2019 Baseball Hall of Fame Vote is Revealed 1/22
Gotta admit, not once during their careers did I ever say to myself, “There’s a Hall of Famer.”
DaveSchmidt said:
Gotta admit, not once during their careers did I ever say to myself, “There’s a Hall of Famer.”
for people who put stock in WAR, there's a good case to be made for Trammel. For Morris, not so much.
I appreciate your opening qualifying clause. The factors that even the creators of the formulas acknowledge make WAR a crude comparison between individual players for any given season are only magnified by cumulative totals over long careers.
ETA: I belatedly see that JAWS uses averages to try to keep longevity from skewing comparisons.
DaveSchmidt said:
I appreciate your opening qualifying clause. The factors that even the creators of the formulas acknowledge make WAR a crude comparison between individual players for any given season are only magnified by cumulative totals over long careers.
it's not an exact science by any means. But it does rank players against those who played the same position. I've always thought it unfair that middle infielders' hitting statistics are compared to corner OF guys when ranking the all-time greats. And even with an inexact measure, Alan Trammell ends up ranked 11th all-time among SS. Everyone around him is already in the HoF with the exception of A-Rod and Jeter (not yet eligible), and Bill Dahlen, who played half his career in the dead-ball era. Almost all of the top 20 SSs in lifetime WAR are in the HoF or will be when they're eligible.
I think looking at WAR even with its flaws is better than going on gut instinct. And there is some face validity when you see that Trammell had 7 seasons in which he received MVP votes. He was among the 2 or 3 best SSs of the 1980s.
I was looking at Ozzie Smith's stats to compare with Trammell. Coincidentally, Smith was drafted by the Tigers in 1976 and then drafted in '77 by San Diego. He could have been the Tigers' shortstop for life instead of Trammell if he came out of college after the '76 draft.
ml1 said:
DaveSchmidt said:
I appreciate your opening qualifying clause. The factors that even the creators of the formulas acknowledge make WAR a crude comparison between individual players for any given season are only magnified by cumulative totals over long careers.
it's not an exact science by any means. But it does rank players against those who played the same position. I've always thought it unfair that middle infielders' hitting statistics are compared to corner OF guys when ranking the all-time greats. And even with an inexact measure, Alan Trammell ends up ranked 11th all-time among SS. Everyone around him is already in the HoF with the exception of A-Rod and Jeter (not yet eligible), and Bill Dahlen, who played half his career in the dead-ball era. Almost all of the top 20 SSs in lifetime WAR are in the HoF or will be when they're eligible.
I think looking at WAR even with its flaws is better than going on gut instinct. And there is some face validity when you see that Trammell had 7 seasons in which he received MVP votes. He was among the 2 or 3 best SSs of the 1980s.
Ozzie was so good with the glove that he was recognized during his playing days for how valuable he was. But he looks even better in retrospect, given the emphasis on OBP among the metrics folks. Lifetime OBP of .337, and a handful of years when he was over .350. And 580 career SB.
yahooyahoo said:
I was looking at Ozzie Smith's stats to compare with Trammell. Coincidentally, Smith was drafted by the Tigers in 1976 and then drafted in '77 by San Diego. He could have been the Tigers' shortstop for life instead of Trammell if he came out of college after the '76 draft.
mfpark said:
^^^ Now THAT was fun to watch again!
and Ozzie's a member of the Hall of Fame wine club. According to Tom Seaver:
After the induction in Cooperstown, there's a dinner for only Hall of Famers. Sitting at my table one year--imagine this--were Bob Gibson, Don Sutton, Sandy Koufax, Steve Carlton and Rollie Fingers. Everybody there enjoyed wine, so I said, "OK boys, let's start having great wines at this dinner. Next year, bring a good bottle." It's expanded like crazy. The year Ozzie Smith was inducted, he came over to our table and said, "Tom, how do I, you know, get a seat at the wine table?" And I said, "It's a very long process, Ozzie, it's very secretive and there's a whole initiation thing." And he said, "Yeah, but what do I have to do?" And I said, "Well, bring a bottle of wine." [laughs] We must have 20 guys now bringing great wine.
http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/Wine-Talk-Tom-Seaver_2438
It is looking like Chipper Jones, Jim Thome, and Vladimir Guererro are going to get in this year.
