Absolutely in. Fantastic numbers in an extreme pitchers park for much of his career. Also was much better defensively and on the base paths than the typical slugging first basemen. I wouldn’t hold a few dozen bad at bats at inopportune times against him.
wins above replacement player.
Sorry.
As pointed out, it’s Wins Above a Replacement Player. Basically, it says “Okay, how much better is this guy than some freely available Quadruple-A schlub would have been in the same number of games?”
Computing the stat is hideously complex and requires a lot of assumptions and faith in the underlying methods, and every time someone makes an adjustment to the formulas it chances them so I don’t even know what set of numbers to believe. But it offers a quick and dirty estimate of player contribution. I am not claiming it’s entirely correct.
And the ASG is a red herring at best-in any event it should be like 20th on the priority list if judging HoF worthiness, not 2nd or thereabouts like you’re making it out to be.
What “actual standards”? He played 10 years in a major North American baseball league, which is the only standard which would apply. And the powers-that-be have put him on the ballot (not every 10-year player gets on, you know). And I’ve already refuted your “negatives”, attacking them head-on, including wins, which I’ll note you have studiously ignored. Other than that, you’ve tried to nitpick his candidacy to death with a bunch of little trivia items (ASG appearances, lack of nono’s as compared to Ryan and Koufax, etc.) and have completely failed to address my concerns, nor the bulk of his significant accomplishments. YOU’RE the one making up imaginary standards, as if no 287 game winners have ever gotten in the Hall. 30 players-that the size of your Hall, is it?
And WTF does the “excluded middle fallacy” have to do with anything here?
You can say that about many HoFers-Brooks Robinson, to name one. Not sure how this harms his candidacy. And sandwiched between two bad years is his stellar 1989 campaign; Steve Carlton would be a better example.
No “rule”, but pitcher batting is not selected for in the modern game, and thus would be expected to go “extinct” (to continue the analogy). In other words a guy can pitch in the majors even if he hits .000 (and bunts like crap too)-likewise he can’t hang around (Ken Brett <cough>) unless he can actually get people out.
Note I have no problem with the DH either-wow something we can agree on.
Uh, I wasn’t mentioning it as a black mark against his candidacy - but to point out that about 100 of his HRs (1/3 of them) came in the final few years of his very long career.
Actually, besides Ruth (who would probably have made it into the HOF even if he had remained a pitcher), there’s one other acknowledged and significant exception to this: Walter Johnson. The Big Train made it in on his pitdhing skills, to be sure, but he batted something like .239 (from memory, so I may be off) – not a horrible average, though not HOF material by itself – on largely lackluster Washington teams, and more than a few of the games he won as a pitcher, he also provided a significant part of the offense, wielding his bat to drive in runs or get hits that the top of the order could then bring him home on. So many of his wins were wins in two senses – he was the pitcher that kept the other team from scoring, to be sure, but also a functional part of the batting order where most pitchers were little more than dead weight on theirs. He also got home runs slightly over 1% of his at bats, which is a credible figure on any player from his era.
Okay gotcha my apologies.
Is there a better measure than 20th best for establishing who were considered the best 2 or 3 performers at their position during their careers?
Why is it necessary to keep mentioning this? :dubious: Repeated from earlier in this very thread:
**"The Committee shall consider all eligible candidates and voting shall be based upon the individual’s record, ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contribution to the game. " **
Those are the standards under the rules for selection to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Did you really not know that?
You can either accept them or you can start your own Hall with the rules you’d rather use instead. But you cannot dismiss them, or call the people who insist on following them anyway stupid or similar terms, okay?
I read it and I’m sold. Blyleven should be in…we wouldn’t even be having this discussion had he won 13 more games. 3700 k’s, 242 complete games and 60 shutouts are Hall numbers.
I think Tim Raines should be in too.
As for the new group, Roberto Alomar is a definite. The spitting incident isn’t enough to keep him out for a few reasons. First, it was an isolated incident. Second, the umpire, John Hirschbeck, not only accepted Alomar’s apology, he also apologized to Alomar. Whatever was said isn’t that important now but the guy didn’t spit because he was called out. Insults were exchanged. Hirschbeck himself says that if he had a vote Alomar would be in.
I keep asking: Why was that?
Can anyone provide a more cogent answer than “the voters were all just stupid and/or blind”?
The ASG measures what player happens to have nice starts to seasons. Among its many issues is it ignores all performance in July, August, September, and October. Besides I have little interest in how good people thought he was at the time. My concern is how good he actually was.
It is against the rules for a catcher to block the plate. What would you think of a catcher who refused to do that. A smart player standing up for the rules? Or one who was ignorant of how things really work.
Writers have coincidently ignored the character clause, or arbitrally enforced it. Often good character gets treated as media friendly or likeable. There is a very good reason for this, and it is these things are nearly impossible to measure. Does Mcgwire have bad character? He has done a ton of work for childrens charities, and was instrumental enough helping other players hit that the Cardinals made him their hitting coach. Bonds was an unlikable guy in public, but his teams never seems to suffer. The animosity between Kent and him seemed to fuel them both as much as anything. Did his abrasiveness help or hinder his teams? How exactly do you know?
I don’t think we are very good at measuring character or sportsmanship. I thus tend to focus on things that we can measure, which is mainly performance on the field.
Because the voters really do and did weigh wins far more than they ever should have. I’d imagine there was a bit of market bias, but I don’t put a lot of weight in that.
