A Winning Tradition: The 1919 Cincinnati Reds - Position Players

1919 Cincinnati Reds - Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Pitchers
• Position Players

As identified in the introduction, the 1919 Cincinnati Reds were an elite fielding team.  This was especially prominent in the outfield, where Edd Roush and Greasy Neale patrolled the vast real estate of Redland Field.  The star of the infield, defensively, was the unheralded Morrie Rath, who, by the numbers and reputation, was a brilliant defender.  Offensively, the team's production revolved around two key hitters: third-baseman Heinie Groh and MLB Hall of Famer Edd Roush.

Morrie Rath

Heinie Groh and Edd Roush were unquestionably the stars of this team; more on them shortly.  But the one who really jumps out at me on this graph was Morrie Rath.  Granted, one should have substantial reservations about fielding numbers from this era (see comment below the jump on this post), but Rath saved 27 runs above average with his glove between 1919-1920, and DRA has him at nearly 45 runs over the same time period.  The fascinating thing about Rath is that he had such a hard time getting the opportunities that he did.  He broke in with the Athletics in 1909, and enjoyed a short tenure with the White Sox as their starting second baseman from 1912-1913.  Following an injury-driven bad season in 1913, however, he was sent to the minors, and did not re-emerge until the Reds gave him an opportunity in 1919.  Rath played all but two games at second base that year, was the Reds' leadoff hitter, and turned in an outstanding defensive season along with league-average hitting.  By the estimates here, he was a 4-win player that year.  Bill James speculated that Rath might have had a longer career had he played in a different era, because his principle skills--fielding, and the ability to get on base--weren't adequately appreciated at the time, writing "He spent almost all of his career in the minor leagues just because his skills were too subtle for the men who managed the major league teams."

Reds Hall of Famer Larry Kopf does not rate highly by these measures.  He was about a league-average hitter in 1919, one of his two best offensive seasons.  However, while an average of his 1919-1920 Total Zone rates him as a league-average shortstop, Michael Humphrey's multiyear Defensive Regression Analysis metric rates him as well below-average (-21 runs).  The values above average the two.  If one uses just TZ or DRA alone, Kopf's WAR value swings by a full win higher or lower.  Kopf's reputation was as a solid defender, and given how good the team's overall fielding numbers were, it seems reasonable to believe Total Zone's numbers in this case.  Nevertheless, even from the most optimistic of perspectives, it is hard to justify induction into Reds' Hall of Fame.  Morrie Rath is more deserving, although he is ineligible due to only playing for the Reds for two seasons.

Greasy Neale

Also worth noting is Greasy Neale.  He rated as an equivalent fielder to Edd Roush that season, and the combination of those two resulted in few balls dropping throughout most of the outfield.  Being a pitcher's park with vast outfield fences, a strong outfield defense was important.  Neale might not have been an offensive force (he'd hit better the prior two seasons as a part-time player), but he was a solid enough hitter to justify his position and keep his glove in the field.  On top of all that, he competed closely with Heinie Groh for the title of best first name on a squad of outstanding first names.  Neale was traded after the 1920 season, along with Jimmy Ring, to the Philadelphia Athletics for future Hall of Famer Eppa Rixey.  The A's, in turn, put him on waivers in mid-1921, and the Reds immediately reacquired him, though he saw his role diminish.  Ultimately, after retiring from baseball, Greasy Neale became an extremely successful football coach, and was inducted in both the College Football Hall of Fame (Washington and Jefferson University) and the NFL Hall of Fame (Philadelphia Eagles).

Edd Roush

Heinie Groh and Edd Roush were similar, dynamic, highly effective hitters that formed the core of the Cincinnati Reds' offensive attack.  Their numbers in 1919 were virtually identical by all major measures, and they even had the exact same slugging percentage.  Groh walked more than Roush that year, but Roush made up most of that gap with a slightly higher batting average.  Both are justly in the Reds Hall of Fame, and Roush would become the Reds' first MLB Hall of Fame inductee in 1962.

The Reds got at least solid offensive production from all of their positions save one: left field.  Sherry Magee was the incumbant left fielder that season, but as the year went on he lost more and more playing time to Rube Bressler (a two-way player that season, as discussed in the post on pitching) and, later in the season, Pat Duncan.  Duncan, a rookie, would go on to take the left field job full-time in 1920, and started there for the Reds for four seasons.

