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.