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.