hall of fame, next vote...

A little bit--a career box (113 HOF points, getting near the upper end of the gray area) and this:

"Our system thinks that Yadi is a very likely Hall of Famer. You may have the same opinion; you may have a different one. He’s got great defense, several .300 seasons, some meaningful power, and some championship teams."

I don't see him as a HOF'er either--maybe I've got the same blind spot towards catchers that voters have historically had (probably the biggest after third basemen).

i may just give too much weight to WAR, which probably doesn't fully account for all the things a catcher can do. but those same limitations would apply to other catchers too. even if yadi stays healthy and puts up 2-3 more decent seasons, he'll still barely crack the top 25 by WAR.

He's about the same place using JAWS. Of the 11 retired (Posey and Mauer are still active) non-HOF'ers ahead of him, Jaffe's book sold me on Ted Simmons, and I wouldn't even have a problem with Munson, who has a bWAR of 5.6 per 650 plate appearances (although he was clearly in decline when the crash happened). Otherwise, don't think I'd add anybody.

Anyway, before long, he's offering me a bet: $25, and I give him 4-1 odds, that Scherzer doesn't make the HOF even with a third Cy Young.
― clemenza, Thursday, 13 July 2017

The cat's in the bag, and the bag's in the river.

I think most all of us thought he was more or less in before the season started, but a fourth Cy Young would clinch it, and he's got a good start on that. Hard to argue that he hasn't passed Kershaw as the best pitcher in the NL.

Two catchers from the hall of very good that have some similarity to Molina would be Bill Freehan and Lance Parrish. Both of their career war numbers are pretty similar.

Freehan's career is similar to Molina with his whole career with the Tigers and the 60s World Series appearances. Only really know him from baseball cards so I cannot speak to how good his defense was, but I would imagine pretty decent. The guy went to 11 All Star games, so the fans knew him and thought of him as a pretty good catcher.

Lance Parrish is another player I remember as a kid. He was pretty good and had a long career. In his peak, he was a good power hitter and big part of the 84 Tiger World Championship club. Never going to come up in a HOF vote, but he was a good pro catcher for over a decade. 300+ home runs is pretty darn good from behind the plate too.

Kluber and Sale essentially equal to Scherzer over the last 2 years, fWARwise.

yeah those are the big 4 for sure right now

I agree (why I specified NL for Scherzer)--I might put Kluber a little ahead as #1. I don't think Sale is quite as consistent as Scherzer and Kluber.

James has been doing this detailed historical ranking for each position based on...I forget; "Value," but I forget how he arrives at that. He's done all the infield positions now, plus catcher. Anyway, he had Freehan and Torre trading for #1 in the mid-late '60s: Torre #1 in '65 and '66, Freehan #1 in '67 and '68. Parrish had a good run from '80-'86 (Carter #1 every year): #4, #3, #2, #3, #2, #3, #3.

don't know why i decided to look at WAR/G, but decided to share anyway:

https://i.imgur.com/I8l2JCM.png

kinda pointless to include the ancient guys like barnes but it's always fun to see an unexpected name at such a position. among current players, trout is where you'd expect to find him, but there's also bryant, mookie betts (!!) and corey seager, and josh donaldson at #30

Donaldson is going to be a fun case.

yeah of course the younger guys are going to be overrepresented when you look at rate stats...trout (and maybe betts...) obv is an all-timer tho

i think Bryant as potential to be all timer on same level as Betts.

I thought Donaldson was building a really interesting case going into this year--maybe the first viable position player who didn't get started till he was 27. (I'd have to check.) He was already close to taking care of the peak-value half of the argument--four-and-a-half seasons that match almost any third baseman this side of Schmidt. But he needed some background, and this year has really set him back. He doesn't have much margin of error.

Donaldson’s not gonna make it, unless he comes back with another few years like the previous few. His peak is amazing but so was Mattingly’s.

JAWS
Third Base (33rd):
37.6 career WAR / 37.9 7yr-peak WAR / 37.7 JAWS

Average HOF 3B (out of 14):
68.4 career WAR / 43.0 7yr-peak WAR / 55.7 JAWS

beltre will only make this worse

ya, i don't think i ever thought of Donaldson as a HOF.

It's true that in a hall of fame without Rolen, Nettles, and Martinez (arguably less a 3B than a DH), Donaldson's case look thin.

I mean the peak is there.

Injuries will most likely keep someone like Donaldson from going long enough to get into the hall. The guy I started thinking about was Troy Glaus, who put up a few really good seasons for the Angels and then the injuries tore him up.

yeah Glaus was better than people remember, those two 40+ HR/100 BB years in his age 23 & 24 seasons were a promise never quite fulfilled.

Matt Williams is another hall of the very good third baseman that had a couple of monster seasons.

All those guys were really good for a couple of years, but I don't think you'll find a four-year peak (plus his injury year last season, which was great) to match Donaldson's. Mattingly's a good comparison, position aside.

Anyway, as I say, almost no margin of error. He'd have to put up another 4-5 solid seasons--All-Star caliber, if not quite MVP-caliber--to have a chance. And this year, plus the injury last year, makes that seem increasingly unlikely.

(If he did pull it off, though, he'd be in a better position than Mattingly. For HOF voters, I'm pretty sure playing well through your 30s is preferable to early peak and then a sudden end, or, even worse, a long, prolonged slide.)

VHS: I don't think Martinez is arguably less a third baseman than a DH. It's pretty inarguable--he had almost three times as many games/PA as a DH.

yeah true, the DH award is named after him on top of that.

Still, justice for Rolen!

