Enos Slaughter

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Enos Slaughter

Hall-of-Famers as Seen Through Player Won-Lost Records: Enos Slaughter

Enos Slaughter was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans' Committee in 1985.

Five highlights of Enos Slaughter's career:

Enos Slaughter was named to ten All-Star teams. He received MVP votes eight times with five top-10 finishes including three top-3 finishes.

On offense, Slaughter had a career batting line of .300/.382/.453 and led his league in triples twice and in doubles, hits, and RBI once each. Defensively, Slaughter led his league in putouts, assists, and double plays by a right fielder twice each and in fielding percentage by a right fielder three times.

Slaughter played in five World Series. In 27 World Series games, Slaughter batted .291/.406/.468 with 3 home runs, 8 RBI, and 17 runs scored. His team won four of the five World Series.

Enos Slaughter is one of two players (Moose Skowron is the other) to hit a World Series home run both for and against the New York Yankees. Slaughter hit a home run against the Yankees in Game 5 of the 1942 World Series and he hit one for the Yankees in Game 3 of the 1956 World Series.

At age 42, Slaughter was the oldest player in the American League in 1958. In 1959, Slaughter was the oldest player to play in the American League and was also the oldest player to play in the National League as he finished his career with 11 games with the Milwaukee Braves.

The first two tables below present Enos Slaughter's career as measured by Player won-lost records, in and out of context.

Season	Team	Age	Games	pWins	pLosses	pWORL	pWOPA

Basic Player Won-Lost Records
						Value Decomposition
1938	SLN	22	112	13.6	14.2	0.1	-1.3
1939	SLN	23	149	22.8	17.9	5.7	3.5
1940	SLN	24	140	19.8	14.7	5.9	4.1
1941	SLN	25	112	16.1	11.6	5.0	3.6
1942	SLN	26	152	26.5	17.1	10.2	7.9
1943	-	27	-	-	-	-	-
1944	-	28	-	-	-	-	-
1945	-	29	-	-	-	-	-
1946	SLN	30	156	25.9	18.4	8.3	6.0
1947	SLN	31	147	21.0	18.6	2.8	0.9
1948	SLN	32	146	24.0	18.7	6.0	3.8
1949	SLN	33	151	24.1	19.2	5.4	3.1
1950	SLN	34	148	19.2	18.8	1.3	-0.7
1951	SLN	35	123	14.8	13.6	2.0	0.5
1952	SLN	36	140	21.9	16.7	6.2	4.2
1953	SLN	37	143	18.6	15.9	3.6	1.7
1954	NYA	38	69	4.1	3.5	1.0	0.6
+– 1955		39	118	8.9	7.3	2.2	1.3
	KC1		108	8.9	7.1	2.3	1.4
	NYA		10	0.0	0.2	-0.1	-0.1
+– 1956		40	115	10.0	10.2	0.3	-0.8
	KC1		91	7.6	7.5	0.5	-0.3
	NYA		24	2.4	2.7	-0.2	-0.5
1957	NYA	41	96	8.2	6.6	2.0	1.2
1958	NYA	42	77	4.5	4.6	0.3	-0.2
+– 1959		43	85	3.5	4.5	-0.6	-1.1
	MLN		11	0.5	0.5	0.0	-0.0
	NYA		74	3.0	4.1	-0.7	-1.1
			------	------	------	------	------
CAREER (reg. season)			2,379	307.4	252.1	67.8	38.4
			------	------	------	------	------
PostSeason (career)			27	4.2	3.0	1.4	1.0
			------	------	------	------	------
COMBINED			2,406	311.6	255.1	69.2	39.4

