He was always known for being a great slugger who wasn’t a good hitter, and 1982 was the epitome of that, as he led the NL in homers with 37, but only posted a .285 OBP.

The home run race in ’82 was pretty exciting, and at times, appears as if Dave Kingman willed himself to be the leader that year. It started as a race between Dave, Dale Murphy, and the Pirates Jason Thompson. By May 1st, Dave led the league, but was only 1 HR ahead of Dale and Jason.

Then on May 24th, the Mets traveled to Atlanta to take on the Braves, pitting Kingman and Murph against each other for 3 games. It was the 2nd game, when Murph took the lead league with a 2nd inning blast on a 2-2 pitch over the right field wall. He now had 14 homers and Dave was still stuck on 13.

Four days later in Shea, Kingman finally hit his 14th off Houston pitcher Joe Niekro. They were tied again atop the NL leaderboard, but only until June 1 when Dale Murphy smashed another. Kingman would only hit 3 home runs from May 30 through July 3, while Murph hit 8. It looked as if Dave Kingman was just not going to keep pace.

Then Dave got hot, real hot. The next 2 weeks, he hit 8 home runs while batting .311/.380/.844, including a 2 HR game in Dodger Stadium to reach 25 homers on July 17, which was 1 more than Dale had hit. Dave Kingman not only led the NL but also the AL at this point too. Nobody else in the NL had reached 20 HR’s yet.

Dave being Kingman though, his hot streak couldn’t last. For a month following that (Jul 18-Aug 20), he only hit a pithetic .085/.214/.195, which included just 3 homers. Can you imagine hitting that for a month, and not being benched? I don’t know how the Mets kept him in the lineup. For the season as a whole, his batting average was .197 and OBP was .286. Yikes.

Meanwhile, Dale slumped at the same time. On July 28, they were both tied again at 26 round trippers each. The next night in Atlanta, Murph had a 2 homer game against the Padres, putting him 2 HR’s up on Dave. That’s how it stays until the Mets went to Pittsburgh a little more than a week later.

August 6, Kingman smacks #27 over the leftfield wall during the 6th inning of a nightcap.

August 7, Kingman smacks a 6th inning tie-breaking 2 run homer off Rick Rhoden to give the Mets a win and tie him for the league lead in home runs.

August 10, Dale Murphy regains the NL homer lead, with a 1st inning shot. So Dale had 29, and Dave had 28. It stayed this way leading into the Mets @ Braves series starting on August 20.

It was in the 2nd game of the series though, that someone finally slugged one out of the park, and it was Dave Kingman to tie Murphy yet again. Dave just wasn’t going to go away.

The next night, Murphy smacks his 30th of the season in the 7th inning, to regain the league lead yet again. Like they say though, it’s not over ’til the fat lady sings, and Kingman hadn’t heard nobody singing yet. In the top of the 9th, Dave slugs a pitch over the fence too. Tied again at 30 HR’s, Dave Kingman just wasn’t going away.

By the end of August, Murphy was leading Dave by 1 homer again, with Jason Thompson & Mike Schmidt sneaking into the picture.

By Sepember 3rd, neither Dale nor Dave hit a homer yet in the month, while Jason Thompson and Mike Schmidt each added another, putting them at 29, just 2 behind Kingman and 3 behind Murphy. The race was getting crowded and lookin’ like maybe there’d be a surprise winner to the NL home run title.

That’s when Kingman, went on a tear again. From September 4 – 17, he bashed 6 HR’s while posting a .304/.377/.761 batting line. At that point, Dave Kingman had finally gone up on Dale Murphy by 2 homers. He was no longer chasing to regain the lead, but being chased.

Nobody knew it at the time, but Dave wouldn’t hit another home run in 1982, but that he wouldn’t need to. Murph only hit 1 more homer that season, leaving him at 36, one short of Dave Kingman.

