It's tough to claim the moral high ground for tone when you're flecked with spittle and spewing obscenities on cable TV, telling us how blogging "really pisses the shit out of" you, as Bissinger did. Dishonesty? How about the intellectual dishonesty of picking one post from one blog and using it to dismiss an entire medium, a responsibility that's borne in part by Bob Costas for narrowing the focus on the medium down to a single, controversial site. As Fire Joe Morgan inimitably put it, that's akin to "picking a random romance novel off an airport bookstore shelf and saying, 'This book sucks. Fuck you, Tolstoy -- your medium is worthless!'"
Having recently said my piece about these battle lines, I don't have much else to add to the fray except a pointer to the always-thoughtful Jon Weisman's column on this melee, another pair of pointers to Bissinger's owndishonesty, and my own dedicated bit of cruelty in recommending that ol' Buzz have a scalding cup of my favorite beverage poured into his lap. Good grief, what a raging, unprofessional assclown.
During last Friday's chat, I was treated to a heaping helping of Hall of Fame-related questions, including a few that I didn't have time or space to answer. In light of a few recent milestones and some hot- and cold-running starts, I though it might be a good time to devote a column to the JAWS cases of these players, who form the core of the most frequently inquired about among my readers.
In the piece, I took a look at four "Cooperstown Cases" covering eight active players: a trio of pitchers (John Smoltz, Mike Mussina, and Curt Schilling), two relif aces (Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman), a pair of sluggers (Frank Thomas and Jim Thome) and, in a class by himself, Chipper Jones. Here's the part about Smoltz and Mussina, with a look at the rankings of the active pitchers (with you-know-who still considered active):
Pitcher Career Peak JAWS Roger Clemens 199.6 83.9 141.8 Greg Maddux 180.3 86.0 133.2 Randy Johnson 147.0 77.3 112.2 Tom Glavine 137.4 63.7 100.6 Pedro Martinez 118.0 68.8 93.4 Mike Mussina 117.8 64.3 91.1 John Smoltz 122.8 58.5 90.7 Curt Schilling 110.3 65.9 88.1 Avg HoF SP 106.0 67.2 86.6
Among this group, Maddux and Glavine are locks for the Hall thanks to their 300+ wins and their assorted hardware. One question that I get asked often, both by fellow analysts and by readers, is whether their longtime rotation-mate Smoltz will be joining them. Last week, Smoltz whiffed his 3,000th hitter, becoming just the 16th pitcher to do so--an impressive feat even given the high-strikeout environment of this era, and one that places him in the company of every other pitcher listed above except for Glavine and Mussina. While he won't reach 300 wins (he's got 210), it's important to remember that Smoltz spent four years working primarily as a closer, saving 154 games but notching just six wins from 2001-2004. He's got a very solid case with respect to his other traditional merits, one that includes a Cy Young award, eight All-Star selections, a crucial role on a team that's won 13 division titles, five pennants, and a World Championship, and a stellar post-season record -- 15-4 with four saves, a 2.65 ERA, and 194 strikeouts in 207 innings. Hell, that's a season's worth of work these days, one that would set a career best for ERA while as a starter.
Turning to his JAWS, from a peak standpoint, Smoltz falls a bit short of the average Hall of Fame starter, but he more than makes up for it with his longevity. Lest there be any suggestion that he's simply padding his stats, it's worth noting that his 336 Pitching Runs Above Average and 1263 Pitching Runs Above Replacement blow past the Hall of Fame averages of 279 and 1099; this isn't Tommy John we're talking about. Smoltz ought to be considered a surefire Hall of Famer at this juncture.
Not that he needs them to cement his Hall of Fame case -- five Cys and the third spot on the all-time strikeout list ought to suffice -- but unless the Big Unit can eke out another 15 wins, it will be a while before another pitcher joins the 300 Win Club. Mussina (253 wins) is the next closest pitcher, and one of only three (along with Pedro Martinez at 209 and Andy Pettitte at 204) who have over 200 wins and are still under 40 years old.
At 39 and now reduced to employing a fastball that wouldn't get ticketed in a school zone, it's a safe bet that the Moose isn't going to become a member of the club. Which isn't to say that he doesn't have Hall-worthy numbers, at least from a JAWS standpoint. As with Smoltz but to a lesser extent on both scales, Mussina's ahead on career and short on peak numbers, with PRAR and PRAA numbers (284 and 1221, respectively) that also surpass the benchmarks. What Mussina doesn't have going for him, particularly relative to Smoltz, is the hardware which will augment his much more traditional case: no World Series ring, no Cy Young, no 20-win season (he's had 18 or 19 five times) and "only" five All-Star appearances. His post-season record is "just" 7-8, albeit with a 3.42 ERA and 145 strikeouts in 139 2/3 innings; the fact that his teams have scored just 3.2 runs per game for him is a big reason, and certainly hasn't helped his quest for a ring.
In Mussina's favor is a long stretch in which he could lay claim to being one of the league's best pitchers; he finished in the top five of the Cy voting six times from 1992 to 2001, with two sixth-place finishes as well, and has eight top five finishes in ERA, and eight top 10 finishes in strikeouts. While not the equal of Clemens, Johnson, or Martinez, he was one of the league's top-shelf hurlers for a good long time. He's probably facing a tooth-and-nail fight, but it ought to turn out in his favor.
As with most things JAWS, it's a pretty long piece -- I do tend to jaw on such matters.
The Skinny: Though he's snapped a 1-for-28 skid, Carlos Delgado has fallen below the Mendoza Line; he's hitting just .198/.290/.272 with the lowest VORP on the team and the fourth lowest of any first baseman with at least 60 PA. Sadly, this isn't a new problem for Delgado. He was in the bottom third among NL first basemen last year, and it's increasingly likely that his days as a middle-of-the-lineup threat may be at an end.
Chris and I more or less disagreed over whether Delgado was able to salvage his 2007 season. His splits show that he hit a lousy .242/.305/.435 in the first half, albeit with 14 homers and 49 RBI, whereas in the second half, when not missing three weeks due to injuries, he hit .285/.375/.469 with 10 homers and 38 RBI -- more respectable, but lacking his usual thump (.279/.385/.545 career).
Tommy (OPS,FL): Back when the Rays were shopping Delmon Young there appeared to be some talk of Young for Cliff Lee, but nothing came of it. Knowing what the Rays got in return and Lee's hot start which deal would have been better for the Rays?
JJ: Long-term, I'd still take Matt Garza over Cliff Lee, and it wouldn't cost me a moment of sleep.
Rany Jazayerli has a great Unfiltered post about Lee's hot start, a post that includes a note form Joe Sheehan regarding the quality of competition Lee has faced: "A’s twice, Twins, Royals. Ninth, 13th and 14th in the AL in EqA." Right now Lee is living off a .151 BABIP, and that's not going to last forever by any stretch of the imagination. Furthermore, sooner or later he's going to have to face some competent lineups, and when he does, you can expect his ERA to get fluffed up. The bottom line is that I don't expect him to be a significantly better pitcher than the mid-rotation inning eater who surprised us with his bellyflop last year.
Fred (Houston): Is Sheffield headed for the Hall of Very Good? It doesn't seem like he's made many friends in the media over the years.
JJ: Are you kidding? If there's been one consistent facet of Sheffield's career, its that he'll talk to the media and is almost guaranteed to say something that will stir the pot and give the writer some high profile attention. Writers bash Barry Bonds for not cooperating. They don't bash Gary Sheffield for speaking his mind, however ill-considered his words may sometimes be.
From a JAWS standpoint, Sheffield came into the year at 117.2 WARP career, 63.5 peak, 90.4 JAWS, with the average HOF right fielder at 125.0/68.7/96.8. I think he'll be a close call, because right now its not at all clear he can stay healthy enough to pass 500 homers (he's at 481), and there will be some who will hold his involvement in BALCO against him.
tommybones (new york): Is there a point in a borderline HOF career where the player is better off retiring than padding counting stats at the expense of pct. stats and reputation? I'm looking at Mike Mussina right now.
JJ: Sheffield seems to be a better answer to this than the Moose, whose numbers are well over the JAWS threshold (117.8/64.3/91.1 compared to 105.7/67.5/86.6 for the average HOF P) even if the perception lags behind. To me, I think we've seen enough great pitchers dragged off the mound kicking and screaming, having milked every last ounce of their ability for anyone's perceptions to be damaged by those final, futile days.
Which reminds me, for some reason, of one of the classiest thing I ever saw on a diamond. When Orel Hershiser tried to eke one last year out of his career with the Dodgers, he got knocked around pretty consistently, culminating in an eight-run, 1.2-inning bombing. Rather than boo him, the Dodger Stadium crowd picked up on the fact that the end of the line had arrived for Hershiser, and gave him an incredible standing ovation.
