Hall Election of Lee Smith Makes Sense, But Harold Baines?
The Hall of Fame’s Class of 2019 may belong to the specialists. Ahead of a BBWAA election where all-time saves leader Mariano Rivera and legendary designated hitter Edgar Martinez are most likely to gain entry, on Sunday at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas, the Today’s Game Era Committee elected reliever Lee Smith and outfielder/DH Harold Baines. More than just rankling purists, it is a result that raises some eyebrows.
Smith and Baines were two of the six players on the 10-candidate ballot, alongside outfielders Albert Belle and Joe Carter, first baseman Will Clark, and starter Orel Hershiser. Managers Davey Johnson, Charlie Manuel, and Lou Piniella, and owner George Steinbrenner rounded out the slate. To these eyes, Smith was the most qualified of the players, not only because he held the all-time saves record from 1993 to 2006, when his total of 478 was surpassed by Trevor Hoffman, but because advanced statistics such as WAR, JAWS, and WPA place him in the middle of what’s now a seven-member group of relievers in the Hall. That he once received over 50% of the vote on the BBWAA ballot, where none of the other candidates ever topped 11.2%, made his election appear all the more likely, particularly in front of a group more predisposed to old-school stats than the writers, who lost sight of Smith when the ballot became more crowded late in his 15-year run.
Baines, who took 59.7% of his career plate appearances as a DH and set records in that capacity that were later surpassed by Martinez and David Ortiz, collected 2,866 hits and 384 homers over the course of his 22-year career. Nonetheless, he was poorly supported by the writers; though he lasted through five election cycles before falling off the ballot, he topped out at just 6.1%. Not only is there no precedent for a candidate with so little BBWAA support gaining election by a small committee in the era of the “Five Percent Rule” (from 1980 onward), but there’s really no precedent for a player from the post-1960 expansion era doing so. Via Baseball-Reference:
| Player | MLB Career | Peak % | Vote Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jake Beckley | 1888-1907 | 0.4% | 1942 |
| Elmer Flick | 1898-1910 | 0.4% | 1938 |
| Billy Hamilton | 1888-1901 | 0.4% | 1942 |
| Joe Kelley | 1891-1906, 1908 | 0.4% | 1939 |
| Satchel Paige | 1948-1949, 1951-1952, 1965 | 0.4% | 1951 |
| Rick Ferrell | 1929-1945, 1947 | 0.5% | 1956 |
| Buck Ewing | 1880-1897 | 0.7% | 1939 |
| Jesse Burkett | 1890-1905 | 1.7% | 1942 |
| High Pockets Kelly | 1915-1917, 1919-1930, 1932 | 1.9% | 1960 |
| Jack Chesbro | 1899-1909 | 2.2% | 1939 |
| Kid Nichols | 1890-1901, 1904-1906 | 2.7% | 1939 |
| Bobby Wallace | 1894-1918 | 2.7% | 1938 |
| Harry Hooper | 1909-1925 | 3.0% | 1937 |
| Amos Rusie | 1889-1895, 1897-1898, 1901 | 3.1% | 1939 |
| Larry Doby | 1947-1959 | 3.4% | 1967 |
| Sam Crawford | 1899-1917 | 4.2% | 1938 |
| Freddie Lindstrom | 1924-1936 | 4.4% | 1962 |
| Earl Averill | 1929-1941 | 5.4% | 1958 |
| Harold Baines | 1980-2001 | 6.1% | 2010 |
| Travis Jackson | 1922-1936 | 7.3% | 1956 |
Of that group besides Baines, only Doby and Paige even played after World War II. Doby broke the AL’s color line in 1947 and played 13 major league seasons, while Paige arrived in 1948 and pitched in parts of just six seasons (the last of which was a one-game cameo at age 59!) and thus was technically ineligible to be voted upon by the writers, since 10 years is the minimum to appear on a BBWAA ballot. What’s more, the stray vote he received was from 1951, when he was still active and before the five-year waiting period rule had been formalized.
All of which is to underscore the fact that there’s no modern precedent for the election of a candidate such as Baines in that regard. While his election does offer some hope to players bumped off the ballot in their first go-round — such as Bobby Grich, Kenny Lofton, and Ted Simmons, who missed election by the Modern Baseball Era Committee by one vote last year — the custom of withholding first-year votes from all but the most qualified candidates helps to explain those mistakes; with Baines, 94 to 95 percent of voters consistently judged him to be unworthy.
Every bit as unsettling is the fact that Baines accumulated just 38.7 WAR (using the Baseball-Reference version) and 30.1 JAWS. Considered as a right fielder — I consider every DH candidate at the position where he accrued the most value — he ranks just 74th in JAWS, below 24 of the 25 Hall of Famers (19th century outfielder Tommy McCarthy is the exception). From under-supported BBWAA candidate Larry Walker (10th in JAWS among right fielders), to players such as Dwight Evans (15th) and Reggie Smith (16th) who have never sniffed a small committee ballot, that’s a troubling inequity. And everyone and their brother has a pet candidate just among the right fielders for whom a stronger case could be mounted. Tony Oliva, Rusty Staub, Dave Parker? All rank in the 30s in JAWS among right fielders, and appear to have stronger traditional credentials as well.
According to the Hall, Smith was elected unanimously by the 16-member committee, while Baines received 12 votes, exactly the 75% required for election. Piniella fell one vote short, while all of the other candidates received “fewer than five votes.” The breakdown of the committee was as follows:
Hall of Famers: Roberto Alomar, Bert Blyleven, Pat Gillick, Tony La Russa, Greg Maddux, Joe Morgan, John Schuerholz, Ozzie Smith, Joe Torre
Executives: Al Avila (Tigers), Paul Beeston (Blue Jays), Andy MacPhail (Phillies), Jerry Reinsdorf (White Sox)
Media: Steve Hirdt (Elias Sports Bureau), Tim Kurkjian (ESPN), Claire Smith (ESPN)
As I noted in my election preview on Friday, several of the candidates had connections to the voters, an inescapable fact of longevity within an insular industry but also an inevitable reminder of the old Veterans Committees’ history of cronyism, most notably from the 1960s through the 1980s. Baines, who was drafted by the White Sox with the overall number one pick in 1977, spent three separate stretches on the South Side (1980-1989, 1996-1997, 2000-2001), all but the first year of which were within Reinsdorf’s still-ongoing tenure of ownership. Additionally, he was managed by La Russa both there and in Oakland (1992), and was in Baltimore while Gillick was GM (1997-1998). Smith the reliever played with Smith the shortstop in St. Louis, where he was managed by Torre; he also played with Maddux as a Cub.
It was with the Cubs that Smith made his name. Drafted in the second round in 1975, he spent 1980-1987 in Chicago, where he made two All-Star teams, lead the league in saves once, and, for the last six of those seasons, averaged 99 innings a year, a workload unthinkable for today’s closer; during that span, he was the second-most valuable reliever in the majors by WAR behind Dan Quisenberry. In 1984, he saved 33 games and threw 101 innings while helping the Cubs to the playoffs for their first postseason berth in 39 years, though the series-evening walk-off homer he surrendered to Steve Garvey in Game 4 of the NLCS loomed large, as it was the Padres who won the decisive Game 5. Smith later spent time with the Red Sox, Cardinals (with whom he led the league in saves twice, set a single-season NL record, and broke Jeff Reardon’s previous all-time record of 357 saves), Yankees (with whom he recorded his 400th save), Orioles (with whom he led the league in saves once), Angels, Reds, and Expos. For his career, he made seven All-Star teams and finished with a 3.03 ERA (132 ERA+) and 29.4 WAR.
Baines hit .289/.356/.466 for a 121 OPS+ while making six All-Star teams, four of them while serving primarily as a DH. Injuries to his right knee led to eight surgeries, and so from his age-28 season onward, he served mainly as a DH while rarely playing the field. His 1,643 games at DH are more than any player besides Ortiz, who surpassed his record 1,690 hits at the position as well; his 236 homers as a DH ranks fourth behind Ortiz (485), Frank Thomas (269), and Martinez (243). No doubt a major talking point of his candidacy was the fact that the players’ strikes of 1981 and 1994 likely deprived him of membership in the 3,000 hit club, though he would have ranked as the low man of that club in terms of WAR, at least without compiling another 6.7 wins to surpass Lou Brock, whose single-season and career stolen base marks and dazzling postseason play augmented his Hall of Fame case.
Indeed, that’s yet another facet of what’s frustrating about the election of Baines: his lack of a signature accomplishment that elevates him above the pack. Whether it’s Hershiser with a brilliant 1988 season that included a consecutive scoreless innings record, or Clark, who led the Giants to a pennant and was considered one of the game’s elite hitters for a stretch, or Belle with his ferocious power for the mid-1990s Indians, the other player-candidates besides Carter — who himself at least had the World Series-ending walk-off homer in 1993 — were more distinctive and, to these eyes, significantly more Hall-worthy. Even Jack Morris, who for so long served as a flash point between old-school and new-school voters, had Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, a moment for the ages. Baines’ most famous hit was a walk-off homer in the 25th inning to conclude a suspended game in 1984.
This is not to begrudge the man’s happiness upon being granted entry to the Hall. But Baines’ election is simply not a great day for the institution, or for anyone bringing an analytical, merit-based approach to it while reckoning with its objective standards. The precedent it sets is nearly unmanageable, if future committees are to take seriously candidates of his level. Why battle over Dale Murphy or Fred McGriff if Harold Baines is the standard?
