What might have been: Projecting 10 MLB interrupted careers

Projecting what might have been?

Every so often, the career arcs of established stars or promising youngsters present MLB fans with that intriguing question. Whether by death, serious injury, scandal, or outside intervention, life occasionally has a way of interfering with career arcs.

Here we are looking at 10 of the MLB’s most fascinating players and projecting “what might have been.”

Our subjects are players who established themselves either as stars or potential stars, and then – either by fate, war, or their own carelessness – saw their careers aborted. A few, who lost time in mid-career, were able to return and pick up those careers.

Most of the players on this list, however, saw their careers terminated ahead of schedule. Five of those careers ended in death, one in incapacitating injury, and one in scandal.

Projecting what somebody might have done is obviously a risky business, so take these numbers with a grain of salt. There are, however, two valid ways of at least speculating on what might have occurred.

If the player had built up enough of a career record – especially if he was at some point able to return – we can at least base our speculation on what he actually did before and his forced absence.  Projecting in that fashion isn’t a perfect technique – especially with a pitcher his post-return performance might of course have been altered by the wear and tear he avoided thanks to his enforced absence.

In the cases of younger players, though, the actual career record may not be extensive enough to do serious projecting. In those cases, we need to rely on comparables. What did similar players do during the portions of their own careers that occurred following the departure of the player in question?

Our order of presentation is chronological, beginning with one of the great MLB stars of a century ago and continuing into the present one.

Lefty Williams

The career of Claude ‘Lefty’ Williams fell victim to a unique event in MLB history. Williams did not die an early death, nor was his career sidelined by war or serious injury. He was expelled by Commissioner Kennesaw Landis as one of the Black Sox.

Most of the tarnished eight, involved in the throwing of the 1919 World Series, were either at or near the ends of their careers at the time. Not so with Williams, a three-time loser in that World Series. He was just 27, and entering the absolute prime of his career, when he pitched his last game.

And Williams was good. A seven-year veteran, he had already won 82 games, against just 48 defeats, including 45 victories in his final two seasons, 1919 and 1920. Williams made 78 starts and logged 596 innings in those two seasons.

A legitimate comparable to Williams was his own teammate, Red Faber. Also a 20-game winner in 1920, Faber was four years older than Williams, but to that point had piled up 105 victories 68 losses. Faber’s 61 percent winning percentage to that point is not far different from Williams’ 63 percent.

Following exposure of the scandal, Faber – one of Chicago’s honest pitchers – continued to work full-time through his age 41 season, 1930. Some of Williams’ best contemporaries, Walter Johnson and Grover Cleveland Alexander among them, enjoyed similar career spans, so it’s not unfair to project the same thing for Lefty.

On the mound for the White Sox from 1921 through that 1930 season, Faber accumulated a 144-116 record. Considering the decimation worked by the scandal on the White Sox roster, that’s pretty good. Projecting that Williams might have done about the same is not unreasonable.

And since Williams was four years younger than Faber, his mound work might have continued for an additional 40 victories. Combine that with the 144 he projects to have won in the 1920s plus the 105 he had won at the time of his expulsion and you have a 289-game winner.

In other words, we are projecting Lefty Williams as a potential 300-game winner, and likely the winningest pitcher in the history of the Chicago White Sox. That’s the potential he threw away by consorting with gamblers to fix the World Series.

Lou Gehrig

Gehrig’s 1939 sidelining and death two years later from the eponymously named disease is perhaps baseball’s best-known tragedy. At the time of his last game, he was not yet 36, but had amassed 493 home runs and 1,995 RBIs.

Those numbers raise two intriguing questions. Had Gehrig lived out his natural playing span, could he have joined his long-time teammate, Babe Ruth, in surpassing 600 home runs, and might he have set the all-time MLB record for runs batted in?

Projecting the answers to those questions obviously requires some serious speculation. Here goes.

In 1934, his age 31 season, Gehrig led the league with 49 home runs. His total rose and fell with predictable regularity, but by 1938 – his last plausibly healthy season – sat at 29. That’s a 40 percent decline over four seasons, or about 10 percent per season.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that 10 percent decline rate, and let’s further assume that Gehrig continued to play until age 40. That’s plausible; World War II was by then infusing MLB with players either too young or – as in Gehrig’s case too old—to be drafted.

At that rate, Gehrig would have produced 26 home runs in 1939, 23 in 1940, 21 in 1941, 19 in 1942, and 17 in 1943. That’s 106 home runs atop the 493 he actually retired with, leaving him one measly home run short of the 600 mark.

