hall of fame, next vote...

Are you saying the Cardinals didn't have it or that it doesn't exist at all? A lot of press could just as easily explain Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan.

Obviously, Sutton's in for the 300 wins--if he'd fallen short, he'd probably be out there with Tommy John and Jim Kaat. (Sabermetrics rescued Bert Blyleven; I doubt that would have happened with Sutton, who's ahead of John in WAR but still short of 70.0.) Maybe, if WAR sticks around, a widely recognized benchmark will be established--70 seems to be the number right now for Jaffe-types. Sabathia's at 62.5, right where Kaat is. I'm on the fence with CC, and I think he'll be one of those guys who starts in the 40-50% range, and then, who knows.

Drysdale's in for...mystique!

Don’t forget to the fun name factor (1.01x)

Don’t forget to add all the words to your sentences, either

I don't know what Mystique (TM) *is*, other than it didn't get its Yankees tickets this week.

i keep going back and forth on CC, bc he did have a decent string of peak seasons but at the same time he does really seem sometimes like he's closer to a David Wells type than a Mike Mussina type, when looking at his entire career.

def not quite in Mussina's tier, careerwise

i don't want to mutter "compiler" but if we discuss peak there are a lot of pitchers out there who were much better and didn't last long enough at a diminished level to build up the career totals. Johan and Felix, to name a couple.

agnostic on his induction, but i kinda believe all hall of famers should have had a transcendent period during which they were, however fleetingly, the best in the game. and for cc, that second half with the brewers in 2008 counts.

CC was arguably not even the best lefty Cy Young winner Cleveland had during the '00s.

i thought for awhile he was going to wind up similar to Verlander, in that both had these good early indoctrination periods where they mastered their inherent talents before they peaked and won the Cy, followed by a depressing early decline, but Verlander's was just a blip on the radar and a bit of a mirage. CC wound up just having this very good middle period and a decline marked by occasional fine performances and outright terrible ones.

for me i guess the closest comparison is maybe Pettitte? a really fine and occasionally great pitcher who seems just outside HOF-worthy (though CC was better than Pettitte in terms of a consistent peak).

agnostic on his induction, but i kinda believe all hall of famers should have had a transcendent period during which they were, however fleetingly, the best in the game

Mostly agree with this, except 1) I think you can play/pitch at a slightly lower level if you do it long enough (something like Palmeiro, I guess), and 2) for me, Sabathia's transcendent period is too fleeting--I'd want two or three seasons where you're viewed as one of the best (half-dozen?) in the game.

i, too, prefer hall of famers to achieve transcendence (i'd say "among" the best in the game, not necessarily the very best) - the lower the height of peak transcendence, the longer it has to last. and then take that and divide by 5

and then there's the VC and Harold Baines

wow i don't think there's any need to bring venture capital or the viet cong into this

The Victory Condition for HOF has been lowered to “be at least as hall of famey as Harold Baines, at the very minimum”

Harold is a HOF with so many career highlights, baseball card companies had trouble narrowing it down to just one to cite

https://www.tradingcarddb.com/Images/Cards/Baseball/594/594-232Bk.jpg

hall of fame, next vote i care about... Bonds and Clemens

appreciate that they included a photo of harold getting fooled by a changeup

That card's perfect for Brendan C. Boyd's The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. "Harold & his wife have 4 children." Not to diminish the importance of repopulating the world, but I somehow can't see that turning up on Willie Mays' or Greg Maddux's card.

If CC doesn’t get in, the bar for the new generation is going to be really high. Pitchers with 70+ WAR won’t come up like it used too.

Great pitchers are the exception to whatever prevailing trends are around, so I don't know if usage patterns will much affect the existence or 70+ guys or not. Verlander's there, Greinke and Kershaw are about to be, Scherzer's close to a sure bet, Sale has a good shot, and Hamels, deGrom, Strasburg, Cole, Nola, and who knows who else are making realistic progress.

Not sure how that would compare to a snapshot of 1998 or 1984...There'll be more than that lost '80s generation of starters, for sure.

I don’t see how pitchers pitching fewer innings *couldn’t* lead to fewer guys passing a certain threshold...WAR is a counting stat after all

I'd want two or three seasons where you're viewed as one of the best (half-dozen?) in the game.

From 2007-9 he was certainly one of the best two or three pitchers in the game.

(xpost) I should have been clearer--when a Verlander or Scherzer comes along, they don't follow the prevailing trends.

He averaged > 6 WAR from 2007-2011, he was as dominant and consistent (230+ IP) as anyone in the game at his peak.

xpost

(xpost) True:

Sabathia -- 18.2
Greinke -- 18.0
Lincecum -- 17.5
Halladay -- 16.7
Santana -- 15.4
Beckett -- 14.8

I used the bWAR total for those three years (checked about a dozen pitchers...may have missed someone).

I have one foot dangling off the fence, pointing in the direction of Cooperstown.

he was as dominant and consistent (230+ IP) as anyone in the game

Consistent definitely. Dominant relative to the league--he totals 30.4 bWAR for those five years, 6.1 a year, which is a moderate HOF peak.

You're making a good case...maybe the thing that gets in the way for me is that he's only somewhat effective after the age of 31. Whether it should or shouldn't be, that's always a stumbling block for me.

Verlander's there, Greinke and Kershaw are about to be, Scherzer's close to a sure bet, Sale has a good shot, and Hamels, deGrom, Strasburg, Cole, Nola, and who knows who else are making realistic progress.

Hamels seems like at best an extreme long shot and at worst a no-brainer to be outside the HOF. His WAR is good but I don’t think any voters are gonna be inspired to look closely at him, barring a late career renaissance. He’s kinda the Ian Kinsler of hurlers.

Despite my comments CC is one of those guys who could get in and I’d be totally okay with it, he was obviously great for a period of time and while not up there with some of these guys it’s not like he’s Jack Morris. A compiler in a lot of ways but ultimately, whatever. Definitely Pettitte-like for his career but yeah, better.

What I mean by on the fence--if he gets, I'm fine with that. Honestly, I can't even get worked up about Harold Baines' induction. As I've said before, I simultaneously a) find HOF arguments extremely interesting and b) just don't care.

In relation to CC, though, I wouldn't be so quick to discount Hamels. Except for wins (huge advantage CC) and IP (ditto), Hamels has him beat in some key categories: WHIP, K/BB, ERA, ERA+, and FIP. He's just barely behind in bWAR (62.5-58.7), and--the key difference--Hamels is still pitching pretty well. Hamels is a free agent, so I don't know where (or if) he'll land, but he pitched 140 effective innings last year at age 35. His peak (2010-2014) is, as Karl Malone might say, a little less peaky than CC (27.2 bWAR, 5.4 per season), but for his career, he's been more consistent than CC.

Jaffe's assessment of CC sounds right: "...while he’s a bit short in the JAWS department, his milestones and the esteem with which he’s held will probably win the day."

http://blogs.fangraphs.com/cc-sabathias-storied-career-reaches-a-rough-ending/

Per Fangraphs, he’s as good as Glavine.

fp for bumping during a championship game

.... and not mentioning Altuve.

The Hall of Fame’s 2020 Modern Baseball Era ballot features Dwight Evans, Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Don Mattingly, Marvin Miller, Thurman Munson, Dale Murphy, Dave Parker, Ted Simmons and Lou Whitaker. Results to be announced Dec. 8 on @MLBNetwork #HOF2020 https://t.co/xlF1wuPg15 pic.twitter.com/jCrDFWqyMP

— National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum ⚾ (@baseballhall) November 4, 2019

some of the nominees deserve it by any standard (miller, whitaker, a couple borderline cases), and almost all deserve it by the harold baines standard

So happy that Anthony the cop from states island finally gets to celebrate Donnie baseball’s HOF entry

Baseball Reference career WAR:

Marvin Miller- Literally BILLIONS $$$ in the players pocket.
Lou Whitaker 75.1
Dwight Evans 67.1
Tommy John 61.5
Ted Simmons 50.1
Dale Murphy 46.5
Thurman Munson 46.1
Don Mattingly 42.5
Dave Parker 40.1
Steve Garvey 38.1

If you think star power especially in the 70s and 80s, you would probably flip that list.

