2008:
Will Clark
Dwight Evans
Graig Nettles
Tim Raines
Willie Randolph

I'll have the totals up tomorrow night, after our outage is over.

Albert Belle
Will Clark
Andre Dawson
Dwight Evans
Fred Lynn
Tim Raines
Jim Rice

Looks like we only had 11 ballots. By my count Raines and Dewey (9 votes each) are in.

Will the Thrill (8) just misses.

Albert Belle (7) takes the bronze, followed by Dawson (6), Mattingly (4), Randolph (4), Rice (3), Lynn (3), Nettles (3), Sutter (2) & Lee Smith (2).

Quiz, Henke and Stieb get one vote apiece.


Good thing you're not picking on him, since I've done enough of that already.

I was the first to raise Henke's name here, so blame me instead. However, I was slapped back into reality by the logic and sound reasoning of VAL, LoBC and others and saw that his value, based on those low IP totals, just wasn't that great -- no matter how dominant he was how shiny his stat lines were. I still feel he's the most underrated closer in the history of the game (which, for this argument amounts to the last 30 years or so), but that doesn't make him a HOFer.

2009 ballot up.

Last ballot for Bill Buckner, Tommy John, and Jim Rice.

You won't have Ron Guidry, Graig Nettles, and Bruce Sutter to kick around anymore

If Burkett is elected, he won't go.

2009

Will Clark
David Cone
Andre Dawson
Rickey Henderson
Fred Lynn
Dan Quisenberry

2009 Ballot
Albert Belle
Will Clark
Andre Dawson
Rickey Henderson
Don Mattingly
Willie Randolph

Albert Belle
Bill Buckner
Will Clark
Andre Dawson
Rickey Henderson
Don Mattingley
Willie Randolph
Jim Rice

Jumping on board the Belle/Clark bandwagon, and since we elected Evans, I also added Dawson and Rice.

I kind of like the addition of David Cone. Cone and Saberhagen are interesting cases - both with high peak values, but not enough longevity. Both were significantly better during their peak periods than accumulators like Blyleven, Sutton and Morris, so I could be sold on both with a proper argument. Cone was definitely hurt by either playing on poor teams, or by not being the best pitcher on some great staffs, but he was damned good.

I don't really consider The Rickey to be a slam dunk. He was an accumulator and I wouldn't vote for him just because of his totals. However, even using the standard lwts SB/CS values, he added upwards of 20-30 runs per season with stolen bases - an incredible value, really. He also walked at a very high rate, which for a leadoff hitter with SB capabilities is very valuable. We calculate the run value of walks at the flat rate of .33 runs per walk using lwts, but in fact I suspect that value could be modified upwards for a player like Henderson. A lot of Rickey was show and fluff, but his value was very real.

I also added Billy Buck - he was short of selectivity by a little bit, but his fine career will always be blemished by the wicket, so he gets a vote of appreciation from me.

2009 Vote

Rickey Henderson
Matt Williams
Jim Rice
Albert Belle

No way should Dewey have been voted in before Jim Ed .. let's get Rice in!!

My first post in this thread, how delightful. Nothing too controversial.

2009 Ballot
Albert Belle
Will Clark
Andre Dawson
Rickey Henderson
Don Mattingly
Willie Randolph

Henderson had career WARP3 of 178.1, which is more than twice that of Rice (89.2). He had a career OBP of .401 over 25 seasons. He is currently the all time career leader in runs and stolen bases. He is second to Bonds (and ahead of Ruth, Williams, and everyone else) in career walks and secondary bases. He was good enough to play until age 44. You could not possibly be more wrong about him not being a slam dunk.

Also, you can't legitimately call Henderson an accumulator and not say the same about Buckner. He hung around long enough to have 2700 hits, but his career OPS+ was only 99. His best win shares total was 21 and his best WARP3 total was 7.4 (career total 67.2). I sympathize with him for being unfairly blamed for losing Game 6, but he was probably even more overrated than Rice, which is saying a lot.

Welcome to the thread. By the way, your selections are brilliant.

Ditto to your Henderson sentiment; you saved some of us from posting something similar. But in terms of Buckner I think Vermonter was giving him a vote as a send-off and not as a legitimate HoFer. I doubt even he has the energy to be that contrarian.

