I am a sports fan. As one can tell by my last post - written eons ago - I'm a tennis fan. I'm also a basketball fan, and I was a very big hockey fan until the hapless Toronto Maple Leafs and the 2004-05 NHL lockout conspired to turn Canada's passion into a rather 'meh' affair for me. Hockey's still a great game - better than ever by many accounts - but my interest has waned and I've moved on. It's pretty hard to watch hockey in Japan anyways.
I was for the first three or four years that I lived in Japan, one of the biggest non-Japanese, non-septuagenarian sumo fans in this fine country. That is, until the ridiculously corrupt sumo association forced the great Yokozuna Asashoryu into retirement for the crime of being Mongolian, while obviously rampant match-fixing was going unpunished. That is, until it finally did go punished, and several rikishi walked the plank while the people really responsible for sumo's criminal underbelly kept their jobs. And the Osaka tournament (a once a year affair that is always circled on my calendar) was canceled. I still follow sumo, but it isn't really the same right now. Perhaps my favorite sport of all is baseball. Partly because I've probably played more baseball in my life than any other sport besides tennis. Partly because the slow pace of the game works nicely with my ridiculously low attention span. (Maybe the same goes for sumo with its five-minute breaks between 5-second matches.) But I think mostly because I grew up in a city where losing is the norm in pro sports, and I came of age as a sports fan at a time when, by some stroke of chance, the Toronto Blue Jays were not only good, but they were developing into one of the great sports teams of all time.
I watched Joe Carter's 1993 World Series winning home run on TV at Century Billiards - a grimy pool hall in my home town. I imagine every Blue Jays fan around my age could tell you where they were when they saw it too, because, well, one of the greatest sporting moments in history isn't something one easily forgets. And this was indeed one of those moments. In the long, storied history of baseball, only two World Series have been ended by walk-off home runs. And only one of those home runs came when the winning team had been trailing. That was Joe's shot.
That historic home run made Joe Carter a hero to all Blue Jays fans. If he had never done anything before or after, it wouldn't have mattered. That home run was Joe Carter's legacy.
But that bomb isn't the only thing we remember about Joe Carter. He was a middle of the order mainstay for the Blue Jays for seven seasons, collecting his trademark 100 RBIs in six of those - including the strike-shortened 1994 season. Nowadays the RBI stat means next to nothing (for good reason), but it meant a lot to us in the 1990s, and our memories were formed and shaped within the parameters of how we analyzed the game at the time. By the accepted measures of 1993, Joe Carter was a pretty good - perhaps not great - ball player.
Recently, the terrific Blue Jays blog The Tao Of Stieb re-evaluated Joe Carter's career using advanced metrics that didn't appear in monthly magazines or on the back of baseball cards back in the early 1990s. Unsurprisingly, the analysis was not kind to ol' Joe.
I say unsurprisingly because, at least to me, Joe Carter was a flawed player even then. The archaic stats we relied on at the time were relatively flattering, but his ghastly defence and free-swinging ways were on display for all eyes to see. Flailing at obviously unhittable pitches was the a normal thing for Joe. But he was still a good player - an all-star - right?
Most conventional batting stats tell us that Joe Carter was a pretty good player. Of course, most conventional batting stats have been shown to be far less valuable tools of analysis than was once believed. RBI - Joe's bread and butter - is a particularly misleading measure of individual performance since it is as much a reflection of opportunities to drive in runs than it is a gauge of a player's proficiency when presented with those opportunities. Carter's 121 RBI in 1993 sound nice, but hitting behind Devon White, Roberto Alomar, and Paul Molitor - all of whom had excellent seasons and got on base a lot - will expose a guy to a lot of chances to drive in runs.
But not all conventional stats are useless. Homeruns have as much value today as they ever did, and Joe was a remarkably reliable homerun hitter. Six times in his career Carter went yard at least 30 times, and three more times he hit at least 27. And he did this in the pre-McGwire/Sosa/Bonds et al era. The homeruns alone do not make him a superstar, but very few teams have no need for a player who can reliably hit for power. And while he may have been allergic to getting on base, and he may have swung at a lot of bad pitches, he tended to hit a lot of those pitches a long way. His career .205 ISO (isolated power), while not Pujols-ian, is comparable to Fred McGriff's and higher than those of Dave Winfield and George Bell, to draw comparisons to some other prominent Blue Jays.
Then again, Carter's .771 career OPS is decidedly underwhelming, and his career high .849 mark (1986 with Cleveland) would represent a ho-hum year for most elite power hitters. Factor in that Joe's OPS is light on O and heavy on S - generally regarded as the less valuable of the two stats that comprise OPS - and the case for Joe looks shaky. Joe Carter's career on base percentage of .306 is very low. Despite his solid power numbers, he made a lot of outs for the teams he played for.
Depending on where you check, over his career Joe Carter's teams won between 16.5 (baseball reference) and 22.2 (FanGraphs) more games over his sixteen year career than they would have if, say, Rob Ducey had been playing in his place. Wins above replacement (WAR) is a nice catch all statistic that has it's drawbacks - the fact that FanGraphs and Baseball Reference can't agree on how to calculate it is illustrative of its imperfect science - but can tell us in a nutshell roughly how good a player is. Albert Pujols career WAR is around 85. He's a good player. Yuniesky Betancourt, whose career WAR is a (rather surprising - I expected it to be negative) 2.4, is not.So Joe gave his teams roughly one more win per season than they would have had if a scrub from AAA had taken his spot in the lineup. Meaning he really wasn't that great a player. But to me, and I think to most Blue Jays fans, that doesn't really matter, and I'm still glad he was on our team.
Don't get me wrong, I love advanced metrics. I think they give us a depth of insight that makes the game all the more interesting. It's a bit like when I first started learning to read Japanese, and the Osaka cityscape transformed from a backdrop of undistinguishable characters and brushstrokes, into a living, textured, three-dimensional environment, because the meanings of those characters were being unlocked for me. Modern statistics increase our baseball literacy, and it is an interesting and enlightening exercise to re-examine our heroes from the past with the tools now available to us.
But regardless of what sabermetrics tell us about Joe Carter, he remains a hero to the child inside of us who grew up watching him. That child (well, that teenager in my case) had never thought about Joe's WAR. All I knew then was that Joe Carter gave the Blue Jays one win that nobody else did. Game 6 of the 1993 World Series. That home run was one win Joe got above replacement, and I'm glad that in that fateful moment the bat wasn't in Rob Ducey's hands.
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