Mike Cameron
If there was ever a player poorly served by fixation with the batting average stat…
Exactly two months after signing a minor-league deal with the Washington Nationals, Mike Cameron has decided to call it a career, according to the club.
Cameron appeared to be a possibility as a center-field platoon partner with either Roger Bernadina or Rick Ankiel — both of whom are left-handed — but now the Nats are without a righty option. Of course, if Bryce Harpermakes the team out of spring, the plan is to play Jayson Werth in center every day.
Cameron, 39, closes with a good career resume. In 17 seasons, he hit .249/.338/.444 with 278 home runs, 968 RBI, 1,064 runs and 297 stolen bases. He won three Gold Gloves, made one All-Star Game and received MVP votes two times.
He never spent more than four years with the same ballclub, playing for eight different franchises: The Mariners, White Sox, Mets, Red Sox, Padres,Brewers, Reds and Marlins. Amazingly, as you can see, he played in every single division
The fondest LGM memories of Cameron come from his years with the Mariners, especially 2000 and 2001. Acquired for Griffey along with several other players, Cameron outplayed Griffey in all but his first year, and at much lower cost. He was a crucial part of the great 2001 team, and always a pleasure to watch in center field.
So, will all those schmucks who voted for Jim Rice for the Hall of Fame now vote for the at least equally good Mike Cameron?
He was a terrific defensive Centerfielder, with some pop and speed.
Not HOF worthy. But a really good career. Unfortunately for him, when he was with The Mariners, they ran into the Yankee juggernaught.
To clarify your point about Cameron being better than Griffey except for his first yeat – I believe you mean better than Griffey from 2000 on, because if you factor in Griffey’s resume prior to 2000, Griffey wins by a large margin. Not as good as Cameron defensively but his bat still makes Griffey the best CF to play for the Mariners. Cameron comes in second.
But man, I remember the 2003 Mariners with an outfield consisting of Cameron in CF, Winn in Left, and Ichiro! in Right. An absolutely amazing defensive outfield. The last good Mariners team, but they unfortunately played second fiddle to the A’s and missed the playoffs. They shouldn’t have let Cameron go in 2004. Damn you Bavasi!
Yes; Griffey from 2000 on.
career-wise Cameron was probably better than Rice, but Rice certainly had the best hitting years of the two. Cameron’s low batting average, even with his decent number of walks made him underrated, but still kept him from being a star.
Offensively, in their best years, you traded 60 hits including 10 doubles that turned into HRs for 40 walks for outstanding CF defense
Rice was a corner outfielder/DH, Cameron a center fielder; he was supposed to be a better hitter to pull equal weight.
And, in any event, he wasn’t a better hitter. Take a look at the home/road splits. Rice had a Coors Field career before there was a Coors Field. Rice was an average corner outfielder as a hitter who exploited his home park, a somewhat better version of Dante Bichette. Cameron was a very good hitting CF whose numbers were slightly suppressed by his home parks.
in Rice’s best years (which is the comparison I used explicitly for Rice being better) he was a better hitter on the road than Cameron in either split. further the offensive context of the late 70s was about half a run worse than the early to mid-2000s.
Over their careers they were about the same as hitters, but 4 of the 5 top oWAR seasons between the two are Rice’s
Rice was not a legitimate HOFer, but he was also not an average offensive corner OF in his best years; that’s really silly. He would certainly be a legitimate HOFer if he had sustained his 77/78/79 peak for longer.
This discussion does nothing to move me off my original position that the sabermetric revolution in baseball was brought about so that extremely mediocre players could get emotional participation ribbons.
Mike Cameron is better than Jim Rice?
On what fcking planet?
How much of an advantage to a team do you figure the difference between a below-average corner outfielder is versus a best-active-player defensive center fielder is? All else being equal, I mean. Take two players, both league average hitters, and one is a bad defensive corner outfielder and the other is a top-flight center fielder, how much better is the CF?
a top flight LF (young Barry Bonds) is up to ~2-3 wins a year, an awful LF (Greg Luzinski) loses maybe 1-2 games a year.
a top-flight CF (Andruw Jones) 3-4 wins a year, a poor one (Dale Murphy) loses maybe 1-2 games a year.
