hall of fame, next vote...

or John Franco

Jason Isringhausen for HOF

I'd say the guy who will benefit most from Smith's choice is Billy Wagner.

Smith, i disagree with – but i understand it's based in a different/older understanding of the game... but Baines?! BAINES?!?!? Even Baines thinks it's fucked up!

i am not against billy wagner's induction tbh

my memory of Harold Baines will always be how the ChiSox traded him to the Rangers, and he returned to play against them early in the season, and they retired his number before a game, and everyone was confused because a) the ceremony was pretty haphazard, and b) it was Harold Baines.

i've never seen this kind of reaction to a HOF selection, Morris and Rice and others sort of felt inevitable, this one was out of left field (unlike Harold Baines, who didn't take the field for the last twenty years of his career iirc!)

looks like a Big Hall

ex-players should not be voting; the trees don't understand the forest

Posnanski has a good thing on Baines today that uses a front-door/back-door metaphor for the HOF, and he says back-door picks like Baines and Smith have no bearing on anyone else (i.e., Mazeroski didn't help Frank White). By which logic, Smith doesn't help Wagner at all.

But I think they can easily avoid the slippery-slope problem by putting Wagner in. Smith is not the least deserving closer in there; that's gotta be Sutter. If you put in anyone incontrovertibly more deserving than Smith, that closes the circle. And I think that points to Wagner. There are a few others--Franco, Nathan, Rodriguez--where I think you can finesse the logic of having Smith in and not them (the decade-long saves record, more innings, etc.). Put Wagner in, and 15-20 years from now, you can maybe take a look at Kimbrel/Jensen/Chapman, or maybe someone else will come along who rises to the Rivera level (or to Hoffman's--I'd set the bar at Hoffman, though I know most if not all of you disagree). But Wagner would be it for non-active closers forever.

Baines...is a whole other problem.

I mean, if Baines is a hall of famer, so is... *lists off literally two hundred players*

(I am kind of tempted to do this)

i dunno if this year's voting has already been done, but i'd think this would really concentrate minds on edgar and larry walker

The results are announced Jan. 22, so they can't have voted already, right? I don't recall the tracker going online or anything.

Larry Walker has one year left after this, I imagine that Baines might actually help him as a comparison point, an actual peak HOF five-tool OF talent vs Baines' career of plodding around out there with his one-and-a-half tools. Baines has him beat in, what, health and a single home run and those skills that just don't translate into a single bWAR season that would knock out one of Larry's top ten seasons.

After this upcoming year's possible four-player enshrinement, Walker seems like the guy a lot of people will rally behind.

the HOF tracker is up and running, 32 ballots counted

https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=F2E5D8FC5199DFAF!11134&ithint=file,xlsx&app=Excel&authkey=!ACeqm-knNxexBw8

in that very small sample size:

Walker and Martinez have both gained 6 votes from returning voters. McGriff and Mussina have gained 5. Vizquel has gained 4.

i support an expansive hall in general and don't necessarily go by 'okay you hit 65 WAR and you're in'. bill mazeroski doesn't belong in the hall, but he did at least hit one of the two most famous homers in baseball history. orel hershiser at least had an incredible 1988, and a shutout streak, and ALCS/NLCS/WS MVPs. dave parker won an MVP and had that throw in the all-star game. david ortiz had a bunch of top-five MVP finishes, a WS MVP, and was a famous jolly papi

pretty sure baines' biggest moment was the number-retirement omar mentioned? like i don't want to poop on the guy -- he was a good hitter! had a nice career! -- but there's really nothing to point to at all. was there ever a period -- even of a couple months -- where people claimed harold baines was one of the top X hitters in the game?

Thanks, didn't know the tracker was up.

Edgar's at 100% through 32 ballots--even allowing for drop-off, he's in, finally. Halladay also looks very good.

Mussina's at 84%, which I expect means he'll come in close--if not this year, next year for sure. Schilling's at 75%; he won't make it, but I think that's a bounce-back, no? Walker's at 66%; the sabermetric picks almost always drop off, so I think he's going to miss again, unfortunately. Bonds and Clemens...getting closer, still in limbo. (I'll never understand the voter who says yes to Clemens but no to Bonds--it must be the same guy every year.)

i think the net gains in votes are pretty instructive, Walker gaining six out of 32 is pretty impressive though i tend to agree on the sabermetric picks and he missed by 173 votes last year, he'll need a major groundswell of fresh support, no way he's in this year obv. just hoping it sets him up to go in next time around. Mussina gaining five and needing to pick up 49 overall is a pretty good trend.

There's no end to the ways you can frame how indefensible the Baines pick is. The subject will wear itself out, but for now, scroll down to the "Hall of Baines" chart--"composed of all players who rate at least as well compared to the Hall of Fame averages at their respective positions as Baines does to his."

http://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/12/10/18135296/harold-baines-hall-of-fame-todays-game-era-committee

Chris Hoiles is catching, Ray Durham's at second.

Was Baines a Clemente type humanitarian ? or like the coolest dude to have around? I don’t know him at all beyond the statsheet; from that perspective, his number retirement always felt weird. All of this is cool if he deserves as a great person.

LaRussa: "But if you look at his record, it can’t be denied. The 3,000 hits are right there. In the 80s and 90s, in just about every offensive category, (Baines is) in the top four or five guys.”

He's probably right about hits. (Even there, though, I'm not sure.) Is that even close to being true about any other category, big or small?

