Tag Archives: Mark McGwire

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.

2 Comments | tags: Alan Trammell, Andruw Jones, Barry Bonds, Barry Larkin, Billy Hamilton, Billy Wagner, Bruce Sutter, Bud Selig, Cal Ripken, Charles Johnson, Curt Schilling, Dale Murphy, Dan Quisenberry, Dave McNally, Dennis Eckersley, Denny Neagle, Derek Jeter, Duke Snider, Edgar Martinez, Ellis Burks, Fred Lynn, Fred McGriff, Garret Anderson, Gary Sheffield, George Blanda, Goose Gossage, Greg Swindell, Hoyt Wilhelm, Jan Stenerud, Jason Kendall, Jay Jaffe, Jeff Bagwell, Jeff Kent, Jesse Haines, Jim Edmonds, Joe DiMaggio, John Smoltz, Ken Griffey Jr., Kenny Lofton, Lance Armstrong, Lance Berkman, Larry Walker, Lee Smith, Lou Brock, Lou Groza, Lou Whitaker, Mariano Rivera, Mark McGwire, Marty Cordova, Mickey Mantle, Mike Hampton, Mike Lieberthal, Mike Lowell, Mike Matheny, Mike Mussina, Mike Piazza, Mike Sweeney, Moe Drabowsky, Nomar Garciaparra, Randy Johnson, Randy Winn, Ray Guy, Rickey Henderson, Roger Clemens, Rollie Fingers, Sammy Sosa, Tim Raines, Trevor Hoffman, Tris Speaker, Troy Tulowitzki, Turk Farrell, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays | posted in Rockies/MLB, Uncategorized

December 8, 2014

2015 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot, Part 1

By Dave Krieger

This makes two years in a row, consecutively, that the U.S. Postal Service has delivered my Baseball Hall of Fame ballot to the correct box and not inserted it into a 300-page holiday catalog. That’s a good sign for 2015 and appropriate celebratory measures were taken.

Any year now I’m confident the Hall will transition to electronic voting, but this is baseball, so one step at a time. This year’s innovation: For the first time, they will confirm receipt of ballots.

Before the ballot arrived, I knew I would want to vote for more candidates than the maximum of 10 the Hall permits. My first scan of the ballot, with no benefit of statistical analysis or divine wisdom, produced 14 players that would get my vote. So this year’s consideration was less about the usual issue — Hall worthiness — and more about distinguishing among worthies to cull the list to 10.

Cutting is something newspaper people know about, and we don’t like it. It simplifies, it misleads, it sometimes make you look like an idiot. So I decided to protect myself. For the first time, I used sabermetrician Jay Jaffe’s JAWS system (the humble acronym for Jaffe WAR Score) as my initial screen to get down to the difficult qualitative choices.

In previous years, I looked at lots of numbers to confirm or dispute my impressions, but mostly I relied on the eye test, my totally subjective judgment of whether a player looked like a Hall of Famer. This year, it turned out there wasn’t that much difference between the two, and there were areas of agreement that I found encouraging, not so much for the reliability of my vision as for the chances of certain players I’ve been supporting to no avail up until now.

This happy coincidence is not always the case. For example, when I did my JAWS work last year, I found Jack Morris down so low among the starting pitchers I had to add memory to my laptop to find him. His deficit to the JAWS average of starting pitchers already in the Hall of Fame was massive. So I looked at some of the names above his and asked myself if I would rather have them start a big game. Guys like Mel Stottlemyre, Bartolo Colon, Camilo Pascual, Brad Radke, Jamie Moyer, Carlos Zambrano, Jimmy Key, and so on. The answer in all those cases was no.

The calculation of wins above replacement (WAR), whichever version you subscribe to, is too complex to permit easy diagnostics of the anomalies, but in Morris’s case, I imagined earned-run average was a major culprit. He ranks No. 394 at 3.90, putting him between Joe Nuxhall and Ben McDonald.

On the other hand, if you sort the list by wins, he bounds up to No. 44 all-time with 256. His neighbors here are Red Faber and Carl Hubbell, Hall of Famers both. Now, wins have become a deeply unfashionable stat for pitchers, owing to the many extraneous factors that affect them, but this is also slightly ironic because wins are what WAR allegedly measures.

