This Sunday, baseball will celebrate the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first game at Ebbets Field. As I wrote last week, the various well-meaning tributes to Robinson, by reducing him to a mere symbol, tend to obscure much about the political context in which he acted and the long history of racism in baseball. They also obscure something else — that he was one of the very greatest ballplayers who ever lived.

To state this unequivocally: Robinson, had he been a white man who had exactly the same career he did while playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, would have been a Hall of Famer. He was an MVP-caliber player every year between 1948 and 1953, and in that time, he basically hit like Alex Rodriguez did in his prime; he also had an additional three All-Star caliber years. You don’t really have to credit him for being a pioneer or even for his legendary mastery of the inside game to rank him among the 100 best to ever play the game.

This being so, there are more tantalizing questions surrounding what Robinson could have done than there are for any player in baseball history. The most obvious is the question of what he might have done had it not been for baseball’s Jim Crow policies, but that’s misleading. Robinson only played one year in the Negro Leagues, and one year in the minors before joining the Dodgers; he spent the years before that as an Olympic-class collegiate athlete, as a youth counselor, and in the Army. The real question is what he might have done had he gone into baseball right out of high school or college. By reputation, he was the Derek Jeter of his day, playing disciplined, sophisticated baseball based on a command of its nuances. He did this despite not having really applied himself to the sport until he was 26. Given his intelligence and athleticism, I’d guess that had he devoted himself to baseball from an early age he would have established himself as one of the top 10 players of all time, basically Joe Morgan with Gold Glove defense at shortstop.

“Shortstop?” you ask. “Robinson was a second baseman.” This is true, but only because the Dodgers’ captain, Pee Wee Reese, was himself a Hall of Fame shortstop. By all accounts — and neither contemporary analysis of fielding statistics nor common sense gives us any reason to doubt this —Robinson was an extraordinary defensive player, and this despite coming into the game at an age when fielding skills, which are based largely on reflexes and speed, are already in decline. Under different circumstances, he would surely have played shortstop.

Just to illustrate what Robinson could have done, I worked up a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what his career might have looked like had he made the majors at 22, rather than 28. I took Robinson’s career averages per 572 at bats and applied the sabermetrician Tom Tango’s research on aging curves to them. At age 21 for instance, players hit about 69% as many home runs as they do at 27, which is the peak age for home run power; but 27-year-olds hit for average only about 92% as well as 21-year-olds do, 21 being the peak for average. These curves reflect the basic truths that skills based on speed peak early, and those based on strength and knowledge of the game peak later.

The big problem with this method is that it’s ridiculous to assume that any one player will age anything like players in general do; something that’s true in the broad instance is rarely so in the specific instance. Using this method, I conclude that Robinson would have hit the majors as an All Star at 22. Certainly that’s possible, maybe even probable, but he also had an unusual career, peaking in his 30s; for all I know he would have come up and struggled for years.

With these caveats noted, though, the results actually look fairly reasonable. I estimate that Robinson would have averaged 195 hits during his first six years. He only reached that number once in his career, but I also estimate that he would have averaged only 65 walks a season during his early years, well below what he did later in his career. I have him averaging 31 doubles, 7 triples, 20 steals, and 13 home runs a season; he would almost certainly have hit more doubles and stolen more bases, and probably fewer home runs. In total, though, it feels about right. In this alternate universe, Robinson hits the majors hitting for a high average, and slowly begins to hit for more power and draw more walks as his batting average falls a bit, maintaining a steady plateau of excellence before exploding into his prime at age 30.

While by today’s standards our Earth-2 Robinson’s career totals aren’t staggering, it’s worth remembering that he played his last game in 1956. If he came up as a shortstop and amassed these numbers, he would have ranked behind only Honus Wagner among all shortstops at the time of his retirement. He would have been first among shortstops in total bases and slugging average; second in home runs and batting average; third in hits, walks, doubles, and on-base average, and fourth in at bats and stolen bases. Judging purely by on-field value, a good defensive shortstop with these numbers would rank comfortably as one of the top 20 players of all time, on par with someone like Cal Ripken or Rickey Henderson. And while there are some optimistic assumptions in working backward from what Robinson did to what he might have done, none of this accounts for just how much better a Robinson focused on baseball from his teenage years might have been, or how exactly history would rate a player who combined something like Alex Rodriguez’s production with Derek Jeter’s intangibles.

As things turned, Robinson was destined to play a far greater role in baseball history than Ripken, Henderson, Rodriguez, Jeter, or pretty much anyone else who ever played. But while we celebrate Robinson this weekend, let’s not forget that the great man was also almost incomprehensibly great on the diamond, maybe even better than the legend has it. Fans of the old Dodgers will insist, if you ask, that Robinson was, leaving everything else aside, as good as anyone they ever saw once he stepped on the field. The truth is, they’re probably right.

tmarchman@nysun.com