Vern Stephens!

Vernon Decatur Stephens would be turning 89 years old today. He died of a heart attack in 1968, two weeks after his 48th birthday.

Here are Stephens' all-time ranks among shortstops in various categories (min. 5000 PA and at least 70% of career games at short):

OPS+: 121, 5th
HR: 247, 4th
RBI: 1174, 5th
Runs Created: 1061, 17th
Runs: 1001, 31st
2B: 307, 33rd

Stephens' Hall of Fame case is an interesting one (certainly more interesting than the 2008 Vets' Committee thought it was, giving him less than 25% of the vote while an apparently-but-not-really similar Joe Gordon got 83%). He's clearly among the best-hitting shortstops of all time, with a career that was just a bit too short to compile overwhelming counting stats (though he did have more PA than two of the four ahead of him on the OPS+ list, Nomar and Lou Boudreau), and it appears that he was at least a pretty decent fielding shortstop. Sounds like a Hall of Famer, right?
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According to Michael Hoban's Career Assessment/Win Shares system (thanks to Lar for alerting me to that), Stephens just misses the cutoff for Hall of Fame worthiness -- his score of 246 is just four points below the benchmark -- but comes in ahead of real Hall of Famers Joe Sewell, Dave Bancroft and Rabbit Maranville (and well ahead of a few other schlubs that made it in somehow). By the Bill James-created Hall of Fame Monitor and Hall of Fame Standards tests, Stephens falls well short, but his list of "similar players" (another James creation) shows five of his ten most similar players as Hall of Famers (Gabby Hartnett, Tony Lazzeri, Bobby Doerr, Bill Dickey and Joe Gordon), a sixth being should-have-been HOFer Joe Torre.

Looking at his numbers, he looks like he's probably a Hall of Famer to me. (It should be noted that Baseball Prospectus disagrees; his 53.0 WARP3 is a lot closer to Omar Vizquel than, say, Pee Wee Reese.) But.

The problem here is World War II. As in, Stephens didn't fight in it, failing his army physical thanks to an old knee injury. Nothing wrong with that, except that many of his best seasons came at a time when the top major league talent was severely depleted. While so many of the big boys were off preserving liberty, Stephens hit .291/.354/.462 (130 OPS+) with 80 homers from 1942 to 1945. Those aren't too far off his career rates, but considering he was ages 21 through 24 at the time, it's fair to say that he probably wouldn't quite have been performing at that level yet if he had been playing against top competition. He did have some really nice post-war years, averaging 29 homers and 147 RBI (twice leading the league in the latter category) in a stacked Red Sox lineup from 1948-50. Still, though, he had a pretty short career for a Hall of Famer to begin with; if you discount just a little for those war years, I think he falls short.

He's mostly remembered (if at all) as a member of the Red Sox, for those huge RBI years and for being part of a really solid infield that also included Johnny Pesky and Hall of Famer Bobby Doerr. He spent half again as much time, however, with the St. Louis Browns, coming up with them and then returning to move to Baltimore with the team in 1954. I think Stephens was probably the third or fourth greatest player in Browns history (1902-1953). Which gives me an idea for another series of posts...more on that tomorrow or Monday.

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