I am stating the obvious by saying that Bo Jackson was a freak athlete. A two-sport professional player in both football and baseball, he was electric in both.
Today, I focus on Jackson's baseball career and go By The Numbers to measure his abilities as a slugger. Usually, traditional scouting methods are not incorporated in these articles. With that said, it is important to use them to remind everyone of how amazing of an athlete Jackson was. Advanced data and metrics will then be used for comparison.
Now that we set the ground rules, let's dive in:
The Scouts Loved Him
Let's talk about Jackson's physical abilities, without quantifiable data to support the evaluation. I dug up a scouting report from 1985, courtesy of CBS Sports, to get an idea for how evaluators viewed his athleticism. According to this analysis, written by Edward Vincent Jackson, Bo Jackson was "A complete type player with outstanding tools; can simply do it all and didn't even play baseball last year. A gifted athlete; the best pure athlete in America today." This report also cites Bo's strength and durability as a prospect. It is more than crystal clear, that Bo Jackson was one of the top athletes in the country and if he stayed healthy, he would have been a perennial All-Star.
I want to focus on Bo Jackson's raw power, on-base abilities, and his analytical standing amongst his peers as we approach the data portion of this piece. When we look at his production, it is in the upper echelon of offensive prowess.
Let's Get To The Data
As Jackson’s MLB career spanned eight seasons, I want to focus on his time in the league from 1987 to 1990, as these were his most productive seasons, with 1989 being his highlight year (It included an All-Star selection, All-Star Game MVP honors, and finishing 10th in the AL MVP voting).
Analytically, Jackson became better each year. In reference to Figure One below, his Isolated Power (ISO) and Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA), progressively increased:
Now for reference, if a player's ISO is between 0.120 and 0.140, that is considered elite. If it is above 0.140, that is prolific, and Bo Jackson's estimated raw power is nothing short of that, showing steady growth in ISO in this time frame.
Regarding his on-base abilities, wOBA measures each on-base outcome differently and assigns appropriate weights to properly credit each occurrence. An average wOBA is in the range of 0.320. Jackson quickly went from average to great in this area, as he incrementally improved from 1987 to 1990. So, let's refer back to the scouting report above. Edward Vincent Jackson noted that Bo Jackson was a complete player and a strong, durable prospect. Based on the metrics above, it matches the evaluation.
Compared To His Contemporaries?
Amongst leftfielders in these four seasons, Jackson showed significant improvement over his peers. To show this, we use rate/plus statistics to quantify how much better he was, relative to other leftfielders. OPS+ and wRC+ are normalized metrics, that each use 100 as league average. For example, if a player has an OPS+ or wRC+ of 150, that simply means that the player was 50% better than the league average OPS or wRC.
In this timeframe, Jackson quickly became better than most players in leftfield, as shown in Figure Two below:
Both his OPS+ and wRC+ increased at the same rates, reaching their respective peaks in the 1990 season. At the end of that year, Jackson was 42% better than the average OPS and 40% better than the average wRC in the sport. His power and run creation approached elite levels and he became highly proficient as an offensive player.
Conclusion: Jackson Was The Real Deal
I unfortunately was not around to witness Bo Jackson's athletic greatness. I must rely on numbers, stories, and old videos on YouTube in order to shape my opinion of him as a player in the baseball context. What I have concluded is that if he did not suffer that hip injury in 1991, he would have been one of the greatest outfielders in the history of the game, and that's not an exaggeration.
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