Wednesday, December 12, 2012
2013 Results: Bonds, Clemens, Piazza and Biggio are elected to the Hall of Merit!
(bbtf)
Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza and Craig Biggio have been elected to the Hall of Merit!
The timing for our first year electing 4 candidates could not have worked out better, since class of 2013 is the strongest in terms of electees that we’ve ever had. The top of the 1934 ballot included Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins, Pop Lloyd, Smokey Joe Williams and Cristobal Torriente, but only 2 were elected.
Bonds and Clemens were each unanimous at 1 and 2. I believe that’s the first ...
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1 2 >I'm at a loss to explain why.
Bo's baseball career was, give or take, the young Sammy Sosa. Would he have developed enough patience as Sosa did? Who knows but his age-27 season showed some signs of it.
The point of Bo is, of course, not the reality. It is that, at his age, not having played in some time, Bo could hold his own and then some at the ML level. It was very easy to look at Bo and think about what might have been had he never detoured into football.
A better comp than Francoeur is probably Ankiel at 27-28 -- 270/334/515 with enough speed to play CF after all that time concentrating on his pitching.
I think most people judge him correctly. He was a great physical talent and one of the great what might have beens in both baseball and football.
He also lost his arbitration case in 1990. Any money he made after his injury is just a team taking a shot in the dark. As for being a one-time all-star...big ####### whoop. Much worse players have made the all-star team once.
And he is absolutely worthy of a 30-30 story.
Delta
1990 was pretty clearly his best season.
None of those individuals played two pro sports. Is the author unclear as to this point?
But I think he's unfairly harsh on Jackson, who hit for good power and showed some flashes of being able to control the strike zone. This when his time/body were divided between MLB and the NFL. And that's to say nothing about him slugging .500 and hitting to a 117 OPS+ on a fake hip.
I'm not sure whether that takes into account that offense increased in 1993.
Yes, if you read the thread there was a lively discussion about the projection.
As to players like Jackson being done by 33... I don't know; it doesn't sound too crazy to me. The typical player is out of the league or close thereto by 33, certainly by 35.
On that subject, it was pretty shocking to see Strawberry basically done by 30. Griffey had just 6 WAR after age 31. Canseco and Rice and Murphy and Belle and Kevin Mitchell and Pedro Guerrero and Bobby Bonds were done by 33-35. Tartabull and Jessie Barfield and Jason Bay were done by 30-32.
Yeah, what a bizarre take. Talk about a guy who needs to get his nose out of a spreadsheet and watc HOLY #### DID YOU SEE WHAT BO JUST DID??!1111
Yet Alfonso Soriano marches on!
EDIT: Soriano actually is probably a pretty good comp for what a healthy Bo might have done. He started at 25, doesn't walk, Ks a lot, ISO of 230, 272 steals.
There was some great stuff in there , though I got a little sick of Klosterman and that Mike idiot , I just wanted more Bo.
In any case , I think 30 for 30 is struggling this season - they really need to pull their finger out.
How about if you don't include his 82 AB rookie "season", Jackass?
You have a point, but are such an a$$hat in making it that it gets lost. And to think you communicate for a living.
Projections always "err" toward the middle - they are supposed to. Nobody projects to be Albert Pujols - even Albert Pujols - because being Albert Pujols is unlikely as all hell. Even someone as amazing as Mike Trout, no logically valid system can project him to be an inner-circle HOFer, because its damned unlikely. And we might be talking about the best player his age, ever.
I'm obliged to agree w Ray. Even on a website as filled with stellar minds as this one, I'm regularly surprised by how many people don't consider 35 particularly old in baseball. It's old, and 38 is ancient. The number of fine players out of the game (or who should be) by 33 is a lot longer than the converse.
That part of my baseball education was filled in by James in an essay I can no longer find, on the McReynolds trade and what the Mets could expect from him. In it James also listed the number of full-time players by age, and didn't set the bar for "full-time" particularly high. That year the number of full time players in their age 36 season was all of four. The drop off after 29 was particularly striking. It read like the casualty rate during trench warfare.
James also wrote about McReynolds after his crappy age 31 season in 1991, saying that McReynolds' numbers were those of a guy who was essentially done. James also wrote that GMs and announcers never believed that 31 was old, and that McReynolds, because of his record, was going to be allowed to be crappy for quite a while before GMs understood he was done. Mac stayed in the game for 3 more years, 1.7 more bWAR, and around 10 million dollars.
One of the few times I tried to be a snotty baseball know-it-all with friends was a rant I had about Paul Konerko about five years ago. Finding comparable players and looking at how they did after the age of 33 to demonstrate how it wasn't likely he had much of a career left. I'm pretty sure the Paul Konerko of 2010-2012 is God telling me no one likes a smug dick.
That being said, you're going to be right way more often than you're wrong predicting a pretty heavy mid-30s decline.
Commercials aren't based on WAR. Or even AVG. They're based on appeal. And Bo was appealing as hell. Bo could probably still do commercials (maybe he does, I fast forward a lot).
I didn't get to see it. The 30 for 30s that came after the initial series has seemed to use the Klosterman types more often to its detriment. The story of Ole Miss was badly harmed I thought by the amount of on screen time Wright Thompson had.
