Your top 3 non HOFers

[Brianruns10]

Hodges, Adcock & Minoso for me.

[Hot Springs Bathers]

Hodges, Mattingly and Dahlen but I also agree that numbers are not everything so Minoso, O'Neil and Maris would be great with me. Actually so many great names have been listed that I think many of us could be happy with.

Unlike others I do feel that character is a very important factor in the Hall selections. There is no way to correct the errors of the past but it separates the Baseball Hall of Fame from the Pro Football Hall of Fame which in my opinion is fine but the lack of character in many of their selections reflects the win at all costs attitude that has damaged the league and has had a profound negative effect on college football and the current problems facing the NCAA.

[nat]

Dahlen is a good pick. Most of the guys who the vet's committee has considered in the past few years are underwhelming, but Dahlen deserves election.

Allen had a short career for a hall of famer. 7300 plate appearances just isn't that many. He's at 58 WAR, which is right around the point that players start being serious hall of fame candidates (acknowledging that Frisch and friends from the old vet's committee put in lots of guys with lower totals). He's probably more valuable than those 58 WAR would indicate, however, since he squeezed them into a short time span. (Since winning the pennant requires above-average performance, concentrated great performance is more valuable to a team than is consistent good performance.) Given the hall's standards, he wouldn't a bad choice, although I'm sort of the fence about him.

Walker was better. Only 700 more plate appearances, but 14 additional WAR. Basically, if you took Dick Allen's career, and stuck on Babe Ruth's best season, you'd have Walker's career. (At least in terms of total value, of course Walker never had a single season in which he put up 14 WAR.) It's easy to penalize players too strongly for having played in Colorado, and I think that voters often do. Home-road splits are useful, but they have their limitations. One is that, on average, everybody performs better than expected at home. So you don't want to adjust for Colorado by just doubling a player's road numbers, that would be an unfair penalty to the Rockie. OPS+ is already adjusted for park, and Walker's career total is 141. The same as Alex Rodriguez, Andrew McCutchen, and David Ortiz. Imagine a guy who hit like David Ortiz and was a great fielder, that's Walker.

(And an aside, because I was looking at the OPS+ leader board. Mike Trout is currently 9th, all time. One point ahead of Ty Cobb. Sure it'll go down before he retires, but any time an active player is beating Ty Cobb at something you need to note it.)

[nat]

Since it keeps coming up (especially in my posts), maybe a brief explanation of Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is in order.

The idea is to quantify how much value a player produced, in a way that allows you to compare players across teams and across eras. If the player hadn't been playing, there would have been an open roster spot on his team, which would probably have been filled by some guy from AAA. The performance of that AAA guy is the "replacement" from the stat's name. So WAR tries to calculate how many wins a player would generate for a random team (the randomness is necessary to allow cross-team comparisons), beyond what would be produced by the kind of AAA player that every organization has hanging around.

They do this by finding the "run expectancy" of every event that the player takes part in. Because baseball keeps very good records we know, for example, how many runs, on average, are scored after a player hits a single (or a double, or steals a base, or gets caught stealing, or strikes out, or etc.) That number is the run expectancy for the event. The last time I saw a table setting these out (which was a few years ago, so the numbers in this post are a bit out of date) the run expectancy of a single was about 0.3. The run expectancy of a home run is 1.4. (It's greater than one because there are often players on base when a home run is hit.) We do this with defensive plays too (although it's a bit more complicated with defense). Adding all of those up gives us how many runs the player would have been expected to produce, had he been playing for a random team. We then subtract the number of runs our replacement player (the guy from AAA) would have been expected to produce. That leaves us with the player's net contribution to scoring and preventing runs. Then we divide those numbers by the number of runs scored (or prevented) that it takes, on average, to win a ball game. And the resulting number is the player's WAR.

Edit: Here's a rough guide for what's a good/bad WAR total. Major league average players produce about 2 WAR in a full season. Bench players might get 0.5 to 1. The league MVP usually has around 8 (although there's lots of variation on this). Mike Trout has been averaging about 9 per year. The best season from a position player was Ruth's 1923, which was worth 14. The highest season WAR total ever was Tim Keefe's 1883, which was worth 20 WAR, because he pitched more than 600 innings that year. The best post-1920 pitching season was Dwight Gooden's 1985, worth 13 WAR. It usually takes about 60 WAR to make you a serious hall of fame candidate, although plenty of guys have gotten in with less than that, and a few with higher totals have been left out. Babe Ruth has the all-time career record, with 183 WAR. Cy Young, Walter Johnson, and Barry Bonds are next, with figures in the 160 range.