Then he was off the field and hugging Mo Rivera. He is still the closer and Derek Jeter is still the shortstop and Andy Pettitte, the other member of the Core Four, is improbably on his way back to the rotation after a year in retirement. Pettitte was the first of them to retire, only now he is back. It is Posada who watches them go on without him the way a baseball season finally does in the Bronx.
He talked about how he had offers from other teams to play this season, but finally turned them down.
“I didn’t want to be another guy on another team,” Posada said Friday.
He was the first to hit a home run in the new Yankee Stadium the day it opened, but you know his best days and nights were across the street, when Posada was behind the plate for some of the best Yankee teams you will ever see in this world, when he began playing himself to Cooperstown.
“This is my opinion,” an old catcher named Mike Scioscia said on the field before the game, “but any conversation you have about the great catchers, Jorge Posada has to be a part of it.” And when it was pointed out to Scioscia that some people see Posada as a borderline Hall of Fame candidate, Scioscia shook his head and said, “People who say that about him don’t know what they’re talking about. He’s a slam-dunk candidate as far as I’m concerned.”
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1. JRVJ Posted: April 14, 2012 at 12:12 PM (#4106553)I think it was meant to reference the guys who were on all 5 WS teams. Bernie obviously missed 2009.
Scioscia is right. Few have caught as many games as Posada with a 121 or better OPS+. That should be good enough for the Hall with proper positional adjustment, but you never know. Jorge might have to wait for a Scioscia-led Veterans Committee.
I think the people who see him as borderline are right. He's a guy who requires thoughtful consideration, not a slam dunk.
Bill James' Hall Of Fame and similarity statistics (at B-R) do show Posada to be a unique hitting catcher and a borderline case. WAR arguably puts him outside the Hall of Fame.
>75% games at C, min 7000 PA:
EDIT Note: Ernie Lombardi: 39 WAR, 6349 PA
Posada has such a high career OPS+ because by (post-war) HoF C standards he has very little playing time. Simmons was a better hitter with more games at C who added a ton more PAs in a decline phase. Fisk was a better hitter with a ton more games at C. Carter was a better hitter who had a long decline phase.
What does 75% of games at C have to do with it. How about number of games or starts? Posada had only 1450 starts at C, 1574 games overall.
And several good-hitting Cs with similar career lengths and (highly likely) greater defensive value never got a sniff:
Ted Simmons 50.4 WAR in 9700 PA with 1687 C starts, 8 AS games
Jorge Posada, 44.7 WAR in 7150 PA with 1450 C starts, 5 AS games
Thurman Munson 43.4 WAR in 5905 PA with 1265 C starts, 1 MVP, 1 RoY, 7 AS games, 3 GG
Bill Freehan 43.3 WAR in 6900 PA with 1506 C starts, 11 AS games, 5 GG
Darrell Porter 40.6 WAR in 6570 PA with 1430 C starts, 4 AS games
Simmons, Freehan and Porter were one and done. Munson, who died tragically while still a very good player, stayed on the ballot all 15 years but never more than 15.5% which was in his first year followed by hanging on at 6-7%.
To say that Posada does belong, you either have to accept all those guys or explain why he belongs and some of them don't. To say that he will be voted in, you have to explain why he'll be treated differently than those players. But there is no way you can claim that Posada meets the established post-war standard for HoF catchers.
Poasada is Darrell Porter with one more very good season and some WS rings.
EDIT: to clean up an unclear pronoun in the next-to-last paragraph.
And it would be nice if the reporter followed up with Scioscia asking whether he thinks Posada was superior to Munson, Freehan, Simmons, etc.
EDIT: oops, only just noticed it's Lupica, sorry to insult so many by referring to him as a reporter.
Second, best evidence is that defense sort of matters. It's reasonably clear that Simmons' rep was a big reason why he was one and done. But when it comes to Posada there's the chance that for a lot of voters the reasoning will go something like, he can't have been that bad. The Yankees won an awful lot of titles with him as catcher. It's reasonably clear to me that a big chunk of voters will be utterly uninterested as to what the evidence is about his defense (any more than they were interested in the evidence about Simmons' defense)
That said, I don't expect him to come close to induction. If he gets near 20% I'll be really surprised. Among other things he can be directly compared to Mike Piazza and that rates to hurt him in the same way Tim Raines suffers from being compared to Rickey! Henderson.
In response to Walt's post -- Simmons should be a HOFer or at least should get serious consideration. To make an argument for Posada over Freehan/Porter probably requires one to question the defensive and baserunning numbers. Posada was a good 8-9 wins better than those guys offensively, especially taking into account the longer career, but he gives back 3-5 wins on baserunning/GDP and 3-5 wins on defense. Are the GDP numbers unfair to him because the guys hitting ahead of him were always on base? Is his defense underrated by WAR (probably not, based on everything I've read/heard on the subject)?