Anyway, I’m not trying to re-litigate the Morris matter. His eligibility expired last year after he received 351 votes out of 571 ballots cast, or 61.5 percent. I think he has a pretty good shot to make it eventually through some iteration of the veterans committee because he was a horse and a hell of a competitor and for a while there, the dominant pitcher of the 1980s. But again, I digress. He’s a good example of the difference between quantitative and qualitative analytical methods in certain cases.

Let’s back up and explain the basics of the quantitative screen I used this year to get down to the serious calls. Here’s a link to the Baseball Reference explanation of JAWS; here’s one to the BR explanation of its version of WAR.

If you’re reading a 4,000-word post on this year’s Baseball Hall of Fame ballot marked “Part 1,” you probably know that WAR is a complicated formula — so complicated that it’s effectively impenetrable for non-math geeks — that attempts to boil down to a single number the overall value of a baseball player. It speaks to the combination of two human needs — certainty and simplicity. So long as the evaluation of players is based on many different categories, as it was for generations, it is messy, and the emphasis any one judge puts on each of those various categories can and often does change the outcome of the inquiry. That’s neither certain nor simple.

WAR’s many calculations and adjustments introduce subjectivity themselves — BR recently changed its definition of an “average” replacement player — or contribute subjectivity in the weight they are accorded in the overall formula. Since most fans like the sport a lot more than they like equations, especially complicated equations, they stop paying attention to the details pretty quickly. Like the passer rating in football, it’s a nice, simple number that many fans use and few can explain in detail. We have two main versions of WAR at present, which make slightly different subjective judgments along the way, and produce slightly different results.

At its most basic, WAR is an adding machine. Player A was X amount better than the average guy at his position, plug that into a formula and you get 2.4 extra wins for his team that year. Then you add up all those little premiums over the course of his career. Even though its modifications and adjustments are considered ameliorating factors, it rewards longevity in a big way — the more years of little numbers like that, the bigger the career total is going to be.

So, for example, Sandy Koufax, one of the best starting pitchers of all time according to pretty much anyone paying attention to the game when he was pitching, ranks No. 85 in the JAWS system, with a considerable deficit to the average JAWS score of starting pitchers already in the Hall of Fame. He’s down around a bunch of guys who aren’t in the Hall and aren’t likely to get there — Kevin Appier, Chuck Finley, Orel Hershiser, Tommy John, Frank Tanana, Wilbur Wood, et al. The JAWS system attempts to compensate for the longevity bias of WAR by averaging a player’s career WAR with his “peak” WAR — the seven highest annual scores of his career. This is supposed to cover for players like Koufax, who were brilliant, but whose careers were cut short.

But, clearly, it doesn’t. Koufax’s peak WAR is higher than any of the guys I mentioned in the previous paragraph, but not by enough to make much difference in the overall calculation. Luckily, there was no WAR when Koufax became eligible for the first time in 1972 and he was elected on the first ballot with 87 percent of the vote, leading a class that also included Yogi Berra and Early Wynn.

I bring this up because it also contributes to this year’s biggest anomaly when using the JAWS system, which is John Smoltz. The former Braves hurler is on the ballot for the first time, following by one year former teammates Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, both of whom were elected on the first try. The voters and JAWS agreed on Maddux. Not so much on Glavine. Maddux ranks 10th all time on the JAWS meter, ahead of immortals like Bob Gibson and Warren Spahn, and pending immortals like Pedro Martinez. Glavine ranks 30th, behind all those guys, and behind a couple more on this year’s ballot — Curt Schilling and Mike Mussina. JAWS counts Maddux as way above the average Hall of Famer at his position, Glavine as barely above average.

Smoltz ranks 58th, well below average for the Hall of Fame, down around guys like Jim Bunning and David Cone. This is mostly because he quit starting for a while to help his team. From 2002-04, Smoltz registered 144 saves with ERAs of 3.25, 1.12 and 2.76. He received MVP votes four times in his career, and three of them were after those three remarkable years as a closer. The Braves made the playoffs in all three seasons. He’s credited with 6.7 wins above replacement for those three seasons combined. He got more than that (7.3) in 1996 alone, his Cy Young year as a starter.

So Smoltz fares poorly in the JAWS Hall of Fame analysis, in part because he’s listed with the starters and no allowance is made for all the starts he gave up to become one of the best closers in the game. For those of us not yet willing to sacrifice our own observations entirely to the gods of quantitative analysis, Smoltz requires an eye-test adjustment this year, which we will get to in Part 2. For the purpose of culling the field of 34 down to a more manageable number, JAWS was quite useful in quantifying the eye test results.

