Smart Baseball
Page 21
Trammell at least received a modicum of support over fifteen years on the ballot, the maximum permitted under the rules at the time of his retirement, eventually reaching 40.9 percent in his final year of eligibility. I believe both Trammell and Whitaker should be in the Hall, but Whitaker’s case is the more important one because of how badly the BBWAA screwed up in his one shot at glory. And I have a grim theory on why it happened.
Lou Whitaker was an outstanding offensive second baseman in an era when second basemen didn’t hit a whole lot. In his best season, 1983, American League second basemen as a whole hit .268/.325/.369, and Whitaker hit .320/.380/.457. His worst season came in 1980, his third year in the majors, and even in that campaign he posted a .331 OBP, exactly the league average for all AL hitters that year. He started strong, winning the Rookie of the Year Award in 1978 at age twenty-one; had a solid peak from 1983 to 1989, with five All-Star appearances and a .359 OBP in those seven seasons; and never really declined, just playing less often into his late thirties but still hitting well, even posting a .293/.372/.518 line at age thirty-eight as a platoon player against right-handed pitching.
Whitaker’s career Wins Above Replacement total of 75 puts him well above the bar for Hall of Fame second basemen:
Player
WAR
Eddie Collins*
123.9
Joe Morgan*
100.3
Charlie Gehringer*
80.6
Lou Whitaker
74.9
Ryne Sandberg*
67.5
Roberto Alomar*
66.8
Willie Randolph
65.5
Chase Utley+
63.7
Robinson Cano+
60.5
Joe Gordon*
57.1
Billy Herman*
54.7
Bobby Doerr*
51.2
Nellie Fox*
49.0
Johnny Evers*
47.7
Bill Mazeroski*
36.2
* Hall of Famer
+ Active as of April 2017
In fact, Whitaker leads all eligible position players who aren’t currently either in the Hall or on the ballot in WAR. By that one particular measure, he is the best position player left out of Cooperstown, and as you can see on the previous table, that same measure says he’s quite a bit better than many players who are already in.
Even if you wish to argue that WAR isn’t the right way to go about this—I think this is its best use, but admit its imprecision—Whitaker stacks up well against the eleven Hall of Famers who played almost exclusively at second base in their careers:
Stat
Whitaker’s Rank Among HoF 2B
AVG
8th
OBP
6th
SLG
8th
HR
4th
2B
6th
BB
3rd
Hits
7th
RBI
6th
Runs
5th
He clearly fits in with what the BBWAA and the Veterans Committee have decided qualifies a second baseman for enshrinement in Cooperstown, and he also makes the case using more advanced statistics.
Stat
Whitaker’s Rank Among HoF 2B
wOBA
8th
wRC+
6th
Batting Runs
5th
Fielding Runs
5th
The Fielding Runs ranking is worth mentioning. In the chapter on how we go about analyzing fielding today, using UZR as an example of how to work with play-by-play data for better evaluation of fielding production, I spent a little time discussing methods of going back to look at historical fielding performances. For every Hall of Fame second baseman other than Roberto Alomar, that’s all we have, since the data required to calculate UZR, dRS, and their ilk did not exist until after the other ten players plus Whitaker had all retired.
Whitaker was an above-average defensive player for just about his entire career, and what data we do have bear this out. TotalZone has him saving 77 more runs than an average second baseman over the course of his career, more than Alomar, Morgan, Sandberg, and Doerr, as well as Collins (whose career started in 1903 and probably isn’t a good comparison for any modern player). Whitaker made more plays per nine innings in the field than Sandberg, Morgan, or Alomar, and among Hall of Fame second basemen only Fox and Mazeroski, both considered elite defenders, turned more double plays.
As an aside, Mazeroski’s selection by the Veterans Committee was a bit controversial for adherents of statistical analysis, because his bat was just not good enough for consideration, let alone induction. He was, however, a truly outstanding defender at second, ranking just three runs behind Joe Gordon for the all-time lead in TotalZone’s runs saved at that position, and turning more double plays—1,706, which works out to 0.8 per game in which he played—than any other second sacker in history. I’m perfectly okay with having him in the Hall, as he remains the gold standard for defense at a skill position, even if his bat is somewhat light and the real reason he’s in the Hall is a certain home run he hit in October 1960.
