hall of fame, next vote...

Mickey Lolich won't get in the Hall, but his pitching in the 68 World Series may be the best performance ever in the fall classic by a starter. The guy out pitched Bob Gibson in Game Seven on TWO days rest. ESPN Classic was showed that game a few months back and it was great. Harry Caray was doing the play by play.

While I don't know if he is good enough player to make the hall, Al Oliver had a pretty good career and never gets put on these kind of lists.

My general point is that "b...b...but he was a bit of an asshole" is a criticism that's used far too often despite being irrelevant most of the time. As long as the guy didn't compromise the game of baseball (Pete Rose being the most obvious example) then I couldn't care less if he was moody and didn't get along with everybody. If he could bring it on the field, then that's the most important thing.

(xpost)

Haha I need to learn to check baseballreference.com before I say stuff sometimes.

Example #2: replace "Reggie Jackson" with "Barry Bonds" in the above paragraph.

Or consider the Yankees and Red Sox of the last few years. When the Yankees were winning, they were "professional" and "disciplined". Their lack of comaraderie was viewed as an asset, i.e. "they're all business when they take the field". OTOH, the Sox were drama queens who didn't know how to win when it counts.

Fast forward to this past year. The Yanks are up 3-0 and they're winning because they're the professionals who respect the game and know how to win. Five days later, the exact same guys are described as "cold" and "unemotional" and that's why they lost. In the meantime, Manny and Pedro's weird quirks and selfishness are ignored, and suddenly all the drama becomes an asset because the Sox are "loose", "having fun", and "relaxed", and that's why they won.

"So we're supposed to believe that Reggie was a poison when his team lost, and a leader when they won?"

I don't think anyone really said Reggie (or Barry or Albert Belle) was a leader at any point though (well maybe Reggie when he got older.) They just said when they won that they were very good players (which obv all three were) and at times very clutch players. That doesn't mean that they also didn't cause some problems in their respective clubhouses/franchises (which all three obv did.)

Great players are great players irrespective of their teams. You can be a great player on a good team or on a bad team. Similarly, if someone is a clubhouse cancer, then that should also be independent of the quality of the team. But it isn't. The same guy who is a cancer when the team loses is a leader when the team wins.

This doesn't mean that team chemistry doesn't count for anything. But it counts for a lot less than player performance.

Haha watch out conventional wisdom! Barry's coming after ya!

Next thing you know, I'll be claiming that there's no such thing as a clutch hitter!!

Reggie's championship teams in both Oakland and the Bronx were filled with hot heads, both on the team, the managers and owners. It was a crazy atmosphere, yet they won, mostly because they were freakin' loaded with talent top to bottom. One thing I find interesting about both of those clubs is that they both won titles with two managers, the A's with Dick Williams and Alvin Dark, the Yanks with Billy Martin and Bob Lemon. Both clubs had complete freak owners with big checkbooks with King George and Charlie Finley.

70s baseball was cool. You had both of these clubs and the Big Red Machine. KC, Baltimore, Philly, LA and Pittsburgh all also won their division more than once in 70s.

Yeah, for purpose of analyzing a player's career worth, it all should come down to stats, or as I prefer to call them, FACTS. We can all spin our own fantasies of who's a "clubhouse cancer" -- one of my first choices would be late-career Saint Cal Ripken -- and it doesn't prove a damn thing.

I agree Mr. Cal could be pretty detrimental to his team by that point too, but Mr. Morb WHY if everything is so easy to calculate based on the "facts" (haha) do we even bother having votes then? Why isn't there just a formula?

2. I'm not advocating a fucking formula, but INTERPRETING the record of the player's career.

Took me a second to figure this out--I thought he was still playing for somebody--but I-Rod's "officially" retiring:

http://cnnsi.com/2012/baseball/mlb/04/19/rodriguez.retires.ap/index.html#?sct=mlb_t11_a2

I guess he goes into the Bagwell group: automatic first-ballot if they vote on stats alone, some undetermined amount of time in limbo otherwise.

thought the same thing when i saw he's retiring. who else are you putting in this group?

Bret Boone...just kidding. Those are the first two that come to mind--let me think about it.

Thome, too. Got any others? The cloud-of-vague-suspicion group...

Piazza?

was Pudge on any sort of nefarious "list"? a coworker of mine seems to think so.

p sure he was named in the mitchell report but didn't have to testify?

came to camp 30 pounds lighter when they started testing

tbh, I just assume anyone on the mid-90s Rangers was using (note: don't care)

Canseco said he used too (note: also don't care)

I remember people pointing fingers on the basis of some drastic offseason weight loss a few years ago ...

