With Murphy scheduled to be on the Hall of Fame ballot just two more times, Braves president John Schuerholz has intensified the efforts to campaign for one of his organization’s most beloved figures. Schuerholz has sent a letter to Hall of Fame voters and other members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America asking them to take a closer look at Murphy’s credentials.
Dear Hall of Fame Voter:
As you prepare to vote for the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Class of 2012, please accept this letter in support of Dale Murphy.
The Atlanta Braves organization is extremely proud of Dale’s outstanding accomplishments during an extraordinary 18-year Major League career, 15 of which were spent with the Braves.
Not only on the field, but off the field as well, Dale represented himself and the city of Atlanta with the class and professionalism consistent with the ideals of Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Even today, he continues to be one of our game’s greatest ambassadors.
On the following two pages, please review Dale’s remarkable accomplishments produced over what the Braves family feels is a Hall of Fame career. On behalf of our organization and Dale individually, I thank you for your consideration.
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1. salvomania Posted: November 17, 2011 at 02:08 AM (#3995318)At least Murph was legitimately great for a while. Back to back MVPs and cleared 7 WAR three times. They could, and have, done a lot worse.
Freak accidents ending careers aside, that has to be sort of rare.
Me too.
I'm a big hall guy and while I can certainly understand the "peak wasn't peak enough and he fell off the cliff too fast to get in as an accumulator", I do tend to weight certain Keltner questions.... and I think a good 3-4 seasons where you could say he was the best OF in the NL (perhaps with a nod to Rock) is enough for me.
On a stuffed ballot, there's a chance he doesn't make the cut -- but if I had a ballot, I think I'd vote 10 every year and looking back over the last few years -- he'd make the cut. Bottom half, for the most part, but he'd get my vote.
I think there are more worse exclusions than Murphy, so I'm not signing up for the movement, though.
Obviously this PR effort is driven mostly because Murph only has two more years of eligibility. But don't think for a minute the Braves' front office aren't playing the "hey, remember when baseball heroes were worth a damn?" card. Murphy's a borderline candidate at best. I always use him as my cut-off criteria. If you're better than Murph, you're in. If you're not, you're out. Murph is the line, and unlike baseball itself, the line itself is not in play.
But if an effort to push him gained traction, and a movement developed around the message "if you're tired of McGwire and Bonds, take a look at this guy who embodied every sportsmanship element of the criteria better than any other player in the history of the game..."
Worse things have happened.
Gracias. I realize there's always a couple of those guys around that hang on a really long time after hitting a brick wall so suddenly, but Murphy seems to hold a higher stature than most that happens to.
I never heard a definitive explanation, but the change in the strike zone may have hurt him. Dale was tall, listed at 6'4". James did an analysis of the possible consequences of the upcoming changed strike zone in the '88 Abstract, by looking at what happened to guys in '62-'63. I believe he concluded that tall power guys were inordinately affected. From '87 to'88, Murph's K's didn't go up, but his walks and BABIP were way down.
It's also possible that 1987 was an aberration. His OPS+ from 1985-1989:
152
126
157
106
89
It's the 157 that's out of place in that sequence.
Well, he wasn't entirely useless after 1987. From 1988-1991 he put up a 99 OPS+ and 5.3 WAR.
Rizzuto was a VC inductee on combined credit for his playing and broadcasting careers. His playing career shouldn't be a yardstick for other player candidates, except maybe for other combined-credit cases, like say Santo might have been.
'87 was a weird year all around.
As I recall, we went from having no one bop 40+ HRs in the longest time to everyone topping 40... that wouldn't explain the OPS+ aberration, since it's normalized for context (right?) -- but heck, Wade Boggs, who's career best outside of '87 was 11 HRs in '94 -- hit 27 that season.
I think it was pretty much confirmed that the balls were stitched tighter or something that year.
Holy Cow they gave Rizzuto credit for his broadcasting? Admittedly I only saw him towards the end of his career and he had likely lost something off his fastball by then but it is hard for me imagine Rizzuto as a competent broadcaster. When I saw him work (this was when Mattingly was playing and the cable system here carried WPIX for a few years) Rizzuto seemingly went out of his way to embarrass his broadcast partners and he made it a "point of honor" to apparently not have a clue to what was happening on the field. Again, perhaps he wasn't always this way but when I was watching Rizzuto was nearly unwatchable. He is not the worst player in the HOF however.
Hell, the aforementioned Rice spent a career being susceptible to that pitch. If he'd been able to lay off just a little bit, Jim Ed would have been a deserving Hall of Famer.
