CEMETERY WINS ABOVE REPLACEMENT, Vol. 1

AKA “Let’s Talk About Some (Dead) Guys”

Down by the baseball cemetery

That’s where your team’s gonna get buried

Six feet wide, six feet under

Thunder, thunder, thunderation

We’re the best team in the nation

- Baseball Cheer

In the 2020 summer of COVID, with the specter of death hovering over every human interaction, a baseball fan had few options for occupying time beyond watching late-night KBO broadcasts, reading endless reports of owner-player bickering, and contemplating mortality.

When life gives you hopelessness, go visit a cemetery, that’s what I’ve always said.*

(*I had never said this until then.)

I wanted to not just visit graveyards, but to find buried baseball players in them. Being an adult with a (pandemic work-from-home) day-job, I did not want to waste any time. How does one get the most bang (quality baseball players) for their buck (time spent wandering a cemetery)? Enter Sabermetrics and baseball-reference.com.

BRef lists players by birthplace, death place, and location of burial. Ba-bam. Here was the treasure trove of data I sought. The metric created for this analysis is WAR (Wins Above Replacement) per Cemetery, or WARpC. It’s fun to say. Try it.

This data set, of course, excludes many baseball managers, coaches, broadcasters, and personalities whose grave sites would certainly be noteworthy. These baseball types don’t exactly accrue WAR. I will include them where I can in the descriptions.

What kind of scale are we talking about here? Well, your average player is worth about two WAR in any given season. If you play badly, worse than how a AAA replacement would play, you can accumulate negative WAR. Aaron Judge and Shohei Otani are looking to surpass ten WAR in 2022. Submit your MVP hot takes in the comments section, if you must. I’m simply going to enjoy both players’ miraculous seasons.

Hall of Famers tend to land between fifty (catchers) and sixty-five (right fielders, pitchers) career WAR, with the elite of the elite touching 150 career WAR. Exactly six players, of the roughly 20,000 in MLB history, surpass that mark. We’ll touch on as many also-rans as indelible icons. That’s the fun of this project.

This series of newsletters will supply you with player anecdotes, huhs, wows, ho-hums, and jokes for at least one cemetery in all fifty states, as we work our way to the ultimate WARpC leader.

“Wow,” you say, “that’s a lot of ground to cover.” Ha. I see what you did there. Trust me, it has been. But I’m thrilled to share this years-in-the-making research.

Let’s talk about some (dead) guys!

The lowest four states have negative WARpC totals. We’ll start there and work our way up. Or down, because that’s how I sorted these charts.

As far as baseball cemetery tourism goes, don’t plan a vacation around Wyoming, South Dakota, or Alaska. Just don’t. These three states combine for -3.07 WARpC for just ten players. And, as you can see in that last column, no Hall of Famers.

Wyoming has so little to claim that I’ll only add this factoid: Pitcher Mike Blyzka (-1.5 WAR, Lakeview Cemetery, Cheyenne) was involved in the largest trade in baseball history when he and sixteen other players moved between the New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles in 1954. Blyzka did not pitch again in the majors after the trade.

Vince Lloyd is buried in South Dakota (St. Michael Catholic Cemetery, Sioux Falls). He was known as “The Voice of Summer” from his long-time WGN radio and TV career (1949 to 1987). That’s maybe worth a visit for die-hard Cubs fans. After 3 seasons in MLB, Marv “Sparky” Olson (.3 WAR, Gayville Cemetery, Gayville) was a scout with the Kansas City Athletics and Minnesota Twins for thirty years. That’s something.

Alaska is a beautiful place and hosts the Midnight Sun baseball game. I’m pert-near certain Charlie Fisher (-.05 WAR, Eagle Cemetery, Eagle) never played in it.

These players have all moved on from this mortal coil, but their remains remain. If we’re lucky, there’s a hunk of marble, or slate, or granite, to mark the spot. So that someday, we weirdos with a baseball fetish can sit a spell, marvel at their B-ref page, and have a catch graveside.

I doubt many baseball players ever considered the happy introspection their grave would impart. They played baseball— decades ago, a century ago, maybe more— but now we can too, standing six feet above their bones and organs. Even though there’s no way for them to hear it, I see these visitations as a thank you. Thank you for being so good at the game we love. Thank you for giving us some continuity with our past when so much is changing so fast.

Next time on Cemetery Wins Above Replacement, we move on to Hawaii, a surprisingly fruitful dead-baseballer destination.