Dumb and Dumber

Here’s a brief history lesson.

The Veterans Committee for the Baseball Hall of Fame has gone through numerous iterations in its long, tortured history. First it was known as The Centennial Commission, and was tasked with considering only players from the 1800s. In reality, under this name the Committee didn't induct a single player. After selecting five executives and managers in 1937 and another two in 1938, the group was re-named The Old-Timers Committee and starting loading up the Hall with players.

At first, one would think it impossible for them not to do a good job. After all, they could choose from literally every player who played all or a majority of his career during the 19th Century. Two of the first four players the Committee elected in 1939 were Cap Anson and Old Hoss Radbourne, and you won't find many, if any, baseball historians and SABR members who would disagree with those choices. Sadly, the other two players chosen were Buck Ewing and Candy Cummings, and thus began the long, mistaken-ridden path this committee would follow for the next 60-odd years.

Next week, when the Hall of Fame announces the results of this year’s Veterans Committee voting, we’ll get a glimpse of the next bend in that path, and it’s a near certainty that it won’t be for the good.

There are two primary reasons for this. First, and most obviously, is the history of the committee, which has allowed the likes of Highpockets Kelly and Tommy McCarthy to grace the halls of baseball’s greatest shrine. They’ve certainly inducted some deserving players, and in many cases the committee's poor selections were merely an attempt to follow the lead established by the BBWAA, as noted previously, but their history of electing stinkers is too prominent to ignore.

The second reason why we should have little confidence that they will elect one or more worthy souls is relatively new. In the most recent reinvention of the committee, it was decided that the ballot of candidates is completely determined by the BBWAA. That’s right; the one part of the election process that was outside the control of the writers is now managed by them.

While it’s true that the Veterans Committee that does that voting is comprised only of living members of the Hall of Fame, plus Ford C. Frick and J.G. Taylor Spink Award winners, the ballot itself is determined by the BBWAA. First, the writers appoint a Historical Overview Committee that is tasked with developing lists of 200 former players and 60 former managers, executives and umpires. The majority of that subcommittee are writers themselves. Then, with those lists complete, a screening committee consisting of 60 members of the BBWAA is selected to winnow those lists down to a final ballot. Only then do the Hall members take over and do the actual voting (and let’s not forget that the J.G. Taylor Spink winners are all BBWAA members themselves).

This is so important because the writers are using their same old shoddy methods for determining who should be on the ballot in the first place. For instance, which of these guys would you imagine is on the ballot:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP	ERA+
Pitcher A	203	132	.606	2887.6	2905	1836	1199	1155	1223	3.74	1.406	120
Pitcher B	193	128	.601	2623.0	2845	1382	1177	1040	985	4.04	1.481	117

Let me also state that Pitcher A won a world championship while Pitcher B’s teams never reached the post-season, and that Pitcher A also scores better on the infamous Bill James Hall of Fame Standards and Hall of Fame Monitor tests. On top of that, he’s still the better pitcher when we neutralize their stats as well. In fact, he’s significantly better:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Pitcher A	300	103	.744	3743.3	2811	1059	954	1113	1533	2.34	1.068
Pitcher B	196	117	.626	2892.0	2708	1129	1016	990	1084	3.16	1.279

Well, it’s Pitcher B, Wes Ferrell, who the BBWAA has decided to put on the Veteran’s Committee ballot, while they feel that Pitcher A, Jack Stivetts, apparently doesn’t make the cut. And before you throw out the argument that Ferrell was one of the best hitting pitchers ever, allow me to note the following:

	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Stivetts	1991	347	592	84	46	35	357	133	.297	.344	.438	.782
Ferrell	1176	175	329	57	12	38	208	129	.280	.351	.446	.797

See, Stivetts was none too shabby with the stick himself, hitting well enough to get regular playing time in the outfield and first base when he wasn’t pitching.

The really sad part about all of this is that Stivetts wasn’t even among the larger group of 200 players that was considered for the final ballot. The Historical Overview Committee has such a narrow overview of baseball history that they didn’t feel Stivetts was worthy of consideration by the broader screening committee. If you were to poll the ten members of the Overview Committee, my guess is that more than half of them would have never even heard of Jack Stivetts. If so, why would they choose to leave him off the eligibility list while including the following pitchers:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP	ERA+
Podres	148	116	.561	2265.0	2239	1026	025	743	1435	3.68	1.317	105
Osteen	196	195	.501	3460.3	3471	1435	1268	940	1612	3.30	1.275	104
Erskine	122	78	.610	1718.6	1637	830	763	646	981	4.00	1.328	101
Raschi	132	66	.667	1819.0	1666	828	752	727	944	3.72	1.316	105

Hmmm. Three Dodgers and a Yankee. Do I hear a "New York Bias" anyone? And I haven't even gotten into the questionable inclusion of Mel Stottlemyre, Dixie Walker, Don Newcombe, Eddie Lopat, Bobby Thomson, Bob Meusel, and a whole host of other New Yorkers on the Historical Overview Committee's list of 200.