I think I have something in my eye...
bam022 (Chicago): Can you think of any analogue to Justin Upton's performance right now. A-Rod was similarly dominant at age 20, but other than him, does this have any parallel?
JJ: Tony Conigliaro hit 24 homers and .290/.354/.530 for the 1964 Red Sox as a 19 year old, which is pretty much the gold standard for teenage success for a hitter. Mel Ott (.322/.397/.524, 16 HR) also had a great Age 19 season. Those two would be a good start.
Homers aren't the only way to look at this obviously, but rather than worry about the number of plate appearances, I just did a quick list of the best single season hitter performances ranked by homers at B-Ref [here].
After enduring a half-hour delay at the start due to technical difficulties, I think I answered about 30 questions. I still had a lot of JAWS-related questions left over, enough to build a Hit and Run column around sometime soon. Anyway, it was lot of fun, as always, to spend a couple hours talking baseball with BP's readers.
The following is a response to a blog entry by one Paul White, a writer I had never heard of until Tuesday afternoon but one who took no prisoners in dishing out the most scathing attack I've received in nearly seven years of writing about baseball. His blog entry went so far as to include the following open letter:
Dear Mr. Jaffe,
Kiss My Ass.
Regards, Everyone Whose Intelligence You Just Insulted
While it was tempting to take either one of two tacks -- simply ignoring this bilious screed lest I afford more publicity to a writer who's done little to merit it, or responding with a curt reply telling Mr. White exactly how far to shove it -- I ultimately settled for what I hope is a more measured approach, one in line with a commitment I made to my readers long ago to focus on the parts of my writing that I enjoy, rather than playing to my Howard Beale side.
• • •
Dear Mr. White,
It's awfully big of you to stick up for the oppressed BBWAA Hall of Fame voters who have the capability of reaching millions of readers with their work, assuming they're still gainfully employed. Heaven knows that the threat posed to its members by a few analysts writing behind subscription-only walls that keep their audience a few magnitudes of order lower is worth the energy of your frothing-at-the-mouth personal attack. Given the penchant some of the BBWAA's higher-profile members -- recentSpink Awardwinners, even -- have for ad hominem attacks, I can understand your affinity for this august group.
I'd love to respond to you with the vehement discourtesy that you've shown me in your post, and there was a time I might have reveled in the opportunity to score a few easy points by doing so. The sad fact is that while you've actually got a good point about the evolution of sabermetric evidence as it pertains to Rice and to every other player eligible for the Hall of Fame, you've polluted it by leveling personal attacks at Messrs. Law, Neyer, Sheehan and myself. Rather than stoop to your level, I'll simply take a page from my guru, Homer Simpson -- "Blame me if you must, but don't ever speak ill of the program!" -- and focus on defending my point of view as it pertains to my system, rather than what you perceive as my arrogance, since you've clearly made up your mind on that topic. So forgive this lengthy stroll through my thought process.
The JAWS system is designed to compare a candidate for election to the Hall of Fame with the players at his position who have already been inducted. The system was created in response to what I perceived as a gap alongside the nebulous standards applied annually by Hall of Fame voters, the work done by Bill James to create tools designed to compare candidates, and more than two decades of sabermetric progress, not to mention baseball history, since James' initial work in that area. What I have proposed via JAWS is that rather than rely on imprecise arguments which make only passing attempt to reckon with the wide disparity in raw statistics between candidates of different eras, environments, and positions, it is useful to incorporate a more all-encompassing measure of player value that accounts for offense, defense and pitching, and to distinguish between the value of a player at his peak and over the course of his career. Used as designed, JAWS highlights which candidates on a given ballot would raise the standards of the Hall by their inclusion, a goal I feel is worthwhile to counter the dilution of the Hall's ranks via shaky Veterans Committee votes and an overreliance on counting stats that don't do a great job of measuring a player's true contribution to winning.
I've chosen Clay Davenport's Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) as the currency to measure value while conceding that it's not without its flaws. Among them is one that you've hit upon -- the fact that the values do get revised from time to time. Davenport, one of the founders of Baseball Prospectus, is a relentless tinkerer whose system evolves as better information becomes available; the replacement-level value of defense at given positions and the levels of league difficulty appear to be the main areas of change in recent years (the latter also requires annual adjustment with the addition of another year of data to the overall pool), with the result that I have to update my spreadsheets on a frequent basis to stay current from a JAWS standpoint. That shouldn't distract or detract from the matter at hand; even Bill James revised his Runs Created formulas and other measures in his annual Baseball Abstract series back in the day, and if you've done nothing else in your diatribe, you've provided a half-decent roadmap of the evolution of sabermetric thought as it pertains to measuring Rice's qualifications (I'll leave the debunking of the particular measures you've used re: Rice to others). I can assure you that the recent fluctuations in Rice's numbers at BP in BRAA and other such measures are no part of a conspiracy; those of Tim Raines, to use an example from the opposite end of the Hall-worthiness spectrum as far as my system goes, have fluctuated as well, not always to his advantage.
My use of a value metric such as WARP in place of raw statistics is designed to offer an alternative to the statistical selectivity that often gets incorporated into Hall of Fame arguments. For example, in the weeks since the 2008 ballot was released, I've seen that Rice is the only player outside the Hall of Fame with 350+ homers and a batting average above .290, that he's the only player in major league history with three consecutive seasons of 35+ homers and 200+ hits, and that he led the league in grounding into double plays four years in a row and ranks much higher on that all-time list (sixth) than on any other. Those are interesting, superlative feats which provide color and nuance to the story of Rice's career, but they're ultimately rather trivial; none is a particularly accurate gauge that accounts for the number of runs Rice really created or prevented when and where he played, or how we should weigh those feats against the impressive ones compiled by already-enshrined players. By using WARP, one can maintain the focus on player value instead of getting distracted by the granular data which is often tossed around without the necessary context for interpretation (i.e., park and league scoring levels).
I began this response with no intention of rehashing the numbers-based case against Jim Rice at length, but I will provide you with the up-to-date BP metrics you cite, along with relevant rankings among the Hall of Fame left fielders. Rice's Equivalent Average (EqA) is a very respectable .294. The composite EqA I use for my JAWS benchmark -- calculated per Davenport's instruction as (total Outs / total EqRuns / 5) ^ 0.4 -- among Hall of Fame left fielders is .306 (for the broadest group in my system, that of Hall of Fame hitters, it's an even .300). The median of the left fielder group is .301. Of the 18 Hall of Fame leftfielders, only Lou Brock (.282) and Zach Wheat (.292) are lower than Rice, while Goose Goslin is at .294 as well. Fenway Park, the high GIDP totals, the relatively modest offensive levels of Rice's era -- they're all incorporated into EqA. Against Rice's totals of Batting Runs Above Replacement (634) and Batting Runs Above Average (366), the benchmarks are 806 and 531, while the medians are 709 and 453. Among Hall left fielders, Rice's BRAR tops only Ralph Kiner (604), Heinie Manush (496) and Chick Hafey (401), and his BRAA tops only Brock (293), Hafey (252) and Manush (251). Translating those runs into career WARP, Rice is at 83.3, the JAWS benchmark is 116.8, the median is 109.3, and Rice only outranks Kiner (74.6), Hafey (68.8) and Manush (54.5). I also track peak WARP, defined as a player's best seven seasons. Rice's 55.5 falls short of the benchmark (65.8) and the median (63.1), outranking only Brock (49.4), Manush (48.1) and Hafey (45.9). Via Rice's JAWS score (the average of his career and peak WARP totals), Rice's 69.4 falls short of the benchmark (91.3) and the median (85.0), outranking only the familiar company of Brock (68.8), Kiner (68.5), Manush (58.5) and Hafey (50.2). In other words, he falls far short by all of these measures which put his offensive contributions in the context of ballpark and league scoring levels.
As an aside, one of the accusations leveled at me by a critic who holds me in much higher esteem than you apparently do is that my system by definition says that half the players in the Hall of Fame are unqualified. As I've pointed out, that's a mischaracterization. While the Hall's rolls have been compromised by the admission of some dubious players, we can't undo what's done; JAWS isn't a prescription for throwing the bums out. As noted before, the thrust of my entire project is the identification of the candidates who surpass the benchmark at their position (position can be broadly defined for players who moved around the field, since I make note of benchmarks for multi-category players such as outfielders, middle infielders, and all hitters), thus inching the standards upwards.
At the end of the day, however, JAWS is a tool, and as such, it's only as smart as those who use it. Furthermore, it's best used as directed, with an awareness that it excludes volumes of information regarding postseason performance, awards, All-Star appearances, milestones, and nonstatistical evidence. I expend thousands of words and dozens of tables in my efforts to fill in some of those gaps within my annual series at BP, and I'll incorporate some of that information into the following comparison.
