currently active players with a shot at the hall of fame

will it happen before the mainstream realizes that pitcher wins don't mean shit, tho?

mostly talking about Ks here

pitcher wins don't mean shit, tho?

Season to season, sure. Over the course of a career, demonstrably not true. James did a thing a few months ago where he systematically ranked pitcher categories as reliable indicators of quality. He had W-L record somewhere in the middle:

6) Won-Lost Records (60.9%). OK, the most interesting conclusion from these studies is the fact that won-lost record and its brother, winning percentage, perform better as a predictor of true value than ERA and its brothers, runs allowed per 9 innings and WHIP, so let’s deal with that here.

We've had this argument nine million times.

Not sure how durable David Price will be, but he looks good in the strikeout department (through age-28 season):

Smoltz -- 1,252
Price -- 1,059 (and counting)
Schilling -- 618

Schilling, of course, hadn't really gotten started yet--struck out 2,215 through his 30s.

New election rules: the eligibility period was shortened to ten years, and voters must make their names public (but not their ballots) and agree to a code of conduct, i. e. the Le Batard rule.

It's kind of unfair to apply it to player who are already on the ballot, especially with all the HOF worthy players on the ballot and those who will be added in the next few years. Tim Raines can probably kiss his chances goodbye.

So wait, everyone agrees there is traffic jam on the ballots and the way to resolve this is to reduce the number of eligible years?

*quits thinking/caring/reading about Hall of Fame*

players who are already on the ballot will still get the full 15 years

xxp

yeah this is ridiculous

not sure what shortening the period does, do they think the voters will feel pressured to vote for guys sooner?

blaming this on bud don't care if he didn't do it

wait that's real?

ya

literally the only change that solves an actual existent problem is the dan lebatard thing. not even blank ballot bullshit. what is the point! rip raines

changes to the vet committee?

As for the others, players can still maintain their status on the BBWAA by attaining five percent of the vote each year. That part of the rule hasn't changed. But after 10 years, they now will be eligible for consideration by only one of the three Veterans Committees -- the Post-Expansion Era Committee -- which meets every three years.

that's the only mention of the vet's committee here

Wait how was the Dan LeBatard thing an actual problem?

My first thought was "That's terrible" too, but after compiling a list of all the guys who were elected by the writers past their 10th year of eligibility, I'm not so sure (career WAR in brackets):

1952 – Harry Heilmann (72.1)
1954 – Rabbit Maranville (42.8)
1954 – Bill Terry (54.2)
1955 – Dazzy Vance (59.9)
1955 – Gabby Hartnett (53.4)
1975 – Ralph Kiner (49.3)
1976 – Bob Lemon (48.8)
1980 – Duke Snider (66.5)
2006 – Bruce Sutter (24.6)
2009 – Jim Rice (47.4)
2011 – Bert Blyleven (95.3)

Past Blyleven, Snider, and Heilmann, a lot of dubious names on that list. (And don't forget, Morris just missed in his 15th year.) I guess you could look at it as a variation on the capital punishment cliché: it's better to let 10 guys go in who don't deserve it than lose one over-qualified guy like Blyleven. I still think the much bigger concern is at the front-end of eligibility--set some reasonable benchmarks for staying on the ballot regardless of support, and get rid of the stupid 5% rule that has dropped many players before they had a real chance to build support.

I should exempt Kiner from the dubious list: he was pretty dominant in a shortened career.

add raines

Yes--and Trammell.

well he wouldn't have had a shot unless they extended it to 25 years

man Blyleven is so classic just for RBI baseball alone

players who are already on the ballot will still get the full 15 years

No, I think it's just the guys who are in years 11-15 (Trammell, Mattingly, Smith) who stay eligible for 15 years. So McGwire has only two years left, for instance.

McGwire wasn't going to get in by writer vote even if he had seven years.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_48ks5s0AV6M/TSSCk-hthpI/AAAAAAAAEQM/VPwfEriUrkc/s400/blylevenfarting.jpg

McGwire, sure, but others could get completely hosed by this -- Raines and Edgar Martinez especially.

Raines def. the big loser in all this.

Jay Jaffe on the BP podcast, saying this is the HOF's attempt to shorten the Steroid Era candidate discussion.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=24261

Yeah, that makes sense. Does this mean it's their backhanded way of dealing with the cluttered ballot? IOW, people who have voted for McGwire will give up and vote for someone else?

They don't have to give up (or Bonds and Clemens voters either), they will be unable to vote for them 5 years sooner.

I meant there are people voting for McGwire for example who just want to keep him in the discussion and hope that other voters eventually come around, but now they might not bother voting for him again.

all these changes without extending the ballot past 10 is indefensible

I usually just shrug my shoulders at this stuff, but this is truly nuts: Smotz ahead of Pedro.