If we give them the benefit if the doubt that there is no such bias involved, then it begs the obvious question of why some of these guys were chosen to appear on the final ballot. Jack Stivetts versus Wes Ferrell is not an isolated case. The writers have constructed a ballot that is comprised, in nearly every case, of players that aren’t as good as eligible players that were passed over. They list Roger Maris but not Jackie Jenson or Hank Sauer. They list Cecil Travis but not Johnny Pesky, and Luis Tiant but not Billy Pierce. They included Don Newcombe but not Nig Cuppy or Ray Kremer. Lefty O’Doul is on there but not Mike Donlin. How about these two:

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Player X	1877	6679	1033	1814	297	21	390	1236	997	.272	.366	.498	.864
Player Y	1914	6716	1004	1953	269	36	420	1299	864	.291	.373	.529	.902

Player X is Rocky Colavito, and he’s on the ballot. Player Y, the better player, is not. That’s Frank Howard. Okay, these are neutralized stats, and it’s a near certainty that the guys on the committee have never once considered anything other than a player’s raw number. Context? What’s that? Even so, I don’t get why Colavito makes the cut and Howard doesn’t:

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Colavito	1841	6503	971	1730	283	21	374	1159	951	.266	.359	.489	.848
Howard	1895	6488	864	1774	245	35	382	1119	782	.273	.352	.499	.851

If someone could explain what makes these guys different, I would really appreciate it.

What’s that you say? Home run titles, all-star appearances, stuff like that? Okay, let’s take a look:

	Colavito	Howard
All-Star Appearances	6	4
Top-10 MVP Finishes	4	4
Rookie of the Year	No	Yes
Home Run Titles	1	2
RBI Titles	1	1
Other Hitting Titles	7	5
World Championships	0	1
Playoff Appearances	0	1

Well, I guess two extra All-Star games and one more extra-base hit and times-on-base title MIGHT equate to an extra homer title, a Rookie of the Year Award and a World Championship, but I’m having a hard time seeing it. Who knows? Maybe Colavito’s world-renowned mediocre corner outfield defense put him over the top. That’s as good a guess as any.

The reality is that there is no good reason for one of these guys to be on this ballot without the other, but this is the yearly insanity ritual we must live with when the BBWAA is involved.

Kinda sickening, isn’t it?

Case Study - Gerry Fraley

I’d like to pose a question. Let’s say you, as a knowledgeable baseball fan, are given the opportunity to put ten additional players in to the Hall of Fame. They can be anyone who is currently eligible for consideration either by the BBWAA or by the Historical Overview Committee, i.e. the Veterans Committee. Who would you choose?

This should be a really fun exercise, and because it is, baseball columnists everywhere regularly present their views on this kind of subject. They find themselves in the doldrums of the sports year, somewhere between bowl season and March Madness, and column ideas are few and far between. And, being BBWAA members, they start to get a jones for something related to the nation’s pastime. So a thought stirs in their minds, generally prompted by the announcement of the new year’s Hall of Fame class, and they decide to put together their own personal list of players who have been wrongfully excluded. They crack out the same column from the previous year, or the year before that, and they rework it into something that could be viewed as fresh.

Let’s explore one of these, just to see if the BBWAA member in question knows what the hell he’s talking about. There were a few candidates to pick from this year, but I settled on Gerry Fraley. Just after the beginning of this year, Fraley wrote a column that appeared in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, though it appears he doesn’t work for that newspaper. In fact, I’m having a hard time finding any current newspaper that Fraley works for. He was once listed as a columnist for The Dallas Morning News, but his most recent work in that newspaper was all related to hockey games and identified him as a freelance writer based in St. Louis. In other words, he’s currently unemployed. Seems like just the guy to be voting on the baseball Hall of Fame, doesn’t he?

Anyway, Fraley decided to put together his own personal list of the ten former baseball players who are most deserving of being inducted into the Hall of Fame. Here’s his list:

Gavvy Cravath
Tony Oliva
Goose Gossage
Jim Kaat
Jim Rice
Ron Santo
Albert Belle
Gil Hodges
Andre Dawson
Roger Maris

Now, I’m going to be charitable and presume that Fraley developed this list with the assumption that Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn were going to be elected this year, which explains why they’re not on this list. And I will also be charitable in granting him Gossage, Rice and Santo, the first two because they are currently the top two returning vote-getters among his BBWAA brethren, and Santo because he really is just about the best player not currently enshrined.

But that’s where my charity ends. Given the wide open parameters Fraley set up for himself, I find it hard to believe that any knowledgeable baseball fan, let alone a Hall of Fame voter, would be foolish enough to develop this list of players as representing the best ten baseball players who are eligible for consideration. Just off the top of my head I came up with this comparison:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Kaat	283	237	.544	4530.3	4620	2038	1738	1083	2461	3.45	1.259
Blyleven	287	250	.534	4970.0	4632	2029	1830	1322	3701	3.31	1.198

Basically, in fewer years in the big leagues, Bert Blyleven won more games, made more starts, pitched more innings, stuck out 50% more batters, threw twice as many shutouts, allowed fewer base runners per inning and posted a lower raw ERA and lower ERA compared to the leagues he pitched in than Jim Kaat did. Blyleven was a much better post-season pitcher as well, posting a career mark of 5-1 with a 2.47 ERA in a post-season career that included two World Championships, compared to Kaat’s career marks of 1-3, 4.01 ERA and one World Championship. If I go to the trouble of neutralizing their respective stats, the gap between Blyleven and Kaat grows even wider:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Kaat	264	223	.542	4514.6	4800	2061	1854	1124	2437	3.70	1.312
Blyleven	324	228	.587	5062.6	4779	2110	1898	1361	3764	3.37	1.213

In short, Blyleven was a vastly better pitcher, but for some reason Fraley thinks he doesn’t deserve to be in the Hall of Fame more than Jim Kaat does. Why? Beats the hell out of me. His official answer for why Kaat deserves to be in the Hall is this:

“Devotion to his team probably kept Kaat from winning 300 games. He had 272
wins when Cards manager Whitey Herzog asked him to go into the bullpen in 1981.
Kaat made 124 relief appearances over the next three seasons but earned only 11
more wins. Kaat ranks among the top 30 in career wins, innings and stars.”