In your piece, you've taken offense at my "Amen" to Keith Law's hyperbolic comment about the Hall of Fame doors. I don't know whether his hyperbole was directly informed by my system, but his point appears to be valid. Via JAWS, Rice ranks 91st all-time among Hall-eligible outfielders (i.e., anyone who played up through 2002, the cutoff for this year's class). Of the 90 outfielders above him, 46 are in the Hall of Fame. Thirty-seven of those 46 are concentrated in the top 46 JAWS scores among this pool. Only 12 enshrined outfielders are outranked by Rice; all but one of those are strewn over the 100 ranking slots directly below him. All but two of those 12 were voted in by the Veterans Committee rather than the writers.
If we move beyond JAWS to give Rice special credit for his 1978 MVP award, we'll have to note that among the 44 out of 90 who outrank him but aren't in the Hall are fellow winners Andre Dawson (81.3 JAWS), George Foster (73.9), two-time winner Dale Murphy (73.4) and Dave Parker (69.5). Save for Foster, all of them had as many or more All-Star appearances as Rice. Dawson, Parker and Murphy have multiple Gold Gloves to their credit, where Rice has none. Parker and Foster have multiple World Series rings to burnish their credentials. Yet of this subgroup, only Dawson has ever joined Rice in topping 25 percent of the BBWAA vote. If we compare Rice to the two BBWAA-elected outfielders whom he outranks, we find Brock, one of the select members of the 3,000 Hit Club, and Kiner, who led his league in home runs for seven straight seasons. Rice led his league three times and finished second once, a fair credit to apply given that Kiner accomplished his feat in an eight-team National League, Rice in a 14-team AL. Without belittling the nuances of Rice's fascinating career or the visceral thrill he provided observers (myself included) in his prime, I honestly can't come up with any conclusion other than that Law's hyperbole is valid -- Rice's credentials vis à vis the Hall simply aren't that unique, and to admit him is to suggest that the institution should admit at least a handful of similar candidates whose credentials also fall short.
To move past this longwinded digression and focus on the crux of your attack on me, nowhere have I suggested that my system is the only way to measure Hall of Fame candidates or that I am one of the "exclusive purveyors of the 'right' way to evaluate baseball players" (your words). My placing of the word "right" in quotation marks within the sentence you excerpted -- from a valid point about the BBWAA's unwillingness to police its membership rolls in accordance with its bylaws -- was an attempt to convey the fact that THERE IS NO ONE RIGHT WAY to do so, nor a broad consensus about the Hall's standards. As to the offense taken at the aforementioned excerpt, I can only infer from your screed that you object to my use of the word "educational" in describing my work, and feel as though I'm arrogant either because of my attempt to create a system which could inform Hall of Fame voters as well as interested spectators or because I long for the evolution of a sabermetrically-inclined electorate that no longer clings to Triple Crown stats as the be-all and end-all of the discussion. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and I do what I can with the platform I've been afforded. Despite your diatribe, I can assure you that BP's readers and staff have responded with enough positive feedback and enthusiasm to ensure my project's continuation. Apparently, there are people who find it informative, entertaining, or (dare I say) educational.
If you feel that I've somehow crossed the Mendoza Line of decorum in making my point, well, I'll leave it to the public to decide which of us has been more indecorous, me with the occasional stridency of my arguments (a charge to which I've already copped), or you with your ad hominem attacks and gratuitous, juvenile references to the size and/or location of your targets' testicles (which you mention three times). Nonetheless, I wish to thank you for the kind words, the superlative ("the most condescending remark I’ve ever seen on the subject"), and the open-letter suggestion on behalf of "everyone whose intelligence you just insulted" -- an angry mob that apparently doubles as a silent majority, judging by the dearth of emails I receive to that effect -- that I should be engaging in some ass-kissing. I'll be sure to put all of that in my scrapbook or on my to-do list as merited.
In closing, I'm well aware that there are millions of baseball fans and hundreds of voters out there who have never heard of me and who get along just fine without my efforts to shine a bit of light into this particular corner of the baseball world. Yet to hear you tell it I've practically enslaved the guardians of Cooperstown in an effort to prevent the necessary supermajority from electing Jim Rice. In fact, the concerted efforts on the part of myself and the aforementioned nefarious conspirators have been so successful that Rice garnered 46 more votes than in 2007, and 116 more than when my system debuted at BP in 2004. Clearly, you have pinpointed the reason why my ego is so huge.
I just wish you weren't so obsessed with my balls.
As you're no doubt aware, Rich Gossage got the call from the Hall last Tuesday, receiving 85.8 percent of the vote. He was the only candidate to gain entry this year. Jim Rice fell just 16 votes shy at 72.2 percent, followed by Andre Dawson (65.9 percent) and Bert Blyleven (61.9 percent). Tim Raines, the candidate I promoted most heavily, finished with a dismal 24.3 percent in his first year of eligibility.
In anticipation of Raines not making it on his first try, I set about to find out what a strong first-year showing for an eventual enshrinee would look like. Using the Hall of Fame's website, I culled the year-by-year voting results back to 1966, when the BBWAA resumed annual balloting after a decade of biennial votes...
Since 1966, the BBWAA has elected 65 players to the Hall of Fame, including Gossage but not including Roberto Clemente, who was elected via a special process in March 1973, less than three months after his death, and Red Ruffing, who was elected in a 1967 runoff which the rules provided for in the case of the writers didn't grant any candidates 75 percent (only the winner of the runoff gained entry). Thirty-two of those 65 were members of one of the three milestone clubs: the 3,000 Hit Club, the 500 Home Run Club, and the 300 Win Club. Of those 32 "marked" players, only six didn't get in on the first ballot: Harmon Killebrew, Eddie Mathews, Gaylord Perry, Phil Niekro, Don Sutton, and Early Wynn. They took an average of 4.33 ballots to gain enshrinement. Only two marked players have thus far failed to gain enshrinement, Pete Rose (who received 41 write-in votes in 1992) and McGwire--a rather incredible precedent.
Of the 33 "unmarked" electees in that span, 10 gained entry on the first ballot... The remaining 23 candidates averaged 6.52 ballots; the distinction between ballots and years is necessary because five of these players, as well as the already-dismissed Ruffing, date back to the 1956-1966 biennial era.
Taking the 18 unmarked, non-first year, non-biennial candidates and the six marked, non-first year ones into consideration leaves us a pool of 24 enshrinees to study for clues as to what constitutes a good start to an eventual Hall of Fame election. It's not a huge sample, but it will have to do:
Wtd is the weighted percentage of votes received (based on the actual number of votes cast instead of the simple mean) and Med is the median percentage of votes received. Any way you look at it, Raines received about half the support level of a typical non-first ballot Hall of Famer. Since 1966, only Duke Snider (17.0 percent), Don Drysdale (21.0 percent), Billy Williams (23.4 percent), and Sutter (23.9 percent) have rallied from lower percentages, while Ralph Kiner (24.5 percent), Luis Aparicio (27.9 percent), and Early Wynn (27.9) weren't much better off. Even Gossage got just 33.3 percent his first time out.
As for Jim Rice, his near-miss 72.2 percent has been eclipsed only by four players who failed to gain enshrinement via that year's voting. Three of them -- Nellie Fox (74.7 percent), Jim Bunning (74.2 percent) and Orlando Cepeda (73.5 percent) -- got in via the Veterans Committee a few years later, while the aforementioned Ruffing got in via a runoff. Even with Rickey Henderson appearing on next year's ballot, Rice's eventual election is a virtual lock, which is a head-scratcher given how far below Raines and below the JAWS benchmarks he ranks.
My BP colleage Joe Sheehan did an excellent job of dismantling Rice's case both at BP and on ESPNews, the latter in which he double-teamed with ESPN Insider columnist and BP alum Keith Law. I only wish that he hadn't uncharacteristically pulled a punch in his article by failing to mention that the ESPN colleague and BBWAA writer who accused Neyer of spearheading an anti-Rice campaign was Peter Gammons, who said that Neyer was "obsessed with degrading Rice's career." While I've had my differences with Rob recently, I found nothing in his examinations of Rice's credentials to suggest his look at the evidence and the arguments that had been advanced on the candidate's behalf was biased. Gammons' statement was a thoroughly unprofessional grandstanding maneuver by one of the game's most powerful writers to try to bully and embarrass Neyer. Frankly, it was horseshit, but it was also sadly characteristic of Gammons' recent unprovoked swipes at some sabermetric straw man that's apparently haunting his offseason. Say it ain't so, Peter.