Looking at WAR, Posada is like the anti-Ichiro...his bat should be enough to get in into the HOF, but all of the ancillary factors drag him down materially. It's funny, you'd think that if you had a catcher and a RF with a similar number of games played, and the catcher had the higher OPS+, he'd be the better HOF candidate.
I think that Posada doesn't get in because of his defense. Posada will most likely look very similar to Don Mattingly's totals.
According to Mike Fast's work on pitch framing, it's quite likely that his defense is being massively overrated by WAR.
Posada played until he was 40. Posada's shortage of playing time stems from not being converted to catcher until the minor leagues and splitting time (perhaps somewhat unwisely) with Girardi. Posada missed playing time in his prime years not his decline years, and he still stacks up pretty well, which should be a point in his favor, not to his detriment.
I agree that Posada is unlikely to get in, but for different reasons than Simmons.
1. Unlike Posada (and Piazza), Simmons played in an era where defense, base-stealing etc. were highly valued. Voters considering Posada will take that into account, even if due only to unconscious bias. The stolen bases and passed balls that Posada failed to prevent were probably viewed as less costly in his era, a higher run-scoring (and baserunner) environment.
2. Simmons was surely hurt by comparisons to Bench. Without Piazza as a point of comparison as a great-hitting but so-so defensive catcher, I think Ivan Rodriguez's defensive reputation would undermine Posada's case even more.
3. Maybe future Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre--not a bad hitting catcher himself--campaigns for Posada, if only to atone for giving all those plate appearances to Girardi--maybe even enough to have pulled Posada even with Piazza. :)
4. Did the trade of Simmons by Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog--and the surrounding controversy--hurt Simmons? It seems like a far bigger deal than Posada refusing to bat 9th at the end of his career at the behest of his former platoon-mate Girardi. Further, Herzog did not seem to help Simmons all that much the second time around with the VC:
Oh, really?
Rk Player WAR/pos OPS+ Rfield PA From To Age1 Mike Piazza 59.1 142 -70 7745 1992 2007 23-38
2 Gene Tenace 48.7 136 -8 5527 1969 1983 22-36
3 Buck Ewing 51.8 129 74 5770 1880 1896 20-36 H
4 Mickey Cochrane 51.2 128 -2 6207 1925 1937 22-34 H
5 Bill Dickey 54.4 127 20 7064 1928 1946 21-39 H
6 Gabby Hartnett 47.0 127 12 6708 1922 1938 21-37 H
7 Johnny Bench 71.3 126 75 8674 1967 1983 19-35 H
8 Roger Bresnahan 41.6 126 -15 5374 1897 1915 18-36 H
9 Ernie Lombardi 39.0 126 -21 6351 1931 1947 23-39 H
10 Yogi Berra 60.6 125 33 8186 1946 1962 21-37 H
11 Roy Campanella 36.2 123 17 4815 1948 1957 26-35 H
12 Victor Martinez 27.7 122 -20 4819 2002 2011 23-32
'13 Jorge Posada 44.7 121 -33 7150 1995 2011 23-39'
14 Mickey Tettleton 27.8 121 -52 5745 1984 1997 23-36
15 Ted Simmons 50.3 120 -20 8626 1968 1984 18-34
16 Wally Schang 44.5 120 -20 6225 1913 1929 23-39
17 Gary Carter 65.0 117 113 8414 1974 1990 20-36 H
18 Carlton Fisk 51.7 117 15 7334 1969 1986 21-38 H
We haven't talked about peak; Howard and Munson won MVPs and were team leaders. Howard probably deserves some sort of discrimination credit. Posada only got MVP votes in 2 seasons, finishing 3rd and 6th.
Threw in some contemporaries who are non-candidates, like Daulton and Lopez.
Best 3 seasons by WAR:
Piazza 22.6
Carter 21.1
Fisk 20
Rodriguez 18.9
Freehan 18.7
Munson 18.6
Simmons 17.7
Posada 17.6
Howard 17.3
Porter 16.7
Daulton 15.9
Lopez 14.7
Fast's work only covers Posada's ages 36-38 years and is probably not representative of the entirety of his career. I find it hard to be believe that a player who caught as long as he did would be 40 runs worse than an average catcher over 5000 PA over his entire career. Rally's work shows him more along the lines of -15.
Over maybe 12-13 full catching seasons, Rally's work suggests there's another 150-200 runs that Posada has cost his club. That would utterly destroy his HoF case, if that's an accurate measure of his production.
EDIT: I do agree that the extent of the effect shown in the pitch-framing study is hard to believe, and certainly it wouldn't be reasonable to extrapolate that effect in full over Posada's entire career.
You're(and tshipman is) right, I didn't realize Posada's only at -2.9 defensive WAR according to BB Ref.
