Brilliant Reader Challenge: Size Matters

Before this week’s Brilliant Reader Challenge (I think it’s a fun one), I do have some very quick WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL updates.

• I should have full details in tomorrow’s Friday Rewind but many of you know that the Sept. 12 L.A. event at Chevalier’s Books with Molly Knight (And Mike Schur! And Nick Offerman!) sold out very, very quickly. Well, it now looks like Chevalier’s is going to move the event to a theater so we can open it up to more readers! So exciting.

• I wrote something about Shohei Ohtani (and why we love baseball) for The Washington Post.

We are coming to the end of Barnes & Noble’s TWENTY-FIVE-PERCENT-OFF preorder deal. I believe it will end on Friday. To get the deal (which even works for the signed edition), simply type in the code CATCH25 at checkout.

This week, I’m combining multiple challenges — hat tips to Brilliant Readers Tom, Travis and John — and matching up two baseball teams. The first team consists of players who are all 5-foot-9 or shorter. The second team has players who are all 6-foot-5 or taller. Let’s go!

The 5-foot-9 and Shorter Team

Catcher: Yogi Berra (5-foot-7) or Roy Campanella (5-foot-9).

Catcher is a position where being short — “squat” is usually the way that the sportswriters say it — has often been considered an advantage. Pudge Rodriguez was also 5-foot-9.

I’ve been thinking about something: I want to show you Yogi vs. Campy from 1948 through ’55, which was when they were each winning MVP awards like crazy.

Campy: .286/.368/.522, 163 2Bs, 209 HRs, 557 runs, 721 RBIs, 131 OPS+, 3 MVPs.

Yogi: .294/.356/.495, 181 2Bs, 195 HRs, 686 runs, 840 RBIs, 130 OPS+, 3 MVPs

By Total Zone Rating, Campy was the better defensive catcher — you couldn’t run on him, for one thing, He threw out 60% of attempted base stealers over those eight seasons, ranking among the leaders every year. Yogi was no slouch throwing out baserunners himself; he threw out about 50% over those years and led the league three times in caught-stealing percentage. But Campy was all-world.

Of course, Campy’s career and Yogi’s career had very different shapes. Yogi was at D-Day, joined the Yankees at 21, won lots of World Series, and continued on as a terrific player for another five years after this peak. Campy started in the Negro leagues when he was 15 and was already a terrific player before World War II. He joined the Dodgers at 26, played for the great and star-crossed Boys of Summer, declined rapidly after 1955, and his career ended suddenly and tragically at 35 when he was paralyzed in a car accident. Yogi and Campy are obviously all-timers, and their careers are hard and perhaps impossible to compare in total. But I’m thinking about them at their best … and at their best, I don’t know. It’s too close to call. But maybe I’d go with Campy.

First base: Joe Judge (5-foot-8)

Here’s something fun — here are the WAR leaders for first basemen 5-foot-9 or shorter over the last 50 years:

See that blank space? Yeah, that’s right, there has not been a player in the last 50 years who is that short and has played half his games as a first baseman.

Joe Judge played almost his entire career for the Washington Senators, and he would have hit .300 for his career had he retired after his age-37 season. He didn’t retire, alas, and his career average dropped to .298. In 1928, he had what was a typical Joe Judge season — he hit .306/.396/.417 — but finished third in the MVP balloting for some reason, something he had never done before or after. It’s unclear to me why this sudden Joe Judge love flourished; it’s not like the Senators had a great season (they were 75-79-1). I guess a bunch of people, all at the same time, thought: Hey, that Joe Judge is a good player!”*

*It might be that in 1928, Babe Ruth (or his ghostwriter) wrote this about Judge: “Goose Goslin will outhit Joe in the averages by 20 to 50 points. But with runners on base and a hit needed to win the ball game, most pitchers would rather pitch to Goose a dozen times over.” In other words: Joe Judge was clutch!

Second base: