These teams stink at finding first basemen, and these teams are great

First basemen should be easy to find. This was the sabermetric orthodoxy when I started getting deep into baseball in the late ‘90s. Take any lumbering galoot with a 30-homer bat and plop him at first, where he can’t possibly do any damage. Every system should have four or five of these guys. It’s not that hard to find a first baseman. Tell ‘em, Wash.

It’s harder than you think, but generally doable.

Wash. Come on.

[sighs deeply] It’s incredibly hard.

Ha ha, yes! But that’s not really true, either. The real answer is that it’s harder than you think but generally doable.

Now, wait just a damned minute.

If you use the Baseball-Reference scale that suggests a two-win player is qualified to be a starter at the position, there have been 325 first basemen to hit that level since 1997. That means a little more than half the teams in baseball have had an average-or-better first baseman over the last two decades, which is roughly what you should expect.

There have been 312 catchers to hit that two-win mark, though, so it’s not like these first basemen grow on a hilarious, saggy first baseman tree. When you adjust for position, it’s nearly as hard to find starting-caliber first basemen as it is to find starting-caliber catchers.

Ah, but the difference is in the stars. Most of those catchers were between two to five wins. First basemen are where the MVPs and 40-homer seasons are. There have been 20 first basemen seasons of 7 WAR or more over the last 20 years, which is nearly triple the number for catchers. Part of that is because catchers don’t play 162 games, usually. Another part of that is dingers.

Which teams have been lousy at finding starting-caliber first basemen? Which teams have been good at finding All-Star first basemen? We’re using the Baseball-Reference guidelines, which go like this:

2+ starter
5+ All-Star
8+ MVP

Josh Bell is hitting .242/.329/.484 with nine home runs for the Pirates. He’s 24 and has a bright future ahead of him.

You should root for Josh Bell.

You should root for him because the Pirates have had three starting-level first basemen in the last 20 years, according to the Baseball-Reference scale. Three! Here’s a list of the 10-best seasons from a Pirates first basemen in the last 20 years:

There have been 41 Pirates over the last 20 years who have played more than 75 percent of their games at first base. Of those, one of the 10 best was Casey McGehee in 2012.

He hit .230/.297/.377 that year.

There’s a table that shows every team in baseball, and there isn’t another one that comes close. The Pirates have been abhorrent at finding first basemen. In 20 years, 41 different Pirates first basemen have combined for 7.1 wins above replacement. That’s 0.35 wins per season. It’s 0.17 wins per player.

So anyway, root a little extra for Josh Bell, would you?

This is a weird combination. Both teams have resources. Both teams have had good first basemen, and recently, too. But according to Baseball-Reference, neither of them have enjoyed the production of a five-win first baseman for 20 years.

This is the Giants/Dodgers rivalry that nobody talks about, really.

In case you were unaware, Giants fans are super, super weird about Brandon Belt. Turns out there’s a little science behind that, as he hasn’t had that one boffo breakout season, even as he’s been productive. Since becoming a starter in 2012, he’s had a 1-WAR season (2014, where he kept getting broken by people throwing baseballs), a 3-WAR season, and three 4-WAR seasons. But nothing that ascended into the stratosphere. He’s on that same path this year — .244/.356/.465 in an extreme pitcher’s park, with solid defense — and it’s driving local talk radio mad.

This is but one of the reasons that Pirates fans want to pull the nose hairs out of the head of every Giants fan they see.

The Dodgers have enjoyed four straight solid seasons from Adrian Gonzalez, which might not be exactly what they were hoping for when they absorbed Carl Crawford’s contract as an Adrian Gonzalez tax, but it could have been worse. In 699 games with the Dodgers, he’s hit .282/.343/.457, which is perfectly acceptable. Those are the kinds of numbers that would make Giants fans yell, “Awful, trade him for prospects and move Posey to first,” so you know they’re OK.

But the Dodgers haven’t gotten over that All-Star hump in a while. From Eric Karros through James Loney and now an aging Gonzalez, they’ve been pretty good at being pretty good, but not better.

I guess this is a segue from the previous section filled with Adrian Gonzalez talk, but I still wasn’t expecting to see the Padres here. In the last 20 years, they’ve had 16 seasons with a starting-caliber first baseman, missing out in 1999, 2003, 2013, and 2014.

It’s not just the five seasons from Gonzalez that are filling out the list. There are solid seasons from Ryan Klesko, Phil Nevin, Wally Joyner, and Yonder Alonso in there, too. They even got solid campaigns from Jesus Guzman and Mark Sweeney, too. Not only that, but they’re set up for a few years with Wil Myers, so they probably won’t be going anywhere.

Not bad for a team that traded Anthony Rizzo away for a young pitcher with a sore shoulder. Not bad at all.

Apologies if that’s a little coarse, but there’s no other name that works for this section. Now that Pujols is making a billionty dollars per year for the next decade and sounds like a rusty playground swing when he bends over to tie his shoes, it’s easy to forget just how great he was.

Do not forget how great he was.

There have been 19 different MVP-caliber seasons according to the Baseball-Reference WAR scale. John Olerud had one. Miguel Cabrera had one. Paul Goldschmidt had one. Todd Helton had three.

Albert Pujols had seven.

What an alien.

While I’m not a zealot when it comes to WAR, it really matches my intuition and anecdotal assumptions when it comes to the value of first basemen. Was Todd Helton better than nearly everyone? Yes. Is Brandon Belt good, but not top tier? Yes. Was Ryan Howard fantastic for a while before he dropped off substantially? Yes.

And did Albert Pujols demolish them all without remorse? Oh, man, yes. He was so incredible, and his swift decline bums me out. Still, be happy for the WARs he won, not the WARs he lost.

The full list is here, with links to Baseball-Reference for each search. Find your team! Share with your friends! And root for Josh Bell. Please, don’t forget to root for Josh Bell.

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