Stan Musial, as you may have heard, joined the ranks of the "formerly living" today, and is now enshrined in that other Hall of Fame. There's been some banter on Facebook about whether he's underrated. Here's my take.
If Stan Musial were incredibly underrated, we could expect the following statements to be true:
- A Google search for his name would yield fewer results than a similar search for the names of players of comparable greatness
- He would not have achieved the recognition he deserved (in terms of Hall of Fame voting, All-Star voting, MVP voting).
To see whether he was under-rated by the first criterion, I looked at Bill James' ratings of the greatest ballplayers and took five players: the two major leaguers immediately ahead of Musial, Stan, and the two right behind him. They were (in order) Ted Williams, Walter Johnson, Stan Musial, Tris Speaker and Henry Aaron.
The results were interesting. With the exception of Aaron, who was fifth according to James in terms of greatness but is most famous because of the all-time home run crown he had until recently,* the order of the players' greatness (according to James) corresponded with the order of their fame (according to Google). This exercise did not show Stan Musial as very underrated. It showed him as appropriately famous, or perhaps a bit less famous than we would expect.
*And who - come to think of it - might have the most common name among these people. Man, this isn't scientific. I re-did the search adding "baseball" to each player's name (i.e. I searched for "stan musial baseball") and the order was similar. Aaron was the only one whose order changed; he wasn't as much higher than expected as he was the first time.
Looking at the second criterion, I see a mixed bag. Musial was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility with over 90% of the vote. He played in 24 All-Star Games, including six in years that he had fewer than 75 RBIs while playing an offensive position. In those six years, he never hit more than 17 home runs and just twice batted .300. I'm really supposed to be looking at how he is rated now (I think) and not how he was rated when he played (which is really what those numbers reflect), but I certainly don't see any signs of his being underrated by looking at his All-Star record.
In terms of MVP awards, Stan won 3 of them. bWAR says he should have won four, but even if we think he should have won more than that, that wouldn't really show that he is underrated. With the exception of a juiced Barry Bonds, ballplayers never win more than a few MVP awards, as the writers (who vote) seem to like to "spread the wealth."
Overall, I don't see any indication from the voting record to show that Musial is under-rated.
All this being said, "stan musial baseball" yields under a million hits on google while "ted williams baseball" yields over 3 million. So, yeah, he's probably underrated. But I don't see evidence that the extent of it is criminal.
