eras committee candidates baseball HOF

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by G1911

WAR directly reduces the value for 19th century pitchers, because otherwise the lists would be dominated by them and their high inning counts. The shorter seasons lead to hitters having lower values of WAR naturally without the direct lowering it does to punish pitchers. Defensive values use a lot of assumptions to fill in missing datapoints, adding to the many problems.

I think WAR is useless for the 19th century, personally. 19th century baseball is pretty much 1/6 of professional baseball history, but rarely gets anywhere near 1/6 of the star credit or fame or attention, unfortunately.

So do you think Nichols should be ranked higher than 4th all time? If not, how do you explain (genuine) why WAR doesn't seem to punish him the way you say it punishes others?