Name 3 HOF'ers you don't think belong
 

A companion piece to the the thread where we named the 3 guys we think most belong in the hall who have yet to get elected. i want to know the 3 guys in who you think didn't deserve it! (try to keep it more modern as i know many of the dead ball era guys got in for reasons more about nostalgia than statistics)

1- Jim Rice - counting stats are good but not great, WAR makes him only the 76th best OF'er all time. If he had played for Cleveland he would have never even been considered. He also presents a problem because so many modern guys rank above him (Berkman, Andruw Jones, Beltran) in stats and WAR that how do you keep them out yet rationalize Rice in?

2-Phil Rizzuto- should be in for broadcasting, but not for playing. in WAR he ranks 26th in the live ball era, posted a career 96 wRC+ and a .706 OPS. Good solid player, but not a HOF'er

3- Bill Mazeroski- mediocre hitter, great glove, but not a great enough player to be in the HOF. in more for that one HR and for making the right friends on the veteran's committee.

Schoendienst
Slaughter
Kell

Blyleven
Maz
Bowie Kuhn

Sutter
Gordon
Maranville
Tinker

oops exceeded my limit

Jim Rice
Ron Santo

You can have my extra spot Peter.

Grimes
Lyons
Tinker

Lindstrom and Hafey.

Jackie Robinson (sorry, couldn't resist :D)

In all seriousness,

Lou Boudreau
Joe Gordon
Luis Aparicio.

Jim Rice, Bill Mazeroski, Andre Dawson

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Where to begin?
 

The list is very long, but there are certain difficulties involved in telling who is on it. Some of the hilariously bad selections were old guys picked for their defensive work. Rabbit Maranville, Pie Traynor, guys like that. The problem with writing them off completely is that it's really hard to measure defense from that long ago. Modern measurements of defense use play-by-play data, which records where, exactly, the ball was hit, where the player was (supposed to be) standing, and so on. So we have a pretty good idea of the quality of modern defense (although it still trails our understanding of offense). For early guys we often have only chances, put outs, and errors, as well as the propensities of batters to hit to certain fielders. That gives us an idea of how good they were, but we don't know if those chances were really difficult, if the batters really did get their hits where they, on average, get them, and so on. It also doesn't include some of the fine-grained measures that we use to evaluate modern players. I suspect that what this means is that we tend to under-rate early defensive wizards.

That said, my first nomination is Freddie Lindstrom. Even if he was a defensive wizard, there's just no way his career was long enough to collect hall of fame credentials. Frankie Frisch (who is a deserving hall of famer) was the leading force behind the Vet's Committee for many years, and got many of his old friends from the Giants inducted. My guess is that that's what happened with Lindstrom.

Joe DiMaggio - just kidding. Jesse Haines gets the second spot. He was basically an average pitcher, with a 3200 inning career. I don't really know how he got in. He topped out at 8.3% of the vote among the writers, and then the veteran's committee put him in.

Finally: all of the relief pitchers except Eckersley (and Smoltz, who wasn't really a relief pitcher). It's just not possible to accumulate the value it takes to make a decent hall of fame case as a relief pitcher. Eck is helped tremendously by the fact that he spent half of his career as a starter. And it's a really fundamental mistake to think that guys who come in to close the 9th inning are especially valuable: a run counts the same no matter when it's scored. A shut-down 9th inning in a close game is more exciting than a shut-down 1st inning in a game that turns out to be close, but the effect that they have on winning or losing the game is the same.*

*It's worth noting that the guys who developed WAR included a "leverage" component for pitching WAR. Basically, WAR *does* give relief pitcher extra credit for pitching at the end of close games. If you, like me, think that they shouldn't get that extra credit, then you'll think that WAR over rates relief pitchers. And relief pitchers (Eck and Smoltz excepted) are absurdly under-qualified for the hall, even by ordinary WAR standards. It usually takes about 60 WAR to get in the conversation for the hall (give or take), here are WAR totals for hall of fame relief pitchers (remember, INCLUDING the leverage component):

Fingers: 25
Gossage: 42
Sutter: 25

Way below what you usually expect.

Bert Blyleven.
Jim Rice.
Phil Niekro

I am sure there are many more "very good" players who do not belong but those three come to mind.

I have always thought of the Hall of Fame as the very elite...the best of the best at their position during the era they played.

Just feel the HOF has been watered down by too many "very good" players.

Gossage first and foremost...while I am a NYY fan who appreciates his contributions and think he is a nice guy, he does not belong enshrined.

my 3
 

Dick Williams
Red Schoendienst
George Kell

As for the argument the last 3 outs aren't more important i could not disagree more. like closing out a series is tougher than winning one game so is closing out a game easier than a regular inning. Pressure does exist even for elite athletes.

Ill just argue for one. Sandy Koufax. Depending on how you look at it he had 5-6 really good seasons, 4 of which were out of this world. He did this during an era where pitchers started to dominate. No doubt he was better than many pitchers from that era in the hof (including teammates like Drysdale and Sutton), but I don't think that being the best for five years is good enough. To me his numbers look like Ron Guidry's. Anyone arguing for his induction?

Guidry v Koufax
 

Ron had a better stretch than many think but it wasn't up to the stretch Koufax had IMHO.