The no-hopers

1. 3B Aaron Boone

He’ll always have 2003, a moment seared into the memories of Red Sox fans who would not slay the beast for another year. Boone’s walkoff home run leading off the bottom of the 11th in Game 7 of the ALCS made him a Yankee hero, even though he played only 54 of his 1152 career games in Yankee pinstripes. His best days were in Cincinnati. He is ranked the 150th-best third baseman in big league history by his JAWS average (14.3). His deficit from the JAWS average for Hall of Famers at his position (40.7) is the greatest in this year’s class. The top comparable to him on Baseball Reference is Scott Brosius.

Every year, there are fans who squawk, “Why is he on the ballot?” I have known members of the screening committee and I agree with their bias toward inclusion. If you meet the basic requirements — a career of at least 10 seasons in the designated time period — I believe you ought to get your minimum one appearance on the ballot. A 10-year major league career is a big deal in any context other than this one. Appearing on the ballot once seems to me an appropriate reward. Boone won’t be back, and neither will the rest of the guys in this category.

2. 1B Tony Clark

Clark had a nice 15-year career with Tigers, Diamondbacks, Mets, Red Sox and Padres. He hit 251 homers with a lifetime .262 batting average and a career OPS of .824. The JAWS average for first basemen now in the Hall is 54.2. Clark’s is 14.2. That deficit (40.0) barely lost out to Boone’s for the title of No-hoper of the Year. His top comparable is Adam LaRoche.

3. SS Rich Aurilia

Aurilia played 15 seasons, mostly for the Giants, finishing with a long goodbye tour through Cincinnati, San Diego and Seattle. He was mostly a shortstop, but he played triple-figure games at each of the other infield positions as well. He had good power for an infielder, hitting double-figure home runs eight times, including an eyebrow-raising 37 in 2001, the year Barry Bonds hit 73 and a number of players looked like Popeye after the spinach. His JAWS deficit to Hall of Famers at his position is 37.3. No. 1 comparable: Brandon Phillips.

4. RF Jermaine Dye

Dye had some serious pop, hitting 44 homers for the White Sox, batting over .300 for the only time in his career and finishing fifth in MVP voting in 2006. He spent 14 years in the big leagues almost equally divided among the Royals, White Sox and A’s, with a nightcap in Atlanta. His deficit to the JAWS average of right fielders in the Hall is 36.4.

5. SP Jason Schmidt

Schmidt was an average starter for most of the first decade of his career, never pitching to an ERA under 4.00 until arriving in San Francisco in the latter part of the 2001 season. Quite suddenly, at the age of 30, he became an elite pitcher for the Giants, going 17-5 with a National League-leading ERA of 2.34. He finished second in Cy Young voting that year and fourth the following year, when he went 18-7 with a 3.20 ERA. As a result of this renaissance in San Francisco, the Dodgers gave him a big free-agent deal in 2007 — three years, $47 million. Alas, Schmidt blew out his shoulder and pitched just 43 mostly ineffective innings over two seasons for L.A. before calling it quits. He comes in at No. 284 on the starting pitchers’ JAWS list. His deficit to existing Hall of Famers is 33.4.

6. LF Cliff Floyd

Floyd was the 14th overall pick of the 1991 draft, and while he had a 17-year stay in the majors, he never became the star that early comparisons to Willie McCovey seemed to promise. He drove in more than 100 runs only once and hit as many as 30 homers twice. He was bedeviled by injuries and ended up playing for seven teams. Still, he finished with a career OPS of .840. His top comparable on Baseball Reference is Aubrey Huff. His JAWS Hall of Fame deficit is 27.9.