Well, we can throw that last sentence out because Blyleven ranks ahead of Kaat in wins, innings and starts, so that’s obviously not the reason why Fraley chose Kaat over him. Does the first part of his argument hold any water? No, it doesn’t. Not only was Kaat never a regular starting pitcher with the Cardinals, as Fraley implies, but he hadn’t been a regular starting pitcher since 1978, two years before he ever joined the Cardinals. He spent 1979 making 41 relief appearances and just two starts in time split between the Phillies and Yankees, and he made just 14 starts compared to 35 relief appearances for the Cardinals in 1980 after being dealt from the Yankees. If you look at Kaat’s splits that season, is easy to see that he still had no business starting regularly in the big leagues. His ERA as a starter that year was 4.12 in a league that averaged 3.72, while his ERA as a reliever was 3.60. Both his strikeout rate and his WHIP were better as a reliever than as a starter.

This was just the continuation of a trend that had already been in place for a while. The reason Kaat had been moved to the bullpen in 1979 was because he just wasn’t all that good as a starter anymore. In 1978 he made 24 starts for the Phillies but threw only 140 innings and posted an ERA of 4.10, 13% below the league average of 3.58. The prior year, 1977, he was even worse, going 6-11 in 35 games, 27 of them starts, throwing just 160 innings and posting an ERA of 5.39, which was 26% worse than the league mark of 3.99. Kaat won the grand total of 26 ballgames in his final three years as a starting pitcher. Even if we presume he would have somehow managed to match that mark while with the Cardinals, that’s only 15 wins more than what he actually posted. That gets him to 298, not 300, and I’ve yet to take into account the fact that Kaat was in his early 40s in those years and had already proven that he could no longer be an effective starting pitcher. If anything, the move to the bullpen probably lengthened Kaat’s career, and therefore his win total, rather than artificially suppress it as Fraley claims.

Beyond this poor history on Fraley’s part, he apparently has no concern at all for the context in which Kaat’s numbers were compiled. As we’ve seen in the neutralized stats for both pitchers, Kaat’s career ERA of 3.45 was the functional equivalent of a 3.70 ERA in a neutral run-scoring context. For his career, his ERA was only 7% better than the leagues he pitched in (compared to 19% for Blyleven), and this is despite a move to the bullpen, where lower ERAs are the norm. Fraley doesn’t make any attempt to account for this, nor does he bother to explore any other starting pitchers whose career numbers are better than Kaat’s. If he had, it would have been obvious that Blyleven was a superior pitcher, in nearly every way but fielding, and he would have uncovered a rather lengthy list of other starters who had careers that were at least as impressive, if not more so, than Kaat’s. For instance, here are the neutralized numbers of Kaat and a few guys I found in about ten minutes of scanning through Baseball-Reference.com:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Kaat	264	223	.542	4514.6	4800	2061	1854	1124	2437	3.70	1.312
T. John	286	228	.556	4725.0	5019	2101	1890	1326	2235	3.60	1.343
L.Tiant	223	157	.587	3501.6	3179	1488	1341	1151	2412	3.45	1.237
B. Pierce	221	149	.597	3421.0	3121	1397	1261	1223	2070	3.32	1.270
M. Harder	237	163	.593	3676.6	3696	1529	1377	1126	1246	3.37	1.312
D. Phillippe	214	94	.695	2826.6	2794	936	843	398	1006	2.68	1.129
S. Leever	217	92	.702	2849.6	2723	917	826	648	916	2.61	1.183

And don’t even get me started on Tony Mullane:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Mullane	554	158	.778	6449.6	4966	1699	1528	1564	2566	2.13	1.012

Fraley’s blatant lack of research didn’t stop with his misplaced attachment to Jim Kaat. Nearly everyone else on his list is easily surpassed by one or more eligible players at the same position. So you think Gavvy Cravath should be in the Hall of Fame, Mr. Fraley? Well, then what about Babe Herman?

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Cravath	1320	4366	696	1311	270	95	137	866	659	102	.300	.396	.500	.896
Herman	1634	5827	873	1843	403	111	182	995	529	93	.316	.374	.517	.891

(Note: These are neutralized career numbers.)

And Gil Hodges should go in? What makes him any more special than Norm Cash or Boog Powell?