The feel good story kept going, and from his debut on August 1, 1974 on through the 1981 season, he stole 427 bases—more bases than any other player during that span. The 1980 Sports Illustrated article “A Leg Up On The League Lead” said “LeFlore usually makes the whole team go”.

He started the 1982 season hot; Through May 18, he was hitting .338/.373/.486, with 14 steals, helping the team to a 23-12 start. The White Sox were just a 1/2 game out of first. He’d scored 28 runs in 33 games played.

Then something changed, and his feel good story starts crashing down hard and fast. From May 18-July 17, he’s only got a .295 OBP, and his BAbip fell from .446 earlier in the year to .327. If their igniter can’t get on base, the team can’t score. This affected the team’s offense terribly, as the team went 22-29 during the two month span. Interestingly, they went 7-7 when Ron wasn’t in the lineup.

The next day, Ron got suspended for 3 games, for missing a special team practice and showing up for the July 18th game just minutes before it started. That didn’t seem to teach him much though, as he was late for the team flight to Detroit later on.

This is a behavior pattern that got fined a lot by Sparky Anderson in Detroit, and annoyed the Expos too. So it’s not really surprising it would get on the nerves of a young Tony LaRussa in Chicago too. He was trouble in the ChiSox clubhouse from midseason onward, and played in his last major league game on September 3, as a pinch runner.

Things only got worse from there as Ron was arrested on September 30, 1982 on drug & gun related charges. By December, the White Sox were trying to unload him, but nobody else wanted him. The White Sox were even willing to pay Ron LeFlore to not play.

Two days before another court date in January ’83, Ron’s infant son dies. His legal issues kept on being drawn out with more and more court dates, as well as the White Sox deciding to just release him and not have to pay him a cent. Of course, the players association helped Ron with that issue.

Eventually, in June, he was acquitted of all the charges. Despite that, the White Sox still didn’t want him. They’d cut him in spring training, which was probably a formality considering they didn’t want him before that anyway. Then they claimed that he’d breached his contract by not being in shape to play and by bad behavior, both of which his contract covered.

Insanely, Ron had more legal troubles a few months later when a man sued him for money the man thought he was owed for discovering Ron LeFlore in prison a decade earlier. Don’t know how that one turned out.

Ron LeFlore doesn’t give up easy though. After the ’83 season, with no teams willing to give him a shot to play, he bolted for the Puerto Rican winter league to show he can still be worth something to a team. He even dropped 23 lbs and made sure he was in better shape.

I remember reading somewhere that he tried out for the Expos in the spring of ’84, but I can’t find that anywhere now. The trail grows cold until 2009, when we find Ron and his wife “living check to check, trying to squeeze every nickel and dime out of Ron’s monthly MLB pension payments”. He can’t even afford the hip replacement he needs.

Sad end to a player who was so exciting and thrilling. A man who’d opened the door when opportunity knocked and got to play with & against some of the greatest baseball players in history.

In ’79, he had a breakout season, being awarded the Sporting News’s NL ROY. Then in 1980 expectations were high, but he regressed petty badly, leading the Astros to think he wasn’t part of their future and that he’d never develop and they needed to dump him on some other team.

Remember, that was a Houston club who’d forced a 1 game playoff with the Dodgers and were looking to reach the World Series in 1981. They couldn’t have a .213 hitter with a pithetic .274 OBP messing up their chances everyday.

Fortunately the Giants had a player they wanted to dump too, a discontented first baseman by the name of Mike Ivie. So on April 20, 1981, the Astros traded Jeff Leonard to the Giants for a discontented first baseman. That made the trade work for both teams, and they probably both figured they were dumping a never-will-be onto a division rival.

As soon as Jeff was a Giant, they assigned him to their AAA club in Phoenix where he promptly smacked the ball around batting .401 and slugging over .600! Yeah, this is that same player Houston didn’t think would be worth keepin’ around.

After the ’81 strike, Jeff was recalled to the majors and became a regularly important part of the Giants offense. In just 140 plate appearances, he earned 1.8 WAR (Wins Above Replacement Player), which ain’t too shabby.

