Mazeroski wasn't elected for his home run. He was elected for being the greatest fielding second baseman of all time.

A Look At The 1965 Topps Luis Tiant Rookie Card

https://baseball-trivia-game.com/images/65_tiant.jpg

Which was exactly my point. A .387 slugging in any era at any position is nowhere near great. But Grich gets a lot of benefit from it because his 2B contemporaries were terrible at the plate.

That's exactly the point I was making with regard to Grich.

If you truly believe this, you might be the only person who does. He was elected for that home run.

Don't you think it makes sense to evaluate a player against his contemporaries? The ones facing the same competition under the same circumstances?

Agreed. I mean if I'm starting a team and I can have either Frank White or Bill Mazeroski I'm not mad, but not for the Hall.

Sure. But if you put me in a foot race against a bunch of newborns, and I win by a mile, that doesn't make me actually fast.

I'm not saying Grich wasn't very good or whatever. I'm saying his resume is inflated because his contemporaries were terrible.

Evidence?

Exactly. That's what I'm getting out of all of this as well. I know I'll be corrected if my interpretation is wrong, but a formula that offers a larger statistical reward based on the incompetence of his peers at the same position is not one that I would ever fully recognize. "Everyone else stinks, so by default you're awesome"?!

The positional adjustment WAR makes for Grich is not substantially different from second baseman of other modern periods. Grich is given 5-6 runs of WAR per full season for being a second baseman. For 2023 and 2024, Marcus Semien is given 6 runs of WAR for being a second baseman and Gleyber Torres is given 4 and 5 runs. For the late 90s, Roberto Alomar is given 4 runs per full season for being a second baseman. For the 1950s, Bobby Avila is given 6-7 runs per full season for being a second baseman.

Grich's high WAR has little or nothing to do with his contemporaries being unusually incompetent. He's slightly helped compared to a few periods, but slightly hurt compared to others. WAR rates Grich highly because his batting was far above league average - a 125 OPS+ is extremely good for a second baseman of any era, as others have pointed out.

I don't think your interpretation is wrong, but the differences in statistical reward or demerit are typically very small across eras.

The only cases I know of where there are substantial differences - like how in the 1910s WAR rates 2b as a perfectly neutral position, offensively - is where the position as a whole has actually changed: second base became more of a fielder's position starting around 1925 or so. In which case the difference isn't due to second baseman becoming worse hitters but to a strategic shift.

Bobby Grich Just isn’t a Hall of Fameish sounding name - if he was Bill Grande or Sonny Maverick - He’d probably be in

Something with more gravitas like Alexander Grich, or more flair like Diego Grich.

His contemporaries were "terrible" because you are comparing them to other players from other eras, who weren't playing in the same era against the same pitchers, etc... It becomes circular logic. All you can do is recognize that his contemporaries were the best in the world at the time. So it's not racing babies. It's the best on earth, and he was near the top of the best.

ooh or a nickname - “ Hall Of Famer Bobby The Grich ! “

Weren't Morgan and Carew contemporaries of Grich? So that's two of the top ten of all time.

+1

How one could come to the conclusion that the players in MLB in 1973 were "terrible" is absurd.

And for all of Tabe's talk about Grich's hitting not being impressive to him, he's still missing the point that Grich had the greatest fielding year of his career in 1973 (which says a lot), and that is a very large part of why his WAR was so high.

Every year The Hall it’s getting farther and farther away from fielding greatness . Chicks dig the long ball blah blah blah and I guess that’s what sells tickets .
Black ink is recognized as an offensive measurement but there’s also black ink Defense .

Not only were Morgan and Carew contemporaries of Grich, they also had really strong years as 2nd basemen in 1973. They both finished 4th in their respective leagues in MVP voting, and Morgan may have deserved to win.

I guess Tabe missed out on that fact. Or does he think Morgan and Carew were "terrible"?

Bobby grich
 

Step outside the old boxes. Grich was a great, no qualifications, no apologies. Excuse me for saying so, but WAR doesn’t lie. Maybe he fell a little short in the counting stats to be a hofer, but he was a truly great player.

WAR is the big lie. In 1965, Bob Veale had 4.0 bWAR and 8.0 fWAR. How are we supposed to know what to believe when the self-proclaimed experts disagree by 100%?

Evidence?
 

A discrepancy in a season is your reason for dismissing the entire metric? Sure, No stat is perfect. But especially to evaluate an entire career i think WAR is hard to beat.

When I see pitcher A has an ERA+ of 169 and a WHIP of .914 and pitcher B has an ERA+ of 123 and a WHIP of 1.278, I don't need WAR to tell me pitcher A was better than pitcher B. When WAR tells me different, then I just ignore it.

If there are large discrepancies in one season, then the sum of discrepancies for a career becomes even larger. When someone tries to argue Bobby Grich was better than other players because he has more WAR or Rich Reuschel was better than pitchers with less WAR, I am not going to believe it.

