On Hall of Fame Ballots
So, yipptiy skippity. Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice are the latest members of Baseball's Hall of Fame. The thing is that the voting for this honour is a joke. Of this there can be little doubt.
Stoeten has already made his persuasive argument against Jim Rice, and in all honesty, I find it difficult to give a fuck. I've never been one to get all up in arms over player selection or wonder if a young star like Travis Snider will ever put together a Hall of Fame career.
It's fine if comparing Bert Blyleven's career numbers to Don Sutton's keeps you up at night. There are worse things to obsess about. But for the time being, try to ignore the top of the selection list for the latest round of voting and instead concentrate on the bottom.
How the fucking fuck can Mo Vaughn, Jay Bell and Jesse Orosco garner votes for the motherfucking Baseball Hall of Fame? As long as players of this ilk receive any votes at all, how the fucking fuck can anyone be expected to take this process seriously?
I'm honestly not trying to be a douche here. Let me know how you can personally justify caring who becomes a member of the Hall of Fame when more than one of those who decide who gets entry casts their vote in the direction of Jay Bell.
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30 comments:
I'd vote for Jay Bell. Not many guys can play well AND wear glasses.
Jesse Orosco automatically garnered votes for achieving dual milestones: 40 years pitching in the majors + playing for 85% of all MLB teams over the course of his career.
Honestly, I forgot Jay Bell even existed.
Fuck off Mo Vau.. I mean Parkes.
I went to the HHOF this summer and here's what I learned: If you play at an above average level for Boston or New York, you get in.
When I saw Mo Vaughn's name on the ballot, I thought it was a typo.
Wouldn't it be something if one of the people who voted for Mo Vaughn was also one of the people who didn't vote for Rickey. Talk about abuse of power...
Parkes - honest question. Is there a big distinction between Jim Rice's career and Mo Vaughn's? I guess I'm not seeing it -- if somebody can get in the HOF on a handful of years being "most feared", I think Vaughn's case is better than Rice's -- just a slightly shorter career. Not a big fan of the strikeouts, but I'll take the rest of the stats year by year on Vaughn - not that i'd put either of them on my ballot.
You know something, you're right. It's not that far off at all. Looking at Vaughn's numbers again, there was a stretch of 3-5 years around his MVP season where he was balls out fantastic. I guess the mental issues and the way he ended his career sort of taint things.
Oh, and you guys are totally losing it. I spelled Vaughn's name incorrectly and there was nary a mention.
Yeah, but again, it's a fucking blog! and thanks
And again, Dumb Jays fans opinions mean nothing.
Just imagine how little that must make the currency of your mind worth.
how did the Rock only get 22% of the vote. that's a crime.
kind of like the crime of inducting one dude with very similar batting stats to another dude who didn't survive the first round of balloting?
Still, if you look at Rice's early years on the ballot, he wasn't doing much better than Raines, so maybe his day will come.
In my opinion, they need to make a section of the HoF for guys with the top 1% of stats, then devote the rest to guys who were famous.
That someone would NOT vote for Rickey is still a hell of a lot worse than anyone voting for Mo or Jay Bell. I can almost see someone thinking that Jay Bell's one great year and a couple good years deserved a token vote, just so he wouldn't have a goose-egg beside his name. But I can't see how anyone could look at Rickey's career and think that it didn't deserve a first-ballot induction.
Some people compared Bell's numbers to Rice and they weren't that different (not the RBI counting stats, of course). If you were stupid enough to vote for Rice, you should vote for Bell.
Guys just vote for their drinking buddies, just so a guy can say "I got a Hall of Fame vote" and put it on his tombstone or something.
Fuck off Parkes
If we keep letting guys like Rice in, the HOF is gonna start overflowing and lose all it's meaning, if there is any. That's why I like Bill Simmon's Pyramid idea, even though he thinks Rice is in.
http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/020108
A pyramid would stop all this senseless equating people do of two unlike players. It doesn't guarantee that voters will make the right decision but at least they would have a flexible framework to put players in instead of a rigid one that forces them to equate Jim Rice to Babe Ruth.
Wouldn't it just shift the debates to being about what level of the pyramid someone belongs on, though?
If you think the standards are relevant, then you can say Rice doesn't belong. But if you think there are no standards, Rice surely belongs.
If you want to say Jim Rice shouldn't be in the HOF, then you should say what standard you think he doesn't reach, and you best state that standard if you want to have the conversation about Rice's irrelevance. Finding bad stats about Rice or players other than Rice who aren't in and are similar doesn't contradict Rice's good stats, individual accomplishments, or prove he doesn't have any.
Or say there is no standard, and leave Rice out of it.
Signed,
The only player ever to lead the ML in triples HR and RBI in a season...
Of course, but at least it would be a healthy debate instead of a boring/meaningless one. We'd have a context when comparing two players. We could easily compare players of different eras and positions, unlike now where everyone is on the same level.
On Rice, even WITH the tremendous benefit of playing in Fenway, among LFs in the Hall Rice only has a better OPS than Winfield and Lou Brock (a big exception in the group, I'm sure you'd agree). His OPS+ is the worst except Brock. And of his counting stats: fewest home runs and RBIs except Brock. Fewest walks of any of them. He has the fewest doubles except Killebrew and the fewest hits and runs scored of the group except Stargell-- and Rice actually had more ABs than them (though because of his low walk totals, Killebrew did actually have more plate appearances).
So, basically, he's now the weakest of any LF in the Hall (excepting Brock, who is too different a player to really make a valid comparison), and that's without factoring in at all how average he was when outside of the extremely Jim Rice-friendly stadium that he played home games in his whole career.
Ranking HOF LFs by WARP3
s. Musial - 191.5
R. Henderson - 189.8
F. Robinson - 167.6
T. Williams - 156.8
C. Yastrzemski - 131.7
D. Winfield - 125.2
B. Williams - 113.1
W. Stargell - 105.6
H. Killebrew 94.5
L. Brock 89.9
J. Rice 80.2
Paragraphs above were written before Henderson was in the list.
Oh, and Devon White's WARP3 is 84.0.
I don't know what that means, exactly, but I thought it was interesting.
Jay Bell is fucking sweet you dicks.
Rice may be the weakest LF in the HOF by career stats. But our disagreement really comes down to the question of if a 12 year stretch of dominance can qualify as a HOF career. and btw, he hit almost as many HRs outside of Fenway as inside Fenway- 208-174. From 75-87 he was in the top five in MVP voting five times, winning once but coming in third in 75 and third in 86, two big years for his team. His last three years were awful, but those 12 seasons were huge averaging 27 HR and 100RBI with and avg. of above 300 and 8AS appearance. 12 seasons of AS, near MVP caliber play is worthy of a place in the HOF.
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