WIllie, Mickey and WAR

By JT

 Allen Barra is an excellent researcher and writer and I really enjoyed his book Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age. In my view, it was well researched and a great read.

However, to be honest, I had one problem with the book. In my view, it seemed to have a slight "Mickey Mantle is better" bias and it showed up in two ways. First, the term "Gold Glove" did not appear in the book. Mays won twelve and Mantle three. Second, in the two appendices, Barra used two baseball metrics that favored Mantle. One was Pete Palmer's player rating (TPR) and the other was Bill James's Win Shares (WS). There are other metrics, such as WAR and versions of it that are not so clear cut.

Thus, I've searched the Web and found all the metrics and put them into one chart so folks can take a look and make their own determination as to who have may have been better (if anyone really was).

Here are the various WAR with TPR and WS in a chart.
(click to enlarge)

With Plamer's total player rating, I added 2.5 to both to make the totals more similar to the WAR numbers, it could also be called TPR above average with 2.5 being average. I did the same for both players so this will still favor Mantle. Most analyses of the AL and NL in that era rated the average player higher in the NL than the Al due to better integration of the NL but I ignored that for TPR. Had a good analysis of what the average player in each league was, the 2.5 number I chose would be different. Perhaps 2.5 for NL and 2.2 for AL, for example.

With Bill James's Win Shares I divided it by 3.5 to make it come out to about the same as others so it would be weighted more evenly. Again, it still favors Mantle.

I also adjusted Mickey Mantle's 1963 to a full season, which helps him in the graphs down below, the 3-year, 4-year averages, etc.

You can click on links to go to the source for charts.

Key: TPR+2.5 Pete Palmer's version http://www.amazon.com/Total-Baseball-Official-Encyclopedia-League/dp/1930844018 WS ÷ 3.5 Bill James's version http://seamheads.com/baseballgauge/player.php?playerID=mayswi01 http://seamheads.com/baseballgauge/player.php?playerID=mantlmi01 BFW+3 retrosheet.org version http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/M/Pmaysw101.htm http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/M/Pmantm101.htm BR-WAR baseball-reference.com version http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/m/mayswi01.shtml http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/m/mantlmi01.shtml FG-WAR fangraphs.com version http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=1008315&position=OF#advanced http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=1008082&position=OF WARP baseballprospectus.com version http://www.baseballprospectus.com/card/card.php?id=25672 http://www.baseballprospectus.com/card/card.php?id=25475 BP-WAR baseballprojection.com version http://www.baseballprojection.com/war/m/maysw101.htm http://www.baseballprojection.com/war/m/mantm101.htm BG-WAR Baseballgauge version http://seamheads.com/baseballgauge/player.php?playerID=mantlmi01 http://seamheads.com/baseballgauge/player.php?playerID=mayswi01 DR-WARP Dan Rosenheck's version baseball think factory http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/hall_of_merit/discussion/willie_mays/P100 http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/hall_of_merit/discussion/ranking_the_hall_of_merit_center_fielders_discussion/P100 T-WAR My own version of WAR Uses Michael Humphrey's revolutionary new fielding statistic, called Defensive Regression Analysis (DRA)   DRA for defense, WPA/ LI for offense, and Smith's "holds" from Baseball refernce.com So, as you can see above there were peaks and valleys for both players. Here are some different averages for different periods of time. People can make up their own minds, as Coach TJ Troup, who saw both play, says, "Mantle was amazing power" and "Mays was sustained greatness". These charts show that those comments are true. (Click to enlarge)