Trevor Hoffman and Edgar Martinez are on the bubble.
Bonds and Clemens will move closer to 60% but will not get enough to get in.
This is based on Ryan Thibideaux who tracks revealed votes to date. Only 40% have made their votes public so far.
Jim Thome totally belongs. The dude had 600+ homers. What was striking to me he had a career OBP of .402! Wow. He had a career slugging of .554. Tremendous.
Ryan ThibodauxVerified account @NotMrTibbs 4 hours ago
With 176 ballots revealed/~41.5% of the vote known:
Chipper - 98% Vlad - 94% Thome - 93% Edgar 80% Hoffman - 78% -----
Mussina - 73% Schilling - 67% BB/RC - 66% Walker - 39% Vizquel - 29.5% Manny - 26% McGriff - 17% Rolen - 11% Andruw - 5.1%
Final vote is revealed January 24.
The key will be the non-publicly released ballots. I am not sure if there is a systematic bias related to which writers release their ballots and which do not.
If the releasers are younger/newer and the non-releasers older/more traditional then the final results will be negatively skewed against PED-linked players and DHs. Meaning Edgar does not get in, Thome will fall closer to the threshold of 75%, and Hoffman gets in.
mfpark said:
The key will be the non-publicly released ballots. I am not sure if there is a systematic bias related to which writers release their ballots and which do not.
my gut tells me there is a bias. I think the old school voters do not release their ballots, and they tend to be the ones who won't vote for PED guys, or anyone who doesn't meet their arbitrary criteria (500 HRs, .300 BA, 200 wins, etc.)
I think Thome is going to get in with a high vote total because even the old school guys can't ignore 600+ HRs. Some will hold the BA against him, but those voters will probably be a small number. If anything, the only guys who don't vote for him will be those relics who think there are some players who belong in the HoF, but just not on the first ballot.
Thome is a guy who played just a few years too early to be really appreciated. First of all, beginning his career in the era of McGwire, Sosa and Bonds, 40 or 50 HRs in a season wasn't a big a deal as it would have been today. And OBP wasn't appreciated as much. Not to mention, Thome's high K totals for that era were looked down upon. Today 175 Ks in a season for a guy with a .400 OBP would be considered an outstanding tradeoff. Also, spending some of his best years in Cleveland didn't help, even though that was an outstanding team. An entire career played in NY, Boston, Chicago or LA and he would have been a lot more famous.
Football League named MLS Soccer will be start soon for upcoming season. Footballs fans can get live updates of MLS Standings for season 2018.
just a thought -- the people who really care the most about that info aren't that likely to find it here.
alex59 said:
Football League named MLS Soccer will be start soon for upcoming season. Footballs fans can get live updates of MLS Standings for season 2018.
Thank you for sharing this information and link. My son, a diehard baseball fan, has become equally rabid about soccer in recent years. I hope baseball’s charms find a way to make you a two-way fan, too.
A very interesting article bound to stir up comment in some corners of this world.
Four candidates you don't realize are about to be Hall of Fame snubs
Dan SzymborskiSpecial to ESPN.com
In the "Politics of Glory," Bill James wrote about the danger of a Hall of Fame when it's defined by its mistakes rather than by its successes; when we talk about the snubs more than the players actually honored. The Hall of Fame's induction process has broken down in recent years, with a logjam ballot complicated by the existing 10-man ballot limit and the Hall's maddening decision to reduce eligibility to 10 years, further compounding the problem.
The pitfall of the HOF's seeming vendetta against prominent steroid-era candidates is that deserving players will continue to be ignored.
