The reasons for voting for one player for Hall of Fame induction over another are as varied as the 500-plus writers, statisticians and bloggers who vote for the Hall of Fame. Generally, a player’s candidacy comes down to how a voter views the player’s career record and contribution to the teams he played for. These are, not coincidentally, the areas that sabermetrics (the analytical study of baseball) is most focused on.
Since I’m interested in baseball statistics and how player performance affects team win-loss totals, I lean strongly toward an analytical take on who should be in the Hall of Fame. Voters have long favored traditional benchmarks like 500 home runs and 300 wins, but as our knowledge of how player performance relates to a team’s success has grown, we now see the limitations of those statistics. This is why I prefer to use Wins Above Replacement, a statistic that isolates each player’s contributions to the team.
WAR combines all of a player’s contributions to the team (hitting, pitching, fielding, base running, position played, among other statistics) into a single number of runs saved or created for his team and then
into a number of wins the player adds to his team total. That total is then measured against what a replacement player from, say, Class AAA would produce.
Wins are a valuable and relatively stable currency across all eras in major league baseball, so WAR makes cross-era comparisons much easier than they would be otherwise. The top five career leaders in WAR are Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays and Cy Young, with Hank Aaron, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, Tris Speaker and Roger Clemens completing the top 10. (For the sake of this discussion, we’ll leave any adjustment needed for steroids to the voters.)
A high career WAR marks a Hall of Fame career better than any other statistic. Among the top 100 players in career WAR not under current or future Hall of Fame consideration, only five have not made the Hall of Fame: Bill Dahlen, Tony Mullane, Bob Caruthers, Lou Whitaker and Bobby Grich. In general, 55 WAR has been the midpoint level for all Hall of Famers as three-fourths of the eligible players with 55 or more WAR are in the Hall of Fame. Whitey Ford, Andre Dawson and Jim Bunning are good examples of median Hall of Famers.
Using a cut-off of 55 WAR, we see 12 credible candidates on the current ballot. Bert Blyleven (88 WAR) and Jeff Bagwell (80) are both no doubt Hall of Famers by the numbers. Both suffer because of the context they played in, Blyleven with little run support and Bagwell with the Astrodome as a home park, but both are among the best ever at their positions.
Behind those two is a large group with 63 to 69 WAR (84 percent of eligible players with 63 or more WAR are in the Hall of Fame). In order, they are Barry Larkin, Larry Walker, Edgar Martinez, Alan Trammell, Rafael Palmeiro, Tim Raines, Kevin Brown, Roberto Alomar and Mark McGwire. The 12th player is John Olerud with 57 WAR.
When we look closely at the records of the best (at least by WAR) non-Hall of Famers, it appears that the writers undervalue on-base percentage (as evidenced by Martinez, Raines, Bagwell and Walker, who appear unlikely to gain induction this year) and offense at premium defensive positions (as shown by Whitaker, Larkin, Trammell and Grich’s difficulties in reaching election).
In general, it is easier to gain induction by doing one thing really well, like Tony Gwynn (68 WAR) and his 3,000 hits, than it is to do a lot of things well, as was the case with Walker (67 WAR) and Tim Raines (65 WAR). Raines actually reached base more times in his career than Gwynn did, but since a large percentage of times it was by walk rather than by single, he is not seen as being as worthy of induction as Gwynn.
Of these 12 worthy candidates, I expect only Alomar and Blyleven to gain induction this year. They polled above 70 percent last year, and there is a strong pull to get those players over the 75 percent threshold when they come so close.
Despite many remaining years of eligibility for the other 10, their candidacies require some urgency. They most likely need to be voted in by 2012 or face the chance of never making the Hall. A tsunami of highly deserving and controversial candidates is building and will most likely wash away the lesser candidates currently on the ballot.
Blyleven vs. Morris
No comparison has riled up the debates been stathead and traditionalist camps more than that of Jack Morris versus Bert Blyleven.
Statheads point out either directly or in some variety of comparable statistics that Blyleven has 88 Wins Above Replacement to Morris’s 39. Traditionalists then point out that Blyleven was 287-250 and Morris was 254-186. This appears to be a point in Morris’s favor, but only if you believe that the pitcher is completely in control of their win-loss record.
During Blyleven’s starts, the average offense backing him ranked 6.5 in the league in runs scored (so an average of the sixth- or seventh-best offense in the league). Morris, however, was backed by offenses ranking on average 4.3 in the league in runs scored. This is the second-best offensive backing, behind Tim Wakefield, among all starters since 1973 with 300 or more starts. This run support directly led to Morris’s win-loss percentage advantage.
If we compare Morris and Blyleven by the number of runs the offense scored in games they started, Blyleven was as good or better than Morris at winning games at each level of run support. Morris just received historically high levels of run support.
Given Morris’s distribution of run support, Blyleven’s won-loss percentage rises from .534 to .617 and his record goes to 331-206.