hall of fame, next vote...

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

though ultimately it's not too different than what JAWS tries to do

I don't think that's right. The JAWS peak is based on seven seasons. Greinke's WAR7 right now is 46.3, which puts him within a couple of games either way of Palmer, Reuschel, Mussina, and Glavine, much more consistent pitchers who all score low (18-23%) on what I'm trying to isolate.

https://t.co/Iyxv0lzyPX

let chase utley in

(fangraphs link)

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/24200497/what-makes-member-hof-class-hall-famer

So why did Morris get elected? Maybe the root of the argument spins around this idea, something I've come around on as a plausible Hall of Fame discussion point: Can you tell the story of the player's era without that player being a prominent part of that story? A recent example is David Ortiz. If you're going strictly by career value, Ortiz's Hall of Fame case is murky, with just 55.3 WAR. But he obviously towered over the game; you can't tell the story of 2004 to 2016 without Ortiz as a central figure. You could make a similar argument for Yadier Molina, a player whose Hall of Fame case is better than his numbers.

That's kind of the Morris argument. He pitched one of the most famous games in baseball history. He won two games in the 1984 World Series for the Tigers, one of the best and most famous teams of the '80s. He was a workhorse in a decade in which many of the other top pitchers didn't stay healthy enough to cement their Hall of Fame cases. You can't really tell the story of the 1980s and 1991 without Morris as a main character.

And yet still closer to Livan Hernandez than Mike Mussina.

Six living, well-known players going in this weekend--that's got to be the most since the first couple of years.

I read somewhere the other day that it's the most in quite a while, forget the timeframe now though

a full 2/3rds of them deserve it too.

It is a fucking travesty that Morris, not Whitaker, is entering the Hall of Fame.

I'm sure that Trammell and Morris will now push for Whitaker's induction (as Maddux and Glavine did with Smoltz), and that the Veteran's Committee will step in soon enough.

http://www.freep.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2018/07/25/detroit-tigers-lou-whitaker-alan-trammell-hall-fame/830271002/

at least 3.5 of the 6 deserve it

Trammell and Morris got me looking at stats and players on that 84 Tiger team. I was 14 that season and followed that year like a hawk each week in the Sporting News. I remember the early season no-hitter that Jack Morris threw on the Saturday game of the week. I was watching it and my dad was working out in the garage and would keep popping in every now and then on the game. It was a really deep roster with great depth both on their bench and their pitching staff.

Historically great team, but I'll use that to correct a common misperception (I followed that year pretty closely too): that after their 35-5 start, Detroit ran away with the division. While they did win the division by +15.0 in the end, Toronto also had a fantastic start, and on June 6, after taking two of three from the Tigers, Toronto had moved to within 3.5 games; Detroit was 39-13 (so they'd just had a 4-8 stretch), Toronto 36-17. They never got that close again, although they were still within six on July 6.

One other thing that popped out on me checking out those Tigers 84 stats, check out Chet Lemon's WAR stats on Baseball Reference. I'm going to have to think about this one for a while, but dig this...his WAR offensive career numbers are pretty much the same as Dave Parker and Jim Rice. Both those guys had a couple thousand more at bats, but both had a couple years where they were arguably the best all around hitter in baseball (and 3 MVPs).

I could easily believe Lemon's defensive WAR numbers would be much better, as he was a good center-fielder and Rice was pretty much always bad in the field. Parker had an amazing arm, but his legs were all beat up bad a good portion of his career. That Chet's offensive WAR by their metrics career equivalent to Jim Rice and Dave Parker. I am going to have to mull that one over as I would not put him in the same level as those two guys.

Saw that no-hitter, too -- maybe three feet from the screen, lying on the floor, from first to last pitch.

I was envious of the Jays for their outfield and Stieb (an actual ace), not that I ever let my best friend (who was originally from Mississauga) know about it. Speaking of '84, this article he wrote (long after he returned to Mississauga and became famous) mentions Dave Collins, whose #deceptivespeed we joked about: https://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/mendes-bracketology-b-sides/

Here's Chet. George Kell on the call and Gibson in left.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7RMB5m-drU

that promo is 100x better than any modern promo i've seen