JAWS and the 2019 Hall of Fame Ballot: Gary Sheffield
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2015 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.
At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late thirties did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out.
Off the field, Bill James once referred to Sheffield as “an urban legend in his own mind.” Sheffield found controversy before he ever reached the majors through his connection to his uncle, Dwight Gooden. He was drafted and developed by the Brewers, who had no idea how to handle such a volatile player and wound up doing far more harm than good. Small wonder then that from the time he was sent down midway through his rookie season after being accused of faking an injury, he was mistrustful of team management and wanted out. And when he wanted out — of Milwaukee, Los Angeles, or New York — he let you know it, and if a bridge had to burn, so be it; it was Festivus every day for Sheffield, who was always willing to air his grievances.
Later in his career, Sheffield became entangled in the BALCO performance enhancing drug scandal through his relationship with Barry Bonds — a relationship that by all accounts crumbled before he found himself in even deeper water. For all of the drama that surrounded Sheffield, and for all of his rage and outrageousness, he never burned out the way his uncle did, nor did he have trouble finding work.
Even in the context of the high-scoring era in which he played, Sheffield’s offensive numbers look to be Hall of Fame caliber, but voters have found plenty of reasons to overlook him, whether it’s his tangential connection to PEDs, his gift for finding controversy, his poor defensive metrics, or the crowd on the ballot. In his 2015 debut, he received just 11.7% of the vote, and in three years since, he’s actually lost a bit of ground, getting 11.1% in 2018. At this point, he’s more likely to fall off the ballot before his eligibility window expires than he is to reach 75% — a fate that, I must admit, surprises me.
| Player | Career WAR | Peak WAR | JAWS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gary Sheffield | 60.5 | 38.0 | 49.3 |
| Avg. HOF RF | 72.7 | 42.9 | 57.8 |
| H | HR | AVG/OBP/SLG | OPS+ |
| 2,689 | 509 | .292/.393/.514 | 140 |
Born in Tampa on November 18, 1968, Sheffield grew up in the Belmont Heights section of town, a baseball-rich area that from 1981 to 1990 produced seven first- or second-round draft picks, including Sheffield, Derek Bell, Carl Everett, Floyd Youmans, and, most notably, Gooden. Four years older than Sheffield, Gooden was more like a sibling than an uncle, regularly dragging his six-year-old nephew out of bed to face his already-searing fastball, either with the bat or the glove.
Playing for the Belmont Heights Little League All-Stars, Sheffield (along with Bell) was part of the 1980 team that advanced all the way to the finals of the Little League World Series before falling to Taiwan. He went on to star at Hillsborough High, where he pitched — some scouts preferred his 90-mph fastball to his bat — and played third base. In 1986, he was named the Gatorade National Player of the Year, one of many future major league stars to win the award. The Brewers chose him with the sixth pick of that year’s draft, signing him for a $152,000 bonus. In the pages of Sports Illustrated, Peter Gammons noted in a 1989 profile that Sheffield used some of the money to have his initials inlaid in gold on his front teeth and bought a gold Mercedes.
As a 17-year-old, Sheffield tore up the rookie Pioneer League in 1986 (.365/.413/.640 with 15 homers and 14 steals in 57 games) and won both the league’s Player of the Year honors and Baseball America’s Short-Season Player of the Year prize. Trouble found him that winter, however, when he was arrested along with Gooden and three others. While the group was returning home from a University of South Florida basketball game, police officers stopped their cars for driving erratically; the confrontation soon turned physical, with Gooden — who by that point had collected Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards as well as a World Series ring in his three big league seasons — “beaten to the ground with nightsticks and flashlights before being handcuffed and shackled,” according to the New York Times. Sheffield was charged with a pair of third-degree felonies for battery on a police officer and violently resisting arrest; he pleaded no contest and was given two years probation.
The incident began Gooden’s legal troubles — he would test positive for cocaine in spring training just a few months later — which spilled over to Sheffield, who was soon subjected to not-so-random drug testing. Beyond that, his baseball life returned to normal. At 18 in 1987, he earned spots on both the California League and Baseball America All-Star teams. At 19, he hit a combined .327/.395/.579 in hitter-friendly environments at Double-A El Paso and Triple-A Denver, earning a late-season callup. He debuted on Sept. 3, 1988 against the Tigers in a lineup that included future Hall of Famers Paul Molitor and Robin Yount, though he did not make an official plate appearance as a defensive replacement for Dale Sveum. He went 0 for 4 the next day and ran his hitless string to 0 for 11 before homering and collecting a single off Seattle’s Mark Langston on September 9.
While Sheffield opened the 1989 season as the Brewers’ starting shortstop, he struggled both at the plate and in the field, where the team accused him of “indifferent fielding.” He complained of a right foot injury, but when the team’s doctors found nothing, he was demoted to Triple A. After initially refusing to play, he was diagnosed with a broken bone in his right foot and filed a grievance with the players’ union, saying he was unjustly demoted. His trust in the Brewers was shattered, and when he returned to the majors two months later, tensions were ratcheted even higher by a forced move to third base — one that he believed was racially motivated. He finished his tumultuous season hitting just .247/.303/.337 with five homers in 95 games and was 12 runs below average defensively according to Total Zone.