Sadly, the Raines/Rice vote discrepancy seems to provide the take-home message of this year's vote -- that advocacy using advanced metrics like WARP or Win Shares might somehow create a backlash among voters due to the uppity refusal of analysts to take their exalted word as gospel instead of thinking for ourselves. Mark Armour, in a provocative guest piece at Baseball Analysts, made a solid point about such efforts:
Another problem with the analytical arguments is that they are so… strident. The current message from the stat community to the Hall of Fame and its voters goes something like this: "Your institution is riddled with poor selections, and most of the current voting writers are morons. P.S. Please find enclosed my application to join your fine group." It's a bit like saying, "I don't like your wife, but if you have me over for dinner I can give her a few tips on her attitude."
Every time some poor writer released their Hall of Fame ballot last month, unless it had the "right" guys on it, the voter was deemed not smart enough, unthinking. I don’t really want to quote examples because I am in enough trouble already, but, trust me, if you voted for Jack Morris you were mocked.
While Mark, who had mentioned my JAWS work earlier in the piece, doesn't specifically point a finger at me at on the stridency charge, I must admit that there are times when that particular shoe fits -- though at least I've got the occasional excuse to go double-barrel -- and there are times I too gawk and groan in dismay at many of the published ballots. What else can I do? I've devoted a great deal of time to carving a niche in covering the Hall of Fame vote, all the while knowing that there's little chance in hell I'm ever going to get to partake in the process myself. For some of these writers to blithely dismiss certain candidates at the expense of others, or to simply not take their role in the process seriously, is an annual disappointment. As I wrote in my recent piece:
The obstinate and occasionally belligerent innumeracy publicly displayed by many a voter over the past few weeks remains the most frustrating aspect of the annual election cycle. For every analyst at the margins who offers a rational, factually-supported argument about the merits of a particular player's candidacy, there appear to be a dozen voters willing to fall back on the "I saw him play, you eggheads" argument accompanied by cherry-picked statistical measures and selectively applied standards. 'Twas ever thus, and so long as the Stonecutters, er, BBWAA keeps electing somebody so as to funnel a steady horde of tourists to Cooperstown every summer, the Hall of Fame has little incentive to get with the times by revamping its voting process. The best those of us who attempt to call attention to the "right" candidates can do is to persist with our educational efforts while hoping that younger, more open-minded writers gradually replace certain fossilized BBWAA members whose voting privileges apparently hinge on the unwillingness of that body to purge its rolls in accordance with its bylaws. Wait 'til next year, or the year after that, or the year after that...
In any event, while the election results weren't all that I'd hoped, I'm delighted to see JAWS and the Hall of Fame standards becoming a bigger part of the discussion. Onward and upwards, my friends.
The day after my JAWS-flavored take on the starting pitchers on the 2008 Hall of Fame ballot ran at Baseball Prospectus, my take on the relievers is up as well, thus -- to my great relief -- completing this year's series (the reliever portion is free, the starter one is sub-only). For those who have been following the series from year to year, the results among the pitchers shouldn't come as a surprise; my system identified Bert Blyleven, Rich Gossage and Lee Smith as Hall-worthy and the rest... not so much. That trio joins Tim Raines, Alan Trammell and Mark McGwire from among the hitters to make up the JAWS Class of 2008 photo.
As I wrote in the starters piece, Blyleven ranks among the top 20 pitchers of all time according to JAWS. He's the highest-ranked pitcher who's eligible for the Hall but not in:
Pitcher PRAA PRAR WARP3 Peak JAWS SUP Walter Johnson 818 1994 209.6 109.5 159.6 HOF Cy Young 943 2024 213.8 99.5 156.7 HOF Roger Clemens 666 2016 199.6 83.9 141.8 Greg Maddux 481 1689 180.3 86.0 133.2 Pete Alexander 593 1520 160.1 91.0 125.6 HOF Christy Mathewson 480 1285 149.1 92.9 121.0 HOF Tom Seaver 439 1576 152.2 75.8 114.0 96 HOF Warren Spahn 324 1598 153.3 72.9 113.1 HOF Randy Johnson 428 1570 147.0 77.3 112.2 Lefty Grove 520 1456 138.5 81.9 110.2 HOF Kid Nichols 494 1248 131.2 84.1 107.7 HOF Steve Carlton 264 1509 137.0 71.6 104.3 104 HOF Phil Niekro 262 1485 137.7 67.5 102.6 97 HOF Robin Roberts 304 1448 129.8 74.8 102.3 HOF Gaylord Perry 266 1512 132.9 68.8 100.9 96 HOF Tom Glavine 296 1341 137.4 63.7 100.6 Bert Blyleven 323 1546 135.1 65.3 100.2 97 Bob Gibson 329 1260 120.7 76.3 98.5 HOF Hal Newhouser 311 1109 111.0 83.0 97.0 HOF Fergie Jenkins 290 1384 125.1 68.4 96.8 101 HOF ... Nolan Ryan 210 1661 128.1 59.4 93.8 95 HOF Jim Palmer 203 1116 100.8 63.9 82.4 109 HOF Don Sutton 141 1371 112.2 48.2 80.2 105 HOF Catfish Hunter 1 820 70.0 51.9 61.0 112 HOF
It's true Blyleven has one of the lowest WARP peaks shown above, but he more than holds his own with his enshrined contemporaries. His secondary peak measure, PRAA, puts him 30-60 runs past Carlton, Niekro, Perry, and Jenkins, and more than 100 beyond his other enshrined contemporaries -- Ryan, Palmer, Sutton and Hunter; only Seaver outdistances him. Spoiled by the half-dozen of those aforementioned peers who won 300 games from the mid-'60s to the mid-'80s, when the days of the four-man rotation dominated, the BBWAA hasn't elected a starter with fewer than 300 wins since Jenkins in 1991. Note the last column, which compares the run support of those contemporaries in a park- and league-adjusted index similar to ERA+, where 100 is average; Blyleven got three percent less support than the average starter during his time, comparable to many of those contemporaries but nonetheless something which kept him from attaining 300 wins.
For the relievers, I use some extra information -- BP's Reliever Expected Wins Added (WXRL) stat:
WXRL accounts for the discovery that a reliever at the end of a ballgame has a quantitatively greater impact on winning and losing (a ratio called leverage) than a starter does. It measures that impact by comparing a team's chances of winning based on the game state (bases, outs, score differential) before he enters and after he leaves. For the purposes of measuring a pitcher's Hall-worthiness, it functions as something of a career/peak hybrid; one can accumulate a high total via performing well under high-pressure situations for shorter periods or in more moderate pressure situations for longer. Two years ago, I put aside an earlier kludge and began incorporating WXRL totals into a Reliever's Adjusted JAWS score via the formula RAJAWS: ((0.5 x WXRL) + JAWS).
...Given the small sample size of Hall of Fame relievers, it's worthwhile to check out the RAJAWS leaderboard for some perspective. The list is somewhat incomplete, as our play-by-play database currently only goes back to 1959, so it's missing the first seven years of [Hoyt] Wilhelm's career, four years of Lindy McDaniel, and seven of Stu Miller (all denoted with asterisks below), to say nothing of their forebears. Nonetheless, we can get a pretty solid idea of where this year's candidates rank with regards to the enshrined and the two active pitchers who are likely bets to reach the Hall soon after retirement, Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman. Here's the provisional version of the RAJAWS Top 20:
Pitcher WARP Peak JAWS WXRL RAJAWS Mariano Rivera 93.9 62.6 78.3 62.5 109.5 Dennis Eckersley 120.8 53.7 87.3 35.1 104.8 HoF Rich Gossage 88.4 56.0 72.2 53.8 99.1 Trevor Hoffman 82.2 49.2 65.7 62.3 96.9 Hoyt Wilhelm 96.5 47.6 72.1 39.0 91.5* HoF Lee Smith 83.7 47.3 65.5 47.0 89.0 Rollie Fingers 80.1 49.4 64.8 45.8 87.6 HOF John Franco 80.9 41.2 61.1 44.8 83.5 Tom Gordon 85.5 46.7 66.1 33.8 83.0 Billy Wagner 66.7 49.2 58.0 44.9 80.4 Doug Jones 66.5 48.2 57.4 33.0 73.8 Lindy McDaniel 72.0 44.1 58.1 31.3 73.7* Bruce Sutter 59.0 47.6 53.3 37.4 72.0 HOF Roberto Hernandez 66.8 46.5 56.7 28.2 70.7 Stu Miller 63.5 43.6 53.6 34.1 70.6* John Wetteland 58.5 46.5 52.5 35.0 70.0 Tom Henke 59.9 42.7 51.3 36.8 69.7 Tug McGraw 60.1 38.5 49.3 39.6 69.1 Dan Quisenberry 55.2 48.2 51.7 34.0 68.7 Kent Tekulve 64.7 40.3 52.5 30.3 67.7
Rivera surpassed Eckersley atop this list last year. With Gossage apparently poised for enshrinement after receiving 71.2 percent of the vote last year, the day where six of the top seven relievers via my system are enshrined isn't far off. In that regard, the election of Sutter two years ago may have been the best thing to happen to the Goose. As I said on my XM spot with Chuck Wilson yesterday, Sutter as the save specialist and Eckersley as the ninth-inning specialist represented easily definable data points for the evolution of the modern closer. The recognition of Gossage's transcendence of that ever-narrowing niche has created a groundswell of support such that his vote totals have increased dramatically over the last four votes:
Year Votes Pct 2004 206 40.7% Eckersley elected 2005 285 55.2% 2006 336 64.6% Sutter elected 2007 388 71.2%
It's probably just a coincidence that those numbers parallel the widening exposure of my JAWS project, which began in '04 as well, but I can't help feeling a tiny measure of satisfaction at this trend nonetheless.
