On the heels of my dustup with some hired goons, two of my loyal readers added some input regarding my Whitey Ford comments which is worth addressing. Studes, a.k.a Dave Studenmund of the fine Baseball Graphs site, mentioned some information in Bill James' Baseball Managers book in which the bearded one stated that Casey Stengel used Whitey more frequently against good opponents, while Johnny C mentioned a Rob Neyer comment about the AL's dearth of black players during the Yankees' heyday (1949-1964).
I'm a big fan of the James Managers book; I enjoy it more than the New Bill James Historical Abstract. The part to which Studes refers is on page 192; essentially it says that during the Stengel years (1953-1960 in Ford's case), Whitey had a lot more decisions against the good teams in the AL (usually Chicago and Cleveland) than the bad ones, and that his winning percentage during that time, already a stellar .681, should have been higher if the distribution of opponents was more proportional. He is almost certainly onto something there, even if he overemphasizes the pitcher's Won-Loss record rather than his outstanding ERAs (something James still tends to do).
In the Neyer piece to which Johnny C. refers, Rob is pointing out similar effects but in the opposite direction on the careers of Lefty Grove (who faced the Yankees less frequently than expected) and Warren Spahn (same, except it's the Dodgers). He doesn't refer to Ford; rather it's a more general quote about the Yankees: "I did know that when the Yankees were running roughshod over the American League from 1949 through 1964, a great majority of the great black players were in the National League, which perhaps should give us pause when considering the true greatness of those Yankees."
Recall that the Yanks didn't get a black player until Elston Howard in 1955, eight years after Jackie Robinson, and Howard was the first black AL MVP in 1963, by which time Jackie, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Don Newcombe, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson and Maury Wills had combined to win eleven NL MVP awards. Exactly as Rob said it, a great majority of great black players were in the NL. For what it's worth, the two teams Ford faced most often had, in Minnie Minoso (White Sox) and Larry Doby (Indians), two of the top black stars in the league during the time. But I suspect that the two effects my readers pointed out, both involving the levels of competition Whitey faced, essentially cancel each other out.
Actually, there's a way we can look even more closely at this. The Davenport system upon which I based my Hall study contains three formulas for Wins Above Replacement. WARP1 is adjusted for a single season, while WARP3 is adjusted for all time, using the level of competition as one of its factors (park effects, league scoring levels and schedule length are others). A bit of what "comes out in the wash" historically can be seen in the way the two totals compare. For Whitey's career (1950, 1953-1967), he's got 98.7 WARP1 and 95.5 WARP3, meaning his contributions are devalued about 3.3 percent historically over the course of his career. A Hall contemporary whose career is essentially contiguous, Robin Roberts (1948-1966), spent all but three years in the NL; his WARP1 and WARP3 totals are 129.3 and 129.5, meaning his contributions are undervalued by 0.2 percent. If that's not convincing enough, I recalculated using only the seasons for which they exactly overlap and were in opposite leagues, and -- allowing for the fact that we may be losing a bit with rounding, since I'm just pulling numbers off of the page rather than going from Clay Davenport's database -- Ford is "overvalued" by 3.0 percent while Roberts is "undervalued" by 1.6 percent. Neither of these are uncommon; I suspect if you look at the Hall of Famers, you'd find the 20th century ones are mostly within 5% one way or another, with the 19th century ones and the ones from the more extreme eras of baseball history, scoring-wise -- the late '30s and early '60s -- changing the most.
I should stress that I am not, by my assertions, trying to take away from Ford's accomplishments. The man was a fantastic pitcher who accomplished a hell of a lot, and the Davenport system doesn't even attempt to account for some of those accomplishments -- the World Series stuff, his performance against key opponents, his hardware, etc. It's a macro system, not a micro system, and I'm trying to use it to value groups of seasons in a manner that Bill James does with Win Shares. The reasons I turned to this are that I think Win Shares makes a few pretty big E-6's, such as when it comes to the concept of replacement level or the reliance on pitcher W-L and S totals to measure their value.
Based on my system (which itself is based on Clay's system), Whitey is quantifiably a few hairs below the average Hall of Famer. Not enough that we should take up a petition to vote him out -- I can point to at least 15 guys who we should -- and it doesn't mean he wasn't a great ballplayer. But even if I had defined peak a bit differently -- say, for five best overall seasons rather than consecutive -- he would still probably come out below average, because he simply never achieved the single-season levels that a lot of other HOFers did. That said, were he a player currently on the ballot, I would see that he's close to average, consider his success in postseason play, and write him down without hesitation.