Though angry over what he later claimed was the revocation of a $7 million long-term contract offer from Brewers owner Bud Selig, Sheffield’s bat perked up the following year (.294/.350/.421 with 10 homers) as did his glove (-3 runs via Total Zone), and he finished with 3.1 WAR, a strong showing for an age-21 season. Nonetheless, he was growing unhappier in Milwaukee. In the spring of 1991, he charged general manager Harry Dalton with “ruining this team” — one that slid from 91 wins and a third-place finish in 1987 to seasons of 87, 81 and 74 wins in successive years. Later, he would be accused of causing Dalton’s heart attack. Between his frustration and shoulder and wrist injuries, he hit just .194/.277/.320 in 50 games. Dalton, who had refused to trade Sheffield, was fired at season’s end, so the job of sending him out of town was left to successor Sal Bando, who dealt him to the Padres in exchange for three players in late March.
Sheffield’s Milwaukee headaches (and Milwaukee’s Sheffield headaches) weren’t quite over, however. In June, he told the Los Angeles Times‘ Bob Nightengale:
“The Brewers brought out the hate in me … I was a crazy man,” Sheffield said. “I hated (Dalton) so much that I wanted to hurt the man. I hated everything about that place. I didn’t even want to come to the ballpark. If I missed a ball or something, so what?
“If the official scorer gave me an error that I didn’t think was an error, I’d say, ‘OK, here’s a real error,’ and I’d throw the next ball into the stands on purpose. I did it all.”
Sheffield recanted the statement in a follow-up with Nightengale: “What I said was out of frustration. They want to take something and run with it. Why would a player purposely make mistakes? I’d never do anything to hurt the team. You get paid to play.” Nightengale did add, “Sheffield said the only time he may have made an error purposely out of anger was when he was in the Brewers’ minor-league system.”
Despite his inflammatory words, there’s no evidence to suggest that Sheffield made intentional errors during his time with the Brewers; many (including myself and Tom Verducci) have explored the matter and found nothing to support the idea that he may have done so. As to the possibility that he may have done so in the minors, in a 2012 Sports on Earth profile, Sheffield told Jack Dickey of an incident that happened in Class A in 1987:
Future major leaguer Darryl Hamilton threw a ball that short-hopped Sheffield, and Sheffield took the error. He was upset. He yelled at the scorer. This made his manager, Dave Machemer, mad. The next inning, Sheffield threw a ball from short to first as hard as he could, and it sailed into the stands. Machemer walked out onto the field and pulled Sheffield from the game, accusing him of sabotage.
Sheffield says his manager apologized to him in front of the whole team later that night, but the damage had been done.
Free of Milwaukee, Sheffield broke out with the Padres in 1992, hitting .330/.385/.580; he won the National League batting title, led the league in total bases (323), and ranked second in slugging percentage and OPS+ (168), third in homers (33), fourth in WAR (6.2), and sixth in on-base percentage. He earned All-Star honors for the first time and placed third in the NL MVP voting behind Barry Bonds and Terry Pendleton. But his stay in San Diego wasn’t long: Like ballot-mate Fred McGriff, he was part of owner Tom Werner’s infamous salary purge and was dealt to the expansion Marlins in a five-player trade that brought back Trevor Hoffman.
In Florida, Sheffield’s batting line slipped to .294/.361/.476, his fielding percentage to .899 (the only time it’s truly acceptable to cite fielding percentage is when it reaches the Hobson Line). Nonetheless, the Marlins wanted to keep him around, signing the 24-year-old to a four-year, $22.45 million deal that made him the game’s highest-paid third baseman and its 10th-highest-paid player overall. As a concession to keeping him at the hot corner, the team wrote a clause into his contract allowing him to play pickup basketball (obviously, Aaron Boone didn’t take note).
Between the players’ strike, a bruised left rotator cuff suffered while diving for a ball in 1994, and torn ligaments in his left thumb that required in-season surgery in 1995, Sheffield played in just 150 games over the next two seasons. In October 1995, he sustained a minor gunshot wound (!) to his left shoulder in a failed carjacking while en route to picking up one of his children. Nonetheless, he was healthy in 1996, playing in 161 games, hitting .314/.465/.624 and leading the league in on-base percentage and OPS+ (189); he ranked second in slugging percentage, homers (42), and walks (142, against just 66 strikeouts), and ninth in WAR (5.9), a total suppressed by terrible defense (-16 runs) in right field.
The following spring, the Marlins signed Sheffield to a six-year, $61 million contract, the largest in baseball history at the time. The move was of a piece with the team’s two-year stockpiling of high-paid free agents, a list that included Moises Alou, Bobby Bonilla, Kevin Brown, Alex Fernandez, and Devon White. Under manager Jim Leyland, Florida earned a Wild Card berth and went on to upset the Indians in a thrilling seven-game World Series. Sheffield, dealing with further problems in his surgically-repaired thumb, collected more walks (121) than hits (110) that year en route to a .250/.424/.446 line with 21 homers, but he hit .324/.430/.592 in September and .320/.521/.500 with 20 walks in the postseason.
