Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 1/17/2019

Jay Jaffe: Hey gang, it’s my staycation week but a short window opened up in my schedule and I decided to take some questions. So let’s talk some baseball!

Mat: Jayson Stark recently posted his HOF ballot. With his voting for a Closer, DH, Coors players, and PED suspected players, do you believe all HOF barriers have now been broken?

Jay Jaffe: People have been voting for various categories within your list for a long time. We’ve had relievers in the Hall since Hoyt Wilhelm was elected in 1985, with five getting in from 2004 (Eckersley) onward. DH’s — depends on your definition but Paul Molitor (elected 2003) had a plurality of his games there, and now . PEDs, let’s not be naive, there are already users enshrined. And people — not a lot of them, but some — have been voting for Larry Walker since he hit the ballot in 2011.

Now, whether we get our first Coors player in is another matter…

B: Is Joey Votto a hall of famer if he retires today?

Jay Jaffe: From a JAWS standpoint, he’s close enough that I would vote for him — above on peak ( 58.8/46.1/52.4 for him,    66.8/42.7/54.7 for the standards) but with only 1,729 hits, he’d still have the Rule of 2,000 resistance to overcome, and right now that’s pretty daunting.

Alec: Today is his birthday. Do you think Don Zimmer should be in the Hall Of fame as a ambassador of the game?

Jay Jaffe: Well, what you’re talking about I guess would fall under the Buck O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Award, which is given out at most once every three years, and not a full-fledged membership (not unlike the distinction between Frick and Spink winners and the plaques for players, managers, execs and umps). I can imagine it’s a pretty long line of people who deserve such an honor, and Zim would seem to be among them.

Jay Jaffe: God, I do miss the Zim. The death of Mel Stottlemyre this past week really served to remind what a great staff those late 1990s teams had under Joe Torre. Stottlemyre, Zimmer and Tony Cloninger are all on the great bench in the sky.

Roger: Think David Cone has a shot at the Hall on some sort of future Veteran’s Committee?  He seems like a guy who was victimized by his low career wins total, but who might get more support from people these days who are not as concerned with the wins stat.

Jay Jaffe: Down the road, yes, I think he might have a chance. But it’s worth remembering tha this career was a relatively short one, with 2898.2 innings. Roy Halladay will be just the second starter since Koufax to be elected with fewer than 3,000 innings (Pedro Martinez the first).

Alec: Is Clayton Kershaw a first ballot hall of Famer if he retires today or next season?

Jay Jaffe: Yeah. Obviously the career totals aren’t there, and maybe not the post-death boost (as in the case of Halladay), but the dominance as outlined by the three Cy Youngs and all the black ink is pretty clear.

Ryan: Kinsler or Pedroia if you had to pick one for the Hall of Fame?

Jay Jaffe: Kinsler is one notch ahead of Pedroia in the JAWS rankings (https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/jaws_2B.shtml) but Pedroia has the higher peak (57.3/40.4/48.9 for Ian, 52.1/42.4/47.3 for Dustin), the MVP and the rings. He’s a better candidate.

Alec: Also who are some 2020 first timers beside Jeter than Will probably be Hall Of famers?

Jay Jaffe: Of next years first-time eligibles, nobody besides Jeter is even gonna make it to a 2nd year, I don’t think. The next three guys in order as far as JAWS is concerned are Bobby Abreu (whom I love but was massively underrated during his career and isn’t strong enough with respect to the advanced stats), Jason Giambi (BALCO) and Cliff Lee (Roy Oswalt with a Cy Young).

PM: Which of the three portions of your JAWS triple slash do you feel to be most important? Or say if a player only eclipsed one which do prefer it be to earn your vote

Jay Jaffe: I used to be tilted more towards the career WAR side, now I’m more towards the peak side. If a guy has a peak score above the standard, plus circumstances that shortened his career — guys like Dick Allen and Johan Santana — I’d vote for them, assuming I could fit them on my ballot. I couldn’t really fit the latter last year, though.

Captain ACAB: Who is the best player who never got to the second ballot?

Jay Jaffe: I more or less answered this via Twitter recently (

) but we can omit Santo because he’s in and he did in fact get back onto the writers’ ballot even before that). By bWAR: Lou Whitaker 75.1 WAR, Bobby Grich 71.1, Kevin Brown 68.4, Kenny Lofton 68.3, Buddy Bell 66.3.

Brian: At this point in the offseason, what kind of contract do you see Marwin Gonzalez getting?

Jay Jaffe: He deserves more but I think he’ll get an AAV around $12 million, as Lowrie and LeMahieu did. It should be for 4 years given his age but maybe he has to settle. Who the hell knows anymore in this frozen-ass market?

Tyler: Was Roy Oswalt was better than David Cone?  His peak looks a lot better.