Closing

Almost every reference you will see to the 1919 Reds will mention the Black Sox scandal.  Without question, it is the legacy of this Reds team that was most strongly tarnished by the actions of those players.  The team was legitimately outstanding, and there's no reason--in hindsight, anyway--to have considered them underdogs in that World Series.  They had an incredible record, easily the highest run differential in baseball, and a team that featured good hitting, good pitching, and outstanding defense.  They were also loaded with interesting and dynamic personalities.  This is a team that Reds Fans should celebrate, and it was a pleasure to learn about them through this series.

References and Resources

• The Baseball Gauge is the most outstanding site on the internet when researching past teams.  It also is the one place I know of where you can find Defensive Regression Analysis data.
• Baseball-Reference is always invaluable, especially for game logs, lineups, and their wonderful Bullpen wiki of concise player bios.
• FanGraphs continues to be my go-to site for performance metrics, and furnished virtually all of the stats in my R baseball database.  Thank you David Appelman!
• SABR's Baseball Biography project is an incredible resource for perspectives and histories on ballplayers.

A Winning Tradition: The 1919 Cincinnati Reds - Pitchers

1919 Cincinnati Reds - Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Pitchers
• Position Players

As discussed yesterday, the Reds were among the best run-prevention teams in the major leagues in 1919.  While the team featured elite fielding, a healthy chunk of that credit goes to their pitching staff.  The Reds' rotation shouldered the majority of the pitching load, accounting for 84% of the innings pitched by the team.  Dolf Luque accounted for most of what was left, which included a handful of starts and a good number of performances in relief.

What you think of the Reds' individual starters depended a fair bit on what metrics you like when looking at pitchers.  Dutch Reuther led the team in ERA, but his fielding-independent numbers rated him as a tad below league-average.  If you like fielding-independent numbers, then Hod Eller probably looks like the best pitcher on the staff:

I put "Lucky" and "Unlucky" in quotes there: even in modern day baseball, you can't chalk all of the gap between FIP and ERA to luck.  And in the dead-ball era, I suspect that pitchers had more control over things like BABIP than they do presently.  Nevertheless, Hod Eller seems to clearly have been the ace of this staff.  He threw the most innings, posted a good ERA, and had the best fielding-independent numbers to go with it.

Now, a look at some of the underlying numbers to reveal how these pitchers went about their business.

Hod Eller

24-year old Hod Eller posted what was easily the best strikeout rate on the team.  It was his third year in the big leagues, all with the Reds, and he was a Shine Ball specialist.  This was a pitch created by rubbing one surface of the baseball extremely smooth using a patch of paraffin wax.  This, when coupled with a roughed-up ball courtesy of his infielders, resulted in a ball that could break in a variety of directions depending on which surface was up.  The pitch became very controversial by the 1919 season, was banned prior the 1920 season.  He missed much of May and June as he worked to develop an alternative arsenal.  While he ultimately pitched pretty well over the rest of the year, he reported out of shape in 1921, lost his starting job, and ultimately was out of major league baseball.  So, with the pitch, more or less, went Hod Eller's career.  But in 1919, it was a heck of a weapon.  It was Eller who pitched game 8 that ultimately brought Cincinnati its first World Series title.

Slim Sallee is interesting.  The veteran southpaw seemed the extreme version of the pitch-to-contact pitcher; almost every batter he faced ended the appearance with a ball in play.  He was known for having other-worldly command, and it showed in his walk rate.  But he also didn't strike anyone out in 1919.  By this point, Sallee had been playing for 11 seasons, for the Cardinals and then the Giants, and was in his first and only full season with the Reds (a deal he apparently engineered by refusing to play for anyone else!).  He'd been dealing with back problems since the prior season, and re-injured his back during spring training, which likely accounts for the major drop in his already-low strikeout rates from earlier in his career.  Nevertheless, using a combination of command, knowledge of batters, and guile, he still managed a very effective season.

