By Kiley McDaniel

I was listening to the Baseball America Podcast this week (Mar. 14 broadcast, roughly 27:00 in) and a conversation between John Manuel and J.J. Cooper got me thinking. Why has the profile for big league first basemen changed?

First, let me back up and explain what I mean by that question. You can read in our Scouting Tutorial about what I mean by a profile. In short, guys that play first base traditionally had to have 30 HR power, and if they didn’t then they were only playing out of position at 1B until someone with that kind of power came along. I’m obviously simplifying that somewhat, but the power profile at first seems to have, in the last 5 years or so, have gone from a requirement to a preference. Why?

I think a lot of people are qualified to tackle this question from a statistical standpoint (not sure if I’m one of them), but I would suspect that with only about 30 starting first basemen each year, a couple standout seasons would constitute enough noise to neutralize any conclusions to be made from the data. So, I’ll tackle this from a more anecdotal perspective.

The first and most obvious answer is performance-enhancing drugs. The argument goes that there is less power in the game today without players on the juice, so the power profile at first drops a tick or two and here we are. I think this is a lazy and erroneous assumption for many reasons. First, the PED era is clearly more complicated than this, as evidence by different rates of use of different types of PEDs by different types of pitchers and hitters. There’s really no way to say what drugs did what to the game, but logic says most of the effects canceled each other out and only the extreme examples (McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, various bulging forearm veins) are noticed, and thus over-applied in a human attempt to explain something that’s very complicated in a much-too-simple way (cap tip to The Black Swan).

The other obvious answer is “Moneyball.” No, I’m not that guy that throws the title of the book around to explain everything that relates to statistics. That being said, things sure did seem to change after the book came out, and whether Michael Lewis’ work was the cause or the effect really isn’t the point. Teams around this release of the book, for whatever reason, became more open on the whole to taking good hitters with good walk rates and ignoring the low HR totals and high K rates at positions where this normally wasn’t widely accepted (see Catalanotto, Frank). With the copycat nature of the league, only a few Kevin Youkilis’ on good teams shift what some teams think a championship first baseman is and thus the definition is broadened. That’s a short and simple answer. It also makes team officials sound like ignorant sheep and still makes this writer seem lazy; now we dig deeper.

Everyone can agree that athletes these days are more athletic–bigger, stronger, faster (cap tip to Daft Punk). Two topics discussed in the same BA Podcast were 1) the strength of the ‘06 and ‘07 MLB rookie classes and 2) the historic boom in young MLB talent (thanks in part to these rookie classes, detailed in their “Top 25 under 25“). The thing I noticed is that of the roughly 30 players mentioned, almost none of them were first basemen (I recall only Prince Fielder). When running down the league-wide starters at each position to gauge depth at each position over the years, it seems that ever since the Nomar/Jeter/A-Rod/Tejada young shortstop boom that not only has that boom moved around the field (appears to be on third basemen currently), but it hasn’t come to first basemen.

Is this just a blip on the long cycle of random impact player distribution, or something larfer? I submit that this is a trend that will continue for some time.

More athletic players on the whole lead to more power coming from more athletic/demanding positions, and in addition to that, those types of players are the ones that are drafted higher, and advanced quicker through the minor leagues. Keep in mind that these players aren’t necessarily advanced faster because they are talented, but if I learned anything in my time on the club-side (and talking to those who still are), tools and tools at premium positions are what get moved before guys that just hit. So that would partially explain why all these guys tend to be “young players” when they reach the bigs a few years earlier than other players who may be called “veterans” in the second season given their more advanced age.

And the other side of that is that Troy Tulowitzki fitting into these parameters at shortstop raises his perceived (and real) value due to his position, and in Tulowitzki’s case, his outstanding glove. If Troy Tulowitzki was born in the 1970’s, would be be just less athletic enough to be, say, Nick Markakis? Not to say that Markakis isn’t an athletic player because he certainly is. But, as an example, if four up-the-middle players lose just enough athleticism to knock their hitting a notch and play a corner position, that moves them from top 5 to 18th in BA’s rankings. If that thought exercise is accurate, and I suspect it may be, if that downgrade happens four of five times in one rookie class and is multiplied over a few classes, that makes a historic influx of young talent look pretty ordinary.

The third and final side of this theory is that if athleticism in this era is boosted a notch (could be for everyone or just a certain population), then it follows that first base is now the home of players who didn’t get that bump (I bet Prince Fielder would’ve been Prince Fielder in the 1970’s, he doesn’t appear to be a “new breed” of player), or players who might have needed this boost to play up from AAA masher to everyday MLB regular and the new broader profile allows them to fit in (I’d venture Kevin Youkilis may be in this group).

That last paragraph was pretty hypothetical and you can certainly be a reasonable mind and disagree with it. Again, I’m not being so short-sighted to say that all players are more athletic but, as described above, 4-5 premium players shifting from shortstop to right field and other from right field to first base would change the dynamic we’re talking about and maybe never allow the first baseman profile to change.

One statistical proof of this concept could be that teams get more of their power from more demanding defensive positions today (as a percentage of team HRs) than they did 5, 10, or 20 years ago. It sure seems that teams are counting on more B.J. Upton’s for power than Ryan Howard’s these days. It could prove that I’m completely wrong, or show nothing and this is just another (much smaller) example of Underestimating The Fog (pdf) for a pretty complex issue.

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