Projecting Gehrig’s RBI total is more satisfying to his fans. Between 1934 and 1938, his RBI totals declined from 166 to 114, a 32 percent drop or 8 percent per season. Projecting in the same fashion, that rate of decline gives Gehrig105 in 1939, 96 in 1940, 89 in 1941, 82 in 1942 and 75 in 1943.

Projecting in that manner adds 447 RBIs to Gehrig’s actual total of 1,995.

Gehrig presently stands seventh all-time in MLB history in RBI, behind six pretty familiar names. The six ahead of him are Hank Aaron (the champ with 2,297), Babe Ruth, Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez, Cap Anson, and Barry Bonds.

By projecting Gehrig to get those extra 447 RBIs, his total rises to 2,442, easily eclipsing everybody ahead of him and building a margin of 145 over Aaron.

Bob Feller

Feller is the first of three of the MLB’s premier stars who lost significant amounts of time to World War II. In his case, the loss amounted to the better part of four seasons from his prime. Feller was approaching his age 23 season when he joined the Navy, failing to return until well into the 1945 season.

What might Feller’s career achievements look like had he not missed those nearly four full seasons at war? Primarily at issue here are both his career win and strikeout totals.

Prior to the war, Feller had established himself as one of the best, if not the best, pitchers in the game. He led the American League in wins annually from 1939 through 1941, with 24, 27, and 25 victories.

Given that he returned in 1946 as just a 27 year old, presumably very much in his prime, one would not have expected much decline. That’s accurate: Following a 5-3 partial season in1945, Feller won 26 games in 1946, and 20 more in 1947.

Plainly, the four seasons Feller effectively lost to war all projected to be at minimum 20-win seasons; in fact, he averaged 24.4 wins in the three years prior and two years subsequent to his return. That works out to about an additional 96 victories.

Feller retired in 1956 with 266 victories, so those potential 96 added wins would have run his total to 362. That would tie him with Kid Nichols for seventh all-time on the MLB wins list, behind only Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Christy Mathewson, Pud Galvin, and Warren Spahn.

On to the strikeout question. In the four seasons prior to entering the service, Feller averaged 252 strikeouts, leading the league every year. In the first two full seasons following his return, he averaged 277 more; again, no sign of a decline.

Projecting his average strikeouts for those four absent-to-incomplete seasons at 260 per season adds 1,040 strikeouts to Feller’s career total of 2,581. He would then have retired as No. 1 on the strikeout list with 3,621. That would have stood as the record into the 1980s, although it has since been passed by Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Steve Carlton, Bert Blyleven, and Tom Seaver.

Obviously, the exercise of projecting Feller is based on a speculative premise; namely, that the four additional seasons Feller would have pitched in mid-career would not have affected his latter-career numbers.

Hank Greenberg

The Tiger star’s lost time to military service actually pre-dated America’s involvement in World War II. Drafted into the Army following the 1940 season, he missed most of 1941, but was prepared to return to the Tigers in 1942 until Pearl Harbor scrambled those plans. Greenberg remained in military service until late in the 1945 seasons, costing him three full MLB seasons and parts of two others.

Greenberg was 30 years old in 1941, and 34 in 1945, so his missed time coordinated with something approaching his prime.

In the three seasons prior to being drafted, Greenberg hit 58, 33, and 41 home runs. In the two full seasons following his 1945 return, he hit 44 and 25, so the dropoff really occurred following the war and not during his lost seasons.

Since Greenberg had produced 40 or more home runs in four of the five seasons before and after the war’s outbreak, projecting that he might have averaged 40 home runs during his missing five near-prime seasons is reasonable.

There’s no guarantee of that, of course. His home run rate did during his two partial seasons, 1941 and 1945, although that could easily be attributed to extenuating circumstances.

Projecting Greenberg for another 40 home runs for each of his five missing or largely missing seasons, the 316 home runs he hit otherwise suddenly elevates Greenberg into the 500 home run class.

Ted Williams

Possibly MLB’s most famous warrior, Williams lost all of 1943 through 1945 while serving as a Marine pilot during World War II, then reprising that assignment in Korea during much of 1952 and 1953.

The total lost time amounted to nearly five full seasons, the first three coming during Williams’ age 24, 25, and 26 years. He was 33 when recalled early in the 1952 season and 34 when mustered out in mid-season 1953.

