Jim Rice and the Fear Factor

As I write, an ESPN poll has 15,905 votes cast and 67 percent of those saying Jim Rice should be going to Cooperstown, as against 33 percent saying he shouldn't. Surely, there will be those Boston writers who covered the man in his prime and may be surprised by the popular sentiment, considering Rice in his playing days may not have been thought the most popular fellow on the block.

But you note that an awful lot of the evidence marshaled on behalf of Rice is the fear factor — the image he has as having been one of the single most feared men in the game whenever he stepped into the batter's box.

He was as fearsome looking as he was fearsomely hitting, both in physical presence and if you take his career statistics at face value and ignore things like his home-road splits. This was the quintessential stereotype of the Fenway Park hitter, a right-handed bombardier who hit like a Hall of Famer at home and like short enough of one on the road, a differential too gaping to brush aside too readily. His home slugging surely kept pitchers thinking on the road, but Jim Rice actually turns out not to have been quite so feared as his reputation has left him.

There are ways to measure the fear factor if you're so inclined. One of them? Well, let's look at how often this man was put on base intentionally because an enemy pitcher decided the last thing he needed was to get slaughtered by a Rice cannon shot. You'd think a man that intimidating would be taking first base on the house at a rate alarming enough, and you might have thought that way even before it became as much a predictable part of a Barry Bonds story as the accusations of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances.

But you're going to have to convince me that a man is genuinely feared when 10 percent of his lifetime walks are intentional passes.

Ten percent. That's how often Jim Rice got first base on the house, out of all the walks he accumulated. That's also how often Jack Clark, a contemporary, got first base on the house out of all the walks he accumulated. And Jack the Ripper isn't going to Cooperstown anytime soon. (And the one free pass Clark should have received, but didn't, was when Tommy Lasorda decided it was safe for Tom Niedenfeuer to pitch to Clark with two on, first base open, and the Dodgers an out or two from the 1985 World Series. Clark hit one into Casey Stengel's back yard for a three-run homer nobody in Los Angeles will ever forget, and the Cardinals held the Dodgers off in the bottom of the ninth to go to the World Series.)

Now, consider the intentional walk percentages of a few more Rice contemporaries: among Rice's contemporaries: Dave Kingman (12 percent), Reggie Jackson (12 percent), Dave Winfield (14 percent), Cal Ripken (9 percent), Mike Schmidt (13 percent), George Brett (21 percent), Dave Parker (25 percent), Andre Dawson (24 percent).

Disallow for the moment that some of the above weren't that great at taking walks in the first place. And, bear in mind that walk totals don't account for those unintentional intentional bases on balls. (You know: the kind in which pitchers pitch around the fellow without setting up for the free pass, keeping the repertoire just beyond reach, but throwing full power rather than eephus lobs.) Given that, you'll have a hard time convincing me that a man whose walks were 10 percent intentional was that much feared against some of his contemporaries.

Dave Kingman was feared slightly more than Jim Rice based on the foregoing tallies, and King Kong turned out to be anywhere but a Hall of Famer. Mr. October speaks for himself; Iron Cal speaks likewise, and based on the foregoing tally he was almost exactly as feared as Rice. Dave Parker and Andre Dawson were actually twice as feared as Rice; the Cobra isn't really likely to go to Cooperstown, while the debate will probably continue about the Hawk.

Dave Winfield, Mike Schmidt, and George Brett were more feared than Rice based on the above tally, but their Hall of Fame cases were (and remain) incontrovertible.

Just for a yuk-yuk, I decided to check four earlier contemporaries. This one may surprise you. Whom would you say among the following foursome was the most feared hitter? Did I hear Mickey Mantle? Did I hear Willie Mays? Did I hear Frank Robinson? Did I hear Hank Aaron? Well, I have a surprise for you: the descending order of fear factor, based on their lifetime intentional walks percentage, is precisely the reverse of the order in which I named them. Aaron: 20 percent. Robinson: 15 percent. Mays: 13 percent. Mantle: 7 percent.

Right then and there, that should end any and every argument (there are those still foolish enough to make them, and they're pretty lame to begin with) about whether or not Hank Aaron belongs in the Asgard of sluggers merely because he lasted long enough to pass Babe Ruth on the bomb list without "spectacular" (read: 50+ bomb seasons) single-season tallies. Tell me why a guy who got to first base on the house 20 percent of the time should be considered less fearsome than three guys who got it 15 percent or less, even if you give Mantle his allowance for all those injuries and Mays his allowance for two years' military service.

And if you think only the big bombers strike fear into the hearts of enemy pitchers, be advised that Roberto Clemente's lifetime walks were 27 percent intentional.

But I digress.

