The Perfect Ballplayer
Here's the perfect player as imagined by Jazz Chisholm
Inspiration for this was a Twitter clip showing Jazz creating his perfect ballplayer based on the 5 tools. I then spend an hour or 2 building the statistical profile for this player. Jazz selected:
Power: Kyle Schwarber
Average: Luis Arraez
Defense: Pete Crow-Armstrong
Arm: Elly De La Cruz
Speed: Himself, or Nasim Nunez
Starting from the bottom up, this player would steal a lot of bases. I was surprised by how many, just based on prorating Nunez’s SB attempts per time on first base. I’m going with Nunez here. While Jazz is having a very good year and is +4 in baserunning runs, Nunez is +6 and leading the league. We are at the halfway two-thirds point, so make that +9 for a full season.
Fielding: PCA is +18 in range this year (and also has a great arm). Make that +27 for a full season. On arm, I’m making this perfect player a center fielder so not sure what I can do with Elly De La Cruz’s arm. So I just looked at the league leader for outfield throwing. That would be Andy Pages and Jackson Merrill, at +5 each. Make that +7 for a full season.
Now we get to the batting. Neither Schwarber or Arraez get hit with a lot of pitches. For a full season of 665 PA, Mr. Perfect gets 4. For walks, I am choosing Schwarber’s rate of 14.3 percent. This might be a big underestimate, but I’ll go with this for now. That gives him 95 walks.
Strikeouts: Going with Arraez’s rate of 0.05, he strikes out only 28 times for the year. This gives him almost 540 times making fair contact with the baseball. Schwarber strikes out so much that he has only made fair contact 228 times yet still has an incredible 33 homers on those. Give him the contact opportunity of Arraez, and we get a new record of 78 homers.
When I first saw this, I thought I made a spreadsheet error. I double and triple checked and there is no error. This is what Kyle Schwarber’s HR rate would be if he was able to eliminate his strikeouts without losing any power. Not a realistic assumption, but we are talking about a hypothetical perfect player.
This is where the walk estimate comes into question, as we saw with Barry Bonds, teams would not allow this guy to hit 78 homers. They would start intentionally walking him so much that maybe he ends up with 45-50 homers and 200 walks. But for now I’ll leave that alone and run the numbers as is.
When he doesn’t homer or strike out, his BABIP is going to be .326. That’s right in the middle of what Luis (.327) and Kyle (.325) have done this year. For Schwarber, this is unusual, well above his career rate of .267. For Arraez, this is his normal rate.
A .326 BABIP, plus the 78 hits on balls sent out of play, gives him a batting average of .403. So in other words, our perfect player is Ted Williams taking Barry Bonds level steroids.
I used the average double and triple percentages, per hit into play, for the two and get 28 doubles and 5 triples. His OBP? .492. His slugging? .883, a new record.
He blows past the 60-60 club and founds the 70/70 club. Using Nasim Nunez’s rate of stolen base attempts per single+BB+HBP, I come up with 78 steals in 88 tries.
His WOBA is .561, which gives him 133 batting runs. This is a new record. Previously, there had been 5 cases of batting runs over 120. All by Ruth and Bonds.
Add in his defense, running, a +5 position adjustment, and 22 replacement runs, this guy comes out to 203 runs better than replacement, or 20 WAR.
The greatest seasons in history have been in the range of 10-12 WAR. This guy would be twice that good. Now just imagine he also has Ohtani’s pitching ability…
Thank you Jazz Chisholm, for providing the inspiration for this post.
Edit: After posting this, I could not get the image of “Ted Williams on Barry Bonds steroids” out of my head. It could have happened, after all, a fellow WW2 vet named Steve Rogers used steroids to great effect.