2020 Playoff Teams and Batting Champs, by Region Instead of Leagues

This was a weird year.  

In an effort to minimize travel, and thereby minimize potential exposure to COVID-19, Major League Baseball implemented an odd, 60-game schedule that allowed teams only to play the other four teams in its own division and the five teams in the corresponding geographical division in the opposite league.  This means, for example, that the Yankees played both the Atlanta Braves and the Miami Marlins, but not the Tigers or the Indians, who are both obviously a lot closer, not to mention in their actual league.   

Additionally, as another concession to the disease and its effects on us all, we have a new, 8-team-per-league postseason format in which the winners from each division and their runners up all make the postseason, plus the two teams with the next best records.  This gives us not one but two teams with losing records (the Brewers and the Astros) who actually have a chance to win the World Series.  

Which sucks.

The decisions on who makes the playoffs are, in themselves, somewhat nonsensical.  Here are the three actual in-practice regional quasi-leagues this season (East, Central and West) and how they stack up against each other.  The teams in bold are the ones going to the actual playoffs.  

You can probably see a couple of things wrong with this picture right away.  Almost everyone from the Central got in (7 of 10 teams), while the Phillies, for example, have almost as good a record as the Astros and Brewers, whom they never played.  If MLB had chosen instead to take, say, six teams from each regional league, and give two teams a bye for the first round or something like that, instead of doing it the way they did, Philly might be in the playoffs right now instead of one of those teams.  Not that they would deserve to be, but still.  

Furthermore, the Giants had the exact same record as the Astros, against the same competition, but did not make the playoffs.  Granted, their head to head records (Houston won two of three) would likely have given the advantage to the Astros anyway, but if MLB had chosen instead to take the best five teams from each region, plus one more to round out the 16  - which probably would have been more fair -  then the Giants would have been in and the Brewers out.  And the Phillies would still be watching the playoffs from their couches, as they should be.  

As it is, in this reality, the teams will all play a three-game series, entirely at the home stadiums of the higher seeded teams in the first round.  Then, if they get past that, they will play the ALDS and NLDS at neutral sites in California and Texas, as shown below.  As a result, we have a playoff picture that is murkier that it has ever been, heading into the first day of competition.  

Another problem with this format is that the seeding was done based on division winners and runners up getting the highest seeds, rather than by best overall record.  So the Twins are a #3 seed, even though they had the best record among the teams against whom they actually competed. They're playing the Astros, who had a losing record, but are seeded above both the White Sox and the Jays, both of which had winning records, because the TrAshtros finished second in the AL West, which was pretty awful outside of Oakland.  

Part of the reason for this format is that the shortened season and limited competition sort of inhibits our ability to tell how good a team is.  Sure, Gerrit Cole seems to be the ace the Yankees signed for a bajillion dollars in the offseason, but he was 5-1 with a 1.69 ERA against teams that did not make the playoffs (Phils, Sawx, O's and Nats), and 2-2 with a 4.10 ERA against teams that did (the Braves, Rays and Jays).  How would he have fared against the A's, or the Twins?  We may never know, especially if the streaky Yankees can't advance past the first round.  

But I was curious to see who would have led their respective "regional leagues", and more important perhaps, who might have "won" the awards if the players were being compared to their regional peers this year instead of to players they never faced until the postseason, or maybe not at all.  I'll look at the position players today and will save the pitchers for tomorrow.

Position Players:

So here are your hitting leaders!  

Luke Voit and DJ LeMahieu would still have their respective crowns, but Tim Anderson and Donovan Solano would also have won batting titles.  

Interestingly, LeMahieu takes the title over Anderson in real life this year, the reverse of 2019, which marks the first time since 1956-57 that the same two players have finished #1 and #2 in the AL batting title race, albeit not in the same order each year.  

At that time it was Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, and of course Mickey won the Triple Crown in 1956, including his only batting title and the first of his three MVPs.  Williams hit .388 a year later and won the "slash line triple crown" (leading the AL in average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage) but finished 2nd in the MVP coting for the 4th time, each time losing to a Yankee (twice to DiMaggio, once to Mantle and once to Joe Gordon).  

Good times!  Anyway, back to 2020...

Manny Machado would have led the West in RBIs!  Mike Trout in homers!  In the Central, Jose Abreu would have two of the three triple crown pillars all to himself, instead of the just the AL RBI crown.  

Donovan Solano seems to have followed the Gio Urshela path to becoming a major league regular.  Both were signed as amateur free agents as teenagers from Colombia.  Both bounced around multiple organizations for many years, primarily as a glove-first backup infielder.  And both somehow just learned how to hit in their late 20s.  Urshela famously filled in for the injured Miguel Andujar, and has hit .314 with 27 homers in 650 plate appearances the last two seasons, while remaining a plus defender at the hot corner.  Solano, meanwhile, has hit .328 with 28 doubles and 7 homers in over 400 at-bats the last two seasons, and by rights should now have a batting title to his credit.  

Jonathan Villar is also an interesting case: He was traded from the Marlins to the Blue Jays for a PTBNL in mid-season, and stole a total of 16 bases.  (The Jays sent Griffin Conine to Miami to complete the trade, apparently having decided that having four sons of former MLB or international baseball stars on their roster was enough.)  On paper it looks like Villar amassed fewer than 10 steals each in the AL and the NL, but in reality, he stole more bases than anybody he played against in the eastern "League".  His 16 steals were one more than Trevor Story had, and yet Story has some black ink on his ledger, for leading the Senior Circuit, whereas Villar does not get credit for the second time he led his competition in steals (he had 62 in 2016 with Milwaukee, which easily led the NL).        

I have also listed the Wins Above Replacement leaders from both Baseball Reference (bWAR) and Fangraphs (fWAR) as well as the position players who I thought might be considered the Rookie of the Year for each region.  In this case, the bWAR and fWAR in two of the three regions both agree on Freeman and Betts.  Mookie Betts leads both WAR types, both in the NL and in the "west" thanks largely to his stellar defense in addition to his excellent hitting and base running skills.  Despite not leading the West in any of the individual stats (he hit .292 with 16 HR and 10 steals), he appears to have been the best overall player, in his or any division or league.   

As for the Central, if the BBWAA were deciding they would probably give it to Abreu, who led middle America in both homers and RBI.  But Jose Ramirez essentially carried the entire Cleveland offense, and played stellar defense at the hot corner to boot (or, you know, not to boot, which is what you're trying to do when you play third base), so I might give the MVP to him if I had the chance.  

And Now for the Rookies...

EAST: Alec Bohm did not play the whole year but when the Phillies called him up, he hit .338 in 44 games with gap power (11 doubles, 4 HR) and didn't totally embarrass himself on defense.  Only one MLB rookie with at least 160 at-bats has hit better than that in a season since Ichiro burst on the scene hitting and AL leading .350 in 2001.  (Trea Turner hit .342 in 307 at-bats in 2016.)  Maybe if the Phillies can upgrade some of that dumpster fire of a bullpen of theirs, they'll have something to build on next season.  OK, probably not.  

CENTRAL: Luis Robert hit just .233, but keep in mind that the major leagues as a whole hit just .245, the lowest mark since 1972 (.244), which was so terrible that half of the owners voted to implement the DH and old people have been whining about it ever since.  Also keep in mind that Robert hit 11 homers and 8 doubles, stole 9 of 11 bases in just 202 at-bats, and played stellar defense in center field.  Extrapolate that out to a full season and you're talking about a Gold Glove rookie knocking on the door of the 30-30 club.  

WEST: Kyle Lewis is another rookie centerfielder, albeit not as good defensively as Robert.  He also hit 11 homers, and hit .268 and took a walk more than once every other game, giving him the best OBP among rookies in the AL.  

Tomorrow I'll look at the pitchers and see who I think should win the MVP and Cy Young awards for each region.   

The 2020 Yankees: So Streaky, Even Facing the Twins May Not Save Them...

People sometimes talk about a team being "consistently inconsistent," meaning that they never seem to string together a winning (or losing) streak of more than a few games.

The 2020 Yankees are, I think, better described as "inconsistently consistent," i.e. that they seem consistent for a while, and just when you think you know who they are, they do a 180.  

Here is a schematic of their season results:

Green markers, above the reference line, are Wins, and red ones are Losses, with the margin of victory (or defeat) indicated by the size. The bar is capped at 10 runs, so the Yankees' 20-6 win against the Jays looks just like their 13-2 win the next night and their 12-1 win earlier this week.  

You can see the problem.

• They won 8 of their first 9.
• Then they lost 5 of the next 7. 
• Then they won six in a row.  
• Then they lost seven in a row.  
• Then they won 4 out of 5. 
• Then they lost 7 of 8.  
• Then they rattled off 10 straight wins(!), which included sweeping Toronto, outscoring them 43-15 in a 3-game set, and setting a new record with 19 homers in a series. 
• And now they've lost five of their last six, despite having most of the team back and ostensibly healthy.  

Somehow, despite finally enjoying the presence of Gleyber Torres, and Aaron Judge, and Giancarlo Stanton, and Urshela and LeMahieu and Aaron Hicks - all players who have spent some time on the injured list this season, some more on it than off - the Yankees still have not been able to stave off either the Blue Jays or the Marlins.

The Jays, despite being four games over .500, have actually been outscored a little this season (292-303). Similarly, the Marlins are two games over .500 but have actually been outscored a LOT this season (254-293). Two teams that not only shouldn't come close to making the playoffs in a "normal" year, but probably shouldn't even have winning records this year, have both clinched a playoff berth at the Yankees' expense in two consecutive nights.  It was hard to watch.

I dunno what any of this means, but I find it interesting, and a little disconcerting heading into the playoffs. How can a team that can't even beat the Marlins, let alone the Tampa Bay Rays, an actual good team, win a championship? 

I mean, obviously the Dodgers would have to be the favorite, but the Dodgers have notoriously choked in several postseasons since their last World Series win in 1988, and especially with the bizarre way the playoffs are set up this year, you would have to think it's anybody's game.  

As things stand now, the Yankees could face the Twins in the first round*, which under normal circumstances would be a guaranteed win. For one thing, the Twins have not won a playoff game since 2004, which was three presidents ago. It was so long that Destiny's Child was still together. So long that the iPhone was still almost three years away. So long ago that Hilary Duff was the most searched name on AOL. Also, AOL was still important.   

*Sorry, I wrote most of this before the final couple of games of the season, and it now looks like the Yankees will have to face the Indians in the first round.  So, take the rest of this post for what you will.  Maybe the Twins will somehow beat the Astros and the Yankees can face them in the ALDS or something.  

Second, in case you hadn't heard, the Yankees have owned the Twins for the better part of the last two decades. The Yankees are an astonishing 119-39* against Minnesota since 2002, including 16-2 in the playoffs, spanning five different series and a Wild Card game. They have won more than 75% of their games against the Twins, which is the best record any team has against anybody over that span, and might be the best record any team has ever had against another team over so long a time. To be fair, the Yankees and Twins have not played each other this year because of the weird COVID rules, so it's hard to know how they match up in 2020. But still.  Winning more than 3 out of every four contests for 18 years???

 How dominant is that? Here are two comparisons:

1. The 1936-53 Yankees vs. Browns 

Back in the so-called Golden Age of Baseball (really just the Golden Age of New York, specifically New York Yankee, Baseball), the St. Louis Browns were a perennial doormat in the Junior Circuit. During their last 18 years in St. Louis, they won barely 40% of their games overall, and that includes three winning seasons, so you can surely imagine how awful they usually were in the other ones. They were so terrible that the owners thought they could make more money in Baltimore, which had not had a franchise since 1902. They lost 100+ games five times and 90+ games six other times. 

Sure, they went to a World Series in 1944, but that was still during WWII, when a lot of the best players were wearing olive and khaki uniforms instead of pinstripes or gray flannels. That team only won 89 games in the regular season, and had only two players with double digit homers, one who hit .300, and one with 100 RBIs.  

Other than Vern Stephens at shortstop, the lineup was pretty forgettable, as was the pitching staff.  About half of the players were out of MLB by 1945 or '46, pushed out by the players returning from military service. Many had never been in MLB before the War, or had only come out of retirement when younger, healthier and better players were conscripted to fight the Nazis. 

In 1945, the Browns were so desperate they tried a one-armed outfielder named Pete Gray.  Later, with Bill Veeck at the helm, they hired a midget for one game, as a promotional stunt, to try to boost attendance. They once played a game with the fans giving managerial advice via placards that were handed out at the gate, and they brought 45-year old Satchel Paige out of retirement.  All of that happened in 1951.  Within about a month.  They were bad. 

 

Small in stature...but also in attendance. And winning percentage. 

Meanwhile, in that same 18-year span (1936-1953) the Yankees won 13 AL pennants and a dozen World Series. They developed eleven future Hall of Famers, not to mention many other stars.  They had a winning record every year, and finished lower than third just once, in 1945, when the likes of Tuck Stainback  and Mike Garback manned CF and catcher instead of Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra, who were in the service.  But otherwise, they were a perennial juggernaut, and a regular winner.  

Imagine almost two decades in which the same team won, on average, two out of every three World Series. That's baseball (Suzyn) in the "Golden Age". 

Anyway, those Yankee teams faced the lowly Browns 22 or 23 times per season - there were only eight teams in the AL at the time - and regularly trounced them, amassing a 272-124 (68.7%) record against them in that time. And even that winning percentage is well shy of how dominant the Yankees of the 21st century have been against Minnesota - which has actually had some pretty good teams - since 2002. 

B. The 1998 & 1927 Yankees vs. The Field

Or, to look at it another way, the 1998 Yankees, widely considered one of the greatest baseball teams of all time, went 114-48 in the regular season and 11-2 in the playoffs, winning the first of three straight championships. If there is another claimant to the title of Greatest MLB Team ever, it is perhaps the Yankees' 1927 Murderers Row squad, who went 111-44 in the regular season and then swept the Pirates, 4-0, in the World Series. And even those teams "only" won 71.4% and 72.8% of their games, respectively, including their postseason heroics.

The Twins are at the bottom of the pile, obviously.

The Yankees' winning percentage against the Twins since 2002 (75.3%) would equate to a 122-Win regular season team, which no team in history has come close to achieving. So the 2002-2019 Yankees have actually been better against the Twins than either the 1927 Yankees or the 1998 Yankees were against, well, everybody.  

Of course, this Yankees team is neither those.  The 1927 team famously used only 25 players on its roster the entire season.  Literally nobody got hurt, ever, whereas these 2020 Yankees can't seem to stay of the injured list for more than a week.  The 1998 Yankees lost more than three in a row only once all season (they had a 4-game streak in August), and only lost three in a row three times all year.  

But this 2020 team' propensity for being maddeningly unlike, well, itself from one week to the next could spell doom for them in the playoffs.  They'll likely be on the road against the Twins for that 3-game series, were they have only a 11-18 record (compared to 21-8 at home).  Moreover, the Twins are 23-6 at home this season, so this could be the year the curse of Tom Kelly (??) is finally broken.  

Or, the fact that the Yankees have been pretty terrible this week might indicate that they're ready to go on a tear, and sweep through the early rounds of the playoffs.  It's anybody's guess.  That's why they play the games.  

Suzyn.  

What the DiMaggio-Williams Rivalry Can Teach us About Modern MVP Voting...

Welp, here I am again, going down another JoePos rabbit hole...

Today's baseball-in-the-time -of-COVID essay details the inexplicable way in which Ted Williams managed to win his second Triple Crown in 1947 but lose the MVP by one point to Joe DiMaggio.  Posnanski attributes it to the fact that the Yankees won their division by a dozen games and the writers did not often vote for players who were not on pennant winners or at least serious contenders in those days, not for first place in the MVP running, anyway.  