In any event, I've got a fair bit of Hall of Fame-related media lining up for next week:
• a radio appearance on KTRH 740 AM in Houston, Monday at 7 a.m. ET / 6 a.m. CT, discussing Roger Clemens' appearance on 60 Minutes. You can listen via their website. I may be doing more Fox affiliate "phoners" that morning as well.
• a BP chat on Tuesday, 2 PM Eastern, just as the voting results are announced.
• a radio appearance on Sports Xtra 1360 AM in San Diego, Tuesday at 3:40 p.m. ET / 12:40 p.m. PT. You can listen via their website.
• my regularly scheduled appearance on Sports Radio 1470 in Toledo, Wednesday at 4:10 p.m. ET.
• Speaking of BP, I've got a quickie Unfiltered post on baseball-themed holiday loot that adds to a staff rundown of my colleagues' hauls. The best items from this awesome bounty might be the DVD burn of the 1975 All-Star Game taped off the local Brewers channel (it was played at Milwaukee County Stadium), and a scan of a photo of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig with a local politician who was the grandfather of a dear family friend, Karen Edson. Quoth my BP colleague Christina Kahrl, "About the only thing missing was a four-day weekend with Sandy Koufax."
Here's a shot of the All-Star Game, with AL starting pitcher Vida Blue resplendent in a full yellow uniform:
• My boy Alex Belth has edited a forthcoming anthology, The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan, which he's understandably jazzed about; the book hits the shelves in late February. Alex has some choice Jordan stuff on Joe Torre (his former batterymate in the Braves' system) dating back to 1996. It didn't make the cut for the book but it's enjoyable reading nonetheless. He's also been pulling some vintage articles on Red Smith and Dick Young. Go get 'em.
• The clearance of my major workload has meant the opportunity to catch up with some of my lighter reading. Amid an epic stint on the couch watching college football bowl games on New Year's Day (more football than I've watched all year combined), I settled in with some excellent entries from Josh Wilker's Cardboard Gods blog which reminded me what I'd been missing: Rickey Henderson, John Urrea, Ray Corbin, Paul Mitchell and Mickey Klutts. Sometimes hilarious, other times philosophical, and often painfully confessional, his stuff is always worth a read.
I shoulda shown more cleavage, I guess. Apologies to anybody who wasted their time trying to track this down.
I can't say I was all that surprised at the outcome. I refused to let the producer put words into my mouth, settling for responses to their questions that didn't break up into neat two-second soundbites ("This is a dark day for baseball," "A-Rod is the last hope," etc.). Basically, my every suspicion about tabloid TV's depth of interest in the story was confirmed. While I'd have loved the segment to have aired so that I could add it to my clip files, and while rushing out the door to jump through their hoops was a serious inconvencience given my workload, the whole adventure was nonetheless a fascinating peak into the sausage factory of TV, and I'd be lying if I said I was the least bit bitter about the outcome.
• the second segment of my JAWS 2008 Hall of Fame ballot roundup went up on Thursday, December 20. It covered the outfielders on the ballot, most notably Tim Raines, whose segment was the longest I've ever devoted to one player. In it, I made a direct comparison between Raines and Tony Gwynn and found that the two of them come out mere whiskers apart on the JAWS scale despite their different skill sets:
Raines [123.7 career WARP/68.4 peak/96.1 JAWS] is often slighted because he doesn't measure up to his direct contemporary, Henderson (187.8 career WARP/83.4 peak/135.6 JAWS). He doesn't have 3,000 hits, and his 808 stolen bases rank "only" fifth all time, and while his 84.7 percent success rate is the best among thieves with more than 300 attempts, that skill doesn't really register in today's power-saturated age, limiting the impression of his all-around ability. But Raines does more than measure up to another Hall of Fame contemporary, 2007 inductee Tony Gwynn. Their JAWS totals are virtually identical (124.4/68.4/96.4 for Gwynn, within one win in each category), but Raines outdistances the left field benchmark by 4.8 JAWS points, while Gwynn rates a hair below that in right field (125.0/68.7/96.8). Gwynn gets the glory because of his 3,141 hits, five 200-hit seasons, and eight batting titles. Raines won only one batting title, but while he never reached 200 hits due to his ability to generate so many walks, he compares very favorably to Gwynn in many key statistical categories:
TOB is times on base (H + BB + HBP), BG is bases gained, the numerator of Tom Boswell's briefly chic mid-'80s Total Average stat (TB + BB + HBP + SB - CS), which is presented here to show that Raines' edge on the basepaths made up for Gwynn's ability to crank out the hits. The point is better served via the comprehensive Equivalent Average and WARP valuations, but it's nonetheless a worthwhile comparison for those wishing to stick to traditional counting stats. The conclusion is the same: Tony Gwynn and Tim Raines were two fantastic ballplayers who had slightly different skills. One was disproportionately heralded in his time thanks to his extreme success by the traditional measures of batting average and hits, while the other was under-appreciated in a career that included a more concentrated early peak and a lot more ups and downs. The two were equally valuable on both career and peak levels, and there is absolutely no reason why one should be in the Hall of Fame on the first ballot while the other should languish outside for more than five seconds. If the voters don't see it that way -- and the early line is that they won't, at least initially -- it will be a gross injustice.
I received a good amount of support regarding Rianes from BP's readership, including a very nice note from a beat reporter who is still a few years away from obtaining his ballot but who told me that I had swayed his thinking about the Rock. That made my day.
• Alasdair Wilkins of Harvard's student radio station, WHRB, interviewed me for a lengthy multi-part podcast regarding my JAWS take on this year's ballot.
• Also on the subject of the Hall of Fame, I had a civil exchange with none other than Rob Neyer last week in which I took issue with the way he handled some performance-enhancing drug hypotheticals in a recent chat in the wake of the Mitchell Report. More specifically, I was peeved at his repeated lumping of Jeff Bagwell in with Mark McGwire in what I read as an "I know it when I see it"-style accusation, and with his statement that the burden of proof now lies on the players (how do you disprove such a negative?). Bagwell has never tested positive, never been mentioned in the context of a steroid-related law enforcement investigation, and while he was tarred by his erroneous inclusion in the notorious WNBC "fake list" that circulated in the hours before the report's initial release, there are no credible PED allegations against him. To simply begin finger-pointing based on a player's late-career injury history -- even in the context of numerous Mitchell-named players with similar latter-day histories (Kevin Brown comes to mind) -- is a slippery slope that leads to a lowest-common-denominator mudpit that any responsible writer should take pains to avoid.
Now, in the context of the entire chat (instead of just two or three questions which I cherrypicked) I do think Rob did a better job of positioning the Bagwell instance as a hypothetical than I initially gave him credit for. And I definitely take pride in the fact that he referred to me as "one of my favorite writers" before running my email to him (with permission) in his Insider column (subscription only, alas). That means a lot to me, particularly because I'd likely be nowhere near this forum had I not started reading him at ESPN years ago and tapped into my long-dormant Bill James-flavored taste for baseball analysis. Neyer had that impact not only on me but on hundreds of writers -- he's our Blogfather -- and thousands upon thousands of readers. He's arguably done more to elevate the debate about all kinds of baseball-related topics than anybody since his mentor, James. But as both a fan of Rob's work and a fellow writer, I would have preferred see him handle the matter in question with a bit more precision and a bit less cynicism instead of taking what I read as a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach.
It's difficult and probably futile to convey the whole scope of our conversation within this brief rundown, but basically I just think that particularly in the wake of the Mitchell Report that baseball writers of any stripe need to do a better job of separating fact from speculation lest they feed the rampant hysteria that the Mitchell Report stoked in some quarters. Steroids isn't the most appealing topic to spend a few minutes or hours dwelling upon as a writer, but I've always tried to take great care in addresing the issue with precision, accuracy, and a lack of hysteria. Within the tens of thousands of words I've devoted to the topic over the past several years, there are only a few I'd like to take back.