Jay Jaffe: Via my system, Cone has Oswalt beat across the board (career/peak/JAWS) in part because he’s got about 700 more innings. He ranks 63rd in JAWS to Oswalt’s 102nd (see https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/jaws_P.shtml). He was much more of a strikeout pitcher than Oswalt (which shows up there) and outside of that, won a Cy Young and had a much greater postseason presence. No question in my mind Coney is the better candidate, though I think both had Hall-caliber talent.

Ben: Is it at all possible that most of us, myself included, have misjudged Machado’s market value?  Should he really get a contract that is TWICE AS BIG as Heyward’s?

Jay Jaffe: I don’t think what we’re seeing is a true reflection of Machado’s market value so much as it is a reflection of a broken system. Which, you could argue, means that his value in *this market* is something we’ve been overestimating and misjudging, but I think there’s a fair bit of bad faith involved in the way this market has failed to materialize and the curious, simultaneous non-spending of the Yankees/Dodgers/Cubs and other clubs.

aka22: Please help me understand the mind of anyone who would vote for Vizquel over Andruw?

Jay Jaffe: Longevity. It’s that simple. One guy got close to 3,000 hits even as a bad hitter, the other guy fell short of 2,000 even while being a pretty decent one.

Kevin: As a former Youth Service League player as a teenager, I’m a bit bias in hoping that Manny Ramirez makes the HOF, even being a Yankees fan. I know PED usage is his biggest negative, but his defense was also horrific. I noticed though that (at least by fWAR), he would he been much more valuable solely as a DH, even with the worse positional adjustment. Should scenarios like this be taken into account when judging a player for the HOF, when he could have had a higher WAR and clearly more valuable, but the position he played was out of his control?

Jay Jaffe: It’s worth thinking about but one thing to note with regards to Manny is that in terms of the way bWAR is constructed, it’s probably a wash. Take a look at his defensive WAR numbers (that’s positional adjustment + fielding metric): -21.7 for a career of 9,774 PA, of which only 14% were as a DH. David Ortiz, in a career of 10,091 PA, of which 87% were as a DH, had a defensive WAR of -20.9. Not much difference.

Where it might be worth re-thinking a bit more is with regards to Sheffield (-27.7 dWAR in 10,947 PA), who got moved all around the diamond and probably should have been moved out of the infield more quickly. But as he played for NL teams for the vast majority of his career, one really has to reimagine his path, and that’s harder to do.

Syndergaardians of the Galaxy : Do you ever look at Adam Darrowski’s “Hall of Stats”? I’ve for years thought that Jerry Koosman has been unfairly completely ignored in HoF discussions, but I see that he’s in the HoS.

Jay Jaffe: Adam does very nice work, and I check his stuff out when I can. I think Koosman’s underrated but I don’t see him as being a better candidate — including the things that go beyond where bWAR and JAWS can take us — than Tommy John (80th in JAWS) or Jim Kaat (110th, where Koos is 101st). Both of those guys have Hall of Fame Monitor scores well above 100, where he’s at 59, for example.

Cove Dweller: Does Marvin Miller have a better chance than Pete Rose of getting into the HOF?

Jay Jaffe: Yes, because he’s the only one in that sentence who is actually eligible.

Russell : Will the Fangraphs HoF voting come out at a similar time to the actual results? Will you have counts for all of the vote combinations as I would love to see how many voted the same as me.

Jay Jaffe: I have the info and it will run on the morning of the announcement. Not sure how granular I’ll be able to get, but with this heads up, i now have a reminder to check in with Sean Dolinar and see what kind of breakdowns he can provide.

andy: is the kiddo in daycare while you staycation?

Jay Jaffe: Kiddo is in day care MWF, I take her Tuesdays and my sainted mother-in-law (the great Paula Span, of NY Times aging and wellness coverage “fame”) comes in from Montclair, NJ to take her on Thursdays.

Jeff: What do you think a guy like Craig Kimbrel has to do to make the HOF one day?

Jay Jaffe: Reverse what appear to be the early signs of decline from total f’ing dominance. I wrote about him and Kenley Jansen (to whom the same concerns apply) at the outset of the World Series. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/world-series-offers-rare-meeting-of-potent…

Andujar: Can he improve his defense? Jeter did (before he then got old) once he actually focused on it. (also, Kinsler has a ring now, replacing Pedroia and playing poorly for BOS)

Jay Jaffe: Whoops, good point on Kinsler’s ring (but Pedroia also gets one and had only slightly less impact).

Yes, I do think Andujar can improve, but the question is what kind of odds to give that. The quality of his arm isn’t in question (it’s a 70) but he needs to get better with his range and footwork. There’s a lot of work to be done.

Donnie Baseball: Is longevity the only reason Don Mattingly isn’t in the hall of fame? He was an offensive force for the yankees for a 4-5 year stretch. UNDERRATED.