I was looking at his B-R player page and was wondering

1) he had a negative dWAR for three straight years from 2002-4. I don't get it ... he was great defensively, then bad for three years, then great again?

2) he had a 67 career WAR, which barely puts him in the top 100 all-time. I don't know, doesn't that seem a bit low for one of the best catchers ever (and probably the best ever defensively). It would suggest that either a) catchers aren't all that valuable (because they usually aren't among the league's best hitters) or b) a catchers' value isn't well represented by current metrics.

catchers have shorter careers and their position takes a bigger toll when it comes to hitting
comparing his WAR against everyone is less meaningful than comparing him to other catchers

BB-Ref ranks his 67 WAR at...67th place, coincidentally. That definitely doesn't seem too low to me.

and #2 among catchers, #11 among catcher WAR/game

10th if you eliminate Jack Clements since he was pre-modern

tbh, I just assume anyone on the mid-90s Rangers was using

One exception:

http://s.ecrater.com/stores/68455/495a38266a0b5_68455n.jpg

Refused to take anything stronger than Flinstones vitamins.

"a catchers' value isn't well represented by current metrics"

From what I understand this is very true on the defensive side of things. All the traditional catcher stats are really hard to isolate as individual achievements (SB, CS, PB/WP) and those are the things that a catcher does that actually appear on a stat sheet.

Or the ability to call a game, which, if you accept that there is such an ability in the first place, exists in some grey area that's hard to isolate. (When Piazza lost those close MVP votes, the Dodgers would always be at or near the league lead in team ERA. But they were good staffs pitching in Dodger Stadium--how do you quantify Piazza's role in that? Seeing as he's catching the bulk of the games, comparing him to second- and third-string Dodger catchers doesn't seem to get you anywhere.)

I don't think Andre Dawson, Jim Rice, Lee Smith and Bert Blylevyn were Hall of Famers. Morris, Sandberg, Sutter and Goosage have much better arguments in their favor...Morris was a monster and at his best (which he was for a large part of 80s) he was one of the best pitchers in baseball...

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Wednesday, December 22, 2004 6:50 PM (7 years ago)

Wow--in view of some of the arguments I've had with Alex the last couple of years, the assessments of Blyleven and Morris there are surprising, to put it mildly. Where I was around the same time (far as I can tell, I posted this in the spring of 2002).

catchers have shorter careers and their position takes a bigger toll when it comes to hitting
comparing his WAR against everyone is less meaningful than comparing him to other catchers

This is what I'm getting at -- if you are going by career WAR, then only two out of the top one hundred best players were catchers. That doesn't seem right. Maybe 1000 games at catcher are equivalent to 1500 games at first base? If you could choose between having a star catcher for ten years or a star first baseman for ten years, you'd probably choose the catcher because good players at that position are much harder to come by.

Or the ability to call a game, which, if you accept that there is such an ability in the first place, exists in some grey area that's hard to isolate.

The ability to call a game exists, but I don't think it's all that important today. In 1910 when pitchers grew up on farms and had 7th grade educations, a guy with his head in the game at all times who could micromanage the other players was important. Now, I'm sure that the best pitchers know the hitters every bit as well as heir catchers do.

From what I understand this is very true on the defensive side of things.

Yeah, it's accepted that Pudge shut down the opposing team's running game based on reputation alone. How much was that worth to his teams on average?

I'm sure that the best pitchers know the hitters every bit as well as their catchers do.

With an established starter, I wouldn't doubt that calling a good game basically amounts to being able to guess almost unerringly what the pitcher wants to throw (and is going to throw) anyway; if you're on the same page, and you only get shaken off a handful of times, you've called a good game. With younger pitchers, or guys whose emotions run high on the mound, I'm sure game-calling skill figures much more prominently.

If you could choose between having a star catcher for ten years or a star first baseman for ten years, you'd probably choose the catcher because good players at that position are much harder to come by.

Ok, but what if it's Catcher for 10 years or First Baseman for 15? I mean that's why these guys are lower on a list of career totals, they just don't provide as much career value.

Exactly, then it's a tougher question. But if it's twice as hard to find a star catcher than a star first baseman, then ten great catching years might be worth twenty great 1B years. Career WAR doesn't account for that, even if you only compare players at the same positions, or on a WAR/162G scale.

"Wow--in view of some of the arguments I've had with Alex the last couple of years, the assessments of Blyleven and Morris there are surprising, to put it mildly."

Alex in SF in 2004 had read a lot less about sabermetrics than Alex in SF in 2006 even.

"With younger pitchers, or guys whose emotions run high on the mound, I'm sure game-calling skill figures much more prominently."

To be honest, I think it's probably a lot less important than a pitching coach or even a general organizational pitching philosophy i.e. pitch to contact or whatever (which are other things that are really hard to quantify.)

