Most undervalued HOFers

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by G1911

One of pitcher WAR’s big components is the runs expected for a replacement pitcher - relying on that teams defense. WAR has his teams being worth negative defense, making a big gap between him pitching very well anyway and the projections based on the data that he had a horrible defense behind him prone to giving up many runs on balls in play. WAR also factors how runs were scored - rewarding FIP components. Reuschel was good at avoiding the long ball. He was good at keeping batted balls in play vs. out of the park, but even with a really bad defense and that tendency, he still did a good job at not giving up many runs (pretty similar ERA’s to Perry and Ryan), an impressive record.

The other component is that Palmer gets punished for these same things. Palmers ERA to FIP is an unusually huge gap, because FIP measures these same things. He has a 2.86 ERA, but a 3.50 FIP which typically demonstrates over a long sample lots of luck or a really, really good defense, which I don’t think anyone would dispute Palmer had behind him.

I’m sure there’s more smaller factors too, but this is the root cause.

Belanger and Brooks are possibly the best left side of an infield ever. Paul Blair was considered a great center fielder.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Belanger and Brooks are possibly the best left side of an infield ever. Paul Blair was considered a great center fielder.

I don’t think I can think of a better defensive team overall off the top of my head than those Orioles clubs.

You can see Palmer’s results were not the result of luck by checking the team totals back then. The Orioles with Palmer off the mound produced highly unusual gaps between FIP and ERA because Weaver had such a great defensive squad out there.

My personal objections to WAR are that one has to agree with tons of valuation values to find it correct, but more significantly the root concepts that 1) the true actual result doesn’t matter much and 2) the bar of comparison should be a fictional made up minor leaguer instead. I liked that Win Shares was based on real world actual wins, and metrics like ERA+ that do great at contextualizing without losing that connection to real world event. All the same, this is a good example of why these metrics are valuable - I don’t think I’d say Palmer was worse but WAR has really opened the door to showing that Palmer had a massive amount of advantages people weren’t really factoring before and that Reuschel has been unfairly overlooked and did very well in a very difficult context.