Quote:
Originally Posted by Misunderestimated
A friend of mine once remarked that it called the Hall of Fame not the "Hall of Stats"...
WAR and other Uber stats (like Win Shares) purport to capture the worth of players based entirely on their statistical performances during the regular seasons. This is insufficient to measure a career for HOF purposes. Here are some of my additional factors:
1) What if the player won a lot -- doesn't that mean something (hence the abundance of Yankees with iffy WAR scores like Scooter and Ruffing)
2) What if the player was considered the BEST or among the very best at a certain aspect of the game ? Brock with SBs, Mazeroski and Maranville as great middle infielders... Sewell and Kell were impossible to strike out).
3) What if the player was recognized at the time and and years after as the BEST at his position? As Paul pointed out above-- Pie Traynor was considered baseball's greatest 3B for many many years after his career. I have a Kelloggs' 3D card of him that reflects this estimation from the early 1970's.
4) What about innovation (I don't just mean Candy Cummings) how about Bruce Sutter, Roger Bresnahan etc.
5) What about short-term greatness ?
6) What about great Post-season performances? Jack Morris for instance.
Remember: the object of the game is to win championships.
That said, I still think T. McCarthy, G. Kelly and "Sunny Jim" Bottomley and many of the others are less than worthy. We know that Frisch packed the HOF with his cronies and some like Kelly and Lindstrom simply don't measure up.... And I also think that Dahlen and some of the others discussed above belong instead.
But it's about a lot more than WAR scores...
---
Also I note that Tommy McCarthy was a big winner in his day and considered a stellar outfielder. I don't think this is enough to put him in the HOF but it does explain why the Veterans Committee back in the day picked him without the benefit of WAR (or much else given the paucity of 19th Century stats at the time). They selected someone based on legend and reputation - he was one of the "heavenly twins" of the outfield with Hugh Duffy...
https://baseballegg.com/2010/02/01/b...eavenly-twins/ |
I agree with much of this. I don't think there's much of a Yankee bias (For every questionable Yankee in, there's one you would expect to have made it if there was a Yankee bias, like Mattingly). Winning doesn't matter much, even the absolute best couldn't win championships on their own, in a game where the impact of a single player is limited over the course of a season it's not a good measure of an individual. Context of the election is important, and why I wouldn't put Cummings on a list of the worst choices, or necessarily even McCarthy.
Cummings was not elected for his statistical performance, he was elected because he was thought to have either invented the curveball or popularized it and brought it to the mainstream game. Which seems a clearly worthy innovation.
McCarthy was in the AA and WAR hates him and OPS+ hates him, but these didn't exist. He stole a ton of bases, scored a ton of runs, and hit .292. He had a reputation for wonderful defense and developed new plays and styles that were a counter to an unpopular-among-baseball-elitists thuggish style of play. I'm not even clear that they had available full statistics of the traditional stats for him in 1947 when he was picked.
Maranville, Mazeroski and Schalk were elected for their defense. It is reasonable to posit that defense of non-pitchers doesn't have enough of an impact to merit induction for it alone, but the use of batting stats to deride the choices that is usually done instead completely misses the context.
I think it much worse when the reasons actually present in that time for the selection are A) completely unreasonable, B) inconsistent or C) openly corrupt. Waner, the Fritsch appointments, Baines, Sutter, Morris, these types where the standards used for them are corrupt or pretty inconsistent and unreasonable are much worse picks.