2009 ballot
--------------
Albert Belle
Will Clark
Andre Dawson
Rickey Henderson
Fred Lynn

I agree with your call-out for Cone. I think he has a better case than Saberhagen, though I believe the lack of quantity in his record is more related to personal issues than to injuries so I don't feel too bad for him.

Neither were as good as Blyleven even at their peak. Bert was putting up great stats in 300 innings year after year, which these guys simply could not match. I will not buy the argument about the game changing, since neither Saberhagen nor Cone could stay on the mound much even with the reduced workloads of a decade later.

Well ... WARP is an accumulated stat, is it not? A long career does not necessarily mean a great career, either (see Harold Baines), and no stat is more overrated than SB's. If you believe the current lwts run values for SBs and CSs (and I am not absolutely sure that I do), Rickey only created 119 runs over his extraordinary career as a base-stealer, which is more than anybody else in modern history (not sure about Cobb, since we don't really know how often he got caught stealing) by a long shot, but really not a lot of runs in the grand scheme of things.

So when I say he's not a slam dunk, I mean that he's not a guy who you vote for without bothering to take a real look at his numbers. We did that with Lou Brock and I deeply regret that. Did you know that Brock once stole 72 bases in a season but actually created negative runs through base-stealing? In comparison to Brock, though, Rickie is golden, and his numbers do stand up as HoF-caliber once you look at them. His walk totals were phenomenal, especially since he's perhaps the one guy in all of baseball who pitchers probably never wanted to walk. Also, as I said, he also probably converted those walks to runs more efficiently than any other player in history. He probably would have been HoF-worthy if he had only batted .230 over his career, but of course he was better than that.

So yeah, Rickie is a first-ballot guy for sure, but not without a little scrutiny first, not without going beyond the walk and SB totals and WARPs and VORPs and pluses and finding out that he was probably better than those numbers give him credit for anyway.

I'm not exactly sure what you are saying in the last paragraph. The game did change, in two ways. First of all, the number of starts got reduced in the 1990's as did the number of innings per start, so if you are implying that Blyleven had better stamina, I guess you are probably correct, but stamina wasn't as necessary afterwards. I'm not sure if Pedro or Maddux would have been as good if they had had to pitch 300+ innings a year, either, but they didn't. Blyleven pitched more, both because he could (I guess) but because that is what he was expected to do. Modern pitchers with their pitch counts and tiered bullpens must seem like pussies in comparison to those earlier pitchers, but good pitchers adapt to their environment.

The same comparison tells us also that Blyleven had more opportunities to win ballgames too, though, because he got more starts per season. In fact, Blyleven had 16 seasons with 30+ starts. Cone only had eight 30+ start seasons, and Saberhagen only five. That speaks of stamina to some degree, but probably more so the five-man rotation. The most starts that a perfectly healthy number one starter is going to get nowadays is 35 or 36. There's just no way that's ever going to exceed more than about 250 innings. Blyleven usually got a few more starts per year than that (37 or more seven times), but actually only put up one 300 season on his own.

If you want to look at how well those three made out in their starts, it should also be noted that Blyleven won 42% of his starts, Saberhagen 45% and Cone 46% (Greg Maddux won 49%, Clemens 50%, Seaver 48%, Carlton 49&, Gaylord Perry 46%, Tommy John 41%, Don Sutton 43% etc for contrast).

So to some extent, those newer pitchers (post 1975 or thereabouts) are getting fewer starts per season, so eventually win totals are going to have to be adjusted. At a Clemenesque 50% W/GS rate and a max of 36 starts per year, it's going to take 17 seasons to win 300 game given perfect health. As you mentioned, though, certainly not all of the low start totals for Cone and Saberhagen were because of lack of opportunity, so we can't adjust them too far upwards.

The other side of the coin is that the game changed significantly in about 1993 with regards to the quality of contact, and modern pitchers are pitching in a signicantly more difficult run scoring environment nowadays. Cone pitched in 10 seasons post-1993, Saberhagen 7 and Blyleven none. I'm not completely sure how well our adjusted numbers (like plus stats) are affected in the pitching categories. Earned runs as a percentage of total runs are lower (whether through better defense, or kinder scoring is difficult to tell), and I suspect that starting pitchers are probably losing a fair amount of wins in late innings against bullpens nowadays - or at least more than they used to.

