Omar y Amigos

Back in the mid-90s, the Indians radio network carried a pregame feature before Sunday afternoon games called "Kenny's Kids". It was your standard bolierplate schlock--little kids given tickets to the game through the Indians charities or Kenny Lofton's foundation or something of the sort would get to listen to Kenny talk to another Indian, or get to ask him questions ("Mr. Wofton, Mr. Wofton, how do I get to be a baseball player?")

Then Kenny got traded prior to the 1997 season, and this grave duty fell to Omar Vizquel. The segment was renamed "Omar y Amigos". When Lofton came back the next year, Kenny's Kids did not return; Omar y Amigos continued. So if you ever thought there wasn't an upside to getting traded, then returning to your former club as a free agent...you were wrong.

Title exposition aside, I'd like to discuss Omar Vizquel's place in history. This is a standard boring article written at a low level of sabermetric literacy, one you can safely skip if you're not interested in comparing players' careers across the years (or if you value peak over career). The goal is not to pinpoint a ranking and say that "Omar Vizquel is the fourteenth best shortstop of all-time" or anything like that, just to get a general sense of how he compares to other great shortstops.

One of the most common comparisons for Vizquel, particularly among mainstream thinkers, is Ozzie Smith. The comparison generally assumes that the two provided similar value in the field, and thus can be compared on the basis of their offensive production:



It is easy to see why many traditional, context-free glances at the stats result in considering Vizquel to be Smith's equal. He hit for a higher average, hit fifty more homers, and both drove in and scored over 150 more runs than Ozzie. He hit for a better slugging average while getting on base at the same rate. Smith does have an advantage in basestealing, swiping 176 more bases than Vizquel while getting caught 19 fewer times.

Of course, as a sabermetrically-informed reader you know that context is king. It makes a huge difference; Vizquel played in parks with a composite PF of 1.01, while Smith played in parks with a park factor of .98. Much more significantly, Vizquel played in leagues in which the average team scored 4.81 runs per game; teams in Smith's leagues averaged 4.15 runs per game. Combining the two, Vizquel played in a context in which 19% more runs were scored.

Any serious analytical approach is going to take that into account, and rather than emerging as the superior hitter, Vizquel will assuredly come out as inferior to Smith. Compared to a league average hitter (comparable to Palmer's Batting Wins, except counting stolen bases), I have Smith at +2 wins for his career and Vizquel at -23, with Smith’s RC/out relative to the league average bettering Vizquel’s 102 to 86. Not all methods think the gap is that large (see Technical Note below), but the other commonly used sabermetric methods concur that Smith was a better offensive player: he leads in TAv (.250 to .243), wRC+ (90 to 84), and OPS+ (87 to 82).

Even if one accepts that Smith and Vizquel were similar fielders, they are not particularly close in offensive value. Unless one wants to make the claim that Vizquel was a much better fielder than Smith, Ozzie is the more valuable player--easily.

Engaging in a little bit of unhealthy stereotyping (on both baseball and ethnic levels) one can find decent comparables for Vizquel in three players: Luis Aparicio, Bert Campaneris, and Dave Concepcion. I don't mean to suggest that these three are the most comparable players to Vizquel, but they are obvious comparisons as they are all shortstops, all Latin, all from the expansion era, and all are known for their glovework. One could of course compare Vizquel to players from other positions, or shortstops who arguably were roughly as valuable but with a different offense/defense split than Vizquel (like Jim Fregosi, Tony Fernandez, Junior Stephens, Edgar Renteria, or Miguel Tejada), but comparisons to the aforementioned trio are irresistible:



Once again, it is easy to see why Vizquel is highly regarded in the mainstream when looking at the raw statistics. Most people, presented with that data alone, would choose Vizquel. When park factors and league averages are considered, though, it is clear that Vizquel played in a much more offense-friendly time and place:



The final column is Vizquel's run environment (N*PF, where N is the league average runs/game) as a ratio to the others. Runs were 18% more common in Vizquel's games than Aparicio's, 25% versus Campaneris', and 17% versus Concepcion's. The result is that while Vizquel has -23 hitting WAA, Concepcion has -2, Campaneris -3, and Aparicio -10. (See technical note for an explanation of why the differences are greater than some other methods show).

Let’s suppose you refuse to consider sabermetric measures, and want to limit your offensive evaluation only to what you protest are “actual” runs--runs scored and RBI. For the sake of argument, I’ll play along, as long as you allow me to consider league context and outs made. (See this post for the full details on how these are figured, but essentially R+ is runs scored per out relative to league average, RBI+ is the same for RBI, ANY is the average of R+ and RBI+, and ANYA is the average of runs scored above league average and runs batted in above league average).

When you do, it becomes clear that Vizquel’s runs scored and batted in totals are not as impressive as those in this peer group:



Vizquel scored fewer runs per out than his league average; only Concepcion joined him, but Concepcion had the best RBI rate of the five. In terms of the average, Vizquel is well behind the others at just 83% of league average R and RBI per out.

I'm sure that any Vizquel partisan who is still reading is screaming "What about fielding?" I don't have any particular insight to lend on that question; all I can do is regurgitate the figures that others have published. Bill James, in Win Shares assigns fielders letter grades based on their Defensive Win Shares per inning rates. Vizquel (through 2001) is evaluated as a B- shortstop, with Aparicio and Campaneris earning Bs and Concepcion an A+. As you know, Win Shares fielding ratings are based on a top-down team evaluation without the benefit of play-by-play data.

Chone Smith's TotalZone method uses Retrosheet batted ball locations to estimate runs saved compared to an average fielder. Smith's RAA results for the four almost flip James' rankings on their head, with Aparicio estimated to have saved 149 runs (adding in the double play component) above an average shortstop, Vizquel 144, Campaneris 62, and Concepcion 50.

TotalZone certainly deems Vizquel to have been an outstanding fielder, but not to such an extent that it elevates him significantly above this pack. And thus, in Chone's WAR figures, Vizquel ranks comfortably head of Concepcion but behind Aparicio and Campaneris. Even with a more generous evaluation of Vizquel's prowess in the field, it's difficult to argue that he was clearly superior to the other members of this group.

In Baseball Prospectus’ FRAA, Vizquel ranks as the lowest of the four with just 14 (Campaneris 31, Concepcion 56, Aparicio 109). This contributes to Vizquel ranking 20 WARP behind Campaneris, 17 behind Aparicio, and 6 behind Concepcion.

That leaves the matter of his reputation as a fielder, which is considerable, and often in mainstream discussions is assumed to be nearly on par with Ozzie Smith. You can decide for yourself how much weight to place on non-statistical evaluation of fielding. The only strong suggestion I'd make is not to place too much emphasis on the evaluation of any one particular individual--including my own take on Vizquel which follows, which I offer not because I think it's particularly insightful but because it's my blog.

I watched Omar Vizquel play shortstop more than any other shortstop--I find it hard to imagine that I'll ever watch anyone more in the future. Most of this occurred during my formative years as a baseball fan, so it is quite possible that it has forever tinged my perception of shortstop fielding--that I am unable to fairly evaluate other shortstops I watch because my expectations for a major league shortstop have been set largely by watching Omar Vizquel.

In any event, I don't have much of a pre-Vizquel frame of reference to offer. I can't say that I was never impressed by Omar Vizquel because he didn't look as good to me as Ozzie did, or as Campaneris did. What I can tell you is that, in watching other shortstops after watching Vizquel, I have never felt that I was watching pale imitations of the master.

Vizquel certainly stands among the best shortstops I've seen myself, possibly even the best. But he does not tower over them. I do think that Vizquel did things with as much flair as anyone I've watched--the barehand grab-and-throws, the back turned to the plate catches of outfield pops. But when you rely on observation, flair can be misleading. It's flair that gets you on SportsCenter, not workman-like consistency. It's the flashy play that gets burned in most people's memories, not the routine play or even the tough play made in the hole with a strong plant-and-throw.

None of this is to say that Omar Vizquel was not an outstanding fielder and a fine all-around player. He was, but so were Aparicio, Campaneris, Concepcion, and others who don't form as natural of a comparison group. His reputation seems to place him in a higher class, at least at this time. These assessments seem to be based on a very rosy assessment of his fielding prowess, a lack of recognition of the high-offense era in which he played, or a combination thereof.