So the difference between average LF and good CF is probably 1.5 wins or about 15 runs.
Looking at their baseball reference numbers, Cameron’s fielding was worth around 5 runs (0.5 wins) a season
Rice was better at average and power, Cameron everything else.
Rice had the higher top end, as I said above, but Cameron had more good years (9 years with an oWAR above 2.4 to 6 for Rice). Cameron has more oWAR per 500 plate appearances over their careers (9.4 to 8.7) and was a better fielder.
I’d say something pithy here, but I know better than to try and match wits with Mr. Pierce in that area.
To be honest, I think Pierce has a reasonable point here. Cameron was better at walking, but Rice was better at [i]actually Getting on base[/i]. Having a large differential between your batting average an OBP is nice, but it’s not a be all and end all. Rice was a significantly better hitter (~15 points higher OBP and ~55 points higher slugging, with park factors and era effects cancelling to an significant extent, as the 109 vs. 128 WRC+ shows nicely enough) than Cameron and no amount of walk-feting will change that.
Cameron did play a more valuable defensive position and he played it quite well, but I do think this a classic case of people trying too hard to go up against what they feel are the preferences of “dumb” fans and sportswriters.
and yet per plate appearance, Cameron had more offensive wins above replacement and runs above replacement
He has more WAR per plate appearance because he was a center fielder- as I said “he played a more valuable defensive position.” Rice was a significantly better hitter, just at a position where good hitters are easier to find.
Cameron did play a more valuable defensive position and he played it quite well, but I do think this a classic case of people trying too hard to go up against what they feel are the preferences of “dumb” fans and sportswriters.
The problem with this argument, even in this form, is all the blank slots in this table. Those are games in which Rice provided no defensive value, and he never provided enough offensive value to offset the nothing he brought to the table as a DH. Now, I’m not knocking DH as a position, just pointing out that if we’re talking about value, it’s not just an apples-to-apples comparison of premium vs. non-premium position — it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison of premium vs. no-position.
+1
No, it was brought about to kick useless stats like batting average and RBI into the dustbin where they belong.
Butbutbut …. clutch! Character guys! Intangibles!
Rice.
Just.
Won.
Games!
That’s all he did!
Next — why the Dodgers would have been better off with Jamie Moyer and not Sandy Koufax. AND WE HAVE THE STATS WITH BIG LETTERS IN THEM TO PROVE IT!
Do you have any actual content to add, or just yelling?
I’m sorry, I was just responding in kind.
Jim Rice is amazing, in a way. He leads the AL THREE TIMES in home runs, plays for 15 (FIFTEEN!) years, and doesn’t even make the top 50 in career home runs. That’s . . . well, the words “amazingly unlikely” come to mind.
I think if you didn’t live in Boston, Rice’s career is largely very good, but nothing particularly special. Of course, if you live in Boston, he’s obvious Hall o’ Fame material.
and with good HR numbers. Harry Davis led the AL 4 times in HRs, played 22 years and didn’t beat Rice’s total in Rice’s 2 best years combined.
Rice had about 1/3 of his HRs in those 3 years, and 3/7th in his 4 best years
What I remember most about Cameron’s tenure with the Reds was a column Cincinnati sports columnist Paul Daugherty wrote about how some jerks in the stands taunted Cameron with racial epithets during a game in Cincinnati, and how Cameron kept his cool. He was a class act.
What I remember is how Marty Brennaman hated him for striking out so much. Marty is a neanderthal
I second Mr. Pierce’s reaction–what the fuck are you people thinking?
Rice was *the* dominant hitter in baseball for an 8-10 year stretch. Whether you think Rice belongs in the HOF or not, he was an incredible hitter; Cameron had a couple of decent years.
As for the “doubles turned into homers remark,” fuggedaboutit. Rice’s power was to left-center, center and right-center. He was not measurably helped in Fenway when it came to power numbers.
I think you mean a 3 year stretch with a few other decent seasons. Or you are leaving out, Mike Schmidt, George Brett, Rickey Henderson, Eddie Murray, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy and Pedro Guerrero all of whom were better than Rice for significant parts of Rice’s best 10 year stretch
Jack Clark.
