Are Home Run Hitters the Best Offensive Weapons?

Ty Cobb continues to hold title of being one of the greatest hitters to ever play Major League Baseball. In Braathen’s biography, Ty Cobb The Idol of Baseball Fandom, Braathen describes Cobb’s hitting style as strategic.  Cobb said that he adopted his hitting style from Wee Willie, which was hit the ball where the defense was not.  You can see in our "hit to hit" comparison between Ty Cobb and Miguel Cabrera that Cobb's hitting style worked great for him.

Major League Baseball disallowed the doctoring of baseballs and introduced the lively ball in 1920. This gave hitters a new and great advantage over pitchers. This allowed home run hitters like Babe Ruth to shine. While fans cheered for the high fly out of the park hits, Cobb stuck to what he knew. Ty believed that strategic hitting was a bigger asset to baseball than hitting the ball hard.

This brings up a great debate. Are home run hitters more valuable offensively to their team than non-home run hitters?

According to Evan Kendall there seems to be a statistical correlation between home run hits and strikeouts. Therefore we have to ask ourselves, do the number of home runs a player hits offset the number of strikeouts that they incur?  

To help answer this question we will take a look at Khris Davis's 2018 stats. Khris Davis currently plays for the Oakland A's and is leading the MLB in homeruns with 48. We will compare Khris's 2018 season stats to and Ty Cobb’s 1921 season stats. In 1921 Cobb hit 12 home runs. This is tied for his career best. It is interesting to note that this was only 1 year after the lively ball was implemented by Major League Baseball. 

Home Runs Hit

• Khris Davis leads the MLB in 2018 with 48 home runs.
• In 1921 Ty Cobb hit 12 home runs. This is the most home runs Cobb hit in a single season. Babe Ruth lead the league in 1921 with 59 home runs.  

Batting Average

• This year Khris Davis has a batting average of .247. Christian Yelich leads the MLB in batting average in 2018 at .346.  
• In 1921 Cobb had a batting average of .329. This was the 3rd highest batting average in the 1921 season. Roger Hornsby lead the league in batting average at .397.

Slugging Percentage

• In 2018 Khris Davis's Slugging Percentage was .549. This ranks 9th for the 2018 season.
• In 1921 Cobb’s Slugging Percentage was .596. This ranked 4th for the 1921 season.

These three stats are interesting. Khris Davis had a 47 more home runs that Cobb, but Cobb had more total bases per at bat (slugging percentage). 

One final interesting stat is Offensive WAR. WAR stands for wins above replacement. Offensive WAR summarizes a players total offensive contributions to their team in one statistic. WAR is all inclusive and provides a useful reference point for comparing players. It is a metric that states how many wins a team would sacrifice without a certain player.    

• In 2018 Khris Davis's Offensive WAR was +3.2
• In 1921 Cobb's Offensive WAR was +6.6

This indicates/estimates that without Khris Davis's batting in 2018 the Oakland A's would have lost 3.2 more games than they did and without Ty Cobb's batting in 1921 the Detroit Tigers would have lost 6.6 more games than they did. 

Therefore, Ty Cobb's hitting in 1921 was more valuable to his team than Khris Davis's hitting in 2018. In this analysis the batting of a non-home run hitter (Cobb) was more valuable than the batting of a home run hitter (Khris). However, this does not mean that non-home run hitters are more important to their teams than home run hitters. There are many other statistics that can be looked at and many other comparisons that can be made.