Book Excerpt: 'New York Loves Them, Cooperstown Snubs Them: Great Mets and Yankees Who Belong in the Hall of Fame' by Tom Van Riper
Chapter 2: Graig Nettles
Continuing with a series I did last spring at Sports Illustrated — here, here, here, here and here — we begin our coverage of recently-published baseball books with a chapter about Graig Nettles from Tom Van Riper’s fine volume, “New York Loves Them, Cooperstown Snubs Them: Great Mets and Yankees Who Belong in the Hall of Fame” (April 16, 2020, McFarland & Company, paperback $35.00, Kindle $16.49).
Longtime journalist Van Riper covered the business of sports for Forbes from 2005 to 2014. This is his second baseball book. His first book “Cincinnati Red and Dodger Blue - Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Rivalry” was published in 2017.
I asked Mr. Van Riper to provide what I call an author-in-his-own-words explanation to pitch the book to potential readers. Below is his five-paragraph explanation, followed by the
excerpt.
Two decades ago, Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane changed the way baseball players are evaluated. For hitters, batting average and runs batted in were out, on-base percentage and slugging percentage were in. For pitchers, won-lost records were mostly tossed aside for WHIP and ERA-plus, the best indicators of a pitcher’s ability to keep opposing hitters off the bases and off the scoreboard relative to his peers – factors he can control. At the same time, advanced fielding metrics began to measure a player’s range by counting how many balls he got to in his area during the season - the kind of thing that used to be called an “intangible” as Gold Glove voters still primarily relied on error totals and fielding percentage to make their calls.
As eye opening as the new metrics became, they were too late for some players whose careers and early retirement years came before the enlightenment. Before some of us realized that David Cone was just about as good as Juan Marichal, that Graig Nettles was about the equal of Paul Molitor and that Keith Hernandez was better than Tony Perez and right on par with Eddie Murray.
With a whole new set of tools to work with, it’s about time for bygone players to get a fresh look from Hall of Fame voters. Many players, no matter where they played, could be strong candidates (Bobby Grich or Rick Reuschel anyone?).
“New York Loves Them, Cooperstown Snubs Them” focuses on New York players – Yankees and Mets from the past 30 years. Not because they’re more deserving than many others but to dispel a second misapprehension – the assumption of a bias toward those who played in the country’s largest media center. New York players tend to get extra attention, tend to be overrated by the press thanks to the big spotlight, the thinking goes.
The problem is that it isn’t true, at least not for many years now. Sure, you can go ahead and look up the numbers of some old New York Giants like Ross Youngs and Freddie Lindstom and you’ll scratch your head wondering why they have plaques hanging in Cooperstown. You can question a couple of decades-ago Yankees like Lefty Gomez and Phil Rizzuto. But the growth in national media in the modern age that has distributed attention pretty evenly throughout the major leagues has rendered the “New York bias” theory null and void. If it still existed, Cone, Hernandez and Nettles would have undoubtedly received a lot more Hall of Fame votes than they did. Chapter 2 on former Yankee great Graig Nettles illustrates the flaws of traditional Hall of Fame voting.
Chapter 2 - Graig Nettles
On Friday night October 13, 1978, Graig Nettles jogged out to his position at third base, the same way he’d done it hundreds of times to kick off a game at Yankee Stadium. This time, though, the stakes were as high as they get. It was Game 3 of the 1978 World Series, essentially a must-win game for the Yankees, who trailed the Los Angeles Dodgers two games to none. Lose tonight, and a repeat of their 1977 championship would be virtually impossible. Nettles hadn’t been much of a factor in the Yankees’ two losses in Los Angeles, going 1-for-8, his only hit a meaningless RBI single late in a one-sided Game 1 loss.
The good news: the Yankees were back on their home turf in front of their boisterous fans, including VIPs Woody Allen and Mariel Hemmingway, co-stars of the upcoming movie “Manhattan,” right behind the home dugout. They also had their stud, Ron Guidry, going in Game 3. But as encouraging as Guidry’s 25-3 record and 1.74 ERA were, there were those subtle signs that the heavy workload was catching up to him as the season wound down. Including his clinching Game 4 A.L.C.S. victory over Kansas City, Guidry hit the World Series with 282 innings under his belt for the season. He hadn’t registered a double digit strikeout game since August 4. On September 20 he’d been knocked out in the second inning at Toronto after giving up five runs. Working on short rest in the A.L East tiebreaker game in Boston on October 2, Guidry had battled hard while dancing around six hits and a walk over six and a third innings before turning the game over to Goose Gossage. Now here he was in the World Series on Friday the 13th, being asked to propel his struggling team back into it. Guidry was game, but he was tired. And as it turned out, he really didn’t have it that night, allowing eight hits, several more hard hit balls, and an almost unheard of seven walks. Normally those numbers would be catastrophic in such a big spot, nearly ensuring a 0-3 series hole. But on this night they weren’t. Guidry’s third baseman had his back.
After the Yankees took an early lead on a Roy White homer in the first, Nettles led off the bottom of the second with a base hit off Dodger veteran Don Sutton and came around to score to make it 2-0. Throughout most of the 1978 season, an early two-run lead with Guidry on the mound was practically money in the bank. But not tonight. Guidry’s struggles had already begun to show as he allowed three base runners in his first two innings, though he’d avoided damage thanks to Thurman Munson throwing out Bill Russell trying to steal in the first and Lee Lacy grounding into an around the horn double play started by Nettles in the second. Guidry began the top of the third by walking the speedy Bill North, who stole second and went to third on a groundout. With Dave Lopes at the plate, three of the four Yankee infielders played back, conceding the run in exchange for an out. Not Nettles, who positioned himself even with the third base bag, daring Lopes to hit one past him. The in-your-face approach was vintage Nettles, whose unwavering confidence in the field had a way of getting inside opponents heads. “He had a presence when he was on the field,” remembers Marty Appel. “It was ‘hit your best shot at me.’”
