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.

Leading Off: #5 In A Series

Who's a better leadoff hitter, Willy Taveras, who batted .251 without power last year and stole 68 bases in 75 attempts, or Jason Giambi, who hit .247 with 32 homers and two steals and runs slower than a stocking?

Well, if you're looking for speed on the basepaths, Taveras is the easy choice. But if you are, the question is, why?

The purpose of a leadoff hitter is to get someone on base in front of the big hitters in the lineup. In that regard, Taveras reached base safely 161 times in 530 trips to the plate last year. The technical term for this is "blecch." To his credit, he turned many of his one-base safeties (singles, walks and HBP) into two-bases, but that hardly atones for a .308 on-base percentage.

Even after his 32 home runs, Giambi got himself on base 36 more times than Taveras in '08 and consumed fewer outs, giving the batters behind him more opportunities to create runs. Certainly he might clog the bases on occasion, and leading him off would reduce the number of multi-run homers he hits, but it's hard to see how that would offset 36 extra scoring opportunities.

Maybe because he could be better utilized in the middle of the lineup, Giambi isn't the better pick here, but if he's not, it's by a lot smaller margin than you thought when you heard the choices, right? And if not Giambi, then how about Conor Jackson of Arizona, who stole 10 bases, but reached base safely 48 more times than Taveras, consumed fewer outs and hit just 12 home runs? Or Yunel Escobar, a 10-homer guy who got caught in five of his seven steal attempts, but reached safely 41 more times and made fewer outs? Or two or three guys on Taveras' own team, the Rockies, like Ryan Spilborghs, whose .407 on base average came with six dingers in half a year's at-bats?

The point is, we have this imprint in our minds about what a leadoff hitter should look like -- speed without power. But the most important attribute of a leadoff hitter is his ability to get on base, which makes guys like Willy Taveras really poor choices. An outfielder with a .604 OPS should bat eighth -- if anywhere. Taveras, because of his stellar base stealing and defense, may merit a spot in the lineup, but not at the head of it.

The speed myth has been passed down into baseball legend, and it takes some hard thinking to recognize that although we've always done it that way, we can now see empirically that it's wrong.