I will note, however, that Baines’ election does offer one neat bit of closure. After he was drafted, White Sox general manager Paul Richards said that the young outfielder “was on his way to the Hall of Fame. He just stopped by Comiskey Park for 20 years or so.” Forty-one years later, Richards was right.
Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.
Baines had a single season with an fWAR higher than 3. His election is truly an embarrassment.
Bill James in the essay “Raising Hal” (2010):
“The point of this article is not that Harold Baines should be in the Hall of Fame, but merely that he could be. Baines had more hits, more home runs, and a higher batting average—all three—than 31 Hall of Famers, including four outfielders and a first baseman. He had more RBI than 30 of those players.”
I guess that’s more a James indictment on players already in the Hall than support for a Baines HoF candidacy.
I read it at the time, and my conclusion was that it was James saying that Baines didn’t deserve to get into the HOF, but that we shouldn’t be all that surprised if he sneaked in.
Which is what happened.
Also perhaps a demonstration that voters don’t have an intuitive sense for positional adjustment. 3000 hits for a center-fielder and a DH are not the same. It’s understandable, it’s too many factors to weigh together just in your head, which is why the good folks at fangraphs and baseball-reference provide us with….
Keith Hernandez (among MANY others now) has to be screaming “SERIOUSLY?!?!?!?” to anyone who will listen. Especially in light of Baines’ election, it continues to be a travesty that the man isn’t in the hall.
So your theory is that one wrong (Baines) should be equaled with another wrong (Hernandez)? Not to mention the hundred other players that had better careers than both men?
My argument here is that Baines’ election apparently lowers the threshold such that players that by every measure were better than Baines should rightfully be agitating for entry into the Hall. Electing a player of Baines’ caliber opens a can of worms that I didn’t think the electors wanted to open.
My first thought was “Oh, they just elected a worse version of John Olerud.”
As an aside and despite playing for my Mets, John Olerud was a lot better than I thought he was.
Hernandez has a legitimate, if probably ultimately lacking, case. Albeit one built mostly on his defensive prowess.
Lou Whitaker…
You beat me to it. If the voters really wanted to elect a player who had a long career, good-to-very good career numbers but not overwhelming traditional numbers, with a middling peak they could have elected Lou Whitaker. And hardly anyone would have grumbled. Certainly, the analytics folks would have been ecstatic about it.
Almost identical W/RC between Baines and Whitaker but who is one of the all time leaders in double plays turned and was generally considered a great defensive player?
::trying to find the good::
This means Edgar HAS to get in. Right? RIGHT?
I don’t know he has to pass a real threshold not just 12 idiots alone in a room.
4 of whom were former teammates of Baines.
Reinsdorf is on the committee and Baines is literally still on Jerry Reinsdorf’s payroll as a White Sox team ambassador.
The HOF vote tracker has him at 100% through 30 public ballots. And he’s already gained 6 of the roughly 20 additional votes he needs for election. So yeah, he’s getting in easily.
There’s a difference between HOF voting standards and veteran committe standards. I remember there was a Ringer article on it a while back and the gap is very striking. So it’s quite an apples to oranges comparison.
I’m convinced the Baines election is the universe setting up an all-time Mariners moment next year where Baines goes in while Edgar just misses.
True, but I would add that the real good is that Baines seems like a good guy who really likes baseball so hopefully this makes him happy. (I agree with the general sentiment that he may not have the qualifications we normally see in HOFers).
I keep thinking there’s going to be some sort of reconsideration. That the Hall is going to realize what a mess this particular committee was (Pinella missed by one vote!) and nullify this committee’s work.
Baines just isn’t close to the HoF. He’s not even in the hall of very good. This is the sort of foolishness that eliminated the Veteran’s Committee in the first place.
Piniella getting within one vote of enshrinement is even more shocking than Baines getting elected.
Maguro, there are many Yankees in the HOF who never should have gotten near it – except that they were Yankees, and had powerful friends and many supporters.
I’ve long heard talk about a “Yankees bias” to the HoF, and yeah Phil Rizzuto has one of the weaker resumes in the HoF. But I am not seeing much of a bias now.
Mussina, Clemens, and Lou Pinella should have been in the HoF years ago. If there were a strong Yankee bias, some of Kevin Brown, Pettitte, Tommy John, Sheff, Billy Martin, Ralph Houk, and Posada would be in by now (and honestly I wouldn’t have a huge problem with any of them getting in). Craig Nettles, David Cone, and Willie Randolph are all deserving, and they all got nuked on their first ballot! Johnny Damon and Bernie Williams aren’t HoFers, but they deserved more votes than they got. Thurmon Munson, and Ron Guidry aren’t in. And although Jeter, Mariano, and Ichiro may all get in on their first ballot, ARod may have a tough road, and CC Sabathia too.
Like many non-fans, I have an instinctive negative reaction to anything having to do with the Yankees. But if anything I wonder if voters may be overadjusting against Yankee bias more than indulging it.
Indeed, the real bias, if it exists, is against Yankees players. To get elected to the HoF via the writers, a player primarily associated with the Yankees needs to be an all time great. Nettles, Randolph, Munson, Posada, et al. were never given any real consideration.
The narrative of a bias in favour of Yankees players comes to us from the sportswriters. ….the very sportswriters who are responsible for the HoF voting.
When you give people within the game of baseball the additional power to put their friends into the Hall of Fame, this is what you’re going to get every time. Power corrupts. It is inevitable.
This committee needs to have a team of non-MLB-staff sabermetricians pre-screening all of its potential candidates and only presenting those who might be worthy to the committee for consideration.
I think you just gave the rationale for why things aren’t ever going to change with the Hall of Fame’s voting process. There’s a significant group of baseball people that don’t want the Baseball Hall of Fame to be determined by non-MLB-staff sabermetricians who have nothing to do with the game.
I’d argue that the Jay Jaffe and the Rob Neyer’s of the world do a fantastic job of determining who should be voted for on the writer’s ballot based on historical data but that the veterans committee has a long history of using a lower standard to induct players because they commonly use things beyond benchmark statistics and advanced metrics to determine who they vote for.
I mean did these hypothetical non-MLB-staff sabermetricians even PLAY baseball???
I get you, but the one thing that really bothers me as Jay notes is the lack of a defining moment. I will never forget Hershiser’s 88 and Joe Carter’s homer, but honestly, I don’t have those memories of Harold Baines. I wonder if South Siders feel differently. They got to see him for a long time.
I think its more of a case of great baseball players not being great at every aspect of baseball. The only explanation for this is that none of those players are as historically and statistically well- versed as the average fangraphs reader.
Its also worth noting that just because you played a game does not make you a good judge of said game. (watch any former player try and do analysis for evidence of that) In fact many times its the opposite. Players are so focused on the trees that they cant see the forest.
So the concept of letting former players vote simply because they are former players is just inherently stupid to begin with and, not surprisingly, has led to inherently stupid outcomes.
What about David Cone??!
Do you mean that Cone should be in the Hall, or that he should be in charge of putting other players in the Hall? I’d vote for both.
The second, haha…but I wouldn’t dispute the first.
The whole “stupid jocks don’t know the game like WE do” thing doesn’t sit well with me, for a variety of reasons.
The “stupid jocks” (full disclosure, I WAS a stupid jock lol) dont watch or study baseball the same way we do though. We look at the macro, they look at the micro.
I agree that he wasn’t a Hall of Famer for all the reasons listed above and it’s borderline criminal that he’s in before Edgar, but seeing people say that Barnes wasn’t even Hall of Very Good strikes me as an overreaction. He was about 20% better than a league-average hitter over 22 years; that’s not nothing.
I’d be interested in seeing list of players with the most seasons with a wRC+ over 100. Baines would almost definitely be the worst player on the list with 19 or more seasons as an above-average hitter, but there can’t be more than a dozen or so guys who’ve done that.
He was a career DH. Hitting 20% better than average, as a DH, makes you about an average player overall.
That’s not answering the question – how many DHs have managed that?
(Don’t think Baines is HoF-caliber, for what’s it’s worth, unless you think the DH penalty is wildly unaccounted for in WAR).
Thats a flawed question though because there have not been that many full time DH’s, period. If you set the threshold at 9000 PA’s you get only 9 guys in history. And at least 3 of them played actually 50% or more games the field than DH. If you drop it to 8000 you still only get 15 guys.
Its not about Baines as much as its about the DH position. You could say “how many DH’s have accomplished that?” about literally anything and the answer is going to be a small number because its just a small group in general.
Okay, then: How many players have accomplished that, period.
He was using Baines status as a DH to delegitimize his production but, as you stated, he really was the first full-time DH.
How many players have been ~20% above league avg as hitters over min 10000 PA’s? Uhhh….alot. Baines ranks 53rd out of 85 possible players. And its not even really as close as it sounds. The difference between baines and 30th ranked guy is still 12% Baines is closer to 70th than he is 30th.. And it probably goes without saying that almost all of them played the field as well. Sobasically among his peer group (guys with similar PA’s) Baines is pretty much avg. And when you Consider the amount of guys who probably could have played longer if the DH existed he would probably be even lower.
If you drop it to 8000 he is 138th.
That’s not the question yer man asked
It’s most seasons by a single player with a wRC+ over 100.
I mean, who cares? Other than just random curiosity it doesn’t really answer anything. You are basically asking who was an average player for the longest.
Player A puts up 101 wRC+ for 20 straight years.
Player B puts up 150 wRC+ for 15 years.
Does it mean anything to anyone that player A had more seasons over 100?
I’d be interested to see a list of players who manage not to come below 105 wRC+ for 19 straight years. Just for the fascination.
Also…does player B exist?
Bonds and Ruth only ever put up 9 straight years above 150 wRC+.