So then ’82 comes around, and expectations are high for Jeff again….just like a year earlier. This time, Jeff started the year out hot despite the Giants struggling to win games.

On April 25th, the Giants went into their game against their longtime rival Dodgers with a mere 4-10 record and trying to stop a 5 game losing streak. By the 8th inning, they were losing again, 3-2, when Jeff came up to the plate with two outs & the bases loaded, and hit his 1st career grand slam! Giants win.

Unfortunately, just a few days after that, Jeff injured his hand diving for a ball in the outfield and would barely play again until July. He still didn’t really get his swing back ’til September though. If we split up his season stats, you can see just how hard the injury affected his whole season—

From that, we can conclude that if he didn’t injure his hand, he probably would’ve batted around .305 for the whole season, and slugged around .460. Although, we’ll never know.

What we do know though, is that when he got hot, the Giants got hot.

This is important, because as was recently pointed out, this was a great division race. In what was largely a division race between the Braves and the Braves and the Atlanta Braves, with the Dodgers sneaking in there. The Giants started slippin into the mix too in September, by going 23-10 after August 27.

What makes this incredibly interesting, is the fact the Giants ended up only 2 games back of the division title when all was said and done. It raises a bunch of questions like — Would the Giants have won just 3 more games during the summer if Jeff Leonard didn’t injure his hand and miss 82 games of the season? If the Giants won the division, could they have beaten the Cardinals or Brewers in the postseason? If the Giants had made the playoffs or won the World Series, would they have still chose to rebuild? Would they have chose to try to keep the winning ways going by signing expensive free agents, or making different trades? How could that have affected the entire National League through the 1980′s?

All the Giants needed was 3 games.

Despite that, I consider 1982 to be his breakout season. He led the world in runs scored with 136, which was the highest total by any player since 1970.

You might think he did that only because of the sluggers behind him in the order like Robin Yount, Gorman Thomas, or Cecil Cooper, but Paul did his part by knocking out 201 hits, 300 total bases, and stealing 41 bases (4th most in the American League).

In fact, Paul had a 3 homer game. One in his first at-bat, then smacking another in the 5th, while the last came off uber-closer Dan Quisenberry. That wasn’t easy back then, when the Royals had pitching and the KC on the Royals cap meant “Kansas City” not “Keystone Cops”.

Whether Molitor was scoring on his own or with a little help from his friends, the fact is, the Brewers were a totally different team on days Paul didn’t cross home plate. In games he scored at least 1 run, the Brew Crew were an unbeatable team, going 70-22. If he didn’t score, they were a weak 24-52! The winning percentage difference is .761 when he scored, and just .316 when he didn’t.

If we look at this from a slightly different angle, we find that the Brewers really couldn’t get the job done without him being on his game. Paul hit .327/.401/.509 in the Brewers victories in ’82, but only .268/.315/.370 in their losses. It doesn’t matter how good the middle of your order is hitting, if your leadoff man has a .315 OBP. Foretunately, Molitor was at his best far more often than he wasn’t.

The Brewers, often called Harvey’s Wallbangers at the time, made the playoffs for the 2nd season in a row, and this time they found themselves in the World Series. Paul, was a big part of Milwaukee’s success in the post-season, killing the Angels pitchers to the tune of a 1.065 OPS, and then got on base at a .394 clip against the Cardinals pitchers in the World Series.

Unfortunately for Paul and his team, they lost game 7 of that series….so close, but yet so far. It would be another 11 seasons before he’d find himself playing for a championship again, this time with the Blue Jays. That time, he won it.

A few years later he retired as one of the all-time great batters….scoring more than 1700 runs, collecting over 3300 hits, stealing more than 500 bases, hit over .300, and an OBP of .369.

