Tuesday, May 21, 2013
JM Catellier: Is Pedro Martinez a First Ballot Hall of Famer?
(www.rantsports.com)
Welcome back, JM Catellier…and his “own unique statistical formula”!
Read More...The average 20th century Hall of Fame starting pitcher has 258.3 career wins. That number is dragged down by Sandy Koufax’ 165 victories, but he can’t be omitted from this exercise as I consider him the best starting pitcher to ever throw a baseball.
Former Boston Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez retired following the 2009 season with just 219 wins and only two 20-win seasons. Is it possible that he’s a first ballot Hall of ...
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1 2 >To be technical Craig Biggio also has eclipsed 60% in the voting and not gotten elected. Of course he will be eventually while Morris is probably a coin flip right about now.
For pitchers if you just go by 'traditional' measures he is #5 (wins), #11 (ERA), #6 (strikeouts), or for negative stats #1 (most HR given up) or #3 (walks given up). Heck, in many respects Kenny Rogers (1st ballot next year) has a better case than Morris. How sad is that?
This seems reasonable to me. Both were arguably the best at their position at a time where (for whatever reason) the position was unusually weak in terms of Hall of Fame candidates. There's not necessarily going to be a Hall of Fame worthy guy at every position from every generation - it just happened that these guys both were the best candidates, and still not quite good enough.
In 2000 he got 22.2%
2001: 19.6
2002: 20.6
2003: 22.8
2004: 26.3
2005: 33.3
2006: 41.2
2007: 37.1
2008: 42.9
2009: 44.0
2010: 52.3
2011: 53.5
2012: 66.6
2013: 67.6
In his initial years he kind of balloted half of what Garvey did his initial years (35-40), but Garvey never gained any traction his support collapsed and he stayed around 20 virtually his last 10 years on the ballot. Garvey, while playing, in his prime, passed the "smells like a HOFer test for most people (in those pre-Sabr days)- Morris did not- guys who "smell" like a HOFer do better their first time on the ballot- in fact his drop in support after year 1 is more typical of those players the voters deem borderline.
Then after 2003/04 he seemed to begin a slow steady ascent- at this point his polling was kind of tracking Blyleven but lagging, it was also tracking Lee Smith to some extent- one thing that in hindsight was obviously helping him was that no new obvious HOFer SPs were coming on the ballot these years- compqre that to the balloting history for guys like Luis Tiant and Jim Bunning
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he had a noticeable boost in 2010 and again in 2012
One thing I noticed was that at about the same time that Morris was pulling 35-40- Rice was pulling around 50%+
Rice started about 7 points ahead of Morris- then gained in year 2 (Morris dropped in year 2) Rice hit 42.9 in year 3 (Morris was 20.6)
Rice was 51.2 in year 5, Morris 33.3
Rice was 59.4 in year 10, Morris 44.4
Rice was 72.2 in year 14, Morris 67.6
Rice cleared at 76.4 in his last year (a gain of 4.2) Morris will need a gain of 7.4, and he needs to do it in a year that Maddux and Glavine are on the ballot (moose too, but I'm guessing that while he'll beat how Wells and Brown, he won't seriously impact Morris' vote)
Bunning was at 74.2 in 1988, then Bench, Yaz, Perry, Jenkins and Palmer came on, he dropped back and had to wait for the Veteran's committee.
A year ago I thought his induction by the BBWAA was likely, 75% maybe, now I'd drop it to 25%, he needed to split teh distanec between 2012 (66.6%) and 75% (i.e, around 70-71%) he didn't.
This marks the first time in history that two people have been "inextricably tied" to a fact that is both temporary and untrue.
Still too high. I'd peg him less than 5 percent. He needed to make hay on this ballot, which was thin on pitchers who were clearly better.* He obviously couldn't do it. His only hope now is if a bunch of non-supporters in the BBWAA fear another empty election and vote more strategically for the top of the backlog, which seems pretty damn unlikely, but can't be ruled out. This was his chance, and he made virtually no progress.
* To the BBWAA. Obviously Schilling was clearly better.
Granted, 2014 is Morris' last year on the ballot, but I definitely think that his not being voted in in 2012, messed up this year's ballot and will certainly mess up next year's ballot.