Sure enough, that’s just what Lopes did, drilling a laser beam right to third that left little time for reaction. But Nettles, almost casually, stuck his left gloved hand into the air to snag it. The run wound up scoring anyway when Russell followed with an infield single, but further potential damage had been minimized. Then Russell looked like he might be in position to score the tying run from first when the dangerous Reggie Smith hit a hard smash on one hop down the third base line that seemed destined for extra bases. But there went Nettles – diving to his backhand side, full extension, smothering the ball and popping up quickly to throw out Smith at first. He ran off the field to a huge roar. The Yankees still had the lead, 2-1.
Still down by just that one run in the top of the fifth, the Dodgers put runners on first and second with two down. Smith hit a hard in-between hop to third base that again tested Nettles’ cat-like reflexes. He ranged to his right near the line and almost in self-defense managed to get his glove in front of the ball to knock it down. He wasn’t able to make a play after the ball trickled a few feet away, so Smith wound up with an infield single. But as NBC announcer Tony Kubek noted, Nettles had certainly saved a run and possibly a double into the corner by keeping the ball in the infield. The game’s biggest moment was now at hand with the bases loaded, two down, and Dodger cleanup hitter Steve Garvey at the plate. Garvey swung at a 0-1 slider from Guidry and hit one exactly where he didn’t want to – toward third base. Once again there was Nettles, so quickly to his right toward the line that he almost overran the ball as he went to his backhand, which forced a split-second readjustment as he brought his extended glove hand back closer to his face before fielding the ball. A quick pivot and throw to second beat a sliding Smith by an eyelash for the inning-ending force play. Guidry, who had just allowed his fourth and fifth walks of the night, was out of another inning.
Nettles’ glove had saved at least three runs, and he wasn’t finished. With the Yankees still clinging to their 2-1 lead, Guidry’s struggles continued in the sixth when he allowed two singles and another walk around a pair of flyball outs. For the second straight inning, the Dodgers had the bases full with two out. Lopes, who’d been making great contact all night, was up. Almost as if on cue, Lopes hit another hard smash down the third base line. Also on cue was Nettles, pouncing again to his right to backhand the ball on his knees and again pop up instantly for a throw to second for the force. At this point, it was hard to decide whether to be even more amazed by Nettles’ latest gem or to just chalk it up as routine by now. Exclaimed Tom Seaver in the NBC booth: “I sit here and shake my head, he’s incredible.”
The Yankees eventually earned some breathing room with a three-run seventh, an inning that ended with Nettles flying out to the warning track in right-center field. In a scenario that would never happen now, Guidry wound up going all the way in a 5-1 win. On a night when the lefty ace struck out only four, a night where he’d battled hard without his good stuff, Nettles had saved him at least five runs. The Yankees were now back in it, trailing two games to one. After pulling out a 10-inning win the following day to tie the series, they completed their four-game comeback by blasting the Dodgers by scores of 12-2 and 7-2 in the next two games. Guidry, seemingly going on fumes at this point, was spared a Game 7. For the second straight year, the Yankees were champions.
Nettles was quiet at the plate during the series, finishing 4-for-25. His partner on the left side of the Yankee infield, shortstop Bucky Dent, took series MVP honors by hitting .417 with seven RBI in the six games. Normally a light hitter, Dent had already been riding the charmed wave of sports celebrity following his huge three-run homer off Mike Torrez to beat Boston in the American League East tiebreaker and push the Yankees into the postseason. While Nettles’ sparkling glove work against the Dodgers got its share of attention, it was Dent – the Fenway Park hero and World Series MVP – who was the toast of the town.
The 1978 World Series scored an average of 44.3 million viewers per game for NBC, still the highest rated series ever (and without a climactic Game 7, no less). [1] While those numbers raised the national profile of Nettles’ superior fielding abilities, they didn’t particularly surprise Yankee fans, who had been witnessing them since 1973. If anything, the ’78 series had sold Nettles short – his glove had been on full display, but not his bat.
Mostly forgotten after Ron Guidry’s historic season and Bucky Dent’s postseason heroics was the enormous role that Graig Nettles had played in bringing the Yankees back from a 14 ½ game deficit to catch the Red Sox in the A.L. East. On July 17, with the Yankees in fourth place, Nettles’ batting average stood at .239. He had two hits against the Kansas City Royals at Yankee Stadium that night, including his 17th homer, though the Yankees lost 9-7 in extra innings. But on the ensuing road trip through Minnesota, Chicago, and Kansas City, Nettles went 13-for-27 as the Yanks won six of seven. They pulled to within six and a half games of the Red Sox by early August before two losses to Boston dropped them to eight and a half back. But then the Yankees continued winning. From August 27 to September 4 they took nine out of ten as Nettles went 16-for-38 (.421) with no errors. Three days later began the four-game “Boston Massacre” sweep at Fenway Park which pulled the Yankees even with the Red Sox and set up their eventual win in the one game showdown on October 2.