He blames, perhaps rightly, the three first-place votes for the resurgent firstbaseman, George McQuinn, who had been released by the Philadelphia Athletics a year before but hit over .300 for the Yankees as they won the AL pennant running away.  McQuinn was out of MLB a year later after hitting just .248, but in the mean time it looked an awful lot like McQuinn was the reason they won.  

Personally, I thought the seven first place votes given to Yankees super-reliever Joe Page had more to do with it than that, but in any case, The Kid Lost and the Yankee Clipper won, and that was that.  

However, this McQuinn "correlation = causality" argument reminds me of the 2003 AL MVP vote.  Shannon Stewart got traded to the Twins for Bobby Kielty and a PTBNL at the All Star break.  They were 44-49 at the time, but they went 46-23 in the second half, the best record in baseball.  Stewart hit .322 with 6 homers and 38 RBI (2.6 bWAR), which made it seem like Stewart was the reason they were winning.  

In reality, the team as a whole hit almost exactly as well in the second half (779 OPS) as they had in the first (768), even though Stewart himself was markedly better than the guy he largely replaced in the lineup, Bobby Kielty, had been.  The lineup did average almost 5.4 runs per game after the break, compared to 4.6 before, but that must have been due to the timeliness of their hitting more than its overall quality.  

In fact it was the pitching staff that got its act together in the second half, pitching to a 3.96 ERA, compared to the 4.74 they had racked up before the break.  In particular Brad Radke and Kenny Rogers both pitched notably better, and Johan Santana just pitched more, as the Twins finally realized tat he should be starting every 5th day.  

At around the same time, the White Sox traded for Carl Everett, another outfielder who really picked up his game after being traded.  He hit .301 with 10 homers and 41 RBIs (2.0 bWAR) for the Pale Hose, and Chicago went 41-27 in the second half, after playing 5 games under .500 in the first half.  Simultaneously, the first-place, 51-41 Royals (!) went back in the tank for the second half (32-38) and fell to third.  

And for what it's worth, at around the same time the Blue Jays, who had traded Stewart away, also played better in the second half.  Using the same logic, then, this would suggest that Stewart's absence was the reason the Jays started winning, which is only slightly more silly a suggestion than the previous one.  

In any case, Everett didn't get a single MVP vote of any kind (nor, for that matter, did Bobby Kielty), while Stewart got three first place votes and finished 4th overall!  So, what gives?  

Well, there were two things at play here:

1. The Twins ended up winning their division by four games over the White Sox.  In particular, they went 5-2 against Chicago in September, in the heat of the pennant race, including a three-game sweep at home that was part of an 11-game winning streak which effectively put the last nail in the coffin for the ChiSox.  They went from two games behind Chicago on September 9th, after losing to the White Sox twice in a row, to 3.5 games up on Chicago on September 18th, after that sweep.  So the optics were there, the Twins literally overtaking the White Sox down the stretch, even if Stewart himself didn't especially do anything remarkable in those particular games or in the pennant drive in particular (he hit .289 with zero homers in September).    
2. Jayson Stark, senior baseball writer on ESPN.com and regular contributor to ESPN's various online and cable TV products, such as SportsCenter and Mike & Mike in the Morning, was lobbying hard for Stewart to get the MVP.  

Admittedly, others made this argument as well (Mark Sheldon from MLB.com, Jim Souhan of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, who may have had a bit of a home bias) but none with as large an audience or as much clout in the world of baseball journalism as Stark. Stark has made something of a career of finding interesting looking numbers in baseball and writing about them, but of course just because they're interesting - or more to the point, just because they correlate with winning - does not necessarily mean they're meaningful or causal.  

My favorite, which I learned about in Psychology I as a freshman at Lehigh, is the Superbowl indicator.  From 1967-1997, the conference that won the SuperBowl correlated at 90% with the way the Dow Jones finished, though there is really no good causal explanation for this.  My psych professor used it to remind us that correlation never implies causality, an expression he repeated so often that I can still hear his voice in my head as I type it out, now almost 27 years later.  

Likewise, there is no more reason to believe that McQuinn deserved all the credit for the success of the 1947 Yankees than that Stewart deserved it for the 1997 Twins.  Or that the Superbowl conference winner deserves credit for the stock market finishing up (or down).  But it's an easy case to make, and harder to disprove when the optics seem to support it.  

In 1947, nobody had the kind of audience that Stark did in 2003, but writers like Dick Young or Jimmy Cannon probably had wider readership than just about anybody else out there, writing for the New York papers, and may have advocated for McQuinn's votes with their fellow writers as well as their readers.  

We'll probably never know, exactly.  But it's interesting to consider how these decisions may have been made.  None of them occurs in a vacuum, and the modern day decision makers (if indeed 2003 can even be considered "modern day" anymore) are not immune to the same kinds of flawed lines of logic.   

Notes on the MLB HoF Voting before the 2020 Announcements

Modern technology is great.

For the last decade or so, a small group of devoted fans, led by Ryan Thibodaux, has been collecting the publicly and privately confessed Cooperstown voting results from BBWAA members  prior to the announcement of the actual vote, which is anticipated tonight at 6PM.  Far from eliminating any tension or wonder before the official announcements, this serves only to increase it, or perhaps just change its nature.  

Since we only know a portion of the voting results (they have a little over half of the ballots accounted for at this point) they also calculate the percentage and number of remaining ballots needed to make enshrinement, or to meet the 5% minimum requirement for staying on the ballot. They track not just which sportswriters voted for whom, but who they didn't vote for, if they did last year, and who they may have added to their ballot.  Additions are coded in green, retractions in red.  

Pete Abraham, for example, added Todd Helton and Billy Wagner to his ballot.  Filip Bondy removed Gary Sheffield (in his 6th year of eligibility) but added Helton, Jeff Kent, Manny Ramirez and Larry Walker, in his 10th and final year.  Bondy used all 10 of his available votes, so you can see why he would think Sheffield expendable, if it meant giving Walker one last chance at enshrinement.  

Peter Gammons, on the other hand, removed Helton and Walker from his ballot, but added Kent.  Gammons has also consistently voted for Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling, so I guess it's OK to be a loudmouth who jokes about reporters being killed or a cheater who uses drugs to improve his results, but being an awesome hitter in Colorado is somehow no longer acceptable behavior.  Man, having his face on the $20 bill has really gone to Gammons' head.  

Other curious things to note here:

• Derek Jeter is the only player named on every ballot so far.  With Mariano Rivera having finally broken the longstanding trend of non-unanimous voting results, writers have no good reason not to vote for an obvious Hall of Famer like Jeter except spite.  Nobody can stand any longer on the logic of, "If Joe DiMaggio didn't get in on the first ballot then nobody should!"  or, "If Babe Ruth wasn't unanimous then nobody should be!"  That ship has sailed.  There is a precedent now, and it's doubtful any of the BBWAA members want to deal with the backlash from perhaps being the ONE writer who inexplicably refused to vote for Jeter.  

Whatever his shortcomings, and this is not to say that there were none, Jeter checks EVERY box for a Hall of Famer:  He was a 14-time All Star shortstop who hit .310 over a 20-year career on the game's biggest stage, led the team to five World Championships, won five Gold Gloves, five Silver Sluggers, a Rookie of the Year award, and the MVP awards for the All Star game and the World Series.  His postseason career is like another All-Star caliber season unto itself, as he is the career leader in almost everything except homers and RBIs, not the stats you expect from a shortstop who usually hits leadoff.  (He's 3rd and 4th all-time in those, BTW.)  He's the total package, and his defensive shortcomings or perceived overratedness are no reasons to pass him up.  

• Three voters - Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe, Anthony Reiber of New York Newsday, and former Newsday writer Steven Marcus all voted for ONLY Derek Jeter.  
• Marcus either did not vote for anyone last year or did not have a vote, as his line shows neither greens nor reds, including the Jeter vote.  
• Shaughnessy is a well known curmudgeon who's not above making something like this about himself and his own sense of indignation.  Last year he voted only for Mariano Rivera.  
• The real curiosity is Reiber, who actually had voted for Bonds, Clemens, Pettitte, Ramirez, Schilling and Vizquel last year, but took those away so he could make a statement, I guess.  Maybe in the blinding light of the awesomeness that was Derek Jeter's career he saw that nobody...OK, never mind.  He's an idiot.  

• Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are getting closer, but are not there yet.  Both have over 70%, but experience suggests that the writers who do not publish their ballots in advance or email the trackers privately about them tend to slant more conservatively in their voting, so those percentages are likely to drop a bit in the final tally.  Since both finished with about 59% last year, though, they're still poised to make a significant jump.  
• Curiously, two voters, Jon Heyman and Christina Kahrl, have given the nod to Bonds (a 7-time MVP award winner who ostensibly started using PEDs after having already won three of them.) but not to Clemens (a 7-time Cy Young Award winner who ostensibly started using PEDs after having won three of them.)  Clemens even has the better postseason resume, often something of a tiebreaker for tossups like this.  Heyman's logic was picked apart by Deadspin a few years ago, but as far as I can tell, despite all the questions about her ballot on Twitter, Kahrl has not explained her ballot. 
• Curt Schilling (78%) and Larry Walker (83%) are the only other players polling over the 75% required for enshrinement at this point.  
• Walker's vote total, like those of Bonds and Clemens, dropped a little more than 11% in the final tally last year, which would put him slightly below the threshold.  Again, the more old-school voters who don't know (or care to know) how to Internet tend to discredit players whom they think received a disproportionate benefit from their home ballpark.  (Jim Rice excepted, evidently.) However, players often get a bit of a bump in their final year, and this being a less crowded ballot than in recent years, Walker may still make it.  
• Schilling probably will not, as he's just barely over the threshold to begin with, and if he drops as much as he did last year (about 9%) he'll end up well below it, but still close enough to likely achieve enshrinement in 2021, his 9th year on the ballot.  
• The only other players polling even close to 50% are Omar Vizquel and Scott Rolen.  This is their third year on the ballot, but they've followed very different paths here.  Vizquel started out strong, with 37% and then 43% last year.  He may even end up over 50% this year, as he and Andy Pettitte were the only two from last year who did better in the final count than the pre-announcement polling had showed.   Rolen, however, started at about 10%, then got 17% last year, so if this result holds - he's currently at 47.7% - it would be a ~30% jump in one year, which is pretty rare, I would imagine.  Evidently there is a pretty serious Scott Rolen is better than you think campaign going on somewhere, and it's working.
• Several players appear likely to fall off the ballot for not receiving at least 5% of the vote.  In fact, several of them have only one vote to date: Cliff Lee, Eric Chavez and Jason Giambi.  
• Not that I expected him to get elected, or even think he should be, but it surprises me that Giambi isn't getting a little more support.  He has the sort of resume that might have kept him on the ballot in the Old Days - 440 homers, over 2000 hits, an MVP award (and he probably should have won another) - but players like this have gone once-and-done on the ballot several times recently: Carlos Delgado, Lance Berkman, Mo Vaughn, Andres Galarraga, Jim Edmonds, Paul Konerko (who currently has two votes and is epected to fall off the ballot), etc.  

The unfortunate side effect of the so-called Steroid Era and all the wonderful hitters we got to watch at the time is that we don't know whose stats to take seriously, and the BBWAA tends to err on the side of caution.  Plus, Giambi has his sniveling press conference in which he apologized - sorta - for using steroids.  

And he has recency bias going against him.  That is, the way in which his career just kinda petered out over a drawn out time after his Yankees contract probably hurts him a bit, too.   He hit .212 over parts of six seasons at the end of his career, with about as many homers (44) in his last 410 games - more than half in a Rockies uniform - as he did in his MVP season alone (43).  The voters tend to frown on "padded stats" preferring guys to go out closer to their peak.  Take away those six seasons and Giambi's career (.286 batting average, 396 homers, 146 OPS+ in almost 8000 plate appearances) looks a lot like Duke Snider's or Orlando Cepeda's, but also Frank Howard's and Albert Belle's.  Not a slam dunk or anything, but maybe more than one person would have thought him worthy of a check mark.

• Two players - Rafael Furcal and Alfonso Soriano - have not received a single vote yet.  Furcal I get: He was a pretty good player for a few years, but didn't amass the counting stats the voters like to see.  His defense bumps his overall WAR total to about 40 (Vizquel has about 45, for reference, in about 10 more seasons) which is impressive for a short career, but just not enough.  
• Soriano, though?  He got some MVP votes, finishing as high as 3rd one season.  He hit over 400 homers, had over 2000 career hits, had a 40-40 season and just missed a second one by a single homer. You'd think someone would give him a vote.  I mean, Danny Tartabull got a single vote, for crying out loud, and Soriano hit 150 more homers!  Danny Tartabull!  

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this goes tonight.  I fully expect Jeter to be unanimous and Walker to just make the cut, but that should be it.  

Next year though, with all of these guys carrying over and nobody who seems particularly like a Hall of Famer being added to the ballot (Mark Buehrle, Tim Hudson, Barry Zito and Torii Hunter are the best of the new nominees next year) it could be Clemens, Bonds, and Schilling giving speeches on the dais in Cooperstown next July.  

It may be a good year to get cheap accommodations and tickets to the ceremonies.  To paraphrase  Yogi Berra, people will be staying away in droves.  

Book Review - Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, by Larry Tye

"History binds Josh [Gibson] and Satchel at the hip as the two towering figures of the Negro Leagues, but nature left them as mismatched as yin and yang. Josh was a hitter who mashed pitches, Satchel a pitcher who undid batters. Josh's power emanated from his huge arms and torso, Satchel's from his string-bean legs. The differences, however, went deeper. Josh steered clear of the limelight. Satchel lived in and monopolized it. Josh was eaten up by the limits of his ravaged knees and his Jim Crow world, consoling himself with booze, which had been legalized, and opiates, which had not. Satchel learned to cope and triumph. Josh was a player's player with a bench full of friends. Satchel played to the crowd, which made his teammates admire more than love him."

- Satchel, by Larry Tye, p 73

King Arthur. Davy Crockett. Paul Bunyan.

There are individuals throughout history who so inspire us that their legends grow well beyond their actual stature, becoming so entangled in the stories of their lives that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to determine where the man ends and the lore begins. Such is the case with Leroy “Satchel” Paige, about whom Larry Tye has penned a new biography, simply entitled, “Satchel”.

For a man who may have been seen in person by more spectators than anyone else in history, there was precious little written about Satchel Paige, at least little that can be called 'reliable', anyway. Perhaps the task of unraveling the mystery surrounding the man appeared so daunting to so many. Perhaps many felt that clearing up those mysteries would take something away from the man himself. Tye has managed to do the former without sacrificing the latter, though it took him two years to accomplish it.

Having pored over every available reference on his subject, Tye sifted and sorted and deciphered all of the available information on Satchel and weaved it into not only a coherent whole, but a telling, endearing and interesting story as well. It’s well written without being pretentious or excessively verbose, making for a very accessible and easily read narrative that flows well. Tye provides sufficient background on people and places without boring you and without feeling the need to inform the reader of every possible nuance about a given individual or situation, and most important, without making the reader feel that he's gotten off track.

He manages to point out and discuss the various social injustices of Satchel’s day without sounding condescending or sanctimonious, something too many who have written about the Negro Leagues seem to feel is their duty. This makes it possible for the reader to enjoy the narrative for what it is, to appreciate the charming, nostalgic aspects, to react with distaste when he discusses racial slights and slurs, but not to become so overburdened with guilt that the reading becomes less than enjoyable. Indeed, few would read such a book if they had to fear being scolded for long-past wrongs they never committed on every other page.

Tye begins at the beginning, which is not as easy at is sounds in the case of Satchel Paige, whose birth name was Leroy Page and whose birth date was virtually anybody’s guess. I won’t ruin the surprise, except to say that part of Satchel’s mystery included the fact that throughout most of his professional life, nobody knew exactly how old he was. The birth date mystery was such a part of his legend that there was even a Trivial Pursuit card that included three possible birthdates as the clue to "Satchel Paige".

