I’ll try not to go into the usual stuff that has been covered on a ton of other blogs. I wish I saved the links, because I’m not going to hunt for them.

My initial gut ballot was: Bert Blyleven, Roberto Alomar, Mark McGwire, Tim Raines. Since then, I’ve reconsidered and would probably add Edgar Martinez, Barry Larkin, and Alan Trammell. So there, seven guys I’d put in before Dawson.

But I’m going to steal and add to an idea presented in this post on The Hardball Times.

Wins Above Excellence:

Time to introduce a new junk stat. For this measure, I’m looking at how many wins a player has above three in a season, though his season total can never be below zero. This gives a player credit for great seasons, and ignores anything where a player is average or below, it neither adds nor hurts a player’s case for greatness. A great player should not be penalized if he hangs around past his peak contributing a only little bit to his teams.

I think three wins is a bit low of a barrier for “excellence.” Two wins is average, three wins is good, four wins is great, five wins is excellence.

Going by Fangraphs’ WAR calculations (which I won’t be using for the historical WAR calculations), last year there were this many players — not including pitchers — that hit each of these WAR thresholds:

3 WAR or above: 75
4 WAR or above: 47
5 WAR or above: 24

I’d definitely define five wins above replacement as excellence. The guys right at the threshold are names like Teixeira, Ichiro, and Sandoval.

But, not many guys collect many wins above 5 WAR. Let’s look at the numbers for the eight Hall of Fame candidates (including the one future inductee):

Oh wait, make that nine. You may have noticed the guy that doesn’t belong. At all. That would be Jack Morris. This is the voting results from this year with Lee Smith taken out, because there’s no point in even adding him to the chart. As you can see, Dawson does not deserve to be on top — and Bert Blyleven should be a no-fucking-brainer. I think  another interesting part of the table is Raines being the second-worst when you use 5 WAR as the barrier (and third-worst with the other two). That ties in well with why he’s been slow in getting support for induction. Trammell was just unfortunate to play shortstop just before the recent influx of heavy-hitting shortstops. His hitting numbers don’t look impressive, and he wasn’t Ozzie Smith in the field. Hall of Fame voters don’t apply position adjustments, apparently.

As always, I must thank Sean Smith at BaseballProjection.com for his historical WAR database. I should probably donate at this point.

This post brought to you by Jon Heyman’s Hall of Fame Ballot, provided by Twitter.

just mailed Hall of Fame ballot, beating deadline yet again. voted for alomar, dawson, larkin, parker, morris & mattingly

The first half of those are respectable, even if I would possibly only vote for one. But then it just gets worse as it goes along. Actually no, that’s unfair to Mattingly, as his peak was legitimately great. Jack Morris? His case boils down to, “Did you see Game 7 of the 1991 World Series?!?!”

But Joe Posnanski has been going on, and on, and on, about Bert Blyleven > Morris, so I figured I’d go with a New York flavored debate. Even if there technically isn’t any debate, considering Keith Hernandez isn’t on the ballot anymore. He almost didn’t make it past the first ballot! He only received 5.1% of the votes first time around — that’s 0.2% away from being totally snubbed.

I’m not even sure if I’m arguing here if Hernandez should be in the Hall of Fame or not. I’d probably put him in, but I think you can make the case for keeping him out. What I can’t see making a case for is Mattingly over Hernandez. Mattingly is all peak, and his peak isn’t even THAT amazing. It’s not like he was Albert Pujols for the 4 years he was truly great. Hernandez has a more steady and unconventional career, one with a barely discernible peak. In the end, Hernandez accumulated more total hitting value and is actually the better career hitter. But as a first baseman, I’m sure hitting a dozen home runs a year doesn’t exactly impress Hall of Fame voters.

If you want to go by OPS+, Hernandez has Mattingly beat 128 to 127. Mattingly’s top 3 seasons do beat Hernandez’s: 161, 156, 156 to 151, 147, 143. But OPS undervalues OBP. Let’s use wRC+, the new-fangled stat on Fangraphs that utilizes wOBA and park and league adjusts it. It’s superior to OPS+ for sure. Hernandez gets a boost here. Career 131 to 128, and his best seasons stack up better, too. But hey, this is all just stats! Hall of Fame voters won’t listen to that. When they look at Mattingly they see more home runs and a career average beginning with a 3. Game over.

What about fielding? I think anyone who saw them both play would say that Hernandez was the better fielder, but I guess I’ll have to pull out more stats here. Total Zone (there’s no UZR data that far back) has Hernandez blowing Mattingly out of the water. Hernandez contributes a win a year with a glove, while Mattingly is just above average. But you don’t need to look at the stats, everyone thought Hernandez was phenomenal — he has the most Gold Gloves of any 1st basemen (11). Admittedly, Mattingly is second with 9.

So we’ve established Hernandez was more valuable over his career both at the plate and in the field. The extent of the latter could be left for debate, I guess? It was never a debate for my dad, but he’s a Mets fan.

