The Hall of Fame's voting process has numerous problems, but perhaps the most pressing one is the growing number of deserving names on an increasingly-crowded ballot. There are at least 15 candidates that warrant discussion this year, but the baseball writers are limited to voting for a maximum of just ten. Because of that restricting rule, there will inevitably be a handful of worthy players at the bottom of the ballot who won't get the support they deserve. The following four players, for instance, will all fall significantly short of election to the Hall of Fame in 2014 -- but each of them has a strong case for induction.
Tim Raines
Raines had two elite skills that made him one of the best players of the 1980s and a productive player into the 1990s. The first was his ability to get on base, which he did at a career .385 rate, better than some of his more notable peers at his position (including Carl Yastrzemski, Willie Stargell, and Jim Rice). The second was his baserunning ability: he stole at least 70 bases six different times and led the league in that category four of those times. He has the fifth-most career steals ever (808), and perhaps more impressively, he was only caught 146 times. That 84.7% success rate ranks as the second-best ever among all base-stealers with at least 300 attempts.
And though he was a historically-good baserunner, Raines was not a stereotypical slap hitter. He hit 430 career doubles, more than Willie Stargell or Mike Schmidt. With a career OPS+ of 123, his offensive production was comparable to that of Ernie Banks and Paul Molitor. From 1981 to 1987, he hit .310/.396/.448 while averaging 72 steals, 79 walks, and 103 runs scored per season. The result of all this production: a career worth almost 70 Wins Above Replacement. The only left fielders with significantly more WAR than Tim Raines are Barry Bonds, Ted Williams, Rickey Henderson, and Carl Yastrzemski.
Perhaps the best way to visualize the value of Raines' career is a straight-up comparison to another corner outfielder who was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot: Tony Gwynn. Unlike Raines, Gwynn earned glory with a .338 batting average, eight batting titles, and over 3,000 hits. But their total production is eerily similar. Gwynn had a career .388 OBP and reached base 3,955 times; Raines had a .385 OBP and reached base 3,977 times in a similar number of games. Gwynn had a seemingly large edge in total bases, but that statistic does not include walks, hit by pitches, or net stolen bases. If you factor in those numbers, Raines actually gained more bases in his career (5,805) than Gwynn (5,267).
Raines is the second-best leadoff hitter of all time and one of the best left fielders and base-stealers ever. He can be reasonably compared to Tony Gwynn, a first-ballot Hall of Famer. But only half of the BBWAA electorate voted for him last year. That needs to change.
Edgar Martinez
There are only 18 players in baseball history with a career batting average over .300, career on-base percentage over .400, and career slugging percentage over .500 (in a minimum of 8,000 plate appearances). Edgar Martinez is one of them, thanks to his .312/.418/.515 line. Additionally: among all hitters in baseball history with at least 2,000 games played, Edgar Martinez has the 12th-best on-base percentage. Of the 11 players with a higher OBP, nine are already in the Hall of Fame and the other two (Barry Bonds and Frank Thomas) should be headed there. Martinez ranks ahead of hitters like Stan Musial, Mel Ott, Manny Ramirez, and Albert Pujols in this category.
He was also one of the best hitters in baseball for over a decade. Between 1990 and 2003, the only players who got on base at a higher rate than Martinez were Barry Bonds and Frank Thomas. He had eleven seasons with an OBP over .400, leading the league in that category three times. His career OPS of .933 is tied for the 33rd-best mark ever, higher than Hank Aaron's and Frank Robinson's. His career OPS+ of 147 is equal to Mike Schmidt's and Willie McCovey's. Martinez was indisputably one of the best hitters of his era and one of the 30 or 40 best hitters of all time.