Tye describes Leroy’s difficult youth in Mobile, Alabama, one of many children in a very poor family, beholden to an alcoholic father who died young. Leroy had trouble with authority even then and spent a third of his youth in a reform school, which helped shape him into both the man and the ballplayer he would eventually become. Upon his release, he almost immediately took up with a local semipro team, was given his famous moniker (though there are even more stories as to how he became Satchel than there are potential birth dates, it seems) and as he realized that his skills could take him much farther, he began to hone them.



Trips through the minors of Black Ball in the 1920’s took him all over the South, to Mexico, the Caribbean, and eventually to Pittsburgh, to the Black major leagues, where he would become a star. Not that he stayed there long. Contracts in the Negro Leagues were looked at as something to do until something better came along, and for the likes of Satchel Paige, it frequently did. He hopped around North America, playing in Pittsburgh, certainly, but also in North Dakota, California, Colorado, and Kansas City, as he felt inclined.

Effa Manley bought his rights twice for the Newark Eagles, though he never suited up for them. He also went back to the Caribbean, playing in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and even Venezuela, where he was nearly killed by natives, if you believe his story. It was probably Satchel, not Babe Ruth (or, as James Hirsch would have you believe, Willie Mays) who was baseball's first true international superstar, and this before he ever suited up for the major leagues.

But believing Satchel’s stories is exactly what makes writing his biography so difficult. There are lots of stories that have trickled down from Satchel Paige and other stars of the Negro leagues, and many of them, if they are true at all, are only slightly so. But they’ve been told and retold so many times that few know the difference anymore.



Part of the charm of the Negro leagues, it seems, was that in an industry that either did not have the money or did not have the interest in recording every event meticulously, the history became entangled with the tall tales, and everyone was basically OK with that. The men who played there lived their lives and spun their fables, never with malice in mind, and they made for good stories and good story tellers, which was what people wanted anyway. Why bother to point out that Satchel never really struck out Babe Ruth in a barnstorming game at Yankee Stadium? He could have, everyone knew, and that was all that counted.

Along the way, Tye describes interactions and exploits with some of the greats of both black and white baseball, Josh Gibson, Buck O’Neil, Double Duty Radcliffe, Oscar Robertson, and Cool Papa Bell, to name a few, but also Bob Feller, Dizzy Dean, Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial, and many of the barnstorming stars of Major League Baseball.

Satchel eventually made it to the major leagues, the first pitcher to break the color barrier. He had been more than a bit irked by the fact that Branch Rickey did not come calling for him, rather than Jackie Robinson, who had played barely one year in the Negro Leagues, whereas Satchel had paid his dues for almost two decades. But Satchel, besides being over 40 years old, was never one to honor a contract or turn the other cheek, so Rickey deemed that he was something less than an ideal candidate for his grand experiment.



Instead, Indians' owner Bill Veeck took a chance on Satchel and made him the American League's first black pitcher. Satchel, at 41, became the oldest "rookie" in major league history, and four years later, its oldest All Star, and then in 1965, he became the oldest pitcher in MLB history, throwing three scoreless innings for the Kansas City Athletics against the Boston Red Sox, at the age of 58. The Los Angeles Times story on the game called it, "A gimmick, yes. A joke, no."

Veeck and Paige would enjoy a life long relationship, and Paige could thank Veeck for giving him second and third chances when he wore out his welcome with previous employers, as he seemingly always did. Veeck brought Paige in to pitch for the St. Louis Browns and then later on for the Miami Marlins, a minor league team for whom Satchel pitched in his 50's.

Because he'd never saved any of his money and didn't have the kinds of sponsorship opportunities afforded to either today's athletes or white stars of Satchel's heyday, Paige never did stop pitching, really. He just kept going, barnstorming in places like Alaska, North Dakota, California, and Missouri, just to make ends meet. Even after he was finally inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971, Satchel kept on making appearances and pitching. He was paid as a consultant when a film was made about his life, but otherwise, he rarely had the luxury of not pitching if he didn't feel like it.



As far as Tye's book goes, it is a joy to read. It's his first baseball book, I believe, and he gets a few of the minute details wrong, such as referring to Joe DiMaggio as "Jumpin' Joe" or indicating that the number of games in the baseball season was 151, rather than 154, but these are minor and forgivable offenses. Tye gets the main and plain things very right, and goes above and beyond the call of duty in writing this book (as attested to by the fact that he has almost 80 pages of notes and bibliography).

Satchel Paige was the kind of interesting, incredible, lovable, frustrating, talented but flawed character that we all wish we could have known or could have been. The stories of his life, such as they are shared in Tye's book, fill out the holes in the legend probably more than Paige would have wished, but no less than his legend deserves.

Big Re-Hash: Frank Thomas Retires - Now What About the Hall of Fame?

Most of this material was penned almost four years ago, but since Frank Thomas announced his retirement today, I thought it might be worthwhile to freshen this up a bit.

There's been some discussion and debate over the last few years about whether Frank Thomas really belongs in the Hall of Fame. Based mostly on the fact that the second half of his MLB career constituted such a severe drop off from the level he established in the first half, many have said that he'[s only a marginal candidate.

This is poppycock.


Frank Thomas

This is about the silliest thing I've heard all week. I could understand if they were saying that Frank Thomas, moderately productive outfielder of several 1950s and '60s National League teams, didn't belong in the Hall of Fame. That Frank Thomas hit .266 in 16 seasons, never hitting .300 in any of them, finishing in the top ten of the MVP ballot only once (4th in 1958), and never leading his league in anything but games played, hit-by-pitch and sacrifice flies (once each). That Frank Thomas certainly doesn't belong in Cooperstown.

But this one? The Big Hurt? The 1B/DH who has terrorized American league pitchers for the last decade and a half? Let's look at his credentials, along with someone else's, shall we?

Name      AB     R    H     2B   HR   RBI
Hurt    10074  1494  2468  495  521  1704
Splint   9791  1798  2654  525  521  1839

Name     Avg   OBP  SLG   OPS  OPS+
Hurt    .301  .419  .555  974  156
Splint  .344  .482  .642 1116  191

The 'Hurt' line is, of course, Frank Thomas' career. The second line is that of the Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams. Four years ago I compared these two, up to a similar point in their careers, and now it turns out that they will both complete their careers with exactly 521 home runs. I'll be issuing lottery predictions for 2014, later tonight, thank you.

In all seriousness, though, are they the same? Of course not. Nobody was as good as Ted Williams, in his generation or any other, save perhaps Ruth and Bonds. But are they close? You're damn right they are. Williams had a few more of just about everything, but not a lot more of anything. He struck out a lot less, but so did everyone else at the time. Pitchers throw harder now, and relief pitchers are trained to get the strikeout, with Thomas having to face them much more often than Williams did.

The second set of stats, their averages, shows a much greater difference between them, but it also shows something else. That last statistic is park and league-adjusted OPS (On-base plus Slugging), a rough but effective measure of a hitter's prowess. Ted Williams ranks second all time, behind only the Babe. Thomas is tied for 19th, with 13 of the 20 guys who are either tied or ahead of him already in the Hall.

Among the other seven, four are not eligible for Cooperstown because they didn't play at least ten seasons (Dave Orr), are banned from baseball for gambling issues (Shoeless Joe Jackson) or have not yet been retired for five years (Albert Pujols and Barry Bonds).

Bonds' case is a little sketchy, given that of Mark McGwire, who's also ahead of Thomas on the OPS+ list, but who has failed to garner more than about a third of the votes he needs in his first three seasons on the ballot. But based on numbers alone, both Bonds and McGwire are no-doubt Hall of Famers.

The sixth is Dick Allen, who was a heckuva hitter, but who played only a dozen full seasons and who was basically washed up by age 35. Also, as I understand it, he was kind of a jerk to the sportswriters, but then they didn't exactly hold that against Ted Williams.

The last is Pete Browning, who played almost half of his ~1,200 game career in the 1880s American Association, beating up on sub-standard pitching while all the best players were in the National League.

