While looking at a list of first overall picks in the draft since it was established in 1965, it was interesting to see that seven position players up until the 1999 draft had not posted at least 1,000 at-bats and three pitchers hadn’t won 20 games in their career. With teams putting so much emphasis on promoting from within, this failure to perform after being chosen among thousands of athletes can be quite distressing to front office personnel.

In my upcoming posts for Seamheads, I will be examining these players. To be fair, I will analyze only the 1965 to 1999 players, totaling 35 first overall picks, because drafted players since then have either not reached the majors or made enough appearances to justify an analysis of their performances so far.

Complete List - First Overall Picks

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We’ve added a new writer to our staff and we’re very pleased to have him here at Seamheads.com. His name is Dave Rouleau. Dave is a SABR member who currently writes for several web sites, including Baseball Digest Daily, The Biz of Baseball, and The Biz of Hockey. He’s also an Associate Producer at Inside the Dome (Scout.com). For a sample of Dave’s work, check out his article: The Most Productive Hitting Streaks…Since 1957 over at Baseball Digest Daily.

We hope you enjoy his work as much as we do!

Did he or didn’t he, that’s the question. Eddie Cicotte is widely recognized as the inventor of the knuckleball, earning his nickname “Knuckles” around 1908, his first full year in the majors. Whether Cicotte is the knuckleball’s true inventor or not—Nap Rucker, Lew “Hicks” Moren and Ed Summers have also been credited with inventing the pitch (or at least refining it)—no pitch earned Cicotte more attention than his vaunted “Shine Ball.” But did he really throw it and, more importantly, did it even exist?

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Maury Wills came onto the BBWAA ballot in 1978. In that first year, he got 115 votes (30%). Luis Aparicio, another shortstop, joined him on the ballot in 1979. Wills got 38% of the vote in 1979 compared to 28% for Aparicio. In 1980, Wills got more votes than Aparicio again – 38% to 32%. In 1981, Wills bested Aparicio again – 41% to 12%

So, for the first three years that Luis was on the ballot, Maury did better than he did. Note that Aparicio fell from 32% in 1980 to only 12% in 1981. That would seem to imply that he was losing support and was in a downward spiral. Or so it would seem to the average fan looking on. But the weird voting patterns of the writers was about to kick in again. In 1982, Aparicio suddenly jumped to 42% (from 12%). What happened? Had he suddenly become a better shortstop? I hardly think so.

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A couple days ago Dr. Hoban posted an article about strange Hall of Fame voting in which he wondered why Bob Lemon was suddenly regarded as a better pitcher than Allie Reynolds in 1972 after Reynolds received more votes in the first seven years that they appeared on the ballot together.

“In 1972, a funny thing happened on the way to the Hall of Fame,” Hoban wrote. “After both players had been retired for many years, Bob Lemon suddenly and mysteriously became a ‘better pitcher’ than Allie Reynolds. Or, at least one could infer that from what happened in the voting. In 1972, Lemon passed Reynolds in the voting and went on to be elected to the Hall in 1976. And Allie Reynolds was never elected. What happened? How can anyone logically explain this turn-around?”

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Major League Equivalents (MLEs) are a series of calculations designed to take non-major league baseball performance and estimate what that performance’s results would look like statistically in the context of the Major Leagues. Bill James gets credit for being the inventor of MLEs, as he outlined his method for batters in the 1985 Baseball Abstract. James was only interested at the time in making sense of minor league statistics, but MLE’s theoretically can be used to evaluate ANY baseball performance, including minor league, Japanese or other foreign league, Negro League, NCAA league, etc. Not only those, but you can actually use the basic MLE procedure to evaluate the performance of an American League player relative to the National League, or vice versa (NLEs, ALEs?), or perhaps calculate what type of batting statistics Ty Cobb’s 1909 performance would look like in the 2007 AL.

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At times, the manner in which some writers who are members of the BBWAA vote in the Hall of Fame elections seemingly defies rational explanation. Writers receive a ballot containing a list of candidates for the Hall. They are asked to vote for ten players at most. I would assume that if someone is voting for the first time, he (or she) would ask himself: Who do I think is deserving of induction?

It seems to me that a voter could decide that there are not ten players on the ballot deserving of the Hall and, therefore, choose to vote for only a few who he considers worthy. This is perfectly understandable. But my assumption would be that a serious voter will only vote for those players who he feels really deserve to be in the Hall. And if one of his choices does not make it on this ballot, he will continue to vote for that deserving player in future ballots.