Any and all energies regarding the HoF should be channeled towards actually getting the good candidates in that need to go in, as opposed to opposing Morris.
In an HoM thread a few days ago, I called Rogers a "poor man's Morris." There are a lot of similarities, including that both have actual W-L records that are much better than their neutralized RA+ based records, and by about the same amount. But Morris does have a career length and durability advantage over Rogers, and should rank ahead of him.
How did it mess the current ballot up? It's not like the majority of writers were using up all 10 spots on their ballot. They had room to vote for other worthy candidates, whether or not they were voting for Morris. Most voters had an additional 3 or 4 slots to them.
This. There's a newish phenomena in the voting behavior that can be summed "oh, the stat dorks say no? Then he's got my vote!"
No, we don't really matter that much. Jim Rice's path to Cooperstown was rather unspectacular, no matter what kind of narrative we want to attach to it. He started at 30 percent of the vote and climbed slowly from there.
FTFY
It might not affect how many votes Rice or Morris get, but it certainly makes their more vocal supporters much angrier.
I'm sure it does, seeing as being called every variant of ####### idiot tends to have that effect on people. OTOH, they don't have a monopoly on anger, as yesterday's threads demonstrated.
To recap:
1. BBWAA members taking a definitive stand with regard to ball players who were either associated or could have been associated with performance enhancing substances: worthy of applause.
2. BBWAA members taking a definitive stand with regard to ball players whose statistics do not merit induction: unenlightened (and evidence of the absence of an epiphany)
But the anger here is righteous, whereas theirs is foolish and wrongheaded.
The new standard: Guilt by Could Have Been Associated.
The second new standard: It is fine for someone who was suspended twice by MLB while an owner to be honored by the HOF without tainting its legacy.
Considering that we know that 5 ballots were sent empty and that at least 2 had only Morris on them (Ken Gurnick and Murray Chass, as some kind of statement), then you are wrong: most writers did not have 3 or 4 slots available to them.
http://bbwaa.com/13-hof-ballots/
(2) Yesterday I posted how 3 writers (Mike Imrem, Joe Christensen & Jeffrey Flanagan) whose ballot has been disclosed voted for 10 people (including Morris) but not for Baggio.
18, are they really necessary at this point? I would rather have Morris in if it means not having Edgar, Tramell or Raines logjammed.
I doubt very seriously that any of those gentlemen make it in now (via the BWAA).
Yes, Morris OTOH started from a lower level than Rice, and began climbing letter than Rice- Morris induction considering the voting on him the 1st 5 years would be fairly unusual- and the "curve" his voting has taken seems more like Blyleven's than it does Rice's...
Maddux won at least 15 games 17 years-in-a-row, which is as many years as Jack Morris had 100ip seasons.
This. The silver lining on any cloud associated with yesterday's electoral shut-out is that Jack Morris' candidacy is probably a lost cause now, as far as the BBWAA vote goes.
Saberists should try to be a bit more 'glass half full', he said, platitudinously.
I doubt very seriously that any of those gentlemen make it in now (via the BWAA).
I wouldn't count Raines out yet. Let's see what happens to his vote next year. If it holds up, I'd be optimistic.
Not as unusual as Bert's, but atypical. Morris benefited most from the paucity of starting pitchers coming on the ballot who's career centered around the 1980s. But as with Rice, the anti-Morris crusade followed his ballot ascension (and those climbs are how a borderline/mistake makes it to Cooperstown. And once those guys start to build momentum, it tends to continue). But it was a backlash, not a forward one.
Trammell has no hope through the BBWAA (but he didn't before yesterday anyway). Edgar, probably not, though I think hardline anti-DH types have always been his biggest impediment.
Raines remains on a clear path to induction. But yes, right now the logjam is the only thing that stands between him and eventual election. I still think he gets there, but it will be a lot harder than it would have been without the jam (but the jam was somewhat inevitable considering the sheer volume of Cooperstown-worthy players hitting the ballot. The BBWAA has just made it worse).
From the beginning Trammell has never drawn enough support to put him an a track to election; the next two years are only prelude to his VC candidacy. As for Edgar and Raines, Morris' presence has had no meaningful impact on their non-elected status, and they still have many years left on the ballot.
After this scolding of everyone to get away from the stats and consider intangibles .... he immediately lists his stats.
wow.