Yet support for his Hall of Fame candidacy hasn't budged upwards since his debut on the ballot four years ago. The reason is both singular and obvious: he was a designated hitter. He provided no defensive (or baserunning) value, and was therefore a "one-dimensional" player. While this is a valid counter-argument, it's just not enough to keep Martinez out of the Hall. First of all: his "one-dimensional" career still produced 68 Wins Above Replacement, roughly the same value provided by Eddie Murray and Ernie Banks. Second: Paul Molitor is already in the Hall despite having spent almost half of his career at DH, and Frank Thomas is about to get in despite having spent over half of his career at DH; those precedents should help Martinez's case. And third: the Hall has already inducted five relief pitchers, which are even more specialized and "one-dimensional" than designated hitters. A hitter as good as Martinez just belongs in the Hall, regardless of what position he did or didn't play.
Larry Walker
Like Edgar Martinez, Larry Walker is one of the 18 members of the career .300/.400/.500 club. The proud owner of a .313/.400/.565 batting line, Walker also owns the 16th-best OPS of all time, just a shade behind Frank Thomas and Stan Musial. He has the 11th-most WAR among all right fielders and the top ten are all in the Hall of Fame. He was a complete all-around player with 230 career stolen bases at a 75% success rate, seven Gold Gloves in right field, and an elite throwing arm. During his extended peak between 1994 and 2004, his OPS was 1.036 and he won three batting titles. In 1997, he earned the MVP award by hitting a ridiculous .366/.452/.720 with 49 homers, 33 steals, 130 RBIs, 143 runs scored, 409 total bases, and a league-leading 9.8 WAR. Despite all these remarkable achievements, he is unlikely to ever make the Hall of Fame.
Walker's candidacy -- and entire career -- is compromised in the eyes of some because he spent the heart of his playing days in mile-high Coors Field before the humidor was installed. Like most other Colorado Rockies of the era, Walker's numbers were therefore inflated by the hyper-friendly offensive environment in which he played. Roughly 31% of his career plate appearances came at Coors, and his cumulative numbers there look like they belong in a video game: a .381 batting average, .462 on-base percentage, and .710 slugging percentage. That's Babe Ruth with a higher batting average. Because those numbers look so utterly cartoonish, many Hall voters can't take Walker's case seriously.But that's not really fair, for a number of reasons:
1. Walker's career numbers away from Coors are still very good (.282/.372/.501, equivalent to or better than the overall numbers of right fielders like Reggie Jackson and Al Kaline).
2. Walker had seasons in which his stats away from Coors were just as good as his home stats (in his 1997 MVP campaign, for example, his home OPS was 1.169 and his road OPS was 1.176).
3. Walker played two full seasons in Coors after the humidor was installed, and his numbers there were still elite even after the change: a 1.124 home OPS in 2002 and a 1.021 home OPS in 2003.
4. Walker's context-neutral statistics, which adjust for the inflation caused by Coors, are still excellent. His 141 OPS+ is in the same neighborhood as Vladimir Guerrero (140) and Reggie Jackson (139). Baseball Reference's neutralized batting line for Walker (putting his numbers into the context of an average offensive environment) is .294/.378/.530. Still Hall of Fame numbers, especially for a five-tool right fielder.
5. Perhaps most importantly, the Hall has never used home-road splits as an excuse to keep players out. Hitters like Jim Rice, Carl Yastrzemski, Billy Williams, and Chuck Klein all benefited from their friendly home ballparks, but all have plaques in Cooperstown. Excluding Walker from Cooperstown because of Coors Field would be inconsistent. He should be in.
Mark McGwire
Only nine players in baseball history have a higher career OPS (.982) than Mark McGwire. Only ten players have a higher career OPS+ (163). Only seven have a higher career slugging percentage (.588). Only nine hit more home runs (583). And no one has ever hit home runs at a higher rate (one per 10.6 at-bats). It's easy to marginalize McGwire's career because he has admitted using performance-enhancing drugs, and he may be in risk of falling off the ballot this year entirely. But his achievements cannot be overlooked.