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Hodges	2163	7279	1098	1943	298	48	374	1266	959	63	.267	.352	.475	.827
Cash	2099	6811	1119	1905	250	41	392	1184	1083	43	.280	.383	.501	.884
Powell	2059	6875	1014	1930	293	11	369	1354	1090	22	.281	.378	.488	.866

The answer, of course, is absolutely nothing. Or at least, nothing objective. The reasons for these assessments by Fraley rest solely in his own mind, and unfortunately he’s representative of a very large percentage of BBWAA voters.

I’m sorry, that’s simply not good enough. I don’t want to hear your gut feeling, or your 20-year old memories, or your half-assed “research”. I want you to actually earn the right to cast your vote. The kind of crap Gerry Fraley foisted upon us simply doesn’t cut it, and I don’t think it’s asking too much of these guys that they actually break a sweat.

Mythbusters, Hall of Fame Edition

Breaking news. There are a lot of really undeserving players in the Baseball Hall of Fame. We will keep you updated on this shocking story as more details become available.

In all seriousness, you, me, and everyone else in America who is aware that a Baseball Hall of Fame exists already knew that some players sneaked in through a hole in the fence instead of paying full admission. And anyone with a functioning brain in his head who cares to study the elections of those players will conclude that the various incarnations of the Veterans Committee have admitted more unqualified or borderline players into the Hall of Fame than the Baseball Writers Association of America.

This was pretty much a forgone conclusion once the voting process was determined. After all, most of the best candidates never reach that committee because even a body as collectively foolish as the BBWAA could figure out that people like Willie Mays and Ted Williams and Tom Seaver belong in Cooperstown. They even have fifteen chances to get it right with each player, so they are clearly set up to take credit for the most obvious selections, and for the most part they’ve delivered the goods. They haven't figured out how to many any of those selections unanimous yet, but they haven't missed a top-tier immortal yet. The Veterans Committee, in contrast, has allowed cronyism and favoritism to replace objectivity far too often, which has resulted in some historically poor selections.

While this is all indisputably true, many baseball writers and historians have taken these facts too far, and now espouse the thought that the BBWAA has done a generally good job with their selections. That’s just patently wrong. If the BBWAA was a basketball player, they'd be Shaquille O'Neal. Give him the ball down low and he'll make every layup and dunk available, but ask him to score from outside the paint and he becomes a train wreck.

Electing Willie Mays or Hank Aaron to the Hall of Fame is a layup, and I'm not inclined to give the writers much credit for that. It's the part of their job that literally any group of moderately knowledgeable baseball fans could accomplish with little difficulty and just as much success. No, the more difficult part of being a Hall of Fame voter is knowing when to elect the Johnny Mizes and Hal Newhousers and Billy Williams' of the baseball world, and when to take a pass, and the BBWAA just isn't all that good at that. When it comes to that part of their job, the BBWAA is Shaq at the free throw line.

The writer have repeatedly made two kinds of errors; they have withheld induction from worthy players and they have granted induction to unworthy players. Compounding this problem, they have sometimes manages to do both things at once.

Look no further than Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown. He was, clearly, an outstanding pitcher:

	W	L	PCT	CG	SHO	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Brown	239	130	.648	271	55	3172.3	2708	1044	725	673	1375	2.06	1.066

If you know anything about baseball, you know that those numbers are exceptional. Well, you’d think that baseball writers, whose entire profession is supposedly dedicated to documenting the performance of baseball players, would be able to look at Brown’s career and say, “There’s a guy who belongs in the Hall of Fame”. Sadly, they passed him up. Brown appeared on seven different ballots between 1936 and 1946 and never got more than 27% of the vote. He was subsequently dropped from the writers’ ballot.

Now, it’s entirely possible that the writers’ goal was an honorable one. Maybe they were limiting their votes to just the super-elite players. After all, through that 1946 election the BBWAA had only elected thirteen men in over a decade of voting, with literally the entire population of past players available to them. Maybe they were just very picky.

Then again, maybe not. In just their fourth election, in 1939, the BBWAA had to consider these two retired right fielders:

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
#1	2123	8591	1719	2932	241	145	33	810	524	495	.341	.388	.415	.803
#2	2517	9570	1391	2961	458	309	97	1525	760	366	.309	.362	.452	.814

After looking at those numbers, they collectively decided that right fielder #1 was 34 times better than right fielder #2. The first guy is Willie Keeler and the second is Sam Crawford, and even if you look at those numbers and decide that Keeler was the better ballplayer, I’m going to guess that you don’t think he deserved 207 Hall of Fame votes while Wahoo Crawford managed just six. I’m going to further guess that you wouldn’t limit yourself to just those numbers before casting your vote. You’d probably want to know the respective contexts in which they were compiled. Well, let me neutralize those stats for you:

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Keeler	2395	9487	1706	3096	254	147	32	793	558	511	.326	.372	.394	.766
Crawford	2685	10410	1635	3362	520	352	108	1794	860	413	.323	.376	.472	.848

In case those numbers aren't enough to convince you that Crawford was better, here's a few more. In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James lists Keeler as the 35th-best right fielder in baseball history. He lists Crawford as 10th. Keeler compiled 333 Win Shares to Crawford’s 446. According to BaseballProspectus.com, Crawford posted a WARP3 score of 112.2, while Keeler managed just 102.5. Keeler scored 21 points on James’ Black Ink Test for leading his leagues in various offensive categories, and scored 169 on the Gray Ink Test for regular top-10 finishes. Those are respectable numbers, but they pale in comparison to Crawford’s scores of 33 and 330 respectively.