Heck, Mickey Lolich won at least 14 games in a season from 1964-1974, had a season where he finished 2nd in the Cy voting, pitched at least 300 innings 4-years-in-a-row and never got more than 25.5% of the vote. These numbers of Jack's just aren't that impressive in the context of the time he was playing.
Schilling did it 5 times, in an era where IP were significantly lower for starters, which was good enough for only 35% of the vote, so Jack should be pleased.
Let's look at next year's ballot. You have 3 first-ballot-level candidates (Maddux, Glavine & Frank Thomas) and 2 pretty-strong-candidates-to-get-in-eventually-in-normal-times (Mussina and Kent). Since Morris is either going in or being dropped in 2014, the HoF has to enshrine at least 4 non-Morris candidates to keep the logjam as it is (which means keeping.
The 2015 has Randy, Pedro, Smoltz and Sheffield (2 first-level guys, 1 pretty-sure he's in and 1 borderline candidate).
So again, the HoF has to vote in at least 3 of these 4 gentlemen (because of Sheffield is a debatable candidate), in order to keep the logjam at the same level.
The fact that Morris was not voted in last year means that he helped clog up this year's ballot. And the fact that he is still on this year's ballot (essentially with the same level of support as last year: 2/3rs of the voters), means that he is going to clog up next year's ballot.
And this clogging up effect is screwing everybody else/will have ripple effect that will be felt at least for 3-4 more years.
Maddux isn't the in/out line, he's nowhere near where that line is (or should be)
Morris problem, is not that he isn't as good as Maddux, it;'s that he's not demonstrably better than a raft of other guys, like Frank Tanana or Dennis Martinez
not to mention someone like Tommy John who laps Morris on longevity or Saberhagen who blows him out of the water on peak
Why Morris and not Luis Tiant?
Tiant was a star when pitching, was seen as a big game pitcher, had a far higher peak, and career nearly as long...
Considering that we know that 5 ballots were sent empty and that at least 2 had only Morris on them (Ken Gurnick and Murray Chass, as some kind of statement), then you are wrong: most writers did not have 3 or 4 slots available to them.
This may be correct, as it only requires that at least 285 of the 569 voters listed 8 or more names. However, the 7 ballots cited above make only a tiny bit of difference. Assuming exactly 6.6 (not 6.64 or 6.57) per ballot, removing the above 7 and their 2-name total would increase the names per ballot all the way to 6.68.
Apologies for the arithmetical pedantry...
Edit: Or to be a real pedant, it would be true if at least 285 listed either 8/more, or 5/less, as only the remainder of voters would have precisely 3 or precisely 4 open slots. ;)
You can always put people in the Hall later, but there's currently no mechanism for taking people out.
Depends what you mean by much. Anti-stat backlash doesn't account for 50% of Morris's vote, but I would feel pretty comfortable saying it's 5-10% at this point (and maybe more), given how many Morris voters seem to specifically say something about throwing out the stats or new fangled-statistics or whatever, and that's from all the relatively young writers who still have a beat. Given that Morris does significantly better in the non-Gizmo writers i.e. the old fogies one would expect that sentiment to run even higher among them. It's not a huge chunk but that 5-10% means a whole lot to Morris's candidacy.
No snark intended, but what year was either considered the best at their position, and by whom? Just flipping through Hodges stats, he never seemed to be an AS starter, and Morris never finished higher than 3rd in Cy Young voting.
Just because they're acknowledging the anti-arguments doesn't mean their votes are in response to them (which is obviously true if they've been voting Jack since the beginning, as 1/3 of Jack's supporters have been doing).
The anti-Morris sentiment didn't start in earnest until he cleared 50 percent (when it became possible that he'd get elected). Since then, he's only picked up another 15 percent or so (and almost nothing this year, when the anti-argument has been at its strongest). You can ascribe his gains to anti-stat sentiment, but you could just as easily, and with more historical evidence to support it, attribute it to the natural momentum that happens when a guy clears 50 (and, in Jack's case, when the single better candidate at his position is finally elected. Morris made his biggest gain, by far, in the year following Bert's election.).
As for the oldest of fogies, the ones Gizmo doesn't catch and the demographic where Jack's support is strongest, there's a real possibility that a great many of them don't even know us statnerds exist.
