Marty Marion

Baseball Player Won-Loss Records
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Marty Marion

2016 Veterans' Committee HOF Ballot: Marty Marion

The Baseball Hall of Fame recently announced their 2016 Veterans' ballot for the Pre-Integration Era. The ballot includes 10 names, including "three executives and one of the game's earliest organizers". Player won-lost records don't really have anything to say about non-players. Player won-lost records also don't really have anything to say about players who played before 1921 (and relatively little to say about players who played before 1916). So, I don't really have anything to say about the non-players on the ballot or about 19th-century major-league players Bill Dahlen and Harry Stovey.

But I have calculated Player won-lost records for at least part of the careers of four of the candidates on the Pre-Integration ballot. This article looks at one of these players: former major-league shortstop Marty Marion. The first table below presents Marty Marion's career as measured by Player won-lost records. The records here have been extrapolated based on the games for which I have play-by-play data to estimate results for those games for which I do not have play-by-play data. The number of games actually played by Marty Marion are identified as "Total"; the number of games for which Player won-lost records are calculated are identified as "Known".

Season	Team	Age	Total	Known	pWins	pLosses	pWin Pct.	pWOPA	pWORL	eWins	eLosses	eWin Pct.	eWOPA	eWORL
Marty Marion Basic Player Won-Lost Records
												Value Decomposition
			Games
1940	SLN	22	125	125	14.4	14.7	0.494	0.2	1.3	14.0	15.2	0.480	-0.3	0.9
1941	SLN	23	155	155	19.9	16.5	0.546	1.9	3.4	17.7	18.7	0.486	-0.3	1.2
1942	SLN	24	147	147	19.2	15.6	0.552	2.1	3.4	18.4	16.4	0.529	1.3	2.6
1943	SLN	25	129	129	16.1	13.6	0.543	1.4	2.5	15.3	14.4	0.515	0.5	1.7
1944	SLN	26	144	144	19.5	15.5	0.557	2.6	4.0	18.0	17.0	0.515	1.1	2.6
1945	SLN	27	123	123	16.0	13.6	0.540	1.5	2.6	15.1	14.6	0.509	0.6	1.7
1946	SLN	28	146	146	18.2	16.5	0.525	1.0	2.4	17.2	17.4	0.497	0.1	1.5
1947	SLN	29	149	149	18.7	18.3	0.505	0.1	1.6	18.1	18.9	0.489	-0.5	1.0
1948	SLN	30	144	144	17.1	18.7	0.477	-0.6	0.8	16.7	19.1	0.468	-1.0	0.5
1949	SLN	31	134	134	18.2	16.8	0.520	0.9	2.3	17.0	18.0	0.485	-0.3	1.1
1950	SLN	32	106	106	12.5	12.4	0.502	0.3	1.2	11.9	13.1	0.476	-0.4	0.6
1952	SLA	34	67	67	6.3	5.8	0.521	0.3	0.8	6.0	6.2	0.491	-0.1	0.4
1953	SLA	35	3	3	0.0	0.2	0.095	-0.1	-0.1	0.0	0.2	0.074	-0.1	-0.1
------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------	------
CAREER (reg. season)			1,572	1,572	196.2	178.4	0.524	11.5	26.5	185.4	189.2	0.495	0.7	15.6
			------	------	------				------	------
PostSeason (career)			23	23	2.6	2.6	0.501		0.3	2.6	2.6	0.500		0.2
			------	------	------	------		------	------	------	------		------
COMBINED			1,595	1,595	198.8	181.0	0.524		26.7	188.0	191.8	0.495		15.9

Overall, I am missing 0 games from Marty Marion's career.

Marty Marion was, by all accounts, a brilliant defensive shortstop who played for four National League pennant winners and three World Champions: the 1942, 1944, and 1946 St. Louis Cardinals.

Player won-lost records generally agree that Marty Marion was a very good fielder. The next table shows the top 25 players in net fielding wins at shortstop for whom I have calculated Player won-lost records. As in the above table, missing player games are extrapolated based on the games for which I do have play-by-play data.

		Top 25 Fielding Shortstops (missing player games extrapolated)
		eWins	eLosses	eWinPct	Net Wins
1	Ozzie Smith	118.6	103.7	0.533	14.9
2	Pee Wee Reese	88.6	76.9	0.535	11.7
3	Lou Boudreau	71.6	60.6	0.542	11.0
4	Mark Belanger	76.6	66.5	0.535	10.1
5	Cal Ripken	92.8	84.8	0.523	8.0
6	Tim Foli	67.4	60.7	0.526	6.6
7	Alan Trammell	82.5	76.1	0.520	6.4
8	Eddie R. Miller	71.9	66.2	0.521	5.7
9	Jack Wilson	52.7	47.0	0.529	5.7
10	Dave Concepcion	90.5	84.8	0.516	5.7
11	Roy McMillan	86.6	81.1	0.517	5.5
12	Andrelton Simmons	35.3	29.8	0.542	5.5
13	Rey Sanchez	37.6	32.1	0.539	5.5
14	Phil Rizzuto	69.1	63.7	0.521	5.5
15	Bud Harrelson	55.1	49.7	0.526	5.4
16	Omar Vizquel	102.8	97.4	0.513	5.3
17	Garry Templeton	84.9	79.7	0.516	5.2
18	Marty Marion	72.7	67.6	0.518	5.1
19	Rabbit Maranville	63.4	58.5	0.520	4.9
20	Ron Hansen	52.0	47.3	0.524	4.7
21	J.J. Hardy	58.6	54.0	0.521	4.6
22	Travis Jackson	75.5	70.9	0.516	4.6
23	Ozzie Guillen	72.3	67.8	0.516	4.5
24	Dal Maxvill	46.3	41.8	0.526	4.5
25	Luis Aparicio	111.7	107.2	0.510	4.5

Fielding Player won-lost records tend to become somewhat less accurate the farther back in time one goes. For example, for many games during Marion's career, the exact nature of many fielding outs are not specified - i.e., we know that a batter made an out, but we don't know if he grounded out to the shortstop (e.g., Marion) or flew out to the left fielder (e.g., Stan Musial). Because of this, Player fielding winning percentages have a tendency to be be closer to 0.500 the farther back in time one goes.

Probably because of this, there are only three players in the above table who were contemporaries of Marion (plus Marion himself, of course): Pee Wee Reese, Lou Boudreau, and Eddie Miller. It may also be worth noting that, coincidentally or not, Reese, Boudreau, and Miller played for the three teams for which Retrosheet has the most complete and generally most detailed play-by-play data over this time period, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cleveland Indians, and Cincinnati Reds, respectively.

It is hard to precisely quantify just how good a defensive player was 70 years ago (heck, it can be hard to precisely quantify just how good a defensive player was three years ago). But the evidence would certainly seem to suggest that Marty Marion was one of the best fielding shortstops of his era.

All articles are written so that they pull data directly from the most recent version of the Player won-lost database. Hence, any numbers cited within these articles should automatically incorporate the most recent update to Player won-lost records. In some cases, however, the accompanying text may have been written based on previous versions of Player won-lost records. I apologize if this results in non-sensical text in any cases.

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