The champagne had barely dried when owner Wayne Huizenga and general manager Dave Dombrowski began gutting the Fish, trading Alou, White, Jeff Conine and Robb Nen by Thanksgiving, Brown the next month, and Al Leiter in January. They saved their biggest blockbuster until six weeks into the 1998 season. On May 14, Sheffield, Bonilla, catcher Charles Johnson, and two other players were trade to the Dodgers for the face of the franchise, Mike Piazza, as well as Todd Zeile.
Sheffield scorched opponents in Los Angeles’ notorious pitchers’ park, batting .316/.444/.535 in 90 games as a Dodger before an ankle sprain shelved him. Over the next three seasons, he averaged 38 homers per year and annually topped the .300/.400/.500 thresholds, something that only four other Dodgers had done since Dodger Stadium opened in 1962. Alas, he grew disgruntled about money in light of the Dodgers committing $105 million to Brown and $55 million to the less-established Darren Dreifort; Sheffield first agitated for an extension, then for a trade (ironically, Brown dissuaded him). In December 2001, the Dodgers attempted to trade him to the A’s in a deal involving Jermaine Dye; after that fell apart, he was shipped to the Braves for Brian Jordan, Odalis Perez, and a prospect.
Sheffield put up monster numbers in two seasons with the Braves, including a .330/.419/.604, 39-homer season in 2003; his 162 OPS+ and 6.8 WAR both ranked fourth in the league, and he finished third in the MVP voting. Although he helped Atlanta continue its long-running streak of postseason appearances, Sheffield went a combined 3-for-30 in their two Division Series losses.
That winter, at age 35, Sheffield reached free agency for the first time and signed a three-year, $39 million deal with the Yankees. Despite an early-season thumb injury, a muscle tear in his left shoulder, and the backdrop of BALCO (more on which below), he turned in another MVP-caliber season, hitting .290/.393/.534 with 36 homers, 28 of them coming in the 77 games he played in June, July, and August. Ultimately, the torrid September of the Angels’ Vladimir Guerrero — a free-agent alternative to Sheffield the previous winter — kept Sheffield from winning the MVP award; he finished second in the voting, though to be fair, his 4.2 WAR was nowhere near the league’s best. While he had another strong postseason overall (.292/.404/.500 with two homers), he slipped into a 1-for-17 funk just as the Yankees made history by blowing their 3–0 advantage to the Red Sox in the ALCS.
Sheffield put up similar numbers in 2005 (.291/.379/.512 with 34 homers), albeit with less fanfare, then was limited to 39 games in 2006 due to torn ligaments and tendons in his wrist suffered in a collision at first base. Again, he agitated for an extension, but having traded for Bobby Abreu during his absence, the Yankees simply exercised Sheffield’s $13 million option, then dealt him to the Tigers, who obliged by tacking on a two-year, $28 million extension. He started slowly in Detroit, but a three-month hot streak lifted his final line to .265/.378/.462 with 25 homers. Stung by his exile from New York, he accused Yankees manager Joe Torre of treating African-American players harshly and inequitably during an HBO Real Sports segment, but stopped short of calling him racist.
Amid bilateral shoulder woes and an oblique strain, Sheffield slumped to .225/.326/.400 in 2008, his age-39 season. Had he not been under contact and one homer shy of 500, he might have retired, but after the Tigers released him in spring training, he caught on with the Mets and hit a respectable .276/.372/.451 with 10 homers in 100 games.
After sitting out 2010, Sheffield briefly entertained the thought of a comeback with the hometown Rays before announcing his retirement in February 2011. Later that year, he opened shop as an agent, with reliever Jason Grilli his first client.
…
On the surface, Sheffield’s stats (including 2,683 hits and 509 homers) appear Hall-worthy, particularly when accompanied by his exhaustive credentials, such as nine All-Star appearances, three top-three finishes in the MVP voting, a World Series ring, a batting title, and prominent all-time rankings in walks (21st with 1,475, against just 1,171 strikeouts), homers (26th), RBIs (29th), and OPS+ (tied for 47th with Hall of Famers Guerrero, Jess Burkett, and Duke Snide (7,000 plate appearance minimum)). He scores 158 (“a virtual cinch”) on the Bill James Hall of Fame Monitor. His 561 batting runs above average — the offensive component of baseball-reference.com’s version of WAR, adjusted for ballpark and era — rank 29th all-time, higher than numerous no-doubt Hall of Famers such as Mike Schmidt, Rickey Henderson, Eddie Mathews, Willie McCovey, Harmon Killebrew, Reggie Jackson, and Carl Yastrzemski.
