Based on the summary I read that’s exactly how it works. Please let me know how I’ve got this wrong:
A team like those O’s have 67 wins. Therefore there will be 201 total shares allotted, 48% to the hitters and 52% to the pitchers and defense. That’s 96 wins distributed to the hitters based on their offensive output. Ripken’s share of those 96 wins was 34. Now, if the O’s gained 5 wins on the back of a hypothetical Jack Morris the total Win shares available goes from 201 to 216, the offensive proportion is now 104. Nothing about the hitters offensive output changes so presumably Cal gets the same percentage of those offensive Win Shares. That would work out to 37 Win Shares, 3 more based solely on the fact that Jacko out-pitched the noodle arms they actually had.
So, unless I’m missing something or the Wiki summary is completely false Cal benefits from something he didn’t do.
No. You’re incorrect in this assumption, I’m afraid. I’m starting to understand why you didn’t like Win Shares - if this was true the statistic would make no sense whatsoever.
The 48/52 split is true for the league as a whole, not any one team. Every team can have a different mix; a great hitting/poor pitching team will have a higher percentage of WS awarded to its hitters. This is clearly noted in the Wikipedia article; “On a team with equal offensive and defensive prowess, hitters receive 48% of the win shares and those win shares are allocated among the hitters based on runs created.” The 1991 Orioles were not, to say the least, a team of equal offensive and defensive prowess; they were the worst pitching/fielding team in the major leagues, except for maybe Oakland. The 1991 Orioles had more Win Shares awarded to their hitters than to pitching and defense; Orioles hitters had 53% of the team’s Win Shares. (And that’s even though they didn’t have a good offense, either.)
Had Morris joined the Orioles, their hitting and fielding WS wouldn’t have changed at all. Ripken’s 34 Win Shares would have remained unchanged.
An interesting article on WS and the HoF was posted today on Bill James On Line (which is fee-required site, but this link is not): Essentially, what Tango Tiger’s doing is providing a list of players NOT in the HOF according to the number of WS.
The highest numbers belong to
Tim Raines 390
Roberto Alomar 376 (eligible in '09)
Darrell Evans 363
Rusty Staub 358
Lou Whittaker 351
with Blyleven in about 10th place with 339. To me, you’d need to make a case for why players should be moved up or moved down on this list to justify why they should be in the HOF or not in the HoF. Raines is so far ahead of anyone else, though, I think it mostly argues for electing him alone and then sorting out some of the lesser players afterwards.
That’s true, though he will have been waiting longer with more win shares points, and fewer Met-fan-hatred points and umpire-sputum points, which all count heavily against Alomar’s candidacy
Actually, not that I want to raise an issue I think a Jays’ fan might feel strongly about, but from a Mets- centric pov, Alomar’s last few years are a wonderful example of someone who added to his career totals for a few years in which he was, in the opinions of most close observers, a waste of a roster space, a waste of money, and a waste of DNA. What a miserable dog of a player he was at Shea stadium. When I hear his name, I feel the urge to stand up and boo. That he doesn’t get WS deducted from his totals for his Mets/ChiSox seasons at the end seems to be the best argument against win shares I’ve ever heard. The notion that those horrible seasons (all-around–I don’t know if he was more inept on the field, at bat or on the bases) somehow add to his qualifications is offensive to fans everywhere.
He lost the ability to play baseball suddenly. It happens. It doesn’t make him a bad person or a lazy player.
But yes you are pointing to another significant flaw of Win shares. It doesn’t do negatives. Thus, it overvalues players less then replacement value and undervalues everyone else. I’m not going use win shares are the basis for my hof arguments, because I don’t it that good a stat.
James is actually working on Win Losses, even as we speak. It’s a better system than you give it for being. It’s just frustrating how Alomar played terribly and played and played because he was earning big money.
What exactly would you expect him to do? Players don’t get paid extra for playing especially well, I don’t expect them to give money back for playing poorly. Nor do I expect them to stop playing if they will want to play. Sticking with Alomar too long was a mistake of Met management, not Alomar.
That’s kinda my point. Current ballplayers with megabux get to play poorly (and accumlate career stats) for years, when in previous times they would have been benched a month into playing badly.
Data Point: Whenever the topic turned to who should be in the HOF, Richie Ashburn would invariably name Vada Pinson. Said Pinson should go before Santo.
During Ashburn’s career (which ended in 1962) Pinson had most of his best years, while Santo was just getting started. I think Ashburn and Santo may have been teammates in Santo’s rookie year, in fact.
(Shrug) Lots of great players sucked at the end of their careers. Do you think Braves fans were all that impressed by Babe Ruth’s last season?
Alomar didn’t have an especially long decline phase or spend many (or actually, any) years as a terrible player. If you don’t like how he played as a Met that’s fine, but objectively there’s nothing about his decline phase you can’t say about most Hall of Fame players; look up 30 random Hall of Famers and at least half will have career-ending phases just as bad. Alomar was still an awesome player in 2001; in 2002 he joined the Mets and had a mediocre season, then played just 196 more games before retiring. His final stint was with Arizona and he actually played pretty well. He never had a really terrible season.
Side note to Hawkeyeop: You can’t really blame Met management for poor judgment. They acquired a guy who’d been an awesome player for ten years, including the year immediately preceding their acquisition of him, and he happened to decline the year they got him, and despite PRR’s comments, he wasn’t so terrible that you would have immediately concluded his time was up. They got rid of him in less than a season and a half, so it’s not like they were stuck with him long.
