Lifetime on-base percentage of .300, pretty terrible, but he didn't seem to strike out too much for a power hitter.

Once when playing 3B for the Giants, man on third with two out, I saw him field a grounder and fire it home. The catcher was not there, of course, as he was running to first to back up a bad throw.

Interesting numbers. I knew Kingman was around long enough to hit 400 home runs, so I figured he couldn't have struck out on an Incavigliesque scale, but even so he struck out less than I expected. He was also still a regular 30+ HR-a-year man even in his late 30s. Did he retire voluntarily, or did his batting average finally do him in?

Never had 100 runs in a season, even the year he hit 48 quadrangulares.

Do 442 pre-steroid HRs make him a Hall of Fame candidate? Or is that just a stupid question? How much harm can a lousy first baseman really do? A fair amount, if he's throwing to home plate when no one is there, I guess...

<The Giants loved his bat, but they didn't have any room for him in their outfield, so they tried to make him an infielder. In 1972-1974, Kingman played 140 games for the Giants at third base, where he committed 44 errors. He wasn't much better at first base, making 13 errors in 91 games in 1974. The Mets tried the tall, lumbering slugger in left field (in 1975), and right field (1976), before trading the troublemaker in 1977, when he played for four teams in four different divisions. With the Cubs from 1978-1980, he was allowed to play left field, and he enjoyed some of his most productive seasons, though his glove seemed allergic to the baseball, and he made 23 errors in exactly 300 games. The Mets got him back and played him at first, where he was dismal - committing 13 errors in 1981, and an amazing 18 in 1982. Anyone who saw Kingman play first base can easily recall the image of the 6-foot, six-inch giant refusing to bend over to field throws below is knees. He also displayed the range of an anvil. The A's had the right idea from 1984-1986, using Kingman as a DH almost exclusively. In his final season, in '86, Kingman played just three games in the field, but still managed to fumble the ball for two errors.>

21! I'll bet that's some sort of record.

Great bat, but defensively he was unsuccessful at third base and in the outfield.

However, it turned out that Garvey's defensive problem was specialized. He was a fine fielder when it was a matter of fielding a ball coming at him -- it was the just balls leaving him that were a problem. He was just awful at throwing the ball.

Fortunately, baseball has a position where receiving the ball is of paramount importance, but throwing it is marginalized: First base!

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/...

But look at that lineup for the Dodgers. Pretty darn good.

I found this description online:

<But it should come as no surprise that "The Bull" had become a DH by the end of his career, given that he was always basically a DH, he was just one who had the misfortune of playing left field. One fan I know described Luzinski simply as "dreadful" while Bill James notes that he "played with his back turned to center field, sort of officially notifying [Garry] Maddox that he considered anything hit to his left Maddox' s responsibility." James also goes into some detail explaining Luzinski's troubles with the wall, the sun, his throwing arm--it was both non-existent and hugely inaccurate--finally summing it up by explaining that "it was like having Herman Munster playing left field.">

I think if you look at the stats, his fielding numbers don't look so terrible. But fielding stats are dubious anyway.

There are a lot of things I don't understand about baseball, but one of them is how a guy can be a first rate hitter, able to locate and drive a 95 mph fastball, and yet be unable to throw decently.

In James' Baseball Abstract, one of the most interesting essays is his discussion of the fielding statistics of Bill Buckner v. Steve Garvey. Garvey couldn't throw, so he always tried to beat the runner to the bag; Buckner had bad knees, so he always made the pitcher cover first. As a result, Buckner had lots of assists and Garvey had very few. But anyone who watched them play (even before the 1986 World Series) knew that Garvey was a better defensive first baseman than Buckner.

James goes on to explain how he worked from this to figuring out a way to massage the assist statistics so that they would actually yield useful information about first basemen, and from there, defensive players generally. I think the entire essay is obsolete, because the whole sabermetrics field has moved on since. then. But it's an impressive example of "a first-rate mind being wasted on baseball" as someone described James.

<Wes Parker really despised Garvey, and the reason wasn't so much he was terrible at throwing, but that if a runner took off from second to third, Garvey would just hold the ball. >

Parker has a point, but Garvey would say he was just avoiding a throwing error, I guess. How often does a guy on second base get a chance to run on the first baseman anyway? (Not trying to pick a fight with Wes Parker; I genuinely have no idea.)

Agree. But I remember James (again) reading someone talking about the "hundreds" of runners that some great outfielder prevented from going from first to third on a ball hit to right. Being James, of course he had to figure out whether that was true. And he had to allow for the fact that there were some slow runners who wouldn't make it to third from first even if slomarko's grandmother was in the outfield, and by contrast there were balls to the corner where not even a guy with a howitzer arm would be able to keep the runner from getting to third. Anyway, James eventually concluded that there was just a small number of occasions when even a great outfielder would make a difference on that particular play.

Similarly, I watched Giambi play for years with the Yankees. Even I could see he was a rotten first baseman, but it didn't matter very often, because about 90% of what a first baseman does is catch throws from other infielders. And Giambi could do that.

James has really punctured a lot of the old thinking about baseball. What I like about him in comparison to most sportswriting (including Sports Illustrated) is that he looks at the data and comes to conclusions. He doesn't start with an idea and look for data to support his position.

Somebody (maybe even Herzog) had said that Ozzie Smith saved the Cards a hundred runs a year. James wrote, "Compared to what? Having no shortstop at all?" He did his analysis, and determined Smith saved perhaps twenty runs a year over a typical shortstop. Which is quite a bit.

You see this too often. I remember an SI article about the San Diego Padres. It said the hitters were having trouble because of the great distances to the fences. But it said the pitching staff was much improved (without mentioning the bigger dimensions).

White: "Willie Mays."

Rizzuto: "What do you mean? He was only the centerfielder."

Morgan, to my amazement, had over 1800 walks in his career, compared to 1015 strikeouts.

At the opposite end of the scale was Dick Stuart, who had 2 career stolen bases in 9 attempts, more than three times as many strikeouts as walks, and 80% more errors than an average first baseman for his era. Individually, none of these figures is at the bottom; Tony Armas and Mariano Duncan, among others, had much worse strikeout to walk ratios, and Kingman and Alex Johnson made more than twice as many errors as the norm. But only Stuart was near the bottom at all four measures.

(Kingman, believe it or not, had 85 career stolen bases, maxing out with 16 as a 23-year-old San Francisco Giant. He was caught stealing 49 times.)

http://www.baseball-reference.com/p...

Bottom ten percentage players: Stuart, Jim Lemon, Alex Johnson, Hubie Brooks, Dave Kingman, Brian Harper, Pete Incaviglia, John Bateman, Hector Lopez and Willie Horton.

The list is a tribute to Stuart in a way; there were worse percentage players, but they didn't last in the majors long enough to qualify. Dick Stuart could hit well enough to have a 9-year career despite being unable, it seems, to run, field or think. Also, Dr. Strangeglove has got to be one of the all-time great baseball nicknames.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/p...

I don't know what percentage of his value is home runs, but what leaps off the page is the fact that, in his prime years, he was walking about twice as often as he struck out. He couldn't have been very fast, since he didn't hit many doubles or triples and stole very few bases, but presumably his walks + homers + decent batting average account for his very high runs scored. So he did have value beyond home runs.

I checked and Barry Bonds had a similar K-BB ratio, even before the freakish numbers he put up 2001-2004. Ruth too. Ruth never struck out 100 times in a season, surprisingly, but strikeouts were much less common in the 1920s than they became later. Dimaggio had a great ratio, of course, but he didn't get walked nearly as much as Kiner, Bonds and Ruth.