SDMB HoF chatter

The Game Room
1

I’m starting this because in his fine thread(s), RickJay seems to be discouraging of discussion that overwhelms the voting, that argues too much with other voters’ choices, etc. I like discussion and argument and don’t wish to disrespect the OP’s preferences. So I’m the OP here: go ahead, and disrespect (me) away!

One large issue I think I have with **RickJay **‘s SDMB HoF (and I must put it that way because he’s being a little secretive about his structure for election, asking us to take it on faith) is the heavy reliance on players’ positions. Simply put, I think it tends to favor those players with a strong identify at any one position. RickJay has claimed that this is not so, since he plans an “at-large” round to elect those players without a primary position, BUT: he hasn’t excluded the players in that round from receiving support at a position either.

I’m not really positive if this favors or disfavors multi-position players, but depending on how the voting shakes out, it probably does one or the other. Let me explain: Pete Rose, who began as a second baseman, was eligible for votes as a second baseman (he got none). Rose, who ended his career as a first baseman, also is eligible, for votes there (he got none). Rose got elected to the All_star team (I think) as a RFer, a LFer and 3B man. He’ll probably get some votes at all three spots. Then he will run as an at-large candidate. So Rose gets six separate chances to get elected–voters may well assume “Oh, I don’t need to vote for Rose at 3b, because he’ll appear later on the RFer ballot, and there are so many other deserving candidates at 3b” or something of that sort. Rose could theoretically finish 11th at six separate positions, including “at-large”, and not get elected to an HoF that has several hundred members despite receiving the highest number of total votes.

Essentially what I’m saying is: of all the things a player does in his career, why are we elevating the position he played to such importance that it alone can wipe out whether or not he’s a member of our HoF?

I agree that we could elect by position, mind you: it’s managable, it’s apples-to-apples, and it’s fun. But I feel strongly that **RickJay ** 's placing people on the ballot numerous times, or only once, skews the results.

As I suggested, a better ballot would set the barrier at a fixed percentage of career games at a position: if someone breaks that barrier (say, 90%) then he’s clearly a second baseman (or whatever) and we can of course consider his career as a whole but he gets voted on, once and once only, with his fellow second basemen. If he falls below the barrier, though, he goes in to the at-large pool, where he gets voted on, once and once only, with everyone else in the at-large pool.

The barrier should be set at a point where the at-large pool will roughly equal the pool at every other position.

2

Could someone ask a Mod to change the typo from SFMB to SDMB in the title? Thanks.

3

Done.

E-Sabbath reported it, and I edited the title.

4

Okay.

The problem with leaving Sandberg off is who you are going to put on in his place? [BTW I consider both him and Alomar about even as defenders-Ryno had a bit more range but Alomar was a bit quicker on the DP turn] Gehringer despite the extra 35 points of BA wasn’t really any better than Ryno as a hitter, adjusted for era, and Sandberg had a better glove. Carew hit for the huge average but had to be moved off the position before he had 2-3 of his big years (including the .388 one). Alomar is close in many ways but even with his 1 1/2 year vacation Ryno still has more career value and had a few more great years. Frisch is overrated because of his lively ball stats, and after him you have guys like Grich and Whitaker who simply didn’t have the real big seasons (FTMP). Biggio overall I’d put above Ryno.

If you assume 1-5 are the mortal locks Hornsby/Morgan/Collins/Jackie R/LaJoie, then you likely are choosing 5 of these 8 guys, and I only see 1-3 at the most clearly ahead of Sandberg.

5

This is my problem with Carew–he was a multipositional player, who had serious (I mean, serious) problems at each position: for a 1B man he lacked power. In the contemporary era, even a poor 1B man has more power than Carew. And for a second baseman, he didn’t play very good defense. (How many defensive wizards do you suppose get moved to play first base?) .388 is nice and all, but we’re talking about the best of the best here.

6

I disagree about Carew. The move to first base was more a manegerial move than a personal decision. After Harmon Killebrew went to DH/retired, the Twins were pathetic at first base. In Carew’s last two years a second, Twins first basemen were Craig Cusick (.239/8/26) and Johnny Briggs (.231/7/39). The Twins thought they had better options at second than first in the minors, so Carew moved over. He wasn’t a perrenial gold glover, but he wasn’t bad. When he went to California, they had Bobby Grich at second.