Williams finished his career with 2,654 base hits, 521 home runs, and 1,839 RBIs. Could he have topped 3,000 hits and/or 600 home runs, and could he, like Gehrig, have made a run at the MLB RBI record?

In his four complete seasons prior to World War II Williams averaged 187 base hits. Had he played at a normal level, that projects to have added 561 hits to his total during the war. His hit production fell off in the four seasons prior to 1952, largely due to a crippling injury in 1950, but he still averaged 164.

If you add the 561 hits he projects to have gotten in the 1940s, plus the 328 he projects to have gotten during Korea, and subtract the 41 base hits he actually did accumulate during his partial 1952 and 1953 seasons, Williams’ career hit total rises from 2,614 to 3,502.

At the time of his retirement, that would have ranked Williams behind only Ty Cobb (4,189) and Tris Speaker on the hit list. Since then Pete Rose (4,256), Hank Aaron, and Stan Musial have surpassed what would have been Williams’ total, the projection leaving Ted sixth on the current hit list.

I’ll make the rest short: By the same process, Williams projects to have lost about 159 home runs 640 RBIs during the military portion of his career absences. (Injury-based absences are not factored in.) Adding those totals to his existing full-season numbers and subtracting his 1952 and 1953 partial season results, he winds up with 666 home runs (as opposed to the 512 he actually hit) and 2,442 RBIs rather than his actual 1,839.

Those numbers would rank him sixth in home runs (behind Bonds, Aaron, Ruth Rodriguez, and Pujols) and first in RBIs, 145 up on Aaron.

Those of you with good memories will recall that a few pages ago we also postulated that a healthy Gehrig would have projected out to 2,442 RBIs. That coincidence would have created a dead heat between Williams and Gehrig at the top of the MLB career RBI category.

Tony Conigliaro

A rising star in the Boston Red Sox outfield, Conigliaro was only 22 when he was laid low by a Jack Hamilton beanball in the heat of the 1967 pennant race.

As a result of the injuries, which included several fractures near his eye, Conigliaro was sidelined for the remainder of the 1967 season as well as all of 1968. He returned for all of 1969 and 1970, but never overcame his eye injury and was not the same player.

Following experimental stints with the Angels in 1971 and Red Sox in 1975, Conigliaro was released, batting just .123 at the time. He suffered a crippling heart attack in 1982 and lingered for eight more years until dying at age 45 in1990.

Projecting Conigliaro is an interesting exercise because his two closest comparables during his productive age years – 20 through 22 – are both major current stars. They are Juan Soto and Bryce Harper. The problem with using either is that since their careers are ongoing, there’s no sufficient database to project Conigliaro onto.

That reduces us to projecting what a healthy Conigliaro might have done based on what he actually did prior to his beaning.

At the time of his injury, Conigliaro had appeared in 80 percent of his team’s 1967 games. Assuming that same ratio, he would have made about 36 more starts that season, gotten about 150 more plate appearances, and finished with a total of approximately 140 base hits, 27 home runs, and 90 RBIs. Let’s start there.

We going to apply some broad, star-level performance variations to project Conigliaro going forward: performances improvements in the range of 1 to 3 percent annually through his age 27 season, followed by a four to five-season steady peak, followed by declines in the same range through age 35.

When we do that, we discover a healthy Tony Conigliaro ranking among the all-time Red Sox greats. The numbers work out to 2,573 base hits, 501 home runs, and 1,622 runs batted in.

Here’s where those totals would rank him.

• Hits: Third all-time behind Carl Yastrzemski (3,419) and Ted Williams (2,654).
• Home runs: Second all-time behind Williams (521).
• Runs batted in: Third all-time behind Yastrzemski (1,844) and Williams.

Lyman Bostock

Bostock was a 27-year-old star outfielder with the California Angels when he was gunned down while riding in the back seat of an automobile in Gary, Indiana.

The shooter, apparently the jealous ex-husband of one of the car’s other occupants, fired into the car with a shotgun, striking Bostock in the head. He died a few hours later. At trial, the shooter was found innocent by reason of insanity.

Completing his fourth MLB season at the time of his death, Bostock was an established star. In three previous seasons with the Twins and this one with the Angels, he had a career .311 average with 250 RBIs, a .361 on base average, and a .791 OPS.

He got MVP votes in each of his last two seasons.

Dying as early as he did on his career path makes projecting what Bostock might have accomplished especially dicey; so many natural elements might have intervened. Baseball-Reference projects the closest comparable to Bostock as Curt Walker, an outfielder with the 1920s Cincinnati Reds.

