Baseball's Most Underrated Players Ever

Bill James on Wednesday pointed to an interesting list that sabermetrics pioneer Cyril Morong put together a few years ago — it’s of the most underrated players in baseball history.

Morong based his list on a formula that examines the relationship between career WAR and MVP shares. The idea as I understand it — and I think it’s a fascinating way to look at the question — is that the most underrated players are the players who received significantly less MVP support than you would expect.

First, here’s Cyril’s 10 most underrated players:

1. Lou Whitaker. At 75.1 career WAR, Cyril estimates Whitaker’s MVP Share expectation at 2.14 — I take that to mean he would have won at least one MVP and finished close a couple of other times. Instead his MVP Shares is 0.21 — he had one eighth-place MVP finish in his entire career. That’s a minus-1.93 difference.

2. Willie Mays. Minus-1.89 difference.

3. Wade Boggs. Minus-1.81 difference.

4. Rickey Henderson. Minus-1.78 difference.

5. Eddie Mathews. Minus-1.70 difference

6. Willie Randolph. Minus-1.67 difference.

7. Ozzie Smith. Minus-1.57-difference.

8. Buddy Bell. Minus-1.54 difference.

9. Bobby Grich. Minus-1.52 difference.

10. Willie Davis. Minus-1.40 difference.

I have lots of thoughts here, but before getting into those, I should mention that Cyril did this list in 2014, and using the same method, the most OVERRATED players in baseball history were, in order: Albert Pujols; Joe DiMaggio; Miguel Cabrera; Frank Thomas; Yogi Berra; Dave Parker; Hank Greenberg; Ryan Howard; Jim Rice; Juan Gonzalez.

Morong in the article talks about some of the issues of his formula, and it’s good stuff if you want to dive in there.

But let’s start with this: I think Cyril’s formula does EXACTLY what it was intended to do. I think it’s kind of brilliant, and I am not in any way criticizing it. Quite the opposite: I am trying to use it to come up with my own thoughts about what overrated and underrated mean. With that, let’s go.

I don’t know that any of us think Willie Mays is somehow underrated; I mean, I know that some guy recently ranked him as the greatest baseball player of all time. But as an MVP candidate, absolutely he was wildly underrated. He won two MVP awards — in 1954 and 1965 — but he ranked first among position players in WAR TEN TIMES, often by quite a lot.

Take 1964, just a representative example. Ken Boyer won the MVP that year. Boyer led the league in RBIs, and his Cardinals pulled off that miraculous comeback when the Phillies collapsed. And look, Boyer had a very good year. But, I mean, Mays was SO much better than Boyer. He slugged 118 points higher. He hit twice as many home runs. He scored 21 more runs. He was the best baserunner in baseball. And while Boyer was a wonderful defensive third baseman, I mean, Willie Mays was Willie Mays in centerfield. This wasn’t even close. Mays had 11 WAR. Boyer had 6.1.

There are LOTS of Willie Mays seasons like that. So, yes, by MVP Shares he definitely was underrated.

But — and here’s where we start to form our own list — I don’t think Mays was actually underrated, even by MVP voters. I think everybody just accepted in those days that the MVP award was not for the best player but for the player who best fit the steadfast MVP narrative. Mays had no chance to win the award in 1964 because his Giants dropped out of the pennant race in August. It’s not like anybody FORGOT or OVERLOOKED the fact that Willie Mays was great. It’s more that everybody agreed that the MVP should go to the player who had the biggest impact on the season, and the Cardinals won that pennant race, and Boyer was the best Cardinal.

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What about Lou Whitaker? He perfectly fits my idea of underrated players … but was he really underrated by MVP voters? Yes … but not in the way you might think. I don’t think Whitaker ever deserved to actually win an MVP award. The closest was probably 1983, when he hit .320/.380/.457, stole a few bases, knocked 40 doubles, played fine defense. But was he up there with Ripken, Boggs, Yount and Henderson that season? No, not quite.

Here’s the way he was underrated by MVP voters: Whitaker should have appeared on a LOT more MVP ballots through the years. I mean, the only year he got votes was ’83. That’s it. He should have gotten votes pretty much every year. In 1984, for example, he posted a very solid season, won a Gold Glove, the Tigers ran away with the division — he definitely should have gotten SOME MVP support. Willie Upshaw, Steve Balboni and Andre Thornton did, and Whitaker had a better year than any of them.