That said, I don't know that any long-lasting hitter has gotten himself out on that pitch more frequently than Soriano.
I go back a little further, but as a kid, I loved Rizzuto. He was a Yankee homer for sure, but never in a way that denigrated the opposition ("Holy Cow, he walked him. And now here comes Jim Rice with the bases loaded and nobody out. Uh oh. Don Carney, get me another cannoli.") He was off topic a lot, but times were different then, and it was normal for people to mail in their birthdays, and have Phil announce them on the air. More importantly, unlike so many of the color guys today, he could laugh at himself, and clearly loved his job, maybe until the end, when he was told to work a game instead of attending Mickey Mantle's funeral.
That being said, I don't condone him getting broadcasting credit for his HOF admission. From what I remember, he had a lot of friends on the VC, which was a driving force behind his election.
It's a mystery to me why Rizzuto is brought up as an egregiously-bad choice, when there are SO many worse ones. If you accept the "guy who pleased his fan base for decades on air" as an automatic bonus, he's easily home free.
#notayankeesfan
I think he also got a bump for "Paradise by the Dashboard Light".
Murphy gives prolific a whole other meaning.
Here's the 1984 NL OPS+ leaders:
1. Schmidt (PHI) 154
2. Murphy (ATL) 149
3. Davis (SFG) 148
4. Cruz (HOU) 145
5. Hernandez (NYM) 143
6. Carter (MON) 143
7. Gwynn (SDP) 141
8. Sandberg (CHC) 140
9. Leonard (SFG) 138
10. Raines (MON) 138
And now the 2001 NL OPS+ Leaders:
1. Bonds (SFG) 259
2. Sosa (CHC) 203
3. Gonzalez (ARI) 174
4. Sheffield (LAD) 164
5. Walker (COL) 160
6. Helton (COL) 160
7. Berkman (HOU) 160
8. Jones (ATL) 160
9. Nevin (SDP) 158
10. Pujols (STL) 157
While these are the extremes during both eras, the years around them follow this same pattern to a lesser degree. The end result is that if you go strictly on a comparison to the league average players, significantly more players are going to wind up getting enshrined from one era than the other. Steroids looks to be preventing this from actually happening though.
To me there needs to be some sort of second adjustment so you get roughly a proportional number of players from each era. I think that adjustment would help Murphy's case some (and Mattingly's as well). I think it also hurts the cases of guys like Larry Walker and Rafael Palmeiro.
That puts Murphy's decline starting as of his age 30 season. A little early, but not unprecedented, and if you accept the tinkering, the drop isn't really all that steep. If you started messing with his BABIP a few years earlier you notice Murphy's 1985 was fueled by a career high in that category, so just maybe a larger stretch of OPS+ beginning in 1983 runs 149, 149, 135, 126, 118, 106, 89, which starts to look almost strangely ordinary.
I've got to put together something that adjusts at least BA, OBP, SLG, OPS and OPS+ year by year for a player based on his yearly BABIP, his career BABIP, and a nice big tablespoon of regression. I'll bet a lot of career trajectories smooth out as a result.
All of this is hind-sight of course, and none of it changes the fact that his career is what it is. But I think that knee injury is too obviously placed at the point of downward spiral to not be considered.
Rk Yrs From To Age1 Dale Murphy 5 1980 1985 24-29
2 Cesar Cedeno 5 1972 1976 21-25
3 Andre Dawson 4 1980 1983 25-28
4 Chet Lemon 4 1977 1984 22-29
5 Devon White 3 1991 1993 28-30
6 Andy Van Slyke 3 1987 1992 26-31
7 Kirby Puckett 3 1986 1992 26-32
8 Paul Blair 3 1967 1970 23-26
Shawon Dunston says hello.
I don't recall any indication that Rizzuto's broadcasting career was a factor in the Veterans Committee decision. Ted Williams was probably the most influential Rizzuto supporter on the Committee, and I don't think that's something that would have affected him. Billy Crystal, maybe, but I don't believe he was ever on the Committee.
Agree. He had Williams and DiMaggio lobbying hard for him, which has to carry a lot of weight.
IIRC, Williams said Rizzuto was the difference maker between the Yankee and Sox teams of the era. Hyperbole, sure. But, that's going to convince a lot of people coming from Williams.