Ah; the insistence of otherwise intelligent people that player X (Jim Rice, Jack Morris) was awesome in defiance of all modern evidentiary standards, and in fact the denigration of those modern evidentiary standards when they return conclusions that are emotionally unsatisfying.
Almost like global warming, or something.
*The* dominant hitter? Are you high? Putting aside the sabermetric stats, there’s no one who remembers that era who thinks that Jim Rice was the dominant hitter for a decade. Except for you, apparently.
Outside of Boston I doubt people though about Rice at all during the era.
This. Bostonians have always overestimated how interesting the rest of the country finds them and their sports teams.
Rice was *the* dominant hitter in baseball for an 8-10 year stretch.
Can you back that up with evidence, or it is another one of those “facts” that “everyone” just “knows?”
Wait… what?
http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2010/12/how_i_think_abo.php
Chet Lemon. Yeah.
http://www.fangraphs.com/graphsw.aspx?players=1001400,1003865,1007518,1010897,1011586
Chet Lemon was a very good player. There was something about the ’84 Tigers that made their best players underappreciated.
Chet Lemon was really good. And very comparable to Jim Rice, who was also a very good baseball player. But neither of them belong in the Hall of Fame.
And the idea that Jim Rice and Chet Lemon were roughly similar players makes Jim Rice fans’ heads explode, which I like.
Chet might have been the worst base runner in the league, though. He or Alfredo Griffin. That doesn’t appear in most statistical evaluations from this period yet
So true, rea. Note Farley’s continued saberhatred of Jack Morris.
Rice was *the* dominant hitter in baseball for an 8-10 year stretch
Sure, if you define “8-10 year stretch” as “1978″
FTW.
Not even in 1978. Rice’s 1978, while a great year, is generally quite overrated. B-R has him as the third hitter in the leage by WAR, and fangraphs, while it has him first, makes it a close call. Once you account for park effects–Rice was a seemingly dominant .361/.416/.690 at home, but only a prosaic .269/.325/.512 on the road; people forget how much Fenway inflates the numbers of hitters who tend to put soft fly balls into left field–and the fact that outs matter more than any simple statistic reflect, Rice in 1978 was essentially no better a hitter than Dave Parker and once you throw in fielding no better a position player than Amos Otis.
Also, note that even Rice’s 1978 fangraphs WAR of 8.1 was unusually low for a league leading number and ordinarily would rank somewhere in the 3-5 range, and that his wOBA and wRC+ rank behind Parker for the season.
WAR already accounts for park effects. I don’t believe in deducting extra point because a player hit better than expected at home — it could just be noise in the data, and for that matter if a player is taking advantage of something in the stadium more than the typical player that’s producing actual value for his teams.
My best memory of Cameron was when he was about five feet away from claiming the record for most home runs in a single game. The would-be home run number five petered out on the warning track of right field at US Cell Out Field.
Cameron pisses me off because I thought the Mets were 100% right to cut bait on him when they did, and instead he came into my division 2 years later and kicked ass for the Brewers.
What the hell kind of a speed/no power CF continues to be an elite defender well into his 30s 8?
If the Mets had kept him – a decision, again, that I would have found dubious – they almost certainly reach the WS in 2006 and reach the playoffs in ’07 and ’08.
It’s one thing to be punished for trading away Tom Seaver. But the Mets were right to cut Cameron entering his age 33 season. Curse you, baseball gods!
* per UZR, his age 36 season was over 1 win of defensive value
Cameron had plenty of power. His career ISO was a robust .195, not much differing from the ISO of, for example, Jim Rice at .204. His power was balanced, with his ISO ranking 272 all time and his AB/HR ranking 270 all time. That’s not elite power, but it’s far better than average power
I regretted that as soon as I posted, because I knew it wasn’t a fair characterization. But the point remains that the plurality of his value came from his defense, which relied on his speed, which isn’t supposed to persist into his late 30s.
BTW, it’s worth noting here that Charlie is right, even by sabermetric principles: Rice was worth 3.5 more wins (6.7%) for his career than Cameron, per FanGraphs. I trust that seamheads take FG as a reputable source for advanced statistical analysis?
There’s probably not as much daylight between the two as Mr. Pierce would argue, but Rice is within sniffing distance of the ~60 WAR cutoff for the HoF; Cameron simply is not.
