Nine Thoughts on the Class of 2019

Roy Halladay

The voters have spoken in both the Veteran’s Committee (whatever they call it today) and among the writers. There are six new member of the Hall of Fame. In keeping with my traditional use of nine, here’s a few thoughts on the class of 2019.

1. Congratulations to Harold Baines, Edgar Martinez, Roy Halladay, Mike Mussina, Mariano Rivera, and Lee Smith on their election to Cooperstown.

2. I’m gratified to see someone finally get all the votes in the BBWAA election. I’m certain Mariano Rivera shouldn’t have been the first (see, Ruth, Babe; Aaron, Henry), but I’m happy someone finally made it.

3. Mike Mussina came as close as you can to failing enshrinement. That’s a shame, he was a terrific pitcher who, like Sandy Koufax, quit when he seemed to still have plenty in the tank. I’d have liked to see more of him, but he made the decision he felt best for himself. So far, he doesn’t have the same glow as Koufax (as a pitcher who went out on top).

4. Harold Baines still is an awful choice, but I hope he, his family, and his fans enjoy the induction ceremony.

5. Both Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds failed inclusion again. They each got around 60% of the vote (actually 59.5 and 59.1). Clemens turned out to receive two more votes than Bonds. I’m not sure how you justify voting for one and not the other and I do not expect the 2 guys who did to explain it.

6. Which leads to the question, are they ever getting in? There are too many variables for me to make a valid prediction, but my guess (and that’s all it is) is that both will either make it in their 10th and final try so that the writers can say they punished them as long as the could, or that the writers will kick the can down the road and let the Veteran’s Committee make the call. That call will, of course, depend on who the preliminary committee puts on the ballot. That action should tell us what the keepers of the keys to the cathedral think of Clemens and Bonds.

7. Curt Shilling came closest to getting in of all the people not chosen. He’s moving steadily up and has three years remaining on the ballot. I think that bodes well for his election. Listen, I don’t think much of his politics, and I’d hate for him to espouse them at a Cooperstown ceremony, but enshrinement should be based on his career, not his politics.

8. Larry Walker has one year left on the ballot and made a major jump this time. Maybe he makes it in 2020.

9. Fred McGriff missed out for the 10th and final time. Look for him to appear on the next ballot for which he is eligible. With the support he got this time, there’s a good chance he gets in (see Smith, Lee).

 

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Thoughts on the 2019 Hall of Fame Ballot

Mike Mussina with the Orioles

Alright, I know you people have been breathlessly waiting to see who I think the writers ought to add to the Hall of Fame. Well, not being one to disappoint, at least not too often, here we go. As usual, I figure if they’re going to give me 10 votes, I’m going to take them.

In no particular order:

1. Mariano Rivera–if you have to ask why, you haven’t been paying attention.

2. Todd Helton–will be hurt by playing in Coors Field and being a gap power guy, but he was a good first baseman and an excellent hitter. I think he ought to be in, but I also think it may take a while. His WAR is 61.2.

3. Roy Halladay–first off, the playoff no-hitter will help a lot. Not getting a ring may offset that. His 65.5 WAR will help, as will the two Cy Young Awards (and two runners-up). I’m not sure whether his death will lead to a sympathy vote or not. It seems to help some guys and not help others. I also think that some of the writers will focus on his two seasons with 20 wins, while on the other hand, he never won an ERA or strikeout title.

4. Lance Berkman–frankly I’m not convinced Berkman is a Hall of Famer, but he’s a player I really liked and I’d like to see him get a second (and third, and…) chance so the writers can get more  time to evaluate him. A winner with both Houston and St. Louis and a valuable member of the 2011 World Series winner. He also has an RBI title and one doubles crown (both with Houston).

And the holdovers:

5. Edgar Martinez–sorry, guys, but designated hitter is a position and he was the best at it. It’s also his last chance before the Veteran’s Committee.

6. Mike Mussina–has a lot of good stats, both traditional and new age. For the old guys, he has a lot of wins. For the new guys his WAR is 82.9. He has one wins title and one 20 game win season (not the same season). A knock on him is that he was never a member of a championship team.

7. Curt Schilling–certainly was a member of championship teams, three of them. He is instrumental in breaking “The Curse of the Bambino” (if you believe in things like that), and he has the “Bloody Sock” (which is kinda like the “Bloody Shirt” after the Civil War). He also led his league in both strikeouts and wins twice. His WAR is 80.6, which exceeds a lot of Hall of Fame pitchers. But he has political opinions that are, in some quarters, unacceptable. He’s not being chosen for the Hall of Great Political Scientists, fellas. There are a lot greater rogues in the Hall than Schilling. I think it will probably hurt him at least one more time.