Looking at it from a more traditional angle, Whitey won 20 games or more only twice. I guarantee you THAT is below average for a Hall of Fame pitcher, especially one pitching in the era he did. Does it matter? Not much in the grand scheme of things, but by the "system" I just devised to suit this example, I can say, "He's below average for a Hall of Fame pitcher."
Well, that's a pretty crappy system right there, but I hope that the one I built to answer the questions I had about the 2004 ballot is at least a bit better -- certainly a lot more thought and time went into it. If one of the measurements it takes tells us Whitey comes up a little below average, does that mean the system is useless? I hope not. I've given a very qualified answer within a certain context, and the statement, taken away from its context, might look foolish. But within the context, it's a statistical fact, at least until Clay's system takes its next step forward and we can look again.
People are extremely resistant to accept new statistical systems when they tell us things which contradict what we think we know. Look at the case to be made against Derek Jeter's fielding via any one of several advanced measures, and at how resistant a certain segment of Yankee fans and mainstream baseball people are to accepting something which is by now as statistically obvious as the nose on Joe Torre's face. Look at the ridiculous scrums and bench-clearing brawls which plague baseball discussion sites across the Internet. People get very defensive about this stuff. I don't blame them, but I've come around to the other side on a lot of what I held dear, even with regards to the Hall of Fame ballot; in the past I've voted for Tommy John, Jack Morris, and Andre Dawson. Given the research I've done, I don't think I'd vote for any of them again, unless somebody can show me a better system which says I should do otherwise.
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In more things Prospectus-related, I was interviewed on Wednesday by Will Carroll for Baseball Prospectus Radio, a syndicated program which probably isn't available in your market but which you can hear over the Internet. Will and I talked for about eight minutes, mostly on the subject of my Hall of Fame pieces and then a bit on the Yankees. The spot will air on Saturday, and though you'll probably be sleeping while it airs, rest assured that I'll link to it once it's added to the archives.
Still on the Prospectus topic, B-Pro's Joe Sheehan was interviewed by Rich Lederer last weekend, while over on Baseball Interactive (a site where I sometimes contribute), Gary Huckabay was interviewed by John Strubel. Both are lengthy interviews which do a good job of getting the Pros -- two of the top analysts in the field -- to talk a bit more about their company's philosophies, its history and its direction. Good stuff.
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A few more random thoughts which might have become columns if I had fewer things on my plate:
* Yankee fans and media whining about Roger Clemens' departure or branding him a traitor should get a friggin' life. We all knew what we were getting when he arrived in the Bronx, and we shouldn't be surprised that a) he prefers living in Texas; and b) he still wants to pitch. The Rocket was a free agent, the circumstances for his return didn't exist at the time the Yanks had an option to persuade him to do so; and anyway, he'd accomplished everything he wanted to here. He owed the Yankees nothing, they owed him nothing, and the circumstances of his tenure in Houston are much different than they would have been here. To paraphrase Simpsons' bartender Moe Szyslak, I'm a well-wisher in that I don't wish him any specific harm.
* Pete Rose spent 14 years deceiving the American public, not to mention himself, when it came to gambling on the game of baseball. Here's a suggestion: he can only be reinstated after 14 years of penance. Being banned from the game while carrying out a lie DOES NOT count as penance. Maybe if he pledged to do something along those lines, writers and peers wouldn't be tripping over each other to back away from him more quickly. Chickens -> home -> roost.
* This story, which has nothing to do with baseball, is amazing and touching. This one, with photos, is hilariously bizarre. With friends like those...
With the Hall's honor sullied by several bad decisions, mostly at the hands of the now-reconstituted Veterans' Committee, the stated purpose of my mission was to produce a system by which we could evaluate the existing standards of the Hall using advanced performance metrics. We would then apply those standards to the candidates on the ballot, and those above average, the ones who would raise the standards of the Hall, would get the vote on our quasi-ballot. Over the course of two articles and some 10,000 words, I came up with four hitters and four pitchers that did so.
As I did for the hitters, I used BP's Davenport Cards to quantify the average Hall of Fame pitcher in the currencies the Davenport uses, Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP, in this case version 3, which is for use in cross-era comparisons), Pitching Runs Above Replacement (PRAR) and Pitching Runs Above Average (PRAA). I filled in a spreadsheet with each pitcher's career totals, and I also calculated their five-year WARP3 peak (PEAK) and came up with a weighted score (WPWT) that's just an average of the peak and career totals. Basically, we're crediting a player's best seasons twice so that the greatest ones float to the top, and the good ones who just stuck around forever are placed appropriately. What I came up with was a line which showed the average Hall of Fame pitcher's credentials in these advanced statistical categories:
Okay, that doesn't mean much sitting by itself, but it will soon. Iin a comment on Jack Morris, whose candidacy I once supported, I made the following comment: "Davenport-wise, Morris would be a below-average Hall of Famer, one who's in the same cluster as the elected [Whitey] Ford and [Jim] Bunning, as well as candidates [Dennis] Martinez and [Jimmy] Key."