The bad news is that his defensive numbers — a mix between Total Zone and (from 2003 onward) Defensive Runs Saved — are all-time awful. His -195 fielding runs rank as the second-lowest total of all-time, ahead of only Derek Jeter (-243). That whopping total suppresses Sheffield’s career and peak WARs, as well as his JAWS: His 60.5 career WAR ranks 18th among right fielders, 12.2 wins below the average Hall of Famer, and his 37.9 peak WAR and 49.0 JAWS both rank 23rd; the former is 4.9 wins below the standard, the latter is 8.5 points below. His career WAR is higher than 12 of the 25 enshrined right fielders, his peak and JAWS higher than just 11 of 25. The shape of Sheffield’s line strongly resembles that of Hall of Famer Dave Winfield (63.8/37.7/50.8), a 12-time All-Star who put up huge counting stats (3,110 hits, 465 homers) but with defense (-91 runs) that bumps him below the bar on all three fronts.
Is that a Hall of Famer? I’m troubled by the extent to which those outlying defensive stats — largely estimates from the pre-batted-ball-type era — nuke Sheffield’s value. That goes double when they’re compared to his defensive numbers via alternative methodologies. Baseball Prospectus‘ Fielding Runs Above Average pegs him at -90 runs for his career, and Michael Humphreys’s Defensive Regression Analysis, which is available at the Baseball Gauge and has been incorporated into the sabermetric component of the past five years’ Gold Glove voting, puts him around -108 runs. Both are bad, but neither is an outlier, and such figures push him much closer to the JAWS line for right fielders; my back-of-the-envelope estimate using DRA’s defensive numbers lifts him to 69.1/40.6/54.9, 2.9 points below the JAWS standard.
Beyond that, of course, is the PED issue. In the October 11, 2004 issue of SI, Verducci reported that Sheffield told the grand jury that he was introduced to BALCO by Bonds, a casual friend who invited him to train with him in San Francisco before the 2002 season. Trainer Greg Anderson gave Sheffield what he believed to be a cortisone-type cream to rub on his surgical scars, but it was in fact the testosterone-based steroid known as “the cream.” He was not told it was an illegal steroid:
“I put it on my legs and thought nothing of it. I kept it in my locker. The trainer saw my cream,” he told the grand jury. Though he soon broke off ties with Bonds due to an unrelated matter, he used the cream during the season, a relatively down one in which he hit a representative .307/.404/.512 but with just 25 homers. He was shocked to find out it was a steroid.
In 2014, Verducci — whose stance on PEDs with regards to Hall of Fame candidates is much more hard line than my own — revisited Sheffield’s unique situation:
Sheffield is the only star I know who, as an active player, without provocation admitted to using steroids; he did so in a 2004 SI story I wrote. Why would he make an admission? Because, he told me, he had testified under oath that he had been duped into using them.
Sheffield said he told the BALCO grand jury the previous year that Bonds arranged for him to use “the cream,” “the clear” and “red beans,” which prosecutors identified as steroid pills from Mexico. Sheffield, however, said he was told the substances were legal arthritic balms or nutritional supplements.… When he later learned that the BALCO products were steroids, he told me, “I was mad. I want everybody to be on an even playing field.”
That’s it; we have no evidence that ties Sheffield to steroids other than those several weeks before the 2002 season when Sheffield lived at Bonds’s home. Even during that 2002 season, when players were resisting the idea of steroid testing, Sheffield spoke out in favor of it [see here], saying, “I would like to see testing. I mean you see how much guys are using it. Unless you’ve got something to hide, you won’t mind testing, right?”
My own stance with regards to PED-linked candidates — which I spelled out annually at SI.com and will elaborate on further in the context of my Bonds and Roger Clemens profiles — is to distinguish between what came before the introduction of testing and suspensions in 2004 (though the initial effort was so weak that the first suspensions didn’t come until a year later) and what came afterwards. The PED problem was the result of a complete institutional failure that implicated the commissioner, the owners, the players’ union, and even reporters (don’t forget, the guy who broke the news about androstenedione in Mark McGwire’s locker was initially ostracized within the industry). If baseball couldn’t punish users during that “Wild West Era,” then voters shouldn’t be applying a retroactive morality. Which isn’t to say that they need to rubber stamp every alleged user, but those alleged users should be viewed in context.
Thus, I don’t see Sheffield’s BALCO link as disqualifying, and having investigated his throwing error issue, I’m satisfied that it’s no reason to strike him down either, though Brewers fans will never let the matter rest, and some voters haven’t done their homework. And if I’m not ruling out voting for candidates such as Bonds and Clemens on the grounds of their prickly natures, I’m in no position to hold Sheffield’s penchant for being an occasional pain in the ass against him — the man showed up to play and played well enough to establish himself as one of the best hitters in the game’s history. In the hot-off-the-press 2019 Bill James Handbook, James wrote of Sheffield:
“In all the years that I have been with the Red Sox, 16 years now, there has never been a player the Red Sox were more concerned about, as an opponent, than Gary Sheffield. Sheffield was a dynamite hitter and a fierce competitor… When he was in the game, you knew exactly where he was from the first pitch to the last pitch. He conceded nothing; he was looking not only to beat you, but to embarrass you. He was on the highest level.”
