Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 2/4/22

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks and welcome to my first chat from the absolute darkest spot on the MLB calendar, the interval between the end of the Hall of Fame election cycle and the opening of spring training, which…. ain’t gonna happen for awhile.

Jay Jaffe: It’s an appropriately gray and rainy day here in Brooklyn, and as i write this, the players’ union has told MLB what to do with its request for mediation to settle the lockout, which was completely unnecessary to begin with

Jay Jaffe: I haven’t yet gotten through Evan Drelich’s piece on where things go from here but suffice it to say that if you thought you were going to see spring training games in late February or March, you should start nailing down those backup plans https://theathletic.com/3112497/2022/02/04/why-the-players-rejected-ml…

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, i’ve been on staycation this week since publishing my five-year outlook for Hall of Fame elections https://blogs.fangraphs.com/dialing-it-down-a-notch-the-next-five-year…

Jay Jaffe: Today I went to the eye doctor and I’m still dilated, so we’ll see how long i can sustain this blurred/haloed vision thing while we chat

Mark: Would you ever consider leaving off a sure thing first ballot candidate to give your 10th vote to someone struggling to pass 5 percent?

Jay Jaffe: I’d reserve that right. Certainly wouldn’t want to do anything that would threaten an otherwise unanimous vote (Ichiro?) or for just any old 5% candidate, it would have to be a player I believed was worthy

Jay Jaffe: On my 2015 virtual ballot, I actually left John Smoltz and Larry Walker off in order to make a point of supporting Tim Raines and Edgar Martinez, neither of whom was in danger of being Five Percented but both of whom had lost those 5 years due to the Hall’s shortening of eligibility window https://www.si.com/mlb/2014/12/26/jaws-2015-hall-of-fame-ballot-final-…

Jay Jaffe: Maybe that’s why Smoltz gave me the cold shoulder when we did MLB Now. LOL

mark406wins: As a long time reader of JJ, I’d like to ask your opinion of the stat-WAA(Wins Above Average) ?

Jay Jaffe: It’s fine for some purposes, certainly. I’ve thought about incorporating it into JAWS but here’s the thing: WAR rewards bulk where WAA does not, and much of the Hall election process is about bulk — minimum thresholds and milestones. There’s real value in league-average performance, and WAR rewards that whereas WAA does not, and you don’t get much sense of how much opportunity a player had with the latter; you could have 0 WAA in 6 plate appearances or 6000 and they would be equal, but you might have a substantial chunk of WAR to show for your effort.

I think that using the 7-year peak captures the “above average” part well enough for my purposes.

Howard Beale: How much do you think the Manfredsplaining of his positive test helped Ortiz with the voters and would a similar PR push have helped Bonds or Clemens?

Jay Jaffe: probably a fair amount; note that he could have done the same for Sammy Sosa, whose only *documented* PED violation is the same 2003 survey test, and yet he never even broke 20%.

Jay Jaffe: Having said that, there’s obviously an informational asymmetry at work there in that Manfred likely knows who got flagged for what, and if what Sosa was doing was clearly out of bounds one can imagine he wouldn’t have received the same courtesy.

Jay Jaffe: As for Bonds and Clemens, Manfred could have helped them, but we have a fair amount of evidence that they used; it’s the context that’s more in doubt.

Phil: Would you predict that a player with, say, Andre Dawson’s numbers but Lenny Dykstra’s personality and post-baseball life get elected to the Hall of Fame? Are there current HOFers who come to mind who have done time? Just trying to put the character clause into a non-PED context. . .

Jay Jaffe: It would really depend on what the violations were and whether there was at least the perception of contrition and reform. Orlando Cepeda did time for marijuana smuggling in the late 1970s but worked his way back into the game’s good graces and was elected in 1999 by the Veterans Committee.

Jay Jaffe: I could probably overlook a drug or tax violation, and the fact remains that I have voted for players who have credibly been accused of domestic violence, though I can’t say I’m proud of that fact. It’s mostly about not wanting to put stock in the character clause except at the extremes.

Anita Bath: Would you not support the Hall candidacy of any player who was suspended by the league twice, for any reason, or does that just apply to PED-linked dudes? And if there are any already in the Hall, do you think they should not have been elected?

Jay Jaffe: In a Hall context, it’s tough to imagine caring too much about a player suspended twice for fighting or spitballing or something like that. Even having said what I just said about having voted for those accused of DV, I think an actual suspension — one, not two — for that might rule that player out, and two certainly would.

Travis: First of all, thank you for all of your Hall of Fame posts. Always a must read, and a way to brighten dark winter days.