Carew wasn’t just a good hitter, he was a phenomenal one. The 70’s were not a time of great offense - Carew would routinely hit 100 points higher than the league average and he won seven batting titles. He maintained a career average over .333 until very late in his career, at a time when only a handful of hitters ended up over .300 in a season. His 1977 season was one of the greatest of all time, leading the league in average, on base %, OPS, runs, hits, triples, and finished second to Jim Rice in Slugging % and total bases.

7

I apologize if I’ve seemed secretive, which isn’t my intent, but I guess it come across that way. I’m trying to avoid two things:

  1. Filling the OPs with a lot of blather, because if I get into too much detail people might get bored, and

  2. Admitting that I started the process without precisely knowing what direction it would take.

Having said that, here is the basic plan at this point:

  1. Hold a ballot for each hitter’s position. Breaking things up by position will allow us to get a core of genuine Hall of Famers. Most important, it’s the single easiest way of subdividing players into manageable groups. I cannot guarantee that the 80 players selected (it might be more than 80 if there’s ever a tie for 10th) will absolutely be the 80 greatest position players in major league history, but it will give us our HoF core that we can fill in with wild card ballots. I am very confident the 80+ players selected will include at least the 60-70 best position players ever and that the other 20 will be way above the real HoF’s lower limit. We aren’t going to elect any Chick Hafeys.

Incidentally, I toyed with the idea of breaking outfielders up by era, instead of left-right-center but finally decided the hell with it. It’s too hard.

  1. Hold a series of ballots for pitchers, eventually selecting 40. I think that is a fair ratio of pitchers to position players to start with.

  2. Hold a ballot for Negro Leaguers.

  3. Hold a series of Wild Card rounds to select an additional 30 players, and then

  4. Maybe doing something else if people want.

That will give us 170 (or slightly more) players, which is, I personally think, a good number, and maybe even a touch on the low side. Everyone has a different opinion as to where the HoF line is, but 170 is less than the real HoF, and it’s less than two players for every year of pro baseball history, which seems a good limit to me.

Rose is the most extreme example in major league history of a weird choice. He had no primary position at all; he played five positions for a significant period of time, and the position where he played the most games was where he had the least value (first base) while he actually was at his greatest value when playing the outfield.

I’m sorry if you think the process is unfair to Rose (and we also have the complicating factor of his gambling and how that may affect voting) but there’s no administratively easy way of doing it any other way, and I really don’t think it will end up being a problem. There are probably not ten players in major league history who this affects who actually have a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected, and one of them, Harmon Killebrew, has already been elected, so Killer’s got his plaque. The other big names are Pete Rose, Rod Carew, Paul Molitor, Tommy Leach, and possibly Ernie Banks; you also have Edgar Martinez, who was a legitimately great hitter with no defensive position, and I guess some people might want to vote for Harold Baines.

If people want Rose in the Hall I have not the slightest doubt he’ll win on a wild card ballot. Molitor will probably make it in too, and I think the other guys are kind of marginal candidates. I might be surprised, of course, and ultimately it lies with the voters. But I just don’t believe, at least not yet, that it will end up mattering; there are not enough multi position stars with impressive resumes to tip the balance.

I do appreciate your points, though, because it’s not a perfect system, and if you have any suggestions for HOW to run the Wild Card rounds I would really like to hear them. I have three ideas:

  1. I could run ballots with actual nominees based on the players who got the most votes in previous rounds without being elected,

  2. I could run ballots with remaining notable ballplayers grouped by era, or

  3. I could run a series of descending ballots, essentially, “Pick ten players. Okay, pick tenh more. Okay, pick ten more” and so on.

8

Actually, that is the principle on which I run my life: If I think something might be unfair to Pete Rose, I advocate it strongly.

I feel about him sort of like I feel about Barry Bonds, Terrell Owens, Rush Limbaugh and Charles Manson put together–you just can’t be unfair enough to these guys. :smiley:

I chose Rose just because he was a big multi-position star, but there are several others: Molitor, Jackie Robinson, Carew, Killebrew, Banks–and these are just at the few positions we’ve covered so far. There are more.

I am concerned about the business I brought up earlier–that we’re biased towards those players we actually saw, naturally enough, and biased against those whose names we’ve just read (outside of big mega-stars we’ve read a lot about, like Ruth and Cobb and Mathewson). What I would do to correct this would be to have four eras for each position (pre-1900, 1901-1945, 1945-1990, and post-1990) and to include the top five vote getters from each era. If someone doesn’t feel qualified to vote for players he never saw, fine. That just means there will be fewer votes in those categories, but the top players will get in the Hall.

