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.