In explaining his case, Murphy pushed for those peers who have also fallen short, such as Lee Smith, Alan Trammel and Gil Hodges.
“It may be self-serving for me to discuss it, but there should be room for guys like me and Jack Morris and Don Mattingly,” Murphy said. “We may not have the elite status of certain players. The discussion is, it’s not that this guy is a good guy and we should let him in. It’s what he’s meant to his team, the game and sportsmanship. Then look at the stats.”
...Though his career numbers are not eye-popping, the discussion for Murphy centers around his dominance during much of the 1980s, which includes the most total bases of the decade.
Detractors, many in the sabermetric community, point to those same numbers and the quick downturn of his career. Much like with Ron Santo, recently elected thanks to the Hall’s Veterans Committee, Murphy’s career did not have the typical slow downturn. But his numbers compare favorably to Santo’s.
...In the end, Dale Murphy’s fate is in the hands of the baseball writers. And maybe someday, if not now, Murphy could gain admission through the Veterans Committee.
“I’m hopeful this year,” Dale Murphy said. “There are real exciting things going on.”
Repoz
Posted: December 25, 2012 at 08:36 PM |
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1. KT's Pot Arb Posted: December 25, 2012 at 08:44 PM (#4332325)I was also shocked when I first learned of sabermetrics and BB-Ref, and realized he wasn't worthy of the HOF. But if the HOF is going to make a mistake, I'd prefer a guy like Dale than Rice or Morris, just because of the nice guy factor.
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Well, although the number of guys who could play both 3B and CF is few, they are pretty much equivalent in terms of average offense and Rpos. I think it's close enough to comp 2B, 3B and CF.
Not that WAR is everything but the Santo-Murphy WAR gap is a mere 24 wins. :-)
Santo had 350 more PA so that explains 2-3 wins.
Santo picks up about 6 wins on Rbat which I assume is mostly OBP and era.
Santo gives back 2-3 wins on DP and baserunning.
Santo does pick up about 8 wins in positional adjustment. Two things -- first Murphy had nearly as many starts at 1B/LF/RF (1009) as CF (1020) which I had never realized before. (Only 77 at C by the way) Second is that apparently it was a poor offensive era for 3B (Santo's Rpos was always a bit positive) and maybe a bit better offensive era for CF (Murphy's is never positive in his CF years).
Oops I forgot Rfield. Santo's is only 20 which, if anything, is low given his reputation and gold gloves. Murphy's is -33 which also seems low given his reputation (but up to 3 CF can win GG). But even if you ignore this gap, it leaves Santo way ahead.
In the end, the writer's comp is the unfair one that's often made for Santo. Santo wasn't a short career given how early he started and how durable he was. He was just done at 34 and that's not the same thing. Through 23, Murphy had contributed nothing (-1.2 WAR) while Santo had 9 WAR. After age 34, Santo didn't play at all while Murphy added 700 PA (helping him catch up) of -1.1 WAR.
From 24-34, Murphy had 45 WAR and Santo had 58 but half of that is Rpos and another 4 wins is Rfield so if you're a major WAR skeptic, you could maybe wave those away. What you can't wave away is Santo's one good and one excellent season prior to age 24 when Murphy wasn't very good.
Santo's Rrep is 3 wins higher despite not a lot of extra playing time. I think this is partly due to league adjustments -- i.e. the NL was considered the superior league during Santo's career (for good reason I think) and so he sometimes got up to 24 replacement runs. Murphy seems to have been able to max out at 22. As I understand it, in WAR you get 20 runs for about 650 PA if you're in an "average" league and you can get up to 22 if you end up around 700 PA. But if you're in a superior league then "average" is 22 replacement runs. But I could have that wrong.
Anyway, given the equal playing time, WAR really does see this as Santo being a lot better. He's 37 wins above average vs. Murphy's 16. Santo also had a mind-blowingly good peak with a WAR7 of 52 (Murphy 39). Santo led the league in WAR once and had 4 other seasons in the top 5 among position players. Murphy never led the league in WAR and had 3 top 5 finishes.
As I said, the positional difference is a lot bigger than I'd ever realized. I'd forgotten about Murphy's time at 1B early and, although I remembered the move to RF, it was earlier and he played more games there than I've ever realized. So Meatwad does have it right -- comping a 3B to a half CF-half corner is not equivalent.
HR: Murphy 398 vs Rice 382
MVP: Murphy 2, Rice 1
All-Star: Murphy 7, Rice 8 (Rice slightly wins)
Now, batting average Rice wins in a landslide-298 vs 265 and for many voters that would be a major issue.
I saw both as being in the same ballpark stats wise, and if you put one in the other should be too. By bWAR they are very close (44.3 Rice vs 42.6 Murphy) and others are in that range too - short of HOF quality by any measure but will always be favorites of some (like Mattingly and Dave Parker and others).
I just watched game one of the 1992 World Series yesterday. (Game Two is on later today!)
It's been so long since I saw Jack Morris pitch I actually forgot about my perception of him as a player rather than a HoF case. I actually never knew the young Morris, but the old Morris had this way of puffing up his face and scrunching his head into his body just before he delivered the pitch, that made him look like a gruff uncle. I always had mixed feelings about him as he wasn't great in his tenure with the Jays. But I'd rather that be my memory of Morris than as the "cite" of some Hall of Fame debate.
My New Years' Resolution will be to remember players for what they are/were to me, rather than what they are/were to other people.
As a Braves fan, may I, politely and in an amicable fashion in the spirit of the holidays, tell you to f#@* off.
I love this comment. I would like it if we could discuss players without limiting it to the single question: should he be a HoFer? Memories of batting stances or pitching motions. Little ways that everybody who played for a long time changed the way we watch. Key games. Funny quotes. Memorable fueds. It doesn't need to be able to be reduced to tenths of a win above replacement to be meaningful or, at least to my aesthetic, fun.
I don't think Murphy should get any flack, or at least not much. Consider the context of his career as an active player. He was a back-to-back MVP, one of the most popular players around, and widely regarded as a future HoF type. Sure, going off the cliff in such a sudden (and drawn-out) fashion does him no favors now -- but it also doesn't erase who he was at his peak or erase the sort of odd feeling that a guy who was so well-regarded in his time is a D-list HoF candidate now.
(Of course, he'll be perfect for the VC, whenever he comes eligible for that....)
Agreed. He's starting to embarrass himself. At some point, doesn't the shameless character-grubbing start to detract from the very character on which the grubbing is based?
Who does he think he is -- R.A. Dickey?
I really don't think that's what this is. I've never seen Murphy bring this up unprompted; when he's asked about it, he says that he thinks he deserves to be in, and people ask him a lot because, well, he is an affable guy who is more than happy to give his time to reporters or Reddit or whatever. Is he really supposed to say no when a reporter calls him and says he wants to write an article about him? Is he supposed to tell his kids to just shut up when they tweet support for him? He even has awareness:
I'm biased because I like Murphy and I'd vote for him for the HoF but it's not like he is Pete Rosing it up out there.
What are you, some kind of Communist or something?
Murphy was better in his 8 or 9 year peak (I'm forgetting which now) than a whole lot of HOFers were at their best, including contemporaries such as Dawson and Rice. He should be far closer to the Hall than he is.
Not really. His 7-best WAR years add up to 39 and he added only 3 more WAR the rest of his career. 39 is very good but, among those that JAWS considers CF (problematic but Murphy was only in CF half the time himself), his WAR7 is behind Dawson, Beltran, Edmonds, Wynn and Cedeno (by not enough to really matter) and just