All of this needs further study, but I suspect that in the end, David Cone is probably at or near the cutoff for where the new standards and adjustments for HoF electability will fall.

I demand someone acknowledges my Burkett joke.

2009 Ballot
Will Clark
Dvid Cone (keep him around a year or two)
Mark Grace (Lets do a Mattingly/Grace thing!)
Rickey Henderson
Don Mattingly
Willie Randolph
Mo Vaughn (heh)

2009 Ballot

John Burkett

(Kidding, of course)

2009 Ballot, for real

Rickey Henderson
Andre Dawson
Will Clark
Jim Rice

I'm really on the fence with Belle. Impressive career over a short span, but right now, I'm leaving him off. The whole Jason Grimsley episode hurts him, in my book.

In my view, Blyleven's career being twice as long as Saberhagen's has little to do with "adapting to their environment". A generation of pitchers was asked to pitch more (i.e., play a more valuable role in the team's quest for victory), and this generation was the best this game has ever produced. Seaver, Ryan, Carlton, Blyleven, Palmer and a host of others were asked to carry a larger load--not only did they do so, they also pitched more years than the guys before or after them. It seems disengenuous to look back and say, "Thanks for all the work, Bert, but you were just 'adapting to your environment'. You, sir, are just an accumulator." Well, so was Babe Ruth then.

When Saberhagen came along (1984), he was 20 and Blyleven was 33. That said, Bert still pitched more innings than Saberhagen in 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987. In Saberhagen's first great Cy Young year (1985), Blyleven pitched 60 more innings and was only slightly less effective per inning. In fact, I think Blyleven had a better season. Finally, when Blyleven was 38, Saberhagen outworked him for a few years, but Bert pitched more innings than Bret again in 1992 when he was 41, a year after Blyleven had had back surgery. Blyleven pitched 234 innings with a 2.70 ERA when he was 38. At that age, Saberhagen was having trouble lifting his arm to brush his teeth.

Saberhagen did not pitch fewer innings because the game changed. He pitched fewer innings because he broke down, either by pitching mediocre for a few months or by going to see Dr. James Andrews. Blyleven's ability to pitch 280 innings every year for several years, and then 230 for several years after that, is not "manager's choice". Its a skill, its part of his resume, like Ted Williams ability to get on base.

This is why games change. The game "changed" in the 1970s because the pitchers did not break down when they were stretched out. The game "changed" in the 1990s because the pitchers forced them to (or at least the manager's perceived it this way). I fear that in 30 years someone is going to try to tell me that it was "manager's choice" that Pedro Martinez had 46 complete games while Bert Blyleven had 60 *SHUTOUTS*. Sorry, it was not. The game changed in large part because of people like Sabehagen and Martinez, not the other way around.

As for Cone, I think he's got a better case. Had he stayed effective into his later 30s (which most great pitchers do, especially today), he'd sail in. He was an excellent pitcher for a very long time. Its very possible, even likely, that he will be a victim of the 1994-95 strike. Had this not occurred, he'd probably have two more 20 win seasons (giving him four) and 200 wins. I suspect that would be enough. On the other hand, Cone was one of the prime movers behind the strike, so it will be tougher to play this card. I loved Coney, I think I am going to vote for him.

Well ... the HoF is full of accumlating pitchers - a pitching "career" almost invites a splendid high-level of mediocrity for pitchers to last as long as they need to to get there. In the grand scheme of things, HoF pitchers are usually the "Belmont Winners" having managed to pace themselves a little better than the hotter thoroughbreds.

I know Sabes doesn't make the HoF, but he had four seasons that were tremendous. He couldn't pitch 250 innings - that killed his career trying to, but was damned good in his peak - probably better than 75% of the HoFers ever were in terms of peak value.

It's a matter of taste, really, and I prefer my pitchers spicy. I'd rather love a guy who burned out in seven years but threw his best and dominated, than a guy who suddenly turns 40 and people suddenly notice that he's managed to win all these games without anyone really having noticed him while he was doing that. Whether it's fair or not, Blyleven was the latter type. Rightly or wrongly, no matter how good he looks in retrospect, AS and CYA voters barely noticed him during his career, nor did the average fans.