Also, the “decade” comment is delusional, but over 7 seasons, Rice was worth 36+ fWAR, with fewer than 2 wins coming from his fielding; that’s a pretty damn respectable peak (especially if you question UZR applied to games played in 1977, which is, I think, a defensible position), and it’s not as if he was a league-average chump the rest of his career; I count 1 more ASG-grade season plus 4 more above average seasons. He might be the worst modern OF in the HoF, but the bottom line is that he was still visibly better than Cameron.
in ~15% more plate appearances
But that matters. Those plate appearances that went to someone other than Cameron went to someone much worse than Cameron. Longevity and durability aren’t everything, but they’re important, and while Rice is not notable on either of those dimensions, he was better than Cameron.
For my money, both players are very good but clearly not Hall-worthy. That Rice is one of the most overrated players in recent memory and Cameron one of the most underrated makes comparisons between the two seem silly to traditionalists, but I think the players were broadly similar in value but with completely different skill sets.
It’s not so much the specific question of Rice vs. Cameron that bothers me (I would never have guessed that Cameron is as close to Rice as he is), but rather the contempt for evidence.
FWIW, when you’re talking about a long career without any real peaks (which describes Cameron – 16 years without a single season more than 5.5 fWAR), you start to lean very heavily on assumptions – if it turns out (once we get the fielding equivalent of Pitch f/X) that UZR overestimated Cameron by 10%, all of a sudden Cameron becomes 2/3 the player Rice was, not 93%. I’m not trying to badmouth UZR, but I think we can agree that its tallies should be taken with a grain of salt, unless we all concur that Nyjer Morgan’s 2009 defense alone clearly represented 2 3/4 wins (in 120 games), more value than Cameron’s entire 2005 or 2007.
I don’t think it’s entirely a seamhead vs. traditionalist argument; you always get strife when you compare guys with great peaks (Rice had 4 seasons better than Cameron’s best; his peak season was worth almost 50% more than Cameron’s best) against slow and steady players.
There is no evidence. There are a series of statistical metrics, some of which depend on hypothetical players doing hypothetical things. Calculate them correctly and Mike Cameron is a better baseball player than Jim Rice. This is theoretical physics, the daisy, and the elephant’s tail.
So, then, may I ask how you decided that Rice is clearly a better player than Cameron such that a comparison is obviously silly? This is a sincere question, even if it sounds rather snarky.
Again, you are making assertions without proof. It’s just what you think.
I love saber metrics, but plus one. WAR is an invented stat. There is no objective way to say an SS is ______ more valuable than a 3b. We all know an SS is more valuable, but the numbers used to correct are guesses, not universal constants
which still have more relevance than assertions
Does it? An educated guess is an educated guess
an assertion lacks the educated part of an educated guess
Oh, and this is absolutely correct. You always see versions of this argument: Player X was rewarded with a bunch of runs per year just for playing SS! But of course, if anyone had been available to play SS at a higher level, he would have gotten the job. Jim Rice, through a combination of health and talent, was sent to the plate ~1370 more times than Cameron was; I don’t see how that makes his HoF case worse.
Plus, of course, if the Sox had cut him after 1988, he’d be a full 4 wins ahead of Cameron, in just 1100 more PAs.
BTW, I think it’s worth noting here that Babe Ruth was cut by the Yankees after 1934 for the crime of having a season that was only slightly better than Mike Cameron’s career year.
but wins calculated from statistics is a counting stat so the opportunities matter, too.
I’m not saying Rice being 6% better isn’t important, but so is this occurring in 15% more plate appearances. Rice had 3 years where he hurt his team with his play totaling about 1200 plate appearances, Cameron had one year with about 100 PAs. So Rice was about 8% worse in the same number of PAs (according to BR WAR), I’m guessing he’s probably 10% better by your metrics. I’m not sure what this means except Rice played three years at replacement level, which probably speaks to his reputation in Boston
I don’t disagree. Both per-plate-appearance and counting stats matter. Someone with a .900 OBP in 10 PAs clearly produced less value to his team than someone else with a .450 OBP in 300 PAs. Even if we move up to meaningful sample sizes, if someone is hurt a lot, that has to be a strike against them, but Koufax also demonstrates that one can have a very short career that is still more valuable than people with much longer careers.
