Today is Baseball Hall of Fame induction day. There’s little, if any, controversy about this year’s selection, but oh my, that’s not always the case. Here’s why.
Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, Billy Wagner, Dave Parker, and Dick Allen will be inducted today into baseball’s Hall of Fame. There was no controversy over their selections. The only disappointment is that Ichiro wasn’t a unanimous selection (one baseball writer didn’t vote for him).
However, past selections have caused quite an uproar, highlighting the chasm between voters who rely on traditional metrics and sabermetric aficionados—case in point were the 2019 Hall of Fame selections. I did not argue with that year’s choices — Harold Baines, Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina, Mariano Rivera, Lee Smith, and the late Roy Halladay. But others did.
Courtesy Baseball Hall of Fame
Jon Tayler, Sports Illustrated: “(Baines) represents one of the most baffling and poor Hall of Fame choices in decades.”
Ben Lindbergh, The Ringer: Statistically speaking, “Baines is probably the worst player to qualify for the Hall in 42 years, and his election is shocking in an era of relatively enlightened (italization added) evaluation.”
Ah, the era of “enlightened evaluation.” Translated: Those who believe sabermetrics and WAR trump any other means of assessing a candidate.
WAR (Wins Above Replacement) is an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic. As explained on FanGraphs
“WAR offers an estimate to answer the question, ‘If this player got injured and their team had to replace them with a freely available minor leaguer or a AAAA player from their bench, how much value would the team be losing?’”
An AAAA player is an outstanding player at the AAA level who struggles to succeed at the Major League level.
In any discussion about Hall of Fame merit, one will invariably run into two camps: the sabermetric folks and the so-called “old school” baseball people.
Rob Neyer of SB Nation wrote this about Bruce Jenkins of the San Francisco Chronicle and other members of the Hall of Fame Expansion Era Committee of 2013: “… nearly everybody on that committee honestly believes that everything they need to know about baseball, they learned in kindergarten.”
One of Jenkins’ sins, in Neyer’s eyes, was writing this about the 1970s in his column about the committee: “Within that realm, players, managers and writers treated wins, RBIs, batting average and ERA as invaluable measuring sticks — and never really felt compelled to adjust.”
With Baines, as Gary Peterson noted in The Mercury News, “The criticism was instant and combustible, focusing on the three-man caucus that punched Baines’ ticket. One is Jerry Reinsdorf, who has owned the Chicago White Sox for 35 years, including the 14 years Baines played on the South Side. Another is Pat Gillick, who was GM of the Orioles during two of the seven seasons Baines spent in Baltimore. La Russa managed Baines for seven seasons in Chicago, and three more in Oakland.”
NBC Sports’ Craig Calcutta said, “It’s hard to view it as anything other than a product of cronyism and a conflict of interest on the part of the Hall of Fame and the Today’s Game Committee.” Tayler of SI wrote, “…the result is the Hall inducting a sub-standard player through a committee that doesn’t care about or understand advanced statistics or anything more than basic numbers.”
Who is better qualified to evaluate a player than someone who has seen him play day in and day out throughout several seasons, like LaRussa, Reinsdorf, and Gillick? Tayler went on to say, “That’s of a piece with last year’s election by the Modern Game Era committee of Jack Morris, who was passed over by the writers but immediately ushered into the Hall in his first year of consideration despite being a mediocre starter whose claim to fame — like Baines — was extreme durability.”
That kind of denigration always makes me wonder: Did they ever see them play? And I don’t mean a bunch of YouTube clips.
Before we talk about alleged “mediocre starter” Morris, let’s hear what LaRussa said in defense of his choice of Baines for the Hall of Fame. In an interview with Christopher Russo on MLB Network’s “High Heat,” Russo asked if LaRussa didn’t think that a Hall of Famer should have a couple of MVP awards under his belt. LaRussa gave a straightforward “no.”
Tony Gwynn never won an MVP Award and went in with 97.6 percent of the vote, the eighth-best all-time. Eddie Mathews, who hit 512 home runs and was elected to the Hall in 1978, never won the MVP. Also, the MVP is often awarded to players on teams that make it to the postseason, so it’s not an even playing field.
LaRussa noted that Baines had knocked in over 100 runs early in his 22-year career (1982 and 1985) and late (1999). He also said that “in game-winning RBIs, he’s up there with the best of them.” The GWRBI, an official MLB statistic from 1981 to 1989, was discontinued after the 1989 season.
FanGraphs admits that WAR does not consider that factor: “WAR is entirely context neutral…. It doesn’t take into account that some hits are more important in games than others…and it doesn’t take into account that some relievers pitch in key, high-leverage situations, making their results more important than, say, the appearances by the team’s long reliever.”
Jack Morris with the Twins (photo courtesy Vanquish the Foe)
Which brings me back to Morris, the guy that Tayler called a “mediocre starter.” As Kevin Eck wrote for the Pressbox, “If you deem Morris not Hall of Fame-worthy because of his 3.90 ERA, you don’t know Jack. The right-hander was the winningest pitcher of the 1980s, a three-time 20-game winner…a five-time All-Star…and the MVP of the 1991 World Series with the Minnesota Twins.”
If you saw his 10 shutout innings to beat the Braves in Game 7 of the 1991 Fall Classic, you learned everything you needed to know about Morris. He was the definition of a clutch performer. And if you were a pitcher, Baines is not the guy you wanted to face with runners in scoring position and the game on the line.
Something WAR can’t tell you about.
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This article, which has been contemporized, first appeared in The Vacaville Reporter on August 1, 2019