Whitaker was very good, for a very long career, at a position that really has not historically led to many good, long careers. (The conventional wisdom is that second basemen are at higher risk of serious injury than most other positions because they serve as the “pivot” on the double play and often can’t see the runner barreling toward them.) Traditional stats favor him; a very slightly more sophisticated look using some modest sabermetric stats favors him.
So what gives? Why did Whitaker merit only a handful of votes and one year on the ballot, when he’s clearly qualified for the Hall, and when during his career he was seen as a future Hall of Famer? (An Associated Press story on August 3, 1993, began with “If history is any gauge, Lou Whitaker will be enshrined in the Hall of Fame one day.” Another AP story, on January 12, 2000, listed Whitaker among notable first-timers for the next year’s ballot along with Puckett, Winfield, and Don Mattingly. Sports Illustrated’s Tim Crothers wrote in April 1995 that the Detroit duo’s last double play “might be scored Trammell-to-Whitaker-to-Cooperstown.”)
My personal hypothesis—untested and untestable—is that Whitaker did not fit expectations for a player of his time. Middle infielders were supposed to be small and speedy, not powerful and, well, not-speedy, as Whitaker wasn’t slow but was a little below average on the bases without big SB totals. He wasn’t flashy on defense. He wasn’t a good quote and was not that well liked by reporters, who ultimately become Hall of Fame voters. And by the time Whitaker hit the ballot, the prototype of the middle infielder had changed; Jeff Kent hit .334/.424/.596 with 33 homers as San Francisco’s second baseman in 2000 and won the NL MVP award.
But Whitaker was also an African American player reaching the ballot at a time when the Hall of Fame electorate was overwhelmingly white. Exact records on the racial makeup of the electorate do not exist, but over the last few years I’ve tried to determine how many African American Hall of Fame voters there were when Whitaker was on the ballot, and I have found fewer than ten. When I reached out to several voters in the winter of 2013–14 to ask about Whitaker’s failure on the ballot, I heard the word “uppity” used to refer to his character, which unfortunately is a word only applied to people of color. African American players who played well with the media, like Winfield and Puckett, had no trouble with the voters, but those who were seen as difficult or aloof, like Whitaker or Jim Rice (a weak candidate who reached the Hall on his 15th and final ballot), fared poorly with voters.
Oh, and as for Puckett, he didn’t even have Whitaker’s production to get himself into the Hall on the first ballot. Whitaker had a higher OBP and more homers along with far better defensive value. But Puckett was seen as a nice guy—inaccurately, as it turned out, wit
h Puckett facing multiple accusations of sexual assault after his induction—and had the narrative of a career cut short by glaucoma. (Puckett died of a stroke in 2006, at age forty-five.) While such factors shouldn’t influence voting, there is no question that they do; it’s just a question of to what degree. If Whitaker wasn’t great with the media during his career, though, it shouldn’t matter one iota to his Hall candidacy. Both he and his double-play partner Trammell belong in Cooperstown.
Kevin Brown was the neutrino of the Hall of Fame ballot in 2011, passing through the entire process without hitting anything and barely even getting support from nonvoters (like myself) who have argued in favor of overlooked, qualified candidates like Bert Blyleven, Tim Raines, and Whitaker. But a fairly cursory look at Brown’s career in comparison to the pitchers already in the Hall and even many of his contemporaries shows he too had a strong case for induction, and should have appeared on many more ballots in his one year of eligibility.
