Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Sports

06/24/07 SPORTSTALK: Stark raving mad

Stark raving mad New book tries too hard to slam Andruw BY ADAM KROHN ESPN senior baseball writer Jayson Stark's book "The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseb...

Andruw Jones CREDIT: Rob Tringali/Getty Images

Stark raving mad
New book tries too hard to slam Andruw
BY ADAM KROHN

ESPN senior baseball writer Jayson Stark's book "The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History" hit bookstores earlier this month, and he couldn’t resist writing something inflammatory to stir up sales. In the book, Stark dubs some of the game's greatest athletes—including Nolan Ryan, Sandy Koufax, Reggie Jackson and Lou Brock—as among the most overrated players of all time.

Those are ridiculous enough, but Stark doesn’t stop there. On page 159, he has the audacity to christen the Braves’ Andruw Jones as the single most overrated center fielder in the history of the game. Is this guy serious?

Oddly enough, Stark spends a more time discussing Jones’ accomplishments—two homers in the 1996 World Series at age 19; nine Gold Gloves, 350+ home runs and 1,000+ career RBI’s all by the age of 30—than he does explaining his assertion. When he does finally get around to backing up his argument, he begins with a conversation he had with an “anonymous” scout. Based on this conversation, Stark claims to “research” Jones’ play over the years, and finds a decline in the number of putouts Jones has recorded, along with a decline in his “zone rating” (a percentage of balls fielded by a player in his typical defensive “zone”).

As far as putouts, there was a five-year span ('98-'02) in which Jones recorded more than 400 of them—and was the first to do so since Willie Mays, arguably the greatest center fielder of all time. Since that span, he’s still averaged 382 putouts a season. Yet because Jones failed to sustain this historic pace, Stark says he’s overvalued. But get this: Heading into the week, Jones was comfortably leading the major leagues in putouts by all outfielders.

Then there’s the "zone rating," a statistical category with so many holes that its creator, John Dewan, has since come up with two amendments to it: the revised zone rating and the plus/minus system. All are considered misleading because they fail to credit fielders who catch balls out of their “zones”—which Jones does regularly.

Stark goes on to say that Jones' defense has suffered because he's trying too hard to become an offensive force. Despite the fact that Jones hit 51 homers in 2005, Stark criticizes him for having the lowest batting average, slugging percentage and OPS (on-base plus slugging average) of any other player to hit more than 50 home runs in a season. He then points to Bill James' obscure “runs created” statistic, which bears out that two players with only 20 home runs, Brian Roberts and Derek Jeter, “created” more runs than Jones, even though Roberts and Jeter are leadoff hitters, meaning they have more opportunities to create runs.

And that's Stark's entire argument. His manipulation of statistics and explanation of a slight decline in performance are the sole basis for his claim that Jones is the most overrated center fielder of all time. Anyone can manipulate statistics any way they choose. And show me an athlete whose performance didn't decline with time.

In an email to Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer Dave O'Brien, Stark defends himself by saying the book was “supposed to make people think, and to raise questions about why we perceive players in certain ways.” But Stark's assessment doesn't raise questions or change the perception of the players he thinks are overrated—it only changes the public's perception of him and raises questions about his credibility. If you ask me, Stark is the one who’s overrated.

Talk to Adam at adamkrohn@sundaypaper.com.