The Pecan Park Eagle

Jeff Bagwell, First Base
Houston Astros 1991-2005
Hall of Fame, 2017
~ and the kid stayed long enough and played well enough to have been the greatest run producer of his entire career era.

After of a fun season of Todd Kalas and Geoff Blum bringing us these little extra sidebars of relevant history in statistical terms on their AT&T Sports Net telecasts, we decided to capture a couple of good examples to share with those of you who may not be watching – or paying attention. We think the new network and the broadcasting team that includes Julia Morales and variable others is doing an excellent job of presenting the game in a much more enjoyable way this season.

It’s taken science and art about a half century to get televised baseball down to the fine status its achieved, but man! Only those of you who are old enough remember what it was like to try and watch Houston Buffs 1949-50 baseball on a 10″ fuzzy resolution black and white screen, with pictures emanating from one camera behind the batter, will remember the horror of that experience. But that’s a much longer story. One we’ve already described years ago.

These two tables were tailored for quick and easy electronic viewer consumption. The first one simply dramatizes the importance of Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio to big league run production from 1991 to 2005, the period of Bagwell’s total MLB career.

NOTES on the Run Production Totals: They are derived by adding together a player’s Runs Scored and Total RBIs over a specific period of time. By year or total career are common, but they may also be used in many of other ways. Comparing how a player performed at various club stops in his career, for example.

The Bagwell figure used below is also an excellent teaching example since his 1991-2005 career total is being used to chart how Jeff did in comparison to all others who played during the years that corresponded to the same period of measurement. A productive player could be included if he played less than 15 years, as long as all those included years also fell between the 1991-2005 Bagwell career range.

Note to remember going into a really simple calculation: Every time a player hits a home run, that feat is recorded as such, but it is also recorded in several other separate batting stat columns. The only ones that concern us here are the “Runs Scored” and the “Runs Batted In” columns.

Doing the Math: Here’s how the calculators determined Jeff Bagwell’s “Run Production” total for 1991-2005 in the first chart below:

(1) They went to  a record book source like Baseball Reference.com and pulled up the page for Jeff Bagwell. (Use the next link to see it for yourself):

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/bagweje01.shtml

(2) They found that Bagwell had scored a total of 1,517 runs under the Standard Batting column marked “R” for that whole 1991-2005 period of his total career; and they also found that Jeff had been credited with 1,529 runs batted in under the column marked “RBI”. Then they added those two figures together and derived a sub-total of 3,046.

1,517 + 1,529 = 3,046.

(3) 3,046 could not be Jeff Bagwell’s final Run Production number for the reason we explained earlier. As with all players, Bagwell’s 449 career home runs already had been added to both the “R” and “RBI” columns all along the way. So, simple as this sounds, what happens next is the follow step. To eliminate the duplication, subtract the number of home runs hit during the period of study (in this case, over the entire Bagwell career), and the derived new figure stands as Jeff Bagwell’s Run Production number for 1991-2005:

3,046 – 449 = 2,597.

(4) Jeff Bagwell’s Run Production Value Number is 2,597 for the 1991-2005 period and it is 62 points higher than Barry Bonds’ registration number of 2,535 for the same period.

(5) And all of that tabular information is available to us this morning because Todd and Geoff’s AT&T Sports Net team flashed both these items shown here on the screen for about 20 seconds each last night during the Saturday Night winnable game loss that the Astros absorbed from those Canadian peckers that fluttered through Minute Maid Park like the Blue Jays of Unhappiness.

(6) Nevertheless, enjoy the tables. And thanks again, AT&T Sports Net!

Major League Baseball

Table One: Run Production Leaders

1991 – 2005

Table Two: Switch Hitters Only

All Time Extra Base Hit Totals

With a strong 2017 finish and another season of regular everyday play, it looks like Carlos Beltran has a shot at capturing first place on the leader board for most extra base hits by a switch hitter, if that sort of thing is even important to him at this point in his life, but he certainly doesn’t need to do anything greater here to prove what he’s already shown about his hitting ability.

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