So don't tell me Blyleven was better than Saberhagen, or Valenzuela, or Fidrych, or Denny McLain, or Vida Blue. Don't tell me that Red Ruffing was better than Dizzy Dean, or Ted Lyons better than Harry Brecheen, or Bob Lemon better than Johnny Antonelli, or Gaylord Perry better than Sam McDowell. They had better careers and they outlasted those guys, but they were never better.

2009 Ballot

Rickey Henderson
David Cone

I can't bring myself to vote for anyone else. Nobody quite stands out for me. Rice is an OK choice, so is Dawson. One could also leave Cone off of the ballot but he is in the top 25 all-time for strikeouts, went 5-0 in WS starts, and was an extraordinary pitcher at his peak and that is good enough for me.

Rickey was one of a kind. There was no question in my mind about him.

I think Saberhagen had a good career, but comparing him to Bert Blyleven is nuts.

Blyleven was better than Saberhagen, or Valenzuela, or Fidrych, or Denny McLain, or Vida Blue, and it's not a matter of taste, it's a matter of ability to pitch a baseball and get outs.

If you want "spice," I suggest Indian food.

Well, you have uncovered the major issue between most of the arguments in this thread, certainly. But you go way overboard here in my opinion.

Perry was not as good as McDowell? This doesn't make sense to me. Perry had better years than McDowell ever had, and he pitched forever. You are essentially penalizing Perry for his durability. Perry's best 10 years are far better than McDowell's. Then he has 12 more years on top of that, which make his rate stats go down (of course). In 1972 Gaylord Perry had a 1.92 ERA in 343 innings. I know you don't care about innings pitched, but my God.

Blyleven not as good as Denny McLain? How does one come to that conclusion? McLain had three years in his career where he was better than an average pitcher. If you narrow better down to "best year" I suppose McLain was better, but why would you a thing like that? Blyleven had about 10 years comparable to McLain's second best season.

I actually am more of a peak value guy myself. But sometimes I think you let career length get in the way of recognizing someone's peak. Tacking 1500 league average innings onto Vida Blue's career does not make him worse, it makes him better. Perry and Blue shared a league for much of their careers, and Perry was always better even though he was 10 years older. Blyleven came up with Blue and outpitched him every single year except one.

You know when Blue was better? From April through July 1971. For four months, he was as good a pitcher as I have ever seen. On July 25, Blue was 19-3 1.37. Blyleven was never that good!

Totally agree on your last point, VAL. As for Henderson, he did have some phenomenal seasons in addition to his excellent career totals. His best year was almost certainly 1990, when he had an EQA of .374, WARP3 of 13.7, 39 win shares, OPS+ of 188, 9.3 RC/27, and a secondary average of .583. Not bad.

This has nothing to do with his Hall of Fame credentials, of course, but Henderson's WARP3, win shares, etc. do not even begin to describe his unique persona, which sadly is going to become less and less well known as time spins by. In a similar vein, I've wished my son, who's 18 and a huge fan, good luck in explaining the essence of Manny to his grandkids.

Yeah, I do go over the top every once in a while ...

Maybe it's all an illlusion though. Maybe the pitchers who end up in the HoF really were better than their flashier Fidrych/Fernando media darlings. Maybe we're just always looking for the next hot guy and ignoring the one's who soldier on from year to year ... hell I don't know. Pitching is really, really hard to quantify from year to year ...

2009 BALLOT
Albert Belle
Will Clark
David Cone
Hawk Dawson
Rickey Henderson
Don Mattingly
Willie Randolph
Lee Smith

* I was going to bitch and moan about all the symbolic votes, and the extra work they create for URI in tracking votes (he'll actually have to add a line in the vote totals for Matt f'ing Williams...) But then I saw URI's vote for Big Mo and reversed course.

This thread was supposed to correct the BBWAA's flaws, not emulate them.


I can only conclude that you have absolutely no clue about the role defense plays in the rational assessment of baseball players.

As an observer and a participant, one of the most interesting things about this thread is how closely it does emulate the BBWA voting. The symbolic votes, the way players climb up the ballot as "years" pass, people using votes to lobby for or against certain eras or positions. And especially how the thread and the real Hall of Fame have about the same numbers of players, and hence the same standards, albeit applied through slightly different criteria.