At no point in time while he was playing did anyone other than the random Morris fanboy say, gee, Jack Morris is the best pitcher in baseball, it was ALWAYS someone else, Gooden, Saberhagen, Clemens etc.,
what happened was AFTER he stooped playing the "Most wins in the 80s" stuff transmorgified into "best pitcher of the 80s" and "most dominant pitcher of the 80s" assertions which if made IN the 80s would have induced spittakes.
Of course the best argument against the "most wins in the 80s stuff is to say, "Mark Grace for the HOF!"
Hodges was before my time, but he made 8 all star teams, and received MVP votes in 9 years, he never came close to winning- what it looks to me is that he was a very highly respected player while playing (as as Morris- as he should have been) but I don't see that he was thought of as a dominant or GREAT player at the time
Why do we assume all anti-stat support for Morris only began after he cleared 50% (i.e. when stat guys started disavowing his election)? The mid-late 2000s ballots when guys like Sutter and Rice were getting elected and Morris was starting to pull big numbers were an orgy of "the fear" and "beyond the stats" and "old school numbers" sentiment, and was right in the peak of the stats-anti stats war in all the baseball media. Remember the uproar from old school guys in 2008-10 when pitchers started winning Cy Youngs with Win totals in the mid-teens? That's right when Morris started getting his big bumps and "pitching to the score" and "most wins in the 80s" took center stage. I would say part of that 5-10% I theorized was built into him reaching 50% (or 40% or whatever) in the first place and reaching the electionable point, when the whole thing took off and Morris gained more support, predominantly from traditional momentum and Blyleven being cleared out, but also from a few more wait-a-minute-you-whippersnappers voters jumping on as a result of stat guys collectively going nuts over the idea that Morris might be elected.
As for the oldest of fogies, the ones Gizmo doesn't catch and the demographic where Jack's support is strongest, there's a real possibility that a great many of them don't even know us statnerds exist.
I think that's underestimating the old fogies, unless if you're talking about guys in their 80s+ who never pick up a newspaper and don't watch baseball on TV anymore. There aren't many of those guys. I think all of us overestimate how many voters there are who have no connection whatsoever to the game anymore, have no idea of the changes that have occurred in the baseball landscape over the last 10 years, and are just picking names out of a hat.
I think Morris is a complicated candidate, and his candidacy is due to a perfect storm of a lot of different factors all coming together at once - a long patch of no excellent durable SPs, the stat wars, the steroid era, bullpen evolution, the decline of moustaches as non-ironic fashion choice, etc. That he and Blyleven, who both seem specifically constructed to tweak different aspects of this perfect storm both came up at essentially the same time in HOF voting is proof that the baseball gods have a sense of humor.
Regardless of how much or how little of Morris' current support you believe stems from an anti-stats backlash, I think this is good advice. Probably the only way Morris makes it now is IF his election becomes a proxy vote on whether or not the BBWAA is a bunch of idiots. So those who don't think Morris should go in will do more to accomplish that goal if they focus on making a positive case for players likely to be undervalued by the writers (Raines, Bagwell), with a particular focus on the non-automatic pitchers who deserve more support than Morris: Schilling, Mussina, Glavine. If you do that, the combination of the 10-vote limit and the logjam of strong candidates will prevent Morris from reaching 75%.
Because that's when the anti-stat side started taking his case more seriously. Before he cleared 50 percent, he wasn't seen as a terribly realistic candidate. There was always some refutation of the pitching to the score silliness and spotty anti-Jack commentary, but the growth in anti-Morris sentiment was in response to rising support, not a fuel for it. And there's no doubt it was at its most vocal after the 2012 election, and the 2013 election provided almost no movement in the Jack for HoF case.
It's possible there's some anti-stats backlash behind his vote. It's an entertaining narrative, no doubt, as it thrusts us right into the action. But making it involves considerable mindreading, which I find is best left in the hands of the professionals (DiPerna, mostly).
You don't need to be that unconnected to be largely oblivious to the strong strain of anti-Morris sentiment. Our voice isn't exactly taking over the MSM.
Edit: And despite my comments, I agree with Guy's 47 and similar remarks. It's better to advocate for than to rail against.
Check page 78 of this SI Issue for the quote.
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