As for the report, I have my issues regarding it. I think the release of names without due process was rather appalling, and that the committee's investigative powers were hamstrung greatly by the lack of legal standing and subpoena power. Nonetheless, I feel that Mitchell was basically right on regarding the need for amnesty and moving forward, and that many of his recommendations could help continue to clean up the game. As flawed as it is, the report should move the public dialogue forward, but this "cheater cheater pumpkineater" syndrome that the more tabloid elements stoke does the game and its fans no good.
Anyway, particularly given the Hall of Fame-related ramifications of the issue, I'm planning to do an addendum to my JAWS series regarding my take on Mitchell, my exchange with Neyer, and how to regard the likes of McGwire, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, etc. going forward. I don't claim to have THE solution, but if nothing else I feel a great need to clarify my own position on the matter.
• • •
In the event that I don't find my way back to this space before 2008 is rung in, I'd like to thank all of my readers here, at Baseball Prospectus and at points beyond, my wife Andra, the Jaffe and Hardt extended families, and my dear friends for their continued support and encouragement. This has been an exciting year for me on the professional and personal fronts -- new column at BP, prominent placement in It Ain't Over, a debut at SI.com, more than 100 radio hits around the country, new apartment, and more -- and while it's resulted in a much lower profile at this blog, it's a positive set of developments nonetheless. Here's hoping the ride takes us in even more interesting directions in 2008. Happy New Year to all of you!
Safely ensconced in our new Brooklyn apartment, I took a lengthy timeout or three from burrowing away at my winter work to plug the Hall of Fame candidacy of Tim Raines. The BBWAA ballot was announced on Monday, leading me to pen not one but two Baseball Prospectus Unfiltered posts as well as my SI.com debut, in which I get to introduce JAWS to Sports Illustrated's audience. No, I haven't actually been hired by SI, no, this won't be in the magazine -- it's via the syndication agreement between BP and SI, and no, they haven't parked my solid gold Rolls Royce out front... yet (it's still at Bill Conlin's pad). But I do think they intend to follow up by promoting the rest of this year's JAWS series, which will start next week over at BP. Fun stuff.
• In Wednesday's New York Sun, I wrote about the demise of the Mariners. A couple of early paragraphs were apparently cut, one for space reasons, the other because the transition kinda sucked. Warts and all, here's the director's cut of the relevant portions, with the excised paragraphs in brackets:
When the sun rose on August 25, the upstart Mariners were sitting pretty. Thanks to a streak in which they won 13 out of 17, they were 73–53, one game behind the Angels in the AL West, and three ahead of the Yankees in the wild card race. According to Baseball Prospectus' Playoff Odds report — which uses a team's run-scoring and run-preventing proclivities in a Monte Carlo-simulation that plays out the rest of the season one million times — the M's held a 29% shot at winning their division, and a 30% shot at the AL Wild Card.
Less than three weeks later, the Mariners' ship has all but sunk. A 1–13 skid helped knock them 8.5 games back in the division, and 5.5 back in the wild card, plunging their Playoff Odds down below 2%. In terms of raw wins and losses, they've set a dubious record — no team so far above .500 so late in the season has ever collapsed so quickly. What went wrong?
[In the grand scheme, the Mariners simply regressed to the mean. Studies have shown that run differentials are better predictors of future performance than past won-loss records. At the point when they were 20 games above .500, the Mariners had outscored opponents by just 28 runs, with rates that projected to a far less impressive and contention-worthy 66-60 record. Call their recent plunge a market correction, a brutal one at that.]
In retrospect, it's surprising the Mariners contended at all this year. The team that made the playoffs four times between 1995 and 2000, and averaged 98 wins a year between 2000 and 2003, has fallen on hard times, with four straight losing seasons and a slew of questionable free-agent signings by general manager Bill Bavasi. Back in the spring, Baseball Prospectus projected the Mariners to finish 73–89, last in the AL West, with the third-worst mark of any AL team.
[Even in surpassing that projection, the team has ridden an emotional rollercoaster. Amid an eight-game winning streak in late June, manager Mike Hargrove resigned abruptly to spend more time with his family. Three weeks later, replacement John McLaren navigated the club through a seven-game losing streak that foreshadowed their late August troubles. Stability is not among the 2007 Mariners’ limited virtues.]
• The Mariners were also the focus of Tuesday's Hit and Run; you'll see some crosover between that and the Sun piece, but the emphasis was on the bullpen's second-half decline. After posting a 3.72 Fair Run Average (accounting for their performance of inherited and bequeathed runners via the good old run expectancy tables; here is a good layman's explanation) in the first half, they've ballooned to a 5.30 FRA in the second half, the fourth-highest jump in the majors. Several contenders have had similar troubles; the Red Sox, Dodgers, Yankees, Brewers, and Padre join the Mariners in the bottom 10, with the Padres dead last, jumping from 2.51 to 5.45.
Also in that Hit and Run is a quick look at Pedro Martinez's JAWS case for the Hall of Fame, and a comparison between his case and that of Sandy Koufax:
Coming into the year, Martinez's JAWS score (113.7 career WARP3/75.3 peak/94.5 JAWS) was well above the Hall standard for starting pitchers (99.0/62.7/80.9). His JAWS score ranks 20th all-time, and his peak score ranks 14th. As I noted in Mind Game, his 2000 season ranks as the best ever in terms of RA+ (293) for any pitcher with at least 150 innings.
Compare that to Koufax; as impressive as the Dodger lefty's stats were, his best seasons were achieved under some of the most favorable conditions of any pitcher, and his JAWS score (70.7/60.3/65.5) is miles behind Pedro, ranking 80th of all time. He was basically a league-average pitcher from 1955-1960 before taking a big step forward in 1961 (the year before the team moved into Dodger Stadium), but he's only got three seasons above 9.0 WARP3. In comparison, Pedro has six. Koufax's best RA+ was "just" 196. But before anybody gets the pitchforks out to either run him out of the Hall (or me out of the field of baseball analysis), as one Schmuck tried to do to BP alum Dayn Perry, let's not forget that Koufax's Hall of Fame case also includes three Cy Youngs, an MVP award, gallons of black ink, three World Series rings, an 0.95 postseason ERA, and the enigmatic glow that comes from retiring while at the pinnacle of success.
Glow aside, Martinez isn't lacking in any of those categories, with three Cys, a ring of his own, and even more black ink in an era where the increased player pool makes it much harder to come by. His JAWS score and other Hall of Fame credentials are so rock solid that he stacks up pretty well with 300-game winning teammate Tom Glavine (129.4/61.4/95.4 coming into the year). He's my lock of the week, and it's a pretty big lock.
• Finally, I'm honored to be the author whose It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over chapter has been chosen for excerpting on the BP site. "The Summer of Loving Carl Yastrzemski" is a supporting chapter for my narrative on the 1967 American League race between the Red Sox, Twins, Tigers, and White Sox, which leads off the book. Here's the intro; you can read the rest at BP, where it's free:
In the simplified narratives that our sports media produce, the notion of one player’s carrying a team is a popular and appealing one. It puts a human—even superhuman—face on a disparate collection of players, emphasizing the strengths of one hitter’s or one pitcher’s accomplishments while glossing over his own weaknesses and those of his teammates. Who cares about Babe Ruth’s lousy baserunning, or who was riding shotgun to Joe DiMaggio in 1941, or even Barry Bonds’s peevishness unless it actually cost his team a game? Can one player carry a team? Performances like Carl Yastrzemski’s final two weeks of September 1967, when he hit a jaw-dropping .523/.604/.955, certainly suggest it’s possible for a short time. In the longer term, the nature of baseball would suggest not. Aside from the obvious—the simple unlikelihood of one player’s maintaining such a high level of performance over a larger time frame—there’s the inherent structure of the game. The best hitter can only bat once every nine times, the most durable pitcher needs a few days’ rest between starts, and even the best fielder (beyond catchers) handles the ball only a handful of times each game, making it extremely unlikely that a team could keep relying on the same player over and over again for that extra boost.
As superficial as the notion of one player’s carrying a team may be, our ability to quantify the contributions of each player via an all-encompassing value metric like wins above replacement player (WARP) lends itself well to exploring the limitations of this concept as it applies to a full season. WARP measures each player’s hitting, pitching, and fielding contributions against those of a freely available reserve or waiver-wire pickup. The metric calculates these contributions in terms of runs and then converts those runs into the currency of wins. Park and league contexts are built right into WARP, so that, for example, a player in a barren offensive environment such as mid-1960s Dodger Stadium and another player in a bountiful one such as turn-of-the-century Coors Field can be measured on the same scale. With WARP in hand, we can answer questions such as the following:
1. How much impact does the presence of one great player have on a team’s chances?
2. How much impact does the presence of one great player have on a team’s chances if he’s head-and-shoulders above all his other teammates?
