It's the eternal question when it comes to evaluating players for the Hall of Fame: peak or career? Are a few years of true greatness worth more than a long, consistent career? One even occasionally hears those who enjoy debating such matters describe themselves as "peak" or "career" guys.
There are many metrics available for gauging the value of a player's career that use a bar of replacement level (like Baseball Prospectus's WARP3) or lower (like Bill James's Win Shares). Yet many, including myself, feel that these statistics give too much weight to a long period of mediocre performance and not enough to a superstar-level peak--in fact, it's fairly common for people to compare players' peak years along with their overall career numbers when using these stats. A stat with a bar of average will give more weight to a great peak, but it will (in my view, unfairly) penalize a player like Rickey Henderson, who stuck around for a number of years after he was no longer a very good player.
There have been several attempts to find some middle ground between peak and career, the most notable probably being Jay Jaffe's JAWS. However, I recently thought of an approach to the question that I haven't seen implemented elsewhere: to use a metric with an average base--and then only include those seasons in which a player was above average.
For this exercise, I didn't use the most sophisticated metrics: I simply calculated Runs Created Above Position (RCAP) for hitters and Runs Saved Above Average (RSAA) for pitchers. (Both park-adjusted, of course.) I then used James's Pythagorean Formula to convert these runs into wins above or below average for the average team each season. Then I added together the win values for each year of a player's career that this value was positive, ignoring the years when it was negative. I christened the resulting career total Net Wins Above Average, or NWAA. It's a pretty colorless name, except for a few potential NWA jokes, so feel free to suggest a better one.
(As an aside, I'm well aware of the flaws of both RCAP and RSAA. Probably RCAP's biggest flaw is that, while it adjusts for position, it does not include defense; it also has that same problems as a run estimator that regular Runs Created does. But they're both easy to calculate and accurate in the broad strokes, and I don't think that anyone has a lot of confidence in any of the available fielding metrics, at least for years before the most recent. Besides, it's more the approach that I'm interested in demonstrating here, rather than the stats themselves. It would be great if someone were to use this methodology with some more sophisticated average-based stats.)
I don't have the league positional averages needed to calculate RCAP for years prior to 1972, so I only calculated NWAA for players whose careers began in or after this year, or for players whose careers began earlier but still had rookie eligibility in 1972, most notably Carlton Fisk and Bobby Grich. (For these players, I did a rough estimate of their wins above average for their cups of coffee prior to 1972; this should have a very small effect on their career stats.)
Of the players in this group, fourteen have been elected to the Hall of Fame:
With a stat like this, the question now becomes: where do we draw the line between players who are qualified for the Hall of Fame and those who are not? Since there are really no objective criteria to determine Hall of Fame worthiness, all we have to go on are the players who have already been deemed worthy of the Hall. But if we simply were to let in all the players better than the Hall's weakest member, we'd end up with a Hall far too big by anyone's standards. I like the approach used by the Hall of Merit, where they keep their Hall essentially the same size as the actual Hall of Fame, but fill it with the players they believe to be the most deserving. So, since there are fourteen players in the post-1972 class in the Hall, let's look at the fourteen Hall-eligible players in this group with the highest NWAA scores:
Nine of the fourteen players--as well as the top eight--are the same on both lists (and Kirby Puckett just misses the second). There are some surprising names on this list: Pedro Guerrero, despite being among the most dominant hitters of the 1980s, is rarely thought of as a Hall of Famer: he received only 1.3% of the vote his only time on the ballot. Guerrero's Hall of Fame case is based almost completely on his excellent peak--his career was quite short, with only 6115 plate appearances.
But before deciding that Guerrero's inclusion on the list means that this metric is overrating peak as compared to career value, take a look at the high score for Lou Whitaker. Like Guerrero, Whitaker only lasted a single year on the Hall of Fame ballot, although his candidacy has gained some support in sabermetric circles. Whitaker's career profile is almost the exact opposite of Guerrero's: he gained most of his value from a long, consistent career, but his peak was comparatively quite low--he only cracked the league's top ten in Wins Above Average (WAA) once in his career (a fifth-place finish in 1983). The list has Albert Belle, another player with a dominant peak and short career, but also Carlton Fisk, who played for an extremely long time but only had a couple of really great years. It's a very small sample of players, but from this list it doesn't look to me like the stat is placing too much weight on either peak or career. You can decide for yourself when you've seen a few more lists.