I guess that depends on your definition of the Hall of Very Good. Let’s put it this way. Baines had an extremely long career yet only put up 38 WAR. If you look on fangraphs’ leaders’ page, you’ll find that there are 13 pages of position players (30 players per page) before you get to Baines. Two Hundred Twenty-Six MLB players have been elected to the Hall and 79 of them are pitchers, leaving 147 position players. So, even ignoring that Baines’ WAR numbers are unnaturally high due to his long career, there are approximately 243 players with more WAR who AREN”T in the hall of fame. Thus, even if there is a Hall of Very Good with the same number of players as the Hall of Fame, Baines would still be almost 100 players away from making it, and likely more.
Of course…that does assume we’re calculating the DH adjustment correctly.
Also, if there are 147 position players in the HoF, there are almost certainly more in the HoVG.
The HoVG is 65 guys who lasted 5 years, 60 guys who lasted 10 years and 55 guys who lasted 15 years.
I think Baines falls into the last category.
Happy to be downvoted (I’m the same clown who thought Russ Branyan was a better comp for Joey Gallo’s future offense than Giancarlo Stanton or prime Chris Davis)…but it would be interesting to know whether people are taking issue with my opinion on the DH adjustment, or my definition of the HoVG!
Unfortunately his blog isn’t searchable so I won’t be to give a citation, but Tom Tango admitted that he made the DH adjustment up out of thin air (the other positions are based on actual data).
The DH Adjustment (and most other positional adjustments) is mostly bad since it doesn’t adapt based on the scarcity of good DHs and thus makes WAR for DHs sketchy to begin with; not saying this would benefit Baines of course but if you never saw him playing awful defense then it would naturally increase your opinion of of him as a spectator. While I doubt Baines would qualify even with a more generous adjustment it would at least serve to make it more apparent how good David Ortiz or Edgar Martinez were for instance.
No, I agree with you and I’ll die on this hill: from what little I understand about WAR I think it’s a little too harsh on DHs, and I think Baines being an above-average hitter for 19 consecutive years is more impressive than people are giving him credit for– again, how many other people have done that at any position?
Obviously he’s not up to Hall of Fame standards. But it’s not at all a stretch to call that a Very Good Career and it’s kinda weird seeing people act like there’s no difference between Baines and, idk, Pat Burrell.
Yeah, I’d love to see the offensive splits between when players play DH and the field.
When you play 22 years and have 2 years of 3+ WAR (with a high of 4.3), you aren’t a Hall of Famer. Sorry.
Laughable, man!
Smith doesn’t belong either. There are literally dozens and dozens of SPs out there more deserving. Probably hundreds. Just off the of my head from his era: Stieb, Saberhagen, Cone, Appier, Guidry, Gooden, Rijo,
“Closer” is not a position. It’s just a usage of pitcher. We’ve seen again and again that good SPs can become elite closers pretty much at will. Electing closers like they are any other position is about as rational as electing the 10 best 4th OFs to the HoF.
Probably the only RPs who belong in the HoF are Wilhelm and Rivera.
The comparison I make is with a 3rd down running back. Just as closer is a type of pitcher that is brought into specific situations that match their particular skill set, the same is true of a 3rd down running back. And they’re often put into those roles because they lack the skill set to take on the more challenging roles.
And while they both provide value to their teams, no football fan has ever argued that the best 3rd down running backs should be elected to the HOF.
I would think the better analogy would be the punter or placekicker.
I think that Darren Sproles is nearly as worthy of the HoF as Frank Gore, personally.
You do realize that people on this site (myself included) are more likely to have a stronger grasp of baseball than of football, right? They are more likely to understand the baseball case straight up than to get the football analogy.
Marco Rubio, is that you?
I more or less agree with this, but I’d say that the three are Eckersley, Rivera, and Gossage (although Eckersley is a weird case, given the 360+ starts and 40+ WAR he put during those starts).
Em should be in. He has both the fame and the stats.
Reliever absolutely is a position. There are end of season rewards for it, it has spots on the All Star team. It is much more akin to punter or kicker than 3rd down running back because the former has awards as dictated by the league and the latter does not.
The league determines what positions exists by the awards they hand out and the Hall of Fame should reflect that.
1) I don’t think you understand what the definition of “position” is.
2) Basketball has an award for 6th Man of the Year. Does that 6th Man a position? (answer: no, it doesn’t).
3) The punter and kicker analogy is a poor one. They involve using unique skills that no one else on the team has. The closer doesn’t have unique skills. They throw a baseball towards home plate in an attempt to get batters out, the same as any other pitcher. Also. the only awards for kickers and punters are at the college level, and they’re not official awards.
4) MLB’s award for relievers is very informal and didn’t begin until 2005. So by your reasoning, the “position” of reliever also didn’t begin until 2005.
Ah, great point – clearly, Havlicek has no place the HoF!
Also, Doug Flutie would question your assertion that no one else has those skills…just like most starting pitchers would question your assertion that they could come into a game, mid-inning, several times a week and perform at the same level that Lee Smith did for 20 years.
Only 6 catchers match Mariano Rivera in rWAR. Are they overrepresented in the HoF?
Catcher is a far more difficult position than any other due to the physical demands, and the need to work with pitchers. Closer is by far the easiest pitching role. Total apples and oranges.
Just look how hard it is to find a C who can put up a 100 wRC+, and look how easy it is to find a reliever who can put up a 150 ERA+.
Wait…when you claim that “Closer is by far the easiest pitching role, are we now supposed to pretend that closers are the only relief pitchers?
Trying to keep up, here!
And let’s look at how easy it is to find each, over a representative sample!
In history, 41 catchers have achieved a 100 wRC+, over 5000+ career PA.
8 relievers have put up a 150 ERA+, over 500+ career innings.
Being as good as Lee Smith was, over 1000 high intensity innings, is incredibly difficult.
But hey – maybe you know more than every GM in baseball, and they’re all idiots for paying significantly more for 2 WAR relievers than they do for guys like Kurt Suzuki.
“8 relievers have put up a 150 ERA+, over 500+ career innings.
Being as good as Lee Smith was, over 1000 high intensity innings, is incredibly difficult.”
Except Lee Smith isn’t one of those 8. His career ERA+ is only 132. Which is still good but ranks 41st among relievers with 500+ IP.
And among relievers with 1000+ IP…he ranks 6th, tied with Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter.
Unless every GM in the MLB is an idiot, and has gotten even stupider as teams have gained access to ever more data, WAR significantly undervalues the impact of elite relievers.
That’s just a statement of fact, too. Not something reasonable people can disagree on.
1) Hondo was a starter for most of his career, often leading the league in minutes played per game. And even if he had been a 6th man his whole career, he wouldn´t have been elected for that . He would have been elected because he was simply one of the best ever at his position.
2) Plenty of starters have made the transition to closer without a hiccup, often at the of their careers, when their stuff is no longer as good. Could they have done it for 20 years? I don’t know. Maybe we could ask guys like Goose Gossage, Lee Smith, Rollie Fingers, Mariano Rivera,and Billy Wagner – all guys who had considerable experience in the minors as starters before transitioning to relief work.
I believe MLB defines what a position is by how they give out awards and All Star selections. A reliever has both end of season awards as well spots on the All Star game roster reserved for it. 6th Man of the year only has the former and thus has less evidence that the sport’s governing body considers it a position (as opposed to a role, which I argue are quite different).
I don’t care about what skills are involved, that is arbitrary and irrelevant. Either the league thinks something is a position or does not. If people don’t want relievers in the hall, they should petition MLB to remove awards and All Star spots for it and group all pitchers under one heading. Until that happens, the best at it should be represented (Same with DH, Fullback, Long Snapper etc)
MLB doesn’t define positions. They’re not even mentioned in the rulebook.
That being said, if relief pitcher is a separate position as you claim, then why are relief pitchers eligible to win the CY Young? Not to mention Silver Slugger and Gold Glove.
Because those awards are for the best pitcher, not the best reliever.
They aren’t eligible for the Rivera or Hoffman awards, though,
because they aren’t relievers.
Just like how pitchers are eligible for the MVP, because they’re players, but hitters aren’t eligible for the Cy, because they’re not pitchers.
Again…I wish people downvoting me would elucidate on which statements they take issue with!
Do they think that relievers aren’t pitchers, and should therefore be ineligible for the Cy?
Do they think that starters are relievers, and should therefore be eligible for the Rivera and Hoffman awards?
Or is the issue that they don’t think that pitchers are baseball players, and therefore should not be eligible for the MVP?
I’d love to know where I’m going wrong!
You’re going wrong in thinking that which awards MLB chooses to promote (as part of their entertainment product) somehow trumps the structure of the game as defined by its rules and the physical abilities of those who play it.
You wrote: “I don’t care about what skills are involved, that is arbitrary and irrelevant. Either the league thinks something is a position or does not.” That’s exactly backwards. If the league decided to give separate awards for best left-handed first baseman and best right-handed first baseman, that would not make those separate positions.
Historically, all relief pitchers are failed starting pitchers. (That may be changing now; we’ll see.) Pitchers became relief pitchers because they were unable to be successful as starting pitchers. In the same way that playing DH has an opportunity cost — forcing the team to find someone else who can both hit and field a position — being a relief pitcher has an opportunity cost, forcing the team to find good pitchers to pitch the innings you aren’t doing.
Some very few relief pitchers (maybe just Rivera) have been good enough that their overall value was comparable to a great starting pitcher anyway.
