The following was posted to the Red Sox mailing list by Keith Woolner (keith@woolner.com) on April 22, 1995. Ziyun Wu wrote: :I never meant to imply he wasn't a good player. He was. He just wasn't :nearly as great as many bostonians seem to think he was. He had a :spectacular year in 67. But other than that his career was long but :so-so. You do realize that Yaz's peak was in the 60's, not the 70's, don't you? Between 1963 and 1970 he won 5 out of 8 crowns in Total Baseball's Total Player Rating, led the league in OBP 5 times (and SLG in 3 of those years), had more Adjusted Batting Runs than anyone in the league 5 times. Yaz was *not* a one-year wonder. He was the arguably the best hitter in the AL overall between 1963 and 1970. After 1970 he did decline a bit (he was 32 years old in 1971), but still managed to put up a .350+ OBP for 12 of the next 13 years, and a .440+ SLG in 4 of them. He was productive even at the end of his career. :I think Rice was a far more dominant hitter in his prime than Yaz. But :I've met people who thinks much more of Yaz than Rice. I think those :people are way overrating him and underrating Rice. Jim Rice is my favorite player of all-time, hands down. But Yaz was better, and I'll take Yaz's best 5 years over Rice's best 5 anytime: Yaz Rice # Year - AVG/ OBP/ SLG Year - AVG/ OBP/ SLG Prefer? - --------------------- --------------------- ------- #1: 1967 - .326/.421/.622 1978 - .315/.373/.600 Yaz #2 1970 - .329/.453/.592 1979 - .325/.385/.596 Yaz #3 1968 - .301/.429/.495 1977 - .320/.379/.593 Rice #4 1965 - .312/.398/.536 1983 - .305/.364/.550 (tie) #5 1963 - .321/.419/.475 1986 - .320/.389/.490 Yaz Even without taking era adjustments into account, Rice only is ahead on comparing 3rd best seasons. But Yaz's 1968 was the Year of the Pitcher, when he won the batting title with a .301 average, no one else hit over 290. Comparing their OPS's to the league Yaz wins hands-down; Yaz hit 68% above average, while Rice was only 43% above league average. Similar adjustments for the #4 seasons have Yaz ahead 54% to 37%. I'm comfortable saying that Yaz's peak was much brighter than Rice's. Yaz played 23 seasons, and Rice played only 16. If Yaz had retired after his 16th season, their career averages would have been: AVG/ OBP/ SLG OPS Rice .298/.356/.502 858 Yaz (16) .289/.388/.470 858 Yaz (23) .285/.382/.462 844 (As an aside, Yaz's 17th season, 1977, was better than Rice's career averages: .296/.378/.505, and it was the the high water mark of Yaz's later career (1975-1983)). With exactly the same OPS's after 16 seasons, its hard to argue Rice was better in a shorter career, and with each of Yaz's best five years better than the comparable Rice year, its hard to say that Rice had a better peak. Rice had somewhat more power than Yaz, but was significantly poorer at getting on base (Rice never had a .400 OBP season, Yaz had 6 of them). Unless you are really discounting the value of OBP, and completely ignoring the context of the era they played in, its hard to see how Rice could be considered a better hitter than Yaz. --- Keith Woolner keith@woolner.com http://www.best.com/~kwoolner