Tag Archives: Mike Piazza

January 3, 2016

2016 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot

It occurred to me as I was putting this together that I have never given appropriate credit to the anonymous gnomes of the internet who take pleasure each year in making fun of the no-hopers on the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot. They inspired me to write at least something about every name — 32 this year — on the ballot. So they deserve credit for that.

In fact, it probably turns out I write more about those I’m not voting for than those I am. This is partly because there are more of them and partly because most of my votes are repeats and it’s boring making the same arguments over and over. So, for a block of seven candidates I’m voting for again, I’ll refer you to past posts for particulars, if you’re interested. What follows is a stream of consciousness about some of the people and issues that came up this year. As usual, if you’d prefer to skip the verbiage and just harvest the ballot, you can scroll to the bottom.

For the edification of the gnomes, the screening committee of baseball writers that sets the ballot each year errs purposefully on the side of inclusion, and here’s why:

Of nearly half a million high school baseball players in the U.S. each year, less than 6 percent wind up playing on a college team. Of those, about 10 percent will be drafted by a big league team. Of those, about 10 percent will actually make it to the majors. Of those, according to one voluminous study of 20th century players, about one in five position players will play 10 big league seasons, the minimum to be eligible for the Hall. So, roughly speaking, about 0.01 percent of high school players, or one in 10,000, will achieve eligibility for the Hall of Fame. Considering how many players now come from outside the U.S. feeder system, it’s probably fewer than that. For most of them, appearing on the ballot is the only recognition of this achievement they will receive.

Here are the players who accomplished that feat and were included on the 2016 ballot but have roughly the same percentage chance of being elected as they did as young players of becoming eligible. For our purposes, the cutoff is a deficit of 12 or more in Jay Jaffe’s JAWS metric (average of career wins above replacement and seven best WAR seasons) to the average score of existing Hall of Famers at the player’s position.

No-hopers

Garret Anderson

In Anderson’s rookie season with the Angels, 1995, he batted .321 with 16 home runs and 69 RBI in 400 plate appearances. He was edged out for rookie of the year by Marty Cordova, who would play nine seasons. Andy Pettitte finished third.

Anderson played 17 seasons, all but the last two for the Angels, who drafted him out of high school in 1990. He batted cleanup in all seven games of the 2002 World Series, driving in the winning runs in Game 7 with a third-inning, bases-loaded double off the Giants’ Livan Hernandez. He finished fourth in American League MVP voting that year (behind Miguel Tejada, Alex Rodriguez and Alfonso Soriano) and was a three-time All-Star. His career slash was .293/.324/.461 with 287 homers and 1,365 RBI.

His JAWS score of 24.2 ranks 86th all-time among left fielders and 29.1 points below the average score (53.3) of the 19 left fielders already in the Hall.

Brad Ausmus

Rarer even than Hall-of-Famers are Ivy League graduates active in the major leagues, which Ausmus was throughout his 18-year career after mixing terms at Dartmouth with seasons in the minor leagues and sacrificing his collegiate eligibility in the process. He was a terrific defensive catcher, winning three gold gloves and finishing 10th all-time in fielding percentage. He was an American League All-Star in 1999. His defensive wins above replacement (18.3) were more than double his offensive WAR (8.6).

His JAWS score (15.7) ranks 99th among catchers and 27.4 points below the average (43.1) of the 13 catchers in the Hall.

Luis Castillo

A three-time All-Star, three-time gold glove winner and two-time league stolen base leader, Castillo was the only player on the roster of both Marlins championship teams (1997, 2003) who did not get traded in between, although he did not appear in the ’97 World Series. He finished with a career slash of .290/.368/.351. His 370 stolen bases rank 93rd all-time. He was a key member of the ’03 champions.

His JAWS score (26.4) ranks 69th among second basemen and 30.5 points below the average (56.9) of 20 second basemen in the Hall.

David Eckstein

The 5-foot-6-inch “X factor” joined the Angels as a 26-year-old rookie in 2001, batting .285, stealing 29 bases and finishing fourth in rookie-of-the-year voting. He was a two-time All-Star and one of the few shortstops to win World Series in both leagues, with the Angels in 2002 and Cardinals in 2006. He was named most valuable player of the ’06 Series, batting .364 in the five-game victory over the Tigers.

His JAWS score (19.9) ranks 112th among shortstops and 34.8 points below the average (54.7) of the 21 shortstops in the Hall.

Troy Glaus

When baseball executives do the regression studies that demonstrate their tendency to overpay veteran free agents, Glaus is one of the cautionary tales. The year he turned 24, his third season with the Angels, he led the American league in home runs with 47 and made the first of his four All-Star games. Of his career WAR of 37.9, accumulated over 13 seasons, more than half, 20.4, came in seasons two through five, culminating in his World Series MVP in 2002, when he batted .385 with three home runs in the Angels’ seven-game victory over the Giants. His career slash was .254/.358/.489, with 320 homers and 950 RBI.

His JAWS score (35.3) ranks him 37th among third basemen and 19.7 below the average (55.0) of 13 third basemen in the Hall.

Mark Grudzielanek

A regional Skee ball champion in Texas at age 16, Grudzielanek was unofficially the most misspelled name on television graphics of his generation. Vin Scully turned it lyrical, pronouncing it Grass-a-lonic. An above-average defender on either side of second base, he accumulated offensive WAR of 23.4 and defensive WAR of 8.9 over a 15-season career with five teams. Grudzielanek made his only All-Star appearance in his second season, 1996, when he batted .306 and stole 33 bases for the Expos. He won his only gold glove in 2006, at the age of 36, for the Royals.

His JAWS score (23.4) ranks 76th among second basemen and 33.5 below the average (56.9) of the 20 second basemen in the Hall.

Mike Hampton

No one will ever know if Hampton’s career trajectory would have changed materially had he not succumbed to the Rockies’ seduction in 2001, signing an eight-year, $121 million contract to pitch half his games at Coors Field. After dominating the National League with his power sinker in 1999 for the Astros, going 22-4 and finishing second to Randy Johnson in Cy Young balloting, Hampton was traded, enjoyed a good year for the Mets (15-10, 3.14), and then became the centerpiece (with Denny Neagle) of Colorado’s attempt to prove it was not a pitcher’s graveyard.

On June 10, 2001, after the Rockies beat the Cardinals 12-3 at Coors Field, Hampton’s record was 9-2, his ERA 2.98. From there, the experiment unraveled in a hurry. By the end of the season, those numbers were 14-13, 5.41. The next season, his last there, they were 7-15, 6.15. He got back on track with a couple of solid seasons in Atlanta before injuries derailed his career. There is no way to know what if any contribution those two years at elevation made, but the tendency of Rockies pitchers to break down — physically, mentally or both — is what led to some of the club’s odder experiments later on.

Hampton called it quits after 16 years with a record of 148-115 and an ERA of 4.06. Remove the two years in Colorado and those numbers are 127-87, 3.72. He was one of the best-hitting pitchers of his era, winning five silver slugger awards. He took full advantage of his time in Colorado in this respect, winning silver sluggers both years and putting up a career-best seven home runs in 2001. His career batting average was .246 with 16 home runs — 10 in his two years with the Rockies — and 79 RBI.

His JAWS score (27.3) ranks 301st all-time among starting pitchers and 33.5 points below the average (62.1) of 62 starting pitchers in the Hall.

Mike Lowell

On one level, there are few awards in baseball as prestigious as World Series MVP. If your definition of greatness includes rising to the occasion when it matters most, this is the award that attempts to capture that quality. Unfortunately, because it rewards performance in such a small window, the result often seems random. Lowell won it in 2007 when his nice, round .400 batting average made him the selection after Boston’s four-game sweep of the overmatched Rockies, a series in which an MVP wasn’t really required.

Overall, Lowell was a .252 postseason hitter for Florida and Boston and a .279 career hitter overall. His power numbers were OK — 223 career homers, 952 RBI, 108 OPS+ — but not extraordinary. The same could be said of his defense at third base. He became a fan favorite in Boston, but his career didn’t last long enough to take advantage of the WAR career adding machine. He was a four-time All-Star whose best year was ’07, when he batted .324 with 21 homers and 120 RBI, finishing fifth in regular-season MVP voting.

His JAWS score (24.1) ranks 84th among third basemen and 30.9 points below the average (55.0) of 13 third basemen in the Hall.

Mike Sweeney

A three-time player of the year for the Royals, Sweeney was a natural hitter who batted over .300 five times and barely missed it as a career average (.297). He started as a catcher, where he struggled defensively, moved to first base, and ultimately to designated hitter. In the five seasons from 1999 through 2003, he accumulated 18.6 wins above replacement, more than three-quarters of his career total. He appeared in the postseason only once, getting a single at-bat for the Phillies in 2010 at age 36. He singled.

His JAWS score (23.2) ranks 102nd among first basemen and 31.0 points below the average (54.2) of the 19 first basemen in the Hall.

