{"id":15599,"date":"2019-01-02T13:21:42","date_gmt":"2019-01-02T18:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=15599"},"modified":"2019-01-02T13:21:42","modified_gmt":"2019-01-02T18:21:42","slug":"obligatory-post-on-the-2019-hall-of-fame-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=15599","title":{"rendered":"Obligatory Post on the 2019 Hall of Fame class"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_7765\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/RiveraMariano-nyfarewell-20130926-Jim-McIsaac-via-newsday.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7765\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7765\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-7765\" src=\"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/RiveraMariano-nyfarewell-20130926-Jim-McIsaac-via-newsday-300x221.jpg\" alt=\"Rivera's last Yankee Apperance. Photo Jim McIsaac\/Long Island Newsday.\" width=\"300\" height=\"221\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/RiveraMariano-nyfarewell-20130926-Jim-McIsaac-via-newsday-300x221.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/RiveraMariano-nyfarewell-20130926-Jim-McIsaac-via-newsday.jpg 541w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-7765\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rivera&#8217;s last Yankee Apperance. Photo Jim McIsaac\/Long Island Newsday.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Its that time of the year, so that means Hall of Fame Ballot time.\u00a0 BBWAA Writers should have mailed in their ballots by 12\/31\/18, and we should start seeing a glut of &#8220;this is who I voted for and why&#8221; posts come out this week.<\/p>\n<p>Nearly 25% of the voters got a jump on things and published early; as of Christmas more than 90 ballots were in\u00a0<strong>Ryan Thibodaux<\/strong>&#8216;s tracker and as of the new year he&#8217;s got more than 130 of the total 412 ballots available.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re still &#8220;in&#8221; on the hall after the inexplicable\u00a0<strong>Harold Baines<\/strong> election, then read on.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s two key links for you, if you&#8217;re still reading:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Baseball-Reference.com&#8217;s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/awards\/hof_2019.shtml\">2019 ballot with stats<\/a><\/li>\n<li><strong>Ryan Thibodaux<\/strong>&#8216;s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/onedrive.live.com\/view.aspx?resid=F2E5D8FC5199DFAF!11134&amp;ithint=file,xlsx&amp;app=Excel&amp;authkey=!ACeqm-knNxexBw8\">online tracker of all HoF votes<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And, here&#8217;s a link to one of the best &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.fangraphs.com\/blogs\/jay-jaffes-virtual-2019-hall-of-fame-ballot\/\">imaginary hall of fame&#8221; ballot stories<\/a> i&#8217;ve ever read, from\u00a0<strong>Jay Jaffe<\/strong>, he of JAWS fame, breaking down the ballot in a great way.<\/p>\n<p>My consideration of candidates for the Hall, unlike my consideration of a lot of stuff in baseball, comes down more to &#8220;feel&#8221; than it does to stats.\u00a0 I know\u00a0<strong>Jay Jaffe<\/strong>\u00a0 has his great JAWS thing that tries to do both peak and longevity.\u00a0 I know b-r.com has a bunch of metrics per player.\u00a0 That&#8217;s all great.\u00a0 But it isn&#8217;t the hall of stats, it isn&#8217;t the hall of WAR.\u00a0 Its the Hall of Fame.\u00a0 Its the hall of marquee players from their day.\u00a0\u00a0I look at the players I&#8217;d vote for and &#8230; they&#8217;re the guys you paid money to see.\u00a0 They&#8217;re the arms that were on the mound and you gave the opposing team little chance.\u00a0 They&#8217;re the sluggers who you wanted up in the 9th inning of a tie game.\u00a0 That&#8217;s what makes the game exciting and that&#8217;s the lens I like to use when judging players.\u00a0 Yeah its subjective and partisan; so is every person voting in the BBWAA.\u00a0 Even Jaffe admits there&#8217;s stats and then there&#8217;s consideration in his excellent article linked above.<\/p>\n<p>With my imaginary ballot, here&#8217;s how i&#8217;d vote. \u00a0Since there&#8217;s a (ridiculous) limit of 10 players per ballot, I&#8217;ll list these players in rough order of voting priority to start:<\/p>\n<p>New to the 2019 Ballot Candidates:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Absolute Yes on\u00a0<strong>Mariano Rivera<\/strong>,\u00a0<strong>Roy Halladay<\/strong>.\n<ul>\n<li>Rivera may be the closest we ever get to a unanimous player; a dominant closer who impacted the post-season for two decades and was a great guy with no enemies in the press.<\/li>\n<li>Halladay was the best or among the best pitchers in baseball for nearly a decade, winning Cy Youngs in both leagues and throwing a post-season no-hitter.\u00a0 He unfortunately also gets posthumous votes thanks to his ill timed death early in 2018.\u00a0 Yes, his inclusion technically &#8220;lowers&#8221; the SP bar .. but I think its just about time people started realizing we have to re-think the way we evaluate SPs in our game.