If we’re doing bad analogies, evaluating relief pitchers only against other relief pitchers is a lot like evaluating DHs only against other DHs, ignoring the opportunity cost. (Or evaluating pinch hitters only against other pinch hitters — that’s a more extreme case, but the same kind of error.)
I’m curious with a username like “Being Don Mattingly” on what’s your take on Don Mattingly getting inducted?
Next year the veteran’s committee votes again on the Modern Era and very likely Don Mattingly will again be on the ballot along with Ted Simmons, Luis Tiant, Dale Murphy, Tommy John, Dave Parker and Steve Garvey.
If Baines and Smith are in, hell yeah, I want all my Yankee favorites. Nettles and Randolph are fully qualified, but now I want Guidry, Mattingly, Pettitte, Posada, and O’Neill too.
Not yankees fan, but right now, that sounds pretty reasonable. Heck, throw in George Costanza too.
My dad’s still pissed that Nettles didn’t make it.
Should probably throw in Munson, too!
You’re missing one name that truly fits the veteran committee’s (or whatever is called nowadays) criteria: Bernabé Williams… that’s one guy that I believe will be an extremely popular pick for those peeps.
Especially because Jeter, Torre and Rivera will probably be on the committee, haha!
Shoot, before Baines I would have said one, maybe two of those guys should be in, though a case could be made for a few others. After Baines, how do they not all get in?
*writes note in calendar for next year at this time to come back to Fangraphs to read comment thread and get some sanity when the chamber of nitwits elect Steve Garvey*
No, elite relief pitchers are not just a lesser version of a starting pitcher, and not all decent starting pitchers would make great or even good closers. It’s a mostly different skill set. While there are some areas where they often have inferior skill sets such as fewer pitches and/or unable to have success multiple times through a lineup; there are also areas where they often have superior skill sets such as higher velocity, a single elite pitch, and/or higher K and swinging strike rates.
Elite relief pitchers do belong on both the All-Star team and the Hall of Fame, and their WARs should only be judged against each other accordingly.
I’ve typed, and deleted, about 4 different comments so far. What I’ve realized is that I have no answer for the senility displayed by the committee on this election.
At least I hope it’s senility and not something more corrupt.
It’s corruption.
Jerry Reinsdorf is Harold Baines’ current employer, so letting him vote on Baines HOF candidacy seems a little conflict-y, at best.
When I said that Harold Baines was the Bizarro-World version of Omar Vizquel, I didn’t realize it would be true in another way: Enshrinement by a bunch of his pals after he didn’t make it on the writer’s side. I guess if you play long enough and are likable enough, you wind up getting to know enough guys that they want you part of their club.
FWIW, you were the first person I thought of when I saw that Baines had been elected.
Now we have to elect Vizquel so that he and Baines can share a spot. I volunteer to put it together.
Well, if Vizquel could hit like Baines or Baines could field and run like Vizquel, you would have a hall of famer. Sure.
This is actually my point. His name is Homarold Bainezquel, and he’s awesome.
Now, the only way we can fix this is to put Vizquel in there and re-write history.
What about just Old Vaines?
Haha Em, same. I heard a few hours ago.. I thought, well, the committee must have caught ST’s mutant player and confused themselves into voting for Baines.
The “DH adjustment is too harsh” argument upthread seems worthy of further exploration. Is the committee trying to set a standard for future DH threshold, or what? If so, Edgar was the obvious standard, and now a lot of very good ‘80s and ‘90s players have legitimate beef and/or renewed optimism. I think it’s crazy they would put Baines in but not, say, Hershiser.
My estimate of Visquel’s probability of enshrinement just skyrocketed.
Yup! I recalled your post. Quite funny! 2866 hits and likable enough seemed like key elements here.
Poor Rusty Staub. If he was still alive, he’d be rolling over in his grave.
Nahh, if alive, he’d be making #lolmets posts on twitter, from his grave of course.
When I read the news, my knee-jerk reaction was to loudly yell “what?!?!?!?!” at my computer.
But now I realize this all sets up John Franco and Nick Markaikis’ Hall elections in the coming years.
Hell, and Julio Franco too!
Francisco Franco is still out, right?
He remains in stable condition.
He was pretty good at War.
Francisco Franco could hit hard, could earn a win, and had a high war score. Given some of the sabermetric trash in today’s Hall of Fame, you might as well put him in by committee as well.
julio franco can’t be in the hall of fame because he’s never going to stop playing
Jay,
I was shocked. However, I see it as a win for the traditional stats vs newer stats in the ongoing debate. Worth considering however is the need to revisit penalties for
a) hitting into a DP which is a team and context specific measurement in “new stats” akin to RBIs. Baines was penalized 19 runs, or really 2 full bWAR for this.
b) The large run per season penalty assigned to DHs when calculating WAR. On BR, Baines loses 190 runs, which is 20+ WAR. If ignored, either in stats or by traditionalists, then adding that total to Baines’ WAR totals make him a somewhat more viable (although still weak) candidate.
“However, I see it as a win for feelings & friendships vs stats”
That is much more appropriate
I’ll attempt to address your concerns.
A) Hitting into a DP is bad. Very bad. In fact, it’s the second worst outcome a hitter can have with a triple play being the worst. One AB. 2 outs. Baines losing 2 WAR over his career for this is perfectly reasonable.
B) A DH is penalized because they do not play defense. At all. They’re such poor players (or old) that they can no longer run or make basic throws.
Sometimes they can’t even catch! They can, however, hit. Typically, they can hit very well. As one-dimensional players, they are penalized as such.
I don’t think they’re disputing double plays are bad. I think the argument goes like this:
We trivialize RBIs because they’re a product of opportunity and the number of people on base in front of you, not skill. Why should double plays, which similarly depend on situation and opportunity, not be treated the same?
Note: I’m not saying I endorse this argument.
We trivialize the actual counting number of RBI, not the idea of RBI – the idea we attempt to recreate by putting the players rates in a more neutral environment.
Now an argument could be made to neutralize the number of GIDP to account for an average team over the team he specifically played on, but not to disregard them – regardless what team you play on, you will encounter DP opportunities and some guys are much more likely to ground into them than others
So the question becomes, will things change much if GIDP were neutralized to an Average teams rate of opportunities?
The answer is most likely no since the number of GIDP is so small and teams do have guys on at a first in at least a fairly close rate – GIDP numbers would likely change by very small decimals, not full numbers, if you were to do all that work.
A player who usually hits 3rd or 4th is almost certain to have thousands more GIDP opportunities than one who normally hits 8th, 9th or 1st.
“A player who usually hits 3rd or 4th is almost certain to have thousands more GIDP opportunities than one who normally hits 8th, 9th or 1st”
I’m not sure as I’ve never really thought about it, but that might not actually be the case – and could even be completely backwards.
Leadoff hitters, especially back then when they were mostly speedsters with constant green lights, ideally didn’t spend much time at first. A 2 hitters main job was to move said leadoff guys closer to scoring if they could, where 3/4 hitters were there to drive in the run(s). Hitting 3rd or 4th certainly means you have more RISP chances, but possibly fewer GIDP opportunities – the spots before you are where the Speed and SLG guys are that are less likely to be just sitting on 1st
If you’re batting 8th, 9th or 1st though, then you are likely hitting behind guys who do not have enough power or speed to consistently get themselves past first, and with guys around you who don’t make great contact to move you around. They’ll get on less, but when they do get on they probably stay at first much more often
Plus, hitting 3/4 means the guys possibly on 1st are more likely to be running to avoid the DP, where 8/9/1 hitters will see slow runners at 1st that are DPs waiting to happen
Yeah…kinda doubt that the SBs and XBH of the 1, 2 and 3 hitters outweighs how much more likely they are to get on base.
Rather than spitball, though, let’s check the numbers.
In 2018:
8 hitters had 4736 PA with runners on and <2 outs.
9 hitters had 4504 PA with runners on and <2 outs.
Leadoff hitters had 4038 PA with runners on and <2 outs.
2 hitters had 5138 PA with runners on and <2 outs.
3 hitters had 5811 PA with runners on and <2 outs.
4 hitters had 5447 PA with runners on and <2 outs.
5 hitters had 4951 PA with runners on and <2 outs.
So, yeah.
And I agree 100% that 2-4 hitters would see more “runners on” …but that’s not the question
The question is “runners on *first*” because those are the ones that are being doubled off in most every DP
I’d also point out that those “Runners On>2O” numbers you did supply do already point to there being a rather small difference between the number of guys seen on base as a 3rd hitter to 8th hitter:
3rd – 5811 PA runners on>2o in 21614 PA total
8th – 4736 PA runners on>2o in 18964 PA total
Spread the ratios over 11092 (the career PA of Baines) and you get…
3rd – 2982
8th – 2770
…it’s just a 212 PA difference over a 20+ year career
Not exact (can’t do that on phone) but can tell already we are talking rather small numbers for an individual player even with an extremely long career
This is actually a great point!
The way to account for this, using weighted-averages, is swapping in RE24 for wRAA (and cutting GIDP, to avoid double-counting).
Baines gains ~8 wins by that measure…leaving him at 44 fWAR, still firmly short of the HoF standard, as defined by JAWS.
If you want to claim that DH-ing inflicts enough damage offensively that they should be considered equivalent to 1Bs positionally, that adds another 5.5 wins…leaving him at 50 fWAR, still firmly short of the HoF standard, as defined by JAWS, but actually ahead of Jim Rice, who loses about 15 wins of value when context is considered.
Yay?
Yeah, the double play thing is definitely worth revisiting, especially since it’s the harder hit ground balls that turn into most double plays. Why should you be punished for hitting the ball hard just because it happens to turn into two outs, whereas it would only be a single out or possibly even an infield hit if you didn’t hit it as hard?