TECHNICAL NOTE

I did not make any allowance for players in DH leagues, which is part of the reason you'll see discrepancies between the WAA/WAR figures for players listed here and those from Pete Palmer, Chone, and other sabermetricians. Vizquel spent the majority of his career in DH leagues, but Campaneris is the only other player discussed who spent a significant amount of his career in them.

Swapping out pitchers for DHs has the effect of raising the league averages, which are used to set baselines for average and replacement level performance, and this is something that you want to be aware of. However, the increase in scoring which drives runs per win up is a real factor that should not just be adjusted out of existence.

And while Vizquel would benefit from a DH correction, I've implicitly assumed that the position adjustment for shortstops have remained stable from Aparicio's day to Vizquel's. However, shortstop offense reached its all-time low in the 60s and 70s. The matter of positional adjustments is thornier than simply comparing mean positional offense, but there is a distinct possibility that treating the positional adjustment as a constant is hurting the pre-Vizquel members of the group, canceling out much of the DH hit that Omar takes.

Also, I realize that some people are aware of the offensive environment in which Vizquel played, but ignore it because they chalk it up to steroids. Since Vizquel is not suspected of using steroids, we're supposed to believe that he could have transferred his raw offensive performance into a different era and been more valuable relative to the league. That's a nice story.

Meanderings

* I don’t have anything of substance to add on the deaths of Earl Weaver and Stan Musial, but since both were favorites of mine I feel compelled to write a little something. Weaver of course is a managerial hero to many in the sabermetric community. He predated my time as a baseball fan by a significant number of years, but he still was an influence on me through the writing of Bill James and Thomas Boswell, his own book Weaver on Strategy, and Earl Weaver Baseball, which in its DOS form was the first baseball game I played (even though I’m sure he wasn’t writing the code).

The paragraph that follows is the kind of unsupported by evidence blurb I try to avoid writing, because in many cases you can get destroyed with a little cursory fact-checking. Weaver is famed for utilizing his roster to its fullest, particular his bench -- finding specialists whose strengths could help a club. The value of the bench has been greatly reduced in today’s game thanks to the roster crunch--the extra spots have gone to pitchers. Some of this is a natural result of the never-ending progression towards lighter pitching workloads, but some of it may be traceable to an attempt to counter the Weaver school. Once the bench was smartly utilized with specialists, it was necessary to have a counter-stocked bullpen. The verdict of the powers that be in baseball has been to prioritize stopping the other manager from gaining an offensive advantage through substitution rather than leaving one’s self with the tools to do so. One could argue that Tony LaRussa is the anti-Weaver in this regard.

Stan Musial was of course a great player, one who has gotten the short end of the stick--among his contemporaries on either bordering generation, there has been more celebration reserved for DiMaggio, Williams, Mantle, Mays, and Aaron among outfielders. He’s always been a favorite of mine, though--in fact, I have two framed baseball pictures hanging on my wall (the selection is more due to happenstance than a design to pick these particular two, but I wouldn’t hang a picture on my wall if I didn’t like the subject. One is of Babe Ruth’s sixtieth home run, and one is a picture of Stan Musial and various related Musial memorabilia (bats, uniform, ball, etc.)

* The various sports stories of last week (thankfully, not baseball-related) were a perfect reminder of why I have so little respect for sportswriters as a class (certainly I judge people as individuals, but it so happens that I have little use for the majority of individual sportswriters).

The best attribute of sportswriters is how ignorant they tend to be. When someone writes invective against sabermetrics, or displays a complete lack of understanding of statistics or economics or probability, it is easy to simply laugh them off. A huge number of sportswriters fall into this toss category.

As an aside, if I didn’t come to the table with a pre-conceived dim view of the world view held by most mainstream journalists (non-sports), it would be difficult for me to believe how ignorant they are. When I read news stories about topics on which I am well-informed, it is rare to go through an article that does not contain an outright falsehood, a statement of surprise at something that is blindingly obvious, or a quote from a clearly biased source that is allowed to pass without noting that bias. And when I see this occur in articles about a topic about which I know more than the journalist, it naturally gives me great pause about what I read about topics on which I am seeking to learn more.

Unlike many people inclined to interest in sabermetrics, I am not at all looking forward to the rapidly approaching day in which any aspiring young mainstream baseball scribe will be fluent in sabermetrics and not prone to dismissing non-traditional viewpoints. While this will have a limited positive effect of reducing the amount of idiocy we are all exposed to, it will make it that much harder to simply ignore a writer with cause.

My biggest problem with sportswriters is not that they are ignorant--it's that they are self-righteous, prone to pop psychology, and often downright nasty to their subjects. The new breed of baseball writer will still display all these traits, but without the casual ignorance of logic when it comes to strategy and evaluation of players. The perfect symbol of this new breed is Jeff Passan. Passan is as smarmy and as prone to being a jackass as your garden variety Murray Chass-era hack. But because Passan incorporates sabermetric statistics and thinking as appropriate, he is much more likely to get a pass for being a jerk than is a sabermetric ignoramus.

* The Armstrong and Te’o stories are also worthwhile as an illustration of how different my interest in sports is from the interest of the fictional public to which the stories are written. I have essentially zero interest in the private lives of athletes. I do not pick which athletes to root for because they seem like nice people, or because they have overcome some tragedy in their personal lives--I pick which athletes to root for because they play(ed) for/support the teams that I do, or because I enjoy watching them play the game.

When sportswriters single out a human interest story, it is their way of telling you who to root for. One could look at the roster of any Division I college football team with its 85 players and find someone who has been through a traumatic experience. Frankly, the notion that the death of a college-aged person’s grandmother would be a trauma worthy of making into a story is laughable. Certainly such an event is a terrible thing for the affected person and family, but it is also a fact of life and something that the majority of people in that age group have experienced. But journalists decided that Te’o was special, and that you should root for him--and they almost gave him an absurd Heisman trophy for it.

More broadly, I don’t care if Player X is a jerk to fans (and I certainly don’t care if he is a jerk to the media). I might care if I had any reason to interact with Player X--but I don’t, and the odds that I will ever interact with him are infinitesimal. Sportswriters are often incapable of realizing that the rest of us aren’t affected or interested by whatever inconveniences or petty issues Player X creates for them.

If I discover that Player X isn’t too friendly to fans who come up to him and ask for his autograph, I feel no reason to change my opinion of him. I know that when people who want something that I have approach me, I do my best to ignore them altogether (obviously no one is asking me for my autograph, but we all deal with panhandlers, charities calling for money, family members who need a favor, and the like). How can I fault Player X for behaving exactly as I would behave? Why would I factor this into the degree to which I like Player X, when the only reason I am even aware of his existence rather than that of another 1/7,000,000,000 of the world’s population is his ability to play baseball?

Of course, this can be easily looped back to the big baseball story of the month, the Hall of Fame voting. While the Hall of Fame was broken beyond repair before steroids made it a complete joke, the principle holds: I want to view baseball players as baseball players, nothing more and nothing less. Whatever else they are outside of that is of equal consequence to me as that of a mailman in Topeka.

The Next Great Sabermetric Hall of Fame Cause

Occasionally sabermetrically-inclined people will get behind a Hall of Fame candidate, generally one who has overwhelming qualifications from one perspective or another, but for whatever reason don't resonate as well with the mainstream. Rich Lederer's tireless campaign for Bert Blyleven is the most prominent (and successful), and the Tim Raines group of Jonah Keri, Nate Sager, Tango Tiger, and the late John Brattain has put together a website for their now Andre Dawson-endorsed cause. Alan Trammell certainly has his advocates, although they are not nearly as well-organized. Both Robbie Alomar and Barry Larkin debuted with a high enough percentage that there's no particular sense of urgency to make their case.

Blyleven is very likely to be voted in 2011, which should free up some people's quota of HOF arguing time. I have an early suggestion for you on where to invest it, if you're into that sort of thing. It's quite possible that I'm off-base, and that this player will be viewed more favorable by the BBWAA than I imagine. I admittedly don't have a particularly good handle on the mainstream baseball consensus.