I think it is fairly simple, the voters pay attention to wins, certainly back then the analysis was not as nuanced as it is now. If you look at that article there is almost a direct correlation for Blyleven’s win total and how he fared in the voting. Blyleven also played on bad teams and it is hard for a great player on a bad team to get noticed sometimes, especially if they are not playing in the Northeast.
A note on Bert and the ASG:
Bill James did this funky little thing on why knuckleballers never/rarely win the Cy Young Award. His hypothesis is that they usually end up with bad teams, and thus their win/loss record isn’t too great even when they’re not allowing runs. Good teams usually have their pick of pitchers, and all things being (relatively) equal, most managers will pick fireballers instead of junkballers. Thus, the great junkballers tend to end up on mediocre-to-bad teams.
The manager of the All-Star squad is in charge of the utimate “good team”. For the most part, he’s going to grab the guys with 100-mph fastballs who can go out and shut the other guys down for two innings, not the guy with the monster curve who’s just as good (or better) over the course of the season. Thus, selection to the ASG–which, in Bert’s day, was entirely up to the manager–is deceptive as a metric in his case.
Partly. It also is partly a measure of lifetime achievement, or of being the best player on a bad team (the quota system sucks but that’s another thread), and partly showing the fans the people generally considered the best. BTW, if your argument is that Bert was just ordinary for half of each season, you’re not helping him, ya know.
But the standards a voter is required to judge do list sportsmanship, and more often than the things you can put numbers on. You do have to consider it.
Thanks for bringing up the primary problem I have with Basement Baseball - the concept that only things with numbers on them matter, and that things without numbers don’t. That forces one into a limited, distorted understanding of the game that provides immense frustration for those able to keep statistics in perspective. They’re just a tool, and have their limitations like any tool. The measurability-trap problem is hardly limited to sports fandom, either, of course.
But wins did matter, and for pitchers as well as voters. Pay and recognition were based on a defined metric, as in most businesses, and pitchers did pitch to win more than they do now. Those were the effective “rules” of the game at the time. That’s how it was played then. And Blyleven wasn’t one of the best at it under those “rules”.
A century ago, success and pay and glory were measured by extra-base hits and steals, and that’s what the best offensive players went for. The guys who hit the most home runs weren’t better players because people “should not have” scorned them as hotdoggers. It would be ridiculous to do some SABR work and show how one of them belongs in the Hall based on century-later standards. You know better than to think you can compare players from different eras, and that’s why. Don’t apply standards anachronistically. You’re doing exactly that by disparaging Blyleven’s W-L record based on the standards of a different generation.
Discussing what “should have” been the case instead, in some fantasy world, merely exhibits a disdain for the facts as they are.
I’d have to go first with them not being considered “real” pitchers by enough people. That, and that their effectiveness tends to be based on messing up hitters’ timing - if there were more than a few around at any time, batters could adjust better and they’d get hit more often.
Who does he mean? Phil Niekro? Tim Wakefield? Tom Candiotti I’ll give you. The rest of that discussion does not seem fact-derived either, frankly.
I’ll toss in an observation that some of you have seen before, that the greatest players in any sport make their teams better. They inspire their teammates, through that intangible stuff that Hall voters are required to consider, to exceed the levels they would otherwise have performed at (ref. Carlton '72). A good player certainly can be stuck on a bad team, but a great one won’t be.
What is all that blather about Blyleven’s strikeouts, then? Was his curve not considered able to “shut the other guys down” for even two innings? If not, then how great was he, really?
I’ll ask one more time: How many Hall members have been selected fewer times than Blyleven’s 2?
Those rules were as absurd then as they are now. Aside from the massive power boost that Walter Johnson provided his team with his incredible .235/.274/.342 batting line, pitchers simply have no control over their run support. If you can somehow display how pitchers then “pitched to win more than pitchers now” I would absolutely love to hear it, as I’ve always loved hearing a good yarn.
A “different generation”? I think I understand the difficulty here - you’re talking about some other Bert Blyleven that pitched wearing a one-piece unitard swimming suit, had a handlebar mustache and used hair tonic while throwing a baseball made by Abner Doubleday himself. The rest of us are talking about the guy that pitched from 1970 to 1992 on the same sized mound everyone since 1969 has.
The argument isn’t that things that you can’t measure aren’t important. It is that you if you are assigning value to intangibles than your pretty much making
%!@$* up.
Too bad. Those *were *the rules. People do perform to their incentives in any business, including pro sports. You don’t have to like it or agree with any particular incentive structure, but so what? Too bad.
:shrug: That was a classic Basement Baseball comment. Yours was too, hawkeyeop.
Look at the years Blyleven pitched, subtract them from 2009, and you’ll get the span of a human generation. It isn’t that hard a concept, is it?. A number of guys are already in the majors who hadn’t even been born when Bert was in his prime. And haven’t you yourself made enough comments about standards being different now, even if you’ve disguised them by calling the effective standards of that time “stupid” and so forth? Isn’t that acknowledging that it was a different generation?
BTW yes, you really are that old, get over it. 
Could I have a list of these rules? They seem important. Surely they’re written down somewhere… Or you could simply point out how players of his “generation” were “pitching to win” more then than now and how you’d specifically do that.
But seriously - I want to know more about “pitching to win” as it relates to elite pitchers. I understand that a pitcher on a great offensive team doesn’t have to get every single player out, and has a lot more flexibility. That makes sense, and is typically the argument given by the Mike Golics of the world when trying to justify the 20 win 3.40 ERA pitcher over the 17 win 2.50 ERA pitcher. How do those 3 wins indicate the pitcher is better, rather than the team being better? Induction in the HOF is an individual distinction - why do you base your highest criteria on a team statistic?
Ouch!