For a baseball fan, one of the great treats at the start of the New Year is the announcement of the newest class of Hall of Fame players as voted by the Baseball Writers Association of America. The anticipation felt by fans throughout the country is surpassed only by the anticipation and angst felt by the players on the ballot. The honor of enshrinement in Cooperstown is the culmination and validation of a great player’s career.
The 34 players on this year’s ballot all earned tens or hundreds of millions of dollars playing a child’s game but the honor of joining an exclusive club filled with living legends like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays cannot be measured in dollars. For a player, only winning a World Series or setting an all-time record can approach the emotion that Hall of Fame election engenders. A World Championship of course is a team effort; Hall of Fame induction is the ultimate individual glory.
A few weeks ago, approximately 600 writers, members of the BBWAA, received their Hall of Fame ballots for the Class of 2015. Each can mark up to 10 players, although they can mark as few as they choose or none at all. A player must appear on 75% of all submitted ballots to be chosen; the results will be announced on Tuesday, January 6th.
The players selected by the BBWAA will the only ones enshrined on Sunday, July 26th because the Golden Era Committee (which was evaluating players whose primary contribution occurred between 1947 and 1972) failed to elect any of the ten candidates that they considered, with Dick Allen and Tony Oliva falling a mere one vote short.
Just as it was a year ago, this year’s ballot is filled with more Hall of Fame worthy players than any ballots since 1946. That is not a typo: the thesis of this article is that only in the first eleven years of the Hall of Fame’s existence have there been more worthy players from which the baseball writers must make their ten choices. As it was last year, this is a greatly over-crowded ballot. It’s time to call the Fire Marshall. This ballot is way over capacity with Cooperstown material.
Take a look at the names on this year’s ballot for the first time:
- Randy Johnson: 303 wins, 4,875 strikeouts, 5 Cy Young Awards
- Pedro Martinez: 219-100 lifetime record, 2.93 ERA, 3 Cy Young Awards
- John Smoltz: 213 wins, 154 saves, 15-4, 2.67 ERA in the postseason
- Gary Sheffield: 509 HR, 1,676 RBI, .907 OPS
- Carlos Delgado: 473 HR, 1,512 RBI, .929 OPS
- Nomar Garciaparra: .882 OPS, best all-time for SS (min 5,000 PA)
- Brian Giles: .400 career OBP, .902 career OPS
And how about some of the holdovers:
- Barry Bonds: 762 home runs (most all time), 7 MVP’s
- Roger Clemens: 354 wins, 7 Cy Youngs
- Mike Mussina: 270-153 (.638), all pitched in the A.L. East
- Curt Schilling: 216 wins, 11-2, 2.23 ERA in the postseason
- Jeff Bagwell: 449 HR, .948 OPS
- Larry Walker: .313 career BA, .965 career OPS
- Alan Trammell: 1,231 runs scored, 1,003 RBI as a shortstop
- Tim Raines: 808 stolen bases (best SB% all-time, min 350 SB)
- Edgar Martinez: .312 career BA, .933 career OPS
- Craig Biggio: 3,060 hits, 1844 runs, 668 doubles (5th all time)
- Mark McGwire: 583 home runs (10th most all time)
- Mike Piazza: 427 home runs (most HR all-time for a catcher)
- Sammy Sosa: 609 home runs (8th most all time)
- Jeff Kent: 377 home runs (most HR all-time for a 2nd baseman)
- Fred McGriff: 493 HR, 1,550 RBI
- Don Mattingly: .307 career BA, 1985 AL MVP
- Lee Smith: 478 saves (3rd most all time)
Of course even the most casual fan knows that the last few star-studded ballots have left some players waiting on the Cooperstown sidelines because of their alleged use of performance enhancing drugs (PED’s). This list includes Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, and McGwire, all of whom have been linked to PED’s. It also includes a whisper and innuendo campaign against Bagwell and Piazza, who have never been linked to anything but some writers are suspicious of their performance on the diamond. So you have six players (and possibly more) who would already be in the Hall but aren’t because they played during the PED era. A seventh player (Gary Sheffield, who was named in the Mitchell Report on PED’s) is on the ballot for the first time. With these 7 and 17 other players with legitimate Cooperstown resumes also on the ballot it’s really hard for some writers to get down to ten names.