Sheffield’s subpar JAWS score and the ballot’s current crowd leaves him short of an automatic vote, but the strength of his offense, which is far easier to measure than defense, leaves me open to considering him. (I’ll concede that he was also a personal favorite, as my voluminous writing on the subject attests.) Even without recommending him for an immediate vote, I would hate to see him fall off the ballot before the traffic thins out.
For one reason or another, voters haven’t found room for him on their ballots. The 13.3% he received in 2017 was his highest share in four years on the ballot, and you don’t need my fancy stats to tell you that getting 11.1% the year after that is no good. Since 1966, when voters returned to annual balloting, Bert Blyleven (23.5%) had the lowest year-four share of any candidate eventually elected by the writers, and he needed 14 years to get in, time Sheffield doesn’t have given the truncation of eligibility from 15 years to 10. Several post-1966 candidates (Orlando Cepeda, Bobby Doerr, George Kell, Bill Mazeroski, Ron Santo, and Alan Trammell) have polled below 20% in year four and eventually gained entry via the small committees. It took a long time for all of them, but for Sheffield, that may be his best shot.
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.
Wonder how many voters chose not to vote for Rolen and Jones because they didn’t think defense was important enough, then chose not to vote for Sheffield because they didn’t think his defense was good enough?
Gary Sheffield was a one-man wrecking crew on everything, wasn’t he? What a fantastic story of a player. The guy was just so aggressive about everything, but you never get the sense he was really a bad guy. And he just destroyed the baseball.
This is the first article in the series that changed my mind enough to add/subtract someone on my FG ballot. I’m now in on Sheffield; the alternative defensive methodologies make me think that maybe he wasn’t the single worst fielder of all time. Okay, he probably is actually the worst defender of all time, but there is some doubt, and his on-field performance is actually pretty comparable to Edgar Martinez. I think he’s close enough to the border for me to put him in, and I’m also pretty satisfied with the explanation for the steroid stuff; I usually consider it totally disqualifying because going to that level to cheat shouldn’t be rewarded in any form, but I think he’s made it pretty clear what happened.
That said, if there’s ever a logjam on the ballot, he’s almost certainly the first one off it. It’s hard to totally overlook how abysmal he was on defense.
The Martinez comparison is interesting. Should a player be penalized for being asked to do something that he’s not capable of doing?
Looking at Baseball Reference, Sheffield routinely was at -20 or fewer runs between Rfield and Rpos. A full time DH, on the other hand, normally gets about -14 runs via Rpos. So playing the field cost Sheffield roughly 0.5 WAR per season, or about 5-10 WAR over the course of his career.
I don’t have an answer to my questions above but I do think it’s worth thinking abut/debating.
While I appreciate the upvotes, I was mostly interested in sparking a debate/conversation. Would love to hear people’s thoughts on the question that I posed.
jay,
I say yes, a player can be penalized for being asked to do things he is not capable of doing when it actually hurts his team. This is especially the case in fielding, which is more a matter of practice, repetition and applied effort. Never being able to learn the proper route to a fly ball should result in a value penalty to reflect the extra hits gin the opposition.
However, why does not playing the field result in such a large penalty? There are not extra hits granted the opposition sitting on the bench. Less value than a good fielder and good hitter playing the field, but that is reflected as the good hitter-only would not get any extra dWAR. Why such a huge dWAR negative though?
If Sheffield was (predominantly) a DH with the same numbers and a David Ortiz-like narrative then he would probably have more going for him BBWAA-wise.
And the Yankees didn’t hide him at DH. In 2004 they played Ruben Sierra and stuff at DH. (In 2005 Jason Giambi which is hard to argue with.) The Tigers later DHed him.
I can’t with a straight face say I’m confident the 2004 Yankees made eyes-open decisions about defense… but Ruben Sierra. By our numbers you could have shifted Sheffield to DH and played some fourth outfielder to hit like Ruben Sierra (sorry Ruben) and come out well ahead.
I hope you get around to reading this. It has been two days since I visited the site but I know you read some of my ideas. This matches my ideas about penalizing a full time DH for not doing something he either isn’t capable of doing or is in a a situation in which there is somebody better. Much of my frustration comes the existing defensive metrics which fail to provide any consistent content. The various competing systems do only one thing and that is compete. There is so much that makes me doubt their efficacy. I am of the belief that defense is a stable skill until Father Time takes over. When I see supposedly top defenders like Grandal and Maldonado doing their turn and run back to the screen act with stupifying regularity in this year’s post-season i wonder where these numbers come from. As long as there is a DH it is totally ridiculous to penalize the player in that position for not playing in the field. I can fully understand not giving him credit, that is simple logic, but to say he is less valuable and worth fewer runs because of it is absurd. It is a different story in the NL where a klutz like Rhys Hoskins actually negates a fair amount of his value by being obligated to do his statue performance in LF but how can anybody compare that with a DH. The best comparison I could make is to compare Mike Trout with a mythical player. Let us call him J. Bradley Martinez III and see if Trout is better than this mythical magician who hits with power and consistency, plays Gold Glove defense, has a much better arm than Trout and steals base at a 90% plus clip. But wait, he already exists. In essence that is what the Red Sox have. It also makes me wonder every AL team does not see the value in a great DH and take the best hitter they can find, preferably one who adds value only with his bat, and make him a permanent DH. While more teams are doing so, it is not universal and many players who are ill-suited to play the field are still sent out there so the team can keep that 13th pitcher with a 6.75 FIP on the roster.