Bobby Grich 71.1
Bobby Bonds 57.9
Chet Lemon 55.6

Chris Speier is a player who I remember as a longtime coach and remember his baseball cards, but he was a better player than I thought. He was pretty awesome when he first game up, check out his 1972-74. I guess I was thinking he was a hitter like other longtime Giant shortstop Johnny LeMaster, who definitely was a good with the glove not the bat.

That's a good ballot in that three of the players have had very vocal support from saber-leaning advocates (Whitaker, Evans, and Simmons), John and Murphy have had longtime, more traditional support, and Munson does well analytically for a short career (5.1 WAR per 650 PA on Baseball Reference). Garvey, Parker, and Mattingly are the more old-school, black-ink/RBI kind of players who don't do especially well analytically, but Parker and Mattingly had great, meteoric peaks, and Garvey...was consistent through the '70s.

Obviously Miller should have been inducted long ago.

It’s pretty interesting as a baseball fan to see how the ‘80s stars have fared. When I was a kid, Murphy and Mattingly, Parker and Garvey were to an extent legends at that point, and Dwight Evans was this consistently great hitter and had that cannon arm. And none of them got close to getting in. I think there’s sort of a bit of backlash not against the analytics movement but in terms of how many of those guys were overlooked. You probably saw that with Baines and Smith getting in and if they got in, no way most if not all of the above guys do as well. I’m squarely “pro” on several, neither here nor there on others, and Steve Garvey just seems like a key party Michael Young to me.

Funny (had to read that last sentence twice before I got it). The best defense I can make for Garvey--clearly he was wildly overrated in his heyday--is the same one you'd make for the wildly overrated Joe Carter: predictability/consistency/durability. You knew Garvey and Carter would play every day, and you knew you could pencil in 200 H/100 RBI for the former, and 30 HR/100 RBI for the latter. I know--the durability and the bulk numbers work in tandem, and both guys killed you on OBP and defense (seem to remember that Garvey's gold gloves were a joke). But as James wrote in one of the Abstracts (or a little later, maybe, back-stepping a bit on Garvey), GMs try to put together a million moving parts to get a winning team, and if one of those parts is close to 100% reliable, that's valuable in and of itself.

Got looking closer to understand the difference in WAR between Dwight Evans and Dave Parker. Looking at the WAR numbers on their site, Parker definitely drags in d-war later in his career, but surprisingly Evans d-War numbers are not really as good as one might expect. Pretty much both of them were considered of having one of the best throwing arms in the game at one point in their career and both spent considerable time at first and DH (less for Dewey though). The big thing seems to be the o-war numbers Dewey put up between age 35-40 being where he passed up Parker by so much.

The thing that catches me is comparing straight 1985 and 86 between both of them. By surface numbers, both had good season but it seems that Evans with 50 walks and more runs yet somewhat comparable other numbers (Parker has a higher slugging 1 season), his O-War is like twice as much.

i am by no means going to campaign for dave parker, but

MVP
two batting titles
three gold gloves
three silver sluggers
seven all-star games
that fucking throw in the all-star game
greatest nickname
greatest baseball portrait
greatest surname

Also (Wikipedia): "In the early 1970s, as a member of the Pirates AAA minor league ball team Charleston (WV) Charlies, Parker hit a home run that landed on a coal car on a passing train and the ball was later picked up in Columbus, Ohio."

Even after his death, Miller was rejected twice by these committees so it's not a slam dunk he'll be elected this time.

When I was a kid, Murphy and Mattingly, Parker and Garvey were to an extent legends at that point

Definitely, it was generally assumed that they were slam dunk future HOFers at the time. As good as Evans and Whitaker were, they weren't superstars, so if they're elected then the old school voters will say how can they be in but Mattingly isn't, and they'll have a point. There's a strong peak value vs career value argument to be made.

that fucking throw in the all-star game

Had to look into this--my first year of university, so I doubt very much that I watched that year. I assume you mean throwing Downing out at home. There were two great throws he made that game--he also threw Rice out at third trying to stretch a bloop double.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PH6XJypKno

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PH6XJypKno

Oops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jn9e1f0pa4

Definitely, it was generally assumed that they were slam dunk future HOFers at the time. As good as Evans and Whitaker were, they weren't superstars, so if they're elected then the old school voters will say how can they be in but Mattingly isn't, and they'll have a point. There's a strong peak value vs career value argument to be made.