Dutch Ruether

With the caveats mentioned above about the meaning of BABIP for dead ball pitchers still in mind, here is a comparison that tries to get at fielding-independent numbers (K-BB%) versus results of balls in play (BABIP).  Here is where two of the other Reds' starters show up as interesting: Dutch Ruether and Ray Fisher.  1919 was a breakout season for Ruether.  He posted a 1.81 ERA in 240+ innings as a 25-year old, and would go on to pitch as a dependable starter for the Robins, Senators, and even, in his final year, the 1927 New York Yankees.  Throughout his career, he posted a K-BB rate of nearly 0, but as his BABIP swung up in the live ball era, so too did his ERA.

Fisher, on the other hand, was 31 and on the downside of his career, having just returned to baseball after being drafted into the army during the 1918 season.  He was a spitball specialist, but unlike Hod Eller, he was among the 17 pitchers exempted from the ban on doctored baseballs that began in 1920.  Nevertheless, 1920 was his final year.  He went on to coach for 38 years at the University of Michigan.

The only starter who didn't pop out as remarkable on these graphs was the dependable Jimmy Ring.  Like Dutch Ruether, Ring had something of a breakout with the 1919 Reds.  He'd actually joined the Reds rotation as a 23-year old the year prior, but took a step forward in 1919, posting better strikeout numbers and the best ERA of his career.  The Reds ultimately traded him after the 1920 season to Philadelphia in exchange for Eppa Rixey, and Ring went on to post five solid seasons for the Phillies.

Dolf Luque

When the starters could not finish a ballgame, the man who usually got the nod was reliever Dolf Luque.  Loque, who hailed from Cuba, was in his second season with the Reds, and in 1919 pitched primarily in a relief role, with 9 spot starts among his 30 appearances.  On May 16, 1919, Luque threw the first shut-out of any latino ballplayer.  He would go on to secure a full-time starting job in 1920, and would be a keystone starter for the Reds through the 1929 season, earning a place in the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame.

One other reliever was of particular interest: Rube Bressler, also a Reds Hall of Famer.  Bressler had debuted in 1919 as a left-handed pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics, and had had a fine debut season.  Unfortunately, by 1919, he'd encountered arm troubles severe enough that he'd been relegated to the bullpen.  One day, when outfielder Sherry Magee was ill, Reds manager Pat Moran tried Bressler in the outfield.  That was the start of his career as a hitter.  He didn't succeed immediately, but by 1921 Bressler started to have success.  He'd go on to have a number of above-average seasons with the Reds as a high-contact, high-walk, on-base oriented hitter.

Up next: the 1919 Reds Position Players!

A Winning Tradition: The 1919 Cincinnati Reds - Introduction

Today is the start of a series I've been planning for a few years now: a profile on winning Reds teams throughout history.  We start with the first winning Reds team of the 1900's, the 1919 Cincinnati Reds!  This is exciting for me; the way I have it set up, almost everything is automated with R, save for making a few of the pretty tables in Excel.  This will hopefully allow me to put these posts together much quicker as I work through later teams.  I'm looking forward to this tremendously.

1919 Cincinnati Reds - Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Pitchers
• Position Players

The 1919 Reds played in Redland Park, which opened in 1912.
Photo source, c.1920: Wikipedia

The 1919 Reds were the first Cincinnati squad to win their division since the franchise's inaugural team won the debut season of the American Association in 1882.  This team's championship came at a really interesting time.  World War I had just ended, and players were returning from service in the military.  It was the end of the dead ball era.  The next year, in 1920, with the exception of a handful of pitchers, spitballs, scuffballs, and shine balls were outlawed.  With the death of Ray Chapman in 1920, baseballs were replaced whenever they became dirty or damaged to enhance their visibility (this also maintained their performance throughout the game, favoring hitters).  In 1919, Babe Ruth broke the home run record with 29 home runs, topping Ned Williamson's mark of 27 from 1884.  Ruth would crush that record the next year, slugging 54 home runs in 1920 to usher in the Live Ball Era.  And, of course, the 1919 World Series will be forever infamous because of the Black Sox scandal, when White Sox players took money from gamblers to throw the series.

Lost in all of that excitement was an excellent Cincinnati Reds team that featured an MLB Hall of Fame Center Fielder, 6 Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame players, a roster full of brilliant first names, and, most of all, a legitimate claim to being the best overall team in baseball that season.