In short, Sam Crawford was a decidedly better baseball player than Willie Keeler when any real analysis is performed, and even the traditional stats available at the time would support a case that Crawford was at least as good as Keeler, if not better. And yet, the BBWAA decided to give Keeler 34 times as many votes when he and Crawford appeared on the same ballot in 1939. Even worse, not only did the writers simultaneously lower their standards while rejecting a better player at the same position, but they continued to reject Crawford, who never received more than 11 votes in any BBWAA election. He didn’t make it into the Hall until the Veterans Committee tabbed him in 1957.

All of which brings us back to Three Finger Brown, the excellent pitcher who was repeatedly passed over by the BBWAA. Two years after Brown was dropped from the writers’ ballot, the BBWAA elected Herb Pennock to the Hall of Fame, along with third baseman Pie Traynor. To be blunt, neither of them belongs in the Hall of Fame, even by today’s comparatively watered-down standards, let alone those in place in 1948. Just take a look at Pennock’s career numbers compared to Brown:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Brown	239	130	.648	3172.3	2708	1044	725	673	1375	2.06	1.066
Pennock	240	162	.597	3571.6	3900	1692	1428	916	1227	3.60	1.348

Brown was better, in pretty much every imaginable way. So why did he get rejected while Pennock was inducted? Apparently it was because Pennock was dying at the time of the 1948 election, and the writers decided it would be a nice thing to do. That’s it. That’s the only real reason.

Now, I’m just about as sentimental as any dude you’re apt to find, but that’s a crock. If the Hall of Fame is supposed to be about that kind of schlock, then there should be twice as many players enshrined than is currently the case. We’d see a plaque for Jackie Jensen, whose fear of flying ended an MVP-caliber career. We’d see a plaque for Monty Stratton, since any person who had Jimmy Stewart play him in a movie must have sentiment dripping all over him. Jimmy Piersall would get in since he managed to play seventeen years despite being bipolar, and Jim Eisenreich would represent all of the Tourette Syndrome victims in the world.

Those guys aren’t in Cooperstown, for the simple reason that it’s been decided that play on the field should be the primary reason to bestow the game’s highest honor on a player. Pennock just doesn’t qualify in that regard. He’s not included in Bill James’ list of the top-100 pitchers in history in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. (By the way, Three Finger Brown is 20th.)

In retrospect, while it’s certainly fair to criticize the Veterans Committee for allowing lesser caliber players entry into the Hall of Fame, let’s not forget that the BBWAA was on the cutting edge of lowered Hall of Fame induction standards. To this day, there are very few players in the Hall worse than Traynor and very pitchers in the Hall worse than Pennock, and those elections occurred pretty early in the process, thus setting the tone for many of the selections by either body in the future. The Veterans Committee had little choice, for example, but to elect Brown to the Hall the year after the BBWAA admitted Pennock. To leave him out would have been patently unfair. Likewise, it can easily be argued that Kid Nichols and Chief Bender and Eppa Rixey and John Clarkson and numerous other pitchers also had to be inducted once the BBWAA let Herb Pennock in. I mean, just look at the numbers:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Pennock	240	162	.597	3571.6	3900	1692	1428	916	1227	3.60	1.348
Nichols	360	208	.634	5056.3	4912	2477	1660	1268	1868	2.95	1.222
Bender	212	127	.625	3017.0	2645	1110	823	712	1711	2.46	1.113
Rixey	266	251	.515	4494.6	4633	1986	1571	1082	1350	3.15	1.272
Clarkson	328	178	.648	4536.3	4295	2376	1417	1191	1978	2.81	1.209
Keefe	342	225	.603	5047.6	4439	2468	1472	1220	2562	2.62	1.121
Faber	254	215	.544	4086.6	4106	1813	1430	1213	1471	3.15	1.302

Every guy on that list is as good or better than Herb Pennock, and while I wouldn't have voted for all of them to be in the Hall of Fame, I can see how others would given the precedent the BBWAA set with Pennock. I could perform the same exercise with Pie Traynor, but you get the point. The elections of Keeler, Traynor and Pennock were just the tip of the iceberg. The BBWAA started making it a regular occurrence to vote in lesser players, often times passing over players on the same ballot who were clearly better.

In 1953 they elected Dizzy Dean but not Chief Bender. Here are their respective neutral-context numbers:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Dean	149	76	.662	2073.0	1974	743	669	465	1225	2.90	1.177
Bender	220	118	.651	3119.0	3068	1147	1031	825	1764	2.97	1.248

In 1954 they slapped the Hall of Famer title on Rabbit Maranville, with 209 voters casting ballots for him. On the same ballot, just 10 writers voted for a different NL shortstop, Dave Bancroft, who was a direct contemporary of Maranville’s and a significantly better player. Here are the average 162-game season totals for the two, each in a neutral context:

	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Maranville	615	78	162	23	11	2	56	52	18	.263	.323	.346	.669
Bancroft	611	92	173	27	7	3	51	72	13	.282	.359	.362	.721

Throw in the fact that each was a good defender and it’s obvious that Bancroft was the better player in every regard except longevity, so of course the Veterans Committee decided to put Bancroft in the Hall in 1971. To have him sitting out while Maranville was already enshrined simply wasn’t fair. (For the record, I don’t think either one of them belongs in the Hall.)