From July 17 on, when the Yankees went 53-22 to snatch the division from the Red Sox, Nettles made exactly two errors at third base while hitting .315 to bring his season average to .276 with a .343 on-base percentage. His 27 home runs tied for ninth-most in the league. He drove in 93. Nettles’ 5.7 WAR ranked number seven in the A.L. among everyday players.
And it’s not as if 1978 was a career year for Nettles. It was actually right in line with what he’d been doing since the early ‘70s. An athletic San Diego native who played both baseball and basketball at San Diego State, Nettles was selected by the Minnesota Twins in the fourth round of baseball’s inaugural 1965 draft. Six spots earlier, the Yankees had passed on him in favor University of Nebraska pitcher Stan Bahnsen, who turned in a few good years for them before he was dealt to the Chicago White Sox in 1973, the same year that Nettles came to New York. Nettles got his first decent playing time for Minnesota in 1969, when he hit just .222 in 225 at-bats for a strong Twins team that won the A.L. West behind a manager named Billy Martin and the bats of Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, and 23-year-old batting champion Rod Carew. Killebrew, who blasted 49 homers in 1969, played mostly at third base that year, but he shifted to first for 66 games in part to make some room for Nettles, who divided his playing time between third and the outfield. No one could have known it at the time, but Nettles’ limited rookie season wound up as a small scale model for the rest of his career. There was the low batting average, which back then could make people dismiss you as an offensive force. Less noticed was Nettles’ ability to draw walks that led to a .319 on-base percentage, right in line with the league average. And his seven homers translated to going deep once every 32 times up, better than the league average of that pitching-friendly time. As a small sample, those numbers didn’t particularly mean much, but they turned out to be prescient.
After that ’69 season, the Twins, not sold on Nettles enough to move Killebrew to first extensively just yet, dealt Nettles to the Cleveland Indians in a multiplayer deal that brought Luis Tiant – one of Nettles’ future antagonists of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry – to Minnesota. The trade gave Nettles his first chance to flourish. As Minnesota ran to its second consecutive division title in 1970, Nettles took over as the regular third baseman in Cleveland where, in the relative anonymity of fifth place and about 9,000 fans a game, he quietly became one of the American League’s top players.
On the face of it, Nettles’ 1970 season was nothing more than decent. He did hit 26 home runs, but he also batted .235 with 16 errors at third base. It’s easy to guess what people said at the time – ok, he’s got some power, but otherwise…eh. What few people were looking at in 1970: Nettles 81 walks gave him a .336 on-base percentage, a bit better than league average, which essentially negated his mediocre batting average. And his superior range in the field saved 21 runs, according to FanGraphs estimates. His 2.6 defensive WAR (baseball-reference.com) was fourth-highest in the American League behind a pair of Washington Senators’ infielders, Aurelio Rodriguez and Ed Brinkman, and Baltimore outfielder Paul Blair. Nettles’ overall WAR of 5.2 left him just outside the league’s top 10. The exceptional defensive WAR far outdistanced that of the Orioles’ Brooks Robinson (0.8), who nonetheless took the Gold Glove at third base, no doubt thanks to the sterling reputation he’d earned over the previous decade (and of course Robinson would go on to shine in the 1970 World Series against the Reds with several head-turning plays, showcasing his defense for the national audience much the same way that Nettles would in 1978).
But while Robinson still held the big defensive rep at third base, the early ‘70s was actually the start of the transition to Graig Nettles as baseball’s top defensive third baseman. “He was as good as anybody,” says Peter Golenbock. “He and Brooks Robinson were the definitive third basemen.” Nettles played the position with a style all his own, confident enough in his quick reflexes toward his right that he liked to position himself deep and toward the shortstop, the better to get to all those balls to his left. Nettles generally eschewed guarding the line, the favored strategy for preventing extra base hits, in favor of playing the percentages of plugging the third base – shortstop hole. For Yankee pitchers, the reward was the closing of most of the left side of the infield to opposing hitters. He had his own way of concentrating – Nettles liked to say that he would envision the ball being hit to various spots to his left or right and then envision how he would go after it and make the play. It’s tough to argue with the results: by the time he retired in 1988, Nettles had accumulated more assists and had started more double plays than any third baseman in history other than Brooks Robinson (all these years later Robinson and Nettles still stand 1-2 in career assists at third, with Adrian Beltre jumping to the number two spot in double plays started, leaving Nettles third).
His second year in Cleveland was even better than his first. Nettles’ batting average and on-base percentage improved to .261 and .350, respectively, both better than league average. His 28 homers and 86 RBI were both top 10. As for the stellar defense: Nettles’ whopping 3.9 defensive WAR in 1971 led the American League by a wide margin, easily eclipsing the still-excellent 2.8 registered by Robinson, who still (naturally) took the Gold Glove. Robinson’s perception advantage wasn’t just based on his prior years of excellence – he was also helping to lead a powerhouse Orioles team to its third straight World Series while Nettles toiled for a last place Indians club that hadn’t played a postseason game since 1954. Overall, Nettles’ 7.5 WAR in 1971 was tops in the American League among everyday players. If you’re a firm believer in WAR, then your obvious conclusion is that Graig Nettles was the American League’s best player in 1971. And even if you’re lukewarm on it, there’s no denying that he was something very close to that. Where did Nettles finish in the American League MVP voting? Try 28th, behind the likes of sub- three win players Pat Dobson, Mike Cuellar, and George Scott. Brooks Robinson, whose six-win season was excellent but not as good as Nettles’, finished fourth in the MVP voting, including three first place votes. Like the tree in the forest – when you star for a 102-loss team in Cleveland in the pre-ESPN, pre-Internet era when no one saw you, did it really happen?