7. CF Darin Erstad

Erstad was a marvelous athlete whom the Angels made the first pick of the 1995 draft out of Nebraska. He was the punter for Tom Osborne’s ’94 Cornhuskers’ national championship team. Erstad arrived in the majors a year later and finished sixth in rookie-of-the-year voting despite playing only 57 games. He was an all-star at 24 and again at 26, receiving MVP votes both years. He was a five-tool player on the brink of stardom. After batting an astonishing .355 with a league-leading 240 hits in 2000, he never hit .300 again. After putting up double-figure home run totals in five of his first seven seasons, he never hit more than seven after the age of 28. His hustling style and proclivity for leaving his feet produced chronic issues with his shoulders, hamstrings and ankles. For most of the latter part of his career, he was battling one injury or another. His JAWS deficit to center fielders in the Hall is 26.7. On the bright side, he went back to Nebraska as a volunteer assistant for the baseball team in 2011 and Osborne, then the athletic director, named him head coach a year later. His top comparable at 23 was Jeff Bagwell. Ten years later, it was Mark Kotsay.

8. RP Eddie Guardado

Guardado would be a long way from Hall consideration anyway, but the fact that he’s a relief pitcher makes it impossible. He was a decent piece out of the pen for the Twins for years who suddenly became a closer, and a good one, for a four-year stretch from 2002-05. He was an all-star in ’02 and ’03, putting up a league-leading 45 saves in ’02 and following it with 41 the next year. The result was a nice free-agent deal with the Mariners and two more good years before he ran out of fuel. He’s No. 53 in career saves with 187. His JAWS deficit is 22.1. In the history of baseball, five relief pitchers have been inducted, so if you’re Eddie Guardado, you have no shot.

9. RP Troy Percival

Percival was a stud closer for a long time, so you’d think he’d have a chance, but keep in mind he’s way behind Lee Smith in the JAWS rankings and Smith got only 30 percent of the vote in his 12th season of eligibility last year. Percival is in the top 10 in career saves — No. 9 with 358. But again, the standard is the five incumbents — Dennis Eckersley, Hoyt Wilhelm, Rich Gossage, Bruce Sutter and Rollie Fingers. Mariano Rivera will make it six when he’s eligible. Percival ranks behind them all, and behind Smith, too. In fact, his JAWS average is worse than those of Steve Reed, Dick Drago and Dave Giusti. It’s just not happening. His deficit to the Hall average at his position is 18.1

My kingdom for 5 percent

1. RF Sammy Sosa

You wouldn’t think that one of only two players in major league history to hit more than 60 homers in a season twice, one of only eight to hit more than 600 in a career, would be in any danger of falling off the ballot in just his third season of eligibility, but Sosa treated his entire career like an SNL skit. Like Bonds, he used performance-enhancing drugs to such excess that he became a massive, hulking, comic book parody of his former self, then pretended he didn’t understand English when hauled before Congress to explain this amazing transformation. He got 12.5 percent of the vote in his first year and 7.2 percent last year. Half as great a loss of support this year would send him on his way. Even if he’d done it honestly, his JAWS average of 51 wouldn’t justify his election. The average of the right fielders already in the Hall is 58.1. Even through the eyes of a Cubs fan, Sammy doesn’t pass the eye test.

2. 1B Don Mattingly

It doesn’t seem fair that you could drop off the ballot for lack of support the day you’re dropping off anyway by virtue of having been there 15 years without getting elected, but that is a possibility for Donnie Baseball. His election return of 8.2 percent of the vote last year was his lowest total in 14 years of eligibility. He hasn’t been above 20 percent since his second year on the ballot. For a stretch in the 1980s, he was as good as it got, but back trouble limited him to just four years of WAR of 5 or more, and that’s nowhere near enough. He also faces competition from a bunch of other first basemen who aren’t going to make it but have better numbers than he does. On the JAWS list, he ranks behind Norm Cash, Gil Hodges, John Olerud and Will Clark, none of whom are in the Hall. He also ranks behind Carlos Delgado and Fred McGriff, who are on the current ballot and also have little or no shot. His JAWS deficit to the Hall average first sacker is 15.3.

3. 1B Carlos Delgado

Delgado isn’t a close call according to JAWS — he’s 14.8 average WAR behind the existing Hall standard at first — but he was a very productive power hitter for a long time, so you wouldn’t think he’d be in any danger of missing the minimum to remain on the ballot. He has a career OPS of .940 and drove in at least 87 runs in 13 consecutive seasons. Nevertheless, it’s a very strong ballot and Delgado’s JAWS average ranks below McGriff’s. McGriff fell to 11.7 percent of the vote last year, losing half the support he got just two years before. If there’s an argument to be made that Delgado is one of the top 10 players on this year’s ballot, I’m not sure what it is.

