A Great Leadoff Hitter Who Never Was

There's an old joke in which a guy comes upon his friend searching for a lost contact lens under a streetlight. He kneels down and helps his friend search, in vain.

"Where'd you lose the contact?" he asks.

"Around the corner," his friend answers.

"Then why are we looking here?"

"The light here is better."

As in the joke, if you look for something in the wrong place, you're going to have trouble finding it. Which leads us to a great leadoff hitter who never was.

When most baseball fans, players and managers consider table setters, visions of roadrunners dance in their heads. This characteristic is largely irrelevant, like seeking physical attractiveness when scouting for great statesmen. The best leadoff hitters share just two salient characteristics: they lay the groundwork for run scoring by getting on base and they don't waste a lot of power batting with empty bases.

The player in question, whose career ended in 2001, would have been a stellar table setter, and yet seven teams squandered his talent over a 16-year career in which he saw 500 plate appearances just twice. An average gloveman at third and first, he was never (at least seriously) considered for the leadoff spot. 

Here's why: he's 6'3" and ran like an oil spill. He swiped 11 bases in 1582 games and got thrown out just as many times. He staffed the same position as Harmon Killebrew and Mo Vaughn and Prince Fielder. This is not the profile his managers were imagining for a batter in the #1 slot.

Here's why he should have been leading off: He hit .288/.390/.377 over his long career. I don't have the data on all his teams, but I'll bet real, Chinese-propped, American legal tender that his teams rarely bit into the sweet fruit of a .390 OBP leading off. Because a significant percentage of his safeties were free passes, which move runners least of all, leading him off would have maximized his value to the team. Nor would there have been much opportunity cost in a move to the top of the order; his 42 career home runs were spread so thinly that he never popped more than six in any one season.

He's Dave Magadan, and it's a shame how little value his teams got from his considerable batting acumen. In the one year in which he played 144 games for the Mets, he set career highs in hits, runs, RBIs, doubles, triples, homers, total bases, batting average, slugging and OPS. There's a chicken and egg component here, or course -- hit .328 and you'll play more -- but it's worth wondering what kind of career he'd have had if even one of his managers had seen beyond the conventions of the day, batted him first, and watched him score 100 times a season.

Magadan's career is long over, but it can stand for posterity as testament to the value of thinking strategically, ignoring conventions and acting rationally in order to maximize team performance. The Magadan Factor would be a nice legacy for a good, but misused, player.