Brown threw 3,256 innings in the big leagues, with a 3.28 ERA, even though he spent almost his entire career pitching in the highest-offense era in baseball history. Brown’s first full season was 1989, offensive levels in baseball spiked in 1993, and when he retired in 2005 they hadn’t begun to come down. He made six All-Star teams, finished second in the Cy Young voting once and third two years later, and, if you care about such things as voters do, won more than 200 games. Yet in his one year on the Hall of Fame ballot, 2011, Brown garnered just 12 votes, 2.1 percent of the total, falling short of the threshold to remain on the ballot for even one more year. He received fewer votes than Juan Gonzalez, a one-dimensional slugger who was all over the Mitchell Report and was done as a regular at age thirty-two.
The nonbaseball reasons for Brown’s flop on the ballot are a bit beside the point here, but for the sake of completeness I’ll mention that he was considered an odd, unlikable guy, was not a good quote or especially friendly to the media, and was somehow blamed for the fact that the Dodgers gave him the first nine-figure contract in baseball history, a seven-year, $105 million deal that went south in year three when he started to break down physically. I don’t think any of that should matter one whit for his Hall case, but I’m realistic enough to know that it does matter.
Brown’s Hall case, just based on what he did on the field, is surprisingly strong—I say surprisingly because I didn’t appreciate just how good he’d been until well after he’d retired. (Perhaps I too was taken in by the unfavorable media coverage.) Baseball-Reference’s WAR formula gives him 68.5 for his career, which puts him 31st all-time among pitchers. Fangraphs’ version gives him 76.5, good for 24th all-time. There are currently 77 pitchers in the Hall of Fame as of August 2016, so if Brown is even just top 40 in baseball history, he pretty clearly belongs in Cooperstown.
Brown’s career was a little short by Hall standards, but that reflects the trend of lower innings totals for starting pitchers as well as his own injury troubles in his thirties, and there are still plenty of starters in the Hall, even from previous eras, with lower total workloads than Brown had. Here are five starters already enshrined to whom Brown compares favorably, with Brown’s stats included for the sake of comparison:
ERA+ compares the pitcher’s ERA to the league average; an ERA+ over 100 means the pitcher’s ERA was better than average, and under 100 means that he was worse. I include it here primarily because Brown pitched in a much higher-offense era than the other names on the list.
I hesitated to even include Catfish Hunter, whose rapid election to the Hall was one of the worst such votes in BBWAA history. He was a colorful character, he threw a perfect game, and his successful arbitration case against the Oakland A’s over a contract violation made him the first real free agent in modern baseball history, landing him a five-year, $3.35 million contract with the Yankees and opening the eyes of other players to how much money they were really worth. But his performance on the field wasn’t close to Hall of Fame caliber; he was an average pitcher for a moderately long career who threw his last full season at age thirty and his last pitch at age thirty-three. If we just used his career alone as the standard for all pitchers, the Hall of Fame would have the population density of Bangladesh.
Did Glavine’s inclusion surprise you? His on-field case is nowhere near as good as his first-ballot induction—he appeared on 92 percent of ballots—might lead you to believe. Glavine was never a great pitcher, but he was a good pitcher for a very long time, especially today, an era when his kind of durability is becoming less and less common. He won two Cy Young Awards, but one of them, in 1998, should have gone to someone else:
The world was still flat in 1998, so the pitcher with the most wins took home the Cy Young Award despite having a higher ERA in a lower innings total than both Brown, the best pitcher in the NL that year, and Maddux, Glavine’s own teammate!
Brown, meanwhile, finished third behind Glavine and one of his own teammates, Trevor Hoffman, who threw all of 73 innings as San Diego’s closer that year, posted a 1.48 ERA, and somehow got more first-place votes (13) than any other pitcher that year, including Glavine. Brown threw 184 more innings than Hoffman, and allowed 56 more earned runs, which would be a 2.73 ERA just on the excess, and yet thirteen clowns thought Hoffman was the better pitcher even though he worked the equivalent of about a month and a half of work from Brown.