Thomas is one of only 14 players to hit over .300/.400/.500 in a career of over 2,000 games. Almost all of the rest are in Cooperstown or will be some time soon. Here's that list:

Already in the Hall of Fame:
Cobb, Ty
Foxx, Jimmie
Gehrig, Lou
Heilmann, Harry
Hornsby, Rogers
Musial, Stan
Ott, Mel
Ruth, Babe
Speaker, Tris
Williams, Ted

Still active or recently retired (years played):

Thomas, Frank (19)
Martinez, Edgar (18)
Ramirez, Manny (17)
Jones, Chipper (16)

Edgar Martinez, despite playing one fewer season than Thomas, played in only 267 fewer games, and did not hit for nearly as much power ("only" 309 homers). He got about 36% of the BBWAA vote in his first year on the ballot, which bodes well for his candidacy overall.

Ramirez and Jones, both excellent players, aren't likely to improve upon their current career averages being already 37 years old, but are having Cooperstown-worthy careers.

So that's 10 Hall of Famers, one potential Hall of Famer in Edgar, two guys who should be enshrined eventually if they follow normal career paths (and if the voters don't hold Manny's PED suspension against him). Pretty good company, I think.

Let's look at where Thomas falls in history:

Stat:   R  2B  XBH  HR  RBI  BB  TB  TOB  OBP  SLG  OPS
Rank:  68  55   26  18   22   9  37   28   21   25   15

Overall, he's got to be one of the two dozen or so best hitters in history, and maybe only beneath Jimmy Foxx and Joe DiMaggio among right-handed hitters, both of whom have less playing time on their resumes than Thomas does. Even without giving him credit for time he's spent injured, his numbers are clearly Hall-Worthy.

Bill James listed him as the tenth best firstbaseman ever back in the 2000 edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract, and since then he's had two and a half productive seasons, and one and a half seasons lost to injury. That still adds to his career value, in my mind.

Criticisms of Thomas as a Hall of Famer center around the argument that because Thomas was injured so much the last several years, and because he didn't maintain the pace he started in the early 1990s, and "didn't do anything in the playoffs", his Hall of Fame credentials are somehow weak. While certainly the first two of those things are true, should they really cause us not to vote for Thomas when he becomes eligible for Cooperstown?

From 1991 to 1998, Thomas racked up eight consecutive seasons with at least 100 runs, 100 walks and 100 RBI. No, he didn't maintain that pace, but since no one had ever put together more than four such seasons consecutively before, why should we expect it from him? (Jeff Bagwell later had six.) And that streak includes not one but two strike-shortened seasons, making it all the more impressive.

Thomas made five All-Star Games in that span, and won two MVP Awards, in 1993 and 1994. He's also finished in the top ten in the MVP voting seven other times, finishing 4th at the age of 38, and 15th one other time. Only a dozen players in history have amassed more MVP shares than Thomas, and they're all in the Hall, except Bonds, Pujols and Alex Rodriguez. Those guys all won at least three MVPs and are not yet eligible because they're either still active or too recently retired ot have come up for the vote.

For that matter, 12 of the next 13 players on that list after Thomas are also in the Hall, and the 13th is Pete Rose. (I guess 13 isn't his lucky number.) Only three of the next 25 or so elligible players have not been elected, and Thomas is obviously far above them. In short, anyone considered so frequently and so seriously as the MVP of his league is by definition a Hall of Famer.

Thomas was one of the greatest hitters in history over the course of his career, though as Rob Neyer points out, "only" about the 45th greatest player, given what a lousy defender and baserunner he proved to be. But still, 45th out of something like a bajillion players? That's pretty rarefied air. But if he isn't elected to the Hall of Fame when his time comes? That would really be a Big Hurt.

Fisking Fitzpatrick: Comparing the Phillies OF to the 1930 Athletics

Well, I tried to go "old school" with my Canterbury Tales style Phillies Preview, but Philadelphia Inquirer writer Frank Fitzpatrick went old school in a different way in his Sunday column. Fitzpatrick compares the current Phillies outfield of Jason Werth, Raul Ibanez and Shane Victorino to the outfield of the 1930 Athletics, consisting of Mule Haas, Bing Miller and Al Simmons.

He concluded that the Phillies can't match the A's for nicknames, though he admits that neither "Mule" nor "Bing" is as interesting as "The Flyin' Hawiian".



No, seriously, in terms of their abilities, he gives the "...1930 trio a big edge over the Phillies' outfield".

But before we reduce his arguments to rubble, let's ask the obvious question:

Why?

Why are we comparing a team that played 79 years ago, a different franchise, in a different league, in a different park in a different era, with the defending World Champs? Why not compare them to the 1967 Kansas City Athletics, or the 1955 Pirates or the 1884 St. Paul Apostles, for that matter?



It's because those A's were the last repeat World Series champions from Philadelphia, and of course the entire stock of Philly beat writers hopes that these Phillies can repeat as well.

Granted, it's a silly exercise. For one thing, why just compare the outfield? Why not the infield? Why not the starting pitchers or the bullpen or the benches? Besides differences in the leagues and the style of ball, the types of these clubs are completely different as well.

The 2009 Phillies are stocked with several good, but not great players, some of whom had career years in 2008. At best, 20 years from now, we might be able to look back and call, say, Chase Utley or Cole Hamels a Hall of Famer, but that's a long stretch at this point. In reality, there probably isn't a single eventual Cooperstowner on either the 2008 or 2009 Phillies rosters.

By contrast, those 1930 A's had four of them: Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, Lefty Grove and Jimmie Foxx, not to mention a brief appearance by Eddie Collins. The first three were in their prime, in their mid to late 20's.

Jimmie Foxx was only 21 in 1929, but had been in the majors since age 17, and had an MVP-caliber campaign in his first full season of work. (The AL curiously did not dole out an MVP award in 1929, and neither league awarded any in 1930, though Simmons and Foxx would have certainly been in the running.)



Fitzpatrick starts out reasonably well:

As a result, anyone interested in comparing Simmons, Haas and Miller with their counterparts on the 2009 Phillies can do so only through the harsh prism of statistics.

But numbers don't reveal everything. They don't consider 1930's lively ball or 2009's menacing bullpens. They don't account for the rigors of train travel, the daunting glare of the 24/7 spotlight or the spitball and slider.

He then proceeds to base most of the rest of the article on anecdotal evidence and hearsay, all but ignoring any intelligent statistical analysis.

Quoting Dave Jordan, the head of the Philadelphia Historical Society:

"...the old A's outfield looks far, far better. Simmons does that all by himself, and Miller and Haas were very solid performers. Victorino may, in coming years, approach Miller. I don't think Werth can even be placed in a fair comparison with any of them."

Fitzpatrick and his sources are correct in saying that Raul Ibanez, the most accomplished of the three Phillies' outfielders, is no match for the best of the A's outfield, Hall of Famer Al Simmons. The Inquirer article cites Simmons' career batting average of .334, his hits and homer totals, but forgets to mention how significantly these were inflated by the era and the ballpark in which he played.



If you "neutralize" his stats, his career batting average drops to .312, still very good, but not quite so impressive on the face of it. Similarly, he loses about 15 homers and almost 200 RBI over the course of his career. If you neutralize both of their career stats lines, they actually come out quite a bit closer than you would think:

Simmons: .312/.356/.498, with 22 HR, 113 RBI & 93 Runs per 162 Games
Ibanez: .280/.340/.463, with 21 HR, 90 RBI & 78 Runs per 162 Games

That's still a big disparity, but not as big as you might think.

For comparing the other two, he then quotes someone named Bill Kashatus, who wrote a book about the 1929 Athletics:

"What I see in those numbers is that while the power stats are comparable for center and rightfielders, Haas and Miller had higher batting averages and were much more disciplined at the plate than Victorino and Werth, as evidenced by the difference in strikeouts."

Wait, so he's saying that these players from Shibe Park in the 1930's hit for higher batting averages and struck out less often? Well, then they must be better players, right?

Except that they're not.

For one thing, comparing strikeouts is just ridiculous. In 1929, the American League averaged 2.92 strikeouts per game, and then in 1930, it jumped up to an average of 3.32/game.