As a 23-year-old rookie in 1987, he led the league in home runs (49) and slugging percentage (.618) along with a .987 OPS. From 1988 to 1991, he only hit .233 but still managed to be valuable by averaging 32 homers and 90 walks per season. In 1992, he led the league in slugging percentage and OPS+, but two injury-plagued years followed. Then, from 1995 to 2000, he was unstoppable. His cumulative line across those six seasons was .289/.442/.706 with a 192 OPS+ and an average of 53 homers and 113 walks per season. He broke Roger Maris' single-season record for home runs, with 70; he also hit 65, and 58, and 52. Then he abruptly fell off a cliff in 2001, and retired. The career was short -- not even 2,000 games or 8,000 plate appearances. However, he achieved a degree of offensive dominance that has hardly ever been matched in the history of the sport. He will never be in the Hall of Fame, but like Tim Raines, Edgar Martinez, and Larry Walker, his on-the-field record suggests he belongs regardless of whether or not the baseball writers actually put him there.
Showing posts with label Mark McGwire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark McGwire. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Cooperstown Candidates: Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa
Continuing a series examining the candidates eligible for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The writers' ballots are due by December 31st and the Class of 2013 will be announced in early January.
After Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are the two players most associated with cheating in baseball. McGwire has admitted to using steroids; Sosa almost certainly used too, and was also caught using a corked bat for good measure. There are dozens of sanctimonious baseball writers out there who would rather commit ritualistic suicide than cast a Hall of Fame vote for either of these two sluggers, simply because of a flawed moral stance on performance-enhancing drugs. Well, there's good news and bad news for those writers. The good news: Sosa might not even have the numbers to deserve enshrinement on his own merits anyway. The bad news: McGwire most definitely does.
We start with Sosa, a right fielder most famous for his days with the Chicago Cubs. Baseball has only ever seen eight 60-homer seasons, and Sosa owns three of them. For his career, he hit 612 homers, making him one of only eight men to hit at least 600. The other seven don't need first-name introductions: Bonds, Aaron, Ruth, Mays, Rodriguez, Griffey, Thome. Sosa is in elite company.
The problem is that much of his career was actually defined by more mediocrity than one might expect from a member of that exclusive club. He arrived in the big leagues for the first time at the age of 20 in 1989 but didn't have his first great season until 1998. What happened in between?
1989-1997: 1,088 games, .257 batting average, .308 on-base percentage, .469 slugging percentage, 23 HR/year, 22 steals/year
For almost a decade, during a stretch of his career that should have included some premier seasons, Sosa was barely an above-average player. A .308 on-base percentage for an everyday player during the 1990s? That's just awful. He stole some bases, but at a 71% success rate, which isn't good either. At least he was a strong defender in right field, or else he would have been nearly useless. Then all of a sudden, at age 29, he exploded. His four seasons between 1998 and 2001 were, for lack of a better word, ridiculous:
1998-2001: 637 games, .310 batting average, .396 on-base percentage, .662 slugging percentage, 61 HR/year
During that four-year sweet spot, Sammy Sosa averaged 61 home runs per year. That's unfathomable. He won an MVP and was the runner-up for another one. He was the best player in baseball not named Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez. After 2001, his production returned to human levels. He had two more very good seasons and then stuck around long enough to reach the 600-homer plateau before retiring after 2007.
So which version of Sosa should be weighed more heavily when considering his case for Cooperstown? Those 637 games of invincibility, or the 1,088 games of mediocrity? This is where subjective arguments come into play. Is a short peak of Sandy Koufax-like dominance good enough to warrant entrance into the Hall? Or is some degree of sustained excellence required? Sosa is certainly lacking on that latter criterion, but some voters will still support him on the strength of his four-year run of Koufaxian supremacy. That's a very justifiable opinion. Plus, for people who like the classic career milestones, 600 home runs is hard to ignore.