At the very least, there’s no justification for penalizing someone for a GIDP without doing the same for popping out/striking out with a man on 3rd and one out.
Either go context-neutral or don’t.
I’m not interested in debating the DP thing, but I do think the DH penalty should be looked at. I don’t think any fielder should be penalized more than the DH penalty.
Gary Sheffield is a prime example. David Ortiz routinely was penalized about 15 runs for being a full-time DH. Sheffield had 8 years where his defense was worse than that. It IS his fault that his defense was so bad, but it isn’t his fault that his team wouldn’t DH him.
I’d like to see the defensive penalty capped at 15 per year (or whatever the DH penalty is that year). If we did that for Sheffield, he would gain back about 66 runs. That would put his WAR at almost 70.
Maybe his team wouldn’t DH him because he didn’t want to DH?
Or more likely, because he mostly played in the National League until he got to the Yankees who already had Jason Giambi.
Baines is not even HoF-level by traditional stats. That’s what makes this so mind-boggling.
FWIW- best I can tell, every player with at least 90% of Baines HR, H and RBI , who aren’t already in the HoF:
Not yet eligible-
Alex Rodriguez
Albert Pujols
Adrian Beltre
Miguel Cabrera
Carlos Beltran
Eligible-
Barry Bonds
Rafael Palmeiro
Gary Sheffield
It certainly appears that by H/HR/RBI, he’s not too absurd a choice.
Lowering the bar on the traditional counting stats to even just 80% of Baines and only including those who have already made it onto a ballot:
Barry Bonds
Rafael Palmeiro
Gary Sheffield
Manny Ramirez
Sammy Sosa
—
Fred McGriff
Jeff Kent
Luis Gonzalez
Dave Parker
Chili Davis
Andres Galarraga
Paul Konerko
The minimums here are 307 HR, 2293 H and 1302 RBI. Or looking for any players who were +/- 10% of Baines in these three traditional counting stats you get just Kaline (first ballot BBWAA HoFer) and Tony Perez (9th ballot BBWAA HoFer).
In a universe where the voting body ignores advanced stats and defense and positional value and era adjustments and rate stats such, Baines probably looks pretty good.
Going with fWAR rate, wRC+ and PA, I get, showing BBWAA ballots and max BBWAA %:
BAL %% NAME
15th 43% Steve Garvey
15th 25% Dave Parker
15th 25% Mickey Vernon
7th 8% Rusty Staub
5th 6% Harold Baines
1st 4% Al Oliver
2nd 3% Don Baylor
1st 1% Chili Davis
1st 0% Brett Butler
—- –% Eddie Yost
Jay…I assume Baines’ election is not the worst travesty of the HOF. However, it is likely the worst travesty since another baseball player was elected. In your opinion, who was that and when was it?
Thanks.
Not nearly as clever as you think you are. This one is a true outlier not just complaining about a player people don’t like. In fact I am sure most everyone liked Baines, that is the only thing that explains his election
Hall of Stats has Harold Baines with a hall rating of 58. Tommy McCarthy is in with a rating of 28 and is the worst player in the Hall by Hall Rating.
So this is really bad, but not historically bad.
Except that 58 still puts him in the bottom 12 HOFers. I’d call that historically bad.
If it doesn’t set a record, it doesn’t feel all that historic, there have been 11 arguably worse out of barely more than 200, this is a fairly routine level of nonsense. Heck, Lee Smith will be number 15 from the bottom out of the HoF in Hall Rating.
For the curious, the 11 worse players by Hall Rating are:
Jesse Haines (57) 1970 by Veterans
Chick Hafey (57) 1971 by Veterans
Bruce Sutter (54) 2006 by BBWAA
Rollie Fingers (53) 1992 by BBWAA
Bill Mazeroski (53) 2001 by Veterans
Rick Ferrell (53) 1984 by Veterans
Ray Schalk (52) 1955 by Veterans
Freddie Lindstrom (50) 1976 by Veterans
George Kelly (42) 1973 by Veterans
Lloyd Waner (35) 1967 by Veterans
Tommy McCarthy (28) 1946 by Old Timers
So, in answer to the question that started this sub-thread, the last choice this bad or worse was in 2006 when the BBWAA put in Bruce Sutter.
You can’t count the relief pitchers, since they’re judged on their own level of WAR rather than compared to everyone else (as should also be the case with primary DHs). The true answer here is Bill Mazeroski.
Alex–
I’ve read your comment several times, and the comment you’ve replied to, and…just…so, so lost here. What are you even trying to say?
Going by RE24 rather than wRAA (to account for the “run producer” narrative), Baines is actually well ahead of Jim Rice, who was elected by the writers.
I have him the worst since Bill Mazeroski was inducted in 2001. Before that, High Pockets Kelly in 1973. By my reckoning Baines is going to be the 7th worst HOFer. Pretty impressive.
Even the “would’ve made 300 hits without the strikes” thing doesn’t pass muster, since he wouldn’t have played enough additional games to get 134 hits. There were only ~100 games there he could have played in. Although maybe the 2001 White Sox let him suck for the whole year in order to make it? That team was long on guys who were meant for the DH role already…
The White Sox lost 123 games played in those work stoppages (you can’t leave out the 18 games lost in 1995). But still, it would be fairly charitable to say that he’d get a hit for each game, and also that he’d play in every game, and that would still leave him short.
The player that was robbed the most, in hindsight, was Fred McGriff. He lost those games in 1994 and 1995 when he was in his prime, and would surely have hit at least seven home runs, which would be enough to get to 500. As silly as it is, he would definitely have been elected with seven more home runs.
Then again, what about all the guys who missed time in their primes due to military service? For example, Stan Musial would’ve had the 25 extra home runs he would’ve needed for 500 had he not missed the 1945 season, and just imagine what Ted Williams career numbers would look like had he not missed three entire seasons of his prime to WWII.
Ultimately, you can’t give guys extra credit for things that didn’t happen no matter the circumstances.
That is such a Pandora’s box, though (& I am sure you’re aware of that, really arguing about the committee). Baines probably would have hit 3,000 hits because he would have been at 2970 or whatever & played the next year to get over 3,000. That said, let’s credit everyone from that era with extra stats.
McGriff- He missed about 70 games, let’s give him 14 HR to get him to 507.
Sheffield- He missed about 70 games, let’s give him 14-15 HR.
Tim Raines- Same boat as Baines.
Mussina- Give 7-8 more wins, he’s at 277..maybe he hangs on to get to 300 with those extra wins.
Matt Williams- Let’s give him the single season HR record, maybe that will get him some votes.
Let’s add stats to Rusty Staub, Dave Parker, etc for the 80’s strike..The list is endless..
David Cone had a legit shot at 20-win seasons in ’94 and ’95. That would have given him four 20 win seasons in his career, and pushed him past 200 career wins as well. Both of those marks would have made a huge difference in his HoF consideration.
A significant portion of my eternal hate for Dick Ravitch, Don Fehr, and Bud Selig is attributable to Matt Williams losing his shot to maintain his pace at setting the single-season HR record. My only consolation is that quantum physics indicates the reality of the many-worlds theory (see David Deutsche) whereby there is an alternate universe in which Matty did hit 62 HR in ’94.
He actually hit 64… wait, I’ve said too much.
I did the math on the article here pointing out he and Belle were on the ballot and likely to fail
In it I found he missed 101 Games and 99 Hits based off his Games Played and Hit/Game ratios for the 3 specific seasons in question. That leaves him needing between 60-70 added games over his final season to reach the mark – and he almost certainly did not have the physical skills to do it
Regarding the 2001 White Sox specifically – zero chance they give him more playing time. They were off a 97 win season in 2000 and expected to compete again. Frank Thomas was supposed to be the DH with Baines there as a vet bench bat. Thomas was lost for the season in April, opening up more playing time for Baines. He responded by hitting .131/.202/.143/.345, prompting the still competitive Sox to use Carlos Lee there more frequently and look elsewhere for a fulltime DH. They found one in Canseco, who was hitting extremely well in Indy ball (he hit .258/.366/.477/.843 after Chicago gave him a chance)
The 01 Sox ultimately finished 83-79; 3rd in the Central, but merely 8 games behind the champion Indians. Being that close, hard to imagine they would have entertained the idea of giving Baines the extra 60-70 games and 175-200 AB with his unbelievably bad line – it’s understandable they searched out other DH options
The thing is though, there might be another reason he stoppped getting ABs, and Baines may not have just completely disappeared in June because of bad play – he made a pair of minor league appearances that season as well. I couldn’t find records of them other than them existing, but it appears they would have come in June or later and indicates possible injury is what removed him from the roster. From June to Sept he didn’t play in the majors other than the Sox bringing him back for a final Goodbye game Sept 27th
Extremely unlikely he gets to 3000 with the missed games as his skills, and seemingly health, we’re both gone when he was trying to stretch things out
Baines’ teams missed 124 games (1981, 1994, 1995). Given his playing time in 1994-95, I would estimate he probably would have played in about 108 of those games. Give or take. With his established rate of about one hit per game in those seasons, let’s put him at +108, which would up his total to 2,974. If you want, you can round that down to 2,970 or even 2,965, but Baines would have probably been in that range in 2001.
Think what you want, but I don’t see how the White Sox could NOT allow him to pursue the milestone. This is the same franchise that brought back Minnie Minoso TWICE when he was over 50 years old, so he could set decade records.
Yes I know I’m reaching to justify…….
Baines batted 289 lifetime and averaged 22 home runs and 93 RBIs per 162 games with a 465 lifetime slugging percentage.