Jay Jaffe: Mattingly only had four seasons worth 5.0 WAR, so even his peak is pretty short/low relative to the average HOF 1B (35.7 vs. 42.7). I think he needed to maintain that 1984-1989 stretch of excellence for longer or crater less in order to get more support.

Jeff: Do you believe catchers are underrated by WAR of any kind? If so are there guys who have more serious HOF cases than maybe talked about? I can’t come up with a specific name

Jay Jaffe: I think that if we had a framing-inclusive WAR you’d see seasonal totals much closer to those at other positions, with pitchers and position players both giving up a bit of value relative to them  (the .294 winning percentage definition of WAR relies on the distribution of I think 1,000 WAR around the league). I’ve written about this a few times but I think such a methodology strengthens Yadier Molina’s case (see https://blogs.fangraphs.com/yadier-molinas-climb-towards-cooperstown/) and brings McCann and Martin into the edges of the picture, though both of those guys appear to be done as productive full-time regulars and like salmon swimming upstream on the final legs of their journeys have returned to their original teams.

Brock: Your a WAR expert, is having position flexibility (like Zobrist and Holt) factor into a player’s WAR?

Jay Jaffe: positional flexibility is really tough to capture directly in WAR. I think a lot of what it comes down to is less playing time given to replacement-level teammates. If Zobrist is your secondary 2B and your secondary RF in the kind of two-position platoon he was in as a Ray, chances are there are fewer PA and chances going to true replacement-level players.

Jay Jaffe: And that’s not something that’s really going to boost a guy’s WAR noticeably, though it does help from a team-building standpoint

Jeff: Speaking of frozen-ass markets, when is the revolution? I’d like to sign up

Jay Jaffe: This CBA runs through the 2021 season, so any changes that take place within the industry are likely to be relatively minimal until then.

Matt : Who would be better in the Mets outfield, Jeff McNeil or Bryce Harper?

Jay Jaffe: Harper. Not even close.

Pat’s Bat: Does Pete Rose have to wait until he’s dead or will he never get in?

Jay Jaffe: Given his lack of penitence, I can’t see a strong argument to reverse his lifetime ban even postmortem. Never is a long time but I doubt he gets in within my lifetime.

Jeff: Who is the best not quite HOF worthy switch hitter of all time? Bernie Williams?

Jay Jaffe: Here are the bWAR rankings for switch-hitters. http://bbref.com/pi/shareit/y4fMn  Bernie’s defense was bad enough  (-139 runs via B-Ref) to suppress his WAR. I think the top non-HOF guy is Reggie Smith (64.6 WAR) – ahead of him are Mantle, Chipper, George Davis, Roger Connor, Rose, Ozzie, Frisch, Beltran, Raines, Murray, Alomar — all solid-or-better HOF choices. Ted Simmons (50.3) is 17th but HOF-worthy because of the way catcher WAR is suppressed.

DJ Tanner: How on earth did the players not see this coming? Teams will pay for their past production? That is so loony! It seems so illogical that players will get 10 year contracts and crush a teams payroll when they are bad but they don’t make big money when they are at their peak. Too bad CBA isn’t until 2021, this needs to get fixed ASAP.

Jay Jaffe: Gotta blame the union leadership, and the buck has to start with Tony Clark.

Cito’s Mustache: Do you have any tips for someone who’s going to visit Cooperstown for the first time this year? How much time should one devote to the museum? Would an afternoon suffice or is there enough to see that I should spend a second day there. Thanks!

Jay Jaffe: You really need a LONG day to do it in one day. I’d recommend two, because there’s a lot to take in and Cooperstown is totally worth sticking around to absorb and appreciate.

Jay Jaffe: if you can go in the winter, you can have the place pretty much to yourself. In doing my final research for the book, i went during the first week of February and had long stretches where I was the only one in the plaque gallery, which was incredibly awesome.

What I haven’t been able to do is find time to get to Ommegang Brewery, which you should figure out how to incorporate into your trip.

Nate: What would the Hall of Fame do if Roger Clemens got voted in by 1-2 votes and Barry Bonds missed by 1-2 votes in their final BBWAA election cycle?

Jay Jaffe: I’m sure there would be some joy behind the scenes because Bonds isn’t well-liked. He’d become a committee candidate and get in that way eventually, but I don’t think we can take that for granted.

Mandy is 92% Fresh: Have any BBWAA members got in your face to express extreme displeasure with your work (and I mean going beyond simple disagreements over particular players or critiques of your system)?

Jay Jaffe: Directly, no. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’ve heard positive things from people I never thought I would reach given our stances 10-15 years ago. There’s only two BBWAA members that I can think of who bitch about my HOF work publicly. I’ll let you figure them out.

Jay Jaffe: I’m out of time but thanks to you all for turning this impromptu chat into one that was worth my while (and yours, I hope). Lots of good questions still out there, so I’ll take note for a future article. And I’ll do my best to make sure we get next week’s chat in, for all of the surrounding HOF chaos.