Hearing enough about so-called Fenway hitters — and Rice, to repeat, resembles the stereotype when all is said and done — you can't be all that surprised that he hasn't gotten to the Hall of Fame just yet. When you slug 87 points lower on the road; when you reach base .044 percent less on the road; and, when pitchers on the road fear you a lot less (Rice has 23 less intentional walks on the road) than they do in your own playpen, it's going to hurt your Hall of Fame chances.

Rice has his anomalies. For one thing, like Dale Murphy (whose home-road split is probably the major reason he, too, isn't going to Cooperstown, dearly though so many want to see him there because he was so likable a superstar), Rice defies the percentage match of right-handed hitter versus left-handed pitcher. Both men hit right-handed pitching a lot less often but a lot more productively than they did left-handed pitching; Rice's lifetime batting average against the portsiders is 20 points higher, but he drove in 683 more runs against the starboard siders. I don't know if that's enough to balance or mitigate his gaping home-road splits. But I do know that the right-handers weren't always paying attention to how Rice was battering run production out of them — they gave him three fewer intentional walks.

Rice was also a better man than he was given credit for being, in fact. He was thought a pain in the butt with some of the press and perhaps a few teammates. (Bill Lee, for one, wasn't exactly Rice's biggest fan.) But if you wanted just to talk the game and were willing to wait for him to decide it was good, Rice (rather like Eddie Murray, in fact) could actually be a very enlightening interview.

Peter Gammons, who covered Rice during his Boston Globe heyday, from Beyond the Sixth Game: What's Happened to Baseball Since the Greatest Game in World Series History:

Part of the reason Rice hadn't received what he felt was his due [by 1978] was his personality. Not that any manager ever disliked him, for, as [Don] Zimmer once said, "He's a manager's player — write his name in the lineup every day, he gives you a hundred percent and never says anything." Once, when the fans were booing Zimmer and demanding his firing in 1979, Rice walked into the manager's office after a particularly tough loss and said, "Don't worry, Skip, I won't let them get you. You're a good man, and it's not your fault."

He could be jovial and sometimes even loud on buses ... but Rice's quiet, sometimes moody nature made him one of the targets of extra players like Frank Duffy, Jack Brohamer, and Steve Renko who pointed out that one of the problems with the Red Sox of that era was that, as Duffy once said, "The team gets off a plan and twenty-five players go off in twenty-five different cabs."

As he reached 30, Rice relaxed and seemed to have more fun with his teammates. He also had begun to relax with the media, which from Salem to Seattle viewed him as one of the game's most distant, arrogant, and temperamental stars. To some of the writers who traveled with the team, Rice was never particularly difficult. If he made an out or an error that had some effect on the outcome of the game, he would explain what happened honestly. "What I don't like," he'd say, "is to stand there in the middle of a crowd of reporters and microphones to announce how wonderful I am because I hit two home runs. The game comes back to haunt you when you boast, and, anyway, you can say it better than I can. You get paid to say nice things about me better than I can say them. When there's something to explain, I'll explain it." And he usually does.

Rice never talked a lot about racism and the Red Sox; it first cropped up publicly in a Sport magazine story in 1978, and he quickly issued a statement denying the quotes attributed to him. But, privately, Rice would talk about the Red Sox and their whiteness, and he talked about it rationally and sensibly. "I don't believe that [then-president] Haywood Sullivan or [then-general manager] Ed Kasko are racists," he said. "No way. They've been too good to me. But they don't go after black athletes. How many scouts do we have in the cities? How many scouts do we have getting black players out of certain areas? I'm not saying it's racism, it's just poor scouting. When you look at some of these scrawny white boys we have around here, you wonder who's scouting." With the reference to "white boys," he laughed.

And stories enough have filtered forth about Rice going out of his way for numerous people without caring who did or didn't know about it, even if he wasn't one to announce it or reveal it in retrospect.

A good and decent man, at least until injuries and exhaustion finally got him in his final few seasons; a remarkable baseball player when all was said and done. For one three-season skien in particular (1977-79), Rice played exactly the way you'd expect a Hall of Famer to play. The Red Sox wouldn't have won at least two pennants and gotten to at least one single-game playoff that broke New England's heart without him; they couldn't quite finish off at least one World Series without him (he was injured and couldn't play in 1975), and he wasn't even close to enough to help them win another. (He hit .333 with six runs scored, six walks, and nine hits, including a double and a triple, but he had no runs batted in, in the 1986 heartbreaker.)

It won't diminish what he meant to some remarkable Red Sox teams if Jim Rice, with or without the fear factor actual or alleged, just didn't quite reach enough of the way to what was needed — at least a more sustained peak value, and a far more narrow home-road split — to put him over the line from mere greatness into the Hall of Fame.