And that means he is back in town for one weekend as the unwitting symbol of an embarrassingly inept old way of business. This is the superstar willing to go behind his superagent’s back to negotiate an incredibly below-market deal, only to hesitate when the team would agree to only $23 million over three years, instead of $24 million….
About that Hall of Fame push: It’s closer than you might think.
This week, I asked a dozen or so people inside and around baseball what they thought of Beltran’s Hall of Fame chances. The most optimistic said, “Yes, if he finishes this season like he’s started.” The most pessimistic said, “Not at all. I’ve never thought of him in that light.”
The representative thought: “Not quite yet.”
Through various advanced metrics, Beltran already fares favorably to Hall of Famers like Andre Dawson, Billy Williams and even Dave Winfield. He has more home runs than George Brett, more stolen bases than Robin Yount and probably will end up with more runs scored than Tony Gwynn and RBIs than Roberto Clemente.
You can play games with numbers to make any point you want, of course, but you don’t have to twist very hard for Beltran to rank among the game’s all-time greats.
The wonderful Baseball-Reference has a Hall of Fame Monitor that is exactly what it sounds like, with 100 points making for a good possibility and 130 being a near lock. Beltran is at 96 right now (tied with Bobby Doerr and Joe Torre) but could pick up 20 or more this season (which would put him near Dawson and Barry Larkin, among others).
He also has more hits than Hall of Famers Roy Campanella, Sandy Koufax, and Rollie Fingers COMBINED!
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1. There are no words... (Met Fan Charlie) Posted: June 22, 2012 at 10:59 AM (#4163588)If that guy has an inside job in baseball, and it's not as a peanut vendor, his employers really have to hope he has nothing to do with either reporting on baseball or acquiring talent for a team. Sometimes I wish they would have asked a second question following the absurd answers like that (do you think Bernie Williams is a hofer----the answer would tell you whether this person has an impossibly high standard or whether he's baseball version of an American Idol viewer)
As with Raines' HOF candidacy, some of the gasbags will cite this as further evidence that he was a selfish ballplayer.
I'm a fan of Beltran, thinks he probably deserves it, but I do not see how those are really comparable. You are talking about at most an extra 5-10 bases a year. That isn't an additional man on base, that is an additional advanced base. Not nearly as valuable as an extra time on base or creating an additional out.
Mind you, one of the only useful uses of WPA is to come up with baserunning value for steals(since it's a decision play and not purely random, it's about the only time WPA adds any value to a conversation----and of course fangraphs doesn't keep track of that, instead going with an aggregate score for running....silly, you have a stat that is mostly useless, in the one area where it has value, you don't track.) If wpa were to track steals and steal attempts only, and it showed Beltran value there, I might jump on board with that.
Nothing to do with value, I just think there's a place in the Hall for players who were the absolute best at something.
I can see that, not a fan of it, due to slippery slope issues. Best pinch hitter, best middle reliever, best dh... I don't think any of them by themselves rate a hof plaque without some other context.
This is not clear, since it depends entirely on your threshold for number of attempts. Rickey Henderson, Tim Raines, Carlos Beltran, Chase Utley, or some guy who played thirty games and went 4 for 4...any of them could be considered the best percentage base stealer of all time. Does Utley make the hall in your book becasue of his base stealing?
No one else in the history of baseball could sacrifice a goat like Chris Truby.
By way of context, I believe it's fair to say that base-stealing percentage is not the entirety of Beltran's Hall of Fame Case.
Bottom of the 9th inning with the Royals down by a run in an early September 2003 game that actually meant something because the Royals were in the hunt. The team was 71-66 going into the game and were just a half game behind the Twins in the standings. It was a make up game from an earlier rainout so a Royals win would put them back into a tie for first.
Beltran draws a walk ... steals second ... steals third ... and then scores the tying run on a sacrifice fly that I truly believe was at best 180 feet away from home plate. It was just astonishing to see somebody with that kind of speed on the basepaths who knew how to use.
It's actually an additional advanced base, and an out on the bases, NOT made, so it's very valuable. Outs made on the basepaths are very expensive.
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