Hall of Fame Early Baseball Committee

[rats60]

Originally Posted by OldOriole

As mentioned, measurements of stats like WAR are not theoretical. WAR also helps to put stats and achievements in historical context that have taken place over different time periods.

In your example, Jeff Kent is not (in part) a first ballot HOFer because his WAR is 55.4 - good enough for 240th all time (right in between Chet Lemon and Ian Kinsler). Jim McCormick is 74th all-time in WAR, just above Hoss Radbourn. Dahlen is similar and ranks 78th all-time (and 7th all time for shortstops). They have about 20 more WAR than Kent. WAR allows us to take a look at players we could never see with our own eyes and there's still a few (but not many) that have been overlooked by the Hall.

It is theoretical. It is a made up stat. bWAR is not the same as fWAR and there can be a large difference between the two. If you are going to say someone is a Hofer because their WAR is above a certain number, then you are saying one person should choose who belongs in the HOF, either baseball reference or fangraphs without any, without any transparency.

[CardCollector]

Originally Posted by rats60

It is theoretical. It is a made up stat. bWAR is not the same as fWAR and there can be a large difference between the two. If you are going to say someone is a Hofer because their WAR is above a certain number, then you are saying one person should choose who belongs in the HOF, either baseball reference or fangraphs without any, without any transparency.

I mean, all stats are made up in some sense. So are the stats that were readily available in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That has no bearing whatsoever on whether newer stats more accurately capture a player's value in a way that wasn't apparent to Hall voters a long time ago. Using the best stats from yesteryear and today, we can get a pretty good idea of who should be in the Hall who wasn't enshrined originally. I like Carothers and Dahlen, and from this thread I now appreciate Harry Stovey, but I don't think we should reject more nuanced stats as "theoretical."

[Fred]

They could divide the 19th century into a couple/few categories that include players and "pioneers". Pioneers would be those that were around in the earliest phases of the game that had no way of fulfilling the 10 year rule. If they started around the mid 1880s, then they at least had a good chance to reach the 10 year criteria.

What's also tough is that there will be SABRist that will indicate the AA was not as competitive as the NL, which would then remove Caruthers from possible consideration because 175 of his 218 wins were wile playing in the AA.

Pioneer:
Ross Barnes (how could they exclude him? Had 9 years but most ABs in any season was < 400).
Mathews (combo of pioneer and player with 10 years, 297 Ws)

Players:
Caruthers (ya know, Pedro Martinez could have also had over 200 Ws and less than 100 Ls if he had not come back for that last season where he was 5-1 for Philly)
Stovey - he led the leagues in so many statistical categories during his playing days (5 x HR, 2 x SB, 4 x R, 4 x 3B)
VanHaltren - didn't lead the league in many yearly categories, but 12 x 100 run seasons is fairly impressive.

Probably many more arguably very deserving.

Two players come to mind that had (5) really good years and a few not so statistically relevant years:
Corcoran
Orr

[CardCollector]

[Deleting a double post]

[CardCollector]

Originally Posted by CardCollector

What's also tough is that there will be SABRist that will indicate the AA was not as competitive as the NL, which would then remove Caruthers from possible consideration because 175 of his 218 wins were wile playing in the AA.

"Not Bad for a Beer League" (see p. 55 of this link: http://research.sabr.org/journals/fi...Pastime-15.pdf) does a nice job of presenting some evidence suggesting that the AA was pretty competitive. Here's the takeaway:

"All of the available evidence--championship series, exhibition games, incidence of bushers and the experience of transferred players--suggests that relative parity was achieved between the two leagues between 1886-1889. Partial evidence (exhibition wins, percent of bushers, a tied championship series) supports the theory that this state of parity was achieved as early as 1885. (Indeed, even the Spalding Guide of 1886 admitted that the American Association clubs had shown 'marked improvement in the strength of their teams' in 1885.)

[alaskapaul3]

Jimmy Ryan? 2500H 118 HR and .308 average. Not too shabby.

Would love to see Mathews and Stovey too

[Kenny Cole]

Ryan was a player. No doubt. Hard for me to argue that he is much different from Van Haltren. Both good ballplayers in the day.

[ValKehl]

+1 for William Ellsworth Hoy. Selected stats for his 14-year career (1 year in the Am. Assn.):
1,787 games - 2,048 hits - .288 batting average - 1,006 walks (vs. 345 Ks) - 134 hit by pitches - .386 on-base % - 596 stolen bases - 1,429 runs (avg. 102 runs per year) - 32.6 WAR.

Someone (hi Leon) says all threads (or is it all posts?) should include a pic of a card:

[packs]

Good idea. Here's a Stovey:

[bobcatfunds]

Originally Posted by ValKehl

+1 for William Ellsworth Hoy. Selected stats for his 14-year career (1 year in the Am. Assn.):
1,787 games - 2,048 hits - .288 batting average - 1,006 walks (vs. 345 Ks) - 134 hit by pitches - .386 on-base % - 596 stolen bases - 1,429 runs (avg. 102 runs per year) - 32.6 WAR.