Yeah, I hadn’t seen those alternative defensive numbers before. That’s a bunch of wins.
And honestly I have zero idea how the various pre-batted-ball defensive metrics work, and how I should think of their error bars and their possible biases.
I mean, UZR and DRS have their own cautions in interpretation, and those know where the ball went. Before the batted ball epoch, we don’t even know where the ball was going, and yet we tell fielders have many they should have caught! We sling around these fielding numbers and fold them into our WAR… I feel a little dirty.
I tuned baseball out after the strike (until ‘98 – I’m a lifelong Cubs fan), but the more I hear about Gary Sheffield, the more I love this guy. There are few players who I would go on YouTube to watch highlights, he’s one of them. He was ahead of his time, IMO; in more ways then one.
It’s not worth mentioning that he said some controversial things about Latino ballplayers being easier to control than African-American ballplayers?
Maybe you think this was overblown and shouldn’t be a factor in his Hall of Fame case, but it was a pretty big story, and voters can’t just erase this from their memories, even if they wanted to.
If you start excluding elite baseball players from the HOF for expressed racism? Man, you are a small hall kind of guy!
The papers had little incentive to make this clear, but the man was talking about structural power imbalances. He was saying that guys who come out of extreme poverty and/or military rule, and whose U.S. visa ends if they get cut from the team, they can’t afford to make waves. Compared to a U.S. citizen who’s got some civil rights movement behind them.
> “They have more to lose than we do. You can send them back across the island. You can’t send us back. We’re already here.”
> “So there are a lot of factors involved you look at. I’m not saying you can tell them what to do and it’ll be ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir.’ I’m just saying from a grand scheme of things.”
He sees how power operates. So this gets turned into an attack on him and a catfight between low-power people, while power slips out and laughs all the way to the bank.
Concur. He was saying that players without beyond-work (professional baseball in this case) support networks are liable to be more afraid to rock the boat. It’s a power structure that systemically takes advantage of people.
I think he’s probably #11-12 on my ballot. Which is what I suspect a lot of 10-player voters are thinking.
Very well written article Jay, perhaps the best argument for a player I would not automatically vote for (if I had a vote)with the possible exception of Rolen.
Unlike Rolen though, you did not change my mind, as to me the PED admission is enough to disqualify him.
This one boils down to a referendum on steroids and personal conduct. Sheffield’s numbers are inarguably HoF caliber. However, he was a jerk and almost certainly a PED user. However, while Bagwell and Piazza fit the second category, they don’t fit the first. And, I guess that’s the difference.
Great write up. Orlando Cepeda is actually a pretty good comp, another mostly hit, bad fielding player. Sheffield did steal 253 bases and also was positive baserunning scores, so he contributed in that way as well. He is a legit borderline candidate, I could go either way with him.
Why was Sheffield so bad on defense? He seemed like an athletic ballplayer. He ran well in his prime. Was it just lack or range, poor arm, bad reads, inflexibly body, etc.?
Sheffield was an incredible ballplayer. A real victim of the rule that voters can only vote for ten players on a ridiculously overstuffed ballot.
In 2006, when Sheffield came back from injury but had nowhere to play, they moved him to first base. He was awful. When people tell me that you can move anyone to first base and get adequate defense, Sheffield is the example that reminds me that it ain’t necessarily so. In Sheffield’s defense (pun!) he was asked to play a position he had never played before after returning from injury during the season, but, yes, there are players who you cannot just shift to first base and figure that solves any and all defensive woes.
So basically you are saying that Sheffield was this generation’s Dick Allen, except that Gary’s grumbles are much better documented and Dick was better in the field.
Gary Sheffield could be thought of as a longer-lasting but poor-man’s version of Dick Allen. They had the same combination of great hitting and bad defense, but Dick Allen was a better hitter and fielder over 3500 fewer PAs. And Gary Sheffield, although somewhat mistreated at times, never had to deal with fans throwing batteries at him or a parade to protest a black player in town. He was just angry.
If Sheffield had adequate time to prepare for first base, he surely would have been better at the position. Just like how I am optimistic that Wil Myers can be a better 3b in 2019 than he was in 2018.
Sheffield seems like the batter version of Omar Vizquel: super at one thing, pretty atrocious at the other thing ballplayers are supposed to do. I don’t think either player is an all-time great. If you’re going to be a one-facet player, then unless you’re the absolute best of your lifetime (that’s Edgar Martinez for the bat-only players), you are asking a lot of voters to ignore the other parts of your game that you neglected or simply didn’t have the talent to do competently. And it’s just like Bill James to embarrass himself with a Jim-Rice-like bunch of crap like “errybody wuz skeered!!” of Sheffield. Is that a criterion now? Mmmmmk.
