I’ve never thought Pettitte was quite good enough, but it’s interesting to look at fangraphs. They peg him at 68.2 WAR, just ahead of Hall of Famers Glavine, Bunning and Sabathia.
I always use Baseball Reference as a cite. On there he is way ahead of some other Hall of Famers like Catfish and Sandy Koufax. He’s pretty much equal with Sabathia who just got in. He did admit to using PEDs to come back from an injury which will sink his chances.
If Andy Pettite is “way ahead” of Sandy Koufax, something’s wrong with the stats.
In the last ten years, the veterans committee has elected people like Dave Parker, Fred Mcgriff, Harold Baines, Jim Kaat, and Gil Hodges. I think it is silly to be extremely stringent on voting when the Hall has made it clear that is not the standard. If it was me I would vote for 10 basically every year, because there is always ten who are above the bar the Hall sets for players long retired. Why make Dustin Pedroia and David Wright wait 25 years, when you are going to elect them anyway.
Anyway my ballot.
Carlos Beltran
Manny Ramirez
Arod.
All three were clear hall of famer and mistakes they made does not undo their accomplishments.
Andruw Jones:
The defense was all time great
Chase Utley:
Dustin Pedroia:
David Wright:
Shorter peaks but clear hall of famers during them.
Cole Hamels:
Mark Buerhle
King Felix
We need to readjust our standards for starting pitchers or we are going to stop electing starting pitchers. These were all very good for a long time (or for Felix great for a shorter time)
Ah, it’s the old peak vs career value argument. Koufax had six great seasons and a bunch of seasons in which he wasn’t all that good. Pettitte had a couple of seasons that were up there with Koufax, and then he had like 12-13 seasons which were not Koufax-style great but which had clear value. The Dodgers could ride Koufax for 5-6 years and otherwise he wasn’t particularly useful. Pettitte’s teams couldn’t count on him to be otherworldly, but he made an important contribution year after year. You clearly prefer the few great seasons, and I’m not going to disagree with you. Over the course of his long career, though, Pettitte was quite valuable, and that’s reflected in the WAR totals.
Well stated. That’s the pro-Mattingly argument. For a time he was one of the best in baseball. His bad back kept him from sustaining excellence through a long career. Mattingly’s WAR is very similar to Koufax.
IF you’re going by WAR, that is the 109th highest career total of all time, which means he’d be in the top half of Hall of Famers. A Hall of Fame of only 108 guys would me awfully few for a 150-year-old pro sport. Granted, Negro Leaguers don’t have MLB-length data samples.
To give you some idea of how rare these levels are:
180s - One player, Babe Ruth.
170s - Nobody
160s - 3 (Big Train, Cy Young, Barry Bonds)
150s - 2 (Cobb, Mays)
140s - 1 (Aaron)
130s - 3 (Clemens, Speaker, Wagner)
120s - 4
110s - 7
100s - 11
90s - 14
80s - 19
70s - 40
60s - 91
50s - 124
40s - 235
The high 60s, where Manny is, is the point where it’s a rare feat. And Manny has some significant playoff accomplishments.
The issue isn’t that the Hall has loosened their standards. It’s that right now it has no standards.
We’ve had total mediocrities like Harold Baines and Dave Parker get in, while arguably the best position player and best pitcher ever remain outside. The voters get all snippity about voting for roid cheaters like Manny or Gary, but with David Ortiz now in, along with people like Piazza and Bagwell, there no longer is any sort of bright line between the alleged roiders and those who were supposedly clean and already in.
Even if you ignore the roid angle completely, the best remaining candidates aren’t getting in (starting with Lou Whitaker) in preference to players demonstratably inferior. Yes the VC is mostly to blame for that, but the Hall has given the VC carte blanche to make these inexplicable choices without trying to do anything to mitigate the cronyism involved (by say expanding the VC committees to 50), all in their mad crusade to punish the roiders.
For starting pitchers OTOH yes a new set of standards will be necessary going forward. But even for position players, perusing RickJay’s list above, we may have seen the last of the 100+ WAR guys, at least until and if Ohtani crosses that threshold. Trout would have likely done so if he hadn’t gotten the injury bug, and he still may.
I’d love to see it, and he’s certainly within striking distance (his bWAR is currently 87.5), but in the past five seasons, he’s only gotten a 3+ bWAR once, and that was three years ago. He turns 35 next year, and he’d need to average a 3.1 for the next four seasons to make 100.
The VC putting in lousy candidates isn’t a new thing. Choices like Dave Parker aren’t any worse than Chick Hafey.
Then we have a classic case of “Those who do not remember their history are condemned to repeat it.”
Sure if Harold Baines is the standard you going to need some new wings. It isn’t even the specific players though, but rather the amount of players. Even with more teams and players, there substantially less hall of famers who played in the last few decades than the 50’s and 60’s. If you are going to let in the top 10% (or whatever the number is) of players from previous decades than you should do it from current decades too. Much better to celebrate when they are alive and then adding a plague 40 years later.
This is a good point. There’s over 270 players in now, and there kinda has to be. If we date MLB from the founding of the National League, it’s the oldest continually operating professional team sports league in the world, ever, just finishing its 150th season. The number of players in the Hall of Fame must necessarily keep increasing, and even if the standards remain the same or go up, the sheer number of players will get to the point that it’s dizzying.
If anyone is wondering the lowest WAR by a Hall of Famer is 14, by Tommy McCarthy, but he played in the 1880s and 1890s who who knows. Among post-1901 players it’s Bruce Sutter.
I think something like 30 Hall of Famers are in for Negro League accomplishments, so let’s say the number in with full MLB careers (that includes guys who did play in the Negro Leagues but really are in for their major league careers) is 250. According to Baseball Reference the 250th best player ever is somebody like Joe Mauer, Chet Lemon, or Gabby Harnett. (Hank Greenberg too, but he missed time to WWII.) So that’s your floor, more or less, if you were to just reinduct everyone based on actual value. There’s a bunch of guys playing right now already above that.