Thanks, Pop. Mine's full of more holes than the Pittsburgh infield.

—Kayo in "On the Waterfront" accepting a loaned jacket

The other day, my friends and I were deriding an old Joe Morgan article on the Rangers infield that basically devolved into an homage to his old Reds teammates.

Amid the claims that he and Dave Concepcion were the first doubleplay combo ever to attempt to speed up turning the doubleplay and Joe's dubious choice of adding catcher to the mix so that he could buttress his argument with potentially the best catcher of all time in Johnny Bench, the Big Red Morgan selected the mid-Seventies Reds as the best infield ever, a quite unbiased appraisal. Surprise!

Sure, the Reds had a great infield (Rose, Morgan, Perez, and Concepcion), but was it much better than that of their division rival, the Dodgers (Garvey, Cey, Lopes, and Russell), let alone the best all-time?

I mean there's Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance. There's the "Hundred Thousand Dollar Infield". There's the Steve Jeltz-era Phillies.

Well, I decided to put Morgan's claims to the test. After deriving the starters at all positions (most games at each position), I created a ranking of the best infields by OPS, OPS above the park-adjusted average, and Win Shares per game. I also ran the numbers with and without catchers. Here are the results.

Here are the top infields (including catcher) based on OPS:

Here are the top infields (excluding catcher) based on OPS:

That's great, but you may notice that the two eras with the most offensive in baseball history (the last 12 years and the late 1920s/early 1930s) get over-represented. What if we adjust for era and ballpark by added in the league's average OPS and the team's ballpark factor? Here are the results (including catcher) based on adjusted OPS:

Here are the results (excluding catcher) based on adjusted OPS:

Of course, that ignores defense and a lot of what infields do is play defense. The best way that I know of to weigh a player's offense and defense is Win Shares. Here are the results based on total Win Shares (including catchers; Note: Players from the NA, 1871-75, have no Win Shares associated with them, at least none to which I have access.):

Now, here are the results for total Win Shares for an infield (excluding catcher):

The '76 Reds do extremely well here, but drop a bit when Bench is out of the equation. They also played a 162-game schedule. What if we prorate the Win Shares by team game. Here are the best seasonal Win Shares per game (including catchers):

Now, excluding catchers:

I have about, as Dr. Evil would say, a million comments on these teams and the ones that finished lower. Also, I want to look at these per decade. I am fascinated with these lists and given that the only thing going on with the Phils is the Larry Bowa deathwatch, I want to look at them in depth. I just hope I can get it rolling given that I'll be on vacation for four days starting Saturday.

To be continued…