4. RF Brian Giles

I’m also not sure why Giles does better on the JAWS tote board than Delgado. I’d take Delgado every time, although Giles was certainly a nice offensive player. Delgado had way more homers and RBI, a slightly better OPS+ and trailed in batting average by 10 points. It is true he also struck out a lot more than Giles, but that’s the price of that power (1512 RBI to 1078; 473 homers to 278). Both were below-average defenders, but Delgado somewhat further below average. Giles is a classic very good player who is nevertheless significantly short of the Hall standard by both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Like Delgado, you would expect him to exceed the minimum necessary to stay on for another year if the ballot weren’t so loaded. And he still should. His JAWS deficit among right fielders already in the Hall is 14.0.

Obvious cheaters

1. 1B Mark McGwire

The only thing that saves Sosa from appearing here, where he belongs, is the fact that he might fall off the ballot altogether, earning him a spot in the previous category. McGwire, the only player other than Sosa to hit more than 60 homers in a season twice, comes dangerously close to joining him there. But Mac managed 11 percent of the vote last year, so I’m guessing he survives again, although his number has come down from 23.7 percent in 2010. I realize there is a fair amount of sentiment among sabermetricians that there is no such thing as right and wrong, or we’re not worthy to assess it, or only numbers matter, or something along those lines. If you’re interested in why I don’t agree with this, I went into some depth about it in my post on last year’s ballot. McGwire, by the way, has a small deficit — 2.3 — to the average JAWS score of first basemen now in the Hall.

2. SP Roger Clemens

Clemens’ numbers are ridiculous, which, in his case, is not just an expression. At the age of 42, suddenly he was as good as he had ever been. In fact, he won the ERA title with the best mark of his career (1.87). In court, personal trainer Brian McNamee laid out his doping program in gruesome detail. Clemens’ able defense team got him off perjury charges, but that’s not the same as being innocent. According to JAWS, he’s the third-best pitcher of all time, behind Walter Johnson and Cy Young. His surplus to the average starter in the Hall is 41.5, which would be the highest on the ballot if it weren’t for . . .

3. LF Barry Bonds

Clemens redux. Thanks to the journalists Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, and their book Game of Shadows, we know pretty much exactly what Bonds took and why. Like Clemens, he had a chronology-defying, chemistry-enabled, Greek God-like renaissance very late in his career, winning four consecutive MVP awards at the ages of 36, 37, 38 and 39. We had never seen anything like it before and, assuming Rob Manfred is slightly more on the ball than Bud Selig — a low bar — we will never see anything like it again. Like Clemens, as many have pointed out, he was probably a Hall of Famer before he started cheating, but those sportsmanship and integrity criteria established by the Hall don’t have the luxury of time travel. His surplus to the average JAWS score of Hall of Fame left fielders is 64.3, a number almost as big as his body in those days.

Just wide

1. Nomar Garciaparra

Nomar was a stud shortstop in a very impressive generation. Imagine a three-year stretch in which rookies named Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and Nomar Garciaparra enter the league playing the same position. The Red Sox made Nomar a first-round pick, the 12th overall, in 1994. Three years later, he was rookie of the year, an all-star and eighth in MVP voting. At the age of 23, he hit .306 with 30 home runs and 98 RBI. The next year was even better — .323, 35, 122 — and he finished second in the MVP voting to Juan Gonzalez. He won the batting title each of the next two years, at .357 and .372. If this was not the runup to a Hall of Fame career, it was hard to imagine why not. But it probably wasn’t. Injuries would turn Nomar old before his time and his 30s were nothing like his 20s. The average of his career WAR and peak WAR — 43.6 — is 11.1 below the average of shortstops already in the Hall. You can certainly make an argument for him. His JAWS rating puts him between Luis Aparicio and Joe Tinker, both of whom are in. The improvement in the offensive output at the position since then has changed the calculus.

2. 1B Fred McGriff

You look at those career numbers and it’s hard to imagine he doesn’t belong. Seven homers shy of 500. Twenty-one consecutive seasons of double-digit homers. An OPS just short of .900. MVP votes following eight different seasons. And yet, when you add them all up, he’s a full 10 wins over replacement short of the average for first basemen already in the Hall. In fact, he ranks behind Keith Hernandez, John Olerud and Will Clark, none of whom are enshrined. Of 20 first basemen in Cooperstown, McGriff’s JAWS average is better than four, worse than 16. He’d been getting about 20 percent of the vote in his first four years on the ballot, then fell to 11.7 percent last year as the ballot strengthened. Probably won’t do a lot better this year.