Perhaps it's a sign of how out of touch I am that the comment I'm about to describe even raised my eyebrow. Tom Hamilton, the Indians' play-by-play announcer, described this player as a guy who "might be a borderline Hall of Famer". Had it just been "might" or "borderline", I probably wouldn't have thought as much of it, just chalking it up to laziness. But "might" and "borderline"? As in, "If this guy gets in, he's still more like Jim Rice than Carl Yastrzemski"?

Before I go any further, it must be acknowledged that this player performed in the 90s-00s, and thus will be written off by many because of steroids. So be it; there's no changing any minds on that issue.

The player I speak of is Jeff Bagwell, and he'll be on the ballot for the first time this year. I'm suggesting that if you would like to be the next Rich Lederer, you should get a head start. The day the vote is taken, the blogosphere will be overrun with posts about how badly the BBWAA missed on Bagwell. This is your chance to get ahead of the curve and stake out your territory.

From the sabermetric perspective, it's hardly worth even making the case for Bagwell. He ranks 35th all-time among position players in Chone's WAR, essentially equal with Ken Griffey. The only post-1900 first baseman ahead of him are Gehrig and Foxx (the great ABC trio of the nineteenth-century also ranks ahead of Bagwell). My own figures agree with that assessment. His peak seasons (probably 1994, 1996-1999) are impressive.

However, it's not too difficult to see why Bagwell might be underappreciated by the mainstream. Among the explanations:

1. While Bagwell compiled impressive triple crown numbers during his big seasons, he was a big secondary average guy who looks even better through the lens of advanced metrics. As you'll see below, his adjusted runs scored and RBI rates are much closer to equal than many other great first baseman, and RBI get all the attention (which is not to suggest that Bagwell's RBI rates were anything but outstanding).

2. Bagwell's best season, 1994, was shortened by a hand injury and the strike. The strike was probably fortuitous in his case, as he would not have been the NL MVP had the season continued with him out of action. I'm not suggesting that his 1994 be counted as a full season, and I don't think he requires any dispensation for it. Without it, though, he's missing what would have been a monster season around which to build his case.

3. The end of Bagwell's career was cut short by shoulder problems. His last full season came at age 36, one in which he was still an above-average performer and hit 27 homers. Without injury, it's a pretty safe assumption that he'd have reached 500 homers.

Of course, he didn't, and again I'm not suggesting that he should be credited for doing so. However, getting to 500 would have given him one of the key milestones that shape mainstream perception of career value.

4. Bagwell spent his peak in a fairly strong pitcher's park. The Astrodome park factor ranges from 94-97 during his years playing there (1991-99). The erstwhile Enron Field was a hitter's park, driving Bagwell's career park factor up to a close-to-neutral 98, but the Astrodome disguised some of his peak value.

5. To some extent, Bagwell is associated with poor post-season performances, compiling a .226/.364/.321 line. One has to put a lot of stock in 129 PA to significantly change their evaluation of him on that basis, though.

Earlier this year, I looked at measures of runs and RBI per out relative to the league average. The point was not to suggest that these were superior to context-neutral metrics like runs created, but to put R and RBI totals in context, at least up to a sabermetric minimum (considering outs made and league scoring context). Bagwell's R and RBI, considered in this light, give a similar view of his value as advanced metrics.

Bagwell's runs scored per out relative to the league average (R+) was 153, which would rank fourth among post-1900 Hall of Fame first baseman, trailing only Gehrig, Chance, and Foxx. His RBI per out relative to the league (RBI+) of 163 is nearly as impressive; it would rank seventh, behind Gehrig, Greenberg, Foxx, Mize, McCovey, and Killebrew. The average of the two (which I called Runs Anything and abbreviated as ANY) is 158, which would rank fifth, trailing Gehrig, Greenberg, Foxx, and Mize.

I'll allow you to peruse the chart yourself and draw your own conclusions (or not, as the case may be), but I think it's fair to say that Bagwell's R and RBI figures are very much in line with the other great first baseman. Of course, ANY is not really a stand-in for mainstream analysis, despite being fueled by R and RBI. It does not fit that role, since it recognizes the fundamental principle of sabermetrics with respect to offense: that offense occurs within the context of outs.

When I have had occasion to discuss ranking players with non-saberites, I have often said something like "I'll accept for the sake of argument that R and RBI are appropriate measures of a player's offensive production." However, I refuse to waver on insisting that league context and outs be considered. In the case of Bagwell, league context is not a particularly important factor either way--the NL average R/G of 4.57 for his career is fairly normal. His OBA was outstanding, though, even when compared to great first baseman of history.

It's possible that I'm wrong, and that Bagwell is appreciated by the BBWAA voters and will debut at a percentage that makes future induction a solid bet. If so, any would-be Bagwell Lederers out there will have wasted their time and I will have cried wolf. I'd like for that to be the case, for Bagwell's sake if nothing else.

Bagwell and some other first basemen:

Runs Anything and the Hall of Fame

I don't actually want to discuss specific Hall of Fame candidacies, but I will present career Runs Anything figures for predominantly post-1900 Hall of Famers (not including those selected in 2010, as I wrote this a week before the results were announced) and a number of players who often come up in Hall of Fame debates. While I don't care for many of the Hall's selections, using membership as a standard is a convenient way to keep the player pool to a reasonable size.

First, here is a list of the top ten Hall of Famers in R+. They are mostly the usual suspects, but I think there is one name that will surprise you--it certainly surprised me:



Frank Chance scored 60% more runs per out than the average player in his day. He did have a short career and he was on a historically great team, but his is still a surprising name to have pop up on a list of this type.

Here is a similar list for RBI+:



Willie Stargell is probably the most surprising name on the list (and perhaps Cobb if one fails to account for context in setting their expectations), but for the most part these are exactly the players you would expect to see: middle-of-the-order studs.

There are five players who crack the top ten in both R+ and RBI+ (Cobb, Gehrig, Hornsby, Ruth, and Williams)--it is thus no surprise that they make up the top five in Runs Anything:



A natural question to ask is "what is the degree of agreement between Runs Anything and a sabermetrically-approved context-neutral measure of the same thing, on the career level?" With the release of wRC+ on Fangraphs, it is very easy to compare ANY to such a metric. I did so for the Hall of Famers.

Of course, this is a very biased sample--it is only those players selected as the greatest of all-time, and there may well be a tendency for players who excel in R and RBI to a greater extent than context-neutral statistics to be voted into the Hall. The players in the sample all have long careers, there is a higher representation of players that excel in both runs and RBI than one would observe among the general player population, and there also bound to be more middle-of-the-order hitters, who are placed in a much better position to excel in both categories than leadoff hitters, for instance. wRC+ includes a park adjustment; ANY does not.

With all of the obvious problems with restricting the comparison to this group, why am I bothering? Because players of this group are the only ones for whom mainstream fans really examine career statistics closely. Ordinary players are hardly ever placed in historical perspective; the Hall of Fame debates are really the only time careers are given any sort of through examination. Ordinary players are talked about each season, but when their useful playing careers end, they are forgotten by and large. Few people are particularly concerned about Jeff King's career batting performance and how it compares to that of Al Martin. Those that are probably aren't using R and RBI anyway.

In fact, as a brief digression, the fact that HOF debates are the only time that players are really placed into historical context is what might make it seem as if I care about them. If you read this blog, you'll note a few posts tagged "Hall of Fame"--despite the fact that I do not think the current Hall of Fame structure is capable of being salvaged and don't care which players are chosen. But if someone like me (interested in both statistics and the history of the game) chooses to ignore the discussion surrounding the Hall altogether, they are basically shutting himself out from comparing players' careers. It's really the only time that the topic gets any sort of mainstream play (one could talk about top 100 lists, and comparisons between Aaron and Bonds when the home run record fell, or what have you, but those are in a certain sense subsets of the Hall debate--examining the records of no-brainer Hall of Famers).

If you want to skip the last two paragraphs, the takeaway is that I am only looking at the relationship between ANY and wRC+ for great players because that is the only situation in which ANY would be used in practice (in fact, it won't be at all, but that's besides the point).