The discrepancy you have cited is for a pitcher. I think the ways that Fan Graphs (fWAR) and Baseball Reference (bWAR) calculate pitching value are quite different. But can the same be said for hitting and fielding?

For instance, Bobby Grich has a career bWAR of 71.1 and a career fWAR of 69.1

Not terribly far off.

I'm sure you can find examples where there is a larger difference, but I am not sure that is the norm for hitting/fielding.

In medicine, numerous widely accepted tests yield both type 1 and type 2 errors, because they are not completely perfect. But we don't discard them just because one can find outlier cases where they didn't do such a great job. So too here. This is not, IMO, an invalidating example. False standard of it's invalid if it isn't perfect.

There is a pretty big discrepency for Jackson Merrill this year. 5.3 for fangraphs and 4.4 for baseball reference. Paul Skenes goes the other way. 5.9 for baseball reference and 4.3 for fangraphs. When you have those type of discrepencies, you can't use WAR to compare players.

You can say Grich is a HOFer, but if your only argument is WAR, then you are going to get a lot of people disagreeing with you. In the end, it is only opinions. The only opinions that matter said 11 yes and 419 no the one year he was on the HOF ballot. Interestingly enough, Bill Mazeroski received 182 votes on the same ballot. So at least 171 HOF voters thought Mazeroski was a Hall of Famer and Grich was not.

Sure, and there are many guys who eventually got in who were denied 10 or 15 times by the voters. Assessments can and do change. That said, I doubt he will get in unless he has a political ally on some future committee, and it's no crime to leave him out. But I don't think, as some do apparently, that he invalidates WAR.

Again, I think discrepancies for pitchers are common when comparing fWAR and bWAR. But a difference between 5.3 and 4.4 for Jackson Merrill doesn't seem that big to me.

I like WAR because it is one single number that makes it easy on the surface to compare one player to another across different eras, but man is it heavily flawed for all the reasons outlined in this conversation. It rewards compilers/longevity to a fault, and penalizes certain positions such as catcher, because it's impossible for a catcher's knees to hold up for 3000 games even after they switch positions mid career.

Also, it's awesome when rats60 chimes in. Dude is pure hickory even if I don't always agree with him. I wouldn't totally throw WAR out with the bathwater, but it is not the end all be all.

How does it reward compilers? If people at the end of their careers have lousy years, they don't accumulate much if any WAR for those seasons, look at Pujols? From 2016 on he essentially added no WAR despite adding to the counting stats totals. I believe same is true of Cabrera.

Was checking and yeah you’re right Peter it doesn’t always reward compilers. A guy like Don Sutton was able to eke his way into the HOF with some modestly effective +WAR years late in his career but then again Jim Kaat, another classic compiler, had negative WAR late in his career, and probably shouldn’t be in the HOF anyway but that’s a separate argument.

WAR does a credible job identifying the true greats of the game who were good for a long time (ie, nobody with a 100+ WAR played for less than 15 years). For borderline HOFers it should be one of many considerations and it clearly has been just that. The Jeter/Grich argument being the ultimate example, as I don’t think too many people would say DJ doesn’t belong in the HOF whereas Grich wasn’t even close and will likely never make it despite being a terrific player (I wouldn’t vote for him either).

Which all begs the question, how in the hell did Harold Baines (WAR under 40) make it?

ERA committees are going to be weak. It's a very small number of humans making judgement calls and whether they choose to involve stats is up to them...and which stats they choose to care about.

I would argue that at least in some cases WAR does a good job of offsetting late career added counting stats. Take Pujols again. 2018 and 2019, he adds 42 HR and 157 RBI to his counting stats (the latter thanks to Mike Trout being on base so damn much in front of him), but had a ZERO total WAR.

Baines had a lot of hits but didn't seem to have much else going for him. Was he ever, even early on, among the top ten players in the AL, much less baseball?

Not that I remember. Never. I even asked my 79 year old dad about Baines. Neither one of us remember anyone ever saying “Baines is sure one of the top players in baseball” while he was active. He was above avg / a fine player.

Some of that weakest guys seem to get in that way. See Rizutto, Phil. Although “Holy Cow” may have been the intangible that put him over.

I would like to see Garvey, Dwight Evans, Tiant, and Schilling all get in but not a hill I’m willing to die on.

As an Italian-American Yankees fan I'm not exactly unbiased, but I think Rizzuto is an okay Hall of Famer. He's not a great Hall of Famer, but there are far, far weaker Hall of Famers than him. His counting stats are low, but he lost three years of his prime to the Navy. He wasn't usually much at the plate, but he was a truly great fielder by any measure.

I'd be happy to see Tiant, Evans, and Schilling in the HOF - not a Garvey believer myself.

