Dawson’s Freak

Posted: November 14th, 2007 | Filed under: Baseball | 22 Comments »

While we wait for the MVP picks — I’m calling A-Rod and Jimmy Rollins right now — I thought it might be fun to go back and look at the worst one I can remember. I see a couple of people mentioned in comments too, which tells me I was on the right track writing this.

You have to remember what it was like in the summer of 1987. Home runs were just flying out of ballparks. It was zany. I remember I was an agate clerk on the desk at The Charlotte Observer — an agate clerk being the guy who typed in all the high school boxscores and results (I still break out in sweat when I go past a high school track meet) and made sure the daily baseball standings and daily leaders were correct.

I was not especially good at my job because — I know this will surprise you — I spent most of my time writing practice sports columns. If we had known anything about blogs and the Internet then, I truly would have never gotten out of my pajamas or left my parents basement.

ANYWAY, baseball had been a certain way for about 25 years by then. Nobody had hit even 50 home runs in the American League since Maris and Mantle in 1961 (George Foster had hit 52 in 1977 — and that was almost beyond our imagination). We Gen Xers had grown up in a time when hitting 40 home runs in a season was outrageous and hitting 45 was like something out of the comic books (from 1971, when I first came into sports consciousness, through 1986, the most home runs that anyone in the AL had hit in a season was Jim Rice’s 46 in his monster 1978 season — I put that in there for you Paul White).

So, when 1987 began, none of us were quite ready for the home run mayhem that was to follow. Rob Deer, Pete Incaviglia, Brian Downing, Eric Davis, all of them hit 9 home runs by May 1. That put them right on pace to hit 61 homers for the season. By June 1st, there were five guys on pace to hit 50-plus homers, a bunch more on pace to hit 40, and Eric Davis, who was having a year beyond reason. Only June 1, he was hitting .335 with 19 homers and 21 steals. He was on pace to hit 62 homers, steal 68 bases, drive in 168 runs, score 139 runs, it was ludicrous.

Man, were people screaming. The ball is juiced. The bats are loaded. Ozzie Virgil was on pace to hit 46 home runs. Could Middle East peace be far behind? I remember distinctly that we at the paper put together what our own baseball maven Stan Olson called “The Bopper Chart,” which featured every single player in baseball who was on pace to hit 40 or more home runs. I used to just stare at that chart in awe.

On July 12, the All-Star Break, the home run madness was still very much alive. Now Mark McGwire — a rookie no less — had 33 home runs, George Bell had 29. Eric Davis had 27. Jack Clark had 26. Heck, just a few years earlier, Graig Nettles had won a home run title with 32. This was crazy.

All of this is just to give you an idea how home-run mad we all were in 1987. It was a mixture of disbelief, wonder and joy and old-fashioned grumpiness about it all. There were — at least the way I remember it — two players who best represented the insanity of that ridiculous Dirty Dancing, Fatal Attraction, Wall Street summer. There was Dale Murphy, still the heart and soul of a terrible Atlanta Braves team. And there was the Hawk, Andre Dawson.

There’s a reason those two stand out in my mind, of course. Back then, the Cubs and the Braves were pretty much the only two teams I saw living in Charlotte. The Braves and Cubs were inescapable then. They were the SuperStations — WGN and WTBS. And they both stunk to high heaven. The Braves would lose 92 games, thanks in large part to a pitching staff led by Zane Smith and anchored by Jim Acker. Murphy was, as always, a whole lot of class in the muck of Ted Turner’s circus. And he was having his best statistical year. He would hit .295, walk 115 times, bang 44 homers, steal 16 bases and make his last All-Star team. We, the Cable Kids — who had grown up with Eddie and the Cruisers, Donkey Kong, and triply-named hot young actresses (Sarah Jessica Parker, Penelope Ann Miller, Mary-Stuart Masterson, Mary-Louise Parker, etc.) – were raised on Dale Murphy. He was the closest thing we had to DiMaggio, or at least the closest thing we had on television every night. He remains pretty large in some of our minds.

Andre Dawson was something else entirely. Until 1987, he was just a rumor, a Canadian ghost who (as we saw on his baseball card) could do absolutely everything. He hit homers, he stole bases, he played a spectacular right field, he had an amazing arm. And we hardly ever saw him. He had spent his whole career in Montreal, playing for fundamentally underachieving teams with other mysterious talents like Steve Rogers, Jeff Reardon, Tim Raines and, until a few years before, Gary Carter. When Dawson signed as a free agent with the Cubs, I can distinctly remember people saying: “Wow, you put Dawson in Wrigley Field, look out.”

So, the way I remember it, the Dawson with the Cubs sensation was a little bit like when ichiro came from Japan. We all wondered: What is he going to do? How many home runs will he hit in that park with the wind blowing out? And Dawson did not disappoint. Nobody I knew gave a damn about on-base percentage then. Nobody cared how many doubles you hit. Nobody seemed to care about runs scored either. There were three numbers that mattered, and they were always shown in this order:

Batting average, home runs, RBIs.

On August 1, after 97 games, Dawson was hitting .287 with 31 homers and 97 RBIs.