3. RF Gary Sheffield

Sheff had such a long, productive career, one is tempted to think of him as the Don Sutton of hitters, a guy who eventually makes it on sheer volume. It could happen, but advanced metrics don’t help him. He accumulated surprisingly modest wins above replacement value during his career and his JAWS average of 49 falls 9.1 short of the average of right fielders already inducted. Sheff’s average is worse than those of Bobby (not Barry) Bonds, Reggie Smith and Dwight Evans, none of whom is in. With more than 500 home runs, a career batting average over .290 and an OPS over .900, Sheff passes the eye test, at least for me. He might begin to build support after the current wave of stars passes. For now, he just has to hang around.

Coming in Part 2: The final fifteen

4 Comments | tags: Aaron Boone, Adam LaRoche, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Bartolo Colon, Ben McDonald, Bob Gibson, Bobby Bonds, Brad Radke, Brian Giles, Brian McNamee, Bud Selig, Camilo Pascual, Carl Hubbell, Carlos Delgado, Carlos Zambrano, Chuck Finley, Cliff Floyd, Curt Schilling, Cy Young, Darin Erstad, Dave Giusti, David Cone, Derek Jeter, Don Mattingly, Don Sutton, Dwight Evans, Early Wynn, Eddie Guardado, Frank Tanana, Fred McGriff, Gary Sheffield, Greg Maddux, Jack Morris, Jamie Moyer, Jason Schmidt, Jermaine Dye, Jim Bunning, Jimmy Key, Joe Nuxhall, John Olerud, John Smoltz, Juan Gonzalez, Kevin Appier, Lance Williams, Mark Fainaru-Wada, Mark McGwire, Mel Stottlemyre, Mike Mussina, Nomar Garciaparra, Norm Cash, Orel Hershiser, Pedro Martinez, Red Faber, Reggie Smith, Rich Aurilia, Rob Manfred, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Sandy Koufax, Scott Brosius, Tom Glavine, Tom Osborne, Tommy John, Tony Clark, Troy Percival, Walter Johnson, Warren Spahn, Wilbur Wood, Will Clark, 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

January 10, 2013

Goose Gossage: ‘If these guys are elected . . . I would never go back.’

By Dave Krieger

So no living player was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this year, prompting the New York Times to run a mostly-blank sports section front under the headline, “And the inductees are . . . ”

The failure to elect anyone from a star-studded ballot prompted more moaning and kvetching than usual about the annual balloting by veteran members (ten years or more) of the Baseball Writers Association of America. (Full disclosure: I’m one of them and you can see my ballot, along with those of other writers who have disclosed theirs, here.)

Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, who would have been elected overwhelmingly if it weren’t for their well-documented links to performance-enhancing drugs, received 36.2 and 37.6 percent of the vote, respectively, roughly half the 75 percent required for election. The 200-plus writers who voted for them (out of 569 ballots cast) and many others argue that a Hall of Fame without two of the best players in history would be a joke.

Like it or not, this debate has barely started. Bonds and Clemens will be on the ballot again next year, and the year after that. The issue will be revisited annually until they are elected or fifteen years have passed, whichever comes first. But the argument that their numbers are so big they must be accepted no matter how they were achieved stands in stark contrast to the fate of Lance Armstrong’s unprecedented achievements in cycling, which have been eviscerated in the wake of findings by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that he engaged in a sophisticated doping program.

Baseball has no such independent watchdog. Instead, it belatedly developed an in-house drug testing program after its principals — commissioner Bud Selig and then-players’ association chief Donald Fehr — were embarrassed in a public hearing before Congress. As a result, the sport and many of its apologists have developed a lengthy series of rationalizations for giving up on any attempt to make the distinctions among accomplishments that are standard procedure for sports that fall under international rules and the Olympic umbrella.

But baseball still has a big problem — the apparently universal antipathy for steroid users among existing Hall-of-Famers. If the argument takes hold that a credible Hall must include Bonds and Clemens, Cooperstown will face the threat of a boycott by its most cherished constituency — those already enshrined there.

One of the most outspoken is Colorado’s Goose Gossage, the power relief pitcher inducted in 2008, but a number of others have made their views known as well. In the wake of this year’s balloting, I asked Gossage what he thought existing Hall-of-Famers would do if Bonds or Clemens or both are eventually elected.