Jeff Sullivan says it's now the Hall of Sometimes Good

from 1980-2000 -- which covers baines' entire career apart from 32 very poor games in 2001 -- he ranks fifth in hits, 11th in homers, third in RBI, third in plate appearances and second in GIDP

his 384 homers are two fewer than sammy sosa and three more than albert belle, both of whom did it in nine fewer seasons. he's well behind fred mcgriff (417), who did it in six fewer seasons. the 90s were a different offensive era from the 80s, but only twice in each decade did he rank in the top 10 in his league in OPS+

of the 145 players who debuted in 1980, baines ranks second in career WAR behind fernando valenzuela and just ahead of tim wallach. (no. 145 is ned yost at -3.7 in 219 games, yikes)

baines from 1980 to 1999:

101st in wRC+
29th in fangraphs offensive runs above average
76th in batting average
139th in OBP
99th in slugging
5th in hits
2nd in RBI
9th in HR
12th in runs scored

haha mookie beat me to it

i apologize to Jim Rice; Harold is the worst pick since Fred Lindstrom.

rom 1980-2000 -- which covers baines' entire career apart from 32 very poor games in 2001 -- he ranks fifth in hits, 11th in homers, third in RBI, third in plate appearances and second in GIDP

Third in PA’s is the key. Baines batted a lot (while barely playing the field), which led to a lot of hits. Kind of like future hall of famer nick markakis

Hall of Played a Lot

poor dead Rusty Staub

imo Jim Rice is inarguably a better HOFer than Harold Baines, which isn't to say he's a particularly good HOFer.

agree

i kind of feel bad for Baines, because for the next year all he's going to hear about is how he's not really *that* good and he will forever be a benchmark for undeserving hall of famers.

i kind of hope (but doubt) he calls out the vet committee for their stupidity.

is there any chance this causes MLB (or whoever is in charge of these things) to re-examine how the vet's committee works?

If anyone should protest, it's the BBWAA. They get raked over the coals every year for their choices and individual writers get put under tremendous pressure to justify and defend their choices. Everyone debates and researches and argues over candidates for ten (formerly fifteen) years and the whole process has the illusion of carrying some serious weight -- reputations of players are on the line, and legacies are at stake! Then the next year a bunch of Jack Morris' old drinking buddies get together one afternoon and put him in the HOF anyway. It's ridiculous.

And the Baines case is obv. 10000X worse because the BBWAA (rightly) dismissed him as a serious candidate early on, only to have the New Vets Committee come around 20 years later and say "fuck it, we don't care what you guys think, he's a HOFer".

The writers have made a bunch of one and done screw ups (e.g. Kevin Brown, Lou Whitaker) but surely there's a way of dealing with this. You could have the BBWAA vote on a supplementary ballot for reconsidering players who have fallen off the regular ballot. If you get, say, 40-50% of the vote, *then* you get your name added to a Vets Committee list, and can be reconsidered once every five years. Anything is better than a system where Harold Baines gets elected out of the blue.

I know nobody cares about RBI, but I'm actually surprised and impressed to learn that Baines was second for that time frame. (And no, that doesn't change anything--longevity + fluke of the calendar.)

i kind of feel bad for Baines, because for the next year all he's going to hear about is how he's not really *that* good and he will forever be a benchmark for undeserving hall of famers.

He was much better on the outside--people always spoke highly of him, looked at him as one example of the good player who falls short of the HOF. Now, as TT says, he'll be vilified and held up as a joke.

And for longer than the next year, I'd say.

Nice clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnF08SLklKc

rumor has it LaRussa was venting about analytics today! stay tuned

Harold Baines, the type of solid player whose mid-'80s Topps cards highlight would read something like "laced an RBI double on opening day in a ChiSox 7-3 loss."

https://sportsinfosolutionsblog.com/2018/12/10/the-hall-of-fame-value-standard/

skimming my way through this...

Come on, Baines had ten walk off home runs. He was a good hitter for a really long time.

Thirteen grand salamis

more than 1st ballot hof-er derrack j4ter iirc

Over a seventeen year stretch, he hit under .280 twice. OBP and SLG also both really good consistently. Could have had 400/3,000 if not for the strike, etc.

I'm always arguing against Andruw Jones; I like what James writes about Jones in the piece linked to above. Part of that:

Jones has very, very good defensive numbers, numbers derived from early efforts to measure Defensive Runs Saved, and I do not question that he was a very good defensive center fielder until he put on weight. Those good defensive numbers are incorporated into his WAR, and in fact form the basis of his outstanding 62.8 WAR.

But that means that Jones’ claim to greatness relies on assets that are simply not available to the players to whom he is being compared. If we had parallel data available for Devon White, for Garry Maddox, for Curt Flood, Willie Davis, Paul Blair, Jim Landis and Jimmy Piersall, it is extremely likely that some of them ALSO would have extremely high Defensive Runs Saved, and thus would suddenly leapfrog Andruw Jones in the values; this is not only likely, in my opinion, it is certain. The entire argument for Andruw Jones as a Hall of Famer rests on giving him an advantage that other center fielders are denied. I think it is just totally wrong. I don’t believe that Andruw Jones was a Hall of Famer, I don’t believe that he was anywhere NEAR a Hall of Fame level, and I am strongly opposed to his election.

tim ellison doing a great job of making me wonder whether he’s serious or not

Accumulator!

I really wanted there to be a 3000 Hit Guy not in the HOF. Lou Brock is probably the worst of the modern ones.

Harold Baines was of course a good hitter, the kind of guy you like to have as your third best hitter on a really good team. but he's also a guy whose best bWAR season falls short of the best bWAR season of Raul Ibanez.

Right, but he's not getting in for blockbuster seasons, he's getting in for like eighteen years straight (no injuries?) of being pretty darn good, mostly as a DH. (And not just in some counting stat that doesn't tell the whole picture. He got hits but also got on base a lot and had power.)

I'm not Kevin - I don't think he's a no brainer but I think there's more of a case to be made than others, seemingly.

other posters, that is

Fascinating passage there, clemenza, about those sixties and seventies era outfielders