With Jim Rice in the Hall of Fame, though, it becomes damn difficult to find an argument to keep Sheff out.
If you think that Sheffield deserves to be enshrined, enshrine him. If you think that he doesn’t, don’t.
But don’t enshrine him just because someone else who doesn’t deserve to be enshrined was enshrined. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Oh, the bigger issue with his “bat-only” argument is definitely that Sheffield was a better, more accomplished hitter than Martinez during Martinez’s time as a regular, from 1990-2004.
He beats him in total offense produced (526.6 to 502.3) and put up a 150 wRC+ during that stretch, to Edgar’s 149.
Sheffield’s rate stats decline when you consider the years he added on each side…but they add another 5 wins of offensive value, even before you factor in aspects like his having been a positive in UBR through age 38, while Edgar was atrocious in the sample we have.
I don’t know that 20 batting runs over 15 years and a single-point advantage is definitive proof of his superiority, though. Appears that they’re very comparable hitters over that time.
It is, however, more than enough to illustrate how laughably incorrect it is to label Martinez “the absolute best…for bat-only players,” when Sheffield’s bat not only beats his by 7.5 wins over their careers, but also when adjusted for just Edgar’s career.
I think both belong in the Hall.
Just wanted to underscore the fact that Josh needs to learn an awful lot more about baseball before the next time he tries to be condescending.
He’s the modern Dick Allen. Controversial as hell, but, a great ball player. Unlike Allen, he played on a bunch of winning teams. I’m a Tiger fan & I will say that 3 month hot stretch that Jay alluded to was probably the best prolonged stretch I’ve ever seen from a Tiger..yes, including Miggy. Sheff did it all those 3 months, OPS over 1.000 & stole over 20 bases that year, too.
One point I’ll add is that stretch came from May thru July. In early August, Leyland played him in RF for a game & he collided with Placido Polanco. Polanco was done for the year (& so were the Tigers, who were in 1st place) & Sheff tried to play thru his shoulder injury, but, hit under .200 the last 2 months with little power. He never DID fully recover from that injury, as his stats took a big dip the next year.
I think if he had never played the field that night & gotten hurt, he would have tacked on enough #’s to probably end up with 550 or more HR’s, maybe even 3000 hits. Even in 2009, he had almost as many BB as K’s..his power never fully came back from the injury.
Looking at Sheffield’s player page, I’m struck that it still features a nearly decade-old update from Rotowire about his status going forward. There’s something almost poetic about Sheffield having long-ago retired to embark on his post-baseball life, while here on Fangraphs he will forever just be “bothered by his lower back and . . . limited to pinch-hit duty for the foreseeable future.”
My player page would say the same; still available to pinch-hit if needed! Haven’t gotten many calls lately…
Edgar Martinez w RC+ is only 5 points higher than Sheffield’s. And Sheffield stole 250 bases and played the field. I don’t see how anyone can put Edgar over Sheffield given that Edgar’s bat is his entire case and Sheffield has other aspects to his game. Sheffield also hung around too long. His hitting numbers at this peak are the same as Edgar’s if you take off his last four years.
Sheffield is a hard guy to rate because his personality was so polarizing. The type of player you hate when he plays against you, but love when he’s on your side. He was a first class whiner, complainer and used charges of racism every time he didn’t get his way. The best way to put it might be he stayed immature, angry and petulant even while he became very rich for blasting baseballs. The ideal outcome would be for him to play on a bad team in the other league. In the Hall? No, although he’s a helluva better player than Jim Rice.
The comments on the forum in the heart attack link are hilarious.
The comments on the forum in the heart attack link are pretty much how everyone I know feels about Gary Sheffield, who could say and do things that would make Albert Belle look good.
The Derek Jeter comp is an interesting one.
Sheffield: -89 TZ, -46 UZR –> 135 runs below average for his career
Jeter: -71 TZ, -66 UZR –> 137 runs below average for his career
Jeter’s career-high wRC+ was 156. Sheffield had five seasons with a wRC+ above 156 (and another at 154).
Not saying it’s wrong that Jeter will sail into the HOF nearly unanimously, but it’s interesting to look at the two side-by-side.
Five gold gloves for Jeter. Five. I can’t even type that with a straight face.
Pasta diving jeter
Main difference is the 15 run adjustment between RF and SS (5 between 3B and SS).
I have no clue how these defensive metrics work, so please help me out here. Does your comment mean that Jeter was actually much worse than Sheffield and is rescued by the run adjustment for playing SS? Or, is it the other way around?
Other way around – he’s providing the unadjusted numbers.
Adjusted, Gary was worth -301 runs, defensively. Jeter was worth -20.
That swing though. Sheff was not always pleasant to watch, but every hack he took at the plate was pure entertainment.