See, Whitaker was a very, very good player — a Hall of Fame-caliber player, I believe — and yet he was not really viewed that way. That’s underrated. Mays … Boggs … Rickey … Ozzie … they were surely robbed of MVP awards, particularly Boggs, who never even received a first-place MVP vote. But they were all acknowledged as superstars in their time. They were perennial All-Stars. They were on the cover of magazines. They would all be first-ballot Hall of Famers.

So with all of that in mind, here’s my list of the most underrated players ever:

No. 1. Willie Davis

Willie Davis was always viewed as a disappointment. That was his curse. He was a breathtaking defensive centerfielder, one of the best in baseball history, and he had almost 2,600 hits, despite playing in the worst hitting environment imaginable*, he stole 400 bases, and he was a key player on three pennant-winning Dodgers teams, two of which won the World Series.

*Not only did Willie Davis play his entire career in a time when pitching dominated, he played most of his home games in the hitters’ dungeon that was Dodger Stadium. Over his careers, his OPS was 70 points higher on the road.

And do you know how many Hall of Fame votes he got? Zero.

That was simply a continuation of the theme; Davis was so brilliantly talented (in high school he ran 100 yards in 9.5 seconds and set a national record in the broad jump) that the expectations for him were that he would win batting titles, maybe even hit .400, get 3,000 hits, be another Willie Mays and so on. When he didn’t do those things, he was written off by so many as a failure. He made only two All-Star teams, both late in his career, and he never finished even top 15 in the MVP balloting.

To me, the most underrated player in baseball history has to be someone that hardly anyone ever talks about. Some of the players who come up later on the list have become somewhat famous for being underrated, which oddly and ironically affects their underratedness.

No. 2. Darrell Evans

I remember when Darrell Evans hit his 400th home run, there was a small panic in the baseball community. Up to that point, every eligible player who had hit 400 home runs was in the Hall of Fame. But, obviously, you couldn’t put Darrell Evans in the Hall of Fame. What to do?

OK, maybe “panic” is an overstatement, because by the time Evans hit his 400th homer, Dave Kingman had already passed 400 himself, and everybody knew Kingman was not a Hall of Famer, so basically the whole “400 homers = Hall of Famer” idea had already collapsed.

Still, I do remember thinking this odd and illogical thought: Why isn’t Darrell Evans a Hall of Famer other than the fact that nobody thinks he’s a Hall of Famer?

Doesn’t that get to the heart of being underrated?

Bill James has called Evans the most underrated player ever, and, in fact, used him to develop his wonderful 10 characteristics of underratedness. I’ll mention three of them:

— Specialists are overrated. Generalists are underrated. Players with, say, super-high batting averages and nothing else were famous. Evans, who did many things well, was not.

— Batting average is overrated. Secondary average is underrated. Evans hit .248 for his career. But he still ranks 12th on the all-time list in walks. He also hit those 400 homers.

— A player who has his career broken up by a trade, a position change or some dramatic event can be underrated. Evans’ career was almost equally split among three different teams, which I believe blurs our memory of him. What uniform do you even see him in?

No. 3: Lou Whitaker

I think Whitaker WAS the most underrated player in baseball history until recently, when his high WAR highlighted what a good player he was and people started talking about him seriously as a Hall of Fame candidate.

Whitaker could do it all, but rarely got much credit for it. (Focus on Sport via Getty Images)

No. 4: Bobby Abreu

I used to call Abreu the MBGPIBH. I don’t know exactly how to pronounce that, but it stands for Most Boring Good Player in Baseball History. Looking back, it’s hard to fully explain what made him so boring. I mean, the guy hit doubles, he hit homers, he stole bases, he was a .300 hitter, he was fantastic defensively when he was young. None of that stuff is boring.

But, hey, I don’t know what to tell you: He just had the gift of making those fundamentally interesting feats boring. For one thing, Abreu turned every at-bat into the Bataan death march, fouling off pitch after pitch until the pitcher walked him out of sheer frustration. He drew 100-plus walks every year from 1999 to 2006, and each one felt like taking blood.

I obviously wasn’t the only one to feel that way. Even though he put up MVP-type seasons all the time, he got almost no MVP support. He made only two All-Star teams. Quantitatively, Abreu’s Hall of Fame case compares quite well to, say, Vladimir Guerrero’s, but Vlady was the opposite of Abreu in the excitement department, everything he did was somehow thrilling. And so far, Abreu’s been a Hall of Fame ballot dud, barely getting enough votes to stay on the ballot in each of his first three years. There is a sense that he’s getting a bit more support this year, though.