So, for the Hall of Famers, the correlation between ANY and wRC+ is +.94. The average absolute value of the difference between the two is 7, and the average difference (ANY - wRC+) is -1 (in other words, the average player has a very slightly lower ANY). The players that ANY favors the most:



It's pretty interesting how close both rates are for the three catchers (Bench, Berra, Campanella); they all have ANY of 141-143 and wRC+ of 130. Traynor, Medwick, Klein, and Wilson can be tied into their own group as thirties hitters (although the others, as corner outfielders, form a tighter group than is made if Traynor is included).

The players for that ANY doesn't like:



A lot of high-OBA, top of the order types in this group, highlighted by Henderson and Morgan. It's interesting that two Hall of Famers who would probably be considered in the bottom half of the Hall show up here (Carey and Combs), and that a player often put forth as one of the very worst (Ferrell) is here as well.

The correlation between R+ and wRC+ is +.87; between RBI+ and wRC+ it is +.78. At least with this very biased sample, runs are more closely related to estimated context-neutral production than RBI. The next logical step is to run a regression to estimate wRC+ from R+ and RBI+ (then to never actually use it for a myriad of reasons, as this the type of mathematical gyration that would drive me crazy if it was being used for serious purposes):

wRC+ ~ = .616(R+) + .287(RBI+) + 14.7

This equation estimates that a player with average R+ and RBI+ would actually have a 105 wRC+, which is not quite satisfying; it also puts a double-weight on runs scored. We could try a regression without an intercept:

wRC+ ~ = .710(R+) + .302(RBI+)

This equation puts a R+ = RBI+ = 100 player at 101, which is more in line with what we'd expect, but produces less accurate estimates for this group.

To get back to the point of these posts, one can use runs scored and RBI to derive a decent estimate of a player's productivity, particularly over a career. I'd never use it and even when dressed up it retains the drawbacks present in looking at R and RBI in any event, but I think that it could have some limited persuasive value with mainstream fans if you could get them to accept the key premise (productivity must be expressed in relation to outs). Of course, if you can get one to accept that premise, they are probably open to further sabermetric indoctrination, and that would obviously be preferable.

This spreadsheet includes career totals in these categories for all of the predominantly post-1900 Hall of Famers as well as a few other selected players (the others are not in any way intended to be a comprehensive list of the most productive non-HOF players).

The MVP, the Hall of Fame, and the Emmys

In the past I have written disdainfully of the BBWAA post-season awards, going so far as to say that I don't care. I've said the same thing about Hall of Fame voting.

Whenever I do this, the post seems to get linked somewhere and people ask "If you don't care about it, why are you writing about it?" It's true that "I don't care" is a fairly strong declaration, and that what I'm actually aiming for is "I don't care about the specific outcomes of the voting process. I am interested in ways in which the outcomes could be improved by changing the process or the voter pool". Of course, if you need to slap a title on your blog post, the former is a lot easier to work with than the latter.  In any event, if you're not interested in my opinion, that's fine by me.  Don't read it.

To belabor this point, let me give you an example by discussing four sets of awards/honors that I don't care about in one way or another: the Daytime Emmys, the Primetime Emmys, the BBWAA awards, and the Baseball Hall of Fame. The exact manner in which I don't care about each differs, and should be illustrative of what I'm getting at:

The Daytime Emmys--I don't care about the Daytime Emmys because I don't watch daytime television. Not only does the identity of the award winners have no impact on me, I know and care next to nothing ("next to" is a necessary qualifier to avoid a gotcha when it turns out I've heard of some soap operas) about what is being honored. I don't know who won the awards, I don't care to know, and I don't have any opinion about who should have won them.

The Primetime Emmys--I may not care who wins the awards, but I watch some of the shows eligible for consideration or know something about the others that I don't watch. I'm not a TV critic and make no claims to be one; I watch what I enjoy, and I don't care whether it is considered worthy of praise by critics or considered to be garbage. While I think that it would be cool if LOST won the Emmy for best drama every year (or Monk and/or The Office for best comedy), I can't say that Mad Men is unworthy, because I don't watch it, know little about it, and I don't evaluate TV shows in the same way that Emmy voters do.

Baseball Hall of Fame--Last year I wrote a couple of posts titled "Why I Don't Care About the HOF". The main point was that I don't care about specific Hall of Fame selections (i.e. "Should Blyleven or Trammell be in?" or the endless Jim Rice debates) because I believe the system is too far gone. There have been so many mistakes made that even a concerted effort going forward will not salvage the Hall of Fame as a means to honor truly great players. Additionally, I believe that one of the reasons for the mistakes is the haphazard means of selecting players that have been employed over the years, and the lack of a coherent vision for the player selection process when the institution was founded.

The concept of a Hall of Fame in general, and how a hypothetical one should be constructed, is of interest to me. And so I do offer comments from time to time on how I feel the current Hall could be improved (although this hypothetical improvement would still be insufficient to salvage the inductee roster at this point), or about how a Hall could be designed in theory.

BBWAA Awards--I think that the questions posed by each of these awards are interesting, and I follow the game closely enough to come to my own informed judgments about which player should win. I think the voting process (ten-man ballot, two voters per city in the case of the MVP) itself is solid. I'm not wild about the instructions laid out for voting, but they could certainly be worse. Most importantly, I think it's worthwhile to honor the best players of each season

However, while the voting process and instructions are okay, I don't hold the judgment of those doing the voting in particularly high esteem--particularly with respect to a number of de facto criteria have emerged (or seem to have emerged). Most prominent amongst the de factor prerequisites I find objectionable are that a player must play for a contender (or otherwise have a clearly superior season to anyone else) and that starting pitchers are not seriously considered. With respect to Rookie of the Year voting, sometimes writers apparently can't be bothered to ascertain which players actually are rookies. And there is the issue that people who will report the news are called on to make the news, which may not have a tangible impact on the voting but raises a red flag just a little bit up the pole.

So at the end of the day I have enough qualms about the BBWAA awards to be uninterested in the results of who wins, except to the extent that the results give us insight into how the voters view the game or how the selection process could be improved. If I feel player X is undeserving, yet he wins the award, I might chuckle and shake my head; I might accuse the voters of overlooking one facet of the game and overvaluing another; but I'm not outraged. I'm not going to write about how Player Y who I prefer was robbed of the award; instead, I'll write about why Player Y really was the most valuable player of the league, which is a question that may be raised and brought to the forefront by the BBWAA awards, but could easily exist in a vacuum (if you think this distinction is splitting hairs, I disagree but understand where you're coming from).

Comparing the Hall of Fame votes to the annual award votes, I prefer the latter. The voting process is designed better, but more importantly, the mistakes of the past only cast a small shadow on present results.

Silly choices by the BBWAA for MVP or Cy Young can set a precedent, to a limited extent. One could attempt to justify voting for a closer as MVP because Willie Hernandez won, or for a player solely on the basis of impressive home run and RBI numbers because of Andre Dawson, 1987. And poor choices, even those in the past, can serve to reduce the respect given to the award.

However, in the case of the Hall of Fame, the mistakes of the past are never far from discussion, since each election builds on the one that came before it. The awards slate is wiped clean each year, but each Hall candidate is compared not only to their ballot mates but to the previous inductees. No single voter is compelled to change his standards to fit previous choices, but comparison to past inductees is unavoidable. And while the impact of a single questionable selection can be minimized (Jim Bottomley doesn't come up much in Hall discussions), a series of questionable selections is harder to push aside (like the Frankie Frisch-era VC selections that Bottomley was a part of). Furthermore, the honor of being a Hall of Famer itself is cheapened by poor selections, as the honor is to be considered in a group with the past inductees.

To summarize, in order to flesh out what I mean when I say I don't care about a certain baseball award, I've offered four gradations of indifference:

1. I care about neither the mission of the award nor the entities being honored (Daytime Emmys)
2. I care about the entities to some extent, but not about the mission of the award (Primetime Emmys)
3. I care about the entities, and think the mission of the award is solid in theory, but the implementation is such that it has lost me other than as a theoretical exercise (Baseball Hall of Fame)
4. I care about the entities, and the mission of the award, but the people entrusted with bestowing the award severely dampen my enthusiasm (BBWAA post-season awards)

Here We Go Again

So another player gets suspended for violating the drug policy and we get another round of moralizing and hyperbole, and of course that ridiculous fool Jeff Passan at Yahoo gets to roll them both together, then ooze more smarminess than one thought humanly possible.

