Stats Geek: Clemente, Waner almost an even match

Paul Waner

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

By Brian O'Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Was Paul Waner the equal of Roberto Clemente in right field? The question may be unanswerable, but few teams can point to two players at one position so evenly matched.

The Pirates will retire Waner's No. 11 before Saturday's game against the Astros, an event coming 67 years after his last game as a Pirate. With most of the people who watched the 153-pound "Big Poison" long gone, and the visual record of his greatness mostly unrecorded, we have only anecdotes and numbers to go by.

But they're pretty great.

Jim Tripoldi runs Diamond Jim's, a card and memorabilia shop in Beaver, and tells the story about working for The News-Tribune, a former daily in Beaver Falls, at the time of Clemente's incredible 1971 World Series.

"Forget about Clemente," his cigar-chomping sports editor, Joe Tronzo, said. "Paul Waner, when he was sober, was the best right fielder the Pirates ever had.

"The second best right fielder the Pirates ever had," Tronzo added, "was Paul Waner when he was drunk."

Roberto Clemente

As one who was mesmerized by Clemente's bat, glove, legs and right arm that October, I can't buy Tronzo's glib dismissal. But I never saw Waner.

Waner has the highest career batting average as a Pirate (.340), and only Honus Wagner, the most dominant player in team history, scored more runs (1,521 to 1,493). Waner has the most doubles (558), and those he tacked on after his release by the Pirates put him 11th on the all-time doubles list with 605.

Waner's 3,152 hits (2,868 as a Pirate) put him 16th all time. He won three batting titles, and four of the 10 highest averages in Pirates history belong to him. During the years he played, from 1926-45, nobody hit more than his 191 triples. This guy was so good his reputation probably helped his less gifted brother, Lloyd "Little Poison" Waner, get into the Hall of Fame with him.

Of course, Clemente had four batting titles, the most hits as a Pirate (3,000), and a MVP award in 1966 to match Waner's 1927 plaque. Clemente's 166 triples are more than anyone has hit since the end of World War II.

Clemente also played through an era dominated by pitchers while Waner played in the 1920s and 1930s, when .300 averages were commonplace. Throw in the fact that some of the best players during Waner's era -- Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, Judy Johnson, Satchel Paige, Buck Leonard and Smokey Joe Williams -- were playing for the Pittsburgh Crawfords or Homestead Grays in the Negro Leagues, and a straight comparison by conventional numbers doesn't work.

1934 Goudey

Baseball historians say Waner and Clemente are near equals. Both could run, hit and field like almost nobody else. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract ranks Clemente eighth and Waner ninth among all right fielders.

Jay Jaffe has developed a rating system for Baseball Prospectus to discuss the merits for the Hall of Fame, and he ranks both even higher. Jaffe puts right fielders in this order: 1) Babe Ruth 2) Hank Aaron 3) Mel Ott 4) Frank Robinson 5) Al Kaline 6) Clemente 7) Waner 8) Dave Winfield 9) Reggie Jackson 10) Sam Crawford. (That possibly unfamiliar name is the all-time triples leader who played alongside Ty Cobb in Detroit).

"If Clemente had lived," Jaffe wrote in an e-mail in December, "he'd have probably emerged from the pack for sole possession of fifth."

I haven't space to outline Jaffe's methodology, but he uses peak years and career record to come up with the overall rating. You don't hear arguments about Clemente and Waner the way you do, say, Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, but no players who played the same position for the same team are more closely matched among baseball's all-time greats, according to Jaffe's system.

Fielding is almost impossible to measure accurately, and Waner played before the Gold Glove award arrived, so he had no chance to match Clemente's 12 awards, tied with Willie Mays for the most by an outfielder. But Waner had 238 assists in 2,255 games as a right fielder, nearly as many as Clemente's 252 in 2,305 games there. Baseball Prospectus rates Clemente as saving 110 runs above the average right fielder in his career, and Waner saving 64 at that position.

Roberto Clemente

That can't be certain, but let's agree that from 1926-40, and again from 1955 until the ballpark shut down in 1970, visitors to Forbes Field were well advised to hit the ball somewhere other than right field.

Who was better? Who cares? Let memories of Clemente provide a prism to view Waner's similar skills. If you ever bought into "Field of Dreams," maybe you can see them both hitting triples somewhere still.


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