Bill James on Dick Williams and Youth

More gems from the 1980 Abstract

Bill James on Dick Williams and Youth

Next up in our series on the 1980 Bill James Baseball Abstract is this gem:

This seems to have been an early attempt by James to characterize the different styles of different managers. James would eventually come out with an excellent book on the subject. As we progress slowly through the Abstracts, we’ll see this kind of analysis come up from time to time.

Let’s take a look at Dick Williams and using young talent.

By the end of the 1979 season, Williams had managed 4 different teams for stretches of 3 years each:

And, if you look at some of these teams, it seems that James is right. Look at the age of the starters for the 1967 Boston Red Sox, for example:

Russ Gibson was the backup catcher and was 28. Now, you kind of have to ignore the 30 year old Bob Tillman and the 38 year old Elston Howard — but you can kind of see the idea here. Williams was willing to give time to Reggie Smith and tony Conigliaro early in their careers.

Now, if we jump up to the 1979 Montreal Expos, we can kind of see the same pattern:

And, yeah, it’s a big kind of.

Carter was young, but he wasn’t that young in 1979. Dawson and Valentine were young, but they certainly weren’t 22. Tony Perez, meanwhile, had proven himself as a veteran, and his backups at first were a 35 year old Rusty Staub and a 32 year old Tony Solaita — not exactly the youngest guys around.

It turns out that Williams’ teams look a lot more like the 1979 Expos than the 1967 Red Sox. Consider the 1971 Athletics, for example:

They’re not exactly old men, sure — but Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi, Rick Monday, and even Dave Duncan were established major league players before Williams arrived.

And, if you look at the 1973 Athletics, it becomes even more obvious that Williams was not going with youth:

Finally, we’ll look briefly at the 1975 California Angels — a last place team that Williams probably wanted to forget about:

There was a lot more youth on this team. Remy, Miley, and Collins were rookies in 1975, and Botche had come up to the major league team in 1974 during Williams’ first year at the helm.

But it’s hard to argue that this team was young because Williams wanted it to be young. When you look at the rest of the roster, it seems that Dick simply had no choice:

The 1975 Angels were one of those “AAAA” teams — a team made up largely of players who weren’t quite good enough to play full time at the major league level, but who had a chance anyway because somebody had to play.

Now, I don’t know what Bill James wrote. All I’ve got is Lederer’s summary. Maybe Bill made a case for his characterization, or maybe the original makes it clear that this is another one of his throw away statements; I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that there simply isn’t any evidence that Dick Williams was more likely to use young players than established players. Rather, it seems that he was the same as pretty much any other manager or general manager in the game. He did what he could with what he was given.