Worst of all for many of you: no baseball for the foreseeable future (let's be hopeful and hope for a belated and curtailed 2020 season to start after Memorial Day--a holiday that we pray will remain more figurative than literal).
BUT that's not what we're here to look at today--instead, some old business brought up to date (with added context). Some nine years back, we wrote a quick entry called "When Swoboda Was A Star", a slice from David's Day-By-Day Database that positioned the enigmatic but always entertaining Mets everyman on the cusp of stardom. (We won't revisit the incredulity inherent in that idea: as Swoboda himself readily acknowledged in last year's highly entertaining memoir Here's the Catch, the moment we first traced in 2011 and revisit in a somewhat different way now was clearly a mirage.)
So, never really a star--BUT, but...the three months in his career between August 1, 1967 and April 30, 1968 (encompassing 70-75 games) were clearly his finest hour and (as you'll see below) nothing to be ashamed about. But our earlier version, with more games in the sample, tended to emphasize the notion that Ron was on the cusp of becoming a star slugger--a notion that the data below clearly refutes. Let's take a look at the leading hitters in that three-month window:
You can find Ron right in the middle of this table, which is sorted in descending order of OPS. (Yes, we still prefer OPS, particularly when displayed with OBP/SLG: it's that "shape" thing, you know.) He's clearly closer to the low man on this listing--the legendary Duke Sims, whose stats are doing a bang-up imitation of the 2018 Joey Gallo--than to the top guys (Yaz, in '67 hero mode--and our main man Dick Allen, MIA in September '67 due to his hand injury but still a Top 5 hitter all the way).
We've added some color coding to show where component stats for individual players deviate from their overall level of play: the pale blue cells in the BB column show the folks who just won't take a walk (ruining a chance at stardom for Rick Reichardt and a chance at the HOF for Vada Pinson). We should've had blue in the HR column for Matty Alou and Curt Flood, the two non-sluggers who are high-up on the list (a situation that could not happen today). And we should've had orange in the triples column for Lou Brock, as he's tied with Roberto Clemente; we captured that in his SB totals, which were tops for the period.
The two columns at the right are where it becomes clear that Swoboda is not going to move up in "weight class" to be a slugger. XBH% stands for extra-base hit percentage: Sims, the magic portal to post-modern baseball, is the leader with 50% of his hits going for extra bases. You can see who the big sluggers are this way--and Ron is not one of 'em.
The corollary measure is another old fave of ours: we named it XTB here. It measures the percentage of a hitter's total bases that are generated from extra-base hits. As you'll see from comparing the two columns, this one bounces around a bit depending on what type of XBH they are, but the same verdict is reached for Swoboda here as with XBH%: he's got respectable power, but it's below the average of the 32 hitting leaders for the 8/1/67-4/30/68 time slice. And this is his peak performance, whereas most of the guys above him are having just a representative slice of their production displayed here.
The leaders' slash numbers here are clearly different in this time frame than what we see now, but you have to remember that this is the transition into the "Year of the Pitcher" (1968). Swoboda doesn't cover it in his book, but the offensive freeze of '68 took hold in May and never let up. Ron's seasonal progression that year mirrors that perfectly: he hit 7 HRs in April (a record at that time), but managed only four more over the rest of the year.
At the end of the year Yaz was the only AL hitter who managed to hit .300--and the rest of his slash line numbers do not look like what you see above!
So--not quite "so near, and yet so far" for Ron as we had intimated earlier. He made his mark in '69 anyway, despite tumbling out of the firmament. He was just in time to launch himself across the grass at Shea Stadium on October 15 to make that reckless, improbable, heart-pumping catch. I'm sure Ron would smile and agree with Robert DeNiro's off-the-wall character Rupert Pupkin as he finishes his monologue in The King of Comedy: "Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime."