In keeping with the tradition of Herb Pennock, the writers stuck Ted Lyons in the Hall in 1955, despite the fact that they had already considered and disregarded Stan Coveleski, a decidedly better pitcher. Here are their neutral-context numbers:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Lyons	306	185	.623	4519.3	4457	1750	1575	1112	1166	3.14	1.232
Coveleski	248	118	.678	3353.6	3259	1150	1035	860	1064	2.78	1.228

They elected Red Ruffing in 1967, despite having already passed over Burleigh Grimes. These are their actual numbers:

	W	L	PCT	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP
Ruffing	273	225	.548	4344.0	4284	2117	1833	1541	1987	3.80	1.341
Grimes	270	212	.560	4180.0	4412	2048	1638	1295	1512	3.53	1.365

In 1968, Arky Vaughan appeared on the writers’ ballot for the last time and got 29% of the vote, while another shortstop, Lou Boudreau, received over 51% of the vote on his way to be elected just two years later. Which player would you rather have on your team?

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Boudreau	1646	6029	861	1779	385	66	68	789	796	51	.295	.380	.415	.795
Vaughan	1817	6622	1173	2103	356	128	96	926	937	118	.318	.406	.453	.859

Not only was Vaughan obviously a better player, but he racked up these superior numbers despite walking away from baseball after the 1943 season when he was still just 31 years old, partly due to a dispute with manager Leo Durocher and partly out of a desire to run his farm full time to support the war effort. He didn’t return until 1947, but played only 129 total games over the next two years before retiring. Had he continued his career through the war years, as Boudreau did, the gap between them would be even wider.

You see my point. Starting with Keeler in 1939, and continuing through Traynor and Pennock in 1948, right up to Bruce Sutter in 2006, the BBWAA has regularly acted to lower the existing Hall of Fame standards significantly, while simultaneously passing over better players in the process. The Veterans Committee has certainly perpetuated those lower standards and pushed them a touch lower by a few degrees as well, but they've at least managed to circle back and scoop up these better players that the BBWAA inexplicably left behind. Without the Veterna's Committee, players like Mordecai Brown and Stan Coveleski and Arky Vaughan would have been passed over entirely in favor of direct contemporaries who simply weren’t as good.

The blame for all this mess rests entirely with the unqualified mass that is collectively mislabeled the Baseball Writers Association of America. Let’s try to keep that in mind the next we see someone laud that body’s past performance.

Morneau vs Mauer

Recently, the BBWAA's Minnesota chapter held their Diamond Awards ceremony, their year-end event to bestow local awards upon the best Twins players. This is held in conjunction with the Bob Allison Ataxia Research Center, with the proceeds from ticket sales going to fund research to fight ataxia, the neuromuscular disease that took Allison's life. It sounds like a wonderful cause, and I'm not saying that just because Bob Allison is the best baseball player to ever come out of The University of Kansas (although it helps).

They gave out awards to Francisco Liriano (Twins Rookie of the Year), Michael Cuddyer (Most Improved), a pair of their minor leaguers, and one to Torii Hunter for being a good interview. Harmon Killebrew got an award for community service. Brad Radke was given the Bob Allison Award for his leadership, and in a very touching moment, was also called to the stage unexpectedly by Johan Santana, who then gave his Twins Pitcher of the Year Award to the retiring Radke. Like I said, it sounds like a wonderful evening.

Unfortunately, the local BBWAA chapter doesn't seem to know any more about player performance than the nationwide BBWAA membership, because they gave their Twins Player of the Year Award to Justin Morneau instead of Joe Mauer.

Look folks, this isn't that hard. Joe Mauer, while playing an infinitely more difficult defensive position, was a better offensive player than Justin Morneau last year. A few numbers:

OPS+: Mauer - 144; Morneau - 140

RC/27: Mauer - 8.23; Morneau - 7.92

In case you don't know what those are, OPS+ is a player's on-base percentage, plus slugging percentage (OPS) adjusted for his home ballpark and then compared to the league average. Average would be 100, so Mauer's 144 mark means he was 44% better offensively than a league-average hitter. Morneau was 40% better, still excellent, but short of Mauer's mark. And RC/27 is simply Runs Created per 27 Outs, essentially a representation of the number of runs per game that a team would score if all of their hitters were Joe Mauer or Justin Morneau. As you can see, the Mauer team would score about one-third of a run more each game than the Morneau team.

So there's that. Then add in the disparity in their defensive performances and it becomes even more clear that Mauer was the better player. Two more numbers:

WARP3: Mauer - 10.6; Morneau - 8.6

Win Shares: Mauer - 31; Morneau - 27

WARP stands for Wins Above Replacement Player, a stat created by the good folks at The Baseball Prospectus to measure the number of team wins that a player was worth over the contributions a replacement-level player would have provided. This is inclusive of a player's defense as well as offense, and the "3" appended to it means that the totals have been neutralized to account for the player's home ballpark and run-scoring era. Win Shares, courtesy of The Hardball Times, is Bill James' famous creation that does essentially the same thing as WARP only with a different scoring scale. As you can see, Mauer was clearly ahead of Morneau in each category.

