Where's does A-Rod rank among the all-time greats?
A-Rod's 3,000th hit is in the books, so now let's take the long view when it comes to his career.
By
Dayn Perry
•
3 min read
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Yankees warrior-poet, DH and very occasional third and first baseman Alex Rodriguez recently recorded his 3,000th career hit (a home run!). In matters not unrelated, A-Rod is already at 667 home runs and counting, and he's already topped 2,000 RBI. Soon, he'll score his 2,000th run. Rather long ago, Rodriguez achieved benchmarks such as 500 doubles; 1,000 extra-base hits; 1,000 walks; 4,000 times on base and 5,000 total bases. All of this is to say, A-Rod has authored a deeply impressive career -- one of the best ever on a face-value basis.
There's the thing, though. We all know about A-Rod's history of PED use and his Biogenesis entanglements. Because of that sordid history, some onlookers will feel sanctioned to dismiss A-Rod's bestowals on a wholesale basis. I, however, am going to proceed with this particular exercise without paying any mind to any of that. I have no idea to what extent the PED regimens that A-Rod undertook improved his performance, and neither do you. Similarly, I have no idea to what extent the "steroid era" concoctions manipulated performance over and above what the amphetamines of the 1960s and 1970s afforded their many ball-playing users. (And neither do you.) If you disagree with this supposition of mine, then feel free to thunder about it to no one in particular in the comments section below. The walls are padded, and there's a water fountain in the corner.
So, where does A-Rod presently rank among the all-time greats? Granted, this is a bit premature since A-Rod is, a) still very productive and, b) signed through 2017. As such, he's very likely to pad those career totals to a significant extent. That means there's still time for A-Rod to improve his already lofty standing.
First and foremost, we're talking about a hitter who crafted the above "inner circle" offensive numbers noted above. We're also talking about player who spent almost 11,000 defensive innings at shortstop and was a pronounced defensive asset all the while. He went on to spend more than another 10,000 defensive innings at third base and was a pronounced defensive asset for most of that span. We're also talking about a player who has stolen 323 bases at an 81 percent success rate and has taken the extra base 46 percent of the time (the league-average mark is almost always between 39-41 percent). In other words, A-Rod has on balance been a complete ballplayer for most of his 2,631 games played (he's 35th all-time and counting on the all-time games played list).
To get a thumbnail idea of how A-Rod compares to other all-time greats in terms of career value, let's turn to the Baseball-Reference version of WAR (regarding the utility of WAR, see here). WAR is a somewhat blunt instrument -- mostly because of the uncertainties of the defensive component -- but as single-shot metrics go, it's our best gauge of a player's overall value. So here, per B-Ref, is the top 15 all-time ...
And there's the firebrand man of the hour in 11th place all-time. That indeed feels about right. Of course, as noted, Rodriguez is still going strong. This season, he's on pace to log a WAR of 4.2. Assume season-to-season decline of 0.5 wins, and A-Rod figures to add from now through the end of his current contract about 9.4 WAR. If he's indeed a 3.0-win player in 2017, then he's not going to have any problem finding work in 2018 if he wants to continue playing (absent some kind of informal "black-balling" of course). Even if A-Rod does retire after the 2017 season, when his Yankee contract ends, then, according to our quick-and-dirty "cocktail napkin"-level calculations, he's going to have 126.9 WAR, which, as you can see above, would put him a hairsbreadth behind Rogers Hornsby and in ninth place all-time among position players. If A-Rod decides to play beyond 2017, then it's entirely possible that he'd pass Hornsby and Stan Musial.
On another level, this may undersell what A-Rod could've been. If, when he joined the Yankees prior to the 2004 season, Derek Jeter had moved off short in deference to the superior defender, then A-Rod would've had a substantially higher WAR by virtue of his manning a more premium defensive position for all those years. But that didn't happen, of course.
Things as they are, though, A-Rod has, in the here and now, a case that he's among the 10 greatest position players of the modern era. You might not particularly like that, as realities go, but that doesn't make it go away.
