We're not going to know jack shit until we see the vote this winter. My guess is that you're right and I'd like to see some of the top PED guys plus Tim Raines get in this year, but we're all just pulling stuff out of our asses until we see what effect the voting chances have.
Wait, someone doesn't agree with you and has different opinions on players than you do? Holy shit. Thank god you put up such on the mark assessments of players here that everyone is in concert with you on or we would no longer be blessed with your presence. If that Ellsbury contract hadn't worked out so well, I'm not sure what we would do without you here. Since you can't bother to read words not written by someone who agrees with every opinion you have, why do you hang around here and what other sources do you read? Do you just write something out and then read it over and over to yourself, nodding your head. Because I assure you there is no one out there that is going to have the same opinion as you do, on everything. So why do you bother read anything else if you're so sensitive to someone holding a different opinion?
Can someone summarize that for DH3 so he knows who to stop clicking on? Can we crowd source this and cover all the writers not included here?
Okay, I'll bite: you have both Manny and Ortiz, and they both hit. In universe A, Manny plays the field, and Ortiz is DH. In universe B, Manny is DH, and Ortiz plays the field.
I'm not doing the math, but for 2004 the someone else is Kevin Millar. Made 66 starts at first and 66 starts in the OF. Not a huge sample size, but not small either(even by the board definition of small).
Yes. It sounds as if Keith Law thinks he is voting to enshrine players in the "Hall of Best Advanced Regular Season Statistics" It's not called that. For a reason.
There's no scenario in which Papi and Martinez share a ballot. If he isn't voted in, Martinez's last ballot would be cast in 2018 (for induction in 2019).
I love hat you in one post say you've never given him a click and then in a response try to summarize his viewpoint and his abilities to analyze anything with any kind of backing of expectation to be taken seriously.
I'm glad to see you are inventing terms like "hypothetical stat" to classify your acceptance of modern statistical analysis. That certainly enhances your stance on matters. Keep looking for SBs and RBIs.
This thread asked a hypothetical question about whether Ortiz was "a lock" for the HoF if he got to 500 HR. And while its fine that you can't accept the anti-DH bias or misgivings about the 2003 test, unless you have a vote for the HoF, your acceptance means zilch.
Well the difference between Schilling and Ortiz is that Schilling has a much stronger analytical case without considering the narrative/post-season stuff, while Ortiz's case is very borderline. He's 15th all-time in strikeouts, 7th in K/9 among pitchers with 2000 IP since 1901, 1st in K/BB, 30th in ERA-, 6th in FIP-, and although he never won a Cy he finished 2nd 3 times. He's 20th all-time among pitchers in fWAR and 26th in bWAR (fWAR likes him better because he was great at Ks and avoiding BBs while giving up more contact, which their system penalizes less). The only knock on his case is a low win total, but thankfully most people have stopped caring about pitcher wins. He got a little overshadowed in his career because he played at the same time as four inner-circle/GOAT candidates (Clemens/Maddux/Pedro/Johnson), but he's a legit HoF pitcher, one of the 25-30 or so best SP since 1901 by just about any measure, just as good as guys like Glavine or Smoltz who are already in. And that's even before you add in the great post-season record. I think he'll get in pretty quickly now that Maddux/Pedro/Johnson/Glavine/Smoltz aren't clogging up the ballot and taking votes from him, probably in the next 2-3 years.
C'mon, nobody disputes that Ortiz was a great hitter. The problem with Ortiz's case is how valuable that hitting performance was due to his position. So it very much becomes a discussion about how to measure DH value, which is a tricky problem. Dismissing that issue with no argument as "the DH knock" just begs the question. I find the "it's totally irrelevant that he was a DH and we should just focus on his hitting" camp to be just as close-minded and misguided as the "he didn't play the field, so he can't an HoFer" camp.
He's also the one baseball observer I saw in 2007 that picked the Rockies to win the World Series. Neither here nor there, I know.