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article/mlb/how-will-hall-of-fames-class-of-2015-shape-up?ymd=20140728&content_id=86232740&vkey=news_mlb

There was a lot of lobbying for Smoltz from the podium yesterday, no surprise, and I do think he should go in eventually--maybe four or five years down the road. But Pedro deserves almost as high a percentage as next year as Johnson (slightly less, accounting for career value).

Only 40 people were surveyed, I know--small sample. But I'm still surprised that any sample larger than one person would put Smoltz ahead of Martinez.

Pedro deserves 100%, as does any no-brainer HOFer

In an ideal world, yes. Obviously that's just not going to happen, for reasons that become less and less understandable all the time. The only one that makes the least bit of sense today, with the 10-spot limit, is strategic voting, something I'm not a fan of--go for the 10 best picks--but I at least get that. When Mays and Aaron came up, I'm sure there was a lingering racist component to the electorate--you'd like to believe that's long gone. The Babe-Ruth-didn't-get-100%-so-no-one-should theory, I can't believe that's still at work.

BP podcast above includes speculation that Pedro types will lose votes to candidates who 'need them' under the new system, like Raines.

pedro squeaking by on his first ballot is a lot less despicable than schilling and mussina still hanging out in the 20s.

for reference

fWAR
Pedro: 87.1
Schilling: 83.2
Mussina: 82.5

bWAR
Pedro: 86.0
Schilling: 80.7
Mussina: 82.7

ofc pedro has the "best peak ever maybe" thing going but schilling had probably the second greatest peak of the strds era and mussina is right there with them as a steady producer. schilling will possibly get in eventually but i'm not sure about moose now that he doesn't have the full 15 years.

they'll avoid strds hitters like the plague but still not accept that the era was harder to pitch through

Yes but Cy Youngs!

Also I just discovered Eric Gagné got the 2003 CYA. I'm stunned.

I thought you were a Giants fan, VHS! That was the year Jason Schmidt got robbed.

That was such a joke

I have been into baseball for 2 years. Still lots of awful and great things to discover.

Oh god that was over 10 years ago. D:

The second best peak of the steroid era was Randy Johnson from '99-02--really, he's almost even with Pedro. (Smoltz also overlooked Johnson yesterday, saying that Maddux's four year run of Cy Youngs was only equaled by Koufax; Johnson's right in there with them and Martinez.)

I like checking these things, so I tried to identify the best post-war peak for starters.

Depends what you mean by peak, obviously. I'd have to go back to James's HOF book to find out how he defined it--I think he was the first to write about peak value vs. career value, or at least the first to name it as such. For me, peak means a solid block of four or five seasons. For someone else, it might be three or seven seasons, or it might not require that the seasons be consecutive. Not everyone will agree on that.

Anyway, here are all the four-season blocks of 30+ WAR. I don't think I missed anybody, but I don't know.

1. Johnson – 38.2
2. Pedro – 37.6
3. Koufax – 36.5
4. Wilbur Wood – 35.5
5. Robin Roberts – 35.1
6. Gibson – 35.4
7. Marichal – 33.5
8. Maddux – 33.1
9. Niekro – 33.1
10. Clemens – 33.0
11. Seaver – 31.7
12. Schilling – 31.4
13. Jenkins – 30.7
14. Halladay – 30.3
15. Bunning – 30.2

I should have jotted down the years...Wilbur Wood sticks out on that list so much--everyone else is either in the HOF, or is or should be on his way. (Unless you want to create a separate category for Clemens.) Kevin Brown and Dave Stieb just missed; Carlton's best seasons were spread out (ditto Seaver, whose '69 season falls outside his best four-year block, even though he made the list anyway).

I still think that Gagne's Cy Young was defensible. It looks less special now because strikeouts have gone way up relievers who throw 95 and strikes out 12/9IP aren't rare anymore, but at the time he was doing what no other reliever had done before.

On the premise that there's someone out there who never gets talked about as a candidate right now but will emerge as one in his 30s--and that it's more likely to be a pitcher who turns out to be surprisingly durable (non-pitcher possibilities are usually easy to identify by 30, no?)--I wonder if either Cole Hamels or Jered Weaver might qualify. They're pretty close right now:

Hamels (30) -- 105-79, 124 ERA+, 1.140 WHIP, 3.79 K/BB, 37.7 WAR, 3 Cy Young top-10s
Weaver (31) -- 124-66, 125 ERA+, 1.145 WHIP, 3.13 K/BB, 35.3 WAR, 3 Cy Young top-10s

Close enough that I couldn't say which one's better positioned. I think Weaver's been a little more fragile thus far. They've both had two or three mediocre years, but neither has ever had a flat-out bad season. Long way to go, but I could see one of them ending up with 250 wins and 70 WAR. Which maybe wouldn't be enough even if it happened--don't know where the bar will be for pitcher 15 years from now.