Random Paul Molitor facts and stats—

• 39 game hitting streak in ’87 (7th longest to date)
• Hit for the Molitor cycle on May 15, 1991
• 1 of only 4 players with 1850+ RC without hitting more than 250 HR’s
• As of 2010, is a coach for the AAA Rochester Red Wings
• Posted a .521 OBP when the count was 3-2.
• Posted a .520 SLG in the Sky Dome

He’d never slugged higher than .464 or got on base better than .338, but those were different days back then. People only seemed to notice the fact he smacked 21 HR’s and drove in 101 RBI’s 3 seasons earlier. The logic was that with Dan in the lineup, pitchers wouldn’t want to pitch around Ken Singleton or future Hall of Famer Eddie Murray.

Yeah, in hindsight that sounds so crazy that you’ll think I’m joking until you read the March 3, 1982 article, “In the Orioles starting lineup, Dan will do the Driving“, from the Miami News. Yes, people actually believed he’d be the powerful run producer and made a nice pun about it (Ford/driving…get it?).

History shows us what we’d expect though, that Dan didn’t drive the O’s offense. It was all hype, no hop. There were 5 hitters in Baltimore’s lineup who drove in more runs than Dan, and 4 batters smacked more HR’s. So he didn’t even do what was expected.

Maybe it was just too much pressure or something, I don’t know. By May 25, he was batting just beneath the Mendoza line, .197, with only 4 home runs. When the season was finished, he’d only raised his batting average up to .235 and added 6 more round trippers. His OBP for the year, was a horrible .279.

Meanwhile, the guy he was traded for, Doug DeCinces, posted a suave .369 OBP, hit 30 HR’s, drove in 97 runs, and slugged over .500! The trade was clearly a bust for Baltimore.

There was a bright spot in Dan’ season though, which was June 14, when Harvey’s Wallbangers came to town for a visit. In the 7th inning, Dan Ford was sent in to pinch hit with the O’s leading by a run. He put the game out of reach with a grand slam. The victory helped the birds stay ahead of the Brewers in the standings.

The next season, in ’83, Dan would return to being an above average hitter. He wasn’t great, but he was good enough to help the Orioles win the World Series. After that Championship, Dan simply faded into baseball history.

4 Random Dan Ford career stats and facts—

• Coming to the plate with nobody out, he had a .343 OBP and .320 BABIP
• Had a .510 slugging percentage against the Seattle Mariners
• He should’ve played for the White Sox, since he had a .372 OBP in Comiskey Park.
• Hit best in July: .292/.338/.477 with 24 HR’s and 102 RBI’s (158 games started)

He’s probably thinking something like “how much playing time would I get if I were traded to…the Blue Jays?” Or maybe he’s dreaming of what it might be like to switch from being an outfielder to being a pitcher, and whether that would help his career more.

It all starts back in 1974, when Gary was a high valued prospect who was the 4th pick of the draft. He didn’t sign though, and spent the next two seasons being a 1st round pick for two other teams. He seemed to have potential that everybody wanted.

We’ll fast-forward to 1978 from here, when Gary was a 24 year old rookie trying to help the Red Sox win the AL East. In his first 18 games, he did pretty good, hitting .282. In that 18th game itself, he drove in 2 runs and had 3 hits to help the BoSox slip past the Angels 8-6. He’d done his part to keep the Red Sox 7.5 games up in 1st place.

After that game though, it was all downhill. Gary batted just .171, drawing only 1 walk for the rest of ’78. The Red Sox, they went from being a 77-44 club to a 22-20 one after that day. Gary didn’t even get in a game after September 24.

The next year, he spent the season in the minors dreaming of being a major league star while hitting pretty fine .325/.361/.505 in AAA.

When 1980 came, he got another shot at the majors but had trouble getting on base. Same dull story in ’81 too. So, back to Pawtucket he went until September ’82. Still daydreaming of the day…

Then, in 15 major league plate appearances in 1982, he didn’t get a single base hit. Not one. He had a -80 OPS+ for the season. Sure, it’s only a very small number of time at the plate, but at this point, wouldn’t you be thinking about becoming a pitcher? I would.