Randy Winn

An impressive athlete who could hit from both sides of the plate, run and play defense, Winn was drafted in the third round by Florida in 1995. While he had a nice 13-year career, playing for five teams, he never quite lived up to the athletic promise. He was named to just one All-Star Game, in 2002, for Tampa Bay. Statistically, he was roughly average, both offensively and defensively, with a career OPS+ of 99. His career slash was .284/.343/.416.

His JAWS score (26.1) ranks 95th among center fielders and 31.1 points below the average (57.2) of the 18 center fielders in the Hall.

***

These exclusions pare the original ballot from 32 to 22 names. Here they are, listed in order of their JAWS rankings relative to the average of players at their positions already in the Hall:

Barry Bonds +64.3
Roger Clemens +41.2
Ken Griffey Jr. +11.6
Jeff Bagwell +9.7
Mike Piazza +8.1
Alan Trammell +2.8
Curt Schilling +2.4
Tim Raines +2.3
Mike Mussina +1.7
Edgar Martinez +1.0
Larry Walker +0.5
Mark McGwire -2.3
Jim Edmonds -5.8
Sammy Sosa -7.1
Jason Kendall -7.2
Gary Sheffield -9.0
Lee Smith -9.0
Fred McGriff -10.1
Trevor Hoffman -10.4
Billy Wagner -10.4
Nomar Garciaparra -11.1
Jeff Kent -11.5

***

Obvious cheaters

This category remains controversial, and will, no doubt, for the foreseeable future. I explained my rationale at some length two years ago and you should refer to that post if you want a more verbose explanation than I provide here. With something like 100 honorary voters coming off the rolls as a result of this year’s change in voting qualifications, it will be interesting to see the effect on the percentages these players receive. I would expect them to rise on the assumption that the older voters bumped from the rolls were more likely to penalize them for using performance-enhancing drugs than the younger voters who now make up a larger proportion of the total.

The willingness to shrug off obvious cheating with the usual rationales — everybody was doing it; who knows who was doing it; modern chemistry is a part of sports, like it or not — still baffles me. Some of it comes from veteran baseball writers protective of former commissioner Bud Selig, who botched the steroid era quite spectacularly but treated beat writers well and was rewarded with their loyalty. Minimizing the cheating minimizes his mistake. Some of it comes from a moral relativism that derives from a devotion to sabermetrics — the numbers are really all that matter; the numbers would have been good enough without the cheating. And some of it comes from a related dependence on quantifiable certitude — the view that if we can’t know with certainty who did and who didn’t, we shouldn’t attempt to make any distinctions at all. As a lifelong journalist and the son of a historian, this seems to me either hopelessly naive or purposefully impossible. We are always doing the best we can with the knowledge we have. That’s life.

For those attached to one or more of these rationalizations, or to another rationale entirely, I urge a viewing of the 2014 documentary Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story, currently playing on Showtime. Is there any good reason Armstrong should be vilified and lose everything in his sport while baseball players who did exactly the same thing stand for election to be glorified and immortalized in theirs, other than the fact that baseball, like cycling, was asleep at the switch at the time but, unlike cycling, had no outside entity like the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to clean up afterward?

One recent development is also worth mentioning in light of claims that the “morals clause” in Hall of Fame voting represents the antiquated remains of a bygone era and should properly be excised if anybody ever gets around to modernizing the rules. The Hall of Fame has quite noticeably taken charge of this process over the past couple of years. It has taken the voting logistics from the Baseball Writers Association of America and given them to an accounting firm. It has reduced the time a player may remain on the ballot. It has reduced the time a voter may continue participating after he or she stops covering the game. Amid all these reforms, it has not changed this language in our instructions at all:

Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

The Hall knows what this means in 2016 and it has elected to leave it in. If you have heard players already in the Hall talk about this, you know why.

My imperfect standard remains the same. Where there is evidence of cheating I find convincing, I’m not voting for the guy. Where there is mainly suspicion and rumor, I am, if he’s qualified. On that basis, I disqualify these players from consideration this year, as I have in the past:

Barry Bonds

Roger Clemens

Mark McGwire

Sammy Sosa

***

This leaves me with 18:

Ken Griffey Jr. +11.6
Jeff Bagwell +9.7
Mike Piazza +8.1
Alan Trammell +2.8
Curt Schilling +2.4
Tim Raines +2.3
Mike Mussina +1.7
Edgar Martinez +1.0
Larry Walker +0.5
Jim Edmonds -5.8
Jason Kendall -7.2
Gary Sheffield -9.0
Lee Smith -9.0
Fred McGriff -10.1
Trevor Hoffman -10.4
Billy Wagner -10.4
Nomar Garciaparra -11.1
Jeff Kent -11.5

***

To this point, the process has been reasonably straightforward. I rely on Jaffe’s quantitative sorting metric unless and until I disagree based on my own qualitative judgment — the “eye test.”

Now it gets less straightforward. I like Jaffe’s formulation that players added to the Hall of Fame should be at least as good as those already there — the impulse not to dilute the quality of the place. Still, the effort to compare performances across many generations, during which the game has changed so much, is approximate at best. For example, in 1970 the Veterans Committee elected a Cardinals pitcher from the 1920s and ’30s by the name of Jesse Haines. He won 20 three times, 210 overall, career ERA of 3.64. His JAWS score (27.3) is exactly the same as Mike Hampton’s.

So when these quantitative assessments reach the relatively small differences among our 18 remaining candidates, the decisions get more subjective.

Unfortunately, both qualitative and quantitative measures struggle mightily in the same area — the specialist, baseball’s closer. It is an issue this year because three of our 18 — Lee Smith, Trevor Hoffman and Billy Wagner — are closers.

For most of baseball history, relief pitchers were the guys who weren’t good enough to be starters. By definition, they were not good enough to be in the Hall of Fame. That is still true of most relief pitchers — all but the ones designated to finish games. Of 310 elected members of the Hall, only five were elected as relief pitchers.

Based on Jaffe’s attempt to quantify this judgment, two of the five — Bruce Sutter and Rollie Fingers — don’t belong. Their JAWS scores are well below those of the other three — Dennis Eckersley, Hoyt Wilhelm and Goose Gossage. In fact, the Relief Pitchers JAWS Leaders page over at baseballreference.com is a mess. It makes Greg Swindell and Turk Farrell two of the top 12 relievers of all time, ahead of Smith, Sutter, Wagner, Hoffman, Dan Quisenberry and so on.

Why? Well, because they were once starters and earned a bunch of WAR in that role, then hauled them over to the relievers’ page. The best reliever never to have started a major league game, according to Jaffe’s model, is Sutter, who ranks 17th. So if the closer has a value anywhere near what the modern general manager is willing to pay for one, JAWS has yet to illuminate it.

What would be the key metrics? Being old school, or maybe just old, I start with earned-run average. If the idea is to hold a lead, you want to give up as few runs as possible.

Billy Wagner: 2.31
Hoyt Wilhelm: 2.52
Bruce Sutter: 2.83
Trevor Hoffman: 2.87
Rollie Fingers: 2.90
Goose Gossage: 3.01
Lee Smith: 3.03
Dennis Eckersely: 3.50

Or maybe ERA+, which adjusts for ballparks and makes the league average 100:

Billy Wagner: 187
Hoyt Wilhelm: 147
Trevor Hoffman: 141
Bruce Sutter: 136
Lee Smith: 132
Goose Gossage: 126
Rollie Fingers: 120
Dennis Eckersley: 116

How about saves? There is something arbitrary about this volume number, depending as it does on the quality of your team — how often it is ahead late — and, in days of yore, before it became automatic, your manager’s inclination to bring you into such situations.

Trevor Hoffman: 601
Lee Smith: 478
Billy Wagner: 422
Dennis Eckersley: 390
Rollie Fingers: 341
Goose Gossage: 310
Bruce Sutter: 300
Hoyt Wilhelm: 228

The more modern the player, the more likely that player is to pile up saves because the degree of specialization has increased over time. One would expect to find an inverse correlation between saves and innings pitched per appearance. Eckersley spent half his career as a starter; older relievers pitched more innings per appearance. Moe Drabowsky famously replaced Dave McNally in the third inning of Game 1 of the 1966 World Series and pitched the rest of the game. What, exactly, is the value of the modern specialist who comes in only at the very end, to pitch one-ninth or less of a game, usually when his team is ahead?

The sabermetricians appear to have decided that a team leading late will go on to win so much of the time randomly that even elite closers deserve credit for only a handful, or fewer, of their saves each year. I discussed this at some length last year with respect to John Smoltz, whose career WAR suffered noticeably — and made him a sub-par HOF candidate as a starting pitcher, according to JAWS — because of his years as an elite closer. The fact the Braves chose to use him in that role during those years demonstrates that they estimated the value of the position quite differently from the way the WAR numbers do. To make matters worse, the average JAWS score of the five relievers already in the Hall — which becomes the standard for aspiring candidates — is inflated by Eckersley’s WAR numbers, the majority of which — 45.6 of 62.5 — he earned as a starter.