Nick, a consummate Yankees fan, took issue with this perceived slight of ol' Whitey and wrote to ask whether I'd like a knuckle sandwich. He also asked, "How could a guy with a career ERA+ of 132 be in the same ballpark as a pitcher with a 106 career ERA+. Ford a below average Hall of Famer?"
That's a very good question, and to answer it, here's another chart showing the five pitchers' lines, along with that average again.
In every category above, Ford is below the average -- microscopically so in the two run-total categories, and within a few whisker on career value, but substantially below in terms of his peak -- nearly two wins above replacement a year. I made a comment in the piece:
Whitey's usage patterns were greatly affected by pitching for the Yankees, who would often shut him down in September to keep him from racking up gaudy win totals (lest they have to pay him more) and to preserve his arm for the World Series, where he was the master, holding many important Series pitching records.
So how could Morris be so close to Ford despite an ERA+ that's 25 percent worse relative to the league? The system emphasizes wins above REPLACEMENT level, which means AVERAGE has some value, and lots of innings at average has a good amount of value. Morris pitched about 700 more innings than Ford, which boosts his career above replacement upward, though it's not quite as high as the Chairman.
This didn't satisfy Nick too much, and about an hour later, two burly men arrived at my door, bearing lead pipes and brass knuckles and offering to "show me how it all adds up." I managed to fend them off long enough to craft this answer:
The Davenport system is designed to isolate the player's individual contributions from his team, making all kinds of adjustments. It adjusts for the level of offensive support a player received (by discarding the pitcher's actual W-L record), the quality of defense (neutralizing the effects of balls in play behind him), his park (which in Whitey's case was built to favor lefties), his era (which for Ford was low scoring, with high totals of innings pitched commonplace), and the extra-curricular things which boost his credentials (World Series rings, Cy Young awards, etc.). Within that context, a slightly larger chunk of what Whitey accomplished was due to his pinstriped teammates, relative to the ways other Hall of Famers were helped by their teammates.
The system sees Whitey's best seasons as worth 7 to 9 Wins Above Replacement. That's good, but it's low for a Hall of Famer -- 10's are superstar seasons, and Whitey never had one of those (which is highly unusual for a Hall of Famer), let alone multiples within a five-year span -- which would have boosted his peak score.
I am not saying that my method is the only means of evaluating a Hall of Famer, or even the best method of ranking Hall of Famers, just that it's a very worthwhile one for leveling the playing field so as to more clearly debate the merits of potential Hall of Famers.
Rocco Knuckles and Bobby Leadfingers (they told me their names) were suitably impressed, letting me off with a few firm punches in the solar plexus while shouting stuff like, "That's for disparaging the all-time leader in winning percentage for a lefty!" and "That's for saying Whitey's below average!" and "Pinstripe this!" The last thing I remember before passing out was a blow to the face accompanied by the phrase, "Count da rings, baby!"
The moral of the story: It's a dangerous business trying to get people to look at baseball statistics a new way.
My second piece for Baseball Prospectus is up, this one analyzing the pitchers on the 2004 Hall of Fame ballot. It's another epic -- I had 15 pitchers to evaluate, after all -- and this time it's part of the site's premium content, so you need to be a subscriber to read it. Which ought to be reason enough to shell out if you haven't already, right? Here's the intro:
The Baseball Writers of America's standards on what constitute a Hall of Fame pitcher are in a curious spot now, both when it comes to starters and relievers. Spoiled by a group of contemporaries who won 300 games from the mid-'60s to the mid-'80s (Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, Gaylord Perry, Don Sutton, Nolan Ryan, Phil Niekro), the writers haven't elected a non-300-winning starter since Fergie Jenkins in 1991. That Perry, Sutton and Niekro took a combined 13 ballots to reach the Hall while Ryan waltzed in on his first ballot with the all-time highest percentage of votes is even more puzzling. Apparently what impresses the BBWAA can be summarized as "Just Wins, Baby" -- which is bad news for every active pitcher this side of Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux.
Of the 59 enshrined pitchers with major-league experience, only two of them -- Hoyt Wilhelm and Rollie Fingers -- are in Cooperstown for what they accomplished as relievers. While the standards for starters are somewhat easy to discern (if lately a bit unrealistic), the growing number of quality relievers on the ballot, the continuous evolution of the relief role, and the paucity of standards to measure them by present some interesting challenges to voters.
