There have been 150 ROY winners since the inception of the award in 1947. Nineteen of those players are in the Hall of Fame.
Does that seem low to you?
Let’s ignore the ROYs who aren’t yet HOF eligible–about 25 who are either still active or who retired before 2019. (Some of them are actually shoe-ins–like Mike Trout, Justin Verlander, Albert Pujols, and Ichiro Suzuki. There are also some, like Lou Whitaker and Dick Allen, who should be in already and likely will be inducted via an Era Committee vote someday.)
That’s about 15%.
About 1.5% (273 of 18,000) of the men who have appeared in an MLB game are members of the Hall of Fame.
So just winning Rookie of the Year means that one is 10x more likely than average to have a Hall of Fame career.
But that’s not the baseball-card motivated statistical issue I’m interested in! What I’d like to know is, What is the strongest possible line up we can construct from these players based solely on their rookie seasons . . . .
Let’s say we want three OFs, regardless of which field played, and one player at every other position (limiting each to the position played his rookie season).
Our list contains one pitcher (Seaver), three catchers (Bench, Fisk, and Piazza), four first basemen (Cepeda, McCovey, Murray, and Bagwell), two second basemen (J. Robinson and Luis Aparicio), two shortstops (Ripken and Jeter), and five outfielders (Mays, Billy Williams, Oliva, and Dawson).
By my calculation, that’s 720 possible lineups.
All of them, of course, have to have Seaver and Rolen. But how do we make a decision about who to put at all the other positions?
We could start with a naïve hypothesis—or in other words, just wing it!
What line up would you guess is likely the strongest? My choice would be Seaver, Bench, McCovey, J. Robinson, Ripken, Rollen, Williams, Mays, and F. Robinson.
Now how can we test such a surmise?
One way to do it is by looking at the WAR of the players during their respective rookie seasons and then figure out which lineup would give us the highest sum of player WARs. If someone else has a better way to do it, I’m all ears, of course, so long as it involves numbers.
Here’s the result from that test, using the player WARs supplied by Baseball Reference:
I’ve marked the highest scoring at each position (top three for OF) in yellow. Dawson and Mays, who are tied, are in blue.
Well, I missed three. The difference in WAR between the strongest lineup (47.6), so constructed, and mine was 9.6. So my roster would finish an expected 10 games behind the best ROY/HOF one over a 162-game season.
I think I should have done better. I was thinking too much about career and not enough about rookie season performance. I’m kicking myself for missing Oliva and Fisk in particular.
But that’s how one learns, right?
Hey, now I’m curious: what is the strongest all-rookie (HOF or not) lineup possible, and how would it stack up not only against this one but against some of the best teams in history?…. Stay tuned!