Yastrzemski hit 285 lifetime, averaging 22 home runs and 90 RBIs per 162 games and had a 462 slugging percentage.
He has more homers than Ivan Rodriguez, more hits than Wille Stargell, a higher fielding percentage than Brooks Robinson.
Really? Saying a DH has a higher fielding percentage than Brooks wins you the moron-comment of the day award.
Fun fact: Harold Baines’s best 8-year stretch (20.1 fWAR from 1981-88) leaves him JUST short of Yastrzemski’s best 2-year stretch (20.4 fWAR from 1967-68).
Yastremski: 94 WAR and a wRC+ of 130
Baines 38 WAR and a wRC+ of 119
In other words, besides being a field player who also played longer, Yastremski was a significantly better player when considering the era.
One played GG caliber defense & has his prime in the low scoring 60’s & played 500 more game & 1800 more games defensively. The other was a DH that got his prime extended by a high offense era.
How did his “prime get extended,” haha?
Must have been that juiced ball!
He had a .366 wOBA from 1989-1993, spending most of those years in the Coliseum.
He had a .376 wOBA from 1994-1998, spending most of those years in Camden Yards.
His wRC+ declined from 130 to 124, during those respective stretches, as they league wOBA climbed from .313 in 1989 to .331 in 1998.
Baines doesn’t belong in the HoF…but it’s deeply silly to pretend that the mysterious “high offense era” between 1993 and 2009 lifted all boats equally.
Yaz played the field, and played it well. Baines, when he did, did not.
How do people like this find Fangraphs?
Mr. Warne,
That is rude, insulting and completely uncalled for. I “found” FG before it was even Fangraphs. Unlike you, I am a paying member, and have been published on multiple baseball sites, including this one.
My comment was merely to try to justify statistically what the Committee did, and I even included in my comment that it was a stretch.
Yes. Safe
It’s rude, insulting, and completely useless. I did FG before he was a fang. Unlike you, I’m Ilelan, a beach, and published at a baseball fair, including this one.
My comment is to try to prove the statistics that the commission made, and I commented that it was a move.
when you hear the results and have to look up one of the newly elected, thats not a good sign
For the life of me I can’t understand the outrage regarding election to the HOF. It’s hard for me to believe anyone thinks an award “voted on” is fair, equitable, or based on anything but the biases and favoritism of the voters. The only HOF that does it right is the LPGA HOF that requires a set number of wins and major wins. You get them, you’re in. You don’t, your out. It’s harder in team sports, but as all the fine folks here demonstrate, you can establish a metric, a series of metrics, rank every player by position by metrics, and if you’re in the top 10% you get in. If not, not. But voters will never do that by their vote, and HOFs won’t change. So Baines gets in, or others that are far from the best, people express their outrage in blogs, and life goes on. At least voted awards gives us something to talk about during the off-seaon…bad publicity is better than no publicity at all.
I’m seeing incredulity, not outrage.
You’re right, but I couldn’t spell incredulity…
Even ignoring the obvious flaws of using this method for baseball (such as unreliable defensive metrics), how does a set percentile work when the percentile of greatness for older players constantly changes as new players join the game? You’d soon get to the point where older players in the Hall fall outside the necessary percentile that got them enshrined in the first place and making it harder and harder for newer players to gain enshrinement.
Obviously there are lots of issues associated with using metrics, defense and leadership being two of them, smarter people than I would have to work them out. But imho, using a set of metrics appropriate for the time the player played, however sophisticated or unsophisticated those metrics are, if, for the years the player played he (or she) is in the top 10% of all players of that era (or 5% if you want) they belong in the HOF. So a player today would not be “competing” against players in the HOF, the player would only be graded against players playing the same years he or she played. And it wouldn’t matter if the criteria was the same or not, Best in Your Era is still HOF worthy, again, imho.
Had to finally register with FanGraphs just for this.
Neither of these guys belong. This “Today’s Game Era Committee” should be dissolved if they’re going to put guys like this in. Or there should at least be a qualification here that only players who received at least 50% of the votes in the BBWAA can get onto this ballot.
If you use Baines and Smith as the baseline for making it into the HoF, you can probably add ~200 more players today because they’re better than those two. Let the devolution begin!
I can understand the Baines questioning simply on the basis of there being prob a dozen or so others in that ‘just missed’ category who are prob more worthy (not because he doesn’t deserve some consideration on his own merits)…. but Lee Smith was league’s the dominant RPer for over a decade (mid 80s to mid 90s). If you simply deny that RPers belong in the HOF, well there isn’t anything to discuss. But as a guy who dominated his era, I find that argument hard to make. Smith is certainly worthy IMO.
Honestly, I’m glad Smith is in, because I can’t think of a more perfect benchmark for other relievers to surpass!
Better pitcher than Hoffman, and without the gaudy save total.
Here are players who got to 50%+ and are not already in [looked at 1966 onward]:
— Gil Hodges
2019 Edgar Martinez
2022 Curt Schilling
2022 Roger Clemens
2022 Barry Bonds
2023 Mike Mussina
So, you would have had all of one player to consider with the 50%+ threshold — and in the near future, looks like at most you’d be adding just a handful of PED guys (if they ultimately didn’t get elected by the BBWAA)
Nothing against Harold Baines, who was fine player with a distinguished long career, he should never have been selected. You can certainly say the WAR may under-rate DH’s, but evaluate Baines just as a hitter–he had an OPS+ of 121, tied for 340th on the career list. That’s not top tier.
He’s definitely not a HoFer but fun fact, his Adjusted OPS+ is the same as “superstar” Manny Machado.
Manny plays the field, and plays it well. Baines did not.
Not at SS, but yes.
True.
Manny’s very firmly in the Arenado/Rendon tier of 3B, well above what Baines has ever done.
The best comp for Manny is probably a healthier Scott Rolen, albeit with worse defense – he’s actually not all that close to where Jeter was with the stick, at the same age.
Probably not, but you also have to consider longevity and peak performance alongside average performance (such as measured by OPS+) when analyzing a Hall of Fame case.
Perhaps we should… Fire Joe Morgan?
This random nonsense is like Willie Mays not getting 100% support, there is simply no explanation.
I saw Mays play. I saw Koufax play. They were amazing. Neither one of them got 100% of their HOF vote. If you saw them play then you immediately knew that there are only two possible reasons for that: one is writers with personal grudges (and remember, there were still New York journalists who hated the Dodgers and Giants, which had both left New York for a better future in California) and the other one has to do with their ethnicity and is really, really ugly.
It’s been absolutely proven historically that you can’t trust the media with the Hall of Fame. The Veterans’ Committee and the current committee have now absolutely proven that you can’t trust baseball insiders with it either.
At some point people will hopefully realize that independent, non-media sabermetricians are the only possible reasonable selection body.
Watch Mo Rivera not get 100%
Honestly, I wouldn’t vote for Mo on this ballot if I weren’t a Yankees fan – he’s a lock, so I’d probably go with Sheffield in the 10th slot.
Which goes to why the voters should not be limited to 10 votes per ballot.
There is too much irony: the rules around the writers’ ballot process create strange outcomes. . . .which the ad hoc committees then address years later . . .leading to . . .Harold Baines in, and scores of clearly better players . . . .out.
That will be the case simply because there are still some voters that won’t vote for a relief pitcher.
Looking at his connections to members of the committee, Baines also played with Alomar in BAL and CLE from 1997-1999.
Finally, a solid argument emerges for Chet Lemon’s HOF candidacy
Man, Chet Lemon was a lot better than I remember him being.
Chet was a favorite when I was a kid in Chicago. If I would have had to guess at his career WAR I’d have been way too low
Also, Chili Davis.
Don Demeter
This was certainly bizarre. I actually had a slightly favorable perspective on committees after the veterans committee voted in Santo and Trammell. Whitaker better get elected ASAP
Baines being elected is just the setup to the joke. The punchline will be whatever nonsense they end up putting on his plaque. Seriously, it might be one of the most underwhelming blurbs in Hall history.
“Baines played for 5 different teams in his career, 3 of them twice and was an above average hitter while playing literally no defense.”
Just offhand, here’s a list of people for whom there is no conceivable argument that they shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame, now that Harold Baines is in:
Johnny Damon
Darryl Strawberry
Luis Gonzalez
Torii Hunter
Matt Holiday
Brian Giles
Bobby Abreu
Jack Clark
Like… how in the world is this justified? Other than die-hard White Sox fans, who in the world was itching for Harold Baines to be in the Hall of Fame? Like, I’m a Yankee fan, and I’ve never once pushed Paul O’Neill for the Hall. But O’Neill was better than Baines.
Kenny Lofton, Jim Edmonds, Willie Randolph… The list goes on and on…
Kenny Lofton, Jim Edmonds, and Willie Randolph are all head and shoulders more deserving HoFers than Harold Baines.
Bobby Grich, Dave Parker, Buddy Bell, Dick Allen, Andruw Jones.
His former teammates, apparently, all of whom were on the committee.
There is a very good argument against electing them and it goes like this: Two wrongs don’t make a right.
the day Darryl gets in is the day my life becomes complete
Albert Belle, who missed on the very same ballot has a better case than Baines. Did more damage in just 10 full seasons than Baines did over his long career.