I would also (in addition to my suggestion about the multi-positional stars) make these top ten at each position (I’d actually make it five from each era at each position) mere nominations, which we would then discuss after all the positions were voted on. I think some people might get turned around after some discussion, which I would find interesting and valuable even if no one changed his mind. For one thing, if someone got screwed because he spent part of his career at one position and another part at another, his case could be made that he was unfairly being penalized for his versatility. (I’m thinking of Darrell Evans here but I’m sure there are others.) I’m really interested in the discussions, from which I always learn some things.

Thanks for considering amending the process, RickJay. I always enjoy talking baseball with you.

9

Also, I just noticed that Banks wasn’t even on the list you provided of firstbasemen. I know you said it wasn’t exclusive, but omitting the name of a guy I saw exclusively (the last 10 years of his career) as a first baseman, who totalled over 500 HRs, has to be unfair to Banks’ chances. He’ll probably go as a shortstop anyway, but it seems very inconsistent to list Killebrew but not Banks or Rose. (To say nothing of listing Rudy May–I’d still like to hear how that happened.)

Anyway, if we could consider this as a preliminary round, with some good discussion after these first ballots are complete, and then vote by periods, I think we’ll have much more equitable results. After all, you’re seeking to provide a counter-measure to the idiotic, biased, ignorant, inconsistent, nonsensical results that Cooperstown has managed to enforce for 70 years–we should be able to come up with a system that suffers from none of these.

10

This is in principle a good idea, but it’s complex, and I’m worried we’d bore too many people out of the discussion. And to be honest, it’s too much work. I have a job, a toddler, and I’m moving in four weeks. Feel my pain. :slight_smile:

Also, it would create any number of unintended other voting unfairnesses. You’d have to define some players in one era but not another whose careers straddled both, you’d probably be thin-slicing the nominations in some eras to the point that worthy candidates would be excluded, and you’d still have trouble dealing with multi-position players.

If the goal is to appoint an arbitrary number of players - let’s run with 170-180 - who are the finest to ever play baseball, then the nomination of the CORE group isn’t nearly as important as the way we pick the REST of them. Assuming your criticism that early ballplayers are not being fairly treated is true, the “error” will be, at most, five out of the first 80 position players named. Given that the era before 1920 amounts to less than a quarter of baseball history (by the number of teams/games, not years) it shouldn’t account for more than 20 of the first 80 anyway, and you know we’re going to get the real greats- Eddie Collins, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner et al. are all getting in. So out of the first 80 we’ll have no bozos and we’ll be missing only a few true greats, and I am absolutely confident we’ll get most, if not all, of the remaining true greats in the wild card rounds.

If it’s clear that the process is excluding pre-live ball players I think it would be fair to conduct a wild card round of voting to get in a few of those players, limiting the ballot to pre-1920 players who got support in earlier rounds. We’ll see how the voting goes - I don’t think it will be as bad as you seem to think - but we won’t allow entire swaths of baseball history to go ignored.

My central belief is that having the voting relatively open to start with will get the no-brainers out of the way and allow the wild card rounds to fill it in with the proper supporting cast. We really don’t need to discuss whether or not Willie Mays should be in the Hall of Fame, but I’m very interested to see what people think of Robin Roberts, Ron Santo, and Jim Rice.

And anyway, I want the VOTERS to select the players more than the PROCESS. So I was looking for a process that would make it easy for voters to pick the names they wanted - open enough for people to feel free in their votes, but at the same time making it manageable.
PS. I blew it on Ernie Banks; I assumed he played more games at short. To be honest I doubt he’d have been elected as a first baseman anyway; he played almost as many games at short.

11

We’re voting for a fetal Hall of Fame?

12

I disagree obviously. Sandberg got a huge boost offensively by playing in Wrigley. One of the more extreme examples I have seen for a Hall of Famer. Alomar was a better fielder and a significantly better base stealer. Sandberg’s power was about the equal of Alomar’s outside of Wrigley.

I sometimes think Sandberg has a weird cult of personality going with his fans. It reminds me of the Dodger fans with Gil Hodges.

I don’t think Sandberg is a bad choice, but I don’t think he clearly standouts to the other 7 you listed.

RickJay, is A-Rod going to go on the list at Short or Third or both?

ETA to your PS: I planned to vote for Banks at Short.

13

Carew won the second most batting titles. Only behind Cobb. That is all you need to know. Fielding is important but diminished because it is largely subjective.

14

It is up to the voters, who, technically, could vote him in as a left fielder if they wanted to. However, he will be named on the shortstop post and not the third basemen post; he has played far more games at short than at third. Assuming he remains a regular third baseman he won’t have half his games as a third baseman until about 2012-2013.

