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Saturday, July 29
Larkin's longevity exceedingly rare
Special to ESPN.com
Editor's note: The team of writers from the Baseball Prospectus will be writing twice a week for ESPN.com. You can check out more of their work at their website at baseballprospectus.com.
"That the Reds are forced to trade Barry Larkin for economic reasons is just another example of how the era of free agency has ended the notion of a player spending his entire career with one team. With salaries out of control, a player's loyalty is to the almighty buck first and his team second and when the money is better somewhere else, that's where the player ends up.
Forty years ago, great players were synonymous with the teams they played for: Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays. Today, aside from throwbacks like Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn, the idea of playing fifteen or twenty years with the same team is as outdated as the two-handed catch."
OK, that quote didn't actually appear in any media outlet last week. I made it up, but the main points in it could be found in almost any article written on how those poor Reds were forced to trade their captain and one shining link to their 1990 World Series championship.
Of course, what then happened was that Larkin, far from forcing the Reds to trade him, forced them to keep him -- and when the Reds finally gave him what he wanted, it wasn't to be traded to a big-city contender, but rather to let him finish his career with the same team he has played for since 1986.
Some media types have continued to put their own Pollyanna spin on the affair, lamenting that Larkin's loyalty to his team is an exception that simply makes the mercenary nature of the game even more striking. But is that really the case? Are players really less likely to spend their entire careers with the same team today than they did in 1960, or 1920?
To study this issue, I looked at every season and counted how many players that year had played in the major leagues for 15 seasons or more (we'll call these players "veterans"). I then figured out how many of those veterans had been with the same franchise for their entire career. Here are the results for the 20th century, divided into five-year increments.
Years Veterans Loyal Percent 1900-04 48 1 2.1% 1905-09 72 0 0.0% 1910-14 62 2 3.2% 1915-19 43 3 7.0% 1920-24 49 14 28.6% 1925-29 124 18 14.5% 1930-34 125 14 11.2% 1935-39 99 19 19.2% 1940-44 97 22 22.7% 1945-49 93 22 23.7% 1950-54 29 8 27.6% 1955-59 68 17 25.0% 1960-64 92 19 20.7% 1965-69 89 27 30.3% 1970-74 136 37 27.2% 1975-79 168 27 16.1% 1980-84 263 27 10.3% 1985-89 295 25 8.5% 1990-94 215 24 11.2% 1995-99 168 12 7.1%Early in the century, veterans who stayed loyal to the same team were almost non-existent. Of course, that's because the American League didn't start play until 1901, and many NL teams folded in 1899 -- Honus Wagner, for example, started with the Louisville Colonels in 1897, but when that team closed up shop, he was transferred to the Pirates in 1900, where he played until he retired in 1917. But from 1920 on, about 20 percent of the veterans in baseball each year had been with the same club since the beginning of their career. This loyalty reached its peak in the late 1960s, when just over 30 percent of the veterans in the game had worn only one uniform. In 1969 alone, there were seven "loyal veterans": Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays, Harmon Killebrew, Al Kaline, Brooks Robinson, Ernie Banks and Hank Aaron. The raw number of loyal veterans remained fairly stable into the free agency era, but that is deceptive, because the total number of veterans was going up, as expansion and better conditioning techniques allowed more and more players to stay in baseball into their late 30s. In 1988, there were eight "loyal veterans" -- George Brett, Frank White, Mike Schmidt, Dwight Evans, Bob Forsch, Robin Yount, Dave Concepcion and Jim Rice. But whereas in 1969 there were only 12 "unloyal" veterans -- players who had switched teams at least once -- in 1988 there were 48 of them. And in the last five years, the number of loyal veterans has dropped in half. In 1992 there were still six of them -- Brett, Lou Whitaker, Alan Trammell, Robin Yount, Paul Molitor and Jim Gantner. But since Trammell retired in 1996, there have been only two: Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn. Two out of 36 total veterans had been one team since the beginning. Larkin, in his 15th major league season, makes it three this year. Chuck Finley would have made it four, but he left the Angels as a free agent. Today, the percentage of veterans who have stayed with the same team their whole career is at its lowest point since 1920. Loyalty among veterans today is less than one-quarter what it was 30 years ago. However, let's loosen the definition of "veteran" a little bit, since relatively few players are able to last in the major leagues for 15 or more years. If we define a veteran as any player who has been in the major leagues for just 12 seasons, and run the study again, here are the results since 1920:
Years Veterans Loyal Percent 1920-24 202 40 19.8% 1925-29 285 40 14.0% 1930-34 244 33 13.5% 1935-39 241 49 20.3% 1940-44 227 45 19.8% 1945-49 205 34 16.6% 1950-54 159 37 23.3% 1955-59 215 62 28.8% 1960-64 239 42 17.6% 1965-69 279 69 24.7% 1970-74 384 88 22.9% 1975-79 448 83 18.5% 1980-84 622 60 9.6% 1985-89 627 83 13.2% 1990-94 506 51 10.1% 1995-99 519 42 8.1%The same results: loyalty has been declining steadily for the last 20-25 years, since the era of free agency began, and is now at its lowest level in more than eighty years. I must confess: I did not expect these results at all. While free agency has given players the freedom to change teams as they like, rules like the 10/5 player (allowing a ten-year veteran, the last five with the same team, to veto any trade) has also given players the freedom to stay where they are. Loyalty used to be a one-way street; teams could trade players at any time but the player had input on where he would play. Remember, when Curt Flood challenged baseball's reserve clause in 1970, paving the way for free agency to begin, he did so not because he wanted to change teams, but because he did not want to change teams: he wanted to remain in St. Louis, where he had played for 12 years, rather than be traded to the Phillies against his will. But while modern baseball has made loyalty a mutual decision, free agency and the escalating revenue gap between teams today has made a truly longterm relationship between player and team impractical, if not impossible. Barry Larkin really is the exception. Reds fans, appreciate him while you can. You may not see another like him in a long, long time. Rany Jazayerli, MD, is co-author of the annual Baseball Prospectus. Rany may be reached at ranyj@baseballprospectus.com.
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