Personally, however, I just don't think that Sosa makes the cut. His career line ended up at .273/.344/.534, which is thoroughly unimpressive for a corner outfielder who played in the most offense-friendly era in baseball history. The average career Wins Above Replacement total for a Hall of Fame right fielder is right around 70; Sosa's WAR was just 54.8. Right fielders with more career WAR include Dwight Evans, Reggie Smith, and Bobby Bonds, none of whom were inducted into Cooperstown. He's a borderline candidate, somebody I wouldn't hypothetically vote for, but certainly not someone who would "lessen" the Hall if got there someday.
Mark McGwire, a first baseman who played for the Oakland Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals, is a whole different beast. He finished two slots behind Sosa on the career home run list (he's in 10th-place with 583). But his peak might have been even better than Sosa's: in the five seasons between 1995 and 1999, he hit .287/.438/.702 with an average of 57 home runs and 110 walks per year. That includes his 1998 season when he hit 70 home runs, shattering Roger Maris's single-season record that had stood since 1961. He finished 2nd in the MVP voting that year despite putting up much better numbers than the winner -- a Chicago Cub by the name of Sammy Sosa.
McGwire also had the sustained run of success that Sosa didn't. In 1,097 games spanning the decade between 1992 and his final season in 2001, McGwire hit .277/.424/.663 while averaging 40 homers per year. That stretch doesn't even include his rookie season in 1987, when he led the league in home runs with a rookie record of 49. Had he not missed significant time to injuries during the early-1990s, there's no telling which stratosphere his career numbers might have ended up in.
McGwire retired as a .263/.394/.588 hitter. That .588 career slugging percentage is 8th-best all-time. His career OPS of .982 is 10th-best all-time. There are 18 first basemen in the Hall of Fame and McGwire hit more home runs than all of them. By career Wins Above Replacement, he would rank as the 9th-best player at his position in the Hall. He fits in very comfortably among the very best first basemen -- and hitters -- to ever play the game.
So if the baseball writers really don't want to see steroid users in the Hall of Fame, they can vote against Sammy Sosa with a clear conscience. There are flaws to be found in his candidacy. But there's no statistical reason to keep McGwire out of the Hall. The only excuse to leave him off a ballot is performance-enhancing drugs. And the Hall of Fame has already accepted candidates who used performance-enhancing drugs, and it will again in the future. McGwire shouldn't be the victim of selective morality.
My Ballot, As of Now:
1. Barry Bonds
2. Roger Clemens
3. Mike Piazza
4. Craig Biggio
5. Jeff Bagwell
6. Mark McGwire
Out: Sammy Sosa
After Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are the two players most associated with cheating in baseball. McGwire has admitted to using steroids; Sosa almost certainly used too, and was also caught using a corked bat for good measure. There are dozens of sanctimonious baseball writers out there who would rather commit ritualistic suicide than cast a Hall of Fame vote for either of these two sluggers, simply because of a flawed moral stance on performance-enhancing drugs. Well, there's good news and bad news for those writers. The good news: Sosa might not even have the numbers to deserve enshrinement on his own merits anyway. The bad news: McGwire most definitely does.
We start with Sosa, a right fielder most famous for his days with the Chicago Cubs. Baseball has only ever seen eight 60-homer seasons, and Sosa owns three of them. For his career, he hit 612 homers, making him one of only eight men to hit at least 600. The other seven don't need first-name introductions: Bonds, Aaron, Ruth, Mays, Rodriguez, Griffey, Thome. Sosa is in elite company.
The problem is that much of his career was actually defined by more mediocrity than one might expect from a member of that exclusive club. He arrived in the big leagues for the first time at the age of 20 in 1989 but didn't have his first great season until 1998. What happened in between?
