Would analytics have helped Indians in the past?

If guys like Duane Kuiper were assessed by analytics rather than just batting average, would history have been different?

It’s common to look at the things our parents did and wonder how they could be so stupid. Our children will doubtless do the same for us someday. If my kids would ever see the leisure suit I wore to the prom, they would question my fitness to be a parent, or even to handle sharp objects. In 1977, though, it actually helped my chances.

It’s the same with sports. We talk about how analytics has changed the way teams operate mostly in a negative way. In doing so, though, we neglect the fact that for most of the 20th Century, teams did some really dumb stuff. We didn’t know it at the time, because we didn’t have the tools to figure it out.

For example: If the 2020 Indians had a middle infielder with an OPS of .641, we would be posting blogs every ten minutes wondering why that guy wasn’t sent to Columbus, or working at Taco Bell. As an example, Jason Kipnis has posted one season in his career with an OPS under .700, and it would take a month to search all the blog posts written about who we should get to replace Jason Kipnis.

But there was a time when all we looked at was batting average, and by that standard, we convinced ourselves that Duane Kuiper was a good baseball player. Not only did Kuiper produce a lifetime OPS of .641, he was also caught stealing 71 times in 123 attempts, including seventeen times in 27 attempts in 1976. That is an absolute blizzard of outs!

In those days, though, we were all conditioned to look at batting average as the prime indicator of value, and Kuiper posted a respectable lifetime average of .271. Never mind that his career-high in walks was 37, or that his career-high in doubles was 18. The Indians looked at all of that and gave him over three thousand plate appearances, enough to put him on the verge of the top fifty in franchise history. And – get this – over half of those plate appearances were in the top two spots in the batting order!

In 1975, the Indians had plenty of reason for optimism. Frank Robinson was the new manager, and they had a decent core of veterans, including Gaylord Perry, Boog Powell, Buddy Bell, and George Hendrick.  In the first few weeks of the season, three promising rookies made their debuts:  Rick Manning, Duane Kuiper, and Dennis Eckersley. Guess which was the first to get traded?  Yep, the one who went to the Hall of Fame. Eckersley was traded after three seasons, but the Indians doubled down on two guys who never justified that faith.

Manning was a flashy first-round pick, and probably the Indians’ best defensive center-fielder next to Kenny Lofton in the past fifty years. After his first few years, though, he was even less useful on offense than Kuiper. This was despite my brash prediction during his rookie season that he would win multiple batting titles. Not my finest moment, but I had an excuse – I was fourteen.  In his defense, Manning posted decent numbers throughout his career against right-handed pitching.  His OPS against lefties, though, was .562. Was nobody paying attention to this?

The guys who were getting paid to figure out if Manning and Kuiper were any good had no more clue than I did. This was not without consequence. For the most part, these were not awful teams. Manning and Kuiper were on the team together for eight years. The 1977 and 1978 teams were terrible, but in the rest of those years, the Indians were .500 or close to it, despite getting replacement-level contributions on a consistent basis from two key players.

From 1979 through 1981, Manning and Kuiper combined for a total WAR of 2.2. That’s less than Jose Ramirez had last year, in his worst season as a regular, by himself. In other words, replace Kuiper with Ramirez, and suddenly those .500 teams are pushing ninety wins, and, instead of rebuilding, folks are thinking about adding free agents so the team can contend. That’s how much one decision can alter the trajectory of a franchise.

Granted, it’s not always easy to pluck a player like Jose Ramirez out of the farm system. But preserving a status quo that clearly isn’t working is why general managers lose their jobs. Would the Indians have figured it out sooner with an analytics department like they have today?  We’ll never know.