Maybe it’s just me. But you’re saying that over the course of a 15-year career with ~2,400 games, one player is “better” because he will get you 3.5 additional wins over those 2,400 games?
Hell, getting a better TRAVEL AGENT well probably net you 3.5 additional wins over 2,400 games. Getting slightly better trainers will probably beat that. I can’t imagine how 3.5 additional wins over 2,400 games is anything like a meaningful result.
Turns out that any given player doesn’t give you that many wins. Over 2,400 games, a minimal HoFer will only give you 60 extra wins relative to a guy that you can claim for the waiver fee. So you have to play within that range. If you’re talking about 2 very good players, both of whom played for thousands of games, you’re going to be in the single digits of wins. Sure, if you talk about a Musial or a Bonds or a Ruth, you’ll be talking dozens of games, but no one here is talking about all-time greats.
Mookie Wilson was a nice player, played for a dozen years, 1,400 games; he was worth barely 1/3 of a Jim Rice. Baseball is a hard game to make a sustained difference in.
I’m sure that if Mike Cameron had known how to be 7% better over 17 years, he would have done it. But in fact he didn’t know the number of the travel agent that would have gotten him to Rice’s level. C’est la guerre.
you keep saying Rice was 7% better and according to your stats he is. But using say baseball reference WAR stats, Cameron was 12.5% better. Given there is quite a bit of difference, saying was better than the other is probably pretty hard.
Right. One can craft a variety of arguments for either, but existing statistical evaluations can’t really get us beyond ‘statistical tie’; they’re impressive but they’re not that fine-grained.
This was actually the next thing I was going to say. FG says that Nyjer Morgan’s 2009 was, in 3/4 of the games played, 30% more valuable in the field than Willie Mays’ best defensive season. Since I don’t think there’s anyone alive who’d actually put his reputation on the line to defend that claim, we’re back to the fact that these are pretty blunt (or clumsy) instruments.
My whole point being that, even under one set of very SABR-friendly assumptions, Rice>Cameron. Which makes the howling at Pierce’s comment seem kind of absurd. The side that claims to prize rational analysis has made an emotional commitment against one player and in favor of another, and therefore actual rational analytics vaporize.
except that Pierce’s argument seemed more like there is no way the Cameron was better than Rice because I saw Rice play many many games and really liked him and, what, Cameron played for the Yankees so clearly he wasn’t as good as Rice. there was no rational in Mr. Pierce’s analysis.
If you’re going to make what you claim are my arguments, I wish you’d be less of a dolt about it.
well Charles I wish your argument were less doltish so I guess we are even on the dolt wishing scale.
To put it in less inflammatory language than Bill, I think the opposition to Charles’s comment wasn’t his claim that Rice was better, but his claim that the “sabermetric revolution in baseball was brought about so that extremely mediocre players could get emotional participation ribbons.”
To be honest, I hadn’t looked at B-R; I hate their ugly website, and I really don’t like how they calculate WAR (but, if their site were prettier, I’d probably always look at both).
I handwave it all away because I always use fWAR in may arguments, so I’m being internally consistent.
well I only checked B-R because I don’t keep up with all the places one can find non-traditional baseball stats.
I’d like Bill James (or someone with his blessing) to update his Historical Abstract using many of the new methods to really compare players well.
I disagree with JROth about BR in general, but I do agree that the FanGraphs WAR estimates are better. Given the limitations of defensive statistics, their conservative approach makes more sense.
With regards to Jim Rice and Mike Cameron, fangraphs gives Cameron a bigger edge on defense than does Baseball reference, so differing approaches to defense doesn’t explain at all why fangraphs Rice does relatively better overall by fangraphs measures.
Part of the overall difference is in baserunning. Fangraphs only uses a baserunning component from 2002 forward, which excludes a chunk of value from Cameron, a good baserunner, and is neutral towards Rice, who didn’t have much value either way on the bases. Fangraphs gives rice a slight relative boost via calculations regarding replacement level. The big difference, however, is that B-R includes a GiDP component which gives Cameron about five extra wins relative to Rice over his career.