From 1st season to 17th season, Played 45% of games at C, (requiring At least 7000 plate appearances), sorted by greatest Adjusted OPS+
What if they messed up & used Don Mossi's mug instead? How long would it take for anyone to notice?
We haven't talked about peak; Howard and Munson won MVPs and were team leaders. Howard probably deserves some sort of discrimination credit. Posada only got MVP votes in 2 seasons, finishing 3rd and 6th.
The problem with Howard is that his peak lasted only 4 years, and before and after that he was either a part time player or his offense was weak. And that MVP vote, while deserved, was in an extremely weak league in a year where the best player (Mickey Mantle, 195 OPS+) missed 97 games. The talent pool in Posada's AL was infinitely deeper than in Howard's time.
You could make a case for Munson if you wanted to project his career forward, but at the time of his death he was in a serious injury-related decline since 1976-77, and was showing no sign of recovery. He spent his final years playing gamely through injuries, but his knees were basically shot.
... & other living things.
Selective endpointing.
Posada needs to wait in line for much more deserving players like Simmons and Torre etc. And stay with the Porters, Tenace in the hovg. He's a borderline hof once the hof actually opens it's doors to deserving catchers. As of the standard it has right now, he's not even close to the border.
Now that's a better case against him, at least until the HoF loosens up its standards for catchers.
Absolutely nothing.
Posada is waaaaaay more deserving than Rice. At least he's borderline. He's comparable to a lot of pre-WW2 inductees who are considered solid HoFers. There are maybe two Cs clearly better than him that are not in (Freehan, Simmons).
Rice lowers the bar dramatically. There are probably 50 RF/LF/1B/DH guys better than he is that are not in.
I don't think this is true. If we evaluate Posada as a -15 defender (see Rally's WOWY work and Fast's framing work), then his WAR nets out around 30, which isn't close to borderline even for a catcher. Rice at least has the peak.
(coke to tship)
I believe those numbers for his dotage, but not his prime.
Given all the hyperbole about allegedly awful Yankee defenders (Jeter, Posada, B Williams), and the actual awful one (Sheffield, Giambi, Matsui) we've reached the point of absurdity.
The idea that a team average ~98 wins a year (in the early 00s) while running out -15-20 defenders at 5 positions is quite frankly beyond belief.
It seems to me that this new catcher defense stuff is at about the same point of refinement as we were on overall D when the "Jeremy Giambi can play CF" chorus was at its loudest.
Even if you only believe that Posada was a bad defender since 2006 (which, I don't know why you choose to believe that, but whatever), that still takes him out of any kind of borderline discussion.
Posada is nowhere near the HOF.
I don't see why. A lot of pitchers from that team had a great deal more success when they left the Yankees (Pettite and Clemens most notably). Others, like Brown and Johnson, had great success before joining and bad performance during.
Generally, I look at that as confirming evidence.
Edit:
I think the general idea that Catchers are very important defensively (as important as shortstops) is backed up by current and historical usage to the extent that it should have never been ignored as much as it had been.
I think it's unfair to Posada to only consider his late career defense. By every subjective measure, his defense took a major hit after his shoulder injury in 2008, and prior to that he'd worked very hard to get into the "livably below average" range.
I don't think Poasada's anywhere near a slam dunk Hall of Famer, but I do think he's getting something of a short shrift here. Then again, I tend to apply a two part HOF test: a) the smell test and b) a numbers check just to make sure the smell test isn't off (I like the numbers to be pretty far beyond argument.) Guys who don't pass on both (Posada, por ejemplo) give me pause. I'll stipulate that I'm probably what most here would consider a big-ish HOF guy, too (I freely give credit for postseason, intangibles, etc.)
EDIT:
So much of THIS. The smell test really doesn't buy that the Yankees had that horrible of a defense squad while they were trotting out division champ after division champ.
I don't see why. A lot of pitchers from that team had a great deal more success when they left the Yankees (Pettite and Clemens most notably). Others, like Brown and Johnson, had great success before joining and bad performance during.
Generally, I look at that as confirming evidence.
These are the ERA+ of the Yankees staffs while Posada was the primary C.
'98 116, '99 114, '00 102, '01 112, '02 114, '03 110, '04 96, '05 '94, '06 103, '07 101, '09 108, '10 107 (~80 Gs, but still the most of any C).
The contiguous years where he wasn't the primary C we have '96 108, '97 101, '08 108, '11 119.
Much like the Piazza arguments, the staffs Posada caught were too good for him to have been an all-time horrible C. Except for '10-'11, when we all acknowledge he was shot, there's no evidence of the pitching getting worse b/c of him, or getting better without him.
2002: 4.33 (5th in league)
2003: 4.39 (3rd in league)
2004: 4.99 (6th in league)
2005: 4.87 (9th in league)
It's very clear that those teams won tons of games because they scored tons of runs. They were unimpressive in terms of run prevention.