While I could quibble with the choice of chapters -- this wasn't my personal favorite even among the ones I contributed, but nobody asked me -- I'm honored to be chosen to represent BP for this. The findings here aren't revolutionary, but they do quantify some answers to questions that are often debated on a more abstract level.
I actually applied a couple of the take-home lessons to this chapter in other BP work, one for the Angels' entry here, countering the notion that they lacked enough star power in support of Vlad Guerrero, and the other to answer a Keltner Test question -- If this man were the best player on his team, would it be likely that the team could win the pennant? -- on Jeff Kent. Yes, the Keltner is largely qualitative, not quantitative, but I like to ground my Hall of Fame arguments in numbers and facts before tackling the more subjective elements.
Anyway, I'm off to Switzerland and Austria for the next two weeks, leaving Marc Normandin in charge of the Hit List and my bobblehead collection in charge here. Here's hoping the Yankees can hold onto their playoff spot and that the Dodgers can mount a great comeback while I'm gone.
In today's Prospectus Hit and Run, I turn my attention to the re-revamping of the Baseball Hall of Fame's Veterans Committee. Changes to the New VC, which has gone a self-congratulatory 0-for-3 since it was last restructured -- were announced a couple weeks back, but amid the Bonds home run chase, the trading deadline, and the Hall's annual induction ceremonies, the news flew beneath the radar. Here's the skinny:
According to the Hall's press release, the New New VC will split the player, manager/umpire, and executive voting into three separate ballots that will be screened and voted upon by three separate processes. Furthermore, players whose careers started before 1943 will be treated on a separate track from later ones. The details:
Post-1943 Players: a BBWAA-appointed committee will narrow the list of eligible candidates (players with 10 years in the majors, not on the ineligible list, and not under consideration on the BBWAA ballot) to 20. Concurrently, a screening committee of six Hall members that gets appointed by the Board of Directors will identify five players total. The slate of 20-25 candidates (depending on overlap) will be screened by the living Hall of Fame members, narrowed to 10 finalists, and then voted upon, with candidates needing at least 75 percent for election. The next set of players will be voted upon in 2009.
Pre-1943 players: a Board-appointed committee of 12 Hall of Famers, historians and writers will review eligible candidates every five years starting in 2009.
Managers and umpires: a BBWAA-appointed committee will narrow the list of eligible candidates to 10 candidates. A Board-appointed committee of 16 electors, consisting of Hall members, executives, writers, and historians, will vote on a semiannual basis starting in 2008.
Executives: a Board-appointed committee of Hall members, executives, and writers (but apparently no historians?) will review of ballot of executives. The timing of this has yet to be determined, and no further details were announced in the release.
I think the new changes bode particularly well for non-players, who are likely to get better traction from a better-informed electorate than the unwashed former players. I also think that putting the pre-1943 players -- of which there were seven on the 2007 ballot, none save for Wes Ferrell a very good candidate -- on a separate track will clear away some of the deadwood. However, I worry that while the electorate is more likely to recognize Ron Santo as a Hall of Famer, the other players at the top of its latest vote -- Jim Kaat (63.4%), Gil Hodges (61.0%), and Tony Oliva (57.3%), for starters -- are more than a little shy in the qualifications department according to JAWS. The thing that needs to happen to show that the New New VC is moving forward is a consideration of Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker, Dwight Evans, and Darrell Evans, all of whom fell off the BBWAA ballot after their first try and none of whom have reached the VC ballot since, despite stronger JAWS cases than warhorses like Roger Maris and Thurman Munson who, great as they were, don't really have Hall of Fame chops or momentum behind their candidacies.
Elsewhere in the piece, I begin working through a considerable backlog of JAWS cases, starting with Craig Biggio, who comes up a hair shy of the average HOF second baseman -- a very high bar, if you'll recall. It's a moot point given the fact that he's got 3,000 hits and that it's defense dragging him down; with few exceptions (Ozzie Smith, Bill Mazeroski, Brooks Robinson), BBWAA voters don't place too much emphasis on defense, let alone value it properly.
However, there's one other point about Biggio that bears making, and I intend to do so in an Unfiltered entry: he's not a pure second baseman, having played 427 games at catcher and another 366 in the outfield, roughly 2/3 of which were in centerfield. On an Adjusted Games (i.e., innings) basis, he spent about 28 percent of his career at positions even more demanding than second base. As such, it's appropriate to consider him not only in the context of second basemen but also in the context of the cross-positional groupings I include with the JAWS standards:
Given his rather unique resume, it's not inappropriate to consider Biggio in the light of a "Middle" hitter, that is one who spent his career mostly at catcher, second base, shortstop and centerfield. At 123.7/69.5/96.6 he's just shy of the second base standard but well over that of the Middle players as well as hitters at large. Biggio's on his way to a pretty inglorious end, but I'll have no beef when he's elected in 2013 or so.
Back in December, O'Neill consulted me for a JAWS comparison of Pirate rightfielders Roberto Clemente and Paul "Big Poison" Waner, the latter of whom will have his uniform number retired by the club on Saturday. Not to be confused with his brother, teammate, and fellow Hall of Famer Lloyd "Little Poison" Waner -- nicknames derived from a Brooklynese lament, "Them Waners. It's always the little poison on thoid and the big poison on foist!" -- Paul Waner was the superior of the two; as legend goes, Lloyd was elected by the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee in a case of mistaken identity. Da Big Poison is also a a very good comp for Clemente:
Baseball historians say Waner and Clemente are near equals. Both could run, hit and field like almost nobody else. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract ranks Clemente eighth and Waner ninth among all right fielders.
Jay Jaffe has developed a rating system for Baseball Prospectus to discuss the merits for the Hall of Fame, and he ranks both even higher. Jaffe puts right fielders in this order: 1) Babe Ruth 2) Hank Aaron 3) Mel Ott 4) Frank Robinson 5) Al Kaline 6) Clemente 7) Waner 8) Dave Winfield 9) Reggie Jackson 10) Sam Crawford. (That possibly unfamiliar name is the all-time triples leader who played alongside Ty Cobb in Detroit).
"If Clemente had lived," Jaffe wrote in an e-mail in December, "he'd have probably emerged from the pack for sole possession of fifth."
I haven't space to outline Jaffe's methodology, but he uses peak years and career record to come up with the overall rating. You don't hear arguments about Clemente and Waner the way you do, say, Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, but no players who played the same position for the same team are more closely matched among baseball's all-time greats, according to Jaffe's system.
O'Neill had simply asked how the duo compared with other famous franchise mates, with an eye towards the aforementioned Joe D. and the Mick. In running the numbers, I discovered that Clemente and Waner were actually the closest call, JAWS-wise, among Hall of Famers from the same team. Since O'Neill didn't run down the others, and since this is likely too unwieldy for BP Unfiltered, I'll show the work here:
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Babe Ruth 9 234.2 107.0 170.6 Hank Aaron 9 209.9 85.0 147.5 Mel Ott 9 175.8 84.8 130.3 Frank Robinson 9 165.1 76.2 120.7 Al Kaline 9 129.9 64.6 97.3 Roberto Clemente 9 126.3 67.7 97.0 Paul Waner 9 124.7 68.2 96.5 Dave Winfield 9 131.6 61.0 96.3 Reggie Jackson 9 126.3 64.6 95.5 Sam Crawford 9 112.3 57.3 84.8
Clemente put up 6.3 WARP during his final season at age 37. Even two seasons totaling that would have been enough to distinguish him from the other four players with whom he's clustered here. Going around the horn and then some for other team-specific battles in the rankings among HOFers:
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Johnny Bench 2 122.2 73.7 98.0 Gary Carter 2 117.8 68.9 93.4 Yogi Berra 2 116.2 66.0 91.1 Carlton Fisk 2 118.3 59.5 88.9 Bill Dickey 2 107.0 62.8 84.9
Among the two pinstripers wearing #8, Berra has a solid edge, though the latter is no shame.
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Lou Gehrig 3 147.1 84.7 115.9 Cap Anson 3 159.3 64.0 111.7 Eddie Murray 3 140.3 69.2 104.8 Jimmie Foxx 3 129.9 73.9 101.9 Roger Connor 3 133.0 68.7 100.9 Dan Brouthers 3 116.1 70.1 93.1 Tony Perez 3 109.4 61.2 85.3 Johnny Mize 3 102.9 67.4 85.2 Willie McCovey 3 107.0 62.1 84.6
Connor, Mize, and McCovey all had stints with the Giants, though the latter's was by far the biggest chunk of his career, whereas O'Connor and Mize would see significant time elsewhere.
