Some Thoughts On The Baseball Hall of Fame
The Hall of Fame votes are in for 2018 and Chipper Jones, Jim Thome, Vladimir Guerrero, and Trevor Hoffman will join the immortals in Cooperstown. These are 4 deserving honorees, but this article isn't going to be about them. I would like to focus on a few players who missed induction.
Edgar Martinez fell just short of the required 75% with 70.4% of the vote. The main argument against Martinez is the fact that he spent the majority of his career as a DH. Some of the old school writers resent that the DH is even a position and say that a guy who only plays half the game should not be inducted. This is a silly thing to hold against Martinez. If Martinez had gone out and played a position horribly he would probably have a better shot at the hall, and that makes no sense.
According to Fangraph's Def metric Jim Thome had more negative defensive value than Edgar did in his career. If Thome had spent more of his time at DH he would have actually been more valuable to his teams rather than going out and playing poor defence. Same goes for Frank Thomas. Dave Winfield is the worst defender in the Hall of Fame but dag gummit, he put on a glove, went out there, and cost his teams runs like a true ballplayer! He was terrible, but he was out there! Martinez couldn't even be bothered to put on a glove and kick a ball around! Get off my grass! ...Or in this case it's old men yelling "Get on that grass!" Edgar Martinez is one of the best hitters to play the game. His job was to hit and it's not fair to hold a manager's decision against him.
Larry Walker is looking like he will fall victim to the Coors effect. Since he played most of his career a mile in the sky at Coors Field many people believe his numbers are inflated. Yes the numbers are bigger than if he played at normal elevation, but his park adjusted numbers are still worthy of consideration for the Hall. His career wrc+ is 140 and compares favorably to Jim Thome's 145 and Edgar Martinez's 147. Toss is in Walker's 7 gold gloves and you can see why despite playing nearly 600 fewer games he produced nearly the same fWAR as Thome (68.7 vs. 69). Walker was an impact player on both sides of the ball. It seems that some people just can't get over the fact that he played in Colorado. Consider this, Wlaker's road slash line of .278/.370/.495 is better than the career slash lines of recent Hall of Famers Eddie Murray, Andre Dawson, Ryne Sandberg, Dave Winfield and Jim Rice. Playing outside of Coors he was still a phenomenal hitter. Sure, some of those players are borderline Hall of Famers and some had much longer careers and were able to hit 500 HR, but when it comes to total production Walker tops them all in Baseball-reference's rWAR and only Murray tops him in fWAR.
Scott Rolen is another player being overlooked and it's likely because he did everything well, but not the right things well enough, namely hitting. Rolen won 8 gold gloves and was considered by many the best fielding 3rd baseman of his generation. That alone should get him close to the Hall. But he was also a talented hitter. His .281/.364/..490 slash line compares favorably to those Hall of Fame members mentioned in the Larry Walker paragraph. Scott Rolen never led the league in any hitting categories and fielding stats don't exactly make people stop and say "Wow!" Chicks dig the long ball and Rolen just didn't do enough of the cool stuff to get noticed by voters. During his peak from 1998 to 2004 he ranked 3rd among all hitters in fWAR, behind only Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. That's a 7 year period where the only players who produced more than him were chemically enhanced (allegedly).
Directly behind Rolen on the list of top players from 1998 to 2004 was Andruw Jones. Andruw Jones is by far the biggest snub on this year's ballot. Receiving only 7.3% of the vote is downright lunacy. Jones' peak was even longer than Rolen's and stretched from 1998 to 2006. during that time the fWAR rankings went Bonds, Rodriguez, Jones, Rolen. A 9 year span and he was the third most valuable position player in baseball. It's amazing how quickly people forget how unbelievable Jones was as a fielder. His defensive stats are the best ever for a center fielder. The eye test agrees. People who watched him say he was the best they've ever seen. He won 10 straight Gold Gloves. He was the Ozzie Smith of center field. Now imagine if Ozzie Smith once hit 51 home runs. Jones finished his career with 434 home runs and that's just a footnote on his hall of fame candidacy. Sadly the image most people have of Jones is the late career Jones who was slow and struggled to hit above the Mendoza line. A half a decade of mediocrity should not take away from the decade of superstar production. Jones is the best glovesmith to have ever patrolled center field. The. Best. Ever. How that doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame is beyond me. If they want to recognize greatness at Cooperstown they need to acknowledge the superhuman fielding prowess of Andruw Jones.
This year's Hall of Fame voting got it right in who they elected, but I take issue with the lack of support for some very deserving players. With the exception of Jones, the players above are borderline cases but deserve more credit than they are getting. The voters also seems a bit inconsistent in what they value. On the one hand the voters refused to elect Martinez because he didn't play in the field. Then they fail to support players like Walker, Rolen and Jones who were the best fielders of their era for their respective positions. According to the Hall of Fame voters defence counts, except when it doesn't.