In short, I don't care if the BBWAA as a whole was foolish enough to declare Justin Morneau the Most Valuable Player in the American League. He clearly wasn't, and one would hope that at least the local writers would have known better. Sadly, it appears they weren't able to figure out that Morneau wasn't even the best player on the team they cover for a living.

Case Study: Bob Ryan, Boston Globe

In his shrill way, Bob Ryan is usually somewhat amusing to me. He’s got that east coast accent, he talks a million miles an hour, and he’s so certain that he’s right. It’s kind of an endearing combination, at least if you’re from the east coast yourself, like I am.

But when it comes to Hall of Fame voting, Ryan is a train wreck, and his smug, condescending manner that usually amuses me suddenly becomes annoying beyond reason. It’s bad enough that he regularly perpetuates the foolish notion that Dave Concepcion was a better shortstop than Alan Trammell. But now, he’s gone beyond even that silly stance.

This past Sunday, Ryan wrote a column in which he expressed an opinion that was so cataclysmically stupid that I felt compelled to write up my thoughts by way of rebuttal.

Ryan decided that he was going to take some of his fellow members of the Baseball Writers Association of America to task, by calling them on the carpet for failing to ever elect a single player to the Hall of Fame unanimously. Under normal circumstances, I would agree with that premise completely. Unfortunately, Ryan’s chosen method for doing so was to provide a list of players who, in his estimation, should have been unanimously elected into baseball’s Hall of Fame. He excluded Negro Leaguers for lack of statistical documentation, 19th-Century players for pre-dating the election process, and special cases like Lou Gehrig, Roberto Clemente and Pete Rose who were never put to a normal vote. He concluded his listing with the following challenge:

“Go ahead. Look me in the eye and tell me that these men aren’t Hall of Famers.”

Okay, Bob, fly out to Kansas and I’ll be glad to look you in the eye and say just that. Your list is mostly accurate, so it won’t be a blanket statement on my part to match yours. I’ll give you the Ruths, Aarons, and Mays’ of the baseball world. But I have no problem at all in telling you that a good number of your choices are wrong. Not only do they not belong in the Hall of Fame unanimously, but some of them don’t belong in the Hall of Fame at all.

I have a few options I could go with here. Mickey Cochrane but not Bill Dickey? Charlie Gehringer but not Joe Morgan? I could almost certainly pick a team from your list and beat them with a team of players not on you your list. But I’ll use just two examples for the sake of some semblance of brevity.

The first is Pie Traynor. Traynor is not in the Hall of Fame because of his defense at third base. He’s in there because of his batting average, so let’s look at his career hitting statistics:

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Traynor	1941	7559	1183	2416	371	164	58	1273	472	158	.320	.362	.435	.797

Great batting average, but nothing else to really distinguish Traynor historically. He hit a ton of triples, but that was back in the day of enormous outfields and deep fences. Translate his totals for triples and homers into modern-sized ballparks and you’d have a guy about 90 career triples and 200 home runs, certainly respectable numbers but nothing Hall-worthy by themselves. A .435 career slugging percentage is nothing special. A .362 career on-base percentage is nothing special either, particularly when the vast majority of that figure is accounted for by his batting average. He could run a bit, but 158 career steals won’t get you into the Hall of Fame, and neither will less than 1200 runs, 1300 RBI and 2500 hits.

No, Traynor is quite clearly a player whose value was enormously driven by his batting average . As such, you’d expect to see some really gaudy accomplishments in that regard. To a degree, we do. For instance, Traynor batted .366 in 1930 and .356 the year before. In thirteen full seasons in the big leagues, he batted over .300 ten times. That’s pretty good. So, with all of these gaudy numbers, exactly how many batting titles did Traynor win?

Zero.

That’s none, nada, zilch. Niente. The big goose-egg.

Okay, maybe he just played at the same time as some ridiculous super-duperstar, like when Joe Jackson played at the same time at Ty Cobb. Jackson never won a batting title either, but he hit .356 for his career, and finished second for the batting title three times and third another three times. The guy could hit.

So was Traynor trapped in similar circumstances? Um, no. Not only did Traynor fail to win a batting title, he never managed to finish second either. Or third, or fourth for that matter. His best finish was 5th in 1927, when he hit .342. Remember that great .366 average he had in 1930? Eight other hitters had a better mark in the National League that year.

See, at the time Pie Traynor played, everyone hit for a high batting average. The entire National League batted .303 in 1930, so hitting .366 just isn’t that impressive. It’s certainly good, the rough equivalent of hitting .321 in a league that averages. 265, like the NL did in 2006. What would that have gotten him last year? Seventh place. For Traynor’s entire career, the batting average of the leagues he played in was .295. I’m sorry Bob, but batting .320 for a career when the average player is hitting .295, is nothing that should make a player a unanimous immortal.

