eras committee candidates baseball HOF

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by BillyCoxDodgers3B

At the very least, it would be nice if the new metric would more greatly compliment a player's previous recognition. If a player is almost entirely forgotten about when there are so many alive who saw him play, that speaks more to me than anything a new metric has to say. Yes, Grich won a few awards, but he never led the league with any dizzying stats. In fact, the only three instances where he did so was once in games played (who cares) and once in HR with a whopping 22. (Side note: 22 HR led the league?!). Oh, and WAR one season, a stat which had yet to be created. He retired nearly 40 years ago and it always felt like his name was lost to time. Even if he had been moderately superb, logic would dictate that he'd have been mentioned with exponentially more frequency. But all was quiet for so long until WAR came about, and BOOM, he's a legend?

If you could show that WAR in general is a bad metric, that would make sense. If you can just point to one example where it rates highly a player not previously thought to rate high, then to me what's much more logical is to say this player was underappreciated in his day for the less than obvious things he did. What I don't think you can do is cherry pick. Oh WAR is great generally, and I agree with it except in this one case. Can it really be that it's a great metric but it just completely fails in one single case? Seems unlikely.

So again, I think one has to make out a case against WAR generally. For example, it overrates the value of walks. It overrates the importance of fielding. Etc.