One more comparison for Brown illuminates the sheer folly of the Hall electorate, because while Brown slipped off the ballot after one year, a far inferior pitcher, also never a candidate for Miss Congeniality, spent the full fifteen years on the ballot and seems likely to sneak into Cooperstown one day via the Veterans Committee:
Jack Morris was a thoroughly average pitcher who gained a lot of wins by spending his entire career on good teams, mostly with Detroit in the 1980s, then adding three seasons with World Series winners in 1991 (Minnesota) and 1992–93 (Toronto). Morris’s ERA of 3.90 would be the worst of any pitcher in the Hall. He was never the best pitcher in his league or close to it. He never finished higher than fifth in the American League, where he spent his whole career, in ERA or WAR, and only led the AL in any significant category once, leading in strikeouts (and innings) in 1983. He should never have gotten close to the Hall of Fame, but he did, peaking at 67.7 percent in balloting in 2013, falling short of the 75 percent park required for enshrinement.
Morris and Brown were on the Hall ballot together in 2011, and while Brown appeared on only 12 ballots, Morris appeared on 311. At the time, the BBWAA did not make ballots public unless the writers chose to do so—a terrible policy that allowed some clowns to hide their stupidity or personal grudges behind the veil of anonymity. While thankfully this is changing beginning with the 2017 ballots, which will all be made public, this change will not be retroactive, so don’t count on finding out who, if anyone, voted for Brown but not Morris. Regardless, we do know that at least 299 people voted for Morris and not Brown, a completely indefensible position.
Morris threw 568 more innings than Brown, a little over two seasons’ worth of pitching, but he gave up 472 more earned runs than Brown did, and that’s even with the strong defensive tandem of Whitaker and Trammell playing behind him for most of his career. That’s an effective 7.48 ERA in Morris’s innings “advantage”; would Brown have improved his Hall case any by throwing another 500 innings of awful performance?
Brown was snubbed for most of his career by the writers, who ultimately hold the power over seasonal awards and the Hall of Fame—with the former affecting the latter, too—and thus can take out their dislike of a player on him many times. That seems to be what happened to Brown, one of the best sinkerballers of the modern era and a great pitcher who should have won one or possibly two Cy Young Awards and, at the least, would fit right in among pitchers already in the Hall of Fame.
One thing you might have gleaned from this book or from my writing about baseball for ESPN is that I don’t hold high regard for the total value of relievers’ performances. This often comes up in Cy
Young discussions, where some hot-taker decides to push a closer with a fluky-low ERA for the Cy against starting pitchers who’ll carry three times the workloads—ignoring the fact that most closers are failed starters who moved to the bullpen because they couldn’t stay healthy or couldn’t turn over an opposing lineup three times as starters. The obvious implication is that I wouldn’t support the Hall candidacies of relievers, and by and large that’s true, with one large exception from the modern era.
The Hall of Fame has very few pure relievers, period. There are only 23 pitchers in the Hall who made at least 100 relief appearances in their careers, and most of those were starters by trade; 18 of the 23 finished with more games started than relief appearances. Only 7 pitchers in the Hall made at least 200 relief appearances, including starter-to-closer-to-starter John Smoltz, and starter-to-closer Dennis Eckersley. Bruce Sutter is the only Hall of Fame pitcher with zero games started in the majors; Rollie Fingers started 4 games, Rich “Goose” Gossage 16, and Hoyt Wilhelm 52.
Sutter is the only truly modern short reliever—referring to the length of his outings, not his stature—in the Hall at all, and he was one of the dumbest selections in BBWAA history, named not because of his performance, which shouldn’t have gotten him as far as Utica, let alone Cooperstown, but because of how he was used. When people talk about the advent of the modern one-inning closer, they start with Sutter. He won a Cy Young Award he didn’t deserve in 1979; J. R. Richard had a better season in three times the workload, which turned out to be his last full season before a stroke ended his career in May 1980. Sutter had just ten full seasons in the majors and two partial ones, and finished his career with only 1,042 innings pitched—not just the lowest total of any full-time pitcher in the Hall, but 650 innings less than the next-lowest total, fewer than Babe Ruth threw (1,221), fewer than Addie Joss (2,327), who died at age thirty-one and didn’t even complete nine seasons in the majors.