But outside of the lunatic fringe exemplified by Passan, what is the major topic of discussion? Manny's Hall of Fame fate, naturally. For all of the phony hand-wringing about the "sanctity and integrity of the game" and the like, all anyone really cares about is whether a guy does or doesn't get to join the ranks of Rick Ferrell and Rube Marquard (but not Bert Blyleven or Alan Trammell) in the blessed Hall of Fame. The parody almost writes itself--a visitor from a foreign country might draw the conclusion that Major League Baseball is played for the glory of the Hall of Fame.

Addendum: I am going to edit this post to add links to good, sane takes on this situation (anti-Passans, if you will) as I see them:

Craig Calcaterra at the Hardball Times

Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek

John Stossel in his syndicated column

The Ten Years War

For once, I’m going to attempt to be early to address a topic instead of late. I am usually pretty reactionary; something will happen, everyone in the world will weigh in on it, and then I come in a month later when no one cares anymore (not that my take on it would have been particularly interesting if it were timely). This time, I hope to beat the rush by six or seven months.

Since we are now in 2009, I believe it is safe to assume that we will be treated to a number of pieces on “X of the decade”. The team of the decade, player of the decade, trade of the decade, left-handed sidearming reliever of the decade, etc. This is all well and good, and harmless enough; there’s nothing wrong with frivolous baseball discussions and there’s certainly nothing wrong with putting things in (short) historical perspective.

The key word is “frivolous”. Once the question is allowed to take on greater significance (like being used as a Hall of Fame argument, with Jack Morris as “Pitcher of the Eighties” (*) the prime example), then I have problems with it.

Being the best over a ten-year period is certainly a noteworthy accomplishment. The problem is that the decade approach to issue emphasizes one particular period over all others. Take for instance the fact that Mark Grace led MLB in hits for the 1990s (he had 1,754, seven more than Rafael Palmeiro). In fairness, if anyone has used this to proclaim Grace’s greatness, it has not gained much traction, but still, it sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is. The next six men on the list (Palmeiro, Biggio, Gwynn, Alomar, Griffey, and Ripken) all had more career hits than Grace.

Yes, the list is for hits in the 1990s, not career hits, but this is not a case of getting Grace plus a bunch of guys near the end of their careers or just getting started. With the exception of Ripken and possibly Gwynn, the 1990s were the prime decade for all of them (and Ripken and Gwynn were both productive throughout the decade). It just so happens that for those ten seasons, Grace had a few more hits.

If you look at the ten years from 1989-1998, Grace is third with 1,731 hits, 46 behind Gwynn. The ten years from 1991-2000? Grace (1,715) and Palmeiro (1,719) trade places. So what is it exactly that makes the ten year period from 1990-1999 more important than periods offset by just one year on either side? “The ‘90s” sounds a lot better than “the ten years beginning with ‘89”, but there is no real distinction. By picking out “the ‘90s”, we get the one ten year period in which Mark Grace happened to lead the league in hits. It would be much more impressive is if you could find a player who led the league in hits over multiple ten-year periods. By not examining any other time period, Grace is held up as a singular player, when he should be viewed in a group with other ten-year hit leaders around the same time (for the ten year period beginning with 1988, the leader is Molitor; 1989--Gwynn, 1990--Grace, 1991--Palmeiro, 1992--Alomar).

Organizing history into workable periods can be helpful, but doing it based on endpoints that happen to make a nice numerical cohort (namely, the same digit in the tens place) is a crude way of doing so. If you intend to put any stock in the exercise, why not go through the trouble of dividing time on the basis of important changes in the game? It might be helpful to start a new “era” of baseball history sometime around the middle of the 90s, with events like the strike, the offensive explosion, the influx of Asian talent, the two expansions, and the purported steroids era all as possible markers of a historical shift. I’m not advocating placing too much stock in this sort of classification (for the purposes of establishing statistical leaders, not constructing a historical narrative), either, but if you must break up time into rigid segments, I believe it’s a better way to go.

I’ve been assuming throughout that the “decade” is a natural way to divide time, but who can forget the fascinating (**) arguments that erupted over what constitutes the decade? This issue popped up a lot in 1999 and 2000 as people debated when the third millennium actually began. Since there is no year zero AD (CE if you must, but if you must, please leave), if you actually start counting off ten years to define your decades, the first would be years 1-10, which would eventually lead you to 2001-2010 as the current decade. Furthermore, there’s really nothing to stop you from re-centering the entire calendar of Western Civilization and declaring that the year we call 34 BC should be year 1, and starting from there.

Don’t get me wrong; I have no qualms about calling this the year 2009. The preceding digression is just intended to drive home the point that no specific ten year period is inherently significant solely because of the digits we use to represent it.

In that vein, George Brett’s Hall of Fame plaque includes the tidbit that he was the “first player to win batting titles in three decades (1976, ’80, ’90). There have been objections to this statement on the grounds I described above--a non-negligible portion of observers claim that ’76 and ’80 are in the same decade. Regardless, it’s a fairly impressive feat, but what impresses me about it is that he had batting titles separated by fourteen years, not that the three each fell in a different decade. That’s a long time to be a candidate to lead the league in anything.

However, Ted Williams won batting titles separated by seventeen years (’41 and ’58), and Stan Musial matched Brett at fourteen (’43 and ’57). Brett still has one of the longest gaps between first and last titles, but it’s no longer a historical oddity. And Williams and Musial both won a bunch of them, not just three, the bare minimum needed to have any chance at three decades. The distinction I draw is that Brett’s feat is an ok trivia question, but a really stupid thing to put on someone’s Hall of Fame plaque.

Another issue raised by the decade family of questions is sort of related to the classic career v. peak value issue. Let’s say we were going to pick the player of the ‘00s, as of this moment (I’m writing this in January). Should our pick be the player who contributed the most value over the course of the decade? Should it be the player who was the most valuable in his decade prime, whether he played for the whole decade or not? Should it be the best player, over the course of a full career, for whom this was his most productive decade, even if somebody was more productive in this decade. If you use the first definition, then Jack Morris is a *potential* choice for pitcher of the 80s, and Roger Clemens is probably a poor choice. If you use the second definition, then Clemens or Dwight Gooden is probably your guy (please don’t argue with me on the specific names here; I don’t care and I didn’t check to see which I would pick if I had to). If you use the third definition, you could make an argument along the lines of “I think Hank Aaron was more valuable than Willie Mays in the 1960s, but I also think Mays was a more valuable player over the course of their entire careers, and therefore Mays is the player of the ‘60s.”

If you think it should be the player who added the most value in the decade, period, then what do you do about Albert Pujols (let alone Barry Bonds)? Ignoring fielding (but considering position), I have Alex Rodriguez at 70 WAR and Pujols at 71 WAR for 2000-2008 (those figures are a little higher than most, because I’m using a lower RPW than most people; the specific numbers aren’t really the point). That is too close to call, but consider that Pujols did not play at all in 2000. What if ARod was at 75 WAR and Pujols at 71? That’s still well within a margin of error, but it would make it makes ignoring ARod’s advantage a little tougher. A one win difference is easy to waive off with “He did that in eight seasons rather than nine, but one extra season of 4 WAR is a darn good season.

Another point which should be obvious but that I’ll mention anyway is that the used of a fixed decade period can be a boon to players based on their birthdays. ARod, born in 1975, went from 25 to 34 in the 00s. This is a good ten-year stretch to have considered, as it safely includes his expected peak seasons and avoids seasons in which he would be very young or very old. What about a player like Hanley Ramirez, though? Born in 1983, the 00s are his age 17-26 seasons. And the 10s will be his age 27-36 seasons. Even if Ramirez is the best something (shortstop, maybe even player) in the majors over a legitimate stretch, there is a non-negligible chance that he will never be the “shortstop of the decade” simply because of how his age corresponds to the definition of decade in use.