After the season, he was traded with Carney Lansford to Oakland. Gary spent 1983 playing 101 games in the A’s outfield, and hitting .273 with a 99 ERA+. So, he was just about as average as you could be.

Then came ’84, which was his final season. Although, before it was all over, it probably hit Gary like a ton of bricks that he should’ve been a pitcher all these years, but it was too late to turn around now. On June 25, 1984, he pitched a perfect 1 1/3 innings to finish the game. He induced 3 fly balls and a grounder. Unfortunately, the A’s lost 16-0.

One of those guys who might’ve just been in the wrong line of work all that time.

The record had been set 66 years earlier in 1916 by Hall of Fame catcher Ray Shalk. The closest any catcher had gotten during that time was John Stearns of the Mets, with 25 swipes in 1978.

John’s achievement is even more amazing to me, after I found out that he fractured his ankle on July 5th of the season and spent 5 weeks on the DL. Yet still managed to break the record with more than a month to go and finish the season with 36.

He almost led the team in stolen bases too, but leadoff man Willie Wilson managed to steal his 37th base in the final week of 1982.

The following year, John did an encore by stealing another 28. Through 2009, those 28 steals are still the most any catcher has stolen since he broke the record himself.

John Wathan’s final appearance in the major leagues, was as a pinch runner in the bottom of the 9th of game 6 of the 1985 World Series. The Royals won the game, and the World Series. Nice way to finish a career.

In one of the coolest coincidences ever, Topps added a Larry Gura trivia note to the back of John’s ’82 card. Larry Gura ended up being the winning pitcher of the game in which John broke the steals record.

Random John Wathan facts and stats—

• Drafted by Royals, and played entire career with the team
• Total of 79 steals as a catcher
• Stolen base percentage was 76% as a catcher
• .363 OBP against the White Sox
• Slugged 40 points higher against lefties than he did against righties
• Slugged best when he was batting 4th in the lineup
• Stole 40 bases when was in the #2 slot
• Managed the Royals ’87-’91, to a 287-270 record (.515)

In 1981, Andre was 26 and just made his 1st All-Star game after posting a .325/.380/.598 batting line leading up to the strike. Once in the game, he smacks a 1st inning single off Jack Morris and then steals 2nd base.

So when we collected cards in ’82, Andre was one of the big stars we were all excited about. His Expos were a top notch team, and he was a big reason why. For much of his career we thought he’d be a Hall of Famer. Every time he’d come to the plate against your team, you’d worry a little inside.

Lots of people these days think Dawson shouldn’t have been voted into Cooperstown because his career OBP is so low, and for a while, I was swayed to agree with that view. After all, if you got out more than most other stars, how could you possibly be a Hall of Famer?

That’s a legitimate question, but it really created more questions in my head than it answered.

So after taking a closer look at his stats, I realized that my memory of Andre being one of the most clutch hitters around was pretty accurate. This part seems to be lost on most of the sabermetrics fans. Check out some of how Andre Dawson got on base—

1. .409 OBP (Men on 2nd & 3rd)
2. .373 OBP (Man on 3rd)
3. .366 OBP (Man on 3rd w/ 2 out)
4. .363 OBP (Man on 2nd)
5. .349 (Overall RISP)
6. .315 OBP (Man on 1st)
7. .312 OBP (bases empty)

This makes it clear he didn’t get on base much when there was a runner on 1st base, and that dragged his overall OBP down, making him look worse when you don’t take into account his situational split stats. His RISP OBP would be even higher, if there weren’t a runner on 1st some of the times he had RISP too.

The point is, he didn’t often waste outs when there were runners in scoring position. That’s very important. If you’re going to get out, do it at less crucial points in the game.

Related to this, Andre ranks 48th all-time in Isolated Bases Earned (TB+BB+SB) with 5,690. That’s more than most of the guys in Cooperstown, including Willie McCovey, Ernie Banks, Willie Stargell, Jim Rice, and Richie Ashburn. If Andre did more for his team’s offense when he got on base than those guys, how can you leave him out?