Over the course of his 18-year career, Hoffman accumulated a total of 28 wins above replacement, according to baseballreference.com, or an average of 1.6 per season. Simple subtraction tells us that according to this metric, which Jaffe uses to determine Hall of Fame worthiness, an average replacement relief pitcher would have piled up 573 saves in the circumstances in which Hoffman accumulated 601. Assuming this average replacement player had Hoffman’s durability, he would finish his career with the second-most saves in history, same as Hoffman.

Does anybody believe this? If so, why do the people entrusted with running big league teams pay closers what they pay them these days?

So WAR and JAWS don’t help much, if at all, when it comes to relievers, except possibly as a relative measurement among them, since it might be wrong about all of them in the same ways.

For example, JAWS gives Hoffman and Wagner exactly the same score (24.0). Hoffman has a slightly better career WAR; Wagner a slightly better prime WAR. They even out. So, when Hoffman partisans start quoting his stats, they often insert a minimum requirement of 1,000 innings pitched. That leaves him first in baserunners allowed (1.058 WHIP), an impressive marker. As it happens, Wagner’s number is better (0.998), which might explain why Hoffman partisans put in the innings minimum. Were it not for the round number, the difference between Hoffman’s 1,089 innings and Wagner’s 903 wouldn’t matter much. After all, Smith pitched 1,289, and that hasn’t helped him in 13 years on the ballot.

Complicating all this is the general consensus that Mariano Rivera will be elected to the Hall as soon as he becomes eligible. So there is a certain level of dominance that bypasses the positional problem. Even JAWS approves of Rivera, although he still trails Eckersley. There are Hoffman partisans who believe he should hold the same trump card Rivera holds. But unlike Rivera, Hoffman never got a chance to shine on the big stage. He made only one World Series appearance, giving up two earned runs in two innings. His career postseason ERA is 3.46.

In a way, closers in baseball are like kickers in football. They play a crucial role at certain critical moments, but for the vast majority of the time, they watch from the sidelines or the bullpen, as the case may be. The small cohort of voters for the Pro Football Hall of Fame has similar difficulty comparing them favorably to the guys on the field most of the time. Only three have made it — George Blanda, Lou Groza and Jan Stenerud — and two of those played other positions as well.

Not to bring Ray Guy into the conversation, but I’m punting. The traffic jam of worthy candidates allows me to take more time to think about this and wait for the ballot to open up enough that devoting a spot to a specialist doesn’t require taking one from a deserving everyday player. I’ve got 11 non-relievers I’d like to vote for this year, and when I ask myself whether I would take one of the closers over one of them if I were building a team, the answer is no.

Which gets me down to 15:

Ken Griffey Jr. +11.6
Jeff Bagwell +9.7
Mike Piazza +8.1
Alan Trammell +2.8
Curt Schilling +2.4
Tim Raines +2.3
Mike Mussina +1.7
Edgar Martinez +1.0
Larry Walker +0.5
Jim Edmonds -5.8
Jason Kendall -7.2
Gary Sheffield -9.0
Fred McGriff -10.1
Nomar Garciaparra -11.1
Jeff Kent -11.5

***

Ken Griffey Jr.

Let’s get the easy one out of the way. Early on, Junior’s long, picturesque swing from the left side earned him “The Natural” nickname, in memory of the Bernard Malamud character. Steeped in baseball as a kid in the clubhouse of the Big Red Machine — his father played right field — he was ready to roll almost from the moment the Mariners made him the first overall pick of the 1987 draft at age 17.

Two years later, he was a big league starter. Three years later, at 20, he was an All-Star, the first of 11 consecutive selections and 13 overall. He received MVP votes after 10 seasons, winning the award in 1997, when he led the American League with 56 homers, 147 RBI, 125 runs scored, 393 total bases, 23 intentional walks and a slugging percentage of .646.

He won nine gold gloves along the way, all of them before age 30. The vast majority of his career WAR also came in his 20s. His JAWS score (68.8) makes him the only center fielder not (yet) in the Hall of Fame with a better score than the average of the 18 center fielders already there. He trails only Willie Mays, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker and Mickey Mantle. He leads Joe DiMaggio and Duke Snider.

***

Here is the group of seven candidates I voted for last year that I am voting for again, and for the same reasons. Check last year’s post to explain my votes for Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza, Alan Trammell, Curt Schilling, Tim Raines, Mike Mussina and Larry Walker. You will find a particularly long-winded rant on behalf of Walker, which I am likely to repeat at some point before his eligibility (not to mention mine) expires, because quantitative analysis suggests his modest HOF vote totals are the result of irrational prejudice.

I refer you to the same post to explain my vote this year for Edgar Martinez. I wanted to vote for him last year, as I wrote at the time, but he was No. 11 on my list. Luckily, three of the guys I voted for won, so a spot opened up. I would only mention here a mesmerizing career OPS of .933 and OPS+ of 147. The man could hit.

***

A word or two about Trammell, on the ballot for the last time this year, and Raines, who gets one more shot after this one if he needs it.

On the JAWS list at shortstop, Trammell sits just ahead of Derek Jeter, who will be elected in his first year of eligibility and serenaded to Cooperstown by the New York Philharmonic, and Barry Larkin, who was elected in 2012 with 86.4 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, Trammell is about to fall off the ballot after 15 years, never having achieved 40 percent of the vote.

About the only logical explanation is that voters don’t put much value on defense at arguably the most important defensive position, which doesn’t say much for voters. Trammell has the best defensive WAR of the three, but his offensive numbers were also excellent for a middle infielder. Put them together and they surpass the work of his more popular fellow shortstops, according to the quants, but it doesn’t matter. His partner in that long-lived Tigers double-play combination, Lou Whitaker, received even less respect from the national voters. Who knows, maybe Trammell is paying for the unfortunate accident of playing shortstop in the American League in the era of Cal Ripken.

Whatever the explanation, it’s hard to reconcile an educated voting body giving such disparate treatment to players whose skills and achievements were so comparable.

Raines was caught by the Hall’s reduction in player eligibility from 15 to 10 years. Now in his ninth year on the ballot, he suddenly has one more instead of the six he would have had under the old rules. At the rate he was building support, it could matter. Starting at 24.3 percent of the vote in 2008, he rose to 55.0 percent last year. Here’s hoping logic and urgency turbocharge his push to 75.

Quantitatively, he should be a shoo-in. JAWS makes him the eighth-best left fielder of all time, ahead of Manny Ramirez, Billy Williams, Willie Stargell and many others. His 55.6 JAWS score is 2.3 points better than the average of 19 left fielders already in the Hall.

His 808 stolen bases are fifth all time and the four above him — Rickey Henderson, Lou Brock, Billy Hamilton and Ty Cobb — are in the Hall already. His success rate when he took off — 85 percent — was higher than any of the four above him on the volume list. He was an OBP guy before OBP was cool in front offices, putting up a career .385, contributing to an .810 OPS for a player who never hit 20 homers in a season. If Trammell suffered by comparison to Ripken, perhaps Raines suffered by comparison to Henderson. Advanced metrics make it clear both of these guys belong.

***

Having settled on Griffey, Martinez and the seven unsuccessful candidates I voted for last year, I had one vote remaining and two more candidates I wanted to vote for. Because the JAWS numbers relative to their positions are similar for the remaining six, I began with the eye test.

Nomar Garciaparra sure looked like a Hall of Famer through his 20s, but injuries sabotaged the remainder of his career so thoroughly that the volume offensive numbers he seemed certain to produce never materialized. His rookie-of-the-year award and seven top-13 MVP finishes show how good he was when young and healthy, but except for one year his 30s were a wasteland and never allowed WAR’s longevity bias to work for him. Troy Tulowitzki’s career WAR should pass Nomar’s next year, and Tulo is not exactly an ironman either.

Jim Edmonds did not strike me as a Hall of Famer while I was watching him play. He was a very good player, and his numbers reflect it. Maybe I’m spoiled. I did see Mays and Mantle live as a kid. So Griffey qualifies and Edmonds doesn’t. Good batting averages, but not great. Good power numbers, but not great. Terrific fielder; eight gold gloves.

His similarity scores on baseballreference.com go to guys like Lance Berkman and Ellis Burks, Dale Murphy and Fred Lynn. He never started an All-Star Game while playing for the Angels because Griffey or Kenny Lofton always did. In the National League, he alternated with guys like Berkman and Andruw Jones. He ended up with four All-Star appearances, which seems a bit low for a player with his numbers and suggests how many other outfielders were putting up numbers like that, too.

Jason Kendall was a nice hitter, particularly early in his career, when he batted .300 or better in four of his first five seasons. He did it twice in his remaining 10. He was an All-Star in three of his first five seasons, and then never again. He never won a gold glove. During his years with the Pirates they were going to Charles Johnson, Ausmus and Mike Matheny, and Mike Lieberthal one year.