I chose to highlight ARod/Pujols precisely because it’s so close that it’s easy to justify Pujols if you’d like. But what happens when the difference in playing time is more profound? I previously mentioned Roger Clemens v. Jack Morris for “pitcher of the 80s”. Do Clemens’ brilliant seasons make him better, or do you go with Morris because it’s hard to take a 95-45 pitcher over a 162-119 pitcher? We can all agree that Clemens was a much greater pitcher than Morris, and over each of their best ten-year periods, but if we limit ourselves strictly to just 1980-89, we almost are forced to honor Morris and not Clemens.

The career v. peak issue is a legitimate one, one which is largely a matter of personal preference and on which many reasonable people arrive at very different preferences. Why muddy the waters even more by forcing comparisons into arbitrary timeframes?

My protestations aside, the end of the year figures to yield an explosion of “X of the decade” stories. Hopefully, they will be offered in the spirit of fun, not profundity, and everything will be kept in perspective. The good news is that it’s just baseball, not a war, and so the worst thing that can happen is that we get treated to a number of ridiculous and overly serious choices from the media and groups of fans. Like the Sporting News choosing Pete Rose as “Player of the ‘70s” over two superior teammates. Or the players selecting Ken Griffey, not Barry Bonds, as “Player of the ‘90s”. And who could forget the “All-Century Team”, in which a group of experts had to be impaneled to avoid leaving Lefty Grove, Christy Mathewson, Stan Musial, Warren Spahn, and Hans Wagner off the team in favor of Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, Ken Griffey, Bob Gibson, and Ernie Banks? I’ll embrace these opportunities to chuckle, even as I shake my head at the thought-process that generates them.

(*) Tango wrote a piece for the Hardball Times about Jack Morris and the “Pitcher of the Eighties”, which addresses the arbitrary definition of a decade and the silly emphasis placed on it.

(**) Fascinating in the sense of arguing over the pronunciation of "tomato".

The National Pastime Almanac is a very handy tool for answering questions like “Who had the most hits between years X and Y”, and it was the source for the data in this piece. If you are not a database whiz and like to fiddle around with the numbers, I highly recommend it. And it’s free.

Why I Don’t Care About the HOF, Pt. 2

The last post had some facts in it; this one has a lot of opinions. If you are not interested in my opinion, or don’t think that I should dare comment on your blessed Hall of Fame, then save yourself the aggravation and don’t read it. It’s not worth getting your blood pressure up.

First I will attempt to explain the viewpoint expressed in the title. Why don’t I care about the Hall of Fame? First, it should be noted that a better title would have been “Why I Don’t Care About the HOF as it is Currently Constituted” or “Why I Don’t Care Who the HOF Elects, Only Why It is Broken”, as writing a couple thousand words about something is generally inconsistent with not caring about it at all. Touche. Also, by HOF I am referring to the player inductions, not to the other functions of the institution (museum, research library, etc.)

I should really make this a permanent disclaimer for every post on this blog, but again, let it be noted that: the opinions and ideas expressed in this post are not necessarily new, I do not claim to have thought of them independently of reading the work of others, and even if I don’t explicitly state that something was proposed by someone else, it very well may have been.

One of the issues I have with the Hall of Fame, albeit not one that diminishes it for modern players, is the overlook of nineteenth century players, particularly from the 1870s, 1880s, and the pre-professional days. The HOF recently had a committee of knowledgeable people empowered to elect Negro League candidates; I believe that they need a similar initiative to honor the great stars of the nineteenth century.

In saying this, I realize that the VC is taking a vote on ten pre-1943 players, including Bill Dahlen and Deacon White. However, I do not expect that the volume of nineteenth century players that will eventually be picked is sufficient, nor does it result in the candidates being evaluated by those best suited for the task.

However, the primary reason I view the HOF as I do is that I believe it is incapable of truly honoring great players. This viewpoint is somewhat patronizing, as the Hall of Famers pretty much universally put on a good face, and talk about how honored they are to have been elected and about what a great honor it is.

However, I think that the Hall of Famers themselves, as well as the casual baseball fan, do not fully understand the number of players who are in the HOF who simply did not have the impressive careers that one would expect.. They are trusting, and assume that every body that has been empowered to induct players has done so responsibly.

Perhaps I am off base. Perhaps they know more about the players than I am giving them credit for. I doubt it, but I am open to being persuaded otherwise.

The fact that Lloyd Waner is in the Hall of Fame is not in and of itself damning to the ability of the institution to honor great players any more than that Jeff Burroughs won the AL MVP award means that Alex Rodriguez was unable to be sufficiently honored last year. However, the HOF is a perpetual institution; once Waner is there, he’s there forever. No one except Burroughs and whoever deserved the MVP award really cares that he was given it. It could set a precedent, but it seems to me as if those are wiped out from one generation to the next (at one time middle infielders were popular picks; now RBI men on contenders are in vogue). A HOF mistake like Waner is permanent, and while it doesn’t have to, it can permanently affect the standards to which other players are held.

To belabor the MVP comparison a bit (and this was actually discussed a bit in the BTF thread linked in the comments for the last post--although I had written the preceding paragraph before that discussion), while a poor MVP selection can indeed set a precedent and lead to more selections in the same vein, at least each year’s crop is not being compared to Jeff Burroughs. The selection of Justin Morneau in 2006 may have been similar in some way to that of Burroughs, but at least he was not being compared directly to Burroughs--he was being compared to Jeter, Ortiz, Hafner, Mauer, etc. In the case of the Hall of Fame, the most important comparison is not between the candidates on the ballot (after all, you can choose up to ten of them), but between the candidates and the precedent that has been set by those inducted before them. Thus the mistakes made by the HOF have much more potential for perpetuation than do those for the yearly awards.

Furthermore, if Lloyd Waner was the only questionable player in Cooperstown, it would be no big deal. Mistakes happen, and the world goes on. But it’s not just Lloyd Waner--it's Tommy McCarthy, and Harry Hooper, and Ross Youngs, and Chick Hafey, and Heinie Manush, and Earle Combs, and Edd Roush, and we’ve only touched on the outfielders (you may not consider each of those guys to be big mistakes, but I bet there are others that I do not include that you might). These guys make up a significant proportion of the Hall membership, to the point where I think a Rickey Henderson or a Tony Gwynn would be completely justified in saying, “What, you expect me to be honored by being included with Heine Manush and Ross Youngs?”

One thing that was misunderstood in the last post was my comment that the primary standard I am interested in is career value. I did not mean to (nor did I) suggest that any other viewpoint was invalid, only that the discussion was grounded in that perspective. The relevance here is that I don’t believe that Sandy Koufax belongs in the Hall of Fame. However, if you come from a peak-centric viewpoint, Koufax is very much a defensible choice, maybe even an inner circle HOFer. Selections like Koufax, which are defensible from one point of view but questionable from another, are not the problem. The problem is those choices that make very little sense from any point of view. If there is a rational, fair definition of what a Hall of Famer should be that would include Rube Marquard, I am not aware of it.

Getting back to Hooper, Hafey, et al., I don’t even mean to suggest that those guys shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame. Maybe they should be. After all, the Hall of Fame has done very little to formally define what the standards should be, so everyone is free to make their own judgments. And if you feel that there should be 300 or 500 Hall of Famers, who am I to tell you you’re wrong?

However, at that point, I believe that the ability to honor the great players is gone. A Hall of Fame with Waner, Combs, and company can honor Kenny Lofton, Brett Butler, or Tim Salmon, but it cannot truly honor Tony Gwynn or Gary Sheffield, at least for my money.

Of course, if Gwynn chooses to be honored by it, that’s fine. Some people are naturally humble and will take any sort of accolade as an honor, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, I personally do not celebrate (nor condemn) false modesty or condemn realism about one’s accomplishments.

Some people, in defending the ability of the Hall of Fame to honor players, point out that the writers have enforced a much higher standard than the Veterans Committee has. The data presented in the last post demonstrates that this is the case. However, any distinction between which body votes you in is solely in the eyes of an observer. All of the inductees have their plaques hanging on the same wall. The only real difference that it makes is that the probability of a vets choice being present and able to enjoy their accolades is lower.