Last year, the National League averaged almost seven strikeouts per game. Baseball is played differently now. Everybody swings harder, pitchers throw harder, and the strike zone is half the size of what it was three quarters of a century ago.

For example, Jimmie Foxx led the American League in whiffs every year from 1929-31, and his total for three years (220) was only 10 percent more than Ryan Howard did all by himself last year (199), which didn't even lead the league. There is no good way to say that Werth or Victorino has less impressive bat control than two players from 1930.



Another big difference, of course, is the relative number of runs scored. In 1929, in a league that averaged 5.01 Runs/Game, Bing Miller created 103 runs, or as many as would normally be scored in 20.6 games. Mule Haas created 99 Runs, enough for 19.8 games.

In 1930, the American League averaged 5.41 Runs/Game. Miller, despite hitting .303 with 100 RBI, created only 88 Runs, enough for 16.2 games. Haas created only 74 runs, good for 13.7 games' worth. Simmons created 148 and 166 runs in those two seasons, good for 29.5 and 30.6 games in 1929 and 1930, respectively.

For comparison's sake, last year's outfield played in a league that averaged just 4.54 runs/game, and Ibanez played in the American League, which averaged 4.78 Runs per game. The 2008 Phillies outfield was not better than the 1930 Athletics' outfield but it's closer than you'd think:

       Simmons   Miller  Haas          Total 
1929     29.5    20.6    19.8           69.9 
1930     30.6    16.2    13.7           60.5 

       Burrell  Shane   Werth  (Ibanez)   Total (Tot w/ Ibanez)
2008    23.3     20.3    18.5   (22.6)    62.1 (61.4)

So, even though Simmons has a big edge on Burrell (or Ibanez), the edges for the other two outfielders are very slim, comparing 1929 to 2008, the first Championship year for each team.



And then both Miller (age 35 in 1930) and Haas (age 26) drop off notably the next year. Werth and Victorino are both in their late 20's, and should not see any significant drop off due to age, though Werth may have peaked last year, and in any case, his track record suggests that he's never more than a checked swing away from his next DL stint.

Ibanez, on the other hand, will be 37 this year, and will probably start to decline at any moment, but if the other two pick up his slack, there's no reason that these three can't provide about 60 games worth of runs for the 2009 Phillies, just as Haas, Simmons and Miller did for the 1930 Athletics.

Another comparison made in the article pertained to speed, with Kashatus saying,

"What always amazed me was that Haas in 12 full seasons in the majors totaled 12 stolen bases. With his speed, he could have stolen much more. Then again, the . . . A's weren't built to run. They were a power-hitting team."

This last part is true, though I find it amusing that a guy whose nickname was "Mule" was actually considered fast.



Technically, it's not clear whether he actually was very fast or whether he just had incredible instincts when it came to chasing fly balls in the outfield. Most of the literature talks about him being a great fly chaser, but little of it actually talks specifically about his speed. Similarly, Joe DiMaggio was widely regarded as one of the best in centerfield, but never stole more than six bases in a season.

The 1930 A's were second in the American League in homers, slugging and runs scored (all to the Yankees, of course), but only 7th in steals among eight teams. If you can score 951 runs without risking skinned knees and broken fingers, why bother, right?

These Phillies are different, though. In addition to all the homers (they led the Senior circuit with 214 of them last year) they also had the 3rd most steals (136) in the NL, and were 4th from last in getting caught.

Victorino stole 36 bases himself last year, 6th in the NL, and should probably be compared to Miller, not Haas, as Bing stole 24 bags in 1929, 3rd in the AL, and is the only one of the three with any propensity for swiping bases. He dropped off significantly in 1930, stealing only 13, but also getting caught 13 times.

Another quote from Kashatus:

"Both Werth and Miller are disciplined hitters, though. They both work counts well and can hit in the clutch. But Miller was more of a contact hitter who considered it a disgrace to take a called third strike."

Werth is, indeed, a very patient hitter, seeing 4.51 pitches per plate appearance last season, which would have ranked second in the majors (behind Nick Swisher) if he'd had 19 more plate appearances. Even though he struck out twice as often as he walked, and about 40% more than the average NL player, he waited for his pitch to strike out. Dammit.



Miller was, though not abnormally averse to the strikeout, at least relatively adept at avoiding them. The average American Leaguer in 1930 struck out 56 times in 585 at-bats, while Bing would swing and miss only 25 times that year.

So Kashatus was right about this one, though I would have liked to see some evidence, rather than just taking his word for it. I guess newspapers aren't the place for tables of numbers and complex statistics, unless they refer to the stock market.

Now if we can just get Charlie Manuel to wear a high, false collar and a bowler.

Harold Baines for the Hall of Fame?

It amazes me that I'm even writing this.

It seems to me that if you've got a player whose main job, nay, ONLY job for most of his career was to hit, he ought to have some damn impressive stats if you're going to talk about putting him in the Hall of Fame. Harold Baines won a Silver Slugger and was a six-time All-Star, but Darryl Strawberry made eight All Star teams, Frank McCormick nine, and Steve Garvey ten. Bill Freehan went to 11(!) All Star Games, and when he came up for election, he got two lousy votes and promptly fell off the ballot.

A Designated Hitter ought to amass 200 or more hits at least once. A run producer should pile up 100+ RBIs more than three times in 22 seasons, or score 100 runs, even 90 runs, at least once. A great slugger ought to lead the league in slugging more than once, or hit 30 homers at least once, or at least be among the league leaders occasionally.

Harold Baines did none of these things, and yet there are still folks out there who think he belongs in Cooperstown, along side Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio and Carl Yastrzemski and Dave Winfield.



Scott Merkin, a White Sox beat writer for MLB, is one of them. He's got a column on the MLB website calling for the longtime Pale Hose wearer to get some serious consideration for Cooperstown. To make his case for Baines, Merkin interviewed such non-partisan folks as White Sox GM (and former Baines teammate) Kenny Williams, White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, White Sox color commentator Ken "Hawk" Harrelson, and Harold Baines himself. Way to keep it neutral there, Scotty.

I have never thought of Baines as a Hall of Famer, and usually just glaze over his candidacy with a few sentences between discussions of more serious candidates. Apparently few of the BBWAA voters have either, only about 28 of them, out of the 540 or so who get to vote. This is important because their opinions, unlike mine, actually matter. Merkin and others like him will need to change the minds of almost 400 of the BBWAA writers, which is unlikely.


A few tidbits from Merkin:

Clutch hitting for Baines [...] led to an amazing 1,628 RBIs despite only topping the 100-RBI plateau in 1982 (105) and 1985 (113) with the White Sox, and with Baltimore and Cleveland in 1999 (103). Baines turned 40 before the 1999 campaign.
It's a model for consistent excellence on Baines' part, accomplished the right way through dedication on and off the field, without any questionable shortcuts.

First of all, being 28th all-time at something does not constitute "amazing" in my book. A-Rod is right on his heels, and will pass him before the end of May next year. Jim Thome and Carlos Delgado are about 140 RBIs back, and could both pass him in the next two years, without necessarily even being much good. Chipper Jones is about 250 back, and could pass him inside of three years easily. Any two of those four will push Baines out of the top 30, and thus his best case for Cooperstown will weaken quite a bit.

Also, it's hard for me to agree with "consistent excellence" as an appropriate term to describe someone who hit, on average, .289 with 22 homers per 162 games. (His actual average per season was about 17.5 homers, because he rarely played more than around 145 games in a season.) More like "typical goodness" which sounds a lot less compelling.

Sure, I'll give him three snaps in Z formation for not using steroids, but then do we even know that for sure? He played almost half his career in the so-called steroids era, and suffered little apparent drop off in skills as he went into his late 30's, when most players slow down.

Baines hit the second most homers of his career at age 40, in 1999, the height of the PED era, and also had the third highest slugging percentage and RBI totals of his career that year, then fell off the table, hitting just .254 with 11 homers in Y2K. If players as mundane as Jason Grimsley and Ricky Bones and Hal Morris and David Justice and dozens of others were all using, is it so hard to believe that Baines could have, too?