I also like how he signed his name “Bobby” instead of just Bob or Robert. Makes the card feel more like he’s living out little Bobby’s baseball dreams.

Bobby, wasn’t the best player on the White Sox roster, but he had a good couple of years leading into the ’82 season. In ’81, he started getting used as a pinch hitter a little more than the average player and did petty good at it.

Before the next season though, he was sent from the southside to the northside. The Cubs used him almost exclusively as a pinch hitter for the pitcher and as a late innings defensive replacement, before he was sold to the Phillies at the end August.

He actually hit a lot better for Philadelphia than he did in Chicago, but he was still just a bench player though. At first glance, Bob’s stats look like the description of a player beyond his prime who’s just hanging on by filling out a roster spot. Then I found a very interesting detail to his ’82 stats.

When Bobby came to the plate and there were no runners on the bases, he only hit .119 and got on base at a .190 pace. Just what you’d expect from a player fading into obscurity, but, the real surprise is how he hit when runners were in scoring position (RISP), hitting .350 and getting on base at a .480 clip!

Unfortunately for Bob, 52% of his plate appearances came with nobody on base, dragging down his averages. Only 28% of his PA’s came with RISP. If the manager had used him to pinch hit more when runners were in scoring position, Bobby’s career might’ve lasted longer. He could definitely still get the job done when the moment was important.

Maybe it was the power of the ‘stache.

A crucial moment in that season was on Saturday August 29, 1981, when Tim Raines broke for 2nd base and seconds later broke the record for steals in a season by a rookie.

He’d have done it a couple months earlier if the strike didn’t happen and wipe out 2 months of games. Nonetheless, Raines ended the season with 71 steals in 82 atttempts; a remarkable 85.6% success rate.

It’s even more remarkable than it sounds. He did this in just 88 games. As a rookie. If the strike didn’t happen and we assume he plays in the rest of the Expos games, then he’d get 132 steal attempts in 142 games. If he kept stealing at an 86.5% success rate, he’d have swiped 114 bases in ’81.

Of course, if he got that close to the pe-Rickey record 118 steals, I think he’d have pushed to swipe 5 more. Who wouldn’t? I would.

By the time Tim finished his playing days, he had a career .388 OBP, 1571 runs scored, & ran his way to 5th in steals all-time by stealing bases at the highest success rate in history.

So, does Tim Raines belong in the Hall of Fame?

I think the best way to answer that question is by looking at his combined Total Bases + Steals + Walks (IBE), which is a little statistic I created to help me quantify the production by a player for their team. For now I call it Isolated Bases Earned.

These three stats together (TB + BB + SB), isolate how many bases a player earned without the help of teammates, errors, fielder’s choices, intentional walks, or sac hits. It doesn’t include intentional walks, because that’s more to do with the batter’s reputation on that particular moment instead of their ability.

Now let’s compare Tim Raines IBE to a few Hall of Fame sluggers and hitters and see who went farthest on the base paths on their own—

There’s 26 higher on the list than him, and everyone else in history did worse. This is just showing that Tim Raines fits in perfectly with other Hall of Famers when you think about how much they each produced in terms of how far they got themselves on the basepaths without the help of a teammate.

It doesn’t matter if you hit 20 doubles or if you stole second base 20 times, it’s just different styles of getting there on their own. It doesn’t matter if you smack 20 triples or steal third base 20 times, it’s just different ways to achieve the same result of getting into better scoring position.

By the way, if I calculate correctly, then Tim Raines advanced 1 base every .57 plate appearances. That’s a slightly better average than 1 base for every 2 PA’s, without help. Think about that. That’s impressive.

Among other numbers that put him in a class with Hall of Famers, this IBE stat really nails down my belief that he belongs in Cooperstown. There’s just not many players who can say they touched over 5900 bases without help, but Tim Raines is one of them.