He had unusual speed for a catcher, but he never had much power, which is pretty much a requirement for a catcher who wants to be in the Hall of Fame. Johnny Bench, Gary Carter, Ivan Rodriguez, Carlton Fisk, Mike Piazza, Yogi Berra — the top six JAWS scores at the position — each had more than 300 career homers. Kendall had 75. Early in his career, his similarity scores go to Mickey Cochrane, who had the fewest homers (119) of catchers above the JAWS average for Hall of Famers at the position. By the end, his closest comparable was Dick Bartell, a journeyman infielder of the 1930s and ’40s.

Like Edmonds, Fred McGriff put up big numbers for much of his career and yet did not consistently rise above his contemporaries. From 1988-90, he received MVP votes every year as a member of the Blue Jays, but the first basemen making the American League All-Star team were guys like Mark McGwire, George Brett, Don Mattingly and Cecil Fielder.

He was traded to the Padres following the 1990 season (with Tony Fernandez, for Roberto Alomar and Joe Carter) and found himself in an All-Star mix with Will Clark, John Kruk, Gregg Jefferies and the emerging Bagwell. Three years later, he was traded again, this time for Melvin Nieves and Donnie Elliott. He continued to crank out the home runs, but after Atlanta he was a journeyman, going from the Rays to the Cubs to the Dodgers back to the Rays. He had five All-Star appearances in 19 seasons.

McGriff is a close call. His offensive numbers are very good, and so are his comparables (David Ortiz, Willie McCovey, Willie Stargell, Paul Konerko). But there are guys above him on the JAWS list at first base who have gotten less consideration. He did not dominate the competition at his position in either league. I thought of him as a very good player, but not a great one.

I want to vote for Jeff Kent. To my mind, JAWS underestimates the value of his power and production from a defensive position that so seldom provides them at anything like his level. His 377 career homers rank first all-time among second basemen, ahead of Rogers Hornsby, Craig Biggio, Joe Morgan and all the rest. His 1,518 RBI rank third, behind Hornsby and Nap Lajoie, who played in a different era and considerably longer. Granted, Kent played in an offensive era, but his numbers were still impressive, especially in 2000, the year he won the National League MVP award by batting .334 with 33 homers and 125 RBI. You know how many second basemen have won that award in the last 50 years? Three: Morgan, Ryne Sandberg and Kent.

Like McGriff, he was a five-time All-Star. Unlike McGriff, he was often beaten out by a Hall-of-Famer in Biggio. In 1997 and ’98, he was in the top 10 of National League MVP voting and Biggio was the All-Star. The closest McGriff came to an MVP award was a fourth-place finish in 1993.

My final vote came down to a battle between Kent and Gary Sheffield. Knowing Sheffield would not make my final cut in last year’s traffic jam, I eliminated him early. But I kept thinking about it afterward because as a fan who was usually rooting against the teams he played for, he scared the hell out of me — that menacing bat-wave, the explosive pop when he crushed the ball. It flew off his bat like a missile. The relentless danger he posed at the plate reminded me a little of an old favorite, Eddie Murray, a Hall of Famer often overshadowed by a more celebrated teammate and yet a fearsome competitor and consistent producer. Our brains make the connections they make, so, just for grins, I put their numbers side by side.

The main difference is durability. Murray played 3,026 games in 21 seasons; Sheffield, 2,576 in 22. Still, in 15 percent fewer games, Sheffield managed, like Murray, to exceed 500 home runs, and slightly exceed Murray’s All-Star appearances (nine to eight). When it comes to overall offensive production adjusted for ballparks, Sheffield’s career OPS+ was 140, compared to Murray’s 129. Playing different positions, both ended up with negative defensive WARs, although Sheffield’s was worse. Still, as with Kent, watching the guy play it seemed obvious that his defensive deficiencies were a small price to pay for that bat.

Both passed my eye test. By a whisker, I gave my final vote to Sheffield.

So here’s my 2016 ballot:

Jeff Bagwell
Ken Griffey Jr.
Edgar Martinez
Mike Mussina
Mike Piazza
Tim Raines
Curt Schilling
Gary Sheffield
Alan Trammell
Larry Walker

Happy new year.

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December 13, 2014

2015 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot, Part 2

By Dave Krieger

When I left you hanging in the manner of the Hardy Boys at the end of Part 1, you had suffered through a 4,000-word post just to eliminate the flotsam from this year’s Baseball Hall of Fame ballot. I had crossed out 19 of the 34 names, which still left 15 to share the 10 votes I’m allowed. So I’ve provided the shortcut above for those who just want the bottom line and aren’t up for another 5,000 words. If that’s you, there you go, and see you around. For the rest of you, masochists that you are, here we go.

The 15 names that remained after Part 1:

Starting pitcher: Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Mike Mussina, Curt Schilling.

Hybrid pitcher: John Smoltz.

Relief pitcher: Tom Gordon, Lee Smith.

Catcher: Mike Piazza.

First base: Jeff Bagwell.

Second base: Craig Biggio, Jeff Kent.

Shortstop: Alan Trammell.

Third base: Edgar Martinez. (Right. I know. But that’s how they do it.)

Left fielder: Tim Raines.

Center fielder: None.

Right fielder: Larry Walker.

I began, as I did in Part 1, with Jay Jaffe’s JAWS system to get a feel for what the quants would say. The 15 candidates are listed in order, from best to worst, based on their premium or deficit to the average JAWS score of players at their position already enshrined in the Hall of Fame. As a reminder, JAWS is the average of a player’s career wins above replacement and that player’s “peak” WAR — the total of his best seven seasons. The theory, and I stress the word theory, is the perfect blend of longevity and awesomeness. Presumably, if you believed the JAWS method delivered on this theory, you would vote for the first 10 names on this list and be done with it, especially because the first 10, conveniently, are above the average of the players at their position already in the Hall, and the next five are below. The idea behind JAWS is to prevent dilution of the quality of players in the Hall by inducting only players equal or superior to the existing residents.

Randy Johnson (+20.2)
Jeff Bagwell (+9.7)
Pedro Martinez (+9.3)
Mike Piazza (+8.1)
Alan Trammell (+2.8)
Curt Schilling (+2.7)
Tim Raines (+2.3)
Mike Mussina (+2.0)
Edgar Martinez (+1.0)
Larry Walker (+0.5)
Craig Biggio (-3.6)
Tom Gordon (-5.1)
John Smoltz (-7.6)
Lee Smith (-9.0)
Jeff Kent (-11.6)

In Part 1, I wrote a bit about the difference between quantitative and qualitative analysis. In this case, I am using JAWS to represent quantitative analysis and my own subjective “eye test” — did the dude look like a Hall of Famer to me — to represent the qualitative. (If you want to know why Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, whose JAWS scores are off the charts, are not on this list, you need to go back and read Part 1, where they are listed under the category “Obvious cheaters,” and this will refer you back to my post on last year’s ballot, where I described at length my thought process on the PED issue as it relates to the Hall of Fame.)

Appraising the quantitatively-derived list with my subjective, qualitative eye, several anomalies jump out.

Anomaly No. 1: Craig Biggio.

Considered by most observers a lock for the Hall since the day he retired, Biggio, according to JAWS, was an inferior player to the average second baseman now in the Hall. He was the top vote-getter in his first year on the ballot, 2013, the year nobody was inducted, receiving 68.2 percent of the vote. Last year, leapfrogged by first-timers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas, he received 427 votes from the 571 voters, or 74.8 percent. Had he received two more votes, he would have joined Maddux, Glavine and Thomas in the class of 2014.

Significantly, Biggio’s JAWS score is inferior to that of Lou Whitaker, the under-appreciated longtime Tigers second baseman who failed to receive the minimum 5 percent required to stay on the ballot in his sole appearance in 2001. That, of course, is a crime against nature and baseball, as is the continuing under-appreciation of his teammate and double-play partner, Alan Trammell, on the ballot this year for the 14th time. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

How is it possible that Whitaker, the second-best second baseman in history not to be inducted (Bobby Grich is the first) according to JAWS, would get 2.9 percent of the vote on his first try and Biggio, his inferior by quantitative analysis, would get 68.2? Well, as the old lady in the church says at the end of The Birdcage when asked to identify the mother of the groom, whose parents are Robin Williams and Nathan Lane, “I just don’t know.”

Prone as I am to stirring up trouble, and knowing the howls of outrage this would trigger among veteran members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, I might hypothesize that race had something to do with it — Whitaker is black, Biggio is white — and order up a quantitative analysis of voting on comparable players by race, and a parallel analysis of the racial makeup of the voting population. I don’t know what such a study might find on the first question, although I would note that Tony Gwynn and Frank Thomas sailed in a lot faster than some white comparables, and Jim Rice got in with a JAWS score lower than Minnie Minoso, Lance Berkman and Jose Cruz. On the second, my guess is the racial makeup of the voting population looks something like the racial makeup of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, which is why the hypothesis must be considered.

Another hypothesis would be that the absence of a significant sabermetric influence in 2001 revealed an embarrassing blind spot in qualitative analysis. Whitaker’s offensive numbers in the traditional, non-sabermetric categories — .276/.363/.426, 244 homers, 1,084 RBI — while above average for a second baseman, were nowhere near the numbers generally required of hitters who played the corner positions or the outfield. And while he was known as a smooth fielder, few voters were probably aware this would translate into 15.4 defensive WAR.