The retirement of Joe West (announced today) has sparked some HoF discussion on social media. Personally, I agree with Jon heyman’s take that the Today’s Game ballot is likely overcrowded as it is, but I also feel that if you’re a well-known umpire, you might be doing your job wrong. Should the best umpires be anonymous/not making headlines, or does the Fame factor mean more here? What makes an Umpire HoF worthy? Was Bruce Froemming worthy? Is this 100% not your lane?

Jay Jaffe: I agree with Heyman on this. I would have a very hard time putting an umpire on my ballot ahead of even the fringiest player candidate and I sure as hell wouldn’t put Joe West ahead of a deserving player or manager.

Jay Jaffe: for umpires the Hall is mainly about longevity and West stuck around the longest, but I don’t think he had a very positive impact on the game because, as you say, if you’re well-known UR DOIN IT RONG

Mike: Hypothetically, if Pedroia got into the hall based on his 2007-2016 stretch (where he averaged 5.1 wins a season), would that open up a discussion on guys like Wright and Kinsler. Both had similar WARs over a decade but not much outside of that

Jay Jaffe: we’ve already seen this happen with Kirby Puckett and Chick Hafey and some other short-career players. For me, the line starts with players like Buster Posey, Johan Santana, and Nomar Garciaparra who are around or above the 7-year peak standard (the S-JAWS adjusted one, in Santana’s case) at their positions. Pedroia, Kinsler, and Tulowitzki — all eligible in 2025 and discussed in the aforementioned 5-year piece — are short of the 7-year peaks at their positions, no pun intended.

Phil: Does HOF unanimity really matter–which is to say, should it? I feel like any standard that can be thwarted by one unthinking curmudgeon is perhaps not a legitimate standard. Surely as-good-a-result-as-Griffey is as high a standard for greatness as there is?

Jay Jaffe: Functionally it doesn’t matter at all. Aesthetically, it’s about a voter being contrarian for no good reason, and that’s a horseshit look that brings negative attention to the whole process.

Guest: Hey Jay, I know that pre-1969 the top team from each league won the pennant and advanced directly to the World Series. But what happened in the event of a tie atop league standings? Were there tiebreaker rules?

Jay Jaffe: yes, there were best-of-three tiebreakers played in the NL in 1946, 1951, 1959 and 1962 NL, plus a single-gamer in the AL in 1948; chalk up the discrepancy to the independence of the two leagues at the time.

Roger Dorn: IF you had to guess, how many games this season?

Jay Jaffe: 140ish

Jay Jaffe: I don’t think the owners can afford to lose many games after losing so much in the past two years, and I think the players are more unified than in the recent past.

Bubba: What’s the history of your stache?

Jay Jaffe: Haha, let’s see… as a college freshman I grew a “beard” during finals that looked terrible, it was very reddish compared to my dark brown hair. I didn’t try again for another 20 years, and grew one for giggles over the course of an xmas vacation trip to England (Dec. 2008). I shaved it off afterwards but 18 months later brought it back — it debuted the day Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett both died in 2009 (my 1st wife’s birthday) and it’s been around ever since.

Ryan: Thoughts on Pirates list released today? Will any other team have this many prospects listed?..So deep

Jay Jaffe: You’re asking the wrong person, but congrats to FG contributor Brendon Gawlowski, who yesterday announced he was joining the Pirates’ pro scouting department

Thunderclap Jackson: Two dumb questions: do players (or their families for posthumous inductions) decide what image of them is used for their HoF plaque? And your ballplayer name?

Jay Jaffe: I would imagine that the players and their families get to weigh in on the image and nomenclature that goes onto the plaque but i’m not entirely sure.

glt4dc: This question is actually inspired by a podcast discussion about the approaching NBA trading deadline, but it’s applicable for MLB (or any other sport).  They were talking about how one NBA team, which should really be a seller instead of a buyer, but the GM is on the hot seat, so he’s incentivized to make a short-term move.  Has anyone analyzed how GMs behave in the last year of their contract (or are known to be in trouble) and if they’re more likely to act in a manner more focused on their job situation rather than the team’s long-term interests?

Jay Jaffe: I don’t recall anyone doing such a study but it would seem to be worth a look even if one can’t get a whole lot of quantifiable data out of it

Brad: Why can’t both sides just agree that they aren’t getting extreme items like free agency a year early, just accept the trade off of Universal DH for expanded playoffs, and then meet in the middle with luxury tax and the non free agency bonus pool and easy enough to figure out international draft and regular draft lottery and let’s play baseball….

Jay Jaffe: because these concepts vary dramatically in terms of their economic impact and the players rightly recognize that the owners arenbelieve that the owners aren’t negotiating in good faith.