― NoTimeBeforeTime, Tuesday, November 5, 2019 1:20 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

also as far as the '80s go, a lot of the great starting pitchers from that decade have also largely been locked out from the Hall. i think the only truly "his peak was the '80s" pitcher who's in is Morris, right? Clemens obv not in now, Ryan was very good but the '70s is where he dominated, Carlton won a couple Cys early that decade but he was a '70s guy, Blyleven wasn't as great as he was in the '70s, Sutton and Perry and Jenkins and Palmer and Niekro were occasionally effective but winding down etc. the reasons have a bit to do with injuries and shorter careers, it's less a protest i'd make and more an "interesting note" and "unfortunate fact".

I think Dave Stieb still has a very, very good argument. Steve Rogers is a guy I remember thinking felt like the best pitcher in the league, but his career was short. Gooden obv an all-timer for a minute. Soto, Saberhagen, Viola, Hershiser, Sutcliffe, Tudor, Valenzuela, etc....these guys had some peaks that were HOF-level. cf a whole lot of Cliff Lee/Johan Santana/Tim Lincecum/Brandon Webb/Chris Carpenter/Adam Wainwright types. Not a lot of supreme inner circle HOF types.

this will come out looking great, right? fWAR leaders, 1980-1989

Rank	Name	WAR	W	L	IP	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	BABIP	LOB%	ERA	FIP
1	Nolan Ryan	43.7	122	104	2094	9.31	3.84	0.55	0.27	72.30%	3.14	2.83
2	Bert Blyleven	37.7	123	103	2078.1	6.41	2.41	0.92	0.281	73.20%	3.64	3.56
3	Jack Morris	36.9	162	119	2443.2	6	3.16	0.97	0.262	73.70%	3.66	3.9
4	Dave Stieb	36.4	140	109	2328.2	5.33	3.19	0.71	0.256	74.10%	3.32	3.78
5	F Valenzuela	36.2	128	103	2144.2	6.9	3.52	0.56	0.276	73.20%	3.19	3.21
6	Roger Clemens	35.5	95	45	1284.2	8.51	2.6	0.67	0.281	74.70%	3.06	2.79
7	Mike Witt	34.5	109	104	1945	5.87	2.98	0.77	0.287	71.10%	3.78	3.62
8	Dwight Gooden	34.3	100	39	1291	8.14	2.64	0.45	0.276	75.60%	2.64	2.53
9	Steve Carlton	34	104	84	1732.1	7.55	3.28	0.7	0.291	71.60%	3.48	3.19
10	Bob Welch	32.5	137	93	2082.2	6.3	2.88	0.67	0.273	74.70%	3.21	3.35
11	Bret Saberhagen	29.6	92	61	1329	5.89	1.75	0.71	0.275	72.60%	3.23	3.11
12	Mike Moore	28.7	85	107	1698.2	5.88	3.27	0.85	0.289	69.70%	4.13	3.83
13	D Eckersley	28.7	88	88	1593.2	5.7	1.71	0.96	0.277	69.90%	3.89	3.48
14	Rick Rhoden	28.5	109	100	1918.1	5.12	2.8	0.65	0.292	72.30%	3.65	3.53
15	Rick Reuschel	28.3	97	82	1616.1	4.68	2.17	0.55	0.283	72.60%	3.27	3.3
16	Frank Viola	28	117	98	1858	6.23	2.65	1.06	0.285	73.10%	3.84	3.84
17	Ron Guidry	28	111	72	1639.2	6.18	2.26	0.99	0.28	73.60%	3.66	3.57
18	Orel Hershiser	28	98	64	1457	6.25	2.68	0.46	0.264	74.80%	2.69	3.01
19	Mike Scott	27.7	114	90	1803.2	6.61	2.68	0.7	0.269	71.30%	3.42	3.24
20	Floyd Bannister	27.1	112	109	1890.2	6.45	2.93	1.11	0.274	71.80%	3.98	3.95