Willie Mays' Missing Years

I think Bill James wrote somewhere that while in general one should judge a ballplayer’s career by what he did and not by what he might have done, there were two exceptions – men whose careers were interrupted by wartime service in the armed forces and black players who were kept out of the big leagues by segregation.   In each case there is an easy rule of thumb for adding back what was missed.

 For a black player who got to the majors later in life than he would have if the game had not been segregated, one can look at his performance in his first couple of years in the majors,  estimate at what age he would have come up to the majors if not for segregation, and guess that he would have had similar numbers in the years he missed. For service in the armed forces one can be more precise,  taking  a player’s record the last year before he went into the service and the first year after he returned, averaging them, and estimating that he would had about that kind of performance in the missed years. The main beneficiaries of this are players who served in World War II – Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, Joe Dimaggio, and especially Ted Williams who also missed almost two years of playing time serving in the Korean War. To me it puts Williams second only to Ruth in career performance at the plate.

People often forget that the same calculation can be applied to Willie Mays. After a good rookie year in 1951, he missed most of 1952 and all of 1953 serving in the army during the Korean War. Then he had a very good year in 1954. Adding the missed years back makes his remarkable statistics even more so. He turned ninety a few weeks ago, one of the few great players of my childhood still around.