Jay Jaffe: It’s never as simple as you think it is, and the goal shouldn’t be “just avoid missing games,” because there are real livelihoods and workplace rights at stake

Jeff C: Regarding the lack of recent starting pitchers in the hall, I think voters have complicated things too much.  Of the pitchers who debuted between 1900 and 1979, over 6% of those with 100+ starts are in the HOF.  Even assuming JV, Kershaw, Scherzer, Zach and CC, there would still be less than 3% from 1990-2009.  There’s ample room for Pettitte, Buehrle and others without worrying about Cone, Brown and the prior era’s glaring omissions.

Jay Jaffe: some good points there though it’s worth remembering that with Pettitte, PEDs and the Mitchell Report have complicated his candidacy. working on something in this area for publication next week.

Didace: “Would you ever consider leaving off a sure thing first ballot candidate to give your 10th vote to someone struggling to pass 5 percent?” I always thought (with the small amount of brain time I’ve given to it) that I would list all eligible players as yes/no and then vote for the ten yeses that have the least eligibility remaining. I know it’s not the way the world works, but I don’t much care about “first ballot” or “unanimous”,

Jay Jaffe: the Rule of 10 really does require anybody but the more small-Hall minded to do some kind of triage along these lines. it’s worth remembering, though, that it’s a bit more complicated because there’s a lot of value in clearing a spot on the ballot and having those votes to redistribute next year. My vote for David Ortiz, which I did not anticipate bestowing until this election season, had a lot to do with the ripple effect of helping Rolen, Helton, Wagner, Jones, and Sheffield along.

Jay Jaffe: and where a 90%-type candidate didn’t need my vote, a 78%-type candidate did. Ortiz made it with 11 votes to spare

WinTwins0410: Jay, given how charged the PED issue is, how likely do you think it is that the Hall will make some kind of change that would prevent Bonds and Clemens (and Schilling, and Sosa) from being on this coming winter’s Today’s Game ballot? I know Joe Sheehan in his newsletter wrote that he’d be very surprised if Barry and Roger were on it. And really, I know that Mark McGwire leaving the BBWAA ballot and immediately falling onto a small-committee ballot is a “precedent” (of sorts), but do you think it’s a little strange that there would be no pause or hiatus in the voting for Bonds/Clemens/Schilling/Sosa, and that they’d be considered for the Hall *twice* within a span of less than 12 months? Curious your thoughts.

Jay Jaffe: Well, there was supposed to be a one-year hiatus, but the postponement of the 2020 Era Committee votes due to the pandemic meant that the Today’s Game eligibility lined up with the end of the Bonds-Clemens-Schilling tenures. The Hall put itself in this position, as anybody could have told you in August 2020, when the postponement was announced, that BB and RC weren’t getting in via the writers (CS’s continued sefl-immolation was less foreseeable). If they wanted the hiatus preserved, the Hall could have simply switched the order of the Today’s Game and Modern Baseball deliberations around:

Jay Jaffe:

Jay Jaffe: MB in 2023 and ’25, TG in ’24 and ’26 would have been completely acceptable.

Jay Jaffe: Now, it’s going to look rather suspicious and targeted — as the shortening of eligibility windows from 15 years to 10 did — if the Hall does anything to change course

Bryan: Maybe the MLBPA and the league should just send their proposals to the HOF writers and let them even it out? Would this get us started on time?

Jay Jaffe: Barry and Roger would like a word

Iso Joe: Recently, I’ve come across a couple of articles/tv segments describing Carlos Beltrán as a “borderline” candidate for the Hall. This seems off to me, considering that even by traditional standards (2700+ hits, 400+ HR’s, 9 AS games as a switch hitting CF who played for 20 seaons), he has an evidently strong case. As someone who’s planning to vote for him, why do you think this perception hangs around?

Jay Jaffe: setting aside the 800-pound trashcan in the room, I think that belief is there because Beltrán did not reach the magic milestones that in a time before PEDs guaranteed induction. It’s a mistaken belief that fails to account for the caliber of Beltrán’s speed, defense and postseason performance, all of which elevate him.

Jay Jaffe: Now, having said all that, Beltrán’s role in the Astros’ sign-stealing saga will definitely have some impact on his chances, but it’s difficult to gauge just how much.

Jay Jaffe: Is this an Alomar spit-in-the-ump’s-face matter that would delay his election a year, or a Bonds-PED-level transgression that would keep him outside for the next decade? I don’t know the answer to that at all, but it strikes me that  MLB being content to hang the blame on him and the managers and GMs while not attempting to hold any players accountable offends some sensibilities as well (even while acknowledging that the CBA would probably nullify Manfred’s attempts to discipline players without there having been a rule on the books).