Gooden had a great stretch to start his career too. Koufax only won 20 three times.

who cares about pitcher wins??? Koufax had 3 9+WAR seasons and his last 6 seasons he had an ERA under 2 and an FIP of like 2.05 that's elite levels of elite pitching.

plus 54.5 WAR in only a little over 10 year career is pretty damned impressive stuff

What thread would that be? Are you talking about the thread that specifically said:
I use to be caught with these debates about who shouldn't be in. Then the more I looked at the 700 card sets where only handful of players are even recognizable I realized most players that were able to make a career of this game are already a lot better than they get credit for on a daily basis.

Out of the 18,444 players to play a major league game less than 160 have a career spanning at least 20 years. And not even all of those guys are considered HOF players. Since EVERY single player is better than I ever was I have now decided I would not decide that any player should not be in the HOF.

Rizzuto
Santo
Sutter

He ranks 56th in WAR7. Still impressed? And I see 49.0 WAR next to his name on Baseball Reference.

1. pete
2. re-pete
3. pistol pete

?
53.2 bWAR for Koufax (one of us is looking at the wrong column)

30 wins above average (WAA)

Don Sutton has 23 WAA (to pick someone with the opposite career arc)
Drysdale at 28
or how about Nolan Ryan with 35

WAR isn't a straight measure of value. WAA isn't either. It's more important to a team to get production all at once than it is to get it spread out (because winning a pennant requires above average performance; in general someone who is inconsistently great will win you more pennants than someone who is consistently good). Koufax's WAR total is low for the hall of fame, but since he squeezed that WAR into so few seasons, I'm fairly comfortable saying that it produced as much value as Don Sutton's much higher 68. Koufax isn't the greatest pitcher in the hall, but he's not a terrible mistake either.

This is what I am looking at, maybe it's a mistake.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/jaws_P.shtml

117 Sandy Koufax HOF 49.0 46.1 47.5

I agree his dominant half decade was so overwhelming he should be in. I do think however in popular opinion he tends to be overrated due to the glamour factor.

George Highpockets Kelly
Fred Lindstrom
Chick Hafey

Gooden
 

Peter i don't disagree Gooden at the beginning of his career may have been the best pitcher I ever saw in my lifetime.

yeah talk about two guys -- him and Strawberry -- who should have been the nucleus of a dynasty

well, that's your opinion man, but I think that educated fans who study the game and understand the statistics of the game are just as qualified as most of the writers who vote for the HOF in determining who is or isn't qualified (and often more so judging by some of these goofy votes recently)

He isn't usually mentioned in these discussions, but Newhouser does not seem too impressive at first blush.

Its not fair to judge players I've never seen play, so I'll stick to my era.

Bert Blyleven, Andre Dawson and Craig Biggio are 3 of the most ridiculous selections.

Are you really replying to me? It sounds like you are trying to counter something I said, but yet nothing in your statement does counter me. They are their own stand alone thoughts that have nothing to do with what I said.

My point was that if someone gets an honor for doing a job that very few people even have the ability to maintain then I am not going to come along and say they don't deserve the honor.

If I got an honor at work of let's say "Employee of the year" (not really a thing at my job, just using it for an example), then I wouldn't really be happy if people from outside my industry started to say I didn't deserve it. Just let me have the honor and move on.

I don't mind trying to say you believe someone else deserves the honor, but I don't like trying to second guess someone else's decision to bestow an honor on someone else after the fact.

I love looking over player stats and researching them. But trying to say someone is worse than what others think seems like a negative approach to the conversation.

Ozzie
 

Expect to get some heat for this, but I felt the same way about his election as I did Maz'. Maz' only HOF credential was a HR in the '60 WS. With Ozzie, great acrobatic shortstop, but the poster boy for, "good field / no hit." Being a one-trick pony ballplayer shouldn't get you in the HOF. It's why Edgar Martinez should never be in. Career DH and he's a HOF candidate? WTF?

I'm sorry, but this reeks of 'everyone gets a trophy " to me. Players play the game, their statistics tell us how well they played it. For some guys to be in lowers the level for allowing future players. Just because some group made decisions in voting (or selection in the case of the Vet's committee) doesn't mean the rest of us are bound to approve of said choices.

If you make the HOF mean less by letting in lesser players, the "honor" as you put it, becomes less meaningful.

The Hall honors greatness, and being the greatest defensive second baseman in the history of the game is reason enough for inclusion among the immortals. The guy had a 23.9 dWAR, and 8 Gold Gloves.

I just don't get the line of thinking many have about the Hall; the guys that put runs on the board for their team....do they have a bigger impact on winning than the guys who help their team keep runs off the board?

A hitter comes to the plate four, maybe five times a game. A defender is out there for nine innings, and at any moment, the ball could be screaming in their direction.

Maz had 11,863 defensive chances at second base. He turned 1,706 double plays. How many hits, or runs, did he prevent with his glove?

Using JAWS, Ozzie ranks well ahead of Jeter and Larkin, interestingly. And I believe that does not even include defense.

I can see that argument, but will the Hall put in Andruw Jones? Finest CF'er with the glove of all time, and a better hitter than Maz, Ozzie Smith or Brooks Robinson.

zero

Every player inducted deserved to get in. And there are a few more who should be.

Well, every player inducted into the HOF is in the HOF, and someday there will be more players in the HOF. On that we can agree :)