The Athletic (you need a sub) has been running a daily series by Joe Posnanski covering the 100 greatest baseball players of all time. Today he got to #61 and it was a guy who’s probably known to most folks here, but very few others: former Pirate shortstop Arky Vaughan.
The title of this piece comes straight from Posnanski’s article. For a guy whom Bill James listed in 2001 as the second best shortstop ever, Vaughan is remarkably obscure. (Posnanski even came up with a metric to measure non-fame and Vaughan is steeped in it.) A big part of Vaughan’s misfortune was that the best shortstop ever was also a Pirate. Not only that, but during Vaughan’s career Honus Wagner was making the transition from retired star to legend; Wagner was part of the Hall of Fame’s inaugural class in 1936, Vaughan’s fifth year in the majors.
Vaughan, of course, had other handicaps as well. He played most of his career outside the major media markets. He didn’t play in a World Series until his next-to-last-season, by which time he was a bench player. He missed three seasons due to his unwillingness to play for Leo Durocher. His career wasn’t especially long — he played in only 129 games after age 31 — so he didn’t compile gaudy career stats like 3000 hits. And he joined the Pirates when they already had several other established stars and future Hall-of-Famers in Paul and Lloyd Waner, and Pie Traynor.
But make no mistake, Vaughan was a great player. As a 20-year-old rookie, he batted .318 with an OPS+ of 114, and he just got better. In ten years with the Bucs, his OPS+ averaged 141. He led the league three times in runs, triples, walks and OBP, and once each in batting, slugging, steals and OPS. In 1935 he had one of the greatest seasons ever by a shortstop or a Pirate. He batted 385/491/607, leading the NL in all three. According to Posnanski, he was the first shortstop ever to slug over .600. Baseball Reference credits him with 9.2 WAR that year, more than any Pirate not named Wagner or Bonds picked up in any season. (FanGraphs gives him 9.6.) His career line was 318/406/453. He had eight straight seasons with more than 5.0 bWAR, four of them over 7.0.
Posnanski states that Vaughan wasn’t reputed to be a good fielder, probably because he made a lot of errors. Bb-ref and FG, though, both rate him as having positive defensive value in every year of his career. Bb-ref credits him with 12 defensive wins over his 14-year career and FG is just as generous. FG also rates his baserunning highly.
Maybe the saddest part of Vaughan’s non-fame is the impact that two rather notorious managers had on his career. Vaughan was a quiet, unassuming person who apparently was strongly principled. The Pirates surprisingly, and foolishly, traded him for basically nothing because he wasn’t gritty enough to please new manager Frankie Frisch. Even worse, he ended up in Brooklyn with Durocher, whose well documented lack of honesty or integrity was more than Vaughan could tolerate.
It didn’t even end there. As Posnanski notes, Frisch almost single-handedly, through his dominance of the Veteran’s Committee, turned the Hall of Fame into the Hall of Cronies. He didn’t like Vaughan, so Arky had to wait until 1985, 33 years after his premature death, to get into the Hall. He deserves much better than he’s gotten.
