Bill James and the 1961 Yankees

Pushing the discussion along

Bill James and the 1961 Yankees

I released this video a few weeks ago, though I neglected to expound on this blog:

James’ rant against the 1961 Yankees chiefly comes from The New Historical Baseball Abstract, a book I bought the day it came out and read multiple times when I was in high school.

The New Historical Baseball Abstract is actually kind of hit and miss. There are sections that are brilliant, sections that are half baked (the Win Shares explanation in particular), sections that are incomplete (see the comment on Jeff Bagwell’s career), sections that are historically inaccurate (the section on the Baltimore Orioles of the early 1920s, for example), and sections that are rants, like the one we’ll look at here.

In the great Bill James tradition, he explains early on why it’s not really worth it to dig deep to piece out the greatest teams of all time — and then proceeds to do that exact thing across numerous sections.

The part we’ll talk about comes from Part IV of The Greatest Team What Ever Was, which is in the section covering the 1960s.

James starts it out by telling us where he’s going:

Now, James might be right. The 1961 New york Yankees were not a “great” baseball team if you define “great” only in terms of the 1927 and 1939 Yankees. If we look at the Domination Index, we’ll see that the Yankees rank below quite a few American League teams, many of which are commonly thought of as the greatest team of all time:

The 2.966 Domination Index score isn’t really close to the greatest of all time. It’s a hair under 3 standard deviations from the mean, which means that it falls just outside of that mythical 1% outlier level.

But, of course, it’s still really good. The Yankees were every bit as much of a “great” team as the 1929 Philadelphia Athletics, and they weren’t really all that far behind the likes of the 1917 Chicago White Sox and the 1912 Boston Red Sox. It’s not like this is a really bad team with no depth, which is kind of what James is arguing here:

These aren’t awful points. They’re just not accurate.

Let’s look at the one dimensional offense first.

Okay — this is why we use the Domination Index instead of the raw number of runs scored. The 1950 Boston Red Sox were not one of the greatest teams of all time, nor did they have one of the greatest offenses of all time. The ballpark had an impact.

It’s crazy that I’d have to explain this to Bill James, of all people.

The comparison to the 1976 Reds is interesting — though I’d argue that the 1975 Reds were even more dominant. And it is true that the 1961 Yankees didn’t steal a lot of bases. They didn’t hit a lot of triples — but that’s because they were busy hitting home runs. They didn’t hit a lot of doubles — but, again, that’s because they were hitting home runs.

James has kind of an odd relationship with the concept of linear weights. The truth is that Pete Palmer’s theories about how offense should be evaluated have aged much better than Runs Created and all the stuff that James was playing around with — and we’ll get to that when we start going through the Baseball Abstract publications in order. However, Bill really should have realized that hitting a record number of home runs can easily make up for not stealing a lot of bases and striking out a lot.

Plus, it’s not really fair to compare them to the 1975 or 1976 Reds. The fact that the 1961 New York Yankees weren’t the 1998 New York Yankees doesn’t mean that they were a bad team.

James actually has a good point about the bench. The 1961 Yankees generally used the same players day in and day out, and never really developed much of a bench.

But does it really matter? Again — when you have Maris, Mantle, and Berra in the lineup almost every day (and I know about Mantle’s health issues near the end of the season), does it matter that your bench isn’t the strongest in the world?

Baseball is different from basketball, where having a strong bench is required to get through the most intense games.

The pitching staff section is where this book really bothers me. James’ argument focuses mostly around won-loss records.

Of course, Ralph Terry would probably have had a better career if CBS had actually invested money and time in developing good young players. But the really interesting thing here is the number of Yankee pitchers that wound up pitching for the Kansas City Athletics within 5 years.

And that’s where I think James’ rant really comes from. The core of the 1961 New York Yankees was really the Kansas City Athletics. A shocking number of players on that Yankees team went through Kansas City at some point before they wound up in New York.

There’s a much more interesting story here about the odd relationship between the Yankees and Kansas City from the mid-1950s to the beginning of Charley Finley’s reign. Perhaps that’s something worth looking into in the near future.