These players represent a very small slice of Hall of Fame history, but, just for now, why don't we think of Pedro Guerrero's 28.74 score as representing the dividing line for Hall of Fame worthiness when it comes to NWAA? Here are all the players in the post-1972 group--including those not yet eligible for the Hall--with NWAA scores through 2005 above the "Guerrero bar": (Players active in 2005 are in bold.)
A few points of interest about this list:
Without further ado, the ballot:
It's almost enough to make you feel a little sorry for Ozzie.
_____________________________________________
On a personal note, this is my first attempt at a blog--I really only set forth on it so I could have a place to publish this article. Even though I know the key to success in this medium is a consistent content flow, I haven't decided yet if I'm going to update this very often--but, if you arrived here from Baseball Think Factory, you might be familiar with my film-related posts from in the much-endangered Lounge. So, to when your appetite for some more content (if there's any whetting to be done), my top ten film list from 2005 can be found here. Far too late for anyone to care, I'm sure, but it's taken me this long to see all the movies I wanted to see.
And if you've made it this far, thanks for reading.
There are many metrics available for gauging the value of a player's career that use a bar of replacement level (like Baseball Prospectus's WARP3) or lower (like Bill James's Win Shares). Yet many, including myself, feel that these statistics give too much weight to a long period of mediocre performance and not enough to a superstar-level peak--in fact, it's fairly common for people to compare players' peak years along with their overall career numbers when using these stats. A stat with a bar of average will give more weight to a great peak, but it will (in my view, unfairly) penalize a player like Rickey Henderson, who stuck around for a number of years after he was no longer a very good player.
There have been several attempts to find some middle ground between peak and career, the most notable probably being Jay Jaffe's JAWS. However, I recently thought of an approach to the question that I haven't seen implemented elsewhere: to use a metric with an average base--and then only include those seasons in which a player was above average.
For this exercise, I didn't use the most sophisticated metrics: I simply calculated Runs Created Above Position (RCAP) for hitters and Runs Saved Above Average (RSAA) for pitchers. (Both park-adjusted, of course.) I then used James's Pythagorean Formula to convert these runs into wins above or below average for the average team each season. Then I added together the win values for each year of a player's career that this value was positive, ignoring the years when it was negative. I christened the resulting career total Net Wins Above Average, or NWAA. It's a pretty colorless name, except for a few potential NWA jokes, so feel free to suggest a better one.
(As an aside, I'm well aware of the flaws of both RCAP and RSAA. Probably RCAP's biggest flaw is that, while it adjusts for position, it does not include defense; it also has that same problems as a run estimator that regular Runs Created does. But they're both easy to calculate and accurate in the broad strokes, and I don't think that anyone has a lot of confidence in any of the available fielding metrics, at least for years before the most recent. Besides, it's more the approach that I'm interested in demonstrating here, rather than the stats themselves. It would be great if someone were to use this methodology with some more sophisticated average-based stats.)
I don't have the league positional averages needed to calculate RCAP for years prior to 1972, so I only calculated NWAA for players whose careers began in or after this year, or for players whose careers began earlier but still had rookie eligibility in 1972, most notably Carlton Fisk and Bobby Grich. (For these players, I did a rough estimate of their wins above average for their cups of coffee prior to 1972; this should have a very small effect on their career stats.)
Of the players in this group, fourteen have been elected to the Hall of Fame:
The only thing I'd note here is that the reason Ozzie Smith scores so low is because, as I said, RCAP doesn't include defense, and there are very few players in history who would suffer more from such an omission than Ozzie.
