MLB HOF - Too Big or Too Small?

[Mike D.]

Originally Posted by darwinbulldog

That in itself is a good empirical question. I just took the top 100 players as listed by popular fan vote over at ranker.com and compared them to my sabermetric rankings as a comparison of "old school" vs "numbers geek" rankings.

The lists begin the same (Ruth is #1) and disagree about everyone else from #2-#100. Their #2 (Gehrig) is my #15. Some other notable discrepancies:

Ernie Banks is their #18 and misses my top 100.
Yogi Berra is their #22 (#1 catcher) and misses my top 100 (#8 catcher [or #7 if you exclude Josh Gibson, but you shouldn't; anyway, Gibson did make both lists]).
Barry Bonds is my #4 and misses their top 100 (#105).
Roger Clemens is my #5 and misses their top 100 (#124).
Kid Nichols is my #10 and misses their entire published list (which goes through #150).
Eddie Collins is my #17 and their #74.
A-Rod is my #21 and misses their entire published list.
Mike Schmidt is my #24 and their #93.


Only 55 players made both lists. One could calculate a Spearman rank order correlation if so inclined, but it's clearly not going to be nearly as high as I would have expected. I assumed the Yankees would be systematically overrated by the voting, and that is correct, but since I figured only baseball fans would bother voting on the rankings I wasn't prepared to see Barry Bonds at #105 (right between John Smoltz and Robin Yount) or Kid Nichols outside of the top 150.

Not sure what your sabermetric ranking looks like, but my first take is that that ranker list may be...not very good. Bonds at 105? Clemens 124?

I mean, if you look at the top 100 players all time by WAR (I used BBR variety), I count 16 who aren't in the hall of fame.

That list includes:

- Five active "likely inductees" (Pujols, Trout, Kershaw, Verlander, Grienke)
- Four steroid guys (Bonds, Clemens, Arod, Palmeiro)
- Two Players on the ballot currently or soon with a good shot at induction (Schilling & Beltre)
- Four players often cited as deserving (Grich, Whitaker, Dahlen, McCormick)
- Pete Rose (I *bet* you know why he's not in)

Of the 16, time should see 7-10 of them should get in, maybe more if the thinking changes on the steroid crew.

Of course, the HOF has something like 235 players, not 100, so you'd get a bigger gap as the list grows.