I agree with this.
Sorry I wasn’t clearer. I’ll do it, but not until the long distant future, when we’ve all forgotten about RickJay’s fine thread, and some of us are safely buried and the grass is growing long above our graves.
Or at least for a few more months.
No matter how much some of you beg me.
I don’t think they are valid concerns. Pre 1900 ballplayers did play a different game. Not to mention that rule changes were frequent, and stats unreliable. Even Bill James (who I think does marvelous work) cannot assign meaningful values to stats of that era.
He’s using a Clark Griffith quote to support himself even when everyone knows that the likes of Griffith (i.e., baseball people voting with sentimental, quirky reasons 
) on the various Veteran Committes over the years have made most of the worst Hall of Fame choices ever. There’s a reason people remember Honus Wagner and not Herman Long. That reason is that Griffith was wrong.
And, finally, he’s been whining and complaining about the process ever since it started - he’s being pissy about it, like some music critic complaining that a piece of sheet music from 1885 didn’t make it onto Rolling Stone’s list of greatest songs. I think the threads are fun and the process is fun. I’m glad RickJay started it; I’m enjoying it, and the discussion, were it not for the fact that someone who thinks just because he knows Herman Long’s name justifies him in pissing on the parade.
[mod hat on]
I think it’s time to take the meta-discussion out of the Game Room.
Let’s keep this thread as a hall of fame discussion, and if you want to talk about PRR, start a new Pit thread.
Thanks!
[mod hat off]
The third base vote will be interesting. Looking ahead, it’s pretty obvious Schmidt, Brett, and Robinson will be more or less unanimous selections. I suspect Pie Traynor, who was the consensus best-third-baseman-ever prior to the third basemen’s golden age, will get in, and Home Run Baker, who certainly has the greatest nickname of all time. (A dead ball era player, at that.) And Eddie Mathews.
But after that I think it’s quite wide open. All the infield positions seem to be like this - four to six obvious choices and then a lot of thinking. There aren’t a lot of great third basemen between Baker and Mathews, really; the best of that era were probably two Negro League guys, Ray Dandridge and Judy Johnson, who’ll get their chance on a separate ballot, so I think we’ll end up with quite a mix of votes.
I really, really struggled with my shortstop ballot.
1 word: NETTLES
As much as I love Nettles, his .248 lifetime BA and .329 OBA will make it hard for me to vote for him. I would probably put Boggs and Brett ahead of them without even thinking about it much. His 390 Homers in a very dead ball time period might get me to sneak him in though. That and he had a much better glove than Boggs and better than Brett.
I’ve been saving my “sentimental” vote for Nettles. I didn’t vote for Scooter. Not even Jeter. But Nettles is the reason I love baseball so much. I was 11 years old during the '78 Series. Nettles was a god.
Nettles was underrated. He won’t be in my top ten, but he was a sensational defensive player and a good hitter - low batting average but he hit a lot of home runs - who had a very long career.
If they elected him to the real Hall of Fame he sure wouldn’t be the worst pick they ever made.
Protection? What about murderers row for the old Yankees. ? What about teams with a lot of good hitters like the Yankees a couple years ago. ? Then if you believe protection exists you have to provide a metric. How many points should we subtract from a protected hitter to be fair. ? Do we add to a hitter on a weak hitting last place team? if so ,how much? It is just arguing for kicks.
You said the turn of the century. Are you counting all pre-1900 batters as “the turn of the century”? I’ve provided a fairly discrete dividing line between the untamed jungle of ancient base ball and the Cobb/Ruth/Wagner era which pretty much resembles the modern day game: 1901, when the American League and the National League first came together to form the major leagues. I humbly submit that things that happened in 1894 don’t have anything to do with anything (although they can certainly be quantified and evaluated to a greater extent than you’re suggesting).
gonzomax…you don’t make any sense to me.
He made complete sense to me. He said, specifically: “I think the turn of the century with 400 hitters all over…” I figured he meant “the era in baseball history around 1900,” and not “strictly years AFTER the literal turn of the century.” Particularly in light of his actual post, I’m confused by your confusion.
Even so, once you take out guys on that list with less than 100 AB, there still aren’t that many players with .400 seasons. (It seems about the equivalent of hitting .330 or .340 today.) And more to the point, I don’t see how it’s that hard to evaluate players in context, even when that context seems strange now. Sure, Ed Delahanty’s 1899 season (.410 average) wasn’t as impressive as it would be today, but we can still say it was one of the best seasons of his era, and judge accordingly.
But there’s a big, discernible difference – complete with standardized rules changes and everything – in 1901, so even if his argument about the unevaluability of old-timey base ball had merit regarding the 19th century players, some vague hand-waving about .400 hitters “at the turn of the century” doesn’t address the AL-NL merger and the beginning of the modern-day sport. Neither do single-digit home run leaders during the Dead Ball Era, for that matter, albeit for a different reason.
I’m not sure who’s arguing what side anymore.
I think it’s fair to consider the nature of baseball pre-1900, but complete dismissal strikes me as being a case of the pendulum swinging way, way too far.
To use gonzo’s example of Cy Young, of course no pitcher could win 511 games today; it’s fair to say that Young’s 511 wins in the 1890s and 1900s are not the same as 511 wins would be today. The critical issue, to me, is that 511 wins wasn’t possible in Cy Young’s day, either, except for one guy; Cy Young. His accomplishment is clearly out of kilter with his contemporaries; nobody else won 500 games, nobody else won 450 games, in fact nobody else whose career began in the 19th century won 400 games. (Walter Johnson’s career started in 1907.) Young was way, way, WAY above the normal standard for pitchers; he was above the normal standard for GREAT pitchers. That’s what will put him on my ballot. You don’t have to have seen a guy win 30 games in a season to understand that Young was winning a lot more games than any of the pitchers he was playing against.