Therefore, I don’t see any good argument for the writers continuing to uphold a higher standard, independent of the inherent problem of having two groups choosing from the same players at different times. If there is a player, let’s call him Alan Trammell, who for whatever reason has been rejected by the writers, but is a very good bet to be chosen by the vets down the line, what good does it do to deny him the honor now? The only good reason for the BBWAA to reject eventual Hall of Famers is to prevent a further decay of the HOF standards.

If the BBWAA selects Trammel, then the Vets Committee might induct a lesser player like Omar Vizquel in thirty years, since they can’t induct Trammell. If the BBWAA lowers its standards, and the Vets maintain a mandate to elect somebody, then eventually the Vets’ standards will probably become lower as well, and the standards will be trapped in a downward spiral.

However, this is a problem that is irrelevant to the question of whether Trammell himself does or does not deserve to be in Cooperstown. It is a problem only when the scope is expanded to multiple players over many years. In the individual case, it just causes Trammell to wait needlessly. (If you don’t think Trammell is worthy of induction at any rate, substitute the candidate of your choice who has been passed over by the writers; my intention is not to advocate for Trammell or anyone else).

How does the Hall of Fame get out of this mess, and escape the mistakes of the past? I believe that it could be done very easily by adding tiers to the Hall (obviously not a unique suggestion on my part). Some would argue that the writers/vets breakdown already constitutes a tiered Hall, but again, to the extent that there is, it is in perception only and not reflected in how members of the two groups are treated by the Hall.

I would propose a three-tiered Hall, for players only. The managers, executives, pioneers, etc. would remain in just one group which would be independent of the player tiers.

I would envision the tiers being voted on in a way not unlike what the Hall of Merit at BTF does. Instead of setting a minimum percentage of votes for a player to be elected, there would be timed elections that would result in a fixed number of honorees.

For an example of how this might work, the players currently in the Hall would all begin in the first tier. The second tier could be filled by an initial election of some sort that would put in 25 players (it doesn’t have to be 25). Then, every year there would be a second-tier vote for which all first-tier members would be eligible in perpetuity. One player would be selected per year. The third tier could be started with five of the second tier members, with an additional player chosen every three, five, or ten years depending on just how exclusive one wants this level to be.

I don’t have a proposal for the precise format of the elections, because 1) that’s not as important to me as the concept and 2) it’s not like it’s going to happen anyway, so what use is there in getting into specifics? I would like to think that the voting for the higher tiers could be done by a group of experts rather than the BBWAA or the former players (I do not mean to imply that writers or players could not be “experts”, just that qualified people are by no means limited to those two groups). Perhaps there would be a run off vote, or a MVP-style rank order ballot.

A not necessarily obvious positive about a tiered Hall would be that it would keep debates about past players in the forefront of baseball news for one day a year, rather than being the sole domain of small groups on message boards. It might serve to educate casual fans about baseball history and players of the past. If you consider the precedent of the All-Century Team, in which a special panel had to be added in order to honor obvious selections like Musial and Wagner, the historical knowledge of that voting base (which admittedly may not be reflective of casual fans at large) is quite poor. I doubt that the one day of coverage would lead to any sort of sea change, but it couldn’t hurt.

Do I expect that such a scheme will ever be adopted? Of course not. The Hall has changed its procedures a number of times throughout its history, but these changes have been mainly cosmetic and have done precious little to address the underlying flaws in the process. Am I saying that they must adopt the ideas here? No. What I am saying is that they should do something to correct the fundamental flaws in the system, and this is just a potential remedy that I would find palatable. However, since I doubt the Hall will reform its election process, I will continue to be disinterested in the debates about who should be inducted.

Why I Don’t Care About the HOF, pt. 1

I have stated before that I don’t particularly care about Hall of Fame debates because I think that the HOF is beyond salvation. That is a slight exaggeration of my position, but it’s close enough. However, I do want to comment a little more deeply about it here. In this post I will examine what the standards for the Hall have been empirically in terms I care about. This of course does not imply that the HOF selectors have actually used the basic sabermetric standards I will look at. In the next post, I will discuss why I feel the HOF is broken and the remedies that I think would serve to make it more interesting to me. If you feel that the title is belied a little by what follows, that is understandable.

The idea of examining the what the HOF standards are is by no means a new one. I, like many sabermetricians, have been deeply influenced by Bill James and on this topic particularly by his Politics of Glory. In that book, James set out a few methods for organizing thinking on the Hall, one of which was a Hall of Fame Standards list that set out a number of reasonable criteria (did the player get 2000 hits? 2500 hits? 300 home runs? Etc.). These tools were meant to mimic or approximate things that HOF voters seemed to value.

I have no interest in what HOF voters have valued; what I want to know is how the players that they’ve selected stack up by the standard(s) that I care about. As I have written before, my starting point in evaluating a player’s career is his total value above some baseline, usually replacement level. I am not interested in “peak value” or any such thing. I don’t wish to justify this here; some of the reasoning behind my position is in this post. If you disagree, that’s fine, but that is the perspective that the ensuing discussion is grounded in.

Up front, I should also tell you that this discussion only deals with post-1900 (or at least significantly post-1900) position players, and only those who had significant careers in the major leagues as we know them today (in other words, no Negro Leaguers). I have previously written up my personal rankings of the pitchers, and in that series I wrote a bit about the HOF standards for pitchers. I have excluded nineteenth century players because I believe that they have gotten the short shrift from the Hall of Fame, and because there are more issues in evaluating them. When I finish working through my nineteenth century stats series, I may revisit this topic with a focus on the 1800s.

I did not want to spend a bunch of time calculating career WAR figures, so I used a reasonable approximation. I used Pete Palmer’s Batter-Fielder Wins (formerly Total Player Rating) from the 2005 ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. In doing so, I am not endorsing TPR; it is not the world’s worst way to evaluate players, but it does have its flaws. The offensive ratings are fine, and the positional adjustment approach is not optimal, but neither is the similar approach that I use, so I can scarcely complain about it. However, the fielding figures leave a lot to be desired.

That said, I am not particular concerned about that, because I am looking at the group of Hall of Famers in the aggregate. Even if I don’t particular trust Palmer’s fielding rating for Nap Lajoie, any distortion for any particular player will have little effect on the second baseman as a whole (particular the median value).

I needed to convert TPR into a measure above replacement, and that is easy enough. In this issue of By the Numbers (PDF link), approaches are offered by both Bill Deane and Tom Ruane. The approach that I used is closer to that of Deane’s, but a little more generous--I gave each player a win for every 73.6 games in which they played. That works out to 2.2 wins/162 games. Most estimates of replacement level peg it at around 2 wins per season for an individual position player; I used 2.2 because the .350 OW% (73% of average R/G) standard that I use coupled with 10 runs per win (the long-term average for Palmer’s RPW formula, corresponding to 9 RPG) suggests that is so. (1 - .73)*4.5 = 1.215 runs per game less for a replacement player in an average context. 1.215*162/9 = 21.87 runs for an individual player, divided by 10 is 2.2 wins.

If you want to argue that plate appearances or outs would be a more accurate way to add the extra wins, I’m not going to object. Using games will tend to overvalue part-time players, who may appear briefly as a pinch-hitter or defensive replacement. Again, my objective here is not to make fine distinctions between players but rather to have a rough estimate of value that we can use to examine groups of players.

If I was dealing with pitchers, I would add a win for each 80 innings pitched. (1.25-1)*4.5 = 1.125 less runs per nine innings, which is .1125 less per inning, divided by 10 runs per win = .0125 (1/80) wins/inning.

Now that the details are out of the way, let’s start looking at the results. First, just for the heck of it, here are the top ten Hall of Famers in WAR using this method. Again, I’m note endorsing these figures as being particularly good, but this is just to satisfy natural curiosity:

1. Ruth, 146

2. Lajoie, 129

3. Cobb, 127

4. Aaron, 126

5. Mays, 125

6. Speaker, 121

7. Wagner, 120

8. Williams, 118

9. Hornsby, 117

9. Musial, 117

I don’t think anyone really believes that Nap Lajoie was the second most valuable player in baseball history, especially after Bill James’ deconstruction of Lajoie’s fielding ranking in Win Shares.

Now let’s get on to the real matter at hand, how the Hall of Famers as a group stand in terms of TPR and WAR. The average TPR for a Hall of Famer is 35, with a WAR of 64. The median is a TPR of 33 with a WAR of 61.

So if WAR is your primary criterion, you can put anyone with a WAR of greater than 61 into the Hall without lowering the bar, as such players can only serve to increase the median. Of course, this analysis ignores the difference between those elected by the Veterans Committee and those elected by the BBWAA, as well as any differences between position.

I included the players (Gehrig and Clemente) who were chosen in special elections as writers’ choices. By my count, there are 42 VC picks, with an average TPR/WAR of 20/46. The median for that group is 18/46.

For the 77 BBWAA picks, the averages are 43/75, with medians of 39/70. So any time the writers’ elect a player with a WAR of at least 70, they can only raise the bar that they have set.

The fact that there are two different groups considering the same players with different standards is one of the big problems I have with the Hall of Fame, and I’ll expand on that thought in the next post. Regardless, it is true that the players selected by the writers contributed much more value to their teams than did those selected by the Veterans’ Committee. The highest-ranked Vets player is Arky Vaughn with 68 WAR, which ranks him below the median writers pick.

Here is the breakdown of the selections by position:

A couple notes on the position breakdown: “LF” is actually all corner outfielders, regardless of whether they played left or right. A player is generally classified at the position at which he played the most games, but I made several exceptions, including Ernie Banks (short rather than first), Rod Carew (second), Harmon Killebrew (third), and Paul Molitor (third).

To be honest, this is not what I expected to see. I expected to see positions on the left side of the defensive spectrum have the lower mean and median WAR figures then those on the right side. I was thinking that the difficulty of measuring fielding value would lead to shortstops with unimpressive TPR/WAR but strong defensive reputations being enshrined. Instead, first baseman are tied with center fielders for the lowest median value.

Of course, it is possible that Palmer’s evaluation system is overvaluing fielding, and thus making the left-side players look more valuable than they were. My take, though, is that it is an indication of how shallow reasoning behind many of the HOF selections was--emphasis on players with impressive offensive numbers, with little consideration for the other factors.

Here is a similar chart, this one giving the figures for those elected by the writers. I am not running a similar chart for the Veterans’ selections, so the last column in this chart lists the number of VC picks at the position:

One thing that can be said for the writers is that they have done an excellent job of balancing selections by position. All positions have between nine and eleven elected players (I am averaging the 21 corner outfielders across the two positions) with the exception of center field (seven).

Again, first baseman bring up the rear in terms of WAR, with a median of only 53 for the nine selections. Centerfielders have been held to a much tougher standard than any other position, so it would seem. The top four players (Cobb, Speaker, Mays, Mantle) tower over the others in WAR, with DiMaggio standing alone in a middle tier. The other two choices, Snider and Puckett, are at 52 and 48 WAR respectively.

Of course, my characterization may not be fair, as center field just happens to be a position where there have been a number of megastars, but slim pickings after that. However, I do consider it surprising that some of the marginal (at least in comparison to a DiMaggio or Mays) candidates like Jimmy Wynn, Reggie Smith, and Dale Murphy have been overlooked by the writers.

In closing, I acknowledge that I have thrown around a word like “standards” a lot, but that is incomplete, as I have only looked at this from the perspective of who is in the HOF, not who is not in the HOF. To truly determine what the standards of the HOF are, it is not enough to say that the median inductee is worth X WAR--we would also need to know how many non-HOFers have more than X WAR, and just in general examine the potential HOFers in more detail.

Finally, here is a link to a spreadsheet listing each player I considered, their primary position, which group elected them, and their career TPR and WAR.

The Classes of 2003 and 2008

I felt that it was a very nice little coincidence this week when the two blockbuster trades both involved a young outfielder who first made a name for himself as a big high school prospect in the 2003 amateur draft. It is especially noteworthy to me, as I myself am a member of the class of 2003. Now of course I am not and never have been a major league prospect, but it is not hard to feel a bit of a connection to the players in the exact same age range as you, who are reaching adulthood at the same time as you. In basketball we had LeBron James to bear our standard, and in baseball, Delmon Young and Lastings Milledge were two of our very best prospects.

On the trades themselves, my opinion is not particularly interesting, since I have no special insight on the players and so many other voices have already weighed in. I think that the Rays-Twins trade was just a great baseball trade, one that will be fun to watch over the years to see who emerges on top. Were I running things in Tampa Bay, I would have found it very difficult to trade away a talent like Delmon Young, and I’m not usually one impressed by toolsy players with pitiful walk rates. If I had to guess, I’d say Matt Garza is able to provide more early value, but eventually the Twins win the deal. It’s a great trade, though, because eminently reasonable people can view it any number of ways.

The same will not be said of the Milledge deal. There is very little that can be said in defense of it, it seems; most comments that are not made by people with jaws on the floor tend to stress that Milledge is not that good of a prospect, and that the trade is not an all-time debacle. If that is the best that can be said for a deal, then it almost certainly shouldn’t have been made.

I have also seen the point raised that critics of the trade are overstating not only Milledge’s prospects but his trade value, and that Minaya obviously found that the value was only Schneider and Church. I have two problems with this argument, the first of which is simply that because Minaya felt that Schneider and Church was the most valuable package he could receive does not make it so.

The second is that the argument treats the relationship between a ballplayer and his general manager in the same manner as the relationship between a gallon of milk and a store manager. Even if we suppose that the Nationals’ package represents the extent of Milledge’s value, he’s not a commodity with an expiration date. He doesn’t need to be cashed in.

If I may make an even more ridiculous analogy, the relationship between the GM and the player is more like the relationship between me and my car. I have a car, and it has a certain resale value; which, in the case of my lovely early 1990s automobile, not a whole heckuva lot, but someone would take it at some price. If I sold the car, the best I might be able to get for it is $1,000. So if I do sell it for $1,000, have I made a good deal? After all, I got fair market value for it.

My answer is: depends. I was under no obligation to sell the car, so we have to consider other factors, like how much it will cost to replace my car. A better example is probably the stock market. If I sell a stock for $15, I have by definition received fair market value--there's not even a question about it. But if you were an investment advisor, would you just tell your clients to feel free to buy and sell stocks willy-nilly, just because by definition any stock transaction is a fair deal?

My point is that just because Milledge has X trade value doesn’t justify a decision to trade him for X. This is a trade for which it is very hard to see the upside for the Mets. If Brian Schneider and Ryan Church are going to outperform whoever the Mets’ other alternatives for their roster spots would have been, and doing so will make a significant impact on their fortunes, than I would submit that it is going to be a rough year in Queens.

Moving on, there is the Class of 2008. The potential Hall of Fame class, that is. As I have written before, I don’t really care about who goes into the HOF, because I don’t believe that the HOF has any capacity to honor the truly great players anymore (and “anymore” is not a new condition; the situation dates back to the 1970s at least) . I care a little bit, to about the same extent as I care about who wins NBA games. If Bert Blyleven is finally elected, it will still not be an honor to tell him that he is in the same class as Rube Marquard. As far as I am concerned, they can only dishonor him by waiting a dozen years before considering him worthy of standing aside Marquard.

If it was just Marquard, that would be on thing. But it’s not--it's Pop Haines, and Catfish Hunter, and Bob Lemon, and Chief Bender, and Dizzy Dean, and Jack Chesbro, and Lefty Gomez. None of whom should flatter Blyleven, or Tommy John for that matter, as company.

So I try to stay out of the HOF debates; while I like the “who was better than who” exercise as much as any baseball fan, it’s a lot more interesting to make your own lists, or follow along with something like the Hall of Merit or to just argue about players on a message board. So I’m not going to write an essay begging and pleading for the induction of Alan Trammell, Bert Blyleven, Tommy John, Goose Gossage, Mark McGwire, and Tim Raines, or bemoaning the fact that the BBWAA voters didn’t even give Lou Whitaker a second chance on the ballot. I’m going to write a sentence that does that, and move on with my life. Now excuse me; the Bobcats might be playing the Clippers right now.