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/max-scherzer-has-somehow-been-better/

might have to start talking about scherzer's circle, not just whether he'll get it

in*

also, pedro in 1999...

random thought

matt william hit 43 home runs in 112 games during the 1994 strike season, on pace to hit in the low 60s. if he would have beaten mcgwire and sosa to the record by 4 years, maybe he'd be in the hall of fame right now? as it is, he ended up with about 45 fWAR and is ranked 29th by JAWS. but being the first to break maris' record seems like it would have given him a boost, fairly or not.

well, that wasn't true for mcgwire or sosa, both superior players!

true, but it's PEDs keeping those two out

unless, was that a thing for matt williams too? can't remember

If you give him the then-record and change nothing else about his career, no, I don't think he would have made it--the difficult path for third basemen is well established. But if he'd broken the record, maybe that would have changed his career (he was basically finished at 33) and maybe he would have done stuff that would have put him in.

Matt Williams would basically be Roger Maris in that case, I think. Though I mean I think w/full heath and no strike he’d have an interesting case, he lost a lot of time in ‘95 and ‘96 as well, he likely lost 60 HR total over those three seasons.

WAR has his three best seasons ('90/91/93) all before he chased Maris. His two big seasons after '94 ('97/99) have a big built-in PED-era adjustment.

Yeah Longoria has already better JAWS and I'm not even sure he is going to make it because of the BBWA dinosaurs (heck Rolen only made 10%, Boyer and Nettles are out).

Williams is pretty similar to Rolen, fantastic peak player and played quite a few years but lost a lot of games to a multitude of injuries.

Ryan Zimmerman's career arc is also pretty similar to Rolen and Williams too, although his peak was not quite a the same level. He's had a couple years where he really tore it up at the plate.

I'm starting to think Grienke has a pretty good shot (after being somewhat dismissive of his chances earlier). He's 34, still pitching well, and sitting at a career WAR of just under 60. 70 is close to a sure thing for a pitcher. The only 20th-century pitchers above 70 who aren't in are Clemens (obvious explanation, may still go in), Mussina (he'll be in soon), and Schilling (hard to say--please shut up).

Greinke still feels a little wrong to me, so I've quantified something I've mentioned before: how much of his career value resides in two seasons. I took all career WAR leaders down to Greinke, eliminated pitchers who did most of their pitching in the 19th century (when pitcher WARs were crazy--Tim Keefe is on the fence, so I left him in), and calculated their two best seasons as a percentage of career WAR. The Top 10:

               Career  2 Best    Pct.
Ed Walsh	63.8	22.7	35.6%
Joe McGinnity	60.5	21.5	35.5%
Hal Newhouser	60.7	20.9	34.4%
Rube Waddell	60.8	20.1	33.1%
Zack Greinke	59.3	19.5	32.9%
Dazzy Vance	62.7	20.6	32.9%
Juan Marichal	61.9	19.3	31.2%
Bob Feller	65.5	20.1	30.7%
Red Faber	68.5	20.8	30.4%
Vic Willis	67.6	19.1	28.3%

Almost a third of his career value came in 2009 and 2015; the rest of the time, he's been a good pitcher with one season of 6.1, another of 5.3, and nothing else over 5.0. I don't know if that should matter or not--Gibson, Carlton, and Kershaw are all above 25%, and Pedro's just shy of that.

The ten most consistent measured this way are Cy Young, Roger Clemens, Eddie Plank, Tommy John, Greg Maddux, Bert Blyleven, Walter Johnson, Mike Mussina, Nolan Ryan, and Don Sutton. They're all between 15-19%.

For purposes of comparison, Koufax's two best seasons account for 39% of his career value. Mark Fidrych's two best contribute 105%.

There needs to be an adjustment for career length...Trout right now comes out at 34%, and obviously he's not a two-season phenom--he just hasn't played long enough. By the time he finishes, that percentage will come come down considerably as his two-best-seasons number more or less stays the same (it may go up a bit) and his career number climbs.

Three of the pitchers ahead of Greinke had pretty short careers: McGinnity (10 seasons), Wadell (13), and Ed Walsh (14). Newhouser pitched 17. Greinke's at 15 and counting.

yeah I was going to make that point

it's an interesting way of looking at it...though ultimately it's not too different than what JAWS tries to do

So if Greinke does end up at, say, 70 for his career, his pct. would still be close to the Top 10 at 27.9% (I'll assume he doesn't top his two best seasons the rest of the way), but his career wouldn't seem quite as lopsided as it does now.

There needs to be an adjustment for career length.

i think the way to do it would be to compare a player's best two seasons to the total of, say, their best 10 seasons. that way you're still measuring how much a couple outlier seasons contributed to that player's career, but you're not rewarding (or punishing) players who stuck around for a long time. but as k3vin said, JAWS does a similar kind of thing in measuring the best 7-season stretch of a career

Greinke has a pretty solid shot at the HOF if he finishes up his career w/a string of seasons like this one, just to push that win total up into an area that'll make trad stat types happy, along w/his WAR probably getting towards Mussina/Schilling territory. it probably helps that at present there really only seem to be half a dozen other starting pitchers who are on a possible HOF track (Verlander, Kershaw, Scherzer, Sale, Sabathia, Kluber if you're optimistic about him having a nice run deep into his thirties.)

Would love to see Kluber do it but oof the path is pretty narrow. Not saying it's impossible! Just that if he does it where are going to be all grateful to witness such a peak.

For career length if a player has it then it's fantastic and it's bonus points in my opinion, there is something pretty great as someone who plays for so long, there's value in that. On the other hand, and it might seem contradictory, but if a career is shortened for whatever reason it should not count against the player.

eh..disagree except in special circumstances

I'm a big hall guy anyway, get Reuschel and Lolich in imo.

To get Reuschel and Lolich in, it would indeed have to be a very big hall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-4-gLlF0uw

hahaha