To Mclusky's excellent point and MABD's curious one, I would also add that it's very interesting that defense has come into play really only within the realm of players who we got to watch play, or at least have seen highlight reels of, such as Evans and Ozzie Smith. Of course this isn't fair, because we couldn't apply the same criteria to guys like Mazeroski or Dave Bancroft even though we attempted to capture that value of their defense with the rudimentary numbers we have available. Those were too abstract for the majority of voters here to absorb, but the visual input apparently was just fine. So really I think that as a group, we still really don't have a clue of how defense figures into the objective evaluation of historical players. We have some ideas, but the tools are varied and inconsistent at best. I suppose that in retrospect, we should have developed a more specific protocol for considering defense, or at least a consistent champion of certain methodologies that we could apply. I know that I have tried in certain eras to grasp the defense with the numbers I had, but failed miserably in both the quantity and consistency of that application. It's one thing we can and should have done better here.

Jack Lang, secratary/treasurer of the BBWAA from 1966 to 1988, died yesterday.
Bill Madden (NY Daily News) Column
Obituary

You have a point in that it is hard to evaluate defense of historical players, but saying we don't have a clue is nonsensical, and your examples don't buttress your argument. Mazeroski was a great defender, but his offense was borderline putrid (career OPS+ of 84, career OBP of .299) so it's pretty clear that the entire package doesn't cut it. As for Bancroft, maybe we undervalued his defense a bit but his offense wasn't all that great (OPS+ 98) and he was at best borderline. We've kept out better players.

And we elected Ozzie Smith (OPS+ 87) on the first ballot.

I shouldn't say "we" I guess. I'll modify that to say that in this exercise, I haven't learned how to evaluate defense properly. My main perspective on defense is that unless the guy was very, very good (by reputation, I guess) or really really bad, everyone is essentially average on defense, so I look at the offense instead. Sometimes defense is a tie-breaker, but again only when a guy is clearly above or below the pack. Even if I knew what defense was and how to measure it, I still wouldn't know what proportion of his defensive ability to apply to his overall excellence.

I've mainly learned an awful lot in this exercise, but proper defensive evaluation is one thing I have gotten seriously wrong, or at least haven't learned much about.

I think VAL is right, and I have been considering defense throughout the exercise. For one thing, I think defense is much less important today than it was 50 years ago, to say nothing about 100 years ago.

Take Phil Rizzuto, who I advocated for. Rizzuto anchored one of the best defensive teams of all-time, a team that placed a huge burden on their defense. Defense used to be so much harder to play. In 1950, with tiny gloves and pebble strewn fields, someone like Rizzuto was an extraordinary weapon for the Yankees, something his manager, his teammates, and the writers of the time knew but the modern blogger (OPS+ rules!) simply does not get. Fielding statistics cannot measure this. Stengel put such a premium on defense that Rizzuto was competing with the rest of his great teammates to record the 27 outs.

Ozzie, as good as he was, was not the difference maker of Rizzuto, because he played at a time when the position was much easier to play. I voted for Ozzie because his offense was much better than the OPS+ nazis would have you believe.

In the 1880s, defense was everything. Many of the people in this thread advocated (improperly, in my opinion) for the pitchers of this era, guys like Pud Galvin. Think of Galvin like a slow pitch softball pitcher. His job was to allow his defense to make plays.

Today the pitcher is probably 80% of the defense, even more if its Randy Johnson. Galvin was 30% of the defense.

While that's true, pitchers have no control over how many innings they pitch. That's under the contol of the manager. Instead of looking at how many innings Henke pitched, look at how well he pitched. In comparison to his peers, Henke is 16th all time in saves. He was in the top ten in saves 9 times in a 14 year career, and in the top 5 five times. His career ERA is 2.67, and for those who like adjusted stats, his ERA+ is 156.

I've supported Gossage, and Sutter, and in my opinion Henke ranks among them.

2009 Ballot

Tom Henke
Rickey Henderson

2009 Ballot:
Rickey Henderson
Andre Dawson
Lee Smith

2009 Ballot:

Rickey Henderson
Jim Rice
Lee Smith

Lee Smith
Jim Rice
Bruce Sutter

I'm not voting for "Me-first" Rickey. He fails too many of the criteria.

