Most Dominating Jays Seasons By Position

Monday, October 17 2011 @ 10:10 PM EDT

Just was thinking about how dominating Bautista has been these last two years and got to thinking about which Jay had the most dominating season (vs teammates) all time? What about by position?

First you have to find a method to measure dominance then you need to get it for the team and individual to figure out who had the highest percentage of the team total each year by position (using primary position, thus Bautista in 2010 and 2011 is a right fielder). There are an assortment of ways to do this, from simple RBI's (ugh) to WAR (but which version?). To make life easy I am not worrying about their defense, just offense. A simple method is good old Runs Created. Not the #1 method, but it is easy to calculate and run with the Lahman database and it is close enough for our purposes here. I'll be using the 2002 method since it is marginally more accurate and still works easily within the database.

So for reference the biggest RC seasons for a Jays team (thus the hardest to dominate) are 1999 (890) and 2000 (877) while the lowest are the strike years and 1978 (590) - thus easier to dominate. The highest RC seasons ever for an individual Jay are Carlos Delgado 2000 (161) and (149). Lowest score is sub-0 for Joe Cannon (1980) at -2.7 with another 124 also sub-0

On to the results...

Name	Year	Position	Runs Created	% of Team RC
Darrin Fletcher	2000	C	73	8.31%
Carlos Delgado	2000	1B	161	18.33%
Roberto Alomar	1991	2B	105	14.79%
Kelly Gruber	1990	3B	97	12.82%
Alfredo Griffin	1979	SS	77	12.88%
George Bell	1987	LF	119	14.41%
Devon White	1991	CF	101	14.25%
Jose Bautista	2011	RF	134	18.61%
Paul Molitor	1994	DH	95	16.98%
Roger Clemens	1997	P	1	0.16%

Now I'm sure more than one of you, much like I did, are going 'that cannot be right' in some cases. How can Alfredo Griffin make any positive offensive list? How can Devo win in CF over Moseby & Wells? Quite simply, this is comparing them to their teams and the 1979 Jays had a horrid offense (to put it mildly). Plus during the post-strike era up until recently offense has been so high it takes an extreme to make it (Delgado & Fletcher 2000) and Wells wasn't able to as he had Delgado or Bautista or a solid team offense to deal with. What this chart shows is why guys like Alfredo Griffin were loved back in the early 80's - he was a key part of the (pathetic) offense early on thus seen as better than he was.

For reference here are the peaks for runs created, regardless of team context.

Name	Year	Position	Runs Created	% of Team RC
Darrin Fletcher	2000	C	73	8.31%
Carlos Delgado	2000	1B	161	18.33%
Roberto Alomar	1993	2B	120	14.13%
Eric Hinske	2002	3B	98	12.72%
Tony Fernandez	1986	SS	100	12.67%
George Bell	1987	LF	119	14.41%
Vernon Wells	2003	CF	123	14.17%
Jose Bautista	2011	RF	134	18.61%
Paul Molitor	1993	DH	130	15.27%
Roger Clemens	1997	P	1.04	0.16%

Another item of note: just how weak 3B has been in Jays history. Never getting 100 RC out of that slot is surprising. Glaus & Rolen both were very solid, but couldn't reach it during their limited time here. Gruber had injury issues. Mulliniks/Iorg split time there for years. Sprague just wasn't that good and Hinske had just one good year. For those wondering, Brett Lawrie was on pace for 112 over 150 games (given how he plays I doubt he'll ever play much more than 150 in a season).

This also shows just how amazing Delgado was in 2000 - to outproduce at a level like that when the team was amazing offensively outside of him is a major achievement.

For those who are also curious about career figures I checked % of team offense for 100+ game seasons (ie: I didn't count Delgado's and Wells' cups of tea against them).

Name	RC	Seasons	Av % Per Season
Paul Molitor	306	3	14.74%
Carlos Delgado	1,024	9	14.18%
Dave Winfield	105	1	13.69%
Roberto Alomar	486	5	13.52%
Fred McGriff	390	4	12.90%
John Mayberry	234	3	12.80%
Ron Fairly	73	1	12.06%
George Bell	651	7	12.00%
Shannon Stewart	491	5	11.86%
Joe Carter	582	7	11.69%
Vernon Wells	792	9	11.25%
Raul Mondesi	87	1	11.18%
John Olerud	571	7	11.15%
Devon White	396	5	11.04%
Roy Howell	202	3	11.03%
Tony Fernandez	691	8	10.90%
Jose Canseco	91	1	10.87%
Shawn Green	425	5	10.87%
Willie Upshaw	498	6	10.78%

Again, it shows why some players were viewed as better than they were - because the team around them, well, stunk. To be viewed as great you need to be a solid player and the weaker your teammates the better you will be viewed.

A final reminder - I am not saying Runs Created is the best method of measuring offense, just that it is useful for an exercise like this - to try to understand who the dominate players are in Jays history and why some guys were viewed as great who were not (such as Alfredo Griffin - I loved watching him as a kid, but know he wasn't really that good).

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