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Eddie Collins 4 178.0 84.9 131.5 Rogers Hornsby 4 163.7 96.0 129.9 Joe Morgan 4 168.0 86.1 127.1 Nap Lajoie 4 167.1 83.7 125.4 Ch. Gehringer 4 132.3 77.0 104.7 Rod Carew 4 128.7 70.4 99.6 Frankie Frisch 4 119.8 66.2 93.0 Ryne Sandberg 4 112.8 72.0 92.4 Bobby Doerr 4 112.5 69.3 90.9 Billy Herman 4 106.8 69.6 88.2
Hornsby and Herman both spent significant portions of their careers as Cubs, though not as much as Sandberg.
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Honus Wagner 6 194.4 86.8 140.6 Cal Ripken 6 169.2 89.1 129.2 Arky Vaughan 6 131.4 90.0 110.7
Another one for the Pittsburghers, as two of the top three Hall of Fame shortstops were at their best as Pirates. The underrated Vaughan even bests Wagner in peak score.
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Stan Musial 7 197.3 90.8 144.1 Ted Williams 7 172.0 93.3 132.7 C. Yaztrzemski 7 144.3 67.2 105.8 Ed Delahanty 7 111.9 73.1 92.5 Jim O'Rourke 7 129.0 55.7 92.4 Billy Williams 7 117.2 66.3 91.8 Willie Stargell 7 105.8 60.3 83.1 Al Simmons 7 104.7 60.6 82.7 Joe Medwick 7 98.2 64.1 81.2
A pair of Red Sox at #2 and #3 here make for the highest ranking of "teammates," though the gap is considerably wider than between Clemente and Waner, or Berra and Dickey. Medwick played significantly in St Louis, though it's not really close with Musial, who actually played more of his games in leftfield but accumulated more WARP in rightfield).
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Willie Mays 8 206.1 91.9 149.0 Ty Cobb 8 190.0 81.8 135.9 Tris Speaker 8 173.2 77.8 125.5 Mickey Mantle 8 155.1 85.3 120.2 Joe DiMaggio 8 120.2 77.3 98.8
The most famous intra-team positional battle isn't really all that close on either peak or career values, even with Joe D. holding about an eight-win edge on defense.
Anyway, it's always fun to see my name spelled correctly and my system in the paper. Thanks to Brian O'Neill for casting JAWS in a more flattering light than his colleague.
Last night, Sammy Sosa hit his 600th home run, becoming just the fifth player in baseball history to do so. Ironically, he hit it against the Chicago Cubs, the team for whom he walloped 545 of those homers, including 243 over a four-year span. While that barrage arguably made him the game's most popular player at the time, it has since raised numerous eyebrows as BALCO and other steroid scandals have come to light. Most famously, Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly smugly challenged Sosa to pee in a cup to prove his innocence; when Sosa refused, Reilly wrote a have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife column about it. Sosa, for his part, made a lackluster showing at the 2005 Congressional Steroid Circus, and many other writers treated his 2006 quasi-retirement as a de facto admission of guilt, working steroids into their narrative of his departure.
For all of the innuendo surrounding Sosa, there's no smoking gun, and far less circumstantial evidence surrounding him than his two other contemporaries who crossed the 61-homer Maris threshold, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds (corked bats, on the other hand...). Earlier this year, reports surfaced via a leak that the dubious Mitchell Investigation had called for Sosa's medical records; Mitchell refused comment as to any justification for doing so. In most quarters, that's called a smear.
But enough about steroids for the moment. Multiple readers have asked me about Sosa's JAWS case, so here goes. Coming into the year (working with January 2007 set again), Sosa had 103.1 career WARP3 and a seven-year peak total of 64.3, good for 83.7 JAWS. The average Hall of Fame rightfielder (including freshly-elected Tony Gwynn) scores 119.8/65.5/92.7, leaving Sosa significantly short on the career front, a consequence of him ceasing productivity after his Age 35 season. ESPN's front page trumpets his 30-homer/131-RBI pace, but 12 homers into his comeback, Sosa's hitting just .242/.297/.458, good for 0.7 WARP1, and a projection of 2.3 WARP3. In other words, he's not helping his cause beyond padding his career totals and distracting the focus away from the Rangers' myriad other problems.
Lovely win for Yankees last night to take round two of the Subway Series against a reeling Mets club that looks as though all nine players are channeling Jay Payton's brain waves. Seriously, Carlos Delgado forgetting how many outs there were was just one more ugly moment for a team that's been in vaporlock for the past couple weeks; having watched them against the Dodgers I've seen plenty of the Mets during their slide.
Chien-Ming Wang's career-high 10 strikeouts were impressive, showcasing his much-improved slider and change-up but perhaps also a byproduct of his struggling opponents; the sight of Jose Reyes corkscrewing himself into the ground on the latter in the eighth and then trying not to crack up was worth the price of admission, but it also speaks volumes as to how out of whack the Mets' heads are these days.
The Yankee offense looked in fine form, piling the late-inning runs on in true Bronx Bomber fashion (always good to leave a footprint on your opponent's neck). I missed a live viewing of Alex Rodriguez's monster home run, but then I've seen plenty of those lately; over his last 14 games, the kid is hitting .412/.492/.961 with eight homers, and he's been having great at-bats all over the place.
Also nice to see Jorge Posada rip that eighth-inning short-porch special, which came shortly after I saw his ESPN promo for the first time. Today I took a quick JAWS-flavored look at Hip Hip Jorge's budding Hall of Fame case over at Baseball Prospectus Unfiltered. The short version is that his peak is about average among Hall of Fame catchers but that he'll probably need two excellent or three solid seasons after this one to reach the career WARP levels, no sure thing for a catcher who turns 36 in August. Still, it's pretty impressive that he's even on the Cooperstown radar.
Update: There's much discussion of what I had to say about Posada over at Bronx Banter. I've got about a post or two worth of comments in there myself, some pertaining to Thurman Munson, and a couple of charts whose formatting got messed up, so I'll repost here.
The first is a ranking of the 32 catchers under discussion according to Fielding Runs Above Average. Sparky Anderson famously dissed Munson after the 1976 World Series by telling a reporter, "Don't ever embarrass anybody by comparing him to Johnny Bench," but his boy is no longer the benchmark by which defensive catchers should be judged:
Player FRAA Ivan Rodriguez 200 Gary Carter 149 Yogi Berra 145 Johnny Bench 142 Tony Pena 127 Del Crandall 123 Gabby Hartnett 113 Bill Dickey 111 Buck Ewing 100 Ray Schalk 98 Jim Sundberg 95 Lance Parrish 89 Charlie Bennett 83 Thurman Munson 79 Roy Campanella 74 Mickey Cochrane 58 Darrell Porter 54 Carlton Fisk 47 Jorge Posada 34 Benito Santiago 32 Bill Freehan 28 Javy Lopez 20 Rick Ferrell 14 Jason Kendall 2 Joe Torre -2 Gene Tenace -5 Deacon White -11 Ted Simmons -23 Wally Schang -51 Roger Bresnahan -72 Ernie Lombardi -126 Mike Piazza -150
The second is the other side of the coin, the best hitters among catchers according to Equivalent Average, a rate stat which measures relative offensive ability, with park and league adjustments built in. EqA is essentially runs created per out, adjusted to a batting average-like scale. Slugging and ability to get on base are in there, as they are in OPS+. A .260 EqA is defined average, a .300 is outstanding, .230 is replacement level (note: the previously published version of this at BB and here used the wrong version -- adjusted for season, rather than adjusted for all-time -- of the stat. The correction helps Posada considerably.):
Player EqA Mike Piazza .315 Gene Tenace .309 Joe Torre .298 Jorge Posada .298 Bill Dickey .295 Mickey Cochrane .295 Ernie Lombardi .295 Johnny Bench .292 Gabby Hartnett .292 Roy Campanella .292 Roger Bresnahan .289 Yogi Berra .288 Carlton Fisk .285 Wally Schang .285 Ivan Rodriguez .284 Ted Simmons .284 Thurman Munson .282 Darrell Porter .282 Gary Carter .281 Buck Ewing .281 Javy Lopez .279 Bill Freehan .277 Jason Kendall .277 Deacon White .276 Charlie Bennett .273 Lance Parrish .271 Del Crandall .263 Rick Ferrell .261 Benito Santiago .256 Jim Sundberg .255 Tony Pena .248 Ray Schalk .246
Note that Piazza ranks last with the leather and fist with the lumber. If I were to "zero out" his defense, giving him credit for league-average defense every year, his numbers would shift from 97.5 career WARP/66.1 Peak WARP/81.8 JAWS to 114.9/69.9/92.4, which would put him in the Bench-Carter-Rodriguez-Berra group, the crème de la crème of catchers. His lousy defense has that big an impact on his case by my system, but it won't keep him from Cooperstown.
, which he's understandably jazzed about; the book hits the shelves in late February. Alex has 
