Bill Felber Review (from The Inside Game, SABR’s Deadball Era Committee Newsletter)

The following is a review of Now Taking the Field: Baseball’s All-Time Dream Teams for All 30 Franchises. It was written by Bill Felber for the September 2019 issue of The Inside Game, the Official Newsletter of SABR’s Deadball Era Committee. It is reproduced here in full with the permission of SABR.

Among baseball fans, debating the members of a favorite club’s all-time team is a guaranteed argument starter. Except, perhaps, among those who have read Now Taking the Field: Baseball’s All-Time Dream Teams for All 30 Franchises. Armed with the evidence presented in that book, they may actually be able to reach agreement. It’s not so much that the author Tom Stone lays down definitive and unassailable cases for his selections of the best players ever to represent each team. He does, mostly, but there remains room for disagreement.

The most important thing Stone does is lift the debate out of the realm of the subjective by establishing criteria on which he bases his cases. So even in circumstances where you take great offense at one or two of his picks, you can at least figure out why he made the choices he did. The criteria have a strong statistical component: Wins Above Replacement, traditional stats, awards, and post-season performance. Stone considers only a player’s accomplishments for the team in question but does not restrict a player to membership with one team only. Hence it is possible in Stone’s system for Alex Rodriguez to simultaneously represent the Mariners, Rangers, and Yankees.

In deference to the desire to construct a plausible “team,” Stone does impose some roster limitations: 12 pitchers (no more, no less) with at least two of them bullpen specialists, two players at each position in the field, plus two “wild card” choices for a 30-person roster. I had a bit of a problem with the 12-man staff and 30-person
roster, both of which seem to me largely a means of avoiding difficult choices. But hey, it’s not my book so I don’t get to set the ground rules. In its broad
parameters, Stone’s system is defensible. The real question, of course, is how “good” a job Stone did of actually settling on each franchise’s best 30. Generally speaking, the answer is “quite good.”

To answer that question more specifically in my own mind, I repeated his exercise, using his criteria and methodology but applying my own judgments. On average, my rosters and his roster agreed about 26 times out of 30. That’s close to a 90 percent alignment, which for a book on such a debate-filled topic strikes me as about right. It’s high enough to believe in the author’s general construct but low enough to not entirely shut the door on discussion. To illustrate the method, lets biopsy the roster of one of Stone’s 30 franchises with which people are likely to have both strong knowledge and strong opinions: the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers. Let the record show at the outset that we agreed on 26 of the selections. Here’s the mutually agreed-on core:

• Catcher: Roy Campanella and Mike Piazza
• Infield: Steve Garvey, Gil Hodges, Dave Lopes, Jackie Robinson, PeeWee Reese, Maury Wills, Ron Cey, Pedro Guerrero
• Outfield: Willie Davis, Duke Snider, Dixie Walker, Zach Wheat
• Utility: Jim Gilliam, Dolf Camilli
• Pitchers: Don Drysdale, Orel Hershiser, Clayton Kershaw, Sandy Koufax, Jeff Pfeffer, Don Sutton, Fernando Valenzuela, Dazzy Vance, Eric Gagne, Kenley Jansen.

That left us debating four spots: two pitchers and two outfielders.

Despite the recurring presence of such giants, if you’ll forgive the expression, as Koufax, Kershaw, Hershiser, and Vance, Dodger pitching has from time to time been lackluster. Stone’s work-around to this reality involved giving one of those mound spots to a third reliever, Ron Perranoski. He also favored Don Newcombe based on his dominant role in the 1950s, which included NL Rookie of the Year, Cy Young, and MVP awards. Although Newcombe is a strong candidate, I preferred Bob Welch’s credentials. It’s a close call. At 123-67, Newcombe has a better won-loss record with the Dodgers than Welch (115-86), but Welch’s career 32.7 WAR and 3.16 ERA with LA are both clearly superior to Newcombe’s 22.3 WAR and 3.46 ERA. Beyond that, Welch pitched about 150 more innings in a Dodger uniform than Newcombe.

One of the weaknesses of Stone’s book is his expressed tendency to “heavily discount” (his term) the accomplishments of nineteenth century and Deadball Era players, especially pitchers, due to the dated nature of the game they played. Nap Rucker is one of his victims. Rucker compiled a career 2.42 ERA – yes, that was good even back then – and his WAR has been pegged at 47.2. That’s better than all but five of the Dodger pitchers Stone took. Given Perranoski’s 100 saves for dominant Dodger teams of the 1960s, his selection is understandable. I would have stayed with the tenth starter and picked Rucker. For his outfield, Stone selected Babe Herman and Carl Furillo as his fifth and sixth picks. I moved Pedro Guerrero to outfield and added third baseman Adrian Beltre, selecting Raul Mondesi as my final choice.

Beyond selecting and defending his teams, Stone includes a wonderful little addendum for each franchise: a history of previous such selections. These date back to 1950s era selections by The Sporting News or Sport Magazine and include subsequent teams picked by such experts as Rob Neyer, Nick Acocella, Charles Faber, and the Nefts. Examining those, it’s easy to get a sense of how perceptions of what constitutes a “great” player have changed over the years. Whatever the debates, Stone is obviously open to them. He’s gone so far as to create a website, www.nowtakingthefield.com, where he is inviting reaction to, including disagreement with, his choices. You’ll have some; I guarantee it. But the book would be a lot less fun to read if you agreed with every word.

Bill Felber is a retired newspaper editor, a SABR member since 1982, and chair of the SABR Baseball Research Award Committee. He is the author of seven books, five on
baseball. His latest book is The Hole Truth: Determining the Greatest Players in Golf Using Sabermetrics (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).