After another strong season in 1972 (17 homers, .325 OBP, 4.8 WAR), Nettles became the main man in a big trade between the Indians and Yankees, a trade that would raise some eyebrows a little while after it happened. The six-player deal sent Nettles and backup catcher Jerry Moses to New York for John Ellis, Jerry Kenney, Rusty Torres and Charlie Spikes. Why did the trade raise eyebrows? The initiator from the Cleveland side, Indians’ president Gabe Paul, wound up leaving the team two months later and joining George Steinbrenner’s group that bought the Yankees in January 1973. Whispers of sabotage emerged when Paul wound up as Yankee president right after he’d sent Nettles there. That doesn’t mean the whispers were true - as great as the deal worked out for the Bombers, the trade was defensible from Cleveland’s perspective. The Indians hadn’t been making any noise in the American League East despite Nettles’ strong play for them. It was a club in need of a rebuild. The key to the trade for them was Spikes, a highly regarded outfield prospect whom the Yankees had drafted in the first round (number 11 overall) in 1969. And Spikes did show some early promise in Cleveland, hitting 23 and 22 homers, respectively, in his first two seasons. Had Spikes continued trending up, the deal would have looked reasonable for them. Instead he fizzled, battling injuries and inconsistency that led to just 65 career home runs and a .246 batting average before he retired at age 29.
Graig Nettles, entering his fourth full season at 28, was about to begin the 11-year run that would define his career. Yankee pinstripes. Five post seasons; four World Series. Before he moved along in 1984, he would establish himself as the best third baseman in Yankee history, since surpassed only by Alex Rodriguez. But it was also the era of the George-Billy-Reggie zaniness. An era largely defined by a Nettles quip that became famous: “Most kids want to grow up to play in the major leagues or join the circus. With the Yankees I got to do both” (or some such variation – the widely-used quote took on a few slightly different forms over the years). Not that the Yankees were a circus when Nettles first got there in 1973. Martin’s arrival was still more than two years away; Jackson’s was four years away. Steinbrenner, the new owner, was not yet in peak bombastic form – that wouldn’t really come until he returned from a 15-month suspension that commissioner Bowie Kuhn hit him with in 1974 for questionable contributions to Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign.
Nettles joined a rather bland and very average Yankee club that was getting set to play out its final season in the original Yankee Stadium before a major two-year remodel had them sharing Shea Stadium with the Mets in 1974 and 1975. Just as he’d been doing in Cleveland, Nettles put up the type of year that looks a lot better in today’s enlightened, advanced-stat hindsight than it looked at the time. As the team finished fourth with an 80-82 season, Nettles batted .234. His 22 home runs seemed pretty impressive, but didn’t quite land him the league’s top 10. Nonetheless, Nettles’ .334 on-base percentage and usual great defense produced a 5.5 WAR, his fourth outstanding season in a row. The trend continued during the Yankees’ two seasons at Shea Stadium in 1974 and 1975, where Nettles totaled 43 homers and outhomered the league average by 42% (going deep about every 26 times up) despite the loss of Yankee Stadium’s short right filed porch during those two transient seasons. For the fifth and sixth years in a row, he was either above or close to a five-win player (4.9 and 4.7 WARs in the two Shea Stadium years).
Then came 1976, a breakthrough year in several ways for the Yankees and for baseball. That year, ABC had signed on to a national TV deal with Major League Baseball, giving the league a second major network alongside its traditional partner NBC. Marvin Miller won free agency for the players, a game-changing development that would alter the sport’s landscape forever and that George Steinbrenner would come to take advantage of quickly. At the same time, the Yankees were moving back home to the Bronx into their newly renovated Yankee Stadium, having assembled a club that was ready to shoot to the top of the American League. Gabe Paul, the man who had pushed Nettles to New York from Cleveland, showed that he could work the magic from the Yankee side of the fence too. After bringing in the likes of Chris Chambliss and Lou Piniella in 1974 and signing Catfish Hunter In 1975, Paul really went into overhaul mode as the new stadium awaited. Lineup regulars Mickey Rivers, Willie Randolph, Oscar Gamble and Carlos May were all new Yankees in 1976. So were pitchers Dock Ellis, Ed Figueroa, Ken Holtzman, and Grant Jackson. Nettles was among the key holdovers that also included catcher Thurman Munson, outfielder Roy White and reliever Sparky Lyle. Together, the new-look Yankees led the A.L. East virtually wire to wire and won it by 10 ½ games. They then captured their first A.L. pennant in 12 years on a memorable ninth inning homer by Chambliss off Kansas City’s Mark Littell in the fifth and deciding game of the A.L.C.S. The Yankees were swept out the World Series by the powerful Reds in four straight, but the season was a resounding success. The Bronx Bombers were back.