As a braves fan, i love gary sheffield. That 2003 team( which still has the highest wRC+ for a NL team since 2003, at 119) was a blast to watch. I am not naive enough to know there was probably steroids on that team (see giles and lopez hiting a combined 64 homeruns). Still, that team was so much fun and by far the best hitting team during their 15 year division run
Gary Sheffield seems like a player whose support for the Hall will increase over time. He falls into the Larry Walker/Edgar Martinez bucket as a player whose career is more appreciated as time passes.
Even by the defensive measure that think Sheffield was awful defensively, Jeter was worse, and Sheffield was a better hitter than Jeter. Jeter is a lock for the HOF, maybe first-ballot; by that, Sheffield should absolutely be in the HOF. Prickliness in regards to management is a tiny complaint compared to, say, Cap Anson, Ty Cobb, or more recently Curt Schilling’s ‘indiscretions’, if we may sanitize them so, and it sounds like his beef with Milwaukee’s front office was not undeserved. Vote him in.
Still though, Jeter was a ‘shortstop’ and Sheffield was… I’ve got to look for video of him coming up as a shortstop.
The positional gap between bad SS and bad corner OF is large.
Gary Sheffield career defensive runs: -300.9
Derek Jeter career defensive runs: -19.8
Derek Jeter was worse compared to an average shortstop than Sheffield was compared to an average right fielder. But the whole point of positional adjustments is to balance out for that. That is why Sheffield is borderline and Jeter is automatic.
Sheffield would be 10-15 wins better than Edgar if he had the luxury of DHing and wasn’t dragged down by -25 defense the last third of his career. The SABR push for Edgar and not Sheff shows that they aren’t thinking critically and are just as narrative based as the people they rally against
The Edgar comparison is interesting. If Sheffield had been a DH instead of bad fielding OF, he might have a better chance, The fact is that JAWS systematically disadvantages Sheffield in ways that Edgar doesn’t face. 1st, Edgar’s defense hurts him less than Sheffield’s hurts. It makes no sense that a DH should have less of a defensive penalty than a bad fielding OF. 2nd, Edgar gets compared to 3B while Sheffield gets compared to RF. The elite 3B are Boggs and Schmidt (no slouches) who are nothing compared to Aaron and Ruth. Edgar and Sheffield played similar numbers of games at 3B.
I watched both and have looked at the numbers. I think Sheffield was better. The fact that he was outspoken endears him to me.
Sheffield provided 7.5 more offensive Wins than Edgar, over their careers.
Sheffield??? No no no no no no no no. Never. Not even if Hell freezes over.
He could hit, but there’s a character clause and he never had any.
He had plenty of character, unless you mean to say that he never had the kind of character that you like.
He was one angry dude. I remember him when he first came up. Had a huge chip on his shoulder then, and felt he was constantly being disrespected. The misdiagnosed foot injury probably didn’t help things in MIL, but he was a similar guy in all his other stops. No filter and just totally angry at everyone and everything.
That said, unless you don’t buy his story about BALCO (which would be your right) he never cheated, his only run-in with the law was resisting arrest during a traffic stop, he has never been accused of abusing anyone…a lot of sound and fury, but he was never in trouble.
So it’s not so much that he didn’t have any character. It’s that he was a huuuuuge pain in the ass. I don’t think that’s the same thing.
Now that Harold Baines is in, Sheff is a no-brainer.
The new bar is very low. Shall we discuss the merits of Bret Boone next?
In 2010 I wanted him to keep playing. He could still hit, but his defense was horrendous. He really proved himself with the 2009 Mets, and should have gotten an AL job. He could have reached 2800 hits and climbed further into the 500 HR club. I always liked older players, and Sheffield could have played his 23rd season and his 4th decade. But he decided to retire as the offers weren’t juicy enough. I also wanted Kenny Lofton to keep playing to bolster his HOF case.
Accursed PEDs have screwed up the HOF!!! If they had never been a factor to consider, we would have happily inducted Bonds, Sosa, Clemens, McGwire, Manny, ARod, Palmeiro, and Sheffield. We would fondly remember Manny for his goofy ways, admire McGwire for both his character and excellence, and be discussing whether Clemens and Bonds were the greatest players of all time. Instead, we are stuck with this mess.
I am not advocating voting one way or another on these men here (I am ambivalent personally). Instead I am lamenting the specter of PEDs, which has peed all over the era and messed up a big part of the fun of following baseball — comparing all-time greats.
“If baseball couldn’t punish users during that “Wild West Era,” then voters shouldn’t be applying a retroactive morality.”
This makes excellent sense. The trouble is, it isn’t true that baseball couldn’t punish users. Baseball could, and baseball did punish quite a few players who violated the 1971 Drug Policy Memo of Bowie Kuhn. Specifically, in the 1980’s roughly two dozen players were disciplined by then-Commissioner Peter Ueberroth for recreational drug use under the guidelines of Kuhn’s Drug Policy Memo — guidelines that explicitly proscribed ANY drug use that violated state or federal law, and therefore obviously included anabolic steroid use without a prescription.
The punishments meted out to the baseball’s illegal drug users of the 1980’s were sometimes upheld in full, sometimes reduced on appeal, and in just one instance overturned in its entirety (Fergie Jenkins’ absurd one-year suspension).