I-Rod had pretty much a rifle when he was young as a catcher. I remember in an article about I-Rod back in the early 90s and it had a quote with Sparky Anderson pretty much saying he was the best he had seen since Bench.

Mike Piazza is a better all around hitter, but I'd say Rodriquez might be the better all around player (but it's slight either way). Both of them are the two best catchers of their time and probably on the first hand list of top catchers ever.

Pudge definitely has more guilt by associations on the roids issues than Piazza, but for some reason I got a feeling he might will end up being on that gets a hall pass on the issue faster than the others.

After aging off the BBWAA ballot, Garvey is now on his fifth Era Committee appearance in the past decade and a half.

five strikes and

I could have sworn Lemon's autograph was on the baseball I have autographed by most of the '80 (or '81) White Sox, but he's one of the missing names...

Are Fisk and Baines on there?

Neither of them. But I just realized this one squiggle is Orlando Cepeda's signature on there -- he was a coach in '80.

Lou would be my top pick for “get him in immediately”, his last two seasons combined into one nice swan song.

.298/.375/.503/4.0 bWAR

571 AB
103 hits
170 runs
35 doubles
2 triples
26 hr
87 rbi
6 sb
72 bb
88 so

The other thing about Whitaker is, it's bizarre to have Trammell in there without him. Have two teammates ever been so closely aligned? Ruth-Gehrig, obviously, and I suppose there are others, but it's amazing how closely their careers tracked each other--'77 to '95 with the same team (Trammell lasted one extra season). They're even high on each other's Similarity list, even though they played different positions. Whitaker's five games ahead in bWAR, 75 to 70. The only real edge I can see for Trammel is that he had one monster season ('87, should have won MVP) and Whitaker didn't.

Tinker to Evers to Chance?

Glavine and Smoltz come to mind, but Glavine has those swan song years with the Mets, plus psychologically their association is a bit diluted by being a trio with Maddux for some but not all of their reign. I think Trammell and Whitaker have as much claim to the closely-aligned crown as anyone

one thing I’ve gotta say about the tigers is for a solid decade starting with that World Series team they were one of the coolest squads, they had so many underrated players whose primary talent was they hammered the shit outta the ball. Whitaker, Trammell, Gibson, Lemon, Parrish, Evans, Nokes, Fryman, Tettleton, Phillips, Deer…they even had Incaviglia for a minute.

and Fielder obv

The three Atlanta starters are a good match. And even though Maddux was clearly superior to the other two, it would be silly if two of the three were in the HOF and the other guy still waiting.

FB reminded me today that Curt Flood's still not in the HOF, so let me amend my list to include him near the top (different thing, obviously, though he did exceed 40 bWAR in a career that ended after his age-31 season).

Whitaker is 84th all time in bWAR (tied with Johnny Bench). Everyone ahead of him is in the HOF, with the exception of a few 19th century players, still-active slam-dunk candidates (e.g. Kershaw, Verlander), recently retired slam-dunk candidates (Greinke, Pujols), PED-suspects (Clemens, A-Rod), and "extenuating circumstances" players (Schilling, Rose).

tl;dr version: Whitaker may very well be the very best player who is eligible but isn't in, with the exception of PED-suspects who have fallen off the regular ballot.

just a bit of fun, let's be cool, the current top 25 active players in bWAR, dropped here for easy reference. apologies to Soto and Acuna and Alvarez, who just haven't played enough to make the list.

Mike Trout (14, 32) 86.2
Justin Verlander (19, 41) 80.5
Clayton Kershaw (17, 36) 79.4
Max Scherzer (17, 39) 75.4
Mookie Betts (11, 31) 69.6
Paul Goldschmidt (14, 36) 62.8
Freddie Freeman (15, 34) 60.7
Manny Machado (13, 31) 57.9
Nolan Arenado (12, 33) 56.7
Chris Sale (14, 35) 53.3
Jose Altuve (14, 34) 52.8
José Ramírez (12, 31) 52.4
Aaron Judge (9, 32) 52.2
Bryce Harper (13, 31) 51.1
Francisco Lindor (10, 30) 49.7
Andrew McCutchen (16, 37) 49.3
Marcus Semien (12, 33) 45.8
Jacob deGrom (11, 36) 45.2
Giancarlo Stanton (15, 34) 44.7
Carlos Correa (10, 29) 44.4
Shohei Ohtani (7, 29) 43.8
Gerrit Cole (12, 33) 43.3
Christian Yelich (12, 32) 41.9
Jason Heyward (15, 34) 41.8
Xander Bogaerts (12, 31) 40.8

Wild to think that trout in an inner circle guy and how much longer the runway is for manny harper ohtani and judge