Johnson Declaration of WAR on the Baseball Hall of Fame

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-62309-476-8
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 479 Seiten

Introducing the 'WAR Portfolio' method to analyze the hidden standards of Hall of Fame admission, this book identifies tiers established by past inductions and into which tier current HOF candidates for both the BBWAA and Veterans Committee votes would fall. Also includes forecasts for many current MLB stars, as well as essays on various Hall of Fame-related topics including the Steroid Era, the HOF election process, and examples of some of the worst reasons BBWAA members have ever given for voting on a particular HOF candidate.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Johnson, Tim

Leseproben

Introduction- “Stepping Up to the Plate”
“Whomever wants to know America must know baseball.”- Jacques Barzun Jacques Barzun is a brilliant guy, but he was more brilliant than he knew when he got off this insight. Baseball is America, reflective of so much of what our life is about. It happens most every day, not just one or twice a week. You can fail and still get another chance. You don’t have to succeed every time- in fact, about a third of the time is good enough. And nowhere does baseball reflect America more than in the process of electing Hall of Famers. Look at how similar the processes with choosing who we elect as president. Both electing a president and selecting a Hall of Famer are elections held with no modern analytical standards provided. They are governed by emotion and traditions held dear by a woefully undereducated electorate. Little effort is made to research, analyze, and digest the individual merits of a candidate beyond sound bites or one or two particular statistics. Instead, voters tend to cling to hoary myths handed down from forefathers such as “Democrats are for the little guy, Republicans are for the rich!” or “Republicans are for safety and security, Democrats are soft on crime and national defense!” or “Anyone with 3,000 hits or 500 home runs must be a Hall of Famer!” Both electoral processes somehow have managed to choose someone that is at least minimally qualified most of the time, but the random, uninformed, nature of the process lessens the legitimacy of the outcome and leads to things such as Bush v Gore and the internet warfare over the inductions of guys like Bert Blyleven and Andre Dawson into Cooperstown. Now I am a historian by training and a baseball addict by choice. I have spent most of my entire life wrapped up in those two obsessions, whether it is reading all of the history books in my elementary school library by halfway through the second grade to lying about my age to get into T-Ball a year early. I work at one of the most prestigious museums in the world and have played and/or studied baseball my entire life, leaving parts of my body strewn on diamonds all over the Midwest. I do not live in my parents basement, and I am here to tell you that, regardless of the changes made in both electoral processes (from expanding the right to vote to women, African-Americans, and 18 year olds to allowing electronic media reps and internet writers to vote for HOFers), each continues to neglect the basic weakness within their process, which is a lack of a recognized standard of excellence. In politics, that is called “the lowest common denomination voter”, in baseball it is referred to as “he was as good as Jim Rice.” This prevailing attitude just reinforces the selection of more mediocre choices, further compounding the problems faced by the country and the Baseball Hall of Fame. So how can this be changed? Well, if you are reading this, you are probably a lot like me, and care much more about who is inducted into Cooperstown than whatever yokel gets elected President. And we should care more about the former- we can always vote out a president in four years, but a HOF induction (like a Supreme Court seat) is for life. So I will forego worrying about the presidential electoral process and focus on the more important matter at hand, how to strengthen the process of Hall of Fame induction. To do this, I must take a most drastic step and declare WAR on the entire HOF selection process. To effectively wage this campaign, first we must look at a brief history of how our enemy came into being. When the Hall of Fame first opened in 1936, the question arose on how to select Hall of Famers. It is the essential question that had to be asked, and it was decided that the Baseball Writers of America Association (BBWAA) be given that honor, since it was assumed that they knew more about the game than anyone else due to the simple fact that they saw more games than anyone else. This was not an unreasonable call, since it was true at the time. Baseball writers followed the teams, consistently saw players play more (remember, there were a lot less teams then, so a hometown writer had the chance to see players from other teams much more often than today), and so had a better sense of who the