Even with the presence of players who are clogging up the ballot because of alleged PED use, the overall quality of the remaining players still represents arguably the greatest collection of talent on the Hall of Fame ballot in over 50 years. Let me explain.
One of the most difficult tasks in evaluating Major League Baseball players is when comparing position players to pitchers. The tasks that they are asked to perform are vastly different. To analogize it to other sports, the position players split time between offense and defense while the pitcher is hired specifically to play defense only. Of course, in the National League, the pitcher also goes on offense once every nine at bats, but that’s not why they’re on the field and there are no pitchers in the Hall of Fame who gained entry based on their prowess with the bat. In the modern American League game, of course, there are some players (such as David Ortiz) who are paid only for their offense and there are many position players who play in the field for nine innings but are in the lineup strictly for their bats and not their gloves.
Several years ago, the sabermetric industry created an advanced metric which is designed to compare batters to hitters, first basemen to shortstops, etc. by combining the totality of a player’s contributions into a single statistic: Wins Above Replacement (WAR). This is an imperfect statistic because there are subjective decisions made by its creators as to the relative value of the different positions on the diamond. Thus the two purveyors of the WAR statistic (www.baseballreference.com and www.fangraphs.com) actually give a different WAR to the same player because they calculate it differently. For a single season, a WAR of 8 or above represents a MVP-quality season, 5 or above an All-Star, 2 or above a starting player, and a result between 0 and 2 worthy of a bench player. While it’s imperfect, WAR is a useful tool to look the relative strengths of players or also a pool of players, in this case specifically the Hall of Fame.
Just to put WAR and the Hall of Fame in proper context, here is the career WAR for the last 10 players inducted by the BBWAA (we’ll use the www.baseballreference.com version here):
- 2014 Greg Maddux 104.6
- 2014 Tom Glavine 74.0
- 2014 Frank Thomas 73.7
- 2012 Barry Larkin 70.2
- 2011 Roberto Alomar 66.8
- 2011 Bert Blyleven 96.5
- 2010 Andre Dawson 64.5
- 2009 Rickey Henderson 110.8
- 2009 Jim Rice 47.4
- 2008 Goose Gossage 41.8
Note: for pitchers, only their WAR as pitchers is counted here. Tom Glavine, as an example, was a decent-hitting pitcher and good base-runner, with a career WAR of 7.5 for his contributions offensively.
As you can see, the range goes from the first-ballot no-brainer inductees (Maddux and Henderson) to the borderline choices (Rice and Gossage, who each had to wait many years before they made it). On this list, Blyleven looks like he should have been a first-ballot choice, but he debuted on the ballot with only 17.5% of the vote because of his so-so career won-loss record of 287-250 (.534). His induction on the 14th appearance on the ballot was considered a victory for the sabermetric community.
Anyway, when you look at the WAR of the individuals on the 2015 ballot, there are 9 players with a career WAR of 70 or more, a whopping 15 players with a WAR of 60 or more, 20 players who have a WAR of 50 or more and 23 who have a WAR of 40 or more.
With the exception of last year’s ballot class, the last time there were at least 9 players on the writers’ Hall of Fame ballot who had a career WAR of 70 or more was 1946. Also, 1946 was the last year in which at least 15 players had a 60 or higher WAR. That year, despite the presence of luminaries such as Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx and Frankie Frisch on the ballot, nobody was elected to the Hall. There were a couple of dozen excellent players but none of the Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb or Honus Wagner caliber, nobody that was so obvious that they were able to get 75% of the vote in such a crowded field.
The same problem occurred two years ago, when the BBWAA failed to elect anybody. The reasons then were much different than in 1946. There were two obvious candidates (Bonds and Clemens) but because of their PED ties, less than 40% of the voters marked them on their ballots. For the first time since 1981, 15 different players received at least 20% of the vote, splitting it among too many candidates resulting in an electoral shutout.
