Archive for the 'Hall of Fame' Category

Here's a look at the history of Hall of Fame pitchers and some guesses at active pitchers who might make it.

Firstly, here is a plot of the fraction of pitchers active in any given year that ended up as Hall-of-Famers. I used ERA-title-qualified seasons for this calculation.

If you didn't see my earlier similar post about hitters, check that one out too.

Observations about this graph:

• It is generally very similar to the hitters' plot, including the Federal League dip in 1914-1915, the World Ward II dip in the mid 1940s and the general drop from 1930 to present day.
• One big difference is the large fraction of HOF pitchers in the earliest part of the 1900s. I'm not sure of the reason for this, but generally pitchers from that era have put up numbers that have always looked good over the last 100 years. Because offense has generally increased over the history of baseball, pitchers from the early periods have numbers that, at least at first glance, look excellent when measured against pitchers from other eras. Back then it was common for pitchers to complete 20-30 or more games per season, winning 20 in a year was fairly common, and raw ERAs were very low compared to today. I assume that this has helped a larger fraction of early pitchers get into the HOF because the marginal candidates have numbers that look great when standing alone on paper.
• There's a big spike in 1966-1967 thanks to the overlap of some HOFers near the end of their careers as well as some youngsters just starting theirs. Among the guys winding down around this time were Jim Bunning, Don Drysdale, and Sandy Koufax. The guys on their way up included Tom Seaver, Don Sutton, Catfish Hunter, Fergie Jenkins, and Jim Palmer.
• The results from the late 1980s and 1990 are skewed for two reasons:
  • There are a few pitchers active in 1988-1990 who are going to be in the HOF but didn't figure into this plot since they aren't already there. Five slam dunks right here: Roger Clemens (PED-willing), Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, and Tom Glavine. If you add those 5 guys in, the percentage would be more like 8%. (Incidentally, currently there is only one guy in the HOF from those years---Nolan Ryan.)
  • With pitching becoming far more specialized in the last 25 years, we now have some HOF closers but they are not included in this analysis since we're looking only at ERA-title-qualified seasons. So there's a certain unfairness about this plot since starting pitchers aren't used the same way today as they were in 1900 or 1940 or 1970.

Overall, it seems that getting into the HOF as a starting pitcher is getting harder and harder. No doubt this is because the raw numbers for starters have been getting worse and worse when viewed without context (which, let's face is, how the majority of fans and media members view them.) Getting to 300 wins seems to be nearly an impossibility for any active pitcher, young or old, now. Stats such as shutouts and complete games are now very impressive feats instead of signs of an above-average pitcher. This is the opposite of what's been happening with hitters. Look no further than the debate over Jim Thome. Lots of folks can't fathom how Thome isn't a slam dunk HOFer since he has well over 500 homers. Some of us (myself included) are not quite as impressed with his HR total given the era in which he played. However most people are blind to the context of these numbers. They see big offensive numbers by hitters and fail to discount the value of these numbers given the high offense era. They see poor pitching numbers and similarly fail to give extra credit due to the high offense era. (Incidentally, this is why I desperately cling to OPS+ and ERA+ in so many of my posts here...these stats totally wipe out offense-level biases.)

Anyway, let's assume that the HOF voters adjust their requirements to account for today's game and 8% of the qualified pitchers from last year will make the HOF. Let's see what we've got.

Firstly, none of the 5 guys I mentioned above (Clemens, Johnson, Maddux, Smoltz, and Glavine) had an ERA-title-qualified season last year. So they don't count against the 8%. There were 78 pitchers with qualified seasons so we're looking at basically 6 starting pitchers who will make it.

Let's break this down by age as of June 30 last year:

• 34+: There are only two guys here with even a whiff of a chance--Jamie Moyer and Andy Pettitte. We've had polls on both of these guys before and Moyer did better. Personally I feel like neither guy has done quite enough to get in but both are still pitching well enough to have a chance. Chris Carpenter is also in this group--he has nice stats but missed too many seasons to injury.
• 30-33: The leaders here are Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, Johann Santana, and Mark Buehrle. I can't quite bring myself to totally eliminate Barry Zito or John Lackey. (Lackey's got a surprisingly high W-L% and now that he's with Boston for a while that number could actually go up.) Cliff Lee is a wild card. He's already close to 32 years old but has some very impressive numbers.
• Once you get under 30, it gets really tough. I'm going to throw out a bunch of names here. Some of these guys seem like they would get in easily if they just continue a normal career trajectory. Josh Beckett, Dan Haren, CC Sabathia, Carlos Zambrano, Adam Wainwright,  Jered Weaver, Justin Verlander, Zack Greinke, Jon Lester, Tim Lincecum, Ubaldo Jimenez...  But I can't even totally eliminate guys like James Shields and Cole Hamels.
• And what about the youngsters? Matt Cain? Felix Hernandez? Ricky Romero? This list isn't even close to complete as there are lots of pitchers who are 22-23 years old right now who could become 15-20 game winners for years to come.