If there's an area in which performance analysis has struggled mightily against mainstream baseball thought, it's in hammering home the concept that the pitcher doesn't have as much control over the outcome of ballgames -- as reflected in his Won-Loss totals -- or even individual at-bats -- hits on balls
in play -- as he's generally given credit for. Good run support and good defense can make big winners of mediocre pitchers on good teams, and .500 pitchers of good hurlers on mediocre teams. As such, it's important to examine the things over which a pitcher has control and account for those he does not. Once again, the Davenport system rides to the rescue.
A hint: the system found four pitchers worthy of a vote -- and not the four you'd expect. No, no, no, not Bob Tewksbury. And alas, not my personal favorite, Fernando Valenzuela.
My jaw still aches from smiling over my BP debut last week, and I'm still answering emails related to it. Again, I'm thrilled to have my work in such hallowed company.
An L.A. Times article by Bill Shaikin about the Angels' surprising signing of Vlad Guerrero buried this quote fairly deep:
With major league owners scheduled to vote this month on whether to approve the bid of would-be Dodger buyer Frank McCourt, a source said Sunday that McCourt asked Commissioner Bud Selig whether some owners might vote against him if he spent freely to acquire Guerrero yet presented a financing package heavily dependent on loans. Selig offered no assurances, the source said, and McCourt sent word to General Manager Dan Evans to cease talks with Guerrero.
My man on the L.A. beat, Jon Weisman, has been pleading for weeks to put Guerrero in Dodger blue, and he writes that the deal casts aspersions on McCourt's ability to afford the team: "[W]e're supposed to believe or accept that, amid a market correction for player salaries, Vladimir Guerrero's is the one that would drive McCourt out of business?... If McCourt can't afford to sign Guerrero with the Dodger payroll already on the Atkins diet, he can't afford to buy the Dodgers. Period."
While I share Jon's concern that the team may be bought by an owner who won't spend the appropriate money to make the Dodgers competitive, I see a far more ominous cloud over this. Namely, that Selig effectively blackmailed McCourt out of pursuing Vlad in exchange for his blessing regarding the Dodger sale -- we all know that behind the scenes, Bud can orchestrate the other owners' yea or nay on this.
I want to see sombody investigate this as further evidence of collusion or at least a foul Seligulan shenanigan. As per our ongoing community-wide discussion on the growing influence of non-mainstream baseball writers, I think we can do our part in building a fire that will make Bud sweat this one.
Pete was not a power hitter, but he was a FANTASTIC leadoff hitter. In the Retrosheet era, which covers his career from '69 and thus leaves out four great seasons of his (which would only enhance those numbers if he were leading off then, but I don't know for sure that he was) but includes all of his decline phase, he posted a .386 OBP/.424 SG. He did this despite playing many years in a time period which included some of the lowest levels of offense in modern baseball history. Who led the league in OBP in the Year of the Pitcher? Pete. Who was the leadoff hitter for the Big Red Machine, when they were scoring 25% more runs than the league average? It wasn't Joe Morgan.
Despite the period, his rate stats are NOT ordinary. To turn our attention away from the BP suite of numbers, check his OPS+. For his career he has an OPS+ of 118, and he had a 12-year prime ('65-'76) which was even higher: 116 or better every single year in that span, better than 125 in nine of those 12, better than 130 in six of those. There is no doubt he was a big benefit to his offenses during that run; they led the league in scoring five times and were second in three of those years. What's the object of baseball? Scoring runs. Check his place on the all-time runs scored list: fifth all time, behind Rickey, Ty, Hank and the Babe, and ahead of Willie, Cap, the Man, Barry, and the Iron Horse. That is select company, my friend, and you don't get there without being great.
And that's a hell of a long prime; I'd have to study it more deeply, but I'll bet you there aren't more than a dozen people in baseball history who maintained such a high level for so long. Nine wins above replacement a year for 12 years is a hell of a building block to have for a team. Is it any wonder the man was part of so many winning teams? Add to this a defensive versatility which allowed his managers to shift him around the diamond in order to accomodate the needs of his teams, and you've got a great asset to any ballclub.
Rose's career overlapped with a number of fantastic ballplayers whose careers may have overshadowed his; Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Joe Morgan, and Mike Schmidt come to mind among NL players. And those guys were probably better than him. But I think if you examine Rose's standing using methods that incorporate a player's value including defense (WARP, Win Shares, any others?), you'll find he still comes out among the all-time greats, unequivocally good enough for the Hall of Fame. Smelling like a Rose, so to speak.