Albert Belle
Will Clark
David Cone
Andre Dawson
Rickey Henderson
Fred Lynn
Jim Rice

What criteria are these? Henderson's career was at least twice as valuable, in terms of how much he helped his teams win baseball games, than those of any of the players for whom you voted.

Edit: spehling

Possibly my favorite baseball quote of all time-

"Someone once asked me if Rickey Henderson was a Hall of Famer. I told him, 'if you could split him in half, you'd have two Hall of Famers.'" -Bill James.

I can't conceive of an argument that includes Rice and not Henderson. I don't know if it's possible.

Could you elaborate on this? The only significant difference I know of is artificial turf.

I agree because it seems that OPS+ undervalues OBP and overvalues SLP, so the offense of a player like Smith, whose OBP was better than league average and whose SLP was much worse than league average, is undervalued. Is this what you were getting at?

You and a few other vets of this thread (URI and Mabrowndog come to mind) have been critical of OPS+. Is this only because it undervalues OBP at the expense of SLP, or is there more to it than that? It seems to me that it's pretty useful due to its simplicity if you adjust for this problem.

"the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played."

Note that it doesn't just say player with highest career VORP. If it did, we wouldn't need to vote, just run the numbers through a calculator.

Phil Rizzuto played with a glove not much bigger than a ski glove, with nothing more than a rudimentary hinge. He played on fields with grass patches and pebbles. To play the infield in 1950 you needed to have reflexes like a cat. Rizzuto handled more bad hops in a weekend in St. Louis than Ozzie Smith did in his career. Playing the infield used to be a rare and valued skill. Today you can put a guy like A-Rod or Ripken at SS--since every ground ball is "true", they can just play deep and make up for their lack of true range with their great arms.


Besides skewing the ratio of slugging and on-base skills, OPS or OPS+ does not consider baserunning, either by stealing bases or otherwise. The 1987 Cardinals had one player with an OPS+ over 105 (Jack Clark), but played guys with OPS+ of 55 and 80 and a bunch of 90s. Their team OPS+ was 94, which is horrible, 3rd worst in the whole league. Despite this, they were a great offense, second in the league in runs, one game from winning the World Series. The Cubs had a 103 OPS+, played in a better hitters park, and scored 80 fewer runs, finishing 7th in the league in runs scored. The Cardinals 94 OPS+ wasn't just marginally better than the Cubs 103, it was ridiculously better. It was a great offense versus a bad offense.

The Cardinals, of course, stole 248 bases (caught just 72), but that's not all of it. The Cardinals created a lot of runs on the bases. Saying Ozzie Smith was a 105+ player in 1987 is silly--he wasn't just a great defensive player, he was a very good offensive player. Andre Dawson had 49 home runs and a 129 OPS, but Ozzie was a better offensive player that year than Dawson. James gives him 33 Win Shares to 20 for Dawson, and that's not all defense. He got on base, and when he got on base he moved around the bases. They all did.

Ozzie has a career OPS+ of 87, which is significantly below average. On the other hand, he had a career EQA (which attempts to account for baserunning) of .262, which is slighly above average for all players (including left fielders and DHs). My suspicion is that even EQA doesn't quite reward Ozzie enough for his baserunning, but whatever. I have no doubt at all that Ozzie Smith was an above average offensive player--in his best years he was a very, very good offensive player.

In today's game, where baserunning is much less important, where defense is much less important, we are likely approaching a time when OPS+ will come closer to representing most players ... sort of ... OK. If you are comparing Jim Rice and George Foster, players who brought the same kinds of skills to the table, it might be OK. But the idea that Mark McGwire (163) was a better player than Joe Morgan (132) is hilarious.

Ok, so maybe that went on too long.

Wow. Which of those categories does Rickey fail?

You really think Jim Rice belongs in the Hall of Fame but Rickey Henderson doesn't? Really?

Anyway, 2009 ballot:
Albert Belle
Will Clark
Rickey Henderson

Just to illustrate his point:

The 1954 Cleveland Indians won 111 games with George Strickland (.213/.314.313--361 AB) playing 112 games at shortstop.
The 1954 Yankees won 103 games with Phil Rizzuto (.195/.291/.251--307 AB) playing 126 games at shortstop.

