noisy cloud of data.  Those points hugging the x-axis represent players who hit more homeruns than doubles.  Those points higher toward the y-axis represent players who, despite hitting 300+ homeruns in their career, hit far more doubles still.  At a glance, it doesn’t appear that there is a gross imbalance of players on one side of the orange line (which indicates a perfect 1:1 ratio of the two hit types).  In fact, given this subset of players, only 1,366 more doubles were hit than home runs, or just over 9 more doubles than home runs per career (at this point in time, at least).

Now for a handful of leaderboards.  First up, those players who embody the title of this post: “Why Run When You Can Jog?”.  The first leaderboard includes a top-10 of homeruns minus doubles total as a raw differential.  The second includes a leaderboard based on the ratio between the two totals.

Atop either board: Mark McGwire.  McGwire hit an incredible 331 more home runs than doubles in his career, good for almost 2.5 homers for each double.  The second place holder on either board, Harmon Killebrew, isn’t even particularly close.  Indeed, the two leaderboards above indeed feature some overlap.  Slightly surprising to me is the number of LHH’s on these charts.  I might have guessed that the extra couple feet advantage toward first base, over the course of long careers, might have translated to a few more doubles here and there, and a leaderboard dominated by right-handed hitters.

Next, those on the opposite end of the ratio spectrum.  Why jog when you can run, if you will.

Like the initial two leaderboards, there is some repetition in these lists as well.  In this case, George Brett is the champion of legging out doubles while still possessing the power to get baseballs over the fence with considerable frequency.  Of note as well is the slightly greater number of relatively-contemporary players on these latter lists, possibly suggesting homerun-heavy power hitters might be a a rarer phenomenon these days.  Six players on the double-heavy differential list above played in the 2000’s opposed to four from the homer-heavy leaders.  

Speaking of contemporaries, this fifth list includes all active players with 300+ homeruns:

Because of the 300+ home run benchmark, just one of these players (Giancarlo Stanton) is still in his 20’s.  Still, six of ten have more career doubles than homers.  Stanton, it seems, might be this generations homerun-to-double heavy poster child, featuring a nearly 1.3:1 ratio.  It’s not McGwire-ian, but it is considerable.

As a last point, I figured it would be of interest to highlight those few players with very nearly 1:1 career ratios.  Of all these players, just four boast differentials between +/- 5 hits: Curtis Granderson (+4, as in four more home runs than doubles), Mark Teixeira (+1), Prince Fielder (-2), and Ted Williams (-4).  This is great, in my opinion, for a couple reasons.  Great, because Prince’s dad, Cecil, appears as super homer-heavy on the second leaderboard above and also hit 319 career homeruns.  Great because, body types be damned, Prince Fielder is more double-skewed than Curtis Granderson.  Great because these select players just as often found the gap as they put it over the wall.

If we learned anything here, it’s that Mark McGwire (and to a lesser extent, Ken Griffey Jr. with his own +104 differential) was in fact far more likely to hit a homerun than a double over the course of his career, just not quite five times as likely.