truly great players were. OK, they picked some clunkers, but for a while did a credible job. The statistics they had available for reference at the time were also the best that could be expected. The father of baseball statistics, Henry Chadwick, introduced stats such as home runs, runs, etc, in 1861, and refined these data lines throughout his life in an attempt to provide fans (and the teams themselves) with a statistical record that could be used to better understand the game of baseball. His work was outstanding for his time, and cannot be faulted as a source for early HOF voters to use in their decisions. There- now we have a thumbnail sketch of how the Hall of Fame selection process was born. But, just as we have advanced from horses to Ford Mustangs, science in all endeavors has advanced from the 19th century to today. For example, did you know that there were computers in the 1800’s? Sure was- one of them, in fact, gave us our first measurement of how high Mt. Everest actually is in 1856. Difference is that computer was not a machine- it was a man. A computer was a job description, a profession (I have to believe that a conscientious computer professional from that time, it dropped into the middle of today’s scientific community, would make his first order of business learning how to use GPS to get a clearer picture of things he was measuring.) Despite this, the BBWAA has resisted the advancements made in statistical analysis much the same way as white male landowners resisted expanding the right to vote to anyone else. Using new statistics such as Wins Above Replacement, Fielding Independent Pitching, etc, is seen as surrendering power to “geeks who live in their parent’s basement.” Career home runs, RBI, and wins, were good enough for Grantland Rice, by God, and they are good enough for us, neglecting to take into account the impact of eras and ballparks in compiling those career numbers, much as light refraction was neglected in the first attempts to accurately measure Mt. Everest. The second fallacy that has drifted down through the years and continues to plague the HOF selection process is that BBWAA members watch more baseball than anyone else. The ownership of such a claim became invalid with the introduction of television and its mass infiltration of American homes throughout the 1950’s and ‘60’s. With the exploding popularity of TV, baseball fans could both watch their hometown heroes play in person and catch a game involving two different teams on the weekend, thanks to NBC. This leveling of the playing field was accelerated by the introduction of cable television (which all of us geeks have access to in our parents’ basements) and the explosion of the internet (to which all of us geeks obviously are addicted). So today, while those ink-stained, self-proclaimed, baseball experts of the BBWAA are off racing a deadline to get a quote from a player in a sweaty locker room so they can head off for a few beers with the boys, we hardcore baseball fans are switching over to watch a late game from the west coast courtesy of Ted Turner, WGN out of Chicago, or ESPN. (As for the internet, I hope it isn’t indelicate to point out that while we baseball junkies are hitting Baseball-Reference.com, Fangraphs.com, or the like, most BBWAA members are – judging by their lack of modern statistical analytical knowledge-are using the internet to surf porn.) The BBWA Standards (?)
One would think that, in order to merit the greatest honor possible in baseball, there would be some sort of standard of excellence that a candidate must reach. One would think that, but one would be wrong, at least looking at quotes from voting members of the BBWAA. As far as I can tell, there are two views within the BBWAA on Hall of Fame standards: 1. There are some. 2. There aren’t any. For those that adhere to the first view, the standards seem to be as follows: Vote “Yes” if: •  “He had 3000 hits/300 wins/500 homers or whatever other magic milestone he reached.” •  “He was the most dominating/feared hitter/pitcher of his time.” •  “He was a tough/gritty/big gamer/winner.” •  “He won X number of MVP’s, Cy Youngs, Gold Gloves, Silver Sluggers, and was named to play in X number of All-Star Games.” Vote “No” if: •  “He was a compiler.” •  “He never did well in the MVP/Cy Young race.” •  “He didn’t look like a HOFer to me.” Where did these standards come from? Why are these embraced by supposed professionals as HOF yardsticks? Let’s break these down a bit more: “Magic Milestones” Somewhere in the distant past it was decided that reaching these magic numbers was an automatic ticket to induction. Why? No one saw that future players would try to hang on as long as humanly possible in pursuit of one of these golden ticket numbers? We’ve all seen players play on long past the point of actually helping a team in order to chase these holy grails (Fred McGriff, Harold Baines, etc, are just a couple of the names which come to mind.) Omar Vizquel is doing it right now. Would another 100 or so hits the end of their careers really...