Pitchers who started for the 2002-2005 Yankees include Mike Mussina, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown, Andy Pettitte, David Wells, Javier Vazquez, and Orlando Hernandez. The bullpen was packed with stars, too.
Really, the best explanation for how that many excellent pitchers managed to anchor merely ok staffs is that the defense sucked. Take a look at what happened to Clemens' and Pettitte's and Vazquez's and Johnson's numbers when they left the Yankees and played in front of competent defenders.
But you've already got plenty of sucky defender to blame (Sheffield, Jeter, ancient Bernie, Giambi, Matsui).
His staffs average a ~110 ERA from '98-'03. That's pretty good evidence Posada was not a terrible C.
Edited to add numbers: Pitchers who threw 300 or more innings for the 1998-2006 Yankees:
1201 IP - Mike Mussina
1156 IP - Andy Pettitte
1004 IP - Roger Clemens
876 IP - Orlando Hernandez
635 IP - Mariano Rivera
634 IP - David Wells
556 IP - David Cone
513 IP - Ramiro Mendoza
431 IP - Randy Johnson
383 IP - Mike Stanton
342 IP - Hideki Irabu
334 IP - Chien-Ming Wang
And he did nothing to "un-very good" them.
We'll have to just agree to disagree. All this pitch-framing stuff just seems like a huge rush to judgement based on very early results.
ARoM's study, though, produces much less crazy results using the same data sets we've always had, and it's based on a simple and effective method that should have been used earlier. It finds an effect that any baseball fan would expect - catchers have an effect on pitcher runs allowed. It finds that effect to be relatively small, on the order of at most 15 runs per season, which explains in part why it's been so hard to isolate. I tend to trust those results.
If Posada is costing the staff 10-15 runs per year, that's maybe two or three points of ERA+ per season. Not something that your eyeball test on the whole staff ERA+ would pick up, but something that would kill Posada's HoF argument.
Those league ranks seem pretty good to me. What does it take to impress you?
Out of curiosity, has anybody looked at the DER of the, say, 04 Yankees to see how they jibe with the idea of -20 D at short, catcher and all three outfield positions?
Using THT's definition of DER:
2004 Yankees had a DER of 0.677--pretty consistent with a horrible defensive team.
If I'm doing the math right, then it'd be around 100 extra hits. Not going to bother to look up the run context, but anywhere from like 50-60 runs? Doesn't really matter, though, as Posada's poor defense wouldn't really show up in DER, but in component stats. The proper way to look at that, of course, is in a WOWY study like the one that Rally did and was linked earlier in the thread.
I don't see how Posada as a -15 per year defender is so bizarre. Jeter's around -10 per year for his career and everyone pretty much accepts that. Gary Sheffield is around the same. Bernie averaged -12 for the post-1994 part of his career. It's not like the Yankees couldn't live with bad bats at other positions.
I really don't see how it's very controversial. All the evidence (the WOWY study, the pitch framing study, Posada's passed balls, anecdotal critiques from experts, performance of pitchers he caught when moving elsewhere, how his career started) points to Posada being a poor defensive catcher who hit very well for a catcher.
Larry Walker and his .313/.400/.565 line say Hi.
What will the HOF do with Todd Helton and his 322/421/550 (136 OPS+)?
I do. If Yankee pitchers are facing more hitter's counts because of poor mechanics that's almost certain to produce more hard hit balls, which in turn will be converted into outs at a predictably lower rate.
AROM's research into the matter isn't to my mind absolutely definitive, but it has put people who wish to argue against his conclusions in the position of having to find evidence to support their position.
There are a pretty fair number of pitchers who have extensive records before (and after) pitching to Posada. You can look at how they did before and after joining the Yankees as well as other Yankee catchers with:
a) K per IP
b) BB per IP (both a and b are moderately variable and would only be evidence against Posada if the pattern is strong)
c) Percentage of pitches taken that are called strikes
d) distribution of counts (again c and d aren't definitive, but a catcher with poor mechanics rates to create called balls. Certainly that's what Craig Wright found with Geno Petralli. It's probably the best you can do in the absence of the better breakdowns now available)
e) how the pitcher actually did on balls in play (this is of course subject to park illusion and there's also the issue of pitcher batting for guys coming from the NL)
Rather than adjusting for offensive context, the BBWAA pretty much ignores pre-humidor line from Colorado. It's no accident that Walker's MVP came in a year when he put up great road stats. That's pretty much what he was evaluated on. He wasn't seen as somebody who put up a 178 OPS+ (and yes, it did exist then though it was called PRO+) but as somebody who hit .344 with 29 HR and 62 RBI in 75 road games.
Basically the position is almost that Walker's years in Coors don't count and without them he has no HOF case (any more than almost any HOF candidate would if you ignore 10 years of their career).
And #62, One and done I think.
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