“I didn’t make it there last year, it’s the only year that I’ve missed since I got elected, but they had some discussion last year, and as I understand, there were a lot of guys that said they would not come back to the Hall of Fame,” Gossage said.

“It would be a black day not only for the Hall of Fame, but for baseball, if these guys are elected. I’ve got to say honestly, I would never go back to the Hall of Fame because I don’t think it would mean anything.”

In addition to the substantial minority of veteran writers that voted for Bonds and Clemens, many critics of the BBWAA say any attempt to exclude steroid users is an exercise in sanctimony. Baseball abided a pervasive culture of permissiveness during the steroid era and there’s no undoing it now, they say.

Existing Hall-of-Famers do not share this sentiment, at least in part because many of their accomplishments pale in comparison to the steroid-fed numbers put up by some of the leading suspects.

“There are those writers that think cheating is OK,” Gossage said. “We’re going to reward these guys? The last paddle that we have for these guys’ asses is an election to the Hall of Fame. They’re laughing all the way to the bank. They cheated. They, meaning Bonds and (Mark) McGwire, they broke two of the most sacred records that baseball has had, and that’s the (career) home run champion, which was Henry Aaron — and in my eyes Henry is still the home run king — and Roger Maris’ sacred record of 61 home runs (in a season), and McGwire broke that.

“I think these records ought to be reinstated because they were (broken) by cheaters. Are we going to reward these guys, is the bottom line, to Cooperstown? What kind of message is that sending to our kids?”

One person’s sanctimony is another person’s right and wrong. Advocates of letting bygones be bygones deride any reference to the message tolerance sends as hopelessly naive and sentimental. But many others still think it’s important. When this year’s ballot was released, cartoonist Drew Litton drew a classroom in which the teacher writes on the board, “Cheaters never prosper.” The kid in the front row replies, “Then why do they get on Hall of Fame ballots?”

Gossage thinks baseball’s current system of testing and punishment is still too lenient. He cited Melky Cabrera, the most valuable player in last year’s All-Star Game who was batting .346 for the Giants when he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and was suspended for 50 games.

“What I don’t get is this guy got voted a full (postseason) share by the players,” Gossage said. “He got busted for PEDs and wasn’t around for the end of the season, nor the playoffs, and they voted him a full share. What are these guys thinking? We’re going to reward this guy? I wouldn’t have given him a nickel. If you get busted for PEDs, I think you ought to be suspended for the whole year . . . and a heavy fine. The second time, I think you ought to be kicked out of baseball.”

The Giants had only 45 games remaining when Cabrera was suspended and cut ties with him.

As a Hall of Fame voter, I made a distinction between players linked to steroids by substantial evidence in the public domain and players linked to PEDs merely by rumor. I asked Gossage how he believes writers should treat this latter group, which included Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza on this year’s ballot. Both of them did substantially better (59.6 and 57.8 percent of the vote, respectively) than Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Sammy Sosa or Rafael Palmeiro, all of whom have been linked to steroids by evidence of one sort or another.

“Other than Clemens and Bonds, because we know that they did, Sosa, all of a sudden he goes to Congress and he can’t speak English,” Gossage said. “I think that these guys where there are innuendoes, there’s talk, whispers of these guys taking performance-enhancing drugs, I think if there is nothing directly linking them to them, I think you’ve got to vote with your heart and if they’ve got the stats, they should be in the Hall of Fame.

“On top of that, if they did do it, they’ve got to sleep at night. And they’re going to wonder the rest of their lives when that knock’s going to come or that phone call’s going to come that ‘Hey, here’s some evidence that you cheated.’ And if it was ever found out that they did cheat, then their plaques should be taken down at the Hall of Fame.”

Among both the public and the writers, outrage over baseball’s steroid era is dissipating. The belief that a Hall of Fame without Bonds and Clemens is somehow invalid could continue to gain traction over the coming years. But there is no sign yet that this view is making much progress among those already enshrined. Until it does, the election of a known steroid user such as Bonds or Clemens would likely create a major fissure within the Hall of Fame itself.

Leave a comment | tags: Barry Bonds, Drew Litton, Goose Gossage, Henry Aaron, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, Roger Maris | posted in cheating, Rockies/MLB

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