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IF I HAD A VOTE IN THE 2013 BASEBALL HALL OF FAME ELECTION, PART 1: A HISTORIC REFERENDUM

Index


WAR: "What Is It Good For?"

With apologies to Edwin Starr (technically, Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield), WAR is good for making a quick-and-dirty assessment of a player's value. The concept, which has been tried in various forms, is to determine how much an individual player contributes directly to his team's winning (or losing); in the case of WAR, the baseline is a replacement player, either a league-average player or a minor-league player called up to the major leagues, and the measurement is to determine how many more wins a player contributes to his team—his overall value to his team's success—compared to this hypothetical league-average replacement player.

WAR has proved to be controversial for a number of reasons. One reason is that there can be a tendency to use WAR as a single, or ultimate, unifying statistic to establish the last word in a player's relative worth, a direction suggested by the two tables above, which have ranked both position players and pitchers using the Baseball Reference version of WAR. Another reason is that there are a number of different versions of WAR, each calculated using a slightly different approach, although both Baseball Reference and FanGraphs use run analysis—creating runs and preventing runs—as its basis. Because of the differences in calculation, FanGraphs's WAR values tend to be higher than Baseball Reference's; for career WAR assessments, FanGraphs's values tend to be between approximately five and ten wins-above-replacement higher than Baseball Reference's.

Finally, because WAR is often used as an omnibus statistic to measure a player's worth, it is erroneously considered to be an event to be watched for, just like watching for a batter to hit a milestone home run. This perception was stated on this website in an interview with former catcher Gregg Zaun: "You can’t really itemize the exact moment that a player hits a 100 lifetime in WAR." True enough, but even with classic calculated statistics such as batting average and earned run average, you don't "itemize" those exact moments, either. You never see a hitter reach a .300 batting average directly—you can see the hit he produced that led to the .300 batting average, but unless the scoreboard flashes the change in the hitter's average (or you are computing it yourself independently), the .300 average itself is an abstract concept. Earned run average is even more opaque—you can watch a pitcher record the outs that contribute to his innings pitched along with the earned runs he does or does not allow that determine what his ERA is, but you cannot see that ERA itself rise or fall directly on the field.

Yet both batting average and earned run average have been used for decades to determine player value, including that final legacy—is that player a Hall of Famer? Assuming his career was sufficiently long enough, a hitter who averages .300 for his career is automatically in consideration as a qualified Hall candidate; similarly, a pitcher whose ERA is below 3.00 is also a definite Hall candidate. These two qualitative evaluations had been integral—and in many cases crucial—to the selection process for many years. Now we have a wealth of other qualitative statistics to measure performance and value that includes WAR, which has often been used, or has often been interpreted as being used, as the One Statistic to Rule Them All—the be-all and end-all to determining a player's value.

On the other hand . . . if you look at the list of lifetime leaders in WAR, either on Baseball Reference or on FanGraphs, you will see at the top the names of many players who have historically been considered to be the greatest ever to have played the game, most of whom had been judged before the advent of advanced statistics such as WAR to be Hall of Fame players and so were duly elected to the Hall. This includes hitters such as Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby, Mel Ott, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, and Joe Morgan, and pitchers such as Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Pete Alexander, Lefty Grove, Warren Spahn, Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, and Steve Carlton. Although we cannot rule out entirely the possibility of confirmation bias here with respect to WAR, voters from bygone decades, without the benefit of sabermetrics, determined that these players were among the best-ever in baseball history—assessments reinforced through advanced measurements such as WAR.

Narrowing the Ballot

This is why I used a version of WAR to list the 2013 candidates: It is the best single measure for ranking the candidates. Also, it is the only way to rank both position players and pitchers as their specific measures of offensive and defensive performances are complementary and incompatible. I did also list universal qualitative statistics for both position players (OPS+, wRC+) and pitchers (ERA+, ERA-) as additional comparative metrics. You will notice a close correlation of those metrics with the WAR rankings.

The table below combines both position players and pitchers into a ranking by bWAR.