Given what’s happened to Trammell, who has been treated slightly better but has earned nowhere near the level of support the quantitative analysis would suggest, maybe it’s some strange prejudice against Detroit.

In any case, this is one of the more remarkable divergences between quantitative and qualitative analysis in the history of the Hall, and I admit to being totally on the quants’ side on this one. Whitaker was a wonderful player who belongs in the Hall and with any luck will be installed by some iteration of the veterans committee. But it is not his absence that is outrageous; it is the failure of the BBWAA to consider him even worthy of consideration.

Let’s return for a moment to our discussion in Part 1 of the bias of WAR for longevity. The career stat, as I mentioned, is basically an adding machine. A vastly complicated series of calculations and adjustments reduces everything to a single number per season — let’s say these inscrutable calculations produce four wins above your average replacement player for our guy in a particular season. And let’s say his number is somewhere around there for much of his career. His total WAR will be largely a function of how many years he plays.

JAWS attempts to mitigate the longevity bias by averaging the career WAR total with the seven-year peak WAR total, but the poor standing of Sandy Koufax in the JAWS rankings demonstrates that peak WAR’s mitigation of the longevity bias is insufficient. So let’s try something else. Let’s eliminate longevity as a factor altogether and see what happens. It’s easy enough to do. Take a player’s career WAR total and divide it by the number of years he played, yielding his average single-season WAR. And let’s establish a minimum 10 seasons, since that’s required for consideration for the Hall.

Here are the top 20 second basemen in history based on JAWS, the number in parentheses representing the average of that player’s career WAR and peak WAR:

Rogers Hornsby (100.2)
Eddie Collins (94.1)
Nap Lajoie (83.8)
Joe Morgan (79.7)
Charlie Gehringer (65.6)
Rod Carew (65.4)
Bobby Grich (58.6)
Frankie Frisch (57.4)
Ryne Sandberg (57.2)
Jackie Robinson (56.8)
Lou Whitaker (56.4)
Chase Utley (55.3)
Roberto Alomar (54.8)
Craig Biggio (53.4)
Joe Gordon (51.4)
Willie Randolph (50.8)
Robinson Cano (49.4)
Jeff Kent (45.4)
Billy Herman (45.1)
Bobby Doerr (43.8)

Now let’s see how that list changes if we order the players by annual WAR average:

Jackie Robinson (6.2)
Rogers Hornsby (5.5)
Joe Gordon (5.2)
Robinson Cano (5.2)
Chase Utley (5.1)
Nap Lajoie (5.1)
Eddie Collins (5.0)
Dustin Pedroia (4.8)
Joe Morgan (4.6)
Rod Carew (4.3)
Charlie Gehringer (4.2)
Ryne Sandberg (4.2)
Bobby Grich (4.2)
Lou Whitaker (3.9)
Roberto Alomar (3.9)
Frankie Frisch (3.7)
Bobby Doerr (3.7)
Billy Herman (3.6)
Willie Randolph (3.6)
Tony Lazzeri (3.6)
Craig Biggio (3.3)
Jeff Kent (3.2)

This list is quite different. In effect, we have gone from asking “Who was responsible for the most career wins,” a volume stat, to “Who was responsible for the most wins per year,” a pure performance stat.

Suddenly, all the best second basemen in history didn’t play 100 years ago. Why is that? Well, the guys who played 100 years ago played longer and benefited more from WAR’s longevity bias. Hornsby played 23 seasons; Collins, 25; Lajoie, 21. The principal reason Morgan gets up there with these golden oldies is that he played 22. By failing to adequately mitigate this bias, JAWS reinforces it.

You will note that Biggio and Kent both benefit from the longevity bias. Their per-year averages drop them from 14th to 20th and 18th to 21st, respectively. Whitaker is a better player than both by both measures.

A key factor here is defense, where both Biggio and Kent are rated below average. That’s a pretty important fact to know about a second baseman. Whitaker’s career defensive WAR, as mentioned, is 15.4. Kent’s is -0.7, Biggio’s -3.9.

The result of this analysis is that I changed my mind about both Biggio and Kent. I voted for Biggio in each of his first two years on the ballot. I wanted to vote for Kent last year, his first, but, like this year, ran into the problem of more worthy candidates than votes, so I didn’t. This year, I won’t be voting for either, which reduces my list of candidates to 13.

That doesn’t mean I won’t go back to voting for them at some point in the future when the ballot backlog clears. This year, having more worthy candidates than votes, I don’t have to reach the ultimate question of whether they belong. I only have to reach the conclusion that there are 10 candidates more deserving of my votes.

Anomaly No. 2: John Smoltz.

With a 7.6 deficit to the average JAWS score of starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame, Smoltz would be eliminated from consideration fairly quickly if you accept this result. So I go back to my litmus test for this tool as it applies to starting pitchers. Koufax has a deficit of 14.3 to the average JAWS score of starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame. This fact by itself is enough to marginalize JAWS for me in the examination of pitchers.

Koufax suffers, of course, from the longevity bias in both WAR and JAWS. He pitched only 12 seasons, and half of those were unremarkable. Kevin Appier, who pitched 16, is 13 places ahead of Koufax in the JAWS rankings. If I had been Jaffe while he was developing this system, I would have looked at this result alone and seen that I was failing to adequately mitigate WAR’s longevity bias. But quantitatively-oriented minds may simply see Koufax as an outlier who cannot be accounted for by any formula.

Even when you eliminate longevity as a factor, the result in Koufax’s case is puzzling. He has a career WAR of 49, which gives him an average for each of his 12 seasons of 4.1. Forget all the categories in the WAR formula, forget all the math, and just ask yourself: If you put Joe Blow average pitcher out there every fourth day in Koufax’s place, he’d win four fewer games over the course of a season? Really?

Well, yes, because Koufax doesn’t begin to assemble WAR of any kind until his career is half over. We forget that he was a quite forgettable young hurler in the late 1950s. Koufax’s peak, among the most brilliant in the history of the game, was only six years long. He was an all-star in all six after never having been one before. He won three Cy Young awards and finished third for a fourth. He received MVP votes after all six campaigns, winning it once and finishing second twice.

Now get this: Koufax loses 4.2 career WAR — or the equivalent of a full season — because he was a lousy hitter. Seriously. But even eliminating that silliness, he accumulated 88 percent of his career WAR over the final six seasons of a 12-year stay in the big leagues. If you calculate his average annual WAR over those six seasons, it’s 7.8, which is more like it, although I’m still not sure the formula is adequately valuing him. In 1963, when he wins both the Cy Young award and the MVP, he’s 25-5 with an ERA of 1.88. His WAR that year is 10.7. So if the Dodgers had sent Joe Blow average pitcher out there in his place that year, Joe Blow wins 14 games? Really? Jim O’Toole and Bob Friend tied for ninth winningest pitcher in the National League that year with 17. Fourteen wins is a pretty good year for Joe Blow.

Anyway, when you take the skepticism for JAWS you have learned from the Koufax case and apply it to Smoltz, you see quite quickly why the formula values him so much lower than it values his former teammates, Maddux and Glavine. Smoltz had a five-year stretch right in the middle of his career in which he started only five games. He missed all of the 2000 season following Tommy John surgery and returned in 2001 as a reliever, although he got all five of his starts between 2000 and 2004 that year. In 2002, he saved a league-leading 55 games and finished third in Cy Young voting and eighth in MVP voting. His WAR that year was 1.2. So presumably Joe Blow saves 54 of those games.

I tell you one thing I’m learning here: I’m grabbing Joe Blow in the Rule 5 draft at the first opportunity.

Because of his unusual double as one of the best starters and one of the best closers of his time, Smoltz really has only one comparable, and that’s Dennis Eckersley. Eck spent about half his career in each role. He was a pretty good starter, getting double-figure wins 10 times and winning 20 once, but not as good as Smoltz. He was a better closer by volume because he did it so much longer, but it’s hard to beat what Smoltz did in those three seasons on a qualitative basis. Eck, who is in the Hall as a closer, trails Smoltz in career WAR, 66.5-62.5. Smoltz is the only player in baseball history to amass at least 200 wins (213) and 150 saves (154). Eckersley fell three wins short of 200. I have not done exhaustive research on this, but so far as I can tell, Smoltz is the only player in history to have led his league in both wins (twice) and saves (once).

For the 11 seasons before his injury, Smoltz averaged 3.95 WAR per year, including 7.3 in 1996, when he won the Cy Young award and went 24-8. So presumably Joe Blow wins 17 that year; I totally want to sign this guy. Smoltz’s annual WAR as one of the best closers around are 1.2, 3.3 and 2.2. If you bump these up to the average he’d established prior to that, he jumps up the JAWS rankings to the Bob Feller, Roy Halladay neighborhood, and now he’s a serious candidate even by JAWS standards, although he still has a deficit to the average JAWS score of pitching Hall-of-Famers. When he returned to starting at the age of 38, he put up consecutive annual WARs of 4.9, 5.9 and 4.6. If you give him that annual average during his three years as a closer — 5.1 — he improves his standing further. At some point, you get lost in this hypothetical math, so I’m going to stop.