The best way to speculate about what Bostock might have done, then, is to look at what Walker actually did.

Bostock was concluding his age 27 season when he was killed. From his age 28 season onward, Walker played six more full seasons, accumulating 909 hits in 2,998 official at bats. That works out to a .303 average. Atop the 624 hits in 2,004 official at bats Bostock actually had, that projects to have allowed him to conclude his career in 1983 with a .306 batting average, not far from the .311 average he actually had.

Thurman Munson

Veteran backstop and captain of back-to-back Yankee World Series winners in 1977 and 1978, Munson was 32 in August of 1979 when he used an off day in the schedule to learn how to fly. The plane crashed and he was killed.

By that time, Munson was in his 11th major league season, all of it with the Yankees. He was 32 and had caught 1,423 games. Never a great hitter based on the statistics, he nonetheless had hit 113 home runs with a .292 lifetime batting average and 701 RBIs.

For those reasons, his managers generally batted Munson third in those championship lineups, directly in front of Reggie Jackson.

Baseball-Reference identifies several good comparables to Munson, among them Terry Steinbach, Tim McCarver, and Manny Sanguillen. Using those three, we should be able to construct a reasonable projection for what Munson might have had left.

Munson died about 70 percent of the way through the 1979 season. If we merely extrapolate his actual home run and RBI numbers out through the remainder of that year, his career production climbs to 114 homers and 718 RBIs.

The problem is that our three close comparables produced widely disparate results after age 33. Steinbach, a catcher for the 1980s Oakland Athletics, had by far the most productive late career. Occasionally moving out from behind the plate to first base or DH, he added 80 home runs and 315 RBIs to his post-age 33 totals.

Neither McCarver nor Sanguillen had anything approaching that level of success in their latter years. They averaged just nine home runs and 89 RBIs as post-33 players. That’s not surprising, given the famously grueling nature of playing behind the plate.

Munson’s use arc was far more similar to McCarver’s or Sangulllen’s than to Steinbach. At the time of his death, he had caught 1,277 games. McCarver and Sanguillen caught 1,238 and 1,089 through their age 33 seasons; Steinbach only 800.

It’s more likely, then, that what remained of Munson’s career resembled what McCarver and Sanguillen did in their post-age 33 seasons.

To be generous, put Munson at an additional 15 home runs and 100 RBIs in subsequent seasons and retirement in the early 1980s. Combined with what we project him to have done in what was left of 1979 and you have 129 home runs and 818 RBIs.

Yordano Ventura

Ventura probably ranked as the ace of the Kansas City Royals’ rotation when he died in January of 2017. Ventura was alone behind the wheel of his Jeep when it left a Dominican Republic road and overturned; Although there were no witnesses to the accident, it is believed he died on impact.

Between his callup late in 2013 and his death, Ventura had run up 38 victories for the Royals, not counting his win in the 2014 World Series. His career-best was a 14-10 record in 30 starts in 2014.

As with Bostock, Ventura died so early in his career that the best way to approach an assessment of what might have been being by the use of comparables. In the case of Ventura, the two closest are Gene Conley and Scott Bankhead.

Both, however, are problematic, even among MLB pitchers.

Conley was a right-hander for the 1950s Milwaukee Braves. Between his age 26 season – Ventura’s age when he died – and his departure from the majors in 1962, Conley won 58 games, lost 68, and pitched about 1,066 innings working both as a starter and in relief.

Bankhead pitched for several teams in the 1980s and 1990s. Between his age 26 season and his retirement (at age 31), he compiled a 19-16 record in about 275 innings.

Obviously, none of those totals are especially remarkable, nor do they suggest that Ventura was on the way to a great career when he died.

The reasons probably have to do with the particular vagaries that always surround pitchers.

In Bankhead’s case, the vagary was health. Plagued by persistent arm problems, he never made double figure starts for any of his four teams, eventually retiring at age 31.

Conley was an even more unusual case. A dual sport athlete, he was also a forward for the Boston Celtics. After “giving up” pro basketball for baseball in 1961, Conley went back to hoops following the 1962 baseball season, trying to make it with the New York Knicks.

One year later he was out of both sports.

Ventura was no basketball player. But he was as subject to arm problems as any other hard thrower, so it’s entirely plausible that his career could have ended in his early 30s, as did Conley’s and Bankhead’s.

If not, he would be preparing today for his age 31 season,  either with the Royals or elsewhere.