The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Right now, Wicked-mania is again sweeping the nation’s cinema-goers as the musical saga of Glinda & Elphaba comes to a close. Good-natured critical disagreement on the franchise between myself and our resident film guru aside, Wicked: For Good is raking in the box office dough.

In that spirit this Black Friday, let’s follow the yellow brick road—even if in this case leading away from Twins Territory—to look at baseball’s own Wizard of Oz.

Right now, baseball offense is largely geared towards hard contact. Objectively a solid approach in the sense that booming contact has a direct (and upward) correlation with batting success. Sure, there is still more than enough room for small ball and fundamentals, but “barrels” are a much greater indicator of racking up total bases.

So, imagine a 19-year player elected to the Hall of Fame with this overall lumber resume:

2,573 G, 2,460 H, 402 2B, 28 HR, 793 RBI, .262 BA, .666 OPS.

Put another way: in any 162-game span this player would hit 25 doubles, 2 homers, and drive in just 50 teammates. Would such a light batsman even have a career in modern MLB? Perhaps if one possessed the otherworldly peripherals of one Ozzie Smith.

You see, the Wizard was a defensive (SS) guru of the highest order. Six times Smith led the National League in defensive WAR—in 1989 putting up an absurd 4.8 dWAR. His career 44.2 dWAR is tops in MLB history.

Not only a wizard with the glove, Ozzie mustered magic with his feet: 580 career stolen bases—most of them for Whitey Herzog’s high-octane St. Louis Cardinals of the 1980s—or close to a 40-a-season average. His primary role was to get on base by any means necessary (seeing eye single, bunt, etc.) and wreak havoc on the base paths while Jack Clark & Terry Pendleton tried to drive him in.

Of course, because baseball is a most unpredictable sport, one of Smith’s career highlights ended up—of all things—a long ball that helped the Cardinals to an NL pennant and gave Jack Buck yet another iconic mic moment…

Because Ozzie was an NL life-er, he never crossed paths with our Minnesota Twins in the regular season. But they did clash in the 1987 World Series, where Frank Viola, Bert Blyleven & Co. handled the Wizard pretty well: 30 PA, 6 H, 2 RBI, 2 BB, 2 SB, 3K.

Generally-speaking, it shouldn’t be possible for defensive and speed value to utterly trump offensive thump and allow a player to craft a Hall of Fame career. But Ozzie Smith was an outlier with glove and ruby red cleats. His leather wizardry and aggressive advancements around the horn were so finely-tuned as to be the stuff of legend.

An iconic field entrance didn’t hurt either…

Like a comet pulled from orbit as it passes the sun, baseball’s Wizard of Oz will forever be one of the most popular MLB superstars of all time—synonymous with diamond excitement in all forms.