While one of the consequences of this is that obvious Hall of Famers like Mike Piazza and Jeff Bagwell have had to wait far longer than they would in a sane world, (and hopefully Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina and Curt Schilling before they fall off the ballot), the problem is larger than that. I'm not talking about the steroids guys (Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens) or the steroids-because-of-an-anonymous-report guy either (Sammy Sosa). What's even worse is the less-obvious Hall of Fame candidates, who now never even get a chance to make their cases for immortality.
There have always been players like this scattered throughout history, like Bobby Grich and Lou Whitaker, two players that remain snubbed by MLB's various committees, ham-handedly assembled chimeras of failure. The occasional unfortunate leak has become a flood in recent years. Jim Edmonds, a center fielder with 393 home runs and eight Gold Gloves (his sabermetric defense is just as terrific) went by with barely a whisper. Kenny Lofton, ninth all-time in WAR for a center fielder, didn't even get that. Kevin Brown, with 211 wins in the era of five-man rotations and a 3.33 ERA (and 31st in WAR)? If I had to rely just on the Hall of Fame debates, I wouldn't even known that Bernie Williams or Jorge Posada were even on a ballot. I don't even think the final two are over my personal line, but they're the types of players we should be discussing and debating, reviving their careers one last time in the spotlight, rather than having to fight for seven years about whether one of the top five first basemen in history should be inducted.
There are several players like this on the ballot, mostly first-timers, but even some holdovers, that are strong candidates -- even a few I'd call obvious slam-dunks based on the players currently in the Hall. I'm not talking about the players at Larry Walker-level, obvious candidates being kept out by lackluster analysis and ballot limits, but the players not even getting into the healthy debate territory and in some cases, about to be kicked off the Baseball Writers' Association of America ballot forever.
Not a single named omission in that excerpt bothers me. But I don’t have a vote, so Mr. Szymborski can rest easy.
I think the Baseball Hall of Fame voters as a collective have been a travesty over the years. A lot of them are inflexible and lazy in how they fill out their ballots. They look at a handful of batting and pitching statistics at the exclusion of other information. And they tend to hold players at historically lighter hitting positions like CF, 2B and SS to the same batting criteria as corner outfielders or 1B, which is where sluggers usually play.
DaveSchmidt said:
Not a single named omission in that excerpt bothers me. But I don’t have a vote, so Mr. Szymborski can rest easy.
Totally agree. Bobby Grich??? Come on.
all the guys Szymborski mentions are very high on the list for career WAR at their positions. A lot of people don't like that metric, but when you look at the lists for each position, typically the top 15 guys are in the HoF. So it does have a face validity to it, when you see that the top 2B in WAR is Rogers Hornsby, followed by Eddie Collins, Nap Lajoie and Joe Morgan. Sure, you could argue Grich or Edmonds are outliers for some reason, and WAR isn't meaningful in their cases.
But I don't know that Szymborski is arguing that those guys should definitely be in the Hall. I think he's asking why no one even discusses a guy like Jim Edmonds. Clearly most of the voters don't look at any of the sabermetric stats before considering their ballot.
ml1--exactly the point being made.
There is a well-known bias towards players who were in high profile markets, or sold themselves to the press really well, or played on winning teams even if they were mainly important parts and not the best on their team. If you were to pull them behind a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" and just compare stats straight up, a fair number in the HOF would not be there, and a fair number not in (or even in serious consideration) would be.
So the question for me is, is the HOF about more than just stats? I think the answer is yes, but where the line between is drawn is awful murky.
I think there are definitely guys who don't get consideration because they are/were jerks. Jeff Kent is one. He certainly belongs in the conversation, even if you think his subpar fielding and running disqualifies him. And if you go by WAR, he was a top 20 2B of all time.
mfpark said:
ml1--exactly the point being made.
There is a well-known bias towards players who were in high profile markets, or sold themselves to the press really well, or played on winning teams even if they were mainly important parts and not the best on their team. If you were to pull them behind a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" and just compare stats straight up, a fair number in the HOF would not be there, and a fair number not in (or even in serious consideration) would be.
So the question for me is, is the HOF about more than just stats? I think the answer is yes, but where the line between is drawn is awful murky.
He'll probably be retired by April 1st