Most undervalued HOFers

[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.