This is so obviously wrong. Runs allowed are part pitching and part defense, so, yes, on a per-play basis a pitcher can't generate as much value as a hitter. But pitchers are involved in a lot more plays than hitters are. A good SP will have something like 900-1000 batters faced in a season, while a DH will only have about 600 PAs.
I really don't see the DH value as all that tricky of a problem. It seems to utterly obvious to me that it's prejudicial. Like some kind of a holdover from people complaining about it being implemented (oh, man, can you imagine SoSH if it existed when that went live? Or the internet in general). But Pos absolutely nails it. If Ted Williams was around during the DH era, he'd have been the first DH in the HoF already. Going out there and sucking on defense isn't helping your team any more than just stepping off the field and letting someone else handle it if that's what's best for the team.
There is no argument that position players as a group make a greater impact on team run differential with their bats than their gloves. We have been aware of that to varying degrees since well before WAR was ever created, and the whole framework of comparing players to league average baselines and converting their production into runs and wins is designed, in part, to account for this.
Ted was one of the five greatest hitters in the history of the game. If he had been a DH, he'd still be an easy HoF choice because obviously he was good enough to overcome any reasonable DH penalty, just as he was a good enough hitter to overcome his awful defense. If Ortiz had been that good a hitter, we wouldn't need to have this discussion. He wasn't.
Who are these people you are talking about when you say that "nobody cares" or when "1B defense is discussed" or "is ignored"? Because knowledgeable people who pay attention absolutely do care about defense. Maybe the general public doesn't, or the HoF voters mostly don't, but why should we care what those people think? Do you mean that YOU don't care about 1B defense? Then, respectfully, I think you are wrong.
I'm talking about the other 100 million people in the fanbase. The media. Coaches. Players. HoFers. Basically anyone not spending inordinate number of hours on the internet calculating baseball stats.
How exactly is any of this relevant to your argument about DH positional adjustments?
We saw David Ortiz play a passable first base for YEARS while being primarily a DH.
I know that this is an exercise in futility, but I'm going to do it anyways.
Yeah, no, they're not. But you know that. You're just being obtuse as usual. But please, show us the objective and subjective cases that prove David Ortiz is a first ballot HoFer...if you are pinched for time please focus on the "subjectively wrong" case, because I'd love to see how that can possibly be a thing, since words have definitions and stuff.
If Ortiz had hit as well and for as long as Jim Thome, this wouldn't be much of a discussion. .276/.402/.554, 145 wRC+, 68.9 fWAR/72.9 rWAR. Spending 20% of his career at 3rd base doesn't hurt either.
So you're full of shit as usual. Not that I needed confirmation but thanks for it.
We saw him play 145 games at 1B in a Red Sox uniform. Over 12 seasons. While the likes of Mark Loretta, John Olerud, Carlos Pena, Casey Kotchman, JT Snow, Adam Laroche, Mark Kotsay, Sean Casey - all in various stages of not being good players - logged more games at 1B during their Red Sox tenure than Papi did while they were there. We might not have an explanation for that but it's not difficult to discern one.
I had completely forgotten LaRoche played in Boston. I don't even remember the circumstances around that one.
He was here for a week in 2009. Acquired from the Pirates on 7/22, traded to Atlanta for Casey Kotchman on 7/31. As I recall, the Red Sox were in search of a solution to the Mike-Lowell-is-an-old-geezer-with-a-bum-hip problem, and both trades were made with the idea that Youkilis would slide over to 3B a few days a week. I assume (can't remember) that Kotchman was the ultimate target because he was younger, because he certainly wasn't better.
Partly age, partly the fact that he was the better defender of the two, and partly that he had shown some real offensive promise two years earlier, in his age-24 season, and Theo was probably hoping he could tap back into that. Also a possible factor: he had an extra year of team control, so they'd have the option of keeping him around in 2010 if he did well, while LaRoche was going to be a FA that winter.
LaRoche played 48/127 games at 1B for the White Sox. He also averaged -4.1 UZR/150 in 2864.2 innings from 2013-2015, although DRS thought he was average over that timeframe and the three previous years were solidly above average.