Bottom line: In my opinion, WAR and JAWS are inadequate to account for an anomaly like Smoltz. To my subjective eye, he was every bit Glavine’s equal, if not quite Maddux’s, and held his own very nicely in that select company for many years. He was a wonderful starter, a wonderful reliever and a superb postseason competitor (15-4, 2.67). I’m voting for him.

Anomaly No. 3: Larry Walker.

I admit I bring a clear bias to this part of the conversation, but I contend that my bias is largely a reaction to the bias of most baseball writers and analysts not located in the Rocky Mountains — meaning all but about a dozen of them — against performances put up at Coors Field. Everybody knows it is the park that produces the biggest offensive numbers most of the time, therefore those numbers have to be discounted.

Which is where all these advanced metrics come in, right? They do that. They adjust for ballparks. So that should take care of it. According to JAWS, Walker is the 10th best right fielder in baseball history. The nine ahead of him are all in the Hall of Fame. Three of the four immediately behind him are in the Hall. If he were inducted tomorrow, his JAWS score would be slightly above the average of his new peer group. And yet, he’s getting barely cursory consideration from Hall voters. Last year, he finished 19th of 36 candidates. One in 10 voters checked him off.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know how to compensate for the effects of Coors Field. I’m not that into the mathematics of baseball. So I accept the ballpark adjustments the sabermetricians make. I don’t know exactly what they are, but this is what they do, right? They take the above-average offensive output at Coors and they multiply performances there by some factor to normalize them. I assume this is what they do.

So once Walker’s traditional stats have been put through these various wringers to produce his WAR and JAWS numbers, why don’t they count? Why don’t most of the voters take him as seriously as his JAWS score suggests they should?

Having spent quite a bit of time in press boxes during my days as an active BBWAA member, I would say this is because of a sort of sneering, smirking prejudice against Coors Field and Colorado and anything done here — yes, I’m writing from elevation, and no, I can’t seem to throw a breaking ball — on the part of most baseball writers. A lot of them honestly don’t think, even after 22 years, that Denver is a suitable place for big league baseball. The game is too weird here, not real, not legit.

If you cheer for the Rockies, you may feel the same way. Based on that 22-year data set, there are statistical anomalies here that are really discouraging with respect to the home team’s chances of sustained success. Pitchers blow out here, both physically and mentally. No good pitcher in his right mind wants to pitch half his games here. The few pitchers who experience success here can’t sustain it. No pitcher has won 100 games in a Rockies uniform. No pitcher has won 80. So elevation is a big issue in terms of the team’s ability to compete.

But if the math can adjust for the outsized numbers put up here, why should a player of Walker’s quality be penalized for playing much of his career in a place the snobs of baseball don’t take seriously? Here’s something the discounters don’t pay enough attention to know: Rockies hitters traditionally struggle when they head out on the road after a homestand because they have to readjust to the sharper bite of breaking balls and sinkers again. So while it is true that their offensive output at home is exaggerated by the Coors Field effect, their offensive output on the road is also depressed by it; hence the dramatic home/road splits that critics attribute entirely to the magnification at home. The road numbers are the “real” numbers, they say. They consistently fail to acknowledge the established phenomenon of the destructive effect each and every time hitters return to sea level. Back in the day, Dante Bichette brought a “curve ball machine” on the road with him in an attempt to reacclimate. An inventor in Greeley, Colorado has proposed a pressurized batting cage in which the Rocks could work against pitching in normal (read: sea level) atmospheric conditions in preparation for each road trip. There is no adjustment for this phenomenon in the advanced metrics that I know of. Walker’s numbers at Dodger Stadium would be adjusted for the park in the same way as everybody else’s, even if he’s coming from a mile-high elevation and experiencing a phenomenon that only his teammates face.

Walker got MVP votes after eight seasons, winning the award in 1997. He batted .384 at Coors that year, but he also batted .346 on the road. He hit 29 of his 49 homers on the road. In “late and close” situations, baseball’s measurement for clutch, he hit .352. Heck, he batted .322 in 1994 playing his home games in Montreal’s ghastly Olympic Stadium. He was a marvelous outfielder with a terrific arm and one of the best baserunners of his generation. He played an all-out style that produced various injuries that hurt his volume numbers, but he still overcomes the longevity bias of both WAR and JAWS. He and Harry Heilmann played the fewest seasons (17) of anyone in JAWS’s top 10 right fielders. His JAWS score is better than that of Hall-of-Famers Paul Waner, Sam Crawford, Tony Gwynn, Dave Winfield and a bunch of old-timers you may not have heard of. Gwynn, you may recall, was elected to the Hall on his first try, with 97.6 percent of the vote.

According to the eye test, Walker was an obvious Hall-of-Famer when healthy, a five-tool player who simply played the game at a higher level than everybody else. But there was always that sneaking suspicion about the enhancing effect of Coors Field on his numbers, that those three batting championships, that incredible run of six seasons — .366, .363, .379, .309, .350, .338 — was some sort of mirage. I voted for him his first two years on the ballot based on my subjective view of his talent, but I left him off my ballot last year when there were so many deserving candidates.

I’m grateful for the sabermetrics here because I didn’t know how to adjust for the Coors Field factor and they do, or at least they think they do. The quantitative analysis says Walker was one of the best right fielders ever to play the game. And here’s the important point: The quant analysis says he is the best right fielder in history who is not in the Hall of Fame.

The privilege of watching him every day produced the same conclusion from the eye test. In this case, it seems to me, the quantitative analysis finds a great player and the qualitative analysis of most writers is buried in prejudice and ignorance about Colorado and Coors Field. With my subjective view reinforced by the quants, I will not only vote for Walker this year, I will reserve one of my votes for him for as long as he is on the ballot and I have the privilege of voting.

These are the most interesting and/or difficult issues I wrestled with this year. According to JAWS, neither Tom Gordon nor Lee Smith meets the standard of an average Hall of Fame relief pitcher, and subjectively, I agree. As we’ve seen in Smoltz’s case, advanced metrics have difficulty valuing closers. It’s ridiculous, in my opinion, to suggest that a top closer means only one or two wins a year over an average closer, but I sympathize with the difficulty of the task. It’s such a specialty, it’s a little like a kicker in football, and those guys don’t generally make the Hall of Fame, either.

Eliminating Biggio, Kent, Gordon and Smith gets me down to 11, and there I’m stuck. I would vote for all remaining 11 if I could. And who knows, if I had more votes I might vote for Biggio, Kent and Gary Sheffield, too. As I mentioned earlier, I never reached that point because I knew I didn’t have enough votes.

Because of the logjam when Maddux, Glavine and Thomas hit the ballot last year, I didn’t vote for either Curt Schilling or Mike Mussina, having voted for Schilling the year before. But after studying their numbers, both advanced and basic, my subjective view that they are qualified was confirmed, Schilling, frankly, more so than Mussina because of the unbelievable postseason record. But, in examining my eye test on these guys, I had to admit to a personal bias against Mussina because he left the Orioles as a mercenary and signed with the Yankees. I hate players who do that within a division because it makes the smaller market team look like part of a feeder system to the bigger market team and undermines the illusion of competitive balance.

Mussina went for the money and the improved chances of a championship on a team willing to field the best players money could buy. Do you believe in karma? The Yankees won a championship the year before he arrived, in 2000, and the year after he retired, in 2009. But not during the eight years he was there. As Mel Allen used to say, how ’bout that. Still, he gave the O’s 10 good years and they had losing records his last three seasons there. I still don’t forgive him for the treachery of signing with the Yankees. He could have gone anywhere else without seeming to throw over his girlfriend to go date the richest girl in school. I still haven’t forgiven Reggie Jackson, either, and he spent only one season with the Birds, biding his time until free agency. If anyone was ever meant to play in New York, it was Jackson, but I still have the SI cover with him in an Orioles uniform. He looked good. But I digress. I will vote for Mussina and his 270 wins and 3.68 ERA and JAWS score slightly above average for Hall of Fame pitchers.

Schilling, of course, was obtained by the Orioles in a great trade — from the Red Sox, who drafted him, along with Brady Anderson, for Mike Boddicker — and then shipped out in one of the worst trades of all time — with Steve Finley and Pete Harnisch, for Glenn Davis. This is not relevant to the discussion in any way; just thought I’d mention it. Davis played 185 games over the next three seasons and retired. Schilling, Finley and Harnisch all went on to have long, productive careers. JAWS says Schilling is better than the average pitcher now in the Hall, and I know he was better in the postseason, when he went 11-2 with a 2.23 ERA. In the World Series, he was 4-1, 2.06.

Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez are no-brainers I won’t dwell on. Johnson is one of 24 pitchers in history to win at least 300 games (303). He led the league in strikeouts nine times, won five Cy Young awards and finished second for three more. He had records like 18-2 in 1995 and 20-4 in 1997 for the Mariners, 21-6 in 2001 and 24-5 in 2002 for the Diamondbacks. At 6-10, the Big Unit and his unwinding windup were unique.

