Jacob deGrom, Cooperstown, and the Abstraction of Greatness

I’m a big believer in the value of WAR as a statistic. Like any summary stat, WAR is notably imperfect, with its nods to pragmatism, compromises made on philosophical grounds, and the necessary inclusion of many components that are just damn difficult to quantify even if we have a basis to think they’re important. Still, like all good models, even if WAR isn’t right, it can be useful. It gives us a broad estimate of a player’s overall contribution to winning baseball games, and almost certainly provides a far better conception of which individual actions lead to wins than generally existed, say, 50 years ago. But when we’re talking about whether a player is a Hall of Famer, a more malleable concept than what wins the most games, is WAR the right measure to look at? When I think about this question, four people instantly come to mind: Jacob deGrom, Miguel Cabrera, Jack Morris, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Since FanGraphs is a website dedicated to baseball, we’ll start by talking about Mozart. Even people who don’t really listen to classical music, and thus couldn’t tell Gustav Mahler from Rick Mahler, would almost certainly count Mozart among the greatest composers of all time. Why? Well, the first part is obvious: because of his body of work as a whole. But what aspects of that work make him great? I’d submit that it’s the quality of his best compositions, rather than the massive volume of work he produced, that pushes him ahead of his peers.

Mozart is a legend because of his greatest works, such as his last three symphonies, his late 1780s/early 1790s run of operas, and the latter half of his piano concertos — and I could go on! But he also wrote a lot of stuff that just isn’t that good. He was a musical prodigy, but almost all of his early work is interesting because he was very young when he wrote it, not because of its own merits. Composers have always had to pay the bills, and Mozart wrote a huge amount of what was more or less intended to be pleasant background music, no more compelling than the peppy ukulele and xylophone music that seemed to be in every Kickstarter video in 2017. If the hundreds of examples of such work were to simply blink out of existence because someone got a hold of the Infinity Gauntlet, it would change nothing about Mozart’s greatness. Those compositions had value to Mozart in that they enabled him to write the good stuff that is worth remembering, but he’s great because of his peak.

That brings me to Miguel Cabrera. Pretty much every baseball fan was excited to see him reach the undeniably cool career milestones of 3,000 hits and 500 home runs, including me. Cabrera was an all-time great, but I’d argue that his greatness had almost nothing to do with getting 3,000 hits or 500 homers. Indeed, much of what made Cabrera special was accomplished before the 2017 season, a point at which he had yet to reach either milestone. Cabrera was basically just as amazing with “only” 2,000 hits and 400 homers, and the final runs to the 3,000 and 500 marks were a slog, coming when he wasn’t even an average major leaguer anymore.

The same thing applies to Jack Morris, albeit in reverse. He had a long, long career, and almost made the Hall of Fame via the BBWAA ballot, ultimately being inducted by the Eras Committee. But aside from his spectacular performance in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, Morris was never really a pitcher who dominated opposing teams; he finished with a 3.90 career ERA in an era when a 4.10 ERA would have been league average. Using Baseball Reference’s WAR (you’ll see why in a minute), Morris ranks 149th all-time among pitchers. But using wins above average, or WAA (FanGraphs doesn’t publish WAA, hence the use of Baseball Reference, and Baseball Reference WAR), he ranks just 398th, behind pitchers such as Jarrod Washburn, Danny Duffy, and Mike Clevinger. Paul Skenes already has more career WAA than Morris. WAR exists because we all accept that average players are pretty valuable to teams, and even below-average players can help push a team toward their ultimate goal. In an exercise such as determining who gets to punch his ticket to Cooperstown, however, I don’t think that mediocrity has much value. Washing your hands after going to the bathroom or touching raw chicken is basic hygiene, but I don’t think it should count toward your Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Naturally, I was going to get to deGrom, since his name is in the title of this piece. One reason I find his Hall of Fame case interesting is that it will tell us a lot about how our thinking on what makes a great pitcher has evolved. I wrote about this last year, in a different context. deGrom is nearing 100 wins (he currently has 96), and given his age (he’ll turn 38 in June) and long injury history, he isn’t likely to finish that far above the century mark. And I suspect that there will be some voters who won’t vote for him because of that.

However, imagine that rather than being injured, deGrom was instead just a not-very-good pitcher for 1,000 to 1,500 additional innings. To get a composite for this, I took every starting pitcher since 1980 with between 1,000 and 1,500 innings pitched and an ERA- between 105 and 115, meaning that the group is consistently below average, but safely above replacement level. That gave me 51 pitchers, who averaged a 69-79 record in 211 starts over 1,233 2/3 innings, with an ERA of 4.59 and an ERA- of 109 (ERA+ of 92). Using ZiPS to project the rest of deGrom’s career, let’s look at where the computer expects the right-hander to finish, and how things would look if we grafted those not-very-good numbers onto his:

The win-loss record isn’t impressive, but I strongly suspect that the second line — 64 WAR, approaching 200 wins, and more than 3,000 strikeouts — taken together with deGrom’s highlights would get more Hall of Fame support, both from voters and the general public. That baffles me, however; it’s sort of like looking at deGrom’s impressive contributions and thinking “OK, that’s great, but I think he’d have a better case if he had pitched some more like Jeremy Bonderman or Phil Hughes for a time.”

I am already on record as saying that when I consider awards votes, I tend to place a greater emphasis on being better than average than I do being better than replacement level. But we don’t really have a JAWS equivalent that attempts to weigh peak and career excellence relative to average performance rather than replacement level performance. One important reason that JAWS has had an effect on Hall of Fame voting and our perception of players and their Hall of Fame suitability is that the data both exists and is easy to find. So let’s construct just such a number, and see what it tells us about players that is different from JAWS.

As I mentioned, FanGraphs doesn’t have an easy-to-use WAA measure available, so for our purposes here, I’m making a rough measure of 2.0 WAR per 200 innings pitched or 650 plate appearances. Using FanGraphs WAR since 1901 — I want to avoid the messiness of 19th-century baseball for this exercise — I ran JAWS for every player. I then calculated an AltJAWS, using my constructed FanGraphs WAA.

Below are the top 50 hitters and pitchers by both JAWS and AltJAWS, and how they compare. I’ll note in advance since I’m starting with 1901, poor Cy Young takes a bit of a hit here:

The natural result of using wins above average is to place a greater emphasis on a player’s peak years, so the guys who get big bumps in altJAWS include Sandy Koufax (40 to 25), Johan Santana (90 to 47), Aaron Judge (45 to 28), and Buster Posey (92 to 48).

Now, is this solution better than what we already have? I can’t really answer that question, as the meaning of the Hall of Fame, even with statistics playing a large part, remains a philosophical exercise. Voters obviously consider more than a player’s statistics, advanced or otherwise. But I do think that Jacob deGrom is a great pitcher who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, even if he falls short of the innings and win totals we’re used to. You might not be sold. And it’s OK if we disagree.