Contemporaries of Baines that have about the same strength of Hall of Fame cases as him, by having scores 290 to 320 using a formula [(3 * career WAR) + (1.6 * WAR7) + HoF monitor score + (2 * HoF standards score)]:
Andres Galarraga, Bill Madlock, Bob Welch, Cecil Cooper, Cesar Cedeno, Chet Lemon, Darrell Porter, Darryl Strawberry, Fernando Valenzuela, Frank Viola, Jack Clark, Jim Sundberg, Jose Cruz, Kevin Appier, Mark Grace, Matt Williams, Paul O’Neill, Robin Ventura, Ron Cey, Rusty Staub, Steve Finley, Steve Rogers, Toby Harrah, Tony Fernandez, Tony Phillips, and Willie Wilson.
At current standards, none of those guys should be Hall of Famers.
Dwight Evans.
For me, Baines is the hitting equivalent of Jim Kaat – good counting numbers undercut by the fact that he played for so (so) long; the very definition of a compiler.
I was growing up during his heyday of the mid-80’s, and his baseball card numbers never once stood out from the pack in any meaningful way – in fact, the most flattering thing I remember any sportscaster saying about him was that he was “a professional hitter”.
I’m not upset that he got in (I don’t get upset about anyone being recognized for their accomplishments), but I will admit to being completely puzzled.
Kaat at least put up 5 seasons of 5 or better WAR.
I get your point here, but I wasn’t trying to say one was better or more valuable than the other; merely that without the longevity, neither looks nearly as impressive as they do.
Exactly.
I largely stopped caring about the HoF a few years ago. Morris and Baines have brutally killed whatever small interest remained.
Morris at least made sense from an emotional standpoint. Game 7 in 1991 was HUGE, and for a big stretch of time Morris was considered to be the ace of aces, the guy who you really wanted on the mound in big game situations. Like, I get why there was a big push for Jack Morris. But… what’s the constituency for Harold Baines in the Hall of Fame? I cannot fathom this.
I was thinking that maybe there was someone named Jerrald Barnes who had fantastic stats who the voters confused with Harold Baines, but no, there was no Jerrald Barnes in MLB.
So does this end the big hall vs small hall debate? It seems like we are headed to a very big hall.
If you guys don’t see that Jerry Reinsdorf orchestrated the Baines vote then you haven’t been paying attention.
Somewhere Frankie Frisch is laughing.
Jay, any chance you could explain how dWAR works for a Designated Hitter? I always assumed that WAR compared players that played the same position and in this case it would be designated hitter (obviously a position that doesn’t rely on defense).
Harold Baines didn’t even play a single game in the field from 1993-96 as well as 1998-2001 yet he accumulated negative defensive WAR numbers every year which pulled down his BBREF career WAR down quite a bit.
Speaking in general and not necessarily about an FG-specific metric, dWAR combines two elements — how good or bad you are relative to others at the position and a positional adjustment, so an average SS is more valuable defensively than an average 3B who is more valuable than an average 1B. Baines obviously gets a 0 for defense relative to his position, but the adjustment for DH is ~ -15 for a full season.
There is a negative positional adjustment for playing DH. dWAR doesn’t compare within positions it combines the fielding runs above or below average with the positional adjustment. An average or slightly below average defensive catcher or shortstop will have a positive dWAR and an average or slightly above average defensive 1B will have have a negative dWAR.
I was just plain shocked that Baines was elected. This is a new low for the HOF. Even if the committee was somehow relying only on traditional counting stats, Baines is not deserving of election. Even when accounting for his injuries, he averaged only 22 HR per 162 games played, which is a small number of homers for a player whose basis for election is his bat. 1 Silver Slugger. Never hit 30 HR. Took him 22 years to compile less than 400 HR, despite 2nd-half of his career played in a major offense era. And of course his WAR is absurdly low. There are dozens of vastly more deserving HOF candidates from Baines era who have not and will not be elected. I’m old enough to have seen him play on multiple occasions. Not once, not ever did I say, “wow, that Baines, he’s a HOFer!” By comparison, Albert Belle, his at-bats were must-watch events. You honestly believed Belle just might literally tear the cover off the ball. Or leap into the stands, start a massive brawl, and win it. Belle was freaking amazing. Baines was not freaking amazing. But unlike Belle, he was a nice guy. I don’t envy Baines’ task of preparing an HOF acceptance speech.
The approach of the committee was clearly: “lets get this Baines in the Hall because he’s a good guy in the game and played for 22 years.” Which should be strong reason to disband such a disfunctional committee.
This vote actually does a disservice to Baines. It transformed him in my mind, and likely many others’, from “decent player with a very long career” to “Worst Hall of Fame Player From My Lifetime”. He got elected to the Hall of Infamy.
In Baines’ defense…there’s at least one argument that Rice was worse (Baines was a better run producer!).
That’s…about it.
“Worst Hall of Fame Player From My Lifetime”?
Nope nope nope nope nope. Measurably worse HOFers elected during your lifetime include Bill Mazeroski (2001, Veteran’s Committee) and Bruce Sutter (2006, BBWAA).
Baines is a bad choice, and a political one. But as bad as he is there are still a number of worse choices in the HOF than Baines, and both Mazeroski and Sutter were elected in the last decade. So, unless you’re twelve or under, you were mistaken.
I’m 27. Bruce Sutter retired 3 years before I was born; Mazeroski a couple decades
Seriously. The best thing Harold Baines could do for his own legacy would be to graciously decline the offer, on the grounds that he knows he’s not worthy and the fix was in. Then he’d be remembered forever, positively.
LOL, this is freaking awesome. Seriously, I feel like a kid on Christmas morning. My boy Brett Gardner is going to the HALL OF FAME!
I get the feeling that Baines has pictures of the voters doing blow off the boobs of expensive call girls. That makes more sense than him getting in for his on field accomplishments.
Why expensive call girls when cheap hookers would be far worse?
If Smith is in, what are K-Rod’s chances looking like?
Placido Polanco for the Hall of Fame! They both finished their career with 38.4 fWAR!!
That committee is filled with a lot of Grandpa Simpson “Yell at the Clouds” people like Joe Morgan and Tony LaRussa.
I wonder if part of the Baines selection has to do with these guys wanting to agitate the Sabremetrics crowd.
They need need to rename Today’s Game Era Committee Fox Sports 1 and end any pretense of knowledge.
I like to look at the positive here, which is that if these dummies vote Baines in than some other guys who are much more deserving but likely to get shafted (Andruw Jones, Scott Rolen, Larry Walker, leaving out PED guys) by voters might make it.
But then, one wonders how Whitaker didn’t even make the final list…
Timing killed Sweet Lou. He debuted on the ballot in 2001, before advanced statistical analysis had started to gain some respect. He got only 15 voters from the stupid baseball writers. I would venture that there is probably 1% chance he ever gets in, because the committee (if it exists in the next few years) will simply not be willing to vote on a guy who was “one and done”. I mean, Baines was on the ballot six times.
The 1% chance Whitaker has is when, in say 2032, Alan Trammell and Jack Morris are on a small veterans committee.
Perhaps the Baseball Hall of Fame is going the way of the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. If Baines can get in, why not Chic? Open those doors wide….
Chic is more at the Don Mattingly level. A better comp for Baines is Kenny G.
I dunno about that. Kenny G is about as bland, but more offensive *snerk*
I was thinking Iggy Pop for a Baines comp.
Johnson – so looks like you think Baines is a no-doubt HoFer? I think you’re in the minority here with that one.
He may not be aware of the Stooges.
“Johnson – so looks like you think Baines is a no-doubt HoFer? I think you’re in the minority here with that one.”
It’s Johnston, and no. I think he’s a guy who hung around forever and didn’t accomplish all that much.
Iggy put up plenty of 6+ WAR years early in his career before eventually turning into a Harold Baines.
In other words, Iggy Pop = Dave Parker……I can buy that.
As much as Hall of Fame voting can be a problem, the new veterans committee-type setup is a problem. I know it was conceived as a way to get deserving-though-underrecognized players their due (fat lot of good that did Lou Whitaker last year), but given these two inductions, especially Baines, it runs the risk of becoming as bad as the actual Veterans Committees of the 60s through 80s.
Which kind of begs the question: Was the Committee aware that electing a Baines would viewed by relatively more informed fans as a total miss? Was there any discussion by the group to the effect of “Baines had a long career, compiled a lot of counting stats. . . .but finished in the top ten for MVP once. . . .if we elect him, we are going to have to answer a lot of questions. . . .”
Or is it “res ipsa”: a group of people who could come to the conclusion that Baines is a worthy selection are, on their face, wholly incompetent to make the evaluations they are tasked to make. And those people are likely unaware of their incompetence. (“Bad Driver Syndrome: driving is not hard. Bad drivers are bad because they are utterly unaware of the fact they are bad drivers”).
It isn’t as if Baines is a borderline call (say, body of work that is bottom third of all players, or bottom half of players at his position (charitably, right Field)).
There are many many demonstrably more qualified position players and right fielders than Baines. This is clearly a miss.
(No disrespect meant to Baines – he had a very good career – it just was not in the same area code of other HOF players).
What’s funny to me is that Harold Baines used to be used as an example against 3000 hits getting you into the Hall. If it weren’t for the strikes he could easily have accumulated 3000, and yet nobody would think Baines a Hall of Famer, the argument ran. Ha.
Was it only last week that I posted “Sometimes I’m ashamed to be an MLB fan”?
The newfangled versions of the “veterans committee” ultimately have produced no better work over all than the corrupt old one. (We might have guessed as much, just from the cockamamie definitions and names of the various timeframes.)
It’s too bad for Harold Baines and Lee Smith that their names are now associated with this travesty of a mockery of a sham of two mockeries.
Nice Woody reference!
Baines getting in is good news for Jamie Moyer and Bartolo Colon
Hey, if counting stats can get a player into the HOF, Moyer and Colon should be shoo-ins
Julio Franco is probably calling teams again to get more at bats to pad his Hall of Fame-worthy numbers.