1989-1997: 1,088 games, .257 batting average, .308 on-base percentage, .469 slugging percentage, 23 HR/year, 22 steals/year
For almost a decade, during a stretch of his career that should have included some premier seasons, Sosa was barely an above-average player. A .308 on-base percentage for an everyday player during the 1990s? That's just awful. He stole some bases, but at a 71% success rate, which isn't good either. At least he was a strong defender in right field, or else he would have been nearly useless. Then all of a sudden, at age 29, he exploded. His four seasons between 1998 and 2001 were, for lack of a better word, ridiculous:
1998-2001: 637 games, .310 batting average, .396 on-base percentage, .662 slugging percentage, 61 HR/year
During that four-year sweet spot, Sammy Sosa averaged 61 home runs per year. That's unfathomable. He won an MVP and was the runner-up for another one. He was the best player in baseball not named Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez. After 2001, his production returned to human levels. He had two more very good seasons and then stuck around long enough to reach the 600-homer plateau before retiring after 2007.
So which version of Sosa should be weighed more heavily when considering his case for Cooperstown? Those 637 games of invincibility, or the 1,088 games of mediocrity? This is where subjective arguments come into play. Is a short peak of Sandy Koufax-like dominance good enough to warrant entrance into the Hall? Or is some degree of sustained excellence required? Sosa is certainly lacking on that latter criterion, but some voters will still support him on the strength of his four-year run of Koufaxian supremacy. That's a very justifiable opinion. Plus, for people who like the classic career milestones, 600 home runs is hard to ignore.
Personally, however, I just don't think that Sosa makes the cut. His career line ended up at .273/.344/.534, which is thoroughly unimpressive for a corner outfielder who played in the most offense-friendly era in baseball history. The average career Wins Above Replacement total for a Hall of Fame right fielder is right around 70; Sosa's WAR was just 54.8. Right fielders with more career WAR include Dwight Evans, Reggie Smith, and Bobby Bonds, none of whom were inducted into Cooperstown. He's a borderline candidate, somebody I wouldn't hypothetically vote for, but certainly not someone who would "lessen" the Hall if got there someday.
Mark McGwire, a first baseman who played for the Oakland Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals, is a whole different beast. He finished two slots behind Sosa on the career home run list (he's in 10th-place with 583). But his peak might have been even better than Sosa's: in the five seasons between 1995 and 1999, he hit .287/.438/.702 with an average of 57 home runs and 110 walks per year. That includes his 1998 season when he hit 70 home runs, shattering Roger Maris's single-season record that had stood since 1961. He finished 2nd in the MVP voting that year despite putting up much better numbers than the winner -- a Chicago Cub by the name of Sammy Sosa.
McGwire also had the sustained run of success that Sosa didn't. In 1,097 games spanning the decade between 1992 and his final season in 2001, McGwire hit .277/.424/.663 while averaging 40 homers per year. That stretch doesn't even include his rookie season in 1987, when he led the league in home runs with a rookie record of 49. Had he not missed significant time to injuries during the early-1990s, there's no telling which stratosphere his career numbers might have ended up in.
McGwire retired as a .263/.394/.588 hitter. That .588 career slugging percentage is 8th-best all-time. His career OPS of .982 is 10th-best all-time. There are 18 first basemen in the Hall of Fame and McGwire hit more home runs than all of them. By career Wins Above Replacement, he would rank as the 9th-best player at his position in the Hall. He fits in very comfortably among the very best first basemen -- and hitters -- to ever play the game.
So if the baseball writers really don't want to see steroid users in the Hall of Fame, they can vote against Sammy Sosa with a clear conscience. There are flaws to be found in his candidacy. But there's no statistical reason to keep McGwire out of the Hall. The only excuse to leave him off a ballot is performance-enhancing drugs. And the Hall of Fame has already accepted candidates who used performance-enhancing drugs, and it will again in the future. McGwire shouldn't be the victim of selective morality.
My Ballot, As of Now:
1. Barry Bonds
2. Roger Clemens
3. Mike Piazza
4. Craig Biggio
5. Jeff Bagwell
6. Mark McGwire
Out: Sammy Sosa
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)