Someone (hi Leon) says all threads (or is it all posts?) should include a pic of a card:

Yes! My 2nd grade class just read this last week. (I may or may not have talked about Old Judge cards for a bit as well.) :-)

[Jason19th]

While I think WAR is a great stat it is a Theory. It is not an objective measurement like batting average or era. It is a formula that attempts to predict value based on a combination of objective measurements and subjective weights applied to those measurements. It produces a value that cannot yet actually be confirmed. If that is not a theory I don’t know what is

[nat]

fWAR (the version you'll find on Fangraphs) and bWAR (the version on baseball-reference) are two different statistics, that measure different things. Despite the fact that they both talk about "wins above replacement" it's probably best not to think of them as rival accounts of a single value.

There are several differences between them, but the biggest one is in how they deal with pitching. Pitching values in fWAR are based on the pitchers' strikeout rate, walk rate, and homerun allowed rate, since these figures together predict future ERA better than does a pitcher's past ERA. In bWAR, pitcher value is based on runs allowed, which does a less-good job at predicting future ERA, but, of course, does a better job at capturing, you know, the runs that the pitcher actually allowed.

One way to think about the difference between the two is that they are answers to two different questions. fWAR is an answer to the question "if this player were to play for a randomly selected team, how many more (or fewer) games should we expect that team to win in the future?", whereas bWAR is an answer to the question "if this player were to have played for a randomly selected team, how many more (or fewer) games should we expect them to have won?". I think that, for hall of fame purposes, bWAR is the one that you want to look at. The hall of fame is a retrospective thing, and it's bWAR that's the retrospective one.

(In fact, there are, IMHO, pretty limited uses for fWAR. If you are trying to predict future performance, you usually won't want to strip out context in the way that fWAR does. You'll probably want to predict performance of the player if he's playing for some specific team, not a randomly chosen one.)

There's nothing subjective about either WAR measure, they're just algorithms that take events that actually happened and spits out a number. Just like ERA and batting average.

Very briefly, here's the general idea. WAR calculations are based on something called "linear weights". The idea behind linear weights is that each event that happens on a baseball field (a batter hitting a single, for example), has a run value. The run value of an event is how many more or fewer runs a team scores, on average, after an event of that kind. Run values are derived historically - you get them by adding up all of the runs that actually scored after someone hit a single (for example), above or below the average number of runs scored in an otherwise similar situation, and dividing by the number of singles that were actually hit. (You can use all of baseball history for this if you want, but it makes more sense to use a limited range of years, since the run value of an event will vary over time.) By adding up the run values of everything that a player did, you get the number of runs he produced. You then divide that number by the number of runs that will, on average, win a game for a team. (About 10 in recent years - note, this isn't runs scored, it's runs scored PLUS runs that you prevented the other team from scoring.) That gives you the number of wins a player produced. You then find the wins produced by "replacement level" players. A replacement level player is the last guy on the roster, the kind of guy who every team has stashed in AAA, the kind of guy who is barely (or almost) a major leaguer. That kind of guy. And then you subtract replacement level wins from the wins that your player produced to get his wins above replacement.

That's the general idea. There are lots of complications involved in, for example, adjusting for the park that a player plays in. But all of these extra adjustments (that I'm skipping over for the sake of this short post) are also derived from historical data. That is, they, just like the linear weights calculations, reflect what actually happened on the baseball field.

[ValKehl]

Thanks, Scott, for your post re Dummy Hoy. I am in awe of anyone who overcomes a significant handicap to accomplish great things in life. Even though Hoy's career stats are not quite up the the usual HOF standards, I feel the HOF should enshrine Hoy to recognize how much a handicapped baseball player can accomplish.

[GaryPassamonte]

My top choice.

[Leon]

Originally Posted by ValKehl

Thanks, Scott, for your post re Dummy Hoy. I am in awe of anyone who overcomes a significant handicap to accomplish great things in life. Even though Hoy's career stats are not quite up the the usual HOF standards, I feel the HOF should enshrine Hoy to recognize how much a handicapped baseball player can accomplish.

Not a bad perspective.

[rats60]

Originally Posted by CardCollector

I mean, all stats are made up in some sense. So are the stats that were readily available in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That has no bearing whatsoever on whether newer stats more accurately capture a player's value in a way that wasn't apparent to Hall voters a long time ago. Using the best stats from yesteryear and today, we can get a pretty good idea of who should be in the Hall who wasn't enshrined originally. I like Carothers and Dahlen, and from this thread I now appreciate Harry Stovey, but I don't think we should reject more nuanced stats as "theoretical."

WAR isn't based on actual wins, it is based on theoretical wins. Here is an article by Bill James expaining it.

https://www.billjamesonline.com/judge_and_altuve/

[packs]

Here's my Hoy:

[triwak]

I'm pulling for Dahlen, Alejandro Oms, and Buck O'Neil.

[Angyale]

Hoping they get in!