What’s interesting is which players the fans and the local press looked at when dishing out most of the credit. It started with Munson, the beloved Yankee captain who had been enduring bumps and bruises behind the plate since 1969. He was the gamer, the resilient catcher who’d battled day in and day out for several average Yankee teams before he was finally rewarded with his first pennant winner. Sure enough, Munson was voted American League MVP in 1976, an honor that at the time felt more like a cumulative award for his years of effort at a physically demanding position than for truly being the league’s best player. Then there were newcomers Rivers and Figueroa, who had come over from the California Angels the previous winter in a big trade for Bobby Bonds. Figueroa led the pitching staff with 19 wins. Rivers was an immediate asset as the new catalyst, hitting .312 and stealing 43 bases from the leadoff spot. Both had terrific seasons, but they also benefitted from that perception advantage that falls into the laps of players that switch teams. With the Yankees jumping from 83 wins to 97 wins, the focus naturally moved toward what was different about the roster from one year to the next. Rivers represented a change in the lineup from 1975 to 1976, a new force at the top of the order that had been missing in the past. That’s probably why he wound up third in the MVP voting behind Munson and Kansas City’s George Brett.
But being the new kid in the lineup doesn’t necessarily mean you did more to help the team than a holdover who also had a big year. In 1976, Graig Nettles led the American League with 32 home runs. His rate of homering once every 18 times up was a whopping 69% better than league average (the average A.L. player homered just once every 59 times up in 1976). He finished ninth in the league in both OPS and (ballpark adjusted) OPS-plus. His .254 batting average and .327 on-base percentage were right in line with the league averages. And again there was the tremendous defense – Nettles’ 3.6 defensive WAR ranked a close second in the American League to Baltimore’s slick fielding shortstop Mark Belanger. Once again, there you had it – Nettles’ superstar level of power and defense was neither boosted nor undermined by his neutral on-base numbers. Add it all up, and Nettles’ 8.0 WAR was the highest in the American League among everyday players and second overall to the Tigers’ pitching phenom and pop culture sensation Mark (The Bird) Fidrych. For the second time in six years, Nettles was the league’s top day-to-day player (at least by WAR). And for the second time in six years, no one noticed, even though he did it on the biggest baseball stage in the country this time.
Nettles did not make the American League All-Star team in 1976. He didn’t win the Gold Glove at third base, losing out to Detroit’s Aurelio Rodriguez, whose 0.3 defensive WAR didn’t come within shouting distance of Nettles, and whose Fangraphs estimate of one run below average at his position contrast with Nettles’ 27 runs above average. Of course things like WAR and zone ratings weren’t part of the baseball vocabulary in 1976, so voters did the easy thing. They looked at Rodriguez’s error total – only nine – and decided it looked better than Nettles’ 19 errors.
And then there was the MVP voting. Graig Nettles, probably the most deserving player in the league and certainly among the top few, finished tied for 16th in the writers’ balloting. He finished fourth among Yankees, behind Munson, Rivers and Chambliss, all of whom certainly had excellent years. Rivers turned in an impressive 6.4 WAR, Munson a 5.3, and Chambliss a 4.1. They just weren’t as good as Nettles. But once again – perception. Batting average was a very big thing in the 1970s. Rivers (.312), Munson (.302) and Chambliss (.293) all looked a lot better than Nettles did at .254. No one particularly noticed that Nettles’ .327 on-base percentage put him a bit ahead of Chambliss, just slightly behind Munson, and dead even with Rivers (that’s right, Nettles got on base at the same rate as Rivers, who hit 58 points higher but whose one big flaw as a leadoff hitter - very few walks - didn’t get much attention in the batting average-obsessed 1970s. If you hit .300 with speed, you were considered a top leadoff man). Given Nettles’ clear superiority in power and defense over the others, it’s easy to see in hindsight that he was the top player on the team and probably the top player in the league. On the 1976 Yankees, though, Nettles didn’t have the distinction of being a dynamic new addition like Rivers or a grimy, beloved spiritual leader and .300 hitter like Munson. He was caught in between - a holdover of the previous few years whose full value wasn’t as obvious as Munson’s given the so-so batting average and the perceived good fortune he had to be a lefty hitter swinging at Yankee Stadium’s short right field porch, which had people downplaying his home run total somewhat (more on that in a bit).
When the Yankees won it all in 1977, Nettles again flourished as one of the league’s top players. His 37 homers were two behind league leader Jim Rice while his .333 on-base percentage topped the league average slightly. His 1.4 defensive WAR and nine runs above average at third were a dropoffs from his best seasons, but still strong (Nettles started 155 games at third base and committed 12 errors). His overall 5.5 WAR ranked ninth in the American League among everyday players. His bat was mostly quiet during the 1977 postseason, but his “in your face” presence on the field, as Marty Appel put it, was on display in the decisive Game 5 A.L.C.S. victory over Kansas City. When George Brett blasted a triple in the bottom of the first inning, the big hit that helped the Royals to an early 2-0 lead, his hard slide into Nettles at third base culminated in a forearm to the midsection. Nettles responded with a kick into Brett’s shoulder, igniting a bench-clearing mini-brawl until cooler heads prevailed. Maybe it was a coincidence, but Brett, the main Yankee antagonist during the playoff battles of the era, wasn’t a factor for the remainder of the game. He wound up going 0-for-2 with a walk the rest of the way, got thrown out stealing in the fifth inning, and made an error in the ninth that scored the Yankees’ final run in a 5-3 comeback victory. The exciting game and series ended on a grounder to third by Kansas City’s Fred Patek that Nettles scooped up and turned into a double play.
When he repeated virtually the same season in 1978, as the Yankees repeated as champions, Nettles had wrapped up a nine-year run during which he averaged just under six wins per year from 1970-78. How many everyday players in the American League did better during those nine years? Exactly one: Rod Carew, Nettles’ teammate from the 1969 Twins. And that was by a nose. Fittingly, the Yankees’ 1978 American League championship clincher over Kansas City featured a Nettles game-tying homer in the second inning and then a diving, full extension grab off a bullet hit by Hal McRae in the eighth to save a double and preserve a 2-1 win for Ron Guidry. Shades of things to come in the ’78 World Series.
