hall of fame, next vote...

no one ever called harold baines le grand orange

Harold Baines has zero HOF case and his peak wasn’t peak enough to make his entry as a compiler especially legitimate. None of which I would mind this much (it would still be astonishingly wrongheaded) if the BBWAA would not one-and-done guys like Whitaker or shake their heads sadly in the direction of Larry Walker or make legit great players like Tim Raines and Bert Blyleven and presumably Edgar Martinez wait til the last second to let them sneak in. Fingers crossed for Walker there...

his peak wasn’t peak enough to make his entry as a compiler especially legitimate

I think the argument would be that it doesn't have to be peak enough when you average 2.75 WAR over your twelve best seasons.

what do you think a list of all the players who have averaged 2.75 WAR over 12 years looks like? mostly hall of famers?

It's a good question. Do you have an answer?

Maybe you're right. Oliver and Staub both average closer to 3.5 WAR if you take their 12 best seasons.

i don't have play index, but here are some players who posted 33-35 bWAR over their *first* 12 seasons:

jorge posada
ellis burks
travis fryman
mark ellis
brady anderson
wally joyner
ray durham

here's the leaderboard for most WAR accumulated between a player's age 22 season and his age 33 season

https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&season=2018&month=0&season1=1871&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=22,33&filter=&players=0&page=18_30

baines comes in at 516th, just between jake daubert and riggs stephenson

For reference, Frank White was worth about 2.4 WAR on average over his best 12 (consecutive) seasons, 1975-87

from 1989 to 2001 Mark Grace was 3.6 WAR per year and was dropped from the HOF ballot after his first year (4.1% of the vote)

Yes, and all these guys had defensive opportunities that Baines did not. As a DH, Baines was...really good and for a long time. So maybe it's the specialist conundrum again as with closers.

but a lot of the guys above who had defensive opportunities would have been at least as good as harold baines at the plate as DHs. it's just that they were good in the field as well, so they weren't DH's. but they're not hall of famers, either. so why should baines get in ahead of people who did everything he did at the plate, plus more?

Wait, which of those guys had anything like Baines' offensive numbers?

Ellis Burks did.

(Although over 100 of his HR were for Colorado.)

Baines had 759 more hits

mark grace did

421 fewer hits, 211 fewer HR

Baines lifetime postseason - 113 PA, .324/.378/.510 with 5 HR.

i think we're done here

421 fewer hits, 211 fewer HR

i thought we were still talking the 12 year thing? on that age 22-33 leaderboard kevin posted above, even just looking at offense alone (no defense/DH penalty), harold baines is 320th (mark grace is 282nd. just to be clear, i also don't think mark grace is a hall of famer. i'm just saying, the guy who no one really considers as a hall of fame hitter outhit harold baines.)

i'm going to see if i can find mark grace on twitter so i can update him on this

i wonder if anyone has ever had the guts to say "hall of the very good" out loud in his presence

OK sorry for the confusion. When I asked who had anything like Baines' numbers, I meant lifetime numbers. Thanks for engaging with me, unlike the other ilxor sitting in the peanut gallery.

think the argument would be that it doesn't have to be peak enough when you average 2.75 WAR over your twelve best seasons.

WAR is roughly calibrated like this: 0.0 is of course replacement level, 2.0 is roughly "solid major league regular", 4.0 is an All-Star, 5.0-6.0 and above is getting into MVP territory. So in his very best twelve seasons, Baines was a bit better than the average major league regular.

It does mean something to be a solid regular for 12+ seasons, since most players don't keep their starting jobs for even close to twelve years. But a guy who topped out as a borderline All-Star by WAR (which is being generous) shouldn't be a HOFer by any standard.

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

This is ... something. To summarize : game winning RBIs!!!!!

https://www.mlb.com/cut4/tony-la-russa-and-chris-russo-debate-harold-baines/c-301782986

fwiw, harold baines led his own team in bWAR twice: in 1984 (his biggest season), he and starter richard dotson both put up 4.3; in 1986, he was way out in front with 2.9. that was the last year he spent any significant time in the outfield.

both those white sox teams finished fifth in the AL west.