But let me do some typical sportswriter bullshit now. I already started it by talking about Gold Gloves, so I’m going to continue. Mattingly has more All-Star game appearances (6-5) and more Silver Sluggers (3-2). He also had 145 RBIs one season! Hernandez only broke the 100 RBI barrier once. But Hernandez was on not one, but TWO World Series Champions! Mattingly managed to play for the NEW YORK YANKEES for 14 seasons and he only reached the playoffs once. And once he retired and was replaced with a player with a functioning back, they won the World Series! If that’s not a loser, I don’t know who is. But apparently, a loser can still be a TRUE YANKEE.

In other bullshit arguments, Mattingly and Hernandez both have 1 MVP award, they both were in the top-5 in voting 3 times, in the top-10 4 times, and in the top-20 7 times. I think that qualifies as a wash.

I really think any sort of debate comes down to Mattingly’s peak versus Hernandez’s fielding. Mattingly’s peak just isn’t impressive enough or long enough to outweigh Hernandez’s ridiculous fielding. Total Zone gives Hernandez about 10 wins or 100 runs over Mattingly. Even if you want to cut that in half, that’s still 50 additional runs saved by Hernandez’s fielding. You could take those runs and spread them over his five 90-something-RBI seasons and he’d have six 100 RBI seasons instead. Perhaps that would impress the BBWAA more.

Notice how I haven’t mentioned WAR this entire post? Well, here we go. Straight from BaseballProjection.com.

Hernandez 61.0 WAR
Mattingly 39.8 WAR

And now here’s a handy graph. Really, I would have rather not done this (I’m lying), but I feel like people like pretty graphs!

Hernandez is so awesome, Seinfeld needed a two-part episode to contain him. I rest my case.

Oh, and vote Bert Blyleven and Tim Raines in, you fucking dolts.

Pedro Gomez — you know, the guy who ate Barry Bonds’ shit for three years — thinks Jay Bell is a first-ballot Hall of Famer. A 2-time All-Star with a career OPS+ of 101 is one of the greatest players of all-time who deserves to be enshrined along with the immortals of the sport. For the uninformed, an OPS+ of 101 translates to the definition of an average hitter. Pedro Gomez would call a person with an IQ of 101 a genius. Compared to him, that person probably would be.

I’m not even going to bother with Jim Rice at this point, because the collective stupidity in that case is just incredible. Apparently, baseball writers are as afraid of the wrath of Massholes as media conglomerates are of Muslim extremists. Either that or they are now convinced he was indeed the MOST FEARED HITTER of his era. That seriously better go on his plaque or else all these writers were full of shit. It’s just amazing how he became more and more feared the longer he was retired. Truly incredible.

But Pedro Gomez may not be the owner of the most unthinkable ballot cast this year. At least he voted for Rickey Henderson, unlike some dementia-stricken old dude in Arizona. Corky Simpson was playing keeper-of-the-gate along with a bunch of other old men, just so Henderson couldn’t be the first man to enter the Hall unanimously. It probably wouldn’t as bad if he didn’t put Matt Williams on his ballot. Matt Williams > greatest leadoff hitter of all-time, obviously. Didn’t you know he might have had a chance to break Roger Maris’ single-season HR record if it weren’t for the 1994 strike? Surely being on pace after 4 months to break such a hallowed record makes him a worthy candidate. Oh wait, Roger Maris isn’t even in the Hall of Fame. The best part is that he states he didn’t vote for McGwire because of performance-enhancing drugs, while Matt Williams was named in the Mitchell Report. This coming from the 1988 Sportswriter of the Year. Awesome.

At least he voted for Tim Raines though, unlike over 75% of the other voters. What the fuck? Only one leadoff hitter allowed on a ballot? Tim Raines may have been overshadowed by Henderson for most of his career, but the guy was still one of the best. This excerpt from a Jayson Stark article is all that needs to be said on the matter:

Over the seven seasons from 1982 to 1988, Tim Raines led the National League in singles, doubles, triples and walks. OK, think about that. Now think about the job description of a leadoff man. You want that guy to reach base, correct? Well, this man reached base more times than anyone around him every possible way he could reach it.

And for those who also like their leadoff hitters to steal a base every once in a while, consider this: Raines was the only player in history with at least 70 steals six years in a row. And stole 808 bases in his career. And he racked up all those steals while compiling the best stolen base success rate of all time (84.7 percent).

Finally, in an age when we’re supposed to have a new appreciation for on-base percentage as opposed to batting average, this is the stat that always seems to stagger the Tim Raines doubters out there:

Raines and Tony Gwynn had roughly the same number of plate appearances in their careers — and guess which one reached base more times? All of you who guessed Tim Raines, you’re all truly enlightened, 21st-century baseball observers. Oh, and you’re also absolutely right. So how come this guy got only 24 percent of the vote again?

He obviously wasn’t FEARED enough.