I can find for you, with little work at all, an extremely similar hitter who is not in the Hall of Fame. In fact, I’ll even pick another Pirate, just to make it really simple. Here are his actual numbers, right next to Traynor’s:

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Traynor	1941	7559	1183	2416	371	164	58	1273	472	158	.320	.362	.435	.797
Mr. X	2368	9049	1189	2743	529	77	219	1326	535	84	.303	.344	.451	.795

Mr. X played longer, and therefore compiled more raw counting numbers like hits, RBI, and runs, but otherwise these guys were pretty much equal. Sure, that .320 mark for Traynor looks like a clear advantage over Player X’s .303 career mark, but the contexts have to be considered. I think I’ve already made it clear that Traynor’s batting average isn’t nearly as impressive as it appears. Mr. X’s, on the other hand, is actually more impressive. See, he compiled that .303 mark in leagues that averaged just .262. In other words, his batting average was almost 16% better than the leagues he played in, while Traynor’s was just 8% better. Player X’s top batting average in any one season was just, .331, pretty low compared to Traynor’s top mark. But X won his league batting title that year, something Traynor never did. Mr. X also finished second in batting twice. He was in his league’s top-10 on nine different occasions, compared to just six for Traynor. In short, Mr. X was a better hitter for average than Pie Traynor, no matter what their final numbers looked like.

To make things easier, let’s go out to the Baseball-Reference.com web site and used their handy “Neutralize Stats” tool. This is one of the greatest inventions ever for a baseball fan, because it converts any player’s career statistics into a static run-scoring environment. No more differences between the high-scoring steroid era and the low-scoring 1960’s, for instance. In this translation, everyone played at a time when teams played 162 games and averaged 715 runs per team (4.42 per game). These represent the current season length and the average run-scoring level for all of baseball history. Like I said, it’s pretty handy.

Performing that exercise for Traynor and Player X reveals these results:

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Traynor	2041	7813	1129	2401	370	163	57	1214	468	155	.307	.349	.418	.767
Mr. X	2429	9450	1331	2970	574	81	233	1478	575	88	.314	.356	.466	.822

Who’s better now, Bob? It should be pretty obvious that Mr. X is better. He played longer, compiled more raw totals, and had better numbers across the board in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage and OPS.

So now comes the real test, Bob. Since you believe that Traynor is such a clear Hall of Famer that your BBWAA peers back in the day should have elected him unanimously, the test of your intelligence as a voter is whether or not you personally voted for Mr. X. His true identity?

Al Oliver.

So how about it Bob? Were you one of the 19 intrepid souls who put a check mark next to Oliver’s name in 1991, his only year on the ballot? If not, you really need to either shut your mouth or do better research before you chastise your peers for their past votes.

If you did vote for Oliver, well, that alone is grounds for you to lose your voting privileges, because Al Oliver doesn’t have any business in the Hall of Fame without a ticket.

The second example I’ll use is Bill Terry, again, an admittedly great hitter:

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Terry	1721	6428	1120	2193	373	112	154	1078	537	56	.341	.393	.506	.899

That’s an impressive stat line. Throw in the fact that he is still the last National Leaguer to hit .400 for a full season, and I have no problem with him being in the Hall of Fame.

The problem, Bob, is that Terry wasn’t as good another first baseman that you left off of your list. We’ll call him Mr. Y for now:

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Terry	1721	6428	1120	2193	373	112	154	1078	537	56	.341	.393	.506	.899
Mr. Y	1884	6443	1118	2011	367	83	359	1337	856	28	.312	.397	.562	.959

See my problem, Bob? In careers of similar length, Mr. Y was just plain better in every single category except batting average. He got on base more, hit for more power, scored or drove in far more runs and was more durable. And I haven’t even done the translations to neutralize their stats yet. Here’s what that looks like:

	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Terry	1814	6677	1109	2219	377	113	154	1064	542	55	.332	.383	.492	.875
Mr. Y	1971	6707	1145	2076	376	84	368	1372	881	28	.310	.394	.555	.949

Each player drops a bit, but Terry more so than Mr. Y, who played in a pretty average historical period for scoring runs, while Terry played in the high-offense 20’s and 30’s. Both men had the reputations for being good defensive first basemen, so there is no edge for Terry there. On top of that, Mr. Y was a better post-season performer (.910 post-season OPS compared to .781 for Terry), was more recognized by his peers (6 top-10 MVP finishes, same as Terry, but two 2nd-place finishes, something Terry never did), and led his league in more offensive categories (25 times leading the league in batting average, slugging percentage, OPS, runs, hits, total bases, doubles, triples, homers, RBI, or extra-base hits, compared to just 5 times for Terry).

Now for the coup de grace – Mr. Y also missed three full seasons in his prime due to service in World War II. That’s something not accounted for in any of the numbers above. Consider that Mr. Y averaged 26 homers per year in the seven years before leaving for military service, and 38 per year for the three seasons immediately after, and it’s fair to say he missed something like 90-100 home runs in those three years, along with about 500 hits and over 300 RBI. Add those totals to his career numbers and you have someone so obviously superior to Bill Terry that omitting him from your list calls the validity of the entire list into question.

So please explain, Bob, why Mr. Y, a.k.a. Johnny Mize, is missing from your fabulous list. In fact, why did your BBWAA brethren fail to elect Mize at all, leaving him instead for the Veteran’s Committee to induct? He was obviously better than Bill Terry ever was, and according to you, Terry should have been elected unanimously. So why shouldn’t Mize also be inducted without dissent?

If you’re going be presumptuous enough to represent yourself as the authority on these matters, Bob, you’d better be right. Sadly, I don’t see any way you could be in this case.

Maybe it would be best if you did actual research next time.