There is a reason that I chose a 60+ WAR as a benchmark is that in the long history of the Hall of Fame, the vast majority of players who posted a WAR this high are in the Hall. Here are some facts:
Of all major league players who began their career before 1950 and logged a WAR of 60 or more, only 8 are not in the Hall of Fame. Of those eight men, seven of them began their career in the 19th century and the other was Shoeless Joe Jackson, who would have made the Hall if he had not been one of a more notorious eight, the Black Sox players who threw the 1919 World Series. So, literally, other than Jackson, there is not one player who began their career between 1900 and 1950 had a WAR of 60 or above who is not in the Hall. Not one. 51 players did meet that standard and they’re all in Cooperstown.
Using a less stringent standard (a career WAR of 50 or above), there are only 14 players (including Shoeless Joe) who began their careers between 1900 and 1950 who are not in the Hall of Fame who met that criteria. The other 66 are in the Hall.
Needless to say, the only WAR that the writers and subsequent Veterans’ Committee members who put these 66 men into the Hall knew about was World War II (or Korea, or Vietnam). Wins Above Replacement is a new statistic and it is imperfect, but good players will have a good WAR and mediocre players will not.
In all of baseball history (not just the first half of the century), there are a total of 35 players that posted a 60+ career WAR and have not been inducted, the vast majority of whom debuted in the latter half of the century, as the writers and various incarnations of the Veterans’ Committees have been more stingy.
Let’s take a look at the names of those 35 players.
Players with WAR of 60 or above who are not in the Hall of Fame who began their careers in the 20th century
1B: *Jeff Bagwell (79.6), Rafael Palmeiro (71.6), *Mark McGwire (62.0), Keith Hernandez (60.0)
2B: Lou Whitaker (74.9), Bobby Grich (70.9), Willie Randolph (65.5), *Craig Biggio (65.1)
3B: Graig Nettles (68.0), Buddy Bell (66.1), Ken Boyer (62.8), Sal Bando (61.4)
SS: *Alan Trammell (70.4)
OF: *Barry Bonds (162.4), Pete Rose (79.1), *Larry Walker (72.6), *Tim Raines (69.1), Kenny Lofton (68.2), Dwight Evans (66.9), Reggie Smith (64.5), Joe Jackson (62.3), Willie Davis (60.5), *Gary Sheffield (60.2)
DH: *Edgar Martinez (68.3)
SP: *Roger Clemens (139.4), *Randy Johnson (104.3), *Pedro Martinez (86.0), *Mike Mussina (82.7), *Curt Schilling (80.7), Kevin Brown (68.5), Rick Reuschel (68.2), *John Smoltz (66.5), Luis Tiant (66.1), Tommy John (62.3), David Cone (61.7)
*On the 2015 BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot.
An interesting list, don’t you think? I’m not suggesting that all 35 of these men should be in the Hall of Fame, but once you know that everybody but Shoeless Joe who debuted between 1900 and 1950 is in the Hall, they all merit serious study. (Incidentally, there are eight players from the 19th century with WAR of 60 or more who are also not in in Cooperstown).
Of these 35 men, 15 of them are on this year’s ballot. The good news is that many of these worthy players still have a chance; the bad news is that many of them will have to wait a long time. Excellent players such as Tim Raines, Curt Schilling, Mike Mussina and Alan Trammell are getting lost in the shuffle because there are so many quality guys on the ballot. There are also excellent but not superstar players such as Brian Giles (50.9 career WAR) who will almost certainly be permanently drummed off the ballot next month because they won’t get 5% of the vote (the minimum requirement to stay on the ballot the following year).
(Brian Giles is not a Hall of Famer, but he might have made it in if he had been born 50-to-70 years earlier. I was surprised that his career WAR was over 50 until I looked at the numbers. He spent many of his career years in poor hitter’s parks (PNC Park in Pittsburgh and Petco Park in San Diego) and still tallied a career OPS of .902, which is higher than Sammy Sosa’s.)
The point of all of these numbers is to illuminate how truly great the current class of players is. There are 20 players on the current ballot with a career WAR of 50 or more. There are only 24 who debuted during the 80-year period between 1871 and 1950 who are not, two of whom were on the 1919 Black Sox (Shoeless Joe and Eddie Cicotte).
Even if you believe that the alleged PED users should be discarded, there’s still a bevy of Cooperstown-worthy individuals to consider. You can decide what a bevy means but in my estimation it’s more than ten but ten is all the voters are permitted to vote for.