Baseball history: Red Sox broadcaster Ned Martin, a rare sports radio tape, the pitching mechanics of Jack Morris, the strange case of WAR and second basemen

Tuesday 11/25/25

It'll never happen--he would need to be alive--but Red Sox broadcaster Ned Martin should be in the Hall of Fame. One of the best to do it from a time when people were better at their jobs. Erudite and entertaining. Hearing his voice on the air was baseball. Baseball in New England. Boston Red Sox baseball. Martin didn't have the national presence that Vin Scully did. But does the idea of the Boston Red Sox as being indicative of the life forces of New England--the same as its forests, its legends, its ghosts, its craggy shores--not transcend the idea of "merely" regional? Sometimes, the endemic is supernal.

I have acquired a tape of broadcast from Boston sports radio from right after the Game 6 loss to the Mets. The host is "on location" after the debacle...at a Hilton. Haven't listened to it yet. I'm saving it. Maybe for Thanksgiving. Why? What else am I going to do besides work? I'm neither expecting to enjoy this or regret it, which isn't to say I'm expecting to be ambivalent. I was excited to get a copy and put it in my collection of historical baseball audio.

The other night I was watching a video of a game from 1988 between the Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees at Tiger Stadium. Both teams were pretty good that year. Neither was great and neither made the playoffs, the Tigers winning 88 games to finish one back of the Red Sox and the Yankees winning 85.

And yet, this game captivated me. Pulled me in. All went away for a while as I watched. The stakes didn't matter. That this had already happened didn't matter. It was just baseball. Good baseball with interesting players. Jack Morris--in a down year--was on the hill for Detroit. He began his wind-up by stepping back with his left leg. You would never see that now--it'd be taught out of you. Guys bring their non-plant leg to the side, ever so slightly.

Lou Whitaker, of course, was on that Tigers team. Recently on a baseball forum someone asked the question of whether he was the best second baseman of the last fifty years, as Whitaker has the highest WAR for a second baseman over the last half century. That sounds pretty grand when I put it like that, doesn't it?

WAR is very misleading. You can never go by WAR alone. It's folly. Here are Whitaker's numbers for that 1988 campaign: 54 runs scored, 12 homers, 55 RBI, .275 average, 127 OPS+. Obviously the stat that jumps out is that last one. Whitaker always had a pretty high OPS+, which is surprising. He didn't have much pop for most of his career--in the latter portion he did manage to finish seventh in the league once in homers after bulking up, but he was still under 30 homers--and excepting the 1983 season he didn't hit for average. He'd usually be in the .270s. He walked, but not this huge amount, with four seasons of 80+ plus free passes and a high of 90. You look at his OPS+ from year to year and you wonder how it can be what it is.

Whitaker received MVP votes in exactly one season over his nineteen-year career. And by that I mean any votes. That was 1983, when he finished eighth in voting, which was warranted. Good fielder. Solid player. But I just don't see how you get "great baseball" player from what Whitaker did on the field, never mind Hall of Famer, never mind best second baseman of the last fifty years. As we've talked about before, WAR loves second baseman. It boosts them big time. Conversely, WAR doesn't love catchers. You really need to understand this when looking at the WAR totals of the players who play these two positions and their WAR/162 rates.

You want a classic example of how misleading WAR can be when it comes to second baseman? As I just said, Whitaker has the highest WAR total since 1975 of all second baseman who debuted within that time period. He also averaged 5.1 WAR/162. Bobby Grich debuted in 1971. He didn't accumulate as much career WAR as Whitaker, but he had a higher per 162-games average, at 5.7, which is eye-popping. Anything over 5 for anyone at any position for their career is extremely notable. Insofar as WAR goes.

Here's Bobby Grich's line in 1973 as the second baseman of the Baltimore Orioles: 82 runs scored, 12 homers, 50 RBI, .251 average, 116 OPS+. The last stat, again, jumps out, because Grich walked 107 times. But for the most part this is just...middling...right? (He did play strong defense, which goes into the WAR mix.) With these numbers, Grich led all position players in the American League that year in WAR with 8.3. Again, 12 homers, 50 RBI, and a .251 average. Trad stats, sure. But come on. 8.3 WAR for that?! No one thought Grich was this amazing player that year because he wasn't. He was okay.

It's strange to me that so many people say it's a crime Whitaker isn't in the Hall of Fame--because of WAR--but don't say this about Grich, who has slightly less career WAR and a higher per-162 game WAR rate, which is the more significant number, is it not? People hardcore into analytics have made Grich into a personal hobbyhorse on baseball history forums, but they recognize he's a dark horse case for the Hall of Fame, whereas. Whitaker not being in is posited as this injustice. It's neither consistent nor particularly sensical, unless you think WAR conquers all.

Having said this, it wouldn't bother me if both Grich and Whitaker were in the Hall. I'm not like most people are with Hall of Fame matters. I like when so-called "borderline" guys get in as long as it's not some gross injustice done for gross reasons, like with Kevin Lowe getting into the NHL Hall of Fame. Put Bill Freehan in, and Lance Parrish, and Tim Kerr, and Ken Anderson, and Mark Price, and Bill Pierce, and Vern Stephens, and Mike Liut. I don't even believe most of those aforementioned players are that borderline at all really.

Halls of Fame are teaching tools. People might learn something about players like these and how such players were important to the game and a part of its fabric when they otherwise probably wouldn't have ever heard of them. Yes, I know, that's wishful thinking--people are dumb. They don't learn anything. They don't want to learn anything. Well, look at the world and how bad it is and how unhappy so many people are. Maybe get smarter? Maybe start learning? Maybe learn how to learn?

Learning things and caring about things you learn about is one way to make the world a better place. Sure, it's "just" baseball, but it is something. The Halls of Fame are preservation societies, like that village green variety of the Kinks. Someone might combat what I'm saying by remarking that a player not need be enshrined in a place like Cooperstown to be recognized by the Hall of Fame--a placard about a feat of his might be featured there, or his bat from when he hit a big home run--but it's not same. To be in the Hall of Fame in the enshrinement sense is the thing that sticks and transcends mere commemoration. It's a huge difference between, "Oh, there's Lou Whitaker's glove," and "Look, there's Lou Whitaker."

A final thought regarding the 1988 baseball season: The Red Sox won the AL East by a game over Detroit. It was close but not quite that close--the Red Sox had it wrapped up and then lost their last three games as the Tigers won their final three. The Sox finished at 89 wins, but their longest losing streak of the season was only four games. This is very surprising to me. Normally even great teams--teams that go over 100 wins--lose more than four in a row at some point in a season.

But for a team with less than ninety wins not to do it? It can't have happened many times in the history of the sport. These were the Red Sox of Morgan Magic who won twelve in a row at one point and all of those straight games at Fenway during that summer. So you think of them as this super streaky squad, almost like the 1977 Red Sox whom we've discussed (though they were one of the streakiest teams of all-time).

Basically, the 1988 Red Sox were a consistently .500 team with a hot streak spike. You'd have to be in order to have the record they did. with only a high of four straight losses. The biggest losing streak of the 1927 Yankees? Four games. No team has ever lost less than three straight games in a season. The 2013 Red Sox and the 2018 Red Sox, both never lost more than three in a row. I find this an amazing accomplishment that is underappreciated by basically everyone, and known about by hardly anyone.