Mike: Obviously a stupid thing to do, especially twice, but would Tony LaRussa’s two DUIs have much of an effect on him getting your vote? Luckily he didn’t hurt anyone. I’m aware he’s already in

Jay Jaffe: the baseball historian in me says no, because TLR’s impact on the game was massive and the DUI stuff didn’t have any connection to his career. The responsible citizen in me knows that DUI is a serious problem that I’m lucky has not affected me more directly, and I could see where a voter whose life has been touched by that would feel strongly enough to decide that it said something pretty significant in the negative about TLR’s character.

Phil: I’m from eastern Mass and strongly biased in his favor, but even for me Pedroia seems like a Cantonian HOFer–that is, someone who’d be in easily if we used the NFL’s standard for measuring peak vs. longevity. The only problem is that we don’t.

Jay Jaffe: NFL careers are so much shorter — and the sport so much more likely to produce career-ending injuries — that it makes sense. Gale Sayers played just 7 seasons and two of those were of two games due to injuries.

14343: I know hypotheticals are hard, but do you think if Yuli Gurriel came to MLB in his early 20s, he’d have a good shot at the hall?

Jay Jaffe: The people who saw him and the statistics both suggest yes. Dan Szymborski did some translations that give you an idea of his numbers https://blogs.fangraphs.com/should-yuli-gurriel-and-jose-abreu-be-hall…

Mark: Why aren’t ballots required to be made public? Is it essentially bc y’all make the rule and would like to be able to save face and maintain privacy if necessary? Do you think they should all be required to be made public?

Jay Jaffe: At the Winter Meetings in 2016, the BBWAA voted overwhelmingly (~90%) to make all Hall ballots public starting with the 2018 election (the ’17 one was underway), but the Hall of Fame rejected our vote, giving voters cover to remain anonymous

Travis: Assuming games are cancelled, and a season starts late, how will the schedule adapt? Do they just start from the cancel date, or will they reschedule everything trying to fit more games in? Selfishly asking as someone who might be taken to some games in June for their bachelor party…

Jay Jaffe: Probably just start from the date that they believe they can get things rolling and damn the competitive consequences. Maybe they use doubleheaders to make sure teams play the same number of intradivisional games? I really don’t know.

Jack: Jaffe! Any hot takes on the ESPN top 100 players of all time?

Jay Jaffe: I haven’t looked, TBH, and don’t have imminent plans to. They didn’t even try to place Negro Leagues players, from what I understand, and they placed Jeter ahead of Pujols, which, what?

FWIW I do see a difference between not using Negro Leagues players within JAWS (though it’s something I’m planning to study) and not ranking them in a top 100. JAWS is a ranking based on an objective formula whose blind spots — the postseason, subjective weighting of awards and historical importance, etc — could certainly change how one would rank the players in a more all-encompassing ranking. But if you’re calling something a Top 100 of All-Time, unless it’s the Top 100 WAR or JAWS rankings, you’re implying that you’ve moved beyond the numbers, and if those are the answers, well, I’m going to have to question your process.

Anita Bath: I’ve heard fans say that if guys like Bonds aren’t in the Hall, they don’t even want to visit the place. The institution has to sort out this mess in order to remain alive, don’t they?

Howard Beale: The HOF small committees have always been prone to cronyism and putting Ortiz in over Bonds makes it look like the BBWAA vote is a popularity contest. Can you give a good reason why people should still care about who is in and who isn’t? To me the HOF is quickly becoming irrelevant.

Jay Jaffe: tackling these both together.

Jay Jaffe: The Hall of Fame has weathered ~30 years without Pete Rose just fine, and it will survive without Bonds and Clemens as well. For as much as one side thinks that this is the end of the institution’s relevance, the other side believes that admitting those players is what would cause its downfall.

As to why people should care, the answer is that you certainly *don’t* have to, and from a practical standpoint unless you live within driving distance you might not ever make it there in your lifetime, unless you really want to.  Nonetheless, people do choose to care because they want to see their favorite players honored and connected to the legends of the game — Ruth, Cobb, Mays, Aaron, etc. — and they want a place to go to see those players acknowledged, to see the game’s artifacts, and to access its wealth of historical materials.

Jay Jaffe: Long story short, while baseball’s footprint may be receding as football and basketball and e-sports supplant it in the eyes of the kids, there’s far too much historical weight there for it to go away, and the $11 billion-a-year industry isn’t going to let the institution wither and die just because you’ve sworn you won’t go there due to ~10% of BBWAA voters not giving ground on Bonds/Clemens when the other ~65% were in favor of their election.