I don't really get why people think he would have become a more refined player. Its not like he took up baseball as a hobby as a 24 year old. Baseball had always been his passion since he was a kid and he played high school baseball and SEC college baseball, the best conference in the country. He was what he was - a massively powerful hitter with great speed who had terrible plate discipline. I don't think that was going to change much.
What do the advanced stats say about his defense? I'm always curious about how much the legend outstrips the data. I'm guessing he was probably a liability in the field overall although his incredible arm may have mitigated that somewhat.
I think James noted that one of the early studies on this compared general performance from, say, 25-30 and 35-40 and was like, see, not too much of a dropoff. And James pointed out that that the study wasn't controlling for the fact that most of the players were out of the league by 32 and so weren't being included in "35-40."
Anyway, add Juan Gonzalez to the list of players broadly similar to Jackson in raw "tools" - maybe not speed - who flamed out in his early 30s.
Agreed. That was odd on Silva's part.
Eh. That's nothing. I was insisting to my friends in the late 90s that the wheels were about to come off of Mariano Rivera's wagon. Short shelf life of top drawer closers and for a while there his K rate was dropping.
honestly, i don't care if they make a few, or even a lot, of bad movies, because when they get one right, it's one of the best things you'll see all year.
I disagree. I think his football injury is quite telling. It was a pretty routine tackle. But I think its quite possible Bo's body was stretching the human body to its limits in terms of athleticism. The stress on his tendons and bones would have been great over the years, particularly as he reached his 30s. I'm not sure he would have aged very well.
It's like the author is thinking he's come up with some kind of Great New Theory by saying, I don't know, "Jethro Tull isn't really heavy metal." Except it's worse than that, with the weird comparison to Francouer - it's really more like "Jethro Tull isn't really heavy metal, and they're actually kind of like Milli Vanilli."
Hmmm. Hmmm. Wasn't Frank Thomas a teammate of Bo's at Auburn?
One of the most bizarre things about the entire steroids controversy is the sheer number of people who wouldn't believe players like Sosa or Bagwell, and yet swallowed Thomas's loud and unprompted claims of non-use whole. But if ever there was a player who fit the typical profile of a steroids user, it was Thomas. Big, strong guy, played football growing up and in college, a three-sport guy, around locker rooms his whole life, came of age as the steroids culture was blossoming -- and by his own admission was ultra-competitive and, moreover, was sore that he was not drafted out of high school, as players he knew he was better than were. From wiki:
Kirk Gibson too, also with a football connection. And though Gibson played till he was 38, he was notoriously banged-up despite leaving football for good in his early 20s. He played about 600 games in the last seven years of his baseball career.
Oh ye of little faith.
Yes, but I don't think they really compare athletically. Bo stole 27 bases in 1989. Frank stole 32 in his career.
Frank also had tremendous plate discipline while Bo hacked at anything with 15 miles of Royals Stadium. I think Bo's lack of plate discipline would have really hurt him late in his career when maybe his bat speed was reduced.
And Jim Edmonds starting hitting homers the season after being Bo's teammate!
If we want to move beyond what did happen on the field to what could have happened, it becomes even less clear. Deion had much better control of the strike zone than Bo. And although Bo did have ridiculous speed, Deion had even more ridiculous speed. I think it's very much up for grabs which one would have been the better baseball player, had both devoted their lives to baseball.
One of my favorite stories which I tell from time to time is when Deion was playing, I think for the Reds, and he was on third base and Ozzie Guillen settled under a pop-up at short probably on the lip of the outfield grass or maybe a couple of feet into it. Guillen catches it, checks on Sanders, who bluffs towards home and returns to third. Guillen nods his head to Sanders, as a dare to Sanders to go ahead and try it.
Sanders takes off.
Damned if he wasn't nearly safe, out on a bang-bang play at the plate on a perfect throw by Guillen.
Nearly safe, on a routine pop fly to short.
Sanders dusted himself off and went to the dugout where his manager was waiting for him.
I'll try to find the game on b-r.
Indeed. Despite that it happened 24 years ago, I was riveted. Especially by some of the revelations at the end. As a fellow Scarberian, I still have a soft spot for Ben Johnson.
Also, Deion Sanders absolutely terrified me in the 1992 World Series. He reached base 10 out of 17 times, and stole five bases. I still remember being relieved when Bobby Cox pinch-hit for him in Game Six with Ron Gant after Cito brought in David Wells.
Man, that 1992 Blue Jays pitching staff... look at who pitched Game Six. Cone started, then Stottlemyre, Wells, Duane Ward, Henke (with the blown save... Maldonado's throw was over everything!), Jimmy Key for the win, and Timlin for the save.
Suffice to say that Ray Knight was not happy with Sanders's antics, particularly in a 14-4 game:
And seemingly the ... honesty(maybe not the right word) to see his weaknesses and the work ethic to tackle them. I honestly don't know what the reasonable (optimistic) career arc was, never mind the potential upside.
The usual assumptions simply don't apply. He was so raw and so willing to learn.
I sure you can ask any of one of the ex-Mrs.Gonzalez about Juan's raw tools.
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