The 1968 Detroit Tigers won the World Series in 1968 with Ray Oyler (.135/.212/.186--215 AB) playing 111 games at shortstop (He played 502 games at short in his career while batting .175/.258/.251).

Willie Miranda played 768 games at shortstop for five teams in the 1950s while batting .221/.282/.271.

Jose Valdivieloso played shortstop in over have his team's games for five seasons in the 1950s while batting .219/.282/.290.

The list goes on (Joe DeMaestri, Billy Consolo, Eddie Joost are some that come to mind), but in the 50s and 60s no one seemed to look for any offensive production from their shortstops. There were exceptions, of course (Harvey Kuenn, for example, but he ended up a a center fielder).

Otto, it seems to me that your examples show that teams sacrificed 1/9 of their offense to get good defense at short, but not that they were wise to do so. Also, you cherrypicked a terrible season from Rizzuto to prove your point; he had some far superior ones, notably 1950. By the way, the 1968 Tigers benched Oyler for the World Series, opting instead to move Mickey Stanley to SS to get more offense. The reason Oyler got so much playing time in the first place was the injury to Kaline.

I think you guys have somewhat of a point regarding the change since around 1950 in the degree of difficulty of playing SS, but the change was not as great as you say. The number of shortstop errors has diminished somewhat, but not greatly, since then. There was a much bigger change between 1900 and 1950.

Counting SS errors misses the point. There are more SS errors in my slow-pitch beer league--that does not mean the position is harder to play than the major leagues.

The Yankees were not sacrificing anything. They looked at the pool of people who could play a passable defensive SS, of which there might have been 15, and took the best one (considering offense and defense). The fact that Rizzuto was a very good hitter in his best years made him a star. Today, scouts still look at the pool of people who can play a passable defensive SS, of which there might be 5000, and end up with Alex Rodriguez and Miguel Tejada. 60 years ago these guys would not have been capable of playing the position.

This is the kind of mistake we make looking backwards. The fact that baserunning doesn't matter today means that we develop metrics that don't consider baserunning. The fact that defense doesn't matter as much today means we end up judging people with OPS+. The Yankees of Rizzuto's era beat you by playing great defense year after year. They would bring up (or acquire) unknown pitchers who would suddenly become "stars", before drifting on somewhere else. Defense.

The number of shortstop errors wouldn't tell you how much fielding has changed since 1950. If Lahoud and Otto are correct, that fielding is easier and therefore managers are using worse fielders to gain more offense, the number of errors wouldn't necessarily diminish.

It's a change that isn't easy to see with statistics, which is probably why most fans don't think about it.

Well, here is something interesting and potentially a paradigm buster.

I knew that defense has evolved over the past century. In 1910, for instance teams averaged around 120 defensive runs (runs scored as a result of errors), which was about 25% of their run totals. By comparison, modern teams give up about 55 runs per season through errors, which is only about 7% of their total runs scored. Before someone else mentions it, I know that defenses give up runs in other ways not directly attributable to errors, but I am assuming that those runs are going to be consistent with fielding errors to some degree.

Anyway, I assumed that the growth in defensive performance has been more or less steady throughout history, but that is wrong. As glove technology (i.e. webbed glove technology) improved and came into widespread use in the early 1920's, we did see a significant improvement in defensive runs which stabilized to about 85 runs per team per season by the late 1920's. However, that improvement did not continue, and in fact defensive runs climbed back up into the low 90's by the mid-1930's - presumably because the offense-minded leagues preferred offensive players to defensive players. History bears this out, and lots of infielders from the 1930's were certainly no great glovemen, including guys like Traynor, Vaughan, Jackson, Travis, Elliot etc.

Interestingly, this trend persisted until 1942. During the WW2 years, defensive runs dropped down into the low 70's - presumably because some good fielding players got a chance to play more often. This trend continued after the War when it dropped into the low to mid 60's and plateaued there until the late 1980's, when it began dropping again to it's current level.