WinTwins0410: Jay, not a question but I wanted to say thank you for all your hard work on the Hall these past several months (and really, these many years). I think everyone realizes how hard you work, but I follow you on Twitter (as many of us do) and in advance of the Era Committee votes on Sunday night, Dec. 5, I recall that you on Saturday night, Dec. 4, you tweeted a photo showing that you were hard at work banging out your final profile of the 18 era committee candidate profiles you wrote (John Donaldson) with a pile of research books under your computer screen. (Your tweet: “Saturday night’s all right for writing”! 

) It isn’t lost on many, if not all, of us how hard you work producing profiles that take thoughtful looks at so many candidates. In a belated holiday spirit, thanks for doing these. It adds to baseball history scholarship, and makes the electorate (and all of us) smarter on these candidates, even if folks don’t always agree.

Jay Jaffe: Thank you for that! I am glad that my work has had an impact, and enough people higher on the food chain than myself have told me that enough times that I actually believe it.

Jay Jaffe: I do think the electorate is better informed than it was 10 or 20 years ago, but  that the cacophony on social media regarding the most polarizing candidates threatens to overshadow that. This was a topic that surfaced in my recent conversations with both ESPN’s Buster Olney (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fangraphs-audio-buster-olney-and-jay-jaffe…) and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold (https://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/best-podcast-in-…)

Dan: Why doesn’t a team with the most projected WAR also project as the best team? I know the Yankees aren’t clearly the best team in baseball like their WAR implies but I can’t remember the why’s of the discrepancy.

Jay Jaffe: Risk and randomness have a lot to do with it. As an industry we can project a team to have the most 3- or 5-WAR players but we aren’t all that great at predicting exactly which of those higher-value players will get injured and test a team’s depth.

Justin B.: Jay, I enjoyed your 5-year piece, as always. I definitely see that Rolen is likely to get elected. It also seems like Helton for sure, and maybe Wagner, will get big boosts. I know those 2 are likely to fall short, but I’m also not sure how to think about 4 big vote-getters falling off (plus Sosa). Even allowing for smaller ballot sizes, that’s still a lot of extra votes to go around. Do you think Helton might have an outside chance of election next year for that reason, or do you think it’s just too large of a jump in one year?

Jay Jaffe: It’s too large a jump in one year. Larry Walker’s jump from 54.6% is the lowest mark from which a modern candidate has made it:

Jay Jaffe:

Another Ben: Adrien Beltre is a first ballot HOFer right? I had an argument with a friend who said no and that he just played a long time. That’s crazy right?

Jay Jaffe: The dude has over 3,000 hits, nearly 500 home runs and rates as the 2nd-best defender at third base of all time. Not to put too fine a point on it but your friend needs to pull his head out of his ass.

The Presumption of Bacne: The Early Baseball edition of the Veterans Committee was set up on a 10 year rotation well before the racial reckoning in our country and the resulting reconsideration of negro leagues candidates. Should the Hall reconsider this rotation, perhaps with another committee to keep exposure on both old major leaguers and negro leaguers more equally? What would be your ideal scenario and what do you think they’ll actually do?

Jay Jaffe: I advocated for a new committee or revised cycle in August (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/upcoming-early-baseball-era-committee-ball…) along these lines. There’s been a surge of research and interest into Black baseball in the past couple of decades, and it would be a mistake to squander that momentum by waiting until 2032 for another election. As it is there are only a small handful of Negro Leagues players still alive (I think the number is 3 or 4 including Willie Mays) and we’re likely to see even their descendants shuffling off this mortal coil by waiting. Plus it’s clear that there are more strong candidates that can fit on a single EC ballot.

The Presumption of Bacne: Big Vets committee ballot next year. Are McGriff and Bochy the shoe-ins before maybe a third? I expect a lot of vote splitting.

Jay Jaffe: the additions of the 2022 “graduating” class (Bonds, Clemens, Schilling) complicates all of this, as noted in my election coverage. We might plausibly get a shutout

Guest: Two suspensions for spitballs would be ok for a HOF vote? What about two suspensions for a corked or happy fun ball bat?

Jay Jaffe: I’d have to stop laughing long enough to consider that one. The physics of a corked bat just don’t make it likely that a player would gain an advantage, and I’m never going to crack down on a spitballer.

Jay Jaffe: OK folks, the clock is bearing down on me, so it’s time to go. Thanks so much for stopping by, this was a lot of fun. Stay warm and safe, and we’ll do this again soon!