Lee Smith does not make sense. His 29 WAR isn’t worth more than another player’s 29 WAR. The fact that undeserving relievers made it in before him doesn’t justify his inclusion.
Well, the market clearly disagrees with the claim that 2 WAR from a RP isn’t worth more than 2 WAR from someone else.
2 WAR relievers are the new power-hitting shortstops.
I have long felt, as many do, that WPA is a better indicator of a closer’s worth than WAR, given the high leverage innings that they throw. Lee Smith has a lower career WPA than Joe Nathan, Billy “Götterdämmerung” Wagner, and Papelbon, and Kimbel and FRod are just a hair below. So, still not that impressive.
I mean…Joe Nathan and Billy Wagner are right up there with Hoffman as the best non-Rivera relief pitchers of the last 20 years, and Papelbon’s half a step down (longevity).
I also honestly don’t think we have a catch all stat for reliever value, yet – teams have a lot more data than we do, and WPA doesn’t account for how much they pay relievers, either.
If Baines is now in, the old timers need to find a way to get Dick Allen in. Allen tops Baines in every major category except HRs 384 to 351 and Allen did that in 14 seasons vs 21 for Baines. Allen also was a MVP. Baines only SLG’d .465 for career vs .534 for Allen and had 121 OPS+ vs 156+ for Allen. Sad.
Definitely.
Dick Allen? Never. There is a character clause.
Not only was Allen a clubhouse cancer, not only did he spread “disharmony, dissension, disagreement, and disruption” (per Mitchell Nathanson) whenever he went, but Bill James stated that Allen “did more to keep his teams from winning than anybody else who ever played major league baseball.”
He was poison. No way he should be in the HOF.
That comment reflects worse on James than it does on Allen.
You do know that the character clause is a total joke, right? The only time it’s ever been enforced is to punish PED users, even ignoring other known cheaters like Gaylord Perry.
Okay, but just because voters haven’t taken it seriously doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
We don’t actually know that. It most likely influenced voters in regards to Orlando Cepeda, delaying his election. It seems to have harmed Allen. Because sportswriters in the 1960s hadn’t yet separated themselves from the owners of the teams they covered, almost always siding with management when an athlete was “selfish” or “uppity.”
Allen faced terrible racism coming up with the Phillies. Wont go into everything, but he was also jacked around by the team. His case is sad because if he’d played 10 years later he would have been a Reggie Jackson personality, not a “cancer.”
I’ve found it interesting that Allen has been railed against, while Keith Hernandez emerged practically unscathed from his controversies. Hernandez bought and distributed drugs in the clubhouse, was run out of St. Louis, and hurt his teammates over and over with his selfish behavior. But I’ve never seen James write critical words about him. I guess drug addiction and criminal behavior is a disease, and being an opinionated black man is unacceptable.
So you’ve read Bill James. Would it change your mind if you learned that much of what BJ said about Allen is false? It was a real hatchet job.
Bill James was as wrong about Dick Allen as he was about Pete Rose’s gambling and Win Shares. It’s a glaring mistake.
Inserting Dick Allen’s Name into Works of Cronyism
You can argue that Baines shouldn’t a HoFer, but those saying he doesn’t belong in the Hall of Very Good are wrong. That exaggeration is entirely based off the DH positional adjustment. Go look at the list of outfielders with at least 10,000 PA and look at Baines’ company in career wRC+ is. Within 3 points of Baines’ career 119 wRC+mark , it looks like this:
Rusty Staub
Dave Parker
Pete Rose
Harold Baines
Carlos Beltran
Luis Gonzalez
Andre Dawson*
Harry Hooper*
Not including Baines, that’s two HoFers, one guy that would have been a first-balloter if not for gambling, one likely future HoFer, and three solid members of the Hall of Very Good.
This is the revenge for Blyleven, right?
Joe Morgan is on this committee, so acting surprised by nonsensical decisions is nonsensical in its own way.
Fire Joe Morgan!
CJ Cron just had a season with an OPS + of 122 and was non-tendered. Harold Baines career OPS was 121.
Do I think Baines belongs in the Hall? Probably not.
However, I do feel that WAR is too harsh on DHs. Not only is defense too overrated in WAR (not to mention how defense still isn’t all that reliably measured, anyway, not that it’s an issue in this case), but the defensive punishment given to the DH position is too harsh, as many DHs would put up much better defensive WAR if they didn’t just so happen to be the worst fielder on an AL team, and the very definition of WAR doesn’t mesh with the DH defensive penalty, as any replacement player would instead be subject to the same penalty or push another player into taking on that penalty.
While anyone who was such a bad fielder that he wound up playing the majority of his career at DH does need to have that considered as a significant negative in analysis for the Hall of Fame, strictly using WAR in comparison to position players is still not fair. We only judge relief pitchers (who unless they also started a bunch of games also fall way behind their peers in WAR) against other relief pitchers for Hall of Fame candidacy, so we should do the same with primary DHs. The only issue is that there’s a much smaller sample size available for comparison of great hitters who mainly played DH.
Veterans committees are an inherently political process. If you want those committees to correct wrongs then you have to accept these results. By its very nature it’s considering borderline cases.
It is not surprising that players, managers and execs don’t subscribe to the “ DH position adj penalty” – if it didn’t exist, he’d be within range on Sabr-stats along with high counting stats.
That Baines has the same career fWAR total as Placido Polanco, at the very least, it’s poetic.
From a sabermetric standpoint, there is little to no justification for Baines being in the Hall of Fame.
Looking at traditional stats, Baines has only one seasons in which he finished in the top 5 in any of the most traditional stats (runs, RBI, HR, SB, AVG), which was a fourth place finish. He had only six top-10 finishes in those five stats. As such, there isn’t even a traditional stats based argument to make for him to make the HOF based on his peak value.
However, because he was an above average hitter for a long career, one can make the case in favor of his induction because of his compiled traditional value. He currently ranks 34th on the career RBI list. Of the 33 players ahead of him, 23 are currently in the Hall of Fame. Of the 10 that are not, every single one is either not in the Hall of Fame because he is a known or suspected PED user or is too recent to appear on the ballot and is either a known or suspected PED user or is expected to be inducted on the first ballot. Looking at the 20 hitters behind Baines in career RBI, 17 are in the Hall of Fame, 2 are currently on the BBWAA ballot (Kent and McGriff), and one is not yet eligible (Beltran). In terms of hits, 36 of the 45 players with more hits than Baines are in the Hall of Fame, and of the 9 who aren’t, all but Vizquel are either on the ineligible list (Rose), known or suspected PED users (Palmeiro, Bonds, A-Rod), or expected to be inducted on the first ballot (Jeter, Pujols, Ichiro, Beltre). Lastly, in terms of runs produced (R+RBI-HR), Baines had 2543., which ranks 72 all time. Of the 71 players ahead of him, 54 are in the Hall of Fame, and 16 of the other 17 (all but Damon) are either expected to make the HOF when eligible, are on the ineligible list, are known or suspected PED users, or had the majority of their production before 1901. Of the 21 players behind Baines with at least 2400 runs produced, 12 (or just over half) are in the Hall of Fame. Looking from a strictly traditional counting stats basis, Baines’s induction isn’t so terrible.
I value both traditional stats and sabermetrics. As such, I wouldn’t have voted for Baines, and I disagree with those who did, but it isn’t quite so crazy for a traditionalist to support his induction. Very few of the players with better compiled traditional hitting statistics have failed to earn support from the BBWAA as Baines did, and most of those that did have character reasons to explain it.
What surprises me most is that this wasn’t Baines’s first time appearing before the Today’s Game Committee, and in his previous appearance, he didn’t receive enough votes for his vote total to be released. It is possible that his induction stems from his connections with the members of this year’s committee, but it is also possible that it is a result of the committee members feeling pressure to vote for more than one or two people, and the list of nominees was rather weak. Six of this years nominees were also nominees two years ago and failed to receive enough votes for the results to be announced (and Lou Piniella was also on the ballot two years ago). Of the three new nominees, Smith was elected, and two (Carter and Manuel) also failed to receive support. Perhaps the rules for the nominating committee should be changed such that the ballot must contain at least four players, at least one manager, and at least one executive, and that people cannot be nominated for consecutive meetings of the Era Committee unless they receive at least 6 of the 12 votes needed for election. This would have forced the ballot to have only 2 of the people who appeared (Smith and Piniella), forcing nominations for at least one different executive and three different players among the eight new nominees. Perhaps we would have seen Leyland and Baker as managers, and former CYA winners such as Cone, Saberhagen, and Gooden. Not all of the new nominees would have been better, but some would have. (What would help more is to have Today’s Game less frequently or make the cutoff date between eras earlier, as the available pool for nominees isn’t large enough to have a good 10 person ballot
The problem with using the “every player ranked ahead of Player X is in the hall” argument is, after you enshrine Player X, there’s now a Player Y to whom that argument applies. Then after you put Player Y in you have to do it for Player Z, etc.
For what it’s worth, my own personally developed similarity scores for Harold Baines compared to other existing Hall of Famers has the following players most similar to Baines:
10 Most Similar
1) Tony Perez 1B
2) Eddie Murray 1B
3) Billy Williams OF
4) Cal Ripken SS
5) Carlton Fisk C
6) Al Kaline OF
7) Dave Winfield OF
8) Ernie Banks 1B
9) Ron Santo 3B
10) Jim Rice OF
Some of the above you could question whether or not they belong, while others are more slam dunk cases.