Season	Team	Age	Games	eWins	eLosses	eWORL	eWOPA

Expected Player Won-Lost Records
						Value Decomposition
1938	SLN	22	112	13.8	14.0	0.5	-0.9
1939	SLN	23	149	22.8	17.9	5.5	3.4
1940	SLN	24	140	18.8	15.7	3.7	1.9
1941	SLN	25	112	15.1	12.6	3.0	1.5
1942	SLN	26	152	25.1	18.5	7.5	5.2
1943	-	27	-	-	-	-	-
1944	-	28	-	-	-	-	-
1945	-	29	-	-	-	-	-
1946	SLN	30	156	24.9	19.4	6.3	4.0
1947	SLN	31	147	20.1	19.5	1.1	-0.9
1948	SLN	32	146	23.4	19.2	4.9	2.7
1949	SLN	33	151	22.8	20.4	3.0	0.7
1950	SLN	34	148	19.0	19.0	1.0	-1.0
1951	SLN	35	123	14.9	13.5	2.3	0.8
1952	SLN	36	140	21.0	17.6	4.4	2.4
1953	SLN	37	143	17.6	16.9	1.8	-0.1
1954	NYA	38	69	3.9	3.7	0.7	0.3
+– 1955		39	118	8.9	7.2	2.3	1.4
	KC1		108	8.9	7.1	2.4	1.5
	NYA		10	0.0	0.1	-0.1	-0.1
+– 1956		40	115	10.4	9.7	1.3	0.2
	KC1		91	7.9	7.2	1.2	0.4
	NYA		24	2.5	2.6	0.1	-0.2
1957	NYA	41	96	7.7	7.0	1.0	0.2
1958	NYA	42	77	4.8	4.2	0.9	0.4
+– 1959		43	85	3.8	4.2	-0.0	-0.5
	MLN		11	0.4	0.6	-0.2	-0.2
	NYA		74	3.4	3.6	0.1	-0.3
			------	------	------	------	------
CAREER (reg. season)			2,379	299.1	260.4	51.1	21.7
			------	------	------	------	------
PostSeason (career)			27	4.1	3.1	1.3	0.9
			------	------	------	------	------
COMBINED			2,406	303.3	263.5	52.3	22.6

It is somewhat difficult to get a good feel for exactly how good a player Enos Slaughter was. Slaughter suffers from a couple of minor issues, one general to the time period in which he played and one more specific to Slaughter. First, Slaughter was 31 years old when MLB first integrated, so his prime years were in either completely segregated or at least mostly segregated leagues.

Second, when Enos Slaughter first came to the Cardinals he was teammates with fellow Hall-of-Famers Joe Medwick and Johnny Mize. And then, just as Medwick and Mize moved on, up came Stan Musial. As a result, Enos Slaughter falls into an extremely rare category: a deserving Hall-of-Famer who was probably never the best player on his own team.

Finally, and most significantly, like most players of his generation, Enos Slaughter missed three full major-league seasons - his age 27, 28, and 29 seasons - while he served in the U.S. Air Force.

The next table tries to get a better handle on exactly how good Enos Slaughter was controlling for at least the last of these issues by calculating the 10 most similar players to Enos Slaughter in career value, excluding ages 27 - 29, as measured by Player won-lost records. Seasons have been normalized to 162 games and missing games are extrapolated for players for whom Retrosheet is missing some data.

Player	Games	pWins	pLosses	pWOPA	pWORL	Bat	Run	Field
		Most Similar Players to Enos Slaughter in Value Excluding Ages 27 - 29 (Seasons normalized to 162 games, missing player games extrapolated)
						Wins over Baseline
Enos Slaughter	2,379	320.6	263.0	40.0	70.7	31.0	0.5	9.4
Dave Winfield	2,545	337.8	290.2	32.1	63.6	33.1	1.7	8.6
Dwight Evans	2,195	277.9	229.4	37.9	63.0	34.0	1.8	9.5
Paul Waner	2,100	309.7	257.0	33.3	62.8	29.7	2.6	11.2
Adrian Beltre	2,485	303.7	265.8	33.6	61.8	22.2	0.3	13.3
Goose Goslin	1,859	386.9	330.4	35.1	71.8	34.6	0.1	17.2
Carl Yastrzemski	2,828	359.9	312.7	26.3	60.6	37.0	-1.5	10.0
Billy Williams	1,997	266.1	221.5	26.5	51.4	34.1	0.7	7.9
Tris Speaker	1,431	293.8	234.0	47.1	74.4	30.8	1.2	11.5
Joe Cronin	1,772	256.1	216.5	45.9	70.5	25.1	0.3	9.6
Al Simmons	1,806	291.0	251.2	25.1	53.0	20.0	0.9	12.8

It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what Enos Slaughter might have done in 1943, 1944, and 1945, were it not for World War II.

But setting those seasons aside, eight of the ten most similar players to Enos Slaughter are in the Hall of Fame, a ninth is in the Hall of Merit, and the tenth is likely to be a first-ballot inductee into both Halls when he becomes eligible in 2024.

That would seem to be a strong endorsement of Enos Slaughter's Hall-of-Fame credentials.

Article last updated: November 8, 2020

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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