I'm going to cut and paste something I put up on Facebook, rather than reword exactly the same thing. (When I posted it, I included an aside that I'd never post it on ILB in a million years, knowing the ridicule it would inspire.) Please understand, this is not, in any way, an argument that Baines should be in the HOF. He shouldn't--not at all, not close, and I haven't wavered on that a bit. But I have been trying to grasp onto something that makes his pick a little less...bizarre? Anyway, prompted by a comment Tim made about his hits/HR totals:

One addendum to this. The only way those multi-category combinations have even a bit of validity is to drop the floor well below what the player has achieved--if you set the floor exactly where the player is, and then throw in enough categories, you can prove Kelly Gruber ought to be in the HOF. So extend hits and HR to include RBI. If I'm looking at the career RBI list correctly, there are only two non-PED guys with 2500 hits (Baines has 2866), 300 HR (Baines has 384) and 1500 RBI (Baines has 1628) who are not in the HOF or inarguably on their way: Baines and Carlos Beltran. Beltran will probably make it--he was a much better player than Baines, for starters--but I wouldn't say he's quite a sure thing like Cabrera or Beltre. Anyway, Baines clears all three of those benchmarks with room to spare. So that's...something. Not a HOF resume in and of itself, but it's something.

The reductio ad absurdum illustration of combining categories and using the player's totals as the floor was well illustrated by Posnanski yesterday:

I could put together faux-impressive statistical pages like that on just about any player you want. I mean, how in the world has the Hall of Fame not yet voted in a player who has:

More hits, triples and runs scored than 70 Hall of Famers, more doubles and RBIs than 67 Hall of Famers, more stolen bases than 91 Hall of Famers, I mean, how much more does a man have to do?

Give me a call Tony. I'll tell you exactly why Duane Kuiper belongs in the Hall.

exactly

the reason WAR exists is to stop us from coming up with these arbitrary combinations of flawed counting stats

fwiw I'm not trying to make a case for Baines as HOFer so much as arguing that the idea doesn't seem insane. As just an offensive player, I don't think being impressive for a long career across all three slash line numbers represents an arbitrary combination of facts.

i.e., what can you fault him for as on offensive player other than speed?

as AN offensive player

looks like people generally tend to look at him as 4th best DH of all time (which I know is just a little over 40 years)

I'm not trying to make a case for Baines as HOFer so much as arguing that the idea doesn't seem insane.

it's not insane, it's bad

here's the leaderboard for most WAR accumulated between a player's age 22 season and his age 33 season

baines comes in at 516th, just between jake daubert and riggs stephenson

Daubert is in the HOF too; I had to check on Riggs (no).

btw the hell with Lee Smith getting off easy... the Spink Award went to Jayson Stark.

yeah, no kidding.

i don't have a vendetta against stark or anything, but several years ago he wrote for...yahoo? i forget? and it really seemed like he was being paid by the word. just so repetitive and loooong

ring lardner and jayson stark, side by side

at least he's NOT BEING INDUCTED, despite what the media say every year

If anyone's inclined to care about leverage over an eleven thousand PA career, Baines has his highest numbers in high leverage - .314/.381/.481 (for 2,289 plate appearances).

i guess it's something

he’s 97th in career WPA

Harold Baines was pretty good

I was looking at WPA earlier! I actually wondered if he was higher than that.

KM, Mark Grace is ahead of him...

lol

mark grace - pretty, pretty good

he was!

but not hall of fame good

not at all. we'll put him in the Hall of Professional Hitters, where .300-hitting first basemen with no power rest in glory

*late-career rod carew staggers through the doorway*

*late-career rod carew staggers back through the same doorway to the hall of fame, then closes the door and locks it behind him, leaving only a frightened billy butler in the hallway*