Stats Geek: Bay Carries Too Much of the Load For Pirates

Tuesday, August 23, 2005
By Brian O'Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

An extraordinary event occurred Friday night in Philadelphia. The Pirates plated 11 runs and Jason Bay didn't score any of them.

Bay would score two of the next four runs the Pirates would have in the three-game series, which is closer to our expectation. This slugging/on-base machine has scored more than one of every six runs the Pirates have put on the scoreboard this year.

Bay has 90, third in the National League and sixth in baseball, and is 41 ahead of the closest active Pirate, Jose Castillo, with 49. Matt Lawton had 53 before his trade to the Cubs three weeks ago.

Looking around for a player who has plated a greater share of his team's runs, I found only Derrek Lee, the Cubs' Triple Crown threat. Going into last night's games, Lee had scored 17.4 percent of the Cubs' runs and Bay had scored 17.2 percent of the Pirates'. (Obscure stats like that are why it says "Geek" right on the label.)

I can't calculate the degree of difficulty in Bay being sixth in the majors in runs while his team is 27th, but his remarkable year had me wondering if there had ever been a Pirate this far ahead of his nearest teammate in runs, and whether any other Pirate had a higher share of the team total.
Before I get to the answers, let's get to the stat itself. Runs are the Rodney Dangerfield of the leader board, getting only a little more respect than, say, doubles (Bay has 37, tied for second in the NL) or extra-base hits (Bay is second again, with 66). They aren't nearly as important to ardent fan as runs batted in, and Bay is 18th there, with 72 RBIs.

Why should driving another man home be considered a more manly act than scoring? I'll leave that question to Dr. Freud, but Bay is hitting .340 and slugging .642 with runners in scoring position and hitting .335 and slugging .597 with runners on, so it's curious that he doesn't have more RBIs. The explanation for that is complex, but the reason Bay scores so often is simple. He plays every day, he is on base 40 percent of the time, nearly half Bay's hits are for extra bases and he's an excellent baserunner, stealing 14 bases in 14 attempts.

Give the Pirates hitting behind Bay all the credit for getting him home if you like, but seasons like his don't come around often.

I make no pretense that I conducted a thorough search, but a quick workout of my keyboard on baseball-reference.com netted two Pirates left fielders who also thoroughly dominated the scoring for bad teams: Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner and Brian Giles, a two-time All-Star whom the Pirates traded for Bay and Oliver Perez.

Kiner finished in the top five in scoring every year from 1947-51, which is hardly surprising. Those five seasons fell within Kiner's seven-year run of leading the league in home runs. In only one of those years did the Pirates have a winning season, finishing fourth in '48 at 83-71.

Scoring about 40 more runs than the nearest Pirate was nothing for Kiner in that span, but his loneliest season was probably '51. That year, Kiner tied Stan Musial for the NL lead in runs with 124, which was 44 more than teammate Gus Bell and 18 percent of the team total.

Time has shorn the bitterness from those losing years, but Giles' 715 games as a Pirate represents only about a third of the team's ongoing 13-year Lossapalooza, so no one is looking back fondly. Giles never finished higher than 10th in runs, which he did in 2000 and '01. In the latter year, the Pirates lost 100 games and Giles scored 116 runs, 32 more than Jason Kendall and 17.7 percent of the Pirates' total.

I'm sure other bad teams have had their own prolific scorers, but you get the point. If Bay is lucky, he won't top Kiner or Giles in these deservedly obscure categories, and he'll never have another season where he's so alone in the lineup.

Kiner, Giles and Bay all have this in common with nearly all scoring leaders: a high on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS). Kiner led the league in OPS three times and was never lower than sixth for six consecutive seasons. Giles finished in the top 10 for five consecutive seasons. Bay entered last night sixth in OPS, at .968, up from .907 in his rookie season.
They just got no help. That's a Pirates epitaph that needs to be retired.

(Brian O'Neill can be reached at boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947.)