No. 5: Buddy Bell

Buddy is so underrated that even HE doesn’t appreciate how good a player he was. The problem is — well, there are two problems. One, he played for bad teams. He played 18 years and never once made the playoffs.

Two, he was a third baseman. It’s the position of the underrated — Evans, Graig Nettles, Sal Bando, etc. Bell was a fantastic third baseman — he won the Gold Glove six years in a row and deserved it every year — but people just don’t look at fantastic third basemen the way they do at fantastic shortstops or fantastic second basemen. Buddy hit 200 home runs in his career. Do you know how many Hall of Fame shortstops hit 200 home runs in their careers? Two: Cal Ripken Jr. and Derek Jeter (Ernie Banks actually played more games at first base).

When you look at those players who were as good defensively at short as Buddy was at third — Ozzie, Aparicio, Pee Wee, Rizzuto, guys like that — none of them were as good as hitter as he was.

No. 6: Bobby Grich

Like Whitaker, Grich has become a little bit less underrated because he always makes lists like this. But, I mean: He was a Gold Glove second baseman who walked a lot, hit for power; there just aren’t many players like that in baseball history. There’s a whole lot of talk about Jeff Kent making the Hall of Fame because he is the all-time home run leader among second basemen.

Well, all in all, I think Grich was a better hitter than Kent (higher OPS+ as my opening bid) and was a better baserunner and a much better fielder.

No. 7: Kenny Lofton

Lofton scores high on the Cyril Morong MVP scale — his expected MVP shares is 2.04 but his actual win shares is just 0.58 — he finished fourth in the 1994 MVP balloting and received votes in three other years.

That 1994 season is interesting — it was the strike year, so nobody really cared, but Frank Thomas ran away with the award as everybody thought he should. Thomas had an absurd .487 on-base percentage that year and a .729 slugging. He scored 106 runs in 113 games. He was incredible.

By combined WAR, Lofton was actually better.

How? Well, Lofton hit .349/.412/.536, he scored 105 runs, he stole 60 bases and he was a game-changer in centerfield. What edge Thomas had in power and walks, Lofton made up in defense and baserunning.

Of course, nobody saw it that way then, and perhaps people won’t see it that way now, either. But that’s the point. Thomas hit. Lofton did everything. Thomas was a specialist. Lofton was a generalist. Thomas hit 500 home runs. Lofton won four Gold Gloves and stole 600 bases. Thomas was a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Lofton fell off the ballot after one year.

I’m not saying, by the way, that Lofton was better than Thomas — I don’t believe that. Thomas is in The Baseball 100. Lofton is not. But I’m saying that the gap between them was not very large. But the perception between them is the Grand Canyon.

Lofton spent the last few years of his career jumping from team to team — he ended up playing for TEN different teams after leaving Cleveland — and that surely hurt how people saw him.

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No. 8: Dwight Evans

Dewey was not terribly underrated in his time; he finished high in some MVP balloting, won a bunch of Gold Gloves, made three All-Star teams and so on. He became significantly more underrated after he retired.

For some reason, Red Sox people backed his teammate Jim Rice as the Hall of Fame candidate even though I think it’s pretty clear that Evans was the better overall player. Rice had the MVP award and the persona as the most feared hitter, but Evans got on base more, hit with similar power and was a fantastic outfielder. I do think he’ll get into the Hall of Fame someday.

No. 9: Eddie Mathews

Here is our one Hall of Famer on the list, and it’s because, throughout his life, people simply would not acknowledge Eddie Mathews’ greatness. I think in his specific case a lot of it came down to personality; a lot of the writers didn’t like him.

Still, in 1969, when he was decidedly the best third baseman in the game’s history, Pie Traynor was given the title instead. Pie bleeping Traynor. I mean that wasn’t even close.

And then when he came up for the Hall of Fame, he received just 32.3% of the vote the first year. This guy has 96.1 WAR! It took him five years to get elected to the Hall! He never won an MVP award.

No. 10: Keith Hernandez

It’s unclear to me how someone as famous as Keith Hernandez — and an MVP award winner to boot — could have had his greatness so overlooked. He was a fantastic hitter. He is widely regarded as the greatest defensive first baseman ever. He was a key player and figure on two World Series winners. The guy was on “Seinfeld” as himself.

And yet — the guy’s name just never comes up for the Hall of Fame. He never got more than 11% of the Hall of Fame vote. He hasn’t made a Hall of Fame veterans ballot. I put him on this list not so much because I think he’s MORE underrated than any number of other players, but because I cannot for the life of me figure out WHY he is underrated at all.