But through it all, few people perceived Graig Nettles as a genuine superstar. First off, he really didn’t look the part. At 6-foot and 180 pounds, he wasn’t big and powerful. He wasn’t particularly fast. His throwing arm, accurate as it was, wasn’t a rocket. To the average fan, Nettles came off physically more as the guy in the next office than as a super athlete. Then there were those ‘70s statistics. Nettles didn’t hit .300. His power was impressive, but no doubt it was helped by the short right field wall in his ballpark. The WAR stat, driven by things like on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and defensive range, wasn’t around yet. His personality didn’t attract a crowd – Nettles was generally content to keep things low key while using his occasional humorous zingers to keep his teammates loose. Yankee pitchers would later tell stories of Nettles approaching the mound during tough situations and asking “hmm, how are you going to get out of this one?” Think back to those Yankee championship teams of the late ‘70s, and who do you think of? George, Billy, Reggie, and Thurman. Steinbrenner’s bombast, Martin’s intensity, Jackson’s flair for the dramatic, and Munson’s grouchy yet genuine leadership. And of course, the seemingly never-ending back page feuds among all of them. Nettles? “More of an observer than participant,” remembers Marty Appel of the team feuds. “But he was someone who kept the team loose in tense situations, very good for team chemistry.” Amid a handful of high maintenance types on those Yankee clubs, Nettles was a rock. George Steinbrenner didn’t fluster him. He once blew off a team luncheon and didn’t particularly seem to care whether The Boss was upset. His response to a small fine: “If they want somebody to play third base, they have me. If they want somebody to go to luncheons they can hire George Jessel.” That was Nettles – a little flap, a little joke about it, and then back to the grind. No ongoing drama.
But by and large, the fans and the press didn’t see Nettles as a main man on those Yankee clubs as much as they saw him as part of the good, solid supporting cast. The reliable guy penciled into the lineup every day who made the plays at third and popped his share of homers over the friendly right field porch. A nice player, for sure, but a Hall of Famer? Nah. Nettles even received the ultimate dis from his own team. Look out at Yankee Stadium’s outfield and you will in fact see the No. 9 Nettles wore among the multitude of retired numbers. The problem is that the number is retired for Roger Maris, not Nettles. Of course Maris did make history in 1961 by breaking the single season home run record, an achievement to be celebrated in its own right. But there’s not much of an argument to be made that his Yankee career was as productive as Nettles’ was.
Hindsight in today’s enlightened era shows that the view of Graig Nettles as a good-but-not-great player was all wrong. Take a look at how he compares to other all-time third basemen, and it’s clear that his ticket to Cooperstown should have been punched a long time ago. Start with the man Nettles succeeded as the A.L.’s top defensive third baseman, Brooks Robinson. Was Nettles’ career as good as Robinson’s? No, but it wasn’t far behind. For his entire 22-year career, FanGraphs credits Nettles with 141 runs saved, while baseball-reference.com gives him 20.2 defensive WAR. For Robinson, whose career dates back to 1955 and who had his best seasons in the mid-to-late ‘60s, its’ a whopping 294 runs saved and a 38.8 defensive WAR over 23 years. Clearly, he wasn’t called “the human vacuum cleaner” for nothing. But Nettles was the better offensive player, scoring an edge in offensive WAR, 52.3 to 47.4, and out homering Robinson 390 to 268 with an OPS-plus edge of 110 to 104. In overall career WAR, Robinson outpaced Nettles 78 to 68. Robinson’s peak beat Nettles by just a bit – he averaged 6.0 wins in his ten best seasons compared to Nettles’ 5.5 wins.
Setting the bar even higher, how does Nettles stack up against another peer from his era, Mike Schmidt? No one would compare Nettles favorably to Schmidt, who is generally regarded as the greatest third baseman of all time. Offensively, it’s really not close. Schmidt’s 548 homers and 147 OPS-plus pretty much blow Nettles away. Schmidt was also a true defensive ace in his day – he was awarded 10 Gold Gloves – with a 17.6 defensive WAR and 127 runs saved that come up not all that short of Nettles’ numbers. Schmidt averaged 5.9 wins over his full career to Nettles’ 3.1 wins, a good sized gap. Their respective peaks were a bit closer, with Schmidt averaging eight wins in his ten best seasons to Nettles five and a half wins.
So to compare Graig Nettles to two of the best to ever play third base, this is how it looks: Nettles was clearly in arrears of Robinson defensively and Schmidt offensively, but netting out all the numbers for career WAR averaged against 10-season peak WAR shows him to be about two-thirds of the player Schmidt was and 90% of the player Robinson was. That’s clear Hall of Fame territory. When the numbers say you’re two-thirds as good as the best guy to ever play your position, you’re pretty much golden, or ought to be. Take a look at the other positions on the field. Using the same measurements – averaging career WAR against 10-season peak WAR - Tom Seaver was two-thirds the pitcher that Cy Young was. Behind the plate, Hall of Famer Gabby Hartnett was two-thirds of Johnny Bench. In the outfield, take two-thirds of Babe Ruth and you get Mickey Mantle. And it keeps going around the infield – Charlie Gehringer was two-thirds as good as Rogers Hornsby at second, Frank Thomas two-thirds of Lou Gehrig at first, and Arky Vaughn two-thirds of Honus Wagner at short.