Martinez won three Cy Young awards, finished second for two more and won five ERA titles with these numbers: 1.90 (Montreal, 1997), 2.07 (Boston, 1999), 1.74 (Boston, 2000), 2.26 (Boston, 2002) and 2.22 (Boston, 2003). That year in between titles in Boston? He sagged to 2.39. From 1997 to 2000, there was nobody better, not even Johnson.

I’m voting for Piazza and Bagwell on the same basis I voted for them last year — their numbers obviously qualify them and I don’t have enough evidence of cheating, despite the rumors that followed them, to disqualify them on that basis. Piazza is the fifth-best catcher in history, according to JAWS, better than Yogi Berra and Bill Dickey and Mickey Cochrane. The only catchers who score better are Johnny Bench, Gary Carter, Ivan Rodriguez and Carlton Fisk. Bagwell is the sixth-best first baseman of all time, JAWS says, better than Frank Thomas, elected on his first try last year, Eddie Murray and Willie McCovey, Hall-of-Famers all.

I’m voting for Raines and Trammell, as I have consistently, in declining hope that advanced metrics will make more voters wake up to how good these guys were. The persistent and determined undervaluation of Trammell and Whitaker remains a mystery to me. Maybe it’s a Detroit thing. Been a while since Al Kaline and Sparky Anderson. Trammell has a better JAWS score than Derek Freaking Jeter, who will be serenaded into the Hall on a bed of rose petals at the first opportunity. Trammell was not as good an offensive player, although a lifetime average of .285 with 185 homers ain’t too shabby for a shortstop, but he was a much better defensive player at arguably the most difficult defensive position in the game. Trammell’s career defensive WAR is +22. Jeter’s is -9.7.

Raines’s JAWS score justifies his election, too. He’s the eighth-best left fielder in history, according to JAWS, and the only ones above him not in the Hall are Bonds and Pete Rose. He was also the best base-stealer I ever saw. He finished fifth all time with 808, but the amazing part was his percentage. He was successful 85.7 percent of the time. Only Carlos Beltran, who tried less than half as often, has a better rate. As with Trammell, I am encouraged that advanced metrics bolster Raines’s case, but doubtful that my colleagues in the BBWAA will see the light in time. The new rule allowing candidates to remain on the ballot only 10 years instead of 15 will hurt Raines more than anyone else. He has three years left instead of eight, in the midst of the current wave of superstars becoming eligible. Trammell was grandfathered into the 15-year stay, but has only two of them remaining. The both deserve inclusion, as the advanced metrics confirm, but they will have to rely on the kindness of the veterans committee.

So that leaves Edgar Martinez as the odd man out. I wish I could vote for him. I voted for him last year. He was a lifetime .312 hitter, a two-time batting champion, one of those guys who was born to hit a baseball. Unfortunately, there is also a major weakness to his game, which is defense. He was a sub-par defender when he played third for the Mariners and then he played no defense at all in 68 percent of his games, which is not an insult but a fact. He became a designated hitter. That didn’t keep me from voting for him last year, and it won’t in the future when the logjam clears, but it’s the distinguishing factor among worthies that takes him off my ballot this year.

In the end, even with the criticisms I’ve expressed about JAWS, I end up with only one change from the JAWS top 10 of this year’s class of eligibles after my exclusions for obvious cheating. I remove Edgar Martinez and add John Smoltz.

My 2015 ballot:

1B Jeff Bagwell

P Randy Johnson

P Pedro Martinez

P Mike Mussina

C Mike Piazza

LF Tim Raines

P Curt Schilling

P John Smoltz

SS Alan Trammell

RF Larry Walker

Happy new year.

10 Comments | tags: Al Kaline, Alan Trammell, Barry Bonds, Bill Dickey, Billy Herman, Bob Feller, Bob Friend, Bobby Doerr, Bobby Grich, Brady Anderson, Carlos Beltran, Carlton Fisk, Charlie Gehringer, Chase Utley, Craig Biggio, Curt Schilling, Cy Young, Dante Bichette, Dave Winfield, Dennis Eckersley, Derek Jeter, Dustin Pedroia, Eddie Collins, Eddie Murray, Edgar Martinez, Frank Thomas, Frankie Frisch, Gary Carter, Gary Sheffield, Glenn Davis, Greg Maddux, Harry Heilmann, Ivan Rodriguez, Jackie Robinson, Jay Jaffe, Jeff Bagwell, Jeff Kent, Jim O'Toole, Jim Rice, Joe Blow, Joe Gordon, Joe Morgan, John Smoltz, Johnny Bench, Jose Cruz, Lance Berkman, Larry Walker, Lee Smith, Lou Whitaker, Mel Allen, Mickey Cochrane, Mike Boddicker, Mike Mussina, Mike Piazza, Minnie Minoso, Nap Lajoie, Nathan Lane, Paul Waner, Pedro Martinez, Pete Harnisch, Pete Rose, Randy Johnson, Reggie Jackson, Roberto Alomar, Robin Williams, Robinson Cano, Rod Carew, Roger Clemens, Rogers Hornsby, Roy Halladay, Ryne Sandberg, Sam Crawford, Sandy Koufax, Sparky Anderson, Steve Finley, Tim Raines, Tom Glavine, Tom Gordon, Tommy John, Tony Gwynn, Tony Lazzeri, Willie McCovey, Willie Randolph, Yogi Berra | posted in Rockies/MLB

September 14, 2014

New Baseball Hall of Fame voting rules

By Dave Krieger

In my snail mail this week was a letter from the Baseball Hall of Fame dated Sept. 9, reproduced above, in which it outlined changes in voting procedures beginning with this fall’s balloting for the class of 2015.

The two biggest changes are the length of time a player may remain on the ballot (down to 10 years from 15) and administration of the voting, which is being moved from the Baseball Writers Association of America to the accounting firm Ernst & Young.

Three players already beyond their tenth year on the ballot have been grandfathered in and will remain on the ballot for 15 years, assuming they aren’t elected prior to that — Lee Smith, Alan Trammell and Don Mattingly. The one quibble I have with this transition is the effect it has on players nearing the new 10-year limit, namely Mark McGwire and Tim Raines. McGwire, in his ninth year on the ballot, will actually be kicked off before Smith, in his 13th. That doesn’t seem right.

The timing of the changes is especially unfortunate for Raines, who was making steady progress, from 24 percent of the vote in 2008 to 52 percent in 2013. In a four-year period, from 2013 through 2016, an unusually star-studded wave of newly-eligible players came along — Craig Biggio, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza, Curt Schilling and Sammy Sosa in 2013; Tom Glavine, Jeff Kent, Greg Maddux, Mike Mussina and Frank Thomas in 2014; Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Gary Sheffield and John Smoltz in 2015. The wave culminates with Ken Griffey Jr. in 2016.

Under the old rules, Raines might have ridden out this wave and then resumed his assault on a Bert Blyleven-like renaissance near or at the end of his eligibility. Cutting his remaining eligibility in one fell swoop from eight years to three dramatically reduces the possibility of his being elected. As a Raines voter, I can only hope some version of the veterans committee rights this wrong in the future.

The rest of the procedural changes are mainly to bring more seriousness to the voting process after last year’s instance of an eligible voter offloading his vote to ineligible voters. Whatever you think of the voting bloc, it is to be expected that the Hall would want to control who gets to vote. Commitment to a code of conduct will now accompany voter registration.

The process is brought into the electronic age with online registration and research materials but remains in the Pony Express days with actual submission of ballots by snail mail. The Heisman Trophy has had electronic voting for some time now, so I assume Ernst & Young will ultimately employ this innovation as well. But not yet.

From the standpoint of voters, the new procedure offers the innovation of confirming receipt, never before available because the BBWAA didn’t open ballots until it was time to count them, by which time it would be too late to replace a ballot lost in the mail anyway.

There is no change to the much-discussed limit of 10 votes per voter. Many voters expressed regret that they could not vote for more than 10 last year. I was one of them. I left Curt Schilling and Mike Mussina off my 2014 ballot because I was not willing to abandon candidates I had supported longer — including Raines, Trammell and Jack Morris.

The 10-year eligibility limit will turn over the names more quickly, reducing this ballot congestion problem to some extent, but off the top of my head I can name more than 10 players I’d like to vote for this year.

Here’s a look, courtesy of Baseball Reference, at 2015 eligibles.

1 Comment | tags: Alan Trammell, Barry Bonds, Bert Blyleven, Craig Biggio, Curt Schilling, Don Mattingly, Frank Thomas, Gary Sheffield, Greg Maddux, Jack Morris, Jeff Kent, John Smoltz, Lee Smith, Mark McGwire, Mike Mussina, Mike Piazza, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Tim Raines, Tom Glavine | posted in Rockies/MLB

January 3, 2014

My Baseball Hall of Fame ballot

By Dave Krieger

I should start by admitting that I am the worst kind of voter for the Baseball Hall of Fame, at least according to the modern reformers. I am an “honorary” member of the Baseball Writers Association of America rather than an “active” one.