Another interesting thing I noticed is this:
Nl Playrs with 502+ PAs:
1984: 52
1985: 62
1986: 48
2000: 74
2001: 77
2002: 80
Obviously some of that is expansion...
anyway, 1984 bottom 10:
Rk Player OPS+
1 Ron Oester 70
2 Rafael Ramirez 70
3 Steve Sax 72
4 Dave Concepcion 74
5 Terry Kennedy 79
6 Garry Templeton 79
7 Marvell Wynne 82
8 Craig Reynolds 89
9 Alan Wiggins 90
10 Steve Garvey 91
2001 bottom 10:
Rk Player OPS+
1 Tony Womack 64
2 Rey Ordonez 67
3 Michael Barrett 68
4 Geoff Blum 71
5 Doug Glanville 71
6 Julio Lugo 76
7 Benito Santiago 76
8 Alex Gonzalez 77
9 Edgar Renteria 77
10 Jason Kendall 78
I thought that one thing that could account for this is declining overall league quality - but then thought that no, that would simply increase the skew- to one side- instead we seem to have a flattening of the bell curve so to speak, with the left and right tails getting longer...
I suspect that this means that some type of mean or standard deviation approach is needed to compare across era in addition to normalizing against league levels
I seem to recall an earlier conversation about the dearth of respect CF's get in HOF voting.
I suspect that this means that some type of mean or standard deviation approach is needed to compare across era in addition to normalizing against league levels
Exactly. All "+" statistics should not be vs. league avg., but Standard Deviations above and below league average.
Example:
League A: avg. OPS 700, SD 50, player X 840 OPS (park neutralized)
League B: avg. OPS 750, SD 100, player Y 900 OPS (park neutralized)
Both X and Y have a 120 OPS+, but X is much better. X is nearly 3 SD above league avg., while Y is +1.5 SDs.
Given how close those two teams were for a bit in the 1940s, a lot of things can be considered the difference makers betweenthem.
Historically, the BBWAA has given more votes to relief pitchers than to centerfielders. That's across all voting, from 1936-2011. In part that's because CFs sometimes cruise in quickly (Cobb, Mays, DiMaggio, Mantle, Speaker, and even Puckett). In part it's because relievers often have a long climb to get in.
But it's also because a CF has to hit as well as a corner outfielder to get in, and virtually never gets any defensive credit. Only Mays and Speaker got that, and they didn't need it- unless you're the best ever fielder for your generation, defense doesn't matter in BBWAA voting on CFs for Cooperstown.
But realistically, shortstop didn't really seem to be an area where the Yankees were gaining any separation.
You're reinventing the wheel. Check out Dan R.'s work in the HoM threads.
Right. That's what I was fuzzily recalling. Writers and "baseball men" talk a mean game about "up the middle defense" but when the rubber hits the road, they just don't value defense in CF. Which undercuts Murphy's case, because he was an excellent defensive centerfielder.
When he was playing, he lived in Atlanta. He had to move on a semi-regular basis. People would find out where he lived and come ring his doorbell. He was so nice, he'd never turn them away. Once too many people knew where his house was, he'd move and the cycle would start all over again.
I met him once; he came to our church (Roman Catholic, BTW) for some sort of father/son dinner thing. One of the announcers (can't recall if it was Carey, Van Weiren, or Johnson) was there too.
Maybe we should stop calling it the steroid era, and start calling it the kurtosis era.
Disagree. Talent distribution is and has always been random. Sometimes there are simply more standout greats in one era than another, and electing a bunch of lesser players from a weak era to make things appear "fair" isn't the answer. Palmeiro and Walker WERE better than Mattingly and Murphy. It's not their fault they played during a golden age and thus didn't stand out as much during their peaks.
I think the 90's/00's rank right up there with the 20's/30's and 50's/60's as the best era's of individual talent in baseball history. The 80's rank with the 1900's/10's, 40's, and 70's as amongst the worst. And while it's obviously way too early to tell with this current decade, it's starting to look to me that there's a lot less consistant HOF caliber talent playing right now than there was 10-15 years ago.
And Berra.
When Rizzuto was selected, Berra called him with the news, saying "We got you in."
Good one Perros.
Murphy finishes as tied for the 10th best offensive peak among CF. The problem for him isn't the big 5. It's no sin to have a peak that rates below Mantle, Mays, Cobb, Speaker or DiMaggio. Or Snider or Griffey for that matter.
The problem is that Jimmy Wynn has a slightly better (offensive) peak as does Cesar Cedeno and it's not that much better than Bobby Murcer's (all by linear weights. Different methods will see the matter slightly differently, but it's no big deal.)
And Murphy has very little value outside his peak. It's just tough for me to see a case that doesn't resolve to "wait until Jimmy Wynn is in"
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