Schilling is a total piece of excrement. He'll never get in.

I would put him in solely on the basis of Paradise By the Dashboard Light.

I'd love to see Evans get in as well. As someone else mentioned somewhere on the forum, he was constantly overshadowed by one or more superstar teammates. When one or two of those retired or were traded, another one or two came right along to make sure Dwight was NOT in the spotlight! Honestly, for his personality, I think he was just fine with that. And everyone in Massachusetts loved the guy; rightly so. My kind of player, and person.

With Schilling, it's a lesson to all of us that a douchey personality will always be your worst enemy. Your achievements matter very little if you can't treat others with some modicum of respect.

BTW, the poor OP certainly had his thread derailed. Perhaps it should be renamed the Edwin Starr Memorial Thread.

A classic.

Now I'm praying for the end of this thread to hurry up and arrive.

The voting for this occurs on December 8th, so it is possible this thread hangs around until after the election results.

I vote we start a new thread after the election results.


Brian

WAR certainly has many faults. However, Grich and Sandberg are not that far off each other one way or another. As stated above, WAR represents what the player does over his position in his league. Grich played in more years where offense was down(especially at his position).

OPS+ is similar in regard to measuring against your own league average(but not position).

Grich has a 125 OPS+
Sandberg has a 116 OPS+

Sandberg did that in about 1,000 more career plate appearances so then if you add that it closes the gap a little, but still when compared vs their league average Grich would still be superior hitting wise.

If you want to ignore the league context, then lifetime:

Grich .794 OPS
Sandberg .795 OPS

So ignoring the league run scoring environment, you see that they are about as equal as you can be hitting wise.

Keep in mind that OPS+ and WAR do account for home field hitting advantage. Sandberg did hit in the friendly confines and it wasn't called that for nothing in that time period. Run scoring certainly got a boost from Wrigley.

Sandberg lifetime:

Home OPS .853
Road OPS .738

That is a stark difference. So if someone wants to ignore any park adjustments from WAR or OPS+, then it would be equally right to state that without Wrigley that Sandberg really is a .738 hitter compared to Grich's .795

Grich for his career played in some pitchers parks and his lifetime home/road are .796 to .793. Usually home hitting is higher than road for hitters.

So if one wants to just ignore any of the more accurate measurements that put Grich and Sandberg in the same level, then again, it is just as fair to say without Wrigley that Sandberg does not even compare to Grich.

Now, keep in mind, just looking at home/road splits isn't the only step. OPS+ takes further steps to make those park adjustments more reasonable, and even with that, Grich is sill superior.

There is more to the equation such as baserunning and fielding of course, but the hitting is the lions share of the value(considering they were both superior fielders).

In the end, you need to look further. If you look at the more accurate stats that represent the value(including baserunning and men on base hitting).

Sandberg has a lifetime Win Probability Added of 27.7 wins above average
Grich is 19.9

Sandberg has a lifetime Run Expectancy of 325 runs above average.
Grich is 227.

That 100 run difference in run expectancy really is what separates Sandberg and Grich, and that includes all components of offense and park factors.

Defensively I would give the edge to Sandberg too.

In the end, Sandberg is superior, but it isn't surprising to put Grich in the same level until you look at the more advanced and accurate Run Expectancy numbers that push Sandberg to a higher offensive level to go with his defense advantage.

If they are so similar, why was/is one a household name and the other nearly forgotten? They were contemporaries.

Even without all the number crunching, Grich's contemporaries/managers/coaches/umpires as well as sportswriters/commentators would have realized at the time what you say regarding his home parks being disadvantageous for him. Therefore, one might wonder where any of these people have been over the past 30+ years to champion his induction into the Hall. After all, so many baseball lifers are not in need of a new metric to recognize true talent, especially retroactively! It makes you wonder how many minds of those who spent great portions of time on the diamond with one of these previously unheralded WAR Whizzes would be changed based on such numbers. I just don't see that happening. No matter how open they may be to it, they would likely rely upon their memories first and foremost. They lived it.

I agree that Grich and Sandberg are closer than most people think. But I think OPS+ does control for ballparks.

See this: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/advance...-slugging-plus

On-base Plus Slugging Plus (OPS+)
Definition

OPS+ takes a player's on-base plus slugging percentage and normalizes the number across the entire league. It accounts for external factors like ballparks. It then adjusts so a score of 100 is league average, and 150 is 50 percent better than the league average.

For example, Miguel Cabrera's .895 OPS in 2014 was 50 percent better than the MLB average after being adjusted for league and park factors. As a result, his OPS+ was 150.

The formula
100 x (OBP/lgOBP + SLG/lgSLG - 1)

Why it's useful:
OPS does not tell you how much a player was affected by factors such as his home ballpark's dimensions or altitude. OPS+ attempts to adjust for those factors to give you a context-neutral number.