In fact, I’m still as active as ever, although that’s not a particularly high standard. My BBWAA category changed because my employer changed. I’m still in the media and I still cover baseball, so this is mostly a reflection of the ambiguities of a modern media landscape in transition.

Here’s how it happened: I was an active member while covering baseball as a columnist for the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post. When I moved to KOA radio two years ago, I told the BBWAA I would still be attending Rockies games on a media credential from time to time and writing about baseball in my new blog. As many bloggers will tell you without prompting, that is not enough to make you an active member. I remain an honorary member only because I had the requisite ten years or more as an active member.

The reason that many who advocate reform of the voting process object to honorary BBWAA members voting for the Hall is the category includes retired writers who may or may not keep up with the game. Of course, Hall of Fame voting is all about the past — a player must have been retired for five years to be considered and can remain on the ballot for fifteen years after that — so retired voters are often passing judgment on players they watched or covered at one time. But I’m not retired yet so I’ll let those folks carry their own water.

The Hall of Fame ballot, as you are probably aware, has become more contentious than ever. There were always disputes, of course; fans have passionately argued their differences of opinion for as long as I can remember. I still engage in the Roger Maris argument every now and then. Whether the Hall was essentially a lifetime achievement award or a recognition of true brilliance, even if short-lived, was the most common area of disagreement. Sandy Koufax made it, but generally speaking, the lifetime achievement award won out. Career statistics, including volume statistics that rewarded longevity more than brilliance, became the standard measuring stick.

Then came sabermetrics and a new divide. Older baseball writers were slow to adopt the Bill James template of advanced metrics; a younger generation embraced it. Older writers tended to think the false precision of new metrics allowed those who had never covered the game or talked to players or managers to believe they had a better understanding of it than those who had. Younger analysts often thought those who rejected or ignored the new metrics were allowing anecdotal recollections and inferior statistical measures to stand in for better, more modern rulers.

Jack Morris is the personification of this divide. Many of us considered him the dominant pitcher of the 1980s and remember his signature moment in the 1991 World Series – a 10-inning, 1-0 victory in Game 7 – as the very definition of greatness, of rising to the biggest occasion. Many sabermetricians look at his career numbers and say he’s not even close to Hall-of-Fame worthy.

Then came steroids and a divide that allowed an unbecoming sanctimony to emerge on both sides. Let’s call it a divide between the moralists and the moral relativists, to use allegations that both sides like when they’re about the other side and neither side likes when they’re about them.

I’m not that fond of either characterization. I look at the emotionalism in our politics, at people whose minds are closed by ideological bias and go to name-calling as a first resort, and I admire those in the middle taking arrows from both sides while trying to solve complex problems that don’t lend themselves to the solutions of sloganeering. That’s sort of where I am — in the muddy middle — with respect to the Hall.

In my opinion, there is no question that the game was changed more dramatically by the illegal use of steroids and human growth hormone than any form of cheating that came before. For those who claim these drugs are really no different from greenies, Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated points to the rather large difference in baseball’s penalties for a first offense between the two categories of drugs (“mandatory evaluation” and follow-up testing for amphetamines; 50-game suspension for steroids and HGH) as a measure of their relative impact on the game. The top six single-season home run totals in baseball history all happened in a four-year span, from 1998-2001, at the height of baseball’s steroid era. For a game that’s been played for more than a century, that’s quite a coincidence.

It is true, as the critics of “moralist” voters suggest, that baseball’s ambivalence on the subject of steroids is a complicating factor. Coming out of the 1994-95 strike, commissioner Bud Selig was only too happy to see the home run race of 1998 bring fans back to the game. Many of the BBWAA’s critics wonder why writers are trying to enforce a Hall of Fame penalty for activities baseball didn’t even prohibit through collective bargaining until the 21^st century. Selig, who now condemns PEDs with the zeal of a religious convert, claims the failure to prohibit their use before that was all the union’s fault. It is true that union chief Donald Fehr might have succeeded in blocking an all-out push for reform by Selig, but Selig never made one, whatever he says, so we’ll never know.

In any case, having or using steroids without a prescription has been a federal crime since the early 1990s, so PED users were on the wrong side of the law even if the commissioner remained oblivious, as he claims. The involved and complex ways they went about keeping their use a secret make it clear they knew on some level what they were doing was wrong, or at least prohibited.

Just as important to some of us who followed the game for many years was the distorting effect PED use had on the game’s historical record. Baseball’s blind eye allowed players to obliterate records established without the use of PEDs and to be rewarded and glorified for it. Consider the difference between what happened to Lance Armstrong, the disgraced cyclist subject to the enforcement mechanisms of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, and Roger Clemens, subject to the non-existent enforcement mechanisms of major league baseball. Armstrong has been stripped of his titles and is now subject to a variety of civil lawsuits based on taking money under false pretenses. Exclusion from the Hall of Fame is the only penalty Clemens may face, and even that is not certain.

There is a feeling among many older voters who covered great players before the steroid era that somebody has to stand up for them and the records they established. If you want to know how some of these existing Hall of Fame members feel about steroid users being enshrined, just ask them.

So I don’t vote for otherwise worthy candidates for whom it seems to me there is more than adequate evidence of PED use on the public record. Game of Shadows, the excellent investigative book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, provides this evidence in the case of Barry Bonds. The public record of Clemens’ trial on perjury charges, including the detailed testimony of trainer Brian McNamee, provides it for Clemens. I understand he was acquitted. Given the standard of proof in a criminal proceeding – beyond a reasonable doubt – I understand how the attack on McNamee’s credibility by Clemens’ able legal team produced that result. To quantify “beyond a reasonable doubt,” I think of a standard of 85 percent or 90 percent certainty. The standard required to convince me of any given proposition is more like the civil standard of “preponderance of the evidence” – something greater than 50 percent. In the case of Clemens, the government’s case and McNamee’s testimony get me past that threshold easily. The performance of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa before Congress – one wouldn’t answer questions about PED use, the other temporarily forgot how to speak English — and Rafael Palmeiro’s failed test do the same.

On the other hand, I do vote for otherwise worthy candidates about whom it seems to me there is little more than unsubstantiated allegation and innuendo with respect to PED use. It’s an imperfect, subjective standard, I admit. But given the history, and baseball’s abject failure to police itself during this period, it is the best I can do. I have little sympathy for the argument that since we don’t have perfect knowledge, we should give up and let ‘em all in. As someone who made a living as a journalist for most of my career, I know I never had perfect knowledge. You acquire as much as you can and make judgments on that basis. It’s the best you can do. I’m also not comfortable with a formulation that says we don’t have perfect knowledge, therefore keep anybody out who was ever accused of using steroids by anyone. Adopting standards for the credibility of information is at the very heart of what journalists are supposed to do.

Critics of the BBWAA and its recent voting results tend to make fun of the Hall’s rules for election, especially this one:

5. Voting – Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

These are not my rules, but if I agree to be a voter, I agree to abide by them. It seems to me obvious that people who cheated and lied about it in ways that glorified themselves, disadvantaged competitors who didn’t indulge and distorted the game itself were not exemplifying integrity, sportsmanship or (good) character and are therefore missing three of the six stated criteria for election. It is not the voter bringing morality into the conversation, it is the Hall and the rules it asks voters to respect. I understand there are people already enshrined who may not have met these criteria. I do not agree that this justifies ignoring the criteria now. If the Hall wishes to eliminate these considerations, it can do so at any time. Until then, I’m including them in my deliberations, as I’m instructed to do.

This year, there is an additional, rare complication, which is that there are too many worthy candidates to fit under the limit of ten votes each voter is permitted to cast. Had I been able, I would have voted for more than ten this year. But since I couldn’t, I allowed a very practical consideration — time on the ballot — to influence me. There are first-time nominees I didn’t vote for that I expect to vote for in the future. But, for example, I was not going to abandon Morris in his final year of eligibility in favor of a first-year nominee who would have won a head-to-head competition in my head. I realize that might make some people’s heads explode, but since I have already admitted to being an honorary voter, I’m guessing this will come as no great surprise.

So, anyway, here’s my ballot. Happy new year.

Jeff Bagwell
Craig Biggio
Tom Glavine
Greg Maddux
Edgar Martinez
Jack Morris
Mike Piazza
Tim Raines
Frank Thomas
Alan Trammell

3 Comments | tags: Alan Trammell, Barry Bonds, Bill James, Brian McNamee, Bud Selig, Craig Biggio, Donald Fehr, Edgar Martinez, Frank Thomas, Greg Maddux, Jack Morris, Jeff Bagwell, Lance Armstrong, Lance Williams, Mark Fainaru-Wada, Mark McGwire, Mike Piazza, Rafael Palmeiro, Roger Clemens, Roger Maris, Sammy Sosa, Sandy Koufax, Tim Raines, Tom Glavine, Tom Verducci | posted in cheating, Rockies/MLB

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