He led the league in homers and RBIs. He was a phenomenon. The Cubs were hovering three games over .500 and sort of the brink of contention. Now, even then you could have pointed out all sorts of negative things — like the fact that Dawson had only 16 walks all season, or his 15 measly doubles or his home/road splits which were comical. But nobody cared — the guy was bopping. He had become the face of 1987 home run derby baseball, with his menacing swing, the way he yanked balls out of Wrigley Field, the crazy numbers (or at least they seemed crazy to us). Plus he was a class act, a fun player to watch, a guy who kept going day after day even though (as it would become apparent) the team around him stunk.

All of this is just a way to try and explain some of the swirling emotions of 1987. The season ended, and the home run numbers from that year, you might recall, even now can look like misprints. In the American League, Mark McGwire hit 49 homers, George Bell hit 47 (and remember Jim Rice’s 46 was the most we AL fans had ever seen). Plus all sorts of guys in both leagues — guys like Dale Sveum (25 homers) and Howard Johnson (36) and Ruben Sierra (30) and Alan Trammell (28) and Wally Joyner (34) — hit more home runs than we could ever have imagined from them. was a nutty kind of year.

And Dawson was the king of them all, y’all. He hit .287 with 49 homers and 137 RBIs. In the aftermath of the Bonds/McGwire era, those numbers cannot possibly resonate now the way they did then. It would be like someone now hitting .287 with 104 homers and 238 RBIs. Those numbers were staggering. Those were the most homers anyone in the NL hit in the 1980s, and the most RBIs anyone in the NL hit in the 1980s, People were duly awed. True, the Cubs were terrible — a last place team — but how could you deny the Hawk? He won the MVP award, and honestly it was not that close. Second was Ozzie Smith, who hit 0,0 home runs. In the summer of ’87, he never had a chance.

(Point: Before I get into the extraordinary injustice of all his, I just want to say that had the voters waited until AFTER the playoffs to vote … Ozzie might have won. He did not have a particularly great hitting playoffs, but he was still Ozzie, and seeing him in the postseason might have snapped the writers out of the home run daze that they were in. Then again, it might not have. Maybe I’ll dedicate another post to this whole idea of waiting until after the postseason to vote).

So Dawson was MVP, and I recall even then there being a bit of an outcry from some people, but only because the Cubs had finished in last place. They were channeling Branch Rickey — you could read columns from baseball writers who said the Cubs could have finished last without Dawson. But that’s not really, in my mind, where the injustice comes from.

The injustice is that Dawson did not even have an especially good year.

By Win Shares, Dawson had just 20 — which placed him behind:

Tim Raines, 34
Jack Clark, 33
Ozzie Smith, 33
Eric Davis, 30
Darryl Strawberry, 30
Dale Murphy, 29
Pedro Guerrero, 28
Tony Gwynn, 29
Mike Schmidt, 28
Tim Wallach, 28
Will Clark, 25
Andy Van Slyke, 25
Vince Coleman, 24
Billy Doran, 24
Howard Johnson, 24
Von Hayes, 23
Mitch Webster (!), 23
Barry Bonds, 22
Kal Daniels, 22
Juan Samuel, 22
Orel Hershiser, 21
Keith Hernandez, 21
Terry Pendleton, 21

That would put Dawson 24th in the National League if you’re scoring at home. And he’s actually tied for 24th with teammate Ryne Sandberg who did not have one of his better years and Montreal reliever Tim Burke, who did have a sensational season (7-0, 1.19 ERA). Dawson did, however, finish one win share ahead of Atlanta’s Dion James (.312, 10, 61). So he had that going for him.

How could Dawson have had such mediocre Win Share numbers when he hit 49 homers and drove in 137 RBIs?

Well, he had a a below average .328 on-base percentage, in large part because he had just 32 walks the whole season, a pretty stunning achievement. That remains the fewest walks by anyone who hit 45 or more homers in a season. In fact, among those who hit 49 or more homers in a season, the list looks like so:

Fewest walks — 49 or more homers:
1. Andre Dawson, 1987, 32.
2. George Foster, 1977, 61.
3. Andruw Jones, 2005, 64
4. Mark McGwire, 1987, 71
5. Shawn Green, 2001, 72.

Well, that’s not close. That’s not really a fair list, but I only want to make one point: It’s hard, hard work to hit with that kind of power and walk that few times.

It isn’t just the lack of walking, though. He was ninth in the NL in runs created. He was 10th in OPS and not in the Top 10 in OPS+. He had only 24 doubles all year. Because of that his slugging percentage of .568, while obviously quite good (it was the best of his career), actually placed him sixth in the NL, which isn’t so hot for a power guy at Wrigley Field.

And then there were those absurd home/road splits — he hit .332 and slugged .668 in the friendly confines of Wrigley. He hit .246 and slugged .480 out in the real world.

Of course, people didn’t notice these things or didn’t know about them or didn’t care in 1987. Home runs and RBIs carried the day. The whole year was zany. You might recall that the ’87 Twins, who went an astonishingly bad 29-52 away from the abomination Baggie Dome, and who were outscored by opponents, and who finished eighth in runs scored and 10th in ERA, won the World Series that year. You might recall that the St. Louis Cardinals — who hit a total of 94 home runs in that wild year, more than one-third of them by Jack Clark — won the NL Pennant. And Dale Sveum, as mentioned …

In retrospect, I believe Dawson to be the worst MVP pick of my lifetime (the George Bell over Alan Trammell pick in the AL is in the running for worst pick as well). But I have to admit that now, it sort of stands as a testament to the time — sort of the way a bad Quiet Riot song will take you back. Dawson may have been a horrendous MVP pick in 1987, But it was that kind of year.

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