Jim Rice was a monster double play machine.
Actually, near as I can tell, according to B-R Jim Rice is the all time leader in costing his team runs via the double play. B-R doesn’t keep a leaderboard, but looking at the individual player pages of the top 30 GiDP total players of all time, Rice cost his team 46 runs by grounding into double plays, while the next closest total is 43.
Wait, you’re denying it’s an ugly website? I didn’t think that was possible to dispute.
It’s very useful, especially for looking at historical info about teams (such as, who were the regulars for the ’75 Reds and what were their values vs. the ’76 Reds), but if I want a quick summary of a player, I find FanGraphs’ Dashboard to be far preferable, both in raw appearance and in data presentation.
Huh. I was under the impression that GIDP was mostly something that fans complain about but isn’t a “skill” as such. IOW, that it’s similar to RBI – it’s a residue of something else that you normally do (get hits, ground out while running slowly) while other people happen to be on base. Is there relevant research?
Is there relevant research?
GDPs is like RBIs in that it requires other people on base to excel at it — meaning that you’re probably playing on a better team in the first place — but unlike RBIs, GDPs can be quantified as a “skill.” (Not one you want to have, but a skill nonetheless.) It’s a variation of right-handedness and first-to-third speed (mostly acceleration, but also the angle of attacking the base), and it turns out that, historically, right-handed hitters who perform poorly at going from first-to-third also frequently lead the league in GDPs. If I remember correctly, there was a study done of Jason Bay a few years back — he’s a fantastic base-runner, despite being slow, and doesn’t ground into nearly so many double plays as David Wright. Let me dig around for that, though.
Sorry to get back to this so late, and I don’t know if anyone will see this, but . . .
RBI and GiDP are both the product of opportunity and the ability to convert on those opportunities.
The ability to convert on RBI opportunity, while a real ability, is mostly already reflected in a player’s walk, single, double, triple, and home run rates, and there’s no evidence of “clutch” hitting ability that would give specific players bigger-than-normal and repeatable boosts to these rates with men on base. As these are already WAR components or the components of WAR components adding RBI to the mix doesn’t help. In fact, if you want to predict a player’s subsequent year reaching base RBI conversion rates, looking at his walk and hit distribution will enable you to make a better prediction than will looking at his current and past year RBI conversion rates.
RBI can, of course, also be achieved via sacrifice, a skill that isn’t already reflected in WAR components, but zero-out sacrifices are actually slightly negative run-expectation events and one-out sacrifices even more slightly positive, so that any skill to gain RBI via sacrifice isn’t actually a useful skill except in the narrow confines of one-run ninth and extra inning situations.
So, if you’re already considering power and ability to get on base, RBI and RBI conversion rates are not particularly useful tools in determining whether or not a player helps his team score runs. Once you control for the other elements of WAR, RBI conversion rates might have a very small negative correlation with run scoring due to sacrifices, but probably no more than a fraction of a run per season and, in any event, sacrifice conversion rates are better used than RBI or RBI conversion rates to reflect this skill if it’s real.
GiDP are different. They are, like RBI, largely the product of opportunity, but the ability to avoid GiDP isn’t already fully reflected in a players walk and hit rates. Home-to-first speed, GB/FB/K ratios, and location and velocity distribution of balls hit on the ground, while partially reflected in batting average and slugging percentage, are not fully reflected in those numbers. While play-by-play information is generally enough to compute GB/FB/K ratios, those other components of GiDP avoidance skill can’t be calculated that way, nor can GB/FB ratios be calculated from old box scores lacking play-by-play. Whether a player grounds into double plays at a greater or lesser percentage rate than average is a repeatable skill that isn’t otherwise fully reflected in WAR components, and if you want to calculate a number to represent that skill from box scores and play-by-play data then GiDP rates or estimated GiDP rates, with GiDP opportunities either reflected in play-by-play or closely estimable via box scores, are as good a tool as any.
The net result is that using GiDP avoidance rates as a component in the estimation of run production makes sense, while using RBI or RBI conversion rates doesn’t. Whether Baseball Reference has properly calculated how to convert GiDP avoidance rates into expected run production is another matter, and it’s not readily apparant how they make this conversion.