15

Seriously? This is what the SDMB was made for–you have at least five or ten over-qualified volunteers, I’d guess, who would be happy taking on a share of the workload in the interests of getting it right. There’s one sitting in my undershorts right this second, as a matter of fact.

I’d much rather get it right than get it done quickly. At this pace, we’ll have a SDMB HoF in about a month, but I’m afraid it will be as flawed (for different reasons) as Cooperstown’s. If we were to do this as slowly as humanly possible, discuss each position and each era at great length, we’ll probably finish the job (to my own satisfaction, at any rate) in a few years, which would be more than quick enough for me, because I’m a fan of detailed discussions of baseball.

It’s not a big deal–I could always start my own HoF thread when you’re done, maybe using your lists as my nominations.

But I think you’ve got help if the work involved is really the barrier.

16

Just determining the eras could take months. I found many objections to your four quickly suggested periods. Additionally the stats of the 1800’s are of course subject to many questions as players moved between the NL and the other major leagues of the times that had brief existences. There was a sharp difference between play around 1920. There was another huge surge in offense in the late 30s. The late 60s through the part of the 70s was a real dead period that gradually added offense back but it was not cut and dry. Expansion, free agency and the DH changed things. Then we have the steroid era that started in 1989 in my opinion and might be largely over now.

Then there is the fact that to really be fair, we need not just league adjustments but ballpark adjustments. The very factors that help Sandberg also hurt Joe DiMaggio. I’m not even sure how to find splits and park adjustments on older players. I went through it once on Babe Ruth and I was surprised to discover that Yankee Stadium barely helped his Home Run numbers despite what one would think. At this point I don’t recall where I dug up the numbers to do that.

17

So suggest fairer (but roughly equal) eras. You have, sort of, actually.

The more eras we create, the problems we’ll have with players overlapping, as **RickJay ** pointed out, but that can be dealt with: you simply come up with a metric (games, at-bats, plate appearances, whatever) and the era the player had more of the metric is his era. Arbitrary but reasonable and fair. I’ll be glad to have elections by the decade, though there are decades where the fourth-best player at a position (like CFers in the 1950s) is better than the best player at the position in some other decades, so shortening up the eras may compell us to be more flexible in terms of players we elect from each periood. Maybe that could be dealt with via an at-large category after the eras are finished, specifically to address glaring inequities.

Again, we already have a biased and totally sucky HOF–do we need another one? Are we in some kind of rush?

18

I’m enjoying this current one but I like your idea too. Why not do both? First a pure poll in the style of the writers and then a much more detailed and fair poll.

Here is another suggestion that also has problems.

Pre-1891 as the first break. That was the end of the AA.
1892 to 1919 as 1920 was the first year a team hit 100+ homers in decades. (The 1894 Boston Beaneaters were the prior team that I know of)
1920 to 1960: The league was effectively unchanging in this time unless and then expansion. The other option could be to break eras with Jackie Robinson but I don’t see a sharp change and play in stats even with the addition of Black Players. Another factor was the introduction of Night Baseball.
1961 to 1988: Expansion, changes and all but before the Bash Brothers.
1989 to today: The steroid era plus a few extra years.

19

Individual park effects are a real aspect of that player’s value. I realize Sandberg hit much better in Wrigley than elsewhere, but that is largely unique to Ryne Sandberg; while Wrigley was a hitter’s park it didn’t add 31 points to everyone’s batting average. If Ryne Sandberg, individually, took special advantage of Wrigley, that added real wins to the Cubs. It’s not a statistical illusion, it’s a genuine strength for Sandberg that helped his team.

Similarly, Joe DiMaggio (who will be elected on the center fielder vote with ease, so this doesn’t matter) deserves no extra credit if he was unusually disadvantaged by Yankee Stadium. His statistics have to be viewed with an eye towards to OVERALL effect of Yankee Stadium, which was that it was a moderate pitcher’s park, but if DiMaggio was unusually hurt by it then that’s part of DiMaggio’s overall value, and he doesn’t merit extra credit for it.

20

Also, the things that help someone often hurt him in other ways. DiMag lost homeruns to Yankee Stadium’s dimensions, true, but the depth of CF that ate up his HRs also gave him countless opportunities to get fans bug-eyed at his defensive abilities. Balls that would have gone out of most parks, with the CF looking up into the stands, gave DiMag in Yankee Stadium the chance to catch up with them, and wow observers (and add to his Range Factor).