Roy Hobbs' Stats

From a Soul of Baseball comment thread:

Dash Carlisle said...
I think it was the Hebrew Oilers.

A few years ago I tried to figure out what Hobbs' stats were in 1939 (the year the movie takes place). Others had tried this before (Bill Simmons?), but it seemed to me that they didn't try very hard, so I took a swing at it.

-First I counted all the home runs Hobbs is shown hitting in the movie, just to establish a minimum. That turned out to be 17 or 18 (depending on whether one shot of Hobbs trotting around the bases was a separate homer from the one before).

-Next, I estimated how many games he played. According to the movie, Hobbs got into the lineup around mid-July. In a 154-game season, this would mean he played no more than 73 or so games. To make sure, I counted the number of games the Giants played from mid-July on. (The Knights were sort of stand-ins for the Giants. They're shown playing every team in the National League except the Giants.)

-I considered the dimensions of his ballpark. "Knights Field" was actually old Pilot Field in Buffalo, which was 310 ft down the right field line, and very deep to left-center (not unlike Yankee Stadium). In other words, a paradise for lefty power hitters. However, I figured that Hobbs was likely in that rare class of sluggers, like McGwire, say, who hit the ball so hard that they're not affected much by their home surroundings. Certainly the blast that knocked out the light tower would have been a home run even in Braves' Field.

-I had to factor in the two-to-three week slump Hobbs went through in August while he was dating Memo Paris. He hardly hit at all during this time, and the Knights slipped to 5th place.

-Finally I looked for other great seasons, by actual players, to use as a comparison. Ted Williams in 1957 seemed like a good comp. He was 38-years old (Hobbs was 35 when he joined the Knights) and had an absolute monster season (.388/.526/.731). Besides which, Redford (or the screenwriter) seems to have used the Splendid Splinter as a model for Hobbs. He wore the same number as Williams (which I think was Redford's idea), and of course there's this...

"And then? And then when I walked down the street people would've looked and they would've said there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in this game."

Which is almost exactly like Williams' famous aspiration: "All I ever wanted out of life was that when I walked down the street people would say, 'there goes Ted Williams, the best goddamned hitter who ever lived.'"

Anyway, I pro-rated Williams' season to account for Hobbs' playing time, but it didn't look quite right, so I tweaked it a little bit (added power mostly), which made his rate stats look more like Bonds in '02. Hobbs probably could not have hit more than 34 homers, which is a Bonds-ian rate. Even this seemed high, but then, it wasn't over a whole season. Anyway, without further ado, here's Roy Hobbs' stat line:

Roy Hobbs
Year Age Tm Lg G AB
1939 35 NYK NL 73 265

Runs H 2B 3B HR RBI
86 101 24 5 34 99

SB BB SO BA OBP SLG
3 67 43 .381 .509 .894

OPS OPS+ RC
1.403 285 117

They're just made-up numbers, but it was kind of a fun way to spend an afternoon. The Memo slump kept him from hitting .400, I figure.