Even assuming that he was clean, was he the amazing clutch hitter that Merkin makes him out to be? White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf and GM Kenny Williams think so, but then if you asked any owner and/or GM about a longtime fan favorite on the Cooperstown ballot, they'd probably say something nice like this. But is there any (non-anecdotal) evidence?

Baines hit .289/.356/.465 in his career overall, and while he did hit .313/.387/.427 as a pinch hitter (presumably a clutch situation, most of the time), his "Close & Late" numbers (.284/.360/.474) and other clutch stats hover right around his career marks. In short, there's no evidence that he was any more clutch than anybody else.

Baines' hit total of 2866, 40th all-time, is his other main argument. It's as close as any eligible player has gotten to 3,000 hits without getting elected, and two-thirds of the next 30 players on the list are either in the hall or will be someday. That 3,000 mark has always seemed like a lock, and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf blames himself for Baines' inability to get there:

"What really has bothered me for a long time is that if we hadn't traded him, he would have his 3,000 hits and he would be a lock for the Hall of Fame. We traded him twice and into bad situations where he was a platoon player. If he stayed with us, he would have gone over 3,000 hits. If he doesn't get in, it would really bug me. I talk to him about it, and he just shrugs it off."

Should Reinsdorf blame himself for the fact that Harold Baines elicits so little support for election to the baseball Hall of Fame? Besides the fact that 3,000 hits is by no means an automatic ticket to the Coop, given how bland Baines' other numbers look, is it actually possible that Baines would have gotten more playing time and therefore more hits if he'd stayed in Chicago? Let's see:



In 1989, he was traded to Texas on July 29th, and he played in only 50 of the Rangers' remaining 62 games, but not because he was a platoon player. He got five sporadic days off, but then missed seven consecutive games in September, after being pinch hit for in the 6th inning of the last game before the missed week. We have to presume an injury here, and if so, we cannot presume health if he'd stayed in Chicago.

So at best maybe he gets five more games. But does he really? The White Sox had not played him every day either, as he appeared in only 96 of the team's 102 games up to that point, a day off every 17 games. In Texas, not counting the alleged injury, he sat about once every 11 games. So that gives him less than two more games, if he sits once every 17 instead of once every 11. Hitting .321 (his White Sox BA that year) in those two games would give him maybe three more hits. Woo hoo, only 131 to go!

But his performance slipped a bit too when he went to Texas, his batting average dropping from .321 to .285. There's no saying why this was, but let's just pretend that Harold was sad when the ChiSox traded him, and didn't hit as well because of it, and that he would have continued to hit .321 in the remaining 52 games in 1989, instead of .285 in 50 games. How many more hits would that have gotten him? That would give him 58 hits in 188 at-bats instead of 49 hits in 172 at-bats, his actual numbers in Texas. So we've got a total of nine additional hits. Down to 125.

The next year he split between Texas and Oakland, hitting .284 with 118 hits in 415 at-bats. Baseball Reference says that if he'd spent the whole year with Chicago, he'd have had 115 hits in 412 at-bats, three less than his actual total.

But let's also assume that he'd have gotten more than the 135 games they gave him in Texas and Oakland, too. Some of that was due to normal days off, but others may have been injury-related, like when he missed three games in May after playing all of a doubleheader, or when he missed nine games in July, after a game started in which he only got one at-bat, and had only a two-inning appearance in right field in the middle. He played only 103 games of 129 with Texas before the trade to Oakland, where he actually did play every day (and hit only .266).

We can't give him the 12 or so he presumably missed due to some ailment, so we'll give him seven days off (one every 17 games, like in 1989 with Chicago), plus the 12 due to boo-boos, which leaves him with 143 games played instead of only 135. With four plate appearances per game, he gets 32 more plate appearances at most, but he did walk some, so that takes away about four plate appearances. Hitting a 1990-Comiskey adjusted .279 in 440 at-bats instead of the .284 in 415 at-bats he actually compiled gives him 123 hits that year instead of 118. That's five more hits, and we're down to 120.



You see where this is going? I've written over 1,600 words, and we've managed to find 14 hits for him. At this rate, I'll have written a novella about Harold Baines before we get him 3,000 (real and imaginary) hits. But let's keep it up...

I'm not going to make adjustments for the five years in between Baines' first and second stints with the White Sox. He spent two seasons in Oakland and three in Baltimore, never playing more than 141 games in a a season. Let us presume that this was because he was a 30-something DH with bad knees and not because his managers didn't care about getting him into the Hall of Fame.

If that's the case, there's little reason to think that he would have played more often in Chicago than he did in Baltimore and Oakland. Furthermore, adjusting for ballparks (via Baseball Reference) shows that Baines would have had fewer hits, not more, playing half his games in Comiskey, a slight pitcher's park. We'll leave well enough alone there.

Anyway, the second trade Reinsdorf was talking about happened in late July 1997, two days before the famed White Flag Trade. Baines had played 93 of the team's 103 games to that point. When he went to Baltimore, he was in a platoon, mostly with righty Geronimo Berroa, who hit .277/.366/.426 after Baines' arrival. Baines, for his part, hit .291/.356/.418 for Baltimore, playing 44 of the team's remaining 59 games, but his OPS was 120 points lower against lefties than righties that year, so it seems the platoon was justified.

Reinsdorf would have you believe that Baines would not have been platooned in Chicago, but with 1B/DH Frank Thomas hitting .347 that year, I find that hard to believe. Thomas hit .344 against righties that year, and therefore did not need to be platooned, but if they only used Baines as a DH against righties and played Thomas at first those days, Baines still would have gotten less playing time, not more.

Even if we believe Jerry's argument and we give Baines nine more games (6 games off in the remaining 59) and about nine more hits (using the same .300 batting average and the same ratio of at-bats to games played). Now he only needs 111 for the Hall to come calling.

The next year he was platooned again, this time with Joe Carter and Eric Davis, mostly, but he also missed about 32 games from late June to early August due to an injury, so at best he might have played 117 games that year (with the normal game off every ten days) instead of the 104 he actually played. This exercise typically picks us up about one hit per game, so we'll give him 13 more hits, and now he "only" needs 98 more, and they're obviously not going to be found.

By this point in his career, Baines was a part-time player, and deservedly so. He wasn't getting to play as much because most clubs, including the White Sox, had better options at DH than a 38-year old who couldn't hit lefties and didn't have much power. Reinsdorf is just flat-out wrong.

Another quote from Reinsdorf:

"He's going to have a tough time [getting HoF votes] because for a good part of his career he was a designated hitter and a lot of writers won't vote for a DH,"

No, writers will vote for a DH if he's good enough, as they did for Reggie Jackson, and as they will for Edgar Martinez and Frank Thomas. It's not because Baines was a DH, it's because he wasn't a great DH.

Merkin also argues for Baines, if you can believe this, based on his defense(!):

Many people will forget Baines' natural ability as an outfielder during the early portion of his career, finishing with 10 assists for three straight seasons from 1981 to 1983 and with 15 assists in 1986. But Baines did not play the field from 1993 through his retirement in 2001.

Assists are not the best measure of an oufielder's defense, but they are a measure. In this case, Baines' 15 assists were not in the top 30 among outfielders between 1980 and 1986, the last year he played the field regularly. The 10 assists he had in other years probably would not be among the top 100 marks in those seven seasons, and he never won a Gold Glove. That's not everything, but it tells you that he was never considered one of the three best defensive outfielders in the league when he played.



Surprisingly, according to Baseball Prospectus he was a pretty decent outfielder, good for between 11 and 17 FRAA (Fielding Runs Above Average) each year from 1983 to '86. That's not fantastic, but it is pretty good. Still, you can't give him credit for what he might have done with good knees without throwing everything else off, so we have to evaluate him based on what he actually did, which was DH.

And as a DH, he just doesn't measure up. It's not Reinsdorf's fault. It's not the voters' fault. Baines just wasn't great enough. Being "pretty good" for 22 years should not be, and will not be, enough for Cooperstown.