The point of all of this is that team defense was pretty much the same in 1950 as it was in 1987 - team runs through errors remained almost exactly the same (with some seasonal variation, of course). Glove technology continued to improve, fields got better, but somehow those guys in the 1950's got the job done just as efficiently as their modern peers.

Now to head off another question - I know that errors don't necessarily reflect range, and it could have been that more balls were getting through infields as singles back in the 1950's - untouched by those guys in the baggy pants. Not so. The singles rate in 1950 was actually a few points lower than in the modern game. Singles rates did spike a little in the 1960's, but that was in a slightly more difficult offensive environment, then returned to the previous levels in the 1970's.

In fact, there is no reason to believe that fielders were any better in the 1960's, 70's and 80's than they were in the 1940's and 50's. They might appear to be better now, but much of that is probably an optical illusion. Glove technology probably made a significant impact on the style of play - I doubt if Pee Wee Reese and Marty Marion went horizontal to stab liners like the modern guys do, but their overall efficiency is certainly no better. They just didn't look as good doing it.

Couple this knowledge with the fact that as Lahoud mentioned, fields were in worse condition, gloves were smaller, and that batters strike out quite a bit more often now, one might even conclude that the average infielders of the 1950's were overall better than in the 1970's.

I realize that was an aberrant season by Rizzuto's standards, but the Yankees were content with his infield play and and managed to win 103 games that year with it in spite of his bat. I also know that Oyler was replaced by Stanley gor the 1968 World Series, but it was Oyler who was their starting shortstop on the way there. Oyler actually played more shortstop for the Tigers the previous, playing 75% of the innings while batting .207/.281/.264.

My point is that for nearly two decades the role of the middle infielder (especially the shortstop) was perceived much differently by front offices and managers than it is today. They were expected to field and get their bat on the ball to move runners along when they batted (if any were on base). Anything else like higher AVG, OBP, SLG was gravy. They weren't even necessarily base-stealing threats.

I agree with the sentiment about the increasing difficulty of defense, but I don't think you can prove it with offensive statistics any more than with errors, and I don't think it's true that managers just ignored offense for those decades.

Shortstops from 1960 to 1969 hit .246/.309/.337; shortstops from 1980 to 1989 hit .253/.307/.344. Ray Oyler is an extreme example from an extreme era -- he wasn't typical. For hitting shortstops in that era, you also had Dick Groat, Pee Wee Reese and Ernie Banks. Then, even after the gloves and the fields got better, you have examples like the '85 Royals winning the World Series with Onix Concepcion (204/.255/.245) as the primary shortstop.

I think the point is not that managers ignored offense -- just the opposite. Because the bar for fielding was so much higher, those shortstops that could hit and field, like Rizzuto in his good years, were much more valuable to their teams than most people realize today, or OPS shows.

If you cared as much about this exercise as you did about waving the Jim Rice banner, you would know that Bruce Sutter ran out of eligibility. I figured I'd give you a chance to amend your ballot, since Rice is 42% away from being elected in his last year of eligibility, so I doubt we see you in this thread in the upcoming years.

Sorry, I could have been more precise. The changes that you cite (inferior gloves and playing surfaces) both relate to conditions that, to the extent they are significant, would manifest themselves in higher error rates. Error rates circa 1950 were somewhat, but not extremely, higher than today. Therefore, it would seem that these conditions had some impact, but not a huge one. I don't buy the proposition that, on average, those guys were defensive giants compared to today.

You say that the pool of players then who could handle SS defensively was far smaller than today (although your 5000/15 ratio is obviously hyperbole). Even if true, I don’t think this is a significant. In 1950, there were 16 starting SS jobs in MLB, and a population of around 150,000,000 from which to draw them. (I doubt your beer league has to be quite that selective.) There were plenty of decent offensive shortstops around, including, besides Rizzuto, Vern Stephens, Eddie Joost, Chico Carrasquel, Pee Wee Reese, Granny Hamner, Ray Boone, and Alvin Dark. I suspect that one reason there weren't more is that teams in general weren't creative enough in finding good hitters who could handle the position.

As for OPS+, I'm trying to come up with a simple way to adjust it to properly weigh OBP, without any success so far. You're right, the 1987 Cardinals are a good illustration of its limitations: they led the league in OBP, and their excellent baserunning tended to negate their need for slugging.