And to put Nettles’ 68 career WAR in perspective: it doesn’t beat Robinson or Schmidt, but it beats more than half of the 232 former MLB players currently in the Hall of Fame, including six third basemen. But alas, there’s a reason beyond just the passage of time as to why memories of Nettles’ career are fading – more top notch third basemen coming along. Says Rob Neyer: “Nettles has a good case, though he would have had a better case twenty years ago when the list of all-time great third basemen was shorter.” No doubt, the likes of Wade Boggs and Chipper Jones, both now in the hall, along with Scott Rolen and now Adrian Beltre, both strong future candidates, push Nettles further down the third base chain. That doesn’t make Nettles any less deserving for Coopertown, but it makes it tougher for people to see him in quite the same light.
The closest comparison to Nettles among Hall of Famers who played his position is probably represented by Paul Molitor, who played close to 800 games at third base before ultimately settling in as a DH during the latter part of his career. How does this matchup look? Very, very close. Both had long careers that lasted a little beyond 20 seasons. Nettles had far more home run power, while Molitor’s all-around offensive game was a bit better, which he showed by getting on base 11% more often than a typical player during his era (Nettles was 1.5% better). Molitor also outslugged the league by the same 10% that Nettles did despite way fewer homers, thanks to his extra base power that yielded over 800 combined doubles and triples, far more than Nettles’ 356. But most baseball players don’t just swing bats, they wear gloves too. Molitor, though, wore a glove in barely more than half of his 2,683 career games from 1978 to 1998. And when he did, he wasn’t especially good. Baseball-reference gives him a -8 defensive WAR, while FanGraphs says he saved eight total runs at third base, due almost exclusively to one strong defensive season in 1983. In other words, not in Nettles’ league.
So the comparison is pretty clear cut - Nettles blasting home runs and flashing his glove, Molitor spraying hits all over the field. It nets out to nearly a draw. Overall, Molitor put up a 75 career WAR to Nettles’ 68, a difference of about 0.3 per season that’s mainly attributable to Nettles’ defensive decline by age 35 in 1980 that had him tacking on less production during the tail end of his career than Molitor did. Nettles had the slightly better peak, his 5.5 average WAR in his 10 best seasons edging Molitor’s 5.2. So what happened in the Hall of Fame voting? Molitor sailed in with 85% of the vote in his first year of eligibility in 2004, much the same way that Brooks Robinson did with 92% of the vote in 1983. Nettles, whose career was on par with Molitor’s and quite close to Robinson’s, settled for a four-year run on the ballot during which he maxed out at 8.3% of the vote.
The mismatch of career numbers to balloting numbers among these players seems bizarre. Yet it’s probably easily explainable. Paul Molitor and Brooks Robinson did those things that traditional voters grasp easily. For Molitor, it was the nice round numbers he surpassed - the .300 career batting average and 3,000 career hits, pretty much guaranteed tickets. For Robinson, it was the 16 Gold Gloves that earned him the “best fielder ever at his position” distinction, a strong narrative which, combined with solid offense, was also a surefire ticket. And make no mistake, both are certainly deserving Hall of Famers.
Nettles’ value takes a bit more effort to piece together, something that hall voters have never been willing to do. Maybe it’s laziness, or maybe it’s just the locked in mindset that’s difficult for traditionalists to break. Recently a New York sports radio host made a general comment about prospective but non-obvious candidates that echoed some fans on social media sites: “if you have to think about it or start analyzing a lot of numbers, he’s not a Hall of Famer.”
Really? That’s a pretty lazy approach. Electing Mike Schmidt, Greg Maddux and Frank Thomas is easy. To be unwilling to take a closer look at someone who isn’t the most obvious choice at first blush doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in your voting accuracy. Mention Graig Nettles, or some of the others in this book to some people, and you invariably get the usual tired line, that the Hall of Fame is for truly elite players, that it’s not the “Hall of the Very Good.” Well, yes. The point isn’t to open up the hall for the merely “very good” but to show that Graig Nettles and others were in fact truly elite despite not accumulating the traditional career benchmarks that lazy voters love to latch onto, like 500 home runs or 3,000 hits.
A quick example: every hall-eligible player with 500 career homers who isn’t seen as tainted by the PED scandal is in the Hall of Fame, while Fred McGriff and his 493 homers have never topped 39.8% of the vote. Given that pattern, it stands to reason that if McGriff had hung around for another year and popped at least seven homers to hit the 500 mark, his plaque would be on the wall in Cooperstown even though his career wouldn’t have been any better than it already was. McGriff is pretty much the poster boy for voters’ obsessions with numbers that end with multiple zeroes.
To be fair, of course, today’s common measurement tools weren’t common back when Nettles and others were playing, or for several years after they retired. So it’s understandable that voters would miss the boat on them initially. But where is the current baseball press - particularly in New York – to beat the drum for these guys? It’s long overdue.