Alomar, IMHO, is a first ballot choice. He was a tremendous player, the best overall player on a great team, a contributor to many winning teams, an awesome overall player with the numbers and accolades to support it. You (prr, not Hawkeyeop) yourself are the one who wants to consider peak value as being as or more important than career totals, and Alomar’s peak numbers are very impressive indeed.
That just isn’t the case; even in the past most Hall of Famers hung around for at least a season or two after they were great, or even useful. Guys awesome to the end, like Ted Williams, were the exception. Look at the career ends of Jimmie Foxx, or Willie Mays. Bob Gibson, who was as proud and competitive as anyone who ever played baseball, was pretty mediocre in his penultimate year and atrocious in his last. Juan Marichal went 6-16 three years before he retired, then went 11-15. I could go on.
If you want to substract Alomar’s last few season, it’s not really going to detract much from his career Win Shares, or his overall resume, any more than it does from almost any other Hall of Fame candidate if you apply the same standards.
Ruth had his moments–I’d have liked to have seen that final 3-HR day. But in general I agree with your entire post–most HoFers had few seasons at the end when they were a shadow of their former selves.
But Alomar seemed to add a little attitude to his final days that was particularly distinguished. He was special. He was a star. I have zero documentation (because this is the sort of thing that professional ballplayers discuss only after hours of torture) but you had the feeling that his teammates hated him–they certainly didn’t yak in interviews about how much they learned from following his model, because anyone could see he wasn’t trying very hard. He had the range at 2B of about three holiday-sized postage stamps in either direction and showed the guts of a 4-year-old girl during the DP, which he probably thought stood for “Deliberate Protection,” because that’s what he provided to himself above all else as a charging runner approached, time after time. At the plate, he couldn’t pull anything harder than his dick, and his insane attempts to bunt for a base hit in situations where an XBH was called for made him utterly reviled during his Met career. It was like carrying a flashing neon sign saying “I’m not trying to win the game, with two outs and a runner in scoring position and the game tied and weak hitters following me in the lineup, I’m just trying desperately not to make the final out here.”
Mostly it was his piss-poor attitude. He was acquired to be a veteran among neophytes, and the manager asked him (probably no cite here, either) PLEASE not to slide into first base headfirst–stylin’ like that sets a bad example for the young guys, and the little asshole insisted on doing exactly as he pleased, which probably didn;‘t matter on a terrible club anyway, but GAWD was he hated. The upshot is that no one who watched the WAY he played baseball for the Mets would ever vote for him for the HoF. He’ll get in–his line of stats are that good (though obviously not quite Raines’, whose final days I also saw with the Yankees, and he performed creditably)–but maybe not with the help of New York voters who watched him play. He gets in on win Shares, and I credit him for his peak seasons. If he was kept out of the HoF for a long time, I might break down and concede that his numbers warrant eletion, but I’d certainly cast a ballot with Raines and not Alomar for a few years to discourage what I saw in New York.
And to expand a little bit on this point, my argument against Alomar for the HoF (a loser if ever I made one) concerns the suddenness of his decline, not the length of it. I’ll check out how it compares in terms of WS to other HoFers you mention as well. I’ve been discussing this point (at maddening length) with James himself the past few weeks.
Oh, off the top of my head I could rattle off a bunch of HoFers, many inner circle, who hit a wall by age 35: Jimmie Foxx, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Bench, aforementioned Ryno, Drysdale (if counting pitchers), Lou Boudreau. Most of his value was already in the books-even if Alomar had lasted long enough, as a more or less average player, to get 3,000 hits, it probably wouldn’t have changed his rank on Bill’s list very much, which by his own admission is based more on peak value.
Yeah, I’m mostly venting. Imagine if you had gotten a HoFer still in his peak for a bag of donuts and he sucked from Day One? You might still be ranting too. (I coped by switching my allegiance to Red Sox around that time, but Alomar still pisses me, on principle.)
I used to write to James via e-mail, but he’s a very poor correspondent, and he responds quickly on his site. I hate to name-drop, but it does please me to note that I wrote a few letters to him that he published in his early Abstracts, so we had a pretty good correspondence going there for a while. Now it’s mostly my asking stupid questions, and him responding brilliantlt on-line.
This is entirely possible. He had a reputation in Toronto of being a prima donna off the field, and that was when nobody had any reason to complain about the quality of his play.
But, at the risk of sounding flippant, so what? His teams won. He played in Toronto, and they won. They he went to Baltimore, and they won. Then he went to Cleveland and more winning. He batted .313 in the playoffs. Maybe he was an ass, maybe not - until I meet him I don’t know for sure - but he won ballgames. If his attitude hurt his teams, that’d be one thing, but Alomar played on many winning teams. Let’s be honest; a lot of sports stars are assholes, probably a lot more than we like to believe. Cal Ripken Jr. wouldn’t travel with his team or stay in the same hotel for much of his career. I’m not sure that makes him an asshole but you could spin it that way.
His performance in New York might not have been good, but if it’s as bad as you describe it prepresents a truly amazing, almost Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation from the player who had spent fourteen years playing terrific baseball in four different cities. He never had a reputation for dogging it or not wanting to win - in fact, quite the opposite. Could it possibly have been a case of just disappointed high expectations?