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Congratulations to Goose Gossage on his election to the Hall of Fame. He got 86% of the vote and was the only candidate elected. As we have said here before, Gossage has HOF numbers and should have been elected long ago.

Three other players scored better than 60% of the vote and will probably be elected some day. They are Jim Rice, Andre Dawson and Bert Blyleven.

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On August 16, 1920 the Cleveland Indians prepared to take the field against the New York Yankees to start a crucial three-game series at Yankee Stadium that pitted the first-place Indians against the third-place Yankees. Cleveland was a mere four percentage points ahead of the Chicago White Sox in the standings; New York stood within a half game and only 10 percentage points of first place. The Yankees, perennial also-rans over most of the franchises first two decades, had been strengthened greatly by the acquisitions of manager Miller Huggins in 1918, pitcher Carl Mays in 1919 and outfielder Babe Ruth in 1920, and were contending for their first American League pennant. The Indians were basically in the same boat, having finished higher than third place only once in their first 17 years in the league, before consecutive second place finishes in 1918 and 1919 put them among the Junior Circuit’s elite.

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If you’ve hung around this site you’re no doubt familiar with our “Who, You Ask?” series of articles which celebrates the careers of largely forgotten ballplayers who fashioned excellent careers but slipped through the cracks of our collective memory. Every once in a while, however, I run across players who I’m unfamiliar with whose careers intrigued me enough to want to find out more. More often than not these players had brief stays in the majors and don’t warrant full-length articles, so I’ve created a category specifically for them called “Cup of Coffee.”

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New pages have been added to our quotes encyclopedia. They include quotes by and about:

Ban Johnson

Charles Comiskey

Ed Barrow 

Jacob Ruppert and Cap Huston

Jimmy Collins

Boston Red Sox

Major League Baseball

These pages will continue to be updated and new pages will be added soon.

We’re proud to announce the addition of our first database — the Seamheads.com Quotes Encyclopedia.  It can be found by clicking on the “Database” link on the navigation bar located underneath our logo towards the top of the main page.  The Encyclopedia consists of only one page at this time — Harry Frazee — but you can rest assured that it will be updated weekly and will contain many more pages as we head towards Spring Training and the start of the 2008 season.  Enjoy!

Nolan Ryan is a Hall of Fame pitcher – there is no question about that. But exactly how good was he and how does he compare to the other HOF pitchers?

People are usually surprised when I explain that Nolan Ryan’s career more closely resembles that of Don Sutton than those of truly outstanding pitchers like Tom Seaver or Bob Gibson. Because of his no-hitters and the career strikeout record, fans are surprised to hear that Ryan is in the Hall more for his longevity than for his dominance.

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We here at Seamheads.com would like to thank those of you who visited the site in 2007 as well as those who have either bookmarked or linked to us.  We really appreciate you and hope you come back.  In less than three months we’ve attracted more than 20,000 visitors, who’ve accounted for almost 500,000 hits!  We can’t wait to see how many more visitors we attract in 2008 and we have several projects in the works that we think will bring you back to Seamheads.com for more.  A couple of them are major and at least one them can be considered ground-breaking; unfortunately we can’t go into detail about the latter yet because we’re still ironing out the details.  But we can list a couple of projects that will be posted to the site very soon.

• Ballpark Factors Database: Soon we’ll have the most extensive ballpark factors database on the Internet.  Our database will not only list factors for each type of hit, but it will include factor splits as well as stat splits.  For instance, if you want to know how right-handed home run hitters were affected by Turner Field in 2000, as opposed to left-handed sluggers we’ll have factor splits (HR factor for righties was 87; for lefties it was 105) and lefty/righty stat splits to complement the factors.  We have data on every stadium in major league history as well as those used in the National Association, the American Association, the Union Association, the Players League, and the Federal League (although not all will include splits).

• Quote Encyclopedia: We’re in the process of building an encyclopedia of quotes that will not only include the quote but will list the person who spoke or wrote it, the source of the quote (newspaper, book, magazine, periodical, etc.) and the date it appeared in print.  This will be a great tool for researchers who are looking for material for their books, articles, and/or essays.  Here’s a sample page to peruse.

There’s much more to look forward to here at Seamheads.com, but those are two of the many projects we’re working on.  We thank you for taking the time to explore our site and we look forward to adding many exciting new features over the next few months.