Where to begin?
The list is very long, but there are certain difficulties involved in telling who is on it. Some of the hilariously bad selections were old guys picked for their defensive work. Rabbit Maranville, Pie Traynor, guys like that. The problem with writing them off completely is that it's really hard to measure defense from that long ago. Modern measurements of defense use play-by-play data, which records where, exactly, the ball was hit, where the player was (supposed to be) standing, and so on. So we have a pretty good idea of the quality of modern defense (although it still trails our understanding of offense). For early guys we often have only chances, put outs, and errors, as well as the propensities of batters to hit to certain fielders. That gives us an idea of how good they were, but we don't know if those chances were really difficult, if the batters really did get their hits where they, on average, get them, and so on. It also doesn't include some of the fine-grained measures that we use to evaluate modern players. I suspect that what this means is that we tend to under-rate early defensive wizards.
That said, my first nomination is Freddie Lindstrom. Even if he was a defensive wizard, there's just no way his career was long enough to collect hall of fame credentials. Frankie Frisch (who is a deserving hall of famer) was the leading force behind the Vet's Committee for many years, and got many of his old friends from the Giants inducted. My guess is that that's what happened with Lindstrom.
Joe DiMaggio - just kidding. Jesse Haines gets the second spot. He was basically an average pitcher, with a 3200 inning career. I don't really know how he got in. He topped out at 8.3% of the vote among the writers, and then the veteran's committee put him in.
Finally: all of the relief pitchers except Eckersley (and Smoltz, who wasn't really a relief pitcher). It's just not possible to accumulate the value it takes to make a decent hall of fame case as a relief pitcher. Eck is helped tremendously by the fact that he spent half of his career as a starter. And it's a really fundamental mistake to think that guys who come in to close the 9th inning are especially valuable: a run counts the same no matter when it's scored. A shut-down 9th inning in a close game is more exciting than a shut-down 1st inning in a game that turns out to be close, but the effect that they have on winning or losing the game is the same.*
*It's worth noting that the guys who developed WAR included a "leverage" component for pitching WAR. Basically, WAR *does* give relief pitcher extra credit for pitching at the end of close games. If you, like me, think that they shouldn't get that extra credit, then you'll think that WAR over rates relief pitchers. And relief pitchers (Eck and Smoltz excepted) are absurdly under-qualified for the hall, even by ordinary WAR standards. It usually takes about 60 WAR to get in the conversation for the hall (give or take), here are WAR totals for hall of fame relief pitchers (remember, INCLUDING the leverage component):
Fingers: 25
Gossage: 42
Sutter: 25
Way below what you usually expect.
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06-14-2016, 03:04 PM
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