name nwaa
Mike Schmidt 54.09
George Brett 53.89
Wade Boggs 47.59
Robin Yount 43.62
Paul Molitor 41.97
Eddie Murray 36.79
Carlton Fisk 35.66
Dave Winfield 35.39
Ryne Sandberg 30.69
Kirby Puckett 28.45
Gary Carter 26.71
Dennis Eckersley 26.13
Ozzie Smith 17.35
Bruce Sutter 14.13
With a stat like this, the question now becomes: where do we draw the line between players who are qualified for the Hall of Fame and those who are not? Since there are really no objective criteria to determine Hall of Fame worthiness, all we have to go on are the players who have already been deemed worthy of the Hall. But if we simply were to let in all the players better than the Hall's weakest member, we'd end up with a Hall far too big by anyone's standards. I like the approach used by the Hall of Merit, where they keep their Hall essentially the same size as the actual Hall of Fame, but fill it with the players they believe to be the most deserving. So, since there are fourteen players in the post-1972 class in the Hall, let's look at the fourteen Hall-eligible players in this group with the highest NWAA scores:
Mike Schmidt 54.09
George Brett 53.89
Wade Boggs 47.59
Robin Yount 43.62
Paul Molitor 41.97
Eddie Murray 36.79
Carlton Fisk 35.66
Dave Winfield 35.39
Alan Trammell 33.97
Albert Belle 33.91
Lou Whitaker 33.22
Bobby Grich 32.76
Ryne Sandberg 30.69
Pedro Guerrero 28.74
(Players not in the Hall of Fame in italics.)
Nine of the fourteen players--as well as the top eight--are the same on both lists (and Kirby Puckett just misses the second). There are some surprising names on this list: Pedro Guerrero, despite being among the most dominant hitters of the 1980s, is rarely thought of as a Hall of Famer: he received only 1.3% of the vote his only time on the ballot. Guerrero's Hall of Fame case is based almost completely on his excellent peak--his career was quite short, with only 6115 plate appearances.
But before deciding that Guerrero's inclusion on the list means that this metric is overrating peak as compared to career value, take a look at the high score for Lou Whitaker. Like Guerrero, Whitaker only lasted a single year on the Hall of Fame ballot, although his candidacy has gained some support in sabermetric circles. Whitaker's career profile is almost the exact opposite of Guerrero's: he gained most of his value from a long, consistent career, but his peak was comparatively quite low--he only cracked the league's top ten in Wins Above Average (WAA) once in his career (a fifth-place finish in 1983). The list has Albert Belle, another player with a dominant peak and short career, but also Carlton Fisk, who played for an extremely long time but only had a couple of really great years. It's a very small sample of players, but from this list it doesn't look to me like the stat is placing too much weight on either peak or career. You can decide for yourself when you've seen a few more lists.
These players represent a very small slice of Hall of Fame history, but, just for now, why don't we think of Pedro Guerrero's 28.74 score as representing the dividing line for Hall of Fame worthiness when it comes to NWAA? Here are all the players in the post-1972 group--including those not yet eligible for the Hall--with NWAA scores through 2005 above the "Guerrero bar": (Players active in 2005 are in bold.)
Barry Bonds 120.27
Roger Clemens 69.27
Greg Maddux 61.70
Mike Piazza 58.90
Frank Thomas 54.17
Mike Schmidt 54.09
George Brett 53.89
Rickey Henderson 53.43
Ken Griffey Jr. 52.55
Randy Johnson 51.61
Gary Sheffield 51.23
Alex Rodriguez 51.20
Edgar Martinez 50.81
Jeff Bagwell 48.12
Wade Boggs 47.59
Manny Ramirez 47.35
Pedro Martinez 46.99
Barry Larkin 46.58
Cal Ripken Jr. 45.39
Tony Gwynn 44.94
Mark McGwire 44.01
Robin Yount 43.62
Paul Molitor 41.97
Craig Biggio 39.67
Tom Glavine 37.60
Chipper Jones 37.06
Roberto Alomar 36.93
Eddie Murray 36.79
Jim Edmonds 36.53
Kevin Brown 36.38
Carlton Fisk 35.66
Tim Raines 35.54
Dave Winfield 35.39
Bernie Williams 35.18
Larry Walker 34.90
Jeff Kent 34.42
Alan Trammell 33.97
Albert Belle 33.91
Jim Thome 33.26
Lou Whitaker 33.22
Bobby Grich 32.76
Curt Schilling 32.27
Jason Giambi 31.30
Fred McGriff 31.28
Ivan Rodriguez 31.21
John Smoltz 31.20
Sammy Sosa 30.70
Ryne Sandberg 30.69
Vladimir Guerrero 30.64
Derek Jeter 30.45
Brian Giles 30.44
Albert Pujols 30.26
Mike Mussina 29.32
Pedro Guerrero 28.74
A few points of interest about this list:
- There were thirty-one players active in 2005 above the Guerrero bar. Astoundingly, eight of these players spent the year with the Yankees. (And that doesn't even include Mariano Rivera [19.69 NWAA], who is generally considered a lock for the Hall.) No other 2005 team had more than three players on the list.