Young, Wagner, Cobb et al. are easy. Where some of the tough calls are going to come is where the game has changed in ways that aren’t numerically easy to get a handle on. It’s easy to look at Cy Young and say “Well, 511 wins isn’t quite the same in 1890-1911 as it would be now, but still, holy shit, dude, he’s like 100-150 wins better than the next best guys back then.”
A tough call for me is Jimmy Collins. He’s probably going to be on my list at third base, though statistically that’s a hard call to make. His career numbers are good but not sensational. However, I think the numbers don’t adequately tell the entire story there. Collins was a defensive player of, I believe, spectacular, sport-changing ability; his numbers are superficially eye-popping and his manner of play set a standard for the way the third baseman and shortstop handle defensive assignments (Collins was the first third baseman to routinely handle all bunts to the left side; it was practice at the time for the shortstop to cheat in and handle them.) He also made a lot of plays and had fielding percentages way above normal for the time, at a time when that meant a lot of saved errors. I honestly believe the metrics used today vastly understate Collins’s defensive contributions, and that his glove may have been worth twenty to thirty runs a year (which is a huge amount.) I also think there is a point to be placed in Collins’s column for the fact that even if his stats are not superficially equivalent to more recent third basemen, he WAS the best third baseman of the first forty years of major league baseball history.
But if someone disagrees, I can’t really solidly prove they’re wrong.
To me that’s the sort of thing that makes this process fun.
Interesting to compare Nettles to Brooks Robinson. Nettles had a .329 OBP, but Brooksie had .322 (albeit some of that in the low average 60’s). Robinson turned the 1970 World Series into his own private fielding exhibition, and that was probably enough to push him over the in/out line in the minds of many voters. Nettles did exactly the same thing in the 1978 Series, but it didn’t stick in people’s minds like Brooksie’s play did, for some odd reason. Robinson had a slightly longer career, but both really were in the majors for what seemed like forever. Robinson did win an MVP (arguably deserved), while Nettles never really had anything close to an MVP-quality season. I’d probably choose Darrell Evans over both tho.
Yes, it’s all very confusing.
Especially coming up wtih principles to stand by: if you admit that Cy Young is a legitimate star even though he’s guilty of playing ball before 1901, then you are legitimizing his opponents, too–you’re not crediting him with being a star playing against Little Leaguers and midgets and feebs, right? He was playing baseball against big-league players, albeit under slightly different rules and strategies. (If he wasn’t, then how come he didn’t stop pitching effectively after 1901?–his career tracks fairly normally–there’s no gigantic difference in the two halves of Young’s career. In fact, given how long his career went on, you could argue that pitching after 1901 seems easier than pitching before then. It’s a stupid argument, but not on the basis of Young’s relative effectiveness.) Wagner, too, to a lesser degree–and every MLB player after 1901 who played before that date didn’t go from being a huge star, a major league All-Star (now) playing in an AA league, to a decent player after 1901.
There’s a continuity here–MLB has been getting better over the decades, IMO, and there may be some point --1870s? 1880s?–at which we can cast some doubts on all but the biggest stars, but because great players who played after 1901 also played in the 1890s at about the same levels of talent, I can’t see de-legitimizing the 1890s at all, and by extension the 1880s are a hard sell for me too.
Which is not to say that I’m very confident in my picks there, either. I’m relying on scholars who’ve studied the period extensively, and I’m not completely comfortable arguing for players like Long whom I’ve never seen, never seen a picture of, haven’t read much of the lore and literature of 1890s baseball, dont really care a damn about 1890s baseball–but I cannot find a way to have a HoF that simply ignores 1890s players because it saves me some trouble.
As someone who’s closely followed the Hall of Merit process, I’m convinced that there are fairly rigorous, if variable, ways (undertaken by people much smarter than I) to compare ballplayers over all eras, including pre-1900 and even pre-1871. My selections for the SDMB HOF so far have reflected such (including being convinced by the HoM that George Wright may well have been one of the best shortstops of all-time, despite playing in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s). However, my argument to gonzomax is that even if you’re going to throw out the 19th century as being impossible to compare to the modern era, that reasoning doesn’t, and shouldn’t, hold water for the early 1900s.
But hell, we’ve got people like Bobby Grich – by repute one of very best fielding second basemen ever, and no slouch at all with the bat – garnering only lukewarm support in our votes, and he played in the 1970s and 1980s, so I fully accept that a lot of this is just a matter of taste.
And, as RickJay said, that’s what makes it so much fun.
Well, I wouldn’t assume just because Grich isn’t in someone’s top ten that they don’t believe he should be a hall of famer. For most position there are more then 10 viable candidates.
I would suggest when we reach the wild card rounds instead of picking X number of people, we instead go through every player that has gotten some support and have everyone vote yes or no. If X% (75?) vote yes that individual is in.
Question: Are we doing managers eventually?
As to Jimmy Collins, were his number good even for the time? I know his defense was suppose to be great and he changed the way third base was played and he should get consideration for that. How good was his defense though relative to those that came later? One good point in his favor, he was the very first third baseman elected to the HOF. They did not make many if any mistakes in those early years.