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Slight pause to consider <b>Todd Helton,\u00a0<\/b><strong>Lance Berkman<\/strong>,\u00a0<strong>Andy Pettitte<\/strong> and\u00a0<strong>Roy Oswalt<\/strong>, but then still vote no.\u00a0\u00a0For each, here&#8217;s a couple of thoughts:\n<ul>\n<li>Helton had a 5 year stretch where he was once of the most feared\u00a0 hitters in the game, and accumulated a ton of WAR &#8230; but was kind of a lack-of-power 1B who got a boost playing in Colorado and probably wasn&#8217;t anywhere close to the player that\u00a0<strong>Fred McGriff<\/strong> was, who couldn&#8217;t sniff the hall.<\/li>\n<li>Berkman was an even better, more dangerous hitter &#8230; he retired with a career OPS+ of 144, but aged badly and was done by 37.\u00a0 His <a href=\"https:\/\/www.outsports.com\/2017\/6\/9\/15768990\/st-louis-cardinals-lance-berkman-christian\">intolerant political views<\/a> can&#8217;t be helping him either (in the same vein they&#8217;re affecting Schilling)<\/li>\n<li>If you didn&#8217;t like\u00a0<strong>Jack Morris<\/strong>, you probably don&#8217;t like Pettitte either, as they profile very similarly.\u00a0 Pettitte has the distinction of having the most Wins in the first decade of the new year &#8230; and with Morris&#8217; inclusion every &#8220;decade leading&#8221; wins getter is in the Hall.\u00a0 But something tells me that streak ends here.\u00a0 He also has a bona-fide PED testing result that, for some reason or another, isn&#8217;t viewed with nearly the vitriol as other PED-associated players (<strong>Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Sosa<\/strong>, etc).\u00a0 Amazing how the media narrative changes based on the player (Pettitte == &#8220;good guy&#8221; while Bonds == &#8220;bad guy.&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>Oswalt burst onto the scene and was one of the best pitchers in the NL for the first half of his career &#8230; then disappeared and was done as an effective pitcher by the age of 33.\u00a0 He&#8217;s like the\u00a0<strong>Orel Hershiser<\/strong> of his generation, but only half as accomplished.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>No on everyone else, and there&#8217;s nobody really close.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Returning Ballot Candidates; i&#8217;m not re-litigating these candidates, since i&#8217;ve written many times on them in the past.\u00a0 \u00a0Plus, most of these guys have been on the ballot so long that, frankly, nobody wants to hear your justification any more.\u00a0 Its like politics; reading my blog post isn&#8217;t going to change your opinion on the Border Wall.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Absolute\u00a0Yes on\u00a0<strong>Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds,\u00a0Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>More tepid Yes on\u00a0<strong>Curt Schilling, Manny Ramirez, Fred McGriff<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Almost ready to say Yes on\u00a0<strong>Gary Sheffield, Billy Wagner<\/strong>,\u00a0<strong>Scott Rolen<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Pass for now on\u00a0<strong>Jeff Kent, Larry Walker, Sammy Sosa,<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>Omar Vizquel, Andruw Jones<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So i&#8217;ve got absolute Yes&#8217;s on 6 guys, tepid Yes on another three, then would probably throw on Sheffield as my 10th.<\/p>\n<p>I vote Yes on Mariano, Halladay, Clemens, Bonds, Edgar, Mussina, Schilling, Manny, McGriff and Sheffield.<\/p>\n<p>I get the arguments for Walker, for Wagner, for Sosa, for Jones.\u00a0 That&#8217;s why lots of people say there&#8217;s 14 worth candidates on this year&#8217;s ballot but only 10 spots.\u00a0 Maybe next year.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Its that time of the year, so that means Hall of Fame Ballot time.\u00a0 BBWAA Writers should have mailed in their ballots by 12\/31\/18, and we should start seeing a glut of &#8220;this is who I voted for and why&#8221; posts come out this week. Nearly 25% of the voters got a jump on things [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1390],"tags":[998,704,596,564,638,606,644,1353,999,575,658,1082,338,655,531,171,1083,3992,1320,637,119,297,3392,501,843,684],"class_list":["post-15599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hall-of-fame","tag-andruw-jones","tag-andy-pettitte","tag-barry-bonds","tag-billy-wagner","tag-curt-schilling","tag-edgar-martinez","tag-fred-mcgriff","tag-gary-sheffield","tag-harold-baines","tag-jack-morris","tag-jay-jaffe","tag-jeff-kent","tag-lance-berkman","tag-larry-walker","tag-manny-ramirez","tag-mariano-rivera","tag-mike-mussina","tag-omar-vizuel","tag-orel-hershiser","tag-roger-clemens","tag-roy-halladay","tag-roy-oswalt","tag-ryan-thibodaux","tag-sammy-sosa","tag-scott-rolen","tag-todd-helton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15599"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15620,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15599\/revisions\/15620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}