All 2013 Hall of Fame Candidates, Ranked by bWAR

Rank

Player

bWAR

fWAR

1

Bonds, Barry

158.1

168.0

2

Clemens, Roger

133.1

145.5

3

Schilling, Curt

76.9

86.1

4

Bagwell, Jeff

76.7

83.9

5

Walker, Larry

69.7

73.2

6

Trammell, Alan

67.1

69.5

7

Raines, Tim

66.2

70.6

8

Palmeiro, Rafael

66.1

74.2

9

Lofton, Kenny

64.9

66.2

10

Martinez, Edgar

64.4

69.9

11

Biggio, Craig

62.1

70.5

12

McGwire, Mark

58.7

70.6

13

Piazza, Mike

56.1

66.8

14

Sosa, Sammy

54.8

64.1

15

Wells, David

49.4

61.2

16

McGriff, Fred

48.2

61.0

17

Williams, Bernie

45.9

47.5

18

Murphy, Dale

42.6

47.3

19

Finley, Steve

40.4

44.2

20

Mattingly, Don

39.8

45.8

21

Franco, Julio

39.7

48.6

22

Morris, Jack

39.3

56.9

23

Sanders, Reggie

36.7

41.8

24

Cirillo, Jeff

32.0

36.4

25

Green, Shawn

31.4

34.9

26

Smith, Lee

27.9

29.0

27

White, Rondell

25.5

26.2

28

Williams, Woody

25.0

19.8

29

Klesko, Ryan

24.6

32.7

30

Sele, Aaron

17.2

33.6

31

Hernandez, Roberto

17.2

15.2

32

Clayton, Royce

16.4

21.7

33

Conine, Jeff

16.2

24.4

34

Stanton, Mike

12.6

13.7

35

Alomar Jr., Sandy

11.6

15.7

36

Mesa, Jose

9.5

13.5

37

Walker, Todd

8.3

11.5

 

This table gives a clear indication of just how overstuffed is the 2013 ballot. Even if we cut the list after the median player, Steve Finley at Number 19, that leaves nearly twice as many candidates for consideration as can be voted upon—remember, voters can choose a maximum of ten—while three candidates cut from the list—Don Mattingly, Jack Morris, and Lee Smith—have survived many previous ballots with cases made regularly for their inclusion in the Hall.

For sake of argument, voting for the top ten players ranked by bWAR would still omit players with significant milestones in their records, who on a less-crowded ballot would garner a vote, including Craig Biggio (3060 hits, 668 doubles, 291 home runs, 1844 runs scored, 414 stolen bases), Mark McGwire (583 home runs, 1414 runs batted in, 1317 bases on balls, .394 on-base percentage, .588 slugging average, first in lifetime at-bats per home run with 10.61), Mike Piazza (the greatest-hitting catcher of all-time: 2127 hits, 427 home runs, .308 batting average, .545 slugging average), and Sammy Sosa (2408 hits, eighth in lifetime home runs with 609, the only man in history with three seasons of 60 or more home runs, 1667 runs batted in). In addition, Fred McGriff, Dale Murphy, and Bernie Williams have all generated cases for the Hall. Even David Wells, with his 239 wins tied for 57th all-time with Hall of Famer Mordecai Brown, sported a .604 winning percentage despite a 4.13 ERA. Finally, relief pitchers Lee Smith, Roberto Hernandez, and Jose Mesa fall off the list because their bWAR values are low; however, such a specialized role will yield a lower value than that of an everyday position player or a starting pitcher, indicating that evaluating a specialized role such as a relief pitcher cannot be definitively determined by using WAR.

Ah, but you have undoubtedly noticed the 800-pound gorilla in the room: performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Four of the top ten players listed in the table above, and seven of the top fourteen, have been associated with PEDs including one, Jeff Bagwell, simply rumored to have been a PEDs user with not even circumstantial evidence to substantiate the claim. (Another player, Larry Walker, seems to be getting penalized because his home park was on steroids: Walker posted literally stratospheric numbers at pre-humidor Coors Field in Denver.)

In addition to being overstuffed with qualified candidates, the 2013 ballot is also a referendum on the Steroids Era, to which we now turn.

Embarrassment of Conduct: Performance-enhancing Drugs

With respect to performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), or steroids, the 2013 ballot is a watershed ballot that will force the Hall, through the stance of the voters of the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA), to codify its de facto policy concerning PEDs. How Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens fare for their first time on the ballot will in essence establish the referendum on PEDs because on career numbers alone, divorced from how those numbers were derived, each has one of the strongest cases for Hall of Fame inclusion in the history of the sport.

Bonds of course is the lifetime leader in home runs (762) in addition to being the dominant hitter in the big leagues for much of his career; he is also the lifetime leader in bases on balls (2558) and far and away the lifetime leader in intentional bases on balls—more than twice as many (688) as runner-up Hank Aaron (293)—a sure sign of respect for his hitting prowess. Similarly, Clemens was arguably the dominant pitcher of his time, compiling 354 wins (ninth all-time) and 4672 strikeouts (third all-time) over his career.

Certainly, two PEDs-tainted players, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro, have been on the ballot previously, and their fates have already suggested the stance of the voters toward steroids. McGwire is tenth in lifetime home runs, with 583, in a range that includes Frank Robinson (586), Harmon Killebrew (573), and Reggie Jackson (563), all Hall of Famers—but McGwire reached that plateau in much fewer at-bats. In fact, McGwire is the career leader in fewest at-bats per home run, 10.61, ahead of Babe Ruth (11.76) and Bonds (12.92).

Palmeiro's is an even more auspicious case: He is one of only four men to have compiled more than 3000 hits (3020) and 500 home runs (569) in his career. The other three to do that—Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Eddie Murray—were all elected to the Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility. In 2011, Palmeiro's first year on the ballot, he received just 11.0 percent of the vote, with a very slight uptick to 12.6 percent the following year. The voters' intent seemed very clear: Association with PEDs is the kiss of death for Hall of Fame chances. (Palmeiro, you will recall, angrily denied using PEDs before a Congressional committee in 2005—only to fail a drug test less than five months later.)

Last modified on Thursday, 22 March 2018 01:57

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