The Regular Season

Graph courtesy of the fantastic Baseball Gauge

The Reds entered the season having finished above .500 in two consecutive seasons, but with more than three decades having passed since they topped their league, be it the American Association or the National League.  After a middling start, they finally started to turn it on in June, and climbed their way into a dogfight with the New York Giants that would last until August.  Once August hit, however, the Reds finally gained some separation, and finished with an outstanding 96-44 (.686) record in the 140 game season.  That's 52 games over .500!  To maintain that winning percentage over a 162-game schedule in modern baseball, a team would need to go 111-49.

The Playoffs

Chart courtesy of The Baseball Gauge

While it's impossible to know how much the series was negatively tainted by the gambling operation that would be exposed a year later, the Reds were in control pretty much from the start.  After slugging their away ahead mid-way through the first game, they would win four of the first five contests.  While the White Sox came back to win the next two, the Reds would power their way to a 10-5 victory in game eight behind Hod Eller and lock in their first World Series championship.

Redland Field

Redland Field opened in 1912 in the same location of the Palace of Fans.  It was a deep park, with approximately symmetrical dimensions: 360 feet to left and right field, and 420 feet to center field.  This was reflected in its 96 Park Factor, which put it in a tie for the best pitchers' parks in baseball that year along with Boston and Milwaukee.  It had some interesting quirks, including a 15-degree sloping terrace in left field that angled up to York Street, which is visible in the photograph to the right just beyond the left field wall.

The Reds played at Redland Field until Riverfront Stadium opened in 1970, though the park would undergo massive changes: additional seating, movement of home plate toward the outfield, the installation of the first lights in a major league park, and, of course, a change of name in 1934 to Crosley Field.

Team Statistics

The 1919 Reds were not the best-hitting team in baseball.  That honor went to the White Sox, which likely resulted in their reputation as the superior team.  But the Reds were still a solid-hitting team.   After park adjustments, they were the fifth-best offense in baseball, and by wRC+ they were basically tied with the White Sox.  Where they really excelled, however, was in run prevention, posting the second-lowest park-adjusted runs allowed total in baseball.  This combination made them the best-performing team in baseball, with the highest run differential of any team in baseball.  It really wasn't even close:

Team	Runs Scored*	Runs Allowed*	Run Differential
Reds	602	418	184
Giants	624	485	139
White Sox	675	539	135
Indians	616	523	92
Yankees	576	507	69
Cubs	445	399	46
Tigers	626	583	43
Robins	510	498	12
Pirates	467	461	6
Red Sox	589	591	-2
Browns	525	551	-26
Senators	549	589	-39
Cardinals	468	558	-90
Braves	482	586	-104
Phillies	472	647	-175
Athletics	450	732	-282

Team Statistics: Preventing Runs
How they achieved that outstanding Run Allowed total is interesting.  As will become clear in the pitcher profiles, this Reds team featured a lot of pitch-to-contact guys.  As a group, they didn't strike out a lot of players (even by the standards of the day), though they did avoid walks pretty well.  What this team did do, however, is convert balls in play into outs at a league-leading rate:

There are two major explanations for this.  First, the 1919 Reds were a superb defensive team.  In fact, we can plot xFIP- against Total Zone (it's actually JAARF), which has some corrections for park factors and such and more player-by-player nuance, and we see the Reds still rated as one of the best-fielding teams in baseball that year:

1919 Reds were unquestionably an elite-fielding team.  I also think, however, that when we're looking at Dead Ball Era teams, we need to be far more cautious about assuming how well fielding-independent stats tell the story.  It's very reasonable to suspect that the DER numbers were aided by the ability of some Reds pitchers to induce weak contact, thereby increasing the Reds' ability to convert those balls into outs.

Team Statistics: Producing Runs
Finally, a look at the Reds' offense compared to other teams:

The 1919 Reds were not an elite offense.  They played in Redland Field (later renamed Crosley Field), a pitcher's park (park factor of 96), and so their league-average OBP probably rates out as a tick above-average.  They didn't have a ton of power, although this was still the Dead-Ball era; even the Red Sox, with home run champion Babe Ruth, had an isolated power below .100.  The spread in ISO was about half then what it is now, and even now a point of OBP is worth about 1.7 times as much as a point of ISO.  Power just wasn't that important in terms of how teams varied in the Dead Ball Era.

Next up: 1919 Reds Pitchers!

Statistics courtesy of FanGraphs.