Isn't it amazing? If 6 of these guys are going to get in, I challenge anybody to correctly guess which 6 it will be. The only one I see as an absolute slam dunk is Halladay. His perfect game probably sealed that.

Let the debate begin. I find this one much more difficult than the debate over hitters.

Lately we've had a lot of polls on the Hall of Fame chances for individual players. Here's a different way of looking at things. I did a couple of very simple batting season finder searches. First I listed all batting-title-qualified seasons by HOF players from 1901 to 1990, and then I listed the same for ALL players regardless of whether they are in the HOF or not.

By dividing those two numbers for each season, I found the percentage of players who had a qualified batting season who also ended up in the HOF. (Note that this study considers only batters. We'll look at pitchers separately.)

Here's the graph:

First, a few observations about the graph:

• The thing that jumps out right away is the huge dip down in 1943-1945. Obviously, this is due to the large fraction of established major-leaguers who missed time due to service in World War II. Many of the players who played MLB in those years were minor-leaguers or other players who didn't end up with long careers. Notice too the smaller dip during World War I in the mid 1910's.
• We see a big peak right around 1930. This is no doubt due to the fact that HOF voting first started in 1936 and many of the early honorees were players active in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A fairly consistent fraction of players (around 12-14%) from before the 1920s have been inducted.
• Since 1930, other than the WWII dip mentioned above, the fraction of players making the HOF has been gradually dropping. I suspect the gradual decline is due largely to the expansion of the number of teams. It's natural that as the total number of players increases, a smaller overall fraction would be considered HOF material. Also notice dips down in expansion years of 1962 and 1969. This supports my theory above--a whole bunch of qualified batting seasons were added in those years but not necessarily a proportionate number of HOFers, so the ratio drops.

I took the graph only to 1990 because there are plenty of guys who played in the early 1990s who might be in the HOF but either aren't yet eligible or haven't made it in (or dropped off the ballot) yet. A few who come to mind are Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Craig Biggio, Rafael Palmeio, and Frank Thomas. In other words, the number of active major leaguers in, say, 1992, who are HOFers is a very dubious number because the issue hasn't been settled for many of the candidates as of yet. I think this might also explain the dip in 1989-1990.

Looking at the period of 1976-1988, the percentage is pretty consistent around 12.5% Last year, 155 batters had qualified batting seasons. This suggests that 19-20 active players will be Hall of Famers one day. (Reminder: this discussion considers only hitters.)

So, who will these 19-20 players be?

I have the following nine hitters from 2009 as mortal locks for the HOF:

• Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Ken Griffey, Ivan Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Albert Pujols, Ichiro Suzuki, Chipper Jones, and Jim Thome

Then there are these 5 guys for whom legitimate HOF cases can be made based on what they have already achieved in their careers:

• Todd Helton, Miguel Tejada, Omar Vizquel, Magglio Ordonez, and Jason Kendall

I am inclined to believe that of the 14 guys who have been named already there are 10-12 HOFers among them. Incidentally, there are 6 relevant players I didn't consider because they didn't have qualified batting seasons in 2009: Vladamir Guerrero, Gary Sheffield, Carlos Delgado, Jorge Posada, Jason Giambi, and Andruw Jones.

Here are 17 veterans who almost certainly haven't done enough yet to get into the HOF but have a shot with a few more good years:

• Mike Young, Bobby Abreu, David Ortiz, Jim Edmonds, Lance Berkman, Matt Holliday, Ryan Howard, Carlos Beltran, Miguel Cabrera, Alfonso Soriano, Johnny Damon, Jimmy Rollins, Mark Teixeira, Carlos Lee, Garret Anderson, Joe Mauer, and Chase Utley

Some of these, particularly Mauer, seem like a virtual lock based on projected performance, but they still need to actually perform a bit more to get there. I'd say maybe 4-5 of these guys have a shot of getting in.

That gives us a list of 14-17 players already out of out 20. Who make up the remaining 3-6 players? Keep in mind that my original search didn't consider the age or experience of the HOFers. So those 3-6 players could be guys who were rookies in 2009 or the few years previous.

Players heading the list of young HOF potentials include:

• Hanley Ramirez, Evan Longoria, Ryan Braun, Joey Votto, Pablo Sandoval, Andrew McCutchen, Elvis Andrus, Dustin Pedroia, Prince Fielder, Robinson Cano, Carl Crawford, Jose Reyes, Adrian Gonzalez, and numerous others.

I know I have blurred the line a bit between the veterans and the young players. It's just that the really young ones are tough to guess.

Your thoughts?

Yesterday, I looked at the best eligible position players not in the Hall of Fame by WAR, and you responded with your votes by choosing Tim Raines as the non-HoFer you felt was most deserving of the honor. Today, I'm going to do the same thing, but for starting pitchers who haven't been enshrined in Cooperstown yet. Here are the top non-HoF pitchers by WAR who started at least 60% of their career games:

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Here's a post concept that's sure to be a lightning rod for discussion: who are the best position players not to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame? Using Baseball-Reference's new Wins Above Replacement data, we can attempt to answer that question. First, the players with the most total career value who aren't in the HoF:

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