Putting aside the “sabermetric” numbers like on-base percentage and other measurements that make up WAR, even players’ more traditional numbers are often viewed out of whack. A player’s stats need to be viewed in the context of the era in which they were accumulated. To treat a number like 500 home runs as a uniform plateau across all eras doesn’t make sense when you consider the way statistical norms change from one era to another. On the face of it, Graig Nettles’ career home run total of 390 doesn’t feel like a Hall of Fame number. But Nettles played in the dead ball era of the 1970s and ‘80s, when 30-something homers often led the league. His ratio of at-bats to home runs outdid the league average by 43% during his career, a rate that would have netted him 500 homers in a more hitter friendly era like the 1990s or early 2000s. As it stands, Nettles’ 390 home runs rank 63rd on baseball’s all-time list. Of the 62 players ahead of him, only a few had careers that overlapped strongly with Nettles’ career during the dead ball era – Schmidt, Reggie Jackson, Darrell Evans, Dave Kingman – along with a handful of others who overlapped partially. What does that mean? It means that Graig Nettles was one of the premier home run hitters of his time, a much stronger indication of his level of play than a raw total, which is as much a product of the time period as it is of the player.
There is the matter of Yankee Stadium and its generosity toward lefty power hitters. Yes, the short porch in right field helped Nettles, the same way it helped Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, and Reggie Jackson, among others. But again, perspective. Nettles didn’t play his entire career at Yankee Stadium, and his home run frequency there (48% better than league average) wasn’t much better than it was during his other seasons. Playing in Cleveland from 1970 to 1972, he outdid the American League in home run-to at-bat ratio by 44%. Playing for the Yankees at Shea Stadium in 1974 and 1975, he did it by 42%. When Nettles went to the San Diego Padres in 1984 his 20 homers in 395 at-bats gave him one for every 19.8 times up, which meant that he homered more than twice as often as a typical N.L. player who went deep just once every 52 at-bats that year. He went on to outperform the league by 36% and 49%, respectively during his two following seasons in San Diego in 1985 and 1986. Yes, even in his early 40s without a short porch, Nettles was still reaching the seats.
One other interesting tidbit on the lefty-hitter-at-Yankee-Stadium issue: because many of the Yankee lineups of the mid-‘70s through the early-‘80s featured a lot of dangerous left-handed hitters – Nettles, Jackson, Chambliss, Rivers, Carlos May, Oscar Gamble, at various times – opposing teams saw that their best chance to beat the Yankees was to throw left-handed pitching at them. During his 11 years in pinstripes, Nettles saw lefty pitching in 45% of his at-bats, much higher than the norm. In the team’s three-year A.L. pennant run from 1976 to 1978 it was even higher than that – Nettles saw lefties just about half the time yet still finished first in the league in homers in 1976, second in 1977, and ninth in 1978. By comparison, Nettles’ contemporary George Brett, a fellow left-handed hitter and one of the great offensive players in baseball history, faced lefties just 33% of the time during the same stretch from 1973 to 1983. Of course Brett was a great hitter anyway, and his career rates statistically ahead of Nettles’ by a bit more than Brooks Robinson’s does (though less than by what Mike Schmidt’s does), but he did hit a relatively modest .280 against left-handed pitching compared to .318 against right-handed pitching. Had Brett seen as many southpaws as Nettles did, his offensive edge would have been less pronounced, most likely.
Nettles’ Yankee career did end a bit unceremoniously. A book he did with Peter Golenbock called “Balls,” which came out in early 1984, presented, among other things, a very unflattering portrait of George Steinbrenner. In part because of the book, and probably in part because he was 39, Nettles was shipped to the San Diego Padres for a low level pitching prospect just days before the 1984 season started. But even as his career moved beyond its peak, Nettles teamed with his former World Series rival, Steve Garvey, to help San Diego to its first National League championship in 1984 with his 20 homers in 395 at-bats. During his late career return home he wound up tacking on 51 home runs and a 5.9 WAR over his three years with the Padres at the ages of 39, 40, and 41.
Graig Nettles’ final major league home run came at Olympic Stadium on April 16, 1988 as a pinch hitter for the Montreal Expos. With his club trailing the Philadelphia Phillies 1-0 in the bottom of the eighth and Phillies’ starter Kevin Gross working on a two-hit shutout, Nettles got the call with two out and nobody on and blasted his 390th career homer to tie the game. The Expos went on to win 2-1 in 10 innings. Nettles didn’t homer again during his final season on the Montreal bench. He started nine games at third base, the last three of which came after his 44th birthday on August 20. He finished at .230 (.323 on-base percentage) and 14 RBI in 93 at-bats.
There was no great exclamation point stamped onto his great career, but his final appearance is kind of interesting to look back on now. On October 1, 1988, with the Expos and Phillies tied 3-3 in the bottom of the sixth, manager Buck Rodgers called on Nettles to pinch hit in the pitchers’ spot with the go-ahead run on second base. Nettles failed to get the run home, flying out to Phillies’ center fielder Bobby Dernier. His career was over. The Phillies would win the game 5-4. The Montreal starter Nettles hit for: a young hard throwing lefty named Randy Johnson, who was making his fourth career start exactly four days after Curt Schilling had made his third career start against Ron Guidry in Baltimore. Two historically underrated Yankees had gone out just days apart alongside a pair of future aces who would combine to shut down the Yankees in the World Series for the Arizona Diamondbacks 13 years later, denying them a fourth straight championship in 2001. Johnson, who of course came to be known as “The Big Unit,” went on to win 303 games with 4,875 career strikeouts, second all-time to Nolan Ryan. He’s also one of only eight pitchers in baseball history to accumulate a career WAR of over 100. Johnson, who had 25 career strikeouts in 26 innings when Nettles pinch hit for him, got his Hall of Fame plaque in 2015. Schilling, Guidry, and Nettles are still waiting.