- The bar will probably be raised higher in coming years, as there are a number of not-yet-eligible players above the line who seem unlikely to be elected to the Hall, and very few below the line who have a good shot at induction. This could represent a flaw with the stat, that it's overrating more recent players--but, even though there have been a handful of historically great performances over the past decade or so, the number of Wins Above Average needed to rank among the league leaders in any given year has essentially remained stable since the 1970s. The other possibility is that the voters are simply becoming more strict. It seems to me that there are only two active players below the Guerrero bar that (based on their statistical records to date) have a really strong possibility of being elected to Cooperstown:
- The aforementioned Mariano Rivera: even though relievers fare better on an average-based metric than one with a replacement-level base, they still do not score very highly on RSAA. Applying some sort of leverage index to a reliever's stats might be called for, but I think that in that case one should also adjust for the fact that the average ERA of relievers tends to be significantly lower than that of starters, so I question how much of a difference the adjustment would really make. Also, a great deal of Rivera's Hall of Fame case--perhaps more than any other candidate's in history--rests on his postseason performance, which of course is not accounted for here.
- Rafael Palmeiro (26.81 NWAA): his case for the Hall is now in serious jeopardy due to some recent events, the details of which I don't seem to recall, but, even though there was some cursory examination of his credentials around the time of his 3,000th hit, there is little doubt that Palmeiro would have easily sailed into Cooperstown if his statistical record were the only thing in question. Yet his comparatively low NWAA score rather starkly illustrates the shape of his career: he was a pretty good player who played for a very long time (and played most of his best seasons in very good hitters' parks), but who could rarely be thought of as a superstar. Whether this makes him a deserving Hall of Famer is up to you--although it is interesting to note how his overall score stacks up against other career-over-peak guys like Whitaker or Schilling, or even how it compares to Palmeiro's close contemporary, Fred McGriff.
- Barry Bonds: damn. It's true that RCAP tends to overrate players with very high OBPs and SLGs, so this list probably overstates Bonds's dominance somewhat, but still--damn. And since I know it will come up, even if you take away everything Bonds did after 1998, he still comes in with an NWAA of 62.84, second only to Clemens on the list. The top five (and six of the top seven) WAA seasons since 1972 are all held by Bonds.
Without further ado, the ballot:
Bert Blyleven 41.88*
Alan Trammell 33.97
Albert Belle 33.91
Tommy John 27.61*
Will Clark 27.38
Jim Rice 25.76
Dale Murphy 24.98
Andre Dawson 24.80
Orel Hershiser 24.03
Rich Gossage 22.62
Dave Concepcion 21.48*
Dave Parker 20.94
Don Mattingly 19.87
Dwight Gooden 18.88
Jack Morris 17.14
Steve Garvey 14.50*
Doug Jones 14.33
Lee Smith 14.20
Bruce Sutter 14.13
Alex Fernandez 12.56
John Wetteland 12.17
Rick Aguilera 11.15
Willie McGee 10.77
Gregg Jefferies 9.36
Gary Gaetti 6.44
Hal Morris 5.96
Gary DiSarcina 1.75
Walt Weiss 1.30
Ozzie Guillen 0.00
(* = estimated. Bold = elected to Hall. Italics = dropped off ballot.)
It's almost enough to make you feel a little sorry for Ozzie.
_____________________________________________
On a personal note, this is my first attempt at a blog--I really only set forth on it so I could have a place to publish this article. Even though I know the key to success in this medium is a consistent content flow, I haven't decided yet if I'm going to update this very often--but, if you arrived here from Baseball Think Factory, you might be familiar with my film-related posts from in the much-endangered Lounge. So, to when your appetite for some more content (if there's any whetting to be done), my top ten film list from 2005 can be found here. Far too late for anyone to care, I'm sure, but it's taken me this long to see all the movies I wanted to see.
And if you've made it this far, thanks for reading.
posted by Danny Wind @ 1:46 AM
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