8. Scott Rolen–a much better third baseman than most people realize. He followed Mike Schmidt, wasn’t Schmidt (neither was anyone else), and was never forgiven for it. He did pick up a ring in 2006 with St. Louis (and had a fine World Series). I’ll bet most people don’t know his WAR is 70.2. He was a Rookie of the Year, but never led his league in any major hitting category, but he does have seven Gold Gloves and unlike a lot of winners, deserved most of them.

9. Larry Walker–super arm and a terrific hitter, but he, like Helton, played a lot of his career in Coors Field. He won an MVP and two batting titles there. He also moved to St. Louis late in his career and did well. He hit .357 in his only World Series (a loss). Unfortunately, he has no huge home run number nor RBI number to impress writers, but a 141 OPS+ and 72.7 WAR ought to get someone’s attention.

10. Jeff Kent–has an MVP, but it was controversial at the time. Has a lot of home runs for a second baseman, but wasn’t all that great a second baseman. He made one World Series (two years following his MVP year) and had a good series, but the team lost. He has the advantage of being arguably the best second baseman of his era. Not sure that’s enough to get him elected, certainly not this time.

So there it is, my list. And if they don’t all make it, the writer’s are wrong (and I’m, of course, right). My guess is we’ll see about 3 elected this time (just a guess).

Picking a Winner

Juan Marichal

I’m frankly stunned that Felix Hernandez won the AL Cy Young Award. I guess I’ll have to chalk it up to not believing that the Baseball Writer’s Association had embraced the new statistics. It seems that the last couple of Cy Young votes in both leagues (Roy Halladay excluded) are evidence that the sabrmetric stats are beginning to overtake the more traditional stats.That’s neither a totally good thing nor a totally bad thing. Just because the stats are new (or old) doesn’t make them better. It also doesn’t mean that previous results were wrong. Take Juan Marichal as an example.

I’ve heard people say that Marichal is the best pitcher to never win a Cy Young Award. Actually Walter Johnson (or Cy Young) is. What they mean is that since the award was established, Marichal is the most overlooked. Well, maybe. There have been a number of truly fine pitchers that haven’t won the award, but I won’t argue against Marichal. But by using the traditional stats, is he really particularly overlooked? The heart of Marichal’s career is 1963-1969 with a nod toward 1971. I’ve heard it said that for the entire period Marichal had better numbers than any of the pitchers who won. So what? The Cy Young Award is for yearly, not career, excellence. You want career excellence? Look to the Hall of Fame. If you look at his yearly stats compared to the Cy Young Award winners the conclusion is at best mixed, and at worst you have to conclude Marichal wasn’t rooked. Here’s the stats for the Cy Young Award winners in 1963 through 1971 (with 1967 and 1970 left off because Marichal had down years those two seasons). The stats used are wins/winning percentage/ ERA/ strikeouts/shutouts. Remember from 1963 through 1966 there is only one award, so for Marichal to win he must be the consensus best pitcher in all of Major League Baseball to win. From 1967 through 1971 there are two awards, one for each league, so Marichal has to be only the consensus National League pitcher. Also remember that in 1964 the AL pitcher won, so the numbers don’t exactly compare. All other years the winner involved is an NL pitcher. Marichal’s corresponding stats follow each year’s winner.

1963: 25/833/188/306/11 (Koufax), Marichal: 25/758/241/248/5

1964: 20/690/165/207/11 (Chance), Marichal: 21/724/248/206/4

1965: 26/765/204/382/8 (Koufax), Marichal: 22/629/213/240/10

1966: 27/750/173/317/5 (Koufax), Marichal: 25/806/223/222/4

1968: 22/710/112/268/13 (Gibson), Marichal: 26/743/243/218/5

1969: 25/781/22/208/5 (Seaver), Marichal: 21/656/210/205/8

1971: 24/649/277/253/5 (Jenkins), Marichal: 18/621/294/159/4

So Marichal doesn’t win any of those. Who do you like? Maybe Marichal, maybe the other guy, but in each case you can argue that Marichal did or didn’t get jobbed. The closest, to me, is 1964.

Now remember that between 1963 and 1971 the statistics revolution hadn’t occurred. We didn’t have Whip or ERA+ or War or most of the other stats (even Saves was just being floated) so you cannot use those to argue the voters got it wrong, because those stats didn’t exist. Now that they do, we can see a drift away from the traditional stats that is probably good for the game,  but let’s not retroactively push them back into other eras and argue that they should have been used to come up with different results.

For those interested, I ran the Whip and ERA+ stats for Marichal and the Cy Young Award winner for the years above and list them below Whip/ERA+ with the winner first.

1963: 0.875/159 (Koufax), Marichal: 0.996/133

1964: 1.006/198 (Chance), Marichal: 1.089/144

1965: 0.855/160 (Koufax), Marichal: 0.914/169

1966: 0.985/190 (Koufax), Marichal: 0.859/167

1968: 0.853/258 (Gibson), Marichal: 1.047/123

1969: 1.039/165 (Seaver), Marichal: 0.994/168

1971: 1.049/142 (Jenkins), Marichal: 1.075, 117 

Do those numbers make you think the award went the wrong place? If they do, remember they weren’t around in Juan Marichal’s great years.

Picking the Winners: Cy Young

Barring a rain out, the World Series ends this week and baseball goes from games to votes. I guess that’s appropriate as election day is tomorrow. So in the spirit of those two events, I thought I’d weigh in on who I think will win this season’s baseball awards.

First, a couple of comments. I’m really bad at this. Mostly I get them wrong, but I’m trying to figure out who a bunch of writers are going to pick. Which is the second point. As a rule the writers don’t have a clue about this kind of thing, so it’s difficult to second guess them. I’m doing the Cy Young first so I’ve got to figure out who the writers will pick based on a handful of observations and a lot of looking at the papers (or internet). One thing I’ve noticed about these guys (and almost all are guys–I suppose there’s a gal in there somewhere) is that they seem to have no concept of the new sabermetric stats. They think WAR is what’s going on in Afghanistan and that WHIP is what you put on pumpkin pie (or alternatively goes with chains). So that means they put an extraordinary emphasis on the traditional stats of Wins, Strikeouts, and ERA. Those aren’t bad stats to use, but they’re not all-inclusive. For that matter, no set is all-inclusive, but it seems to me that the more you look at, the better picture you get.

So here we go:

NL: Roy Halladay. This one I think is easy and I’m fairly confident I got it right.

AL: C. C. Sabathia. This one is a bit more dicey. But because the three triple crown stats were split among three pitchers I think the writers will go with the combination of most wins and leading a team to the playoffs to reward Sabathia with this year’s award.

I’m not saying either is the best choice, but only that these are the choices I think will be made. Agree? Disagree?

A tip of the hat

SUPERMAN

WOW!!!!!!!

More Miscellaneous Stats

Yesterday I wrote about the idea of decade lists. These are a list of stats showing who led the majors in a particular stat for a decade. Baseball Digest just published its list for the period 1900-2009, each decade divided using the ending zero as the first year of the decade and the ending nine as the last. Yesterday I looked at the hitters, today I want to comment on the pitchers. This particular set of stats shows the following categories: wins, strikeouts, ERA, innings pitched, shutouts, saves. Now some thoughts on them:

1. You can see the evolving role of both the starter and reliever over the decades. This is the number of wins that leads each decade beginning in 1900: 236, 265, 190, 199, 170, 202, 191, 186, 162, 176, 148. Notice how there are two major drop offs. One is between 1910-19 and 1920-29, the end of the deadball era. The other is between 1970-79 and 1980-89, when relievers become much more common. You can also see this in the increasing number of saves. The lowest number to lead a decade is 21 (Joe McGinnity) in the first decade published and peaks with the last decade published when the lead number is 397 (Mariano “Hey, I finally got a commercial”  Rivera). The same thing happens with shutouts. They peak with Walter Johnson’s 74 in the teens and bottom out with Roy Halladay’s 14 in the just concluded decade.

2. As with the hitters, you can see the advent of the “lively ball” era. There is a drastic drop in wins, shutouts (Johnson also leads the decade of the 1920s, but with only 24) and a huge rise in ERA.

3. Again as with the hitters, there are some pretty surprising pitchers who rise to the top of these lists. Burleigh Grimes leads all pitchers in wins during the 1920s. Who woulda thunk it? Dazzy Vance leads the same decade in strikeouts. I would have never pegged Early Wynn as the 1950s strikeout king. With just over half a decade of play, Sandy Koufax is still third in strikeouts in the 1960s (just over 150 out of first).

4. These lists do only traditional stats. There’s no WHIP, no adjusted ERA, etc. SportsPhd just did a nice article on why “Wins” is a stat that’s less than trustworthy on determining pitcher’s ability. I suggest you read it. It helps explain why this list isn’t necessarily the best list available. My previous comments about breaking lists into decades stands here also.

I’ve always liked to study baseball statistics. I find them individually interesting and note that they can be enlightening. This list is good in that it helps readers see, in simple columns of figures, the changing nature of the game. That’s probably something this list does better than simply giving you an idea of which player dominated which decade.