Who are the best shortstops in baseball?

Whenever I think about the best players in baseball, especially batters, I never tend to think about shortstops. Players like Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, and Mike Trout come to mind. Big and muscular outfielders who can drive the ball out of the park with consistency. Sometimes I’ll consider pitches like Randy Johnson and Nolan Ryan. Shortstop is a position that I never really think about when it comes to players that are the face of baseball players, so the question that I wanted to ask was who are the best shortstops in major league baseball, regarding both their fielding and batting prowess? When I did this analysis, I made sure that I was looking more at modern baseball (no players that played in the 1950s or lower are included), because I feel that today’s game is so much different than the style of play back in the 1800s and even early 1900s. The way I was going to determine my best shortstops was by looking at which players appeared most in the data tables I was constructing.

I started my research by looking at Lahman’s baseball database, where I used the Fielding csv (comma separated variables) file to see which players had the most assists. An assist in baseball is the measure of a player’s contribution to an out. I felt that this stat along with gold glove winners (which I will get to later), would help determine the best fielding shortstops. When I had my table assists table constructed, I saw a couple familiar names, but I did not want familiarity to bias my research. Ozzie Smith led all players with 8,375 assists over 2,511 games. A stat that did not surprise me here was that most of the players on this table were prior to the 2010s, most being even before the 2000s. The assists stat comes mostly from the number of games that players have.

Next, I looked at Gold Glove winners. This award started in the mid 1950s, so it was a perfect award to check which players were looked upon highly by the baseball community. To my surprise, even though Ozzie Smith was the best assist man at shortstop, he never received a single gold glove. Names that I saw on the other list were Luis Aparicio, Omar Vizquel, Derek Jeter, and Allan Trammell. I think that it is fair to say that these are some of the best fielding shortstops in the league and I am curious to see where they will be after I look at them regarding their batting.

I took most of my time and resources to look at the batting component to evaluate shortstops. While fielding ability is crucial to a shortstop’s value, there were not many crucial stats within the Lahman database that would allow me to decipher who the better fielding shortstops are. I felt that finding each player’s average and total base on balls would be some insightful stats to look at. The average is calculated by total hits divided by total at bats. Once all my data was combined and sorted, I was somewhat surprised to see that the highest batters average was Nomar Garciaparra at 0.312. I considered this to be low because there are many players who have averaged more than 0.330 and none of them are shortstops.

Next, I looked at on base percentage or OBP, which is simply put how many times a player got on base divided by their total at bats. In the Average/Base on Balls and OBP tables I noticed that both Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter were close to the tops of these lists. I have no affiliation or allegiance to any baseball team, so the fact that two Yankee shortstops are being shown as some of the better statistical shortstops may make some baseball fans angry. Some other names present were Nomar Garciaparra, Hanley Ramirez, Barry Larkin, and Alan Trammell.

I felt like a player’s ability to hit the ball further was being somewhat minimized and so I then looked at slugging percentage as well as home runs. Slugging percentage gives more value to doubles, triples, and home runs by multiplying them each by the number of bases. For example, a double gets multiplied by 2. This allowed for players who got more impactful base hits to be valued higher than those who do not. On my list, Alex Rodriguez had the most home runs at 696 and the highest slugging percentage at 0.550. I think that it is clear to say that he might be one of the best shortstops of all time just purely based on these stats. A coupe others listed were Ernie Banks, Cal Ripken, Hanley Ramirez, and Derek Jeter.

What I did to find the best players was by seeing how many times some of the players came up, by using “command F” in my module assignment. I also made sure that it was within the data frames with “.head” included. I did not intend on doing it this way, because I realized that it was too late for what I wanted to implement. If I was to restart and do everything again, I would create a value system where on each top 20 players for each category, the player at the top would receive 20 points and then second place receive 19 and so on. Then I would add up the scores and determine who is the best. But instead, I found that these were my top players, that tended to appear the most frequently and towards the highest of each chart. Alex Rodriguez, Cal Ripken, Derek Jeter, Barry Larkin, and Alan Trammell were the players that I tended to see the most and towards the top of each category. There were so many players that were extremely close to being in this list. Some honorable mentions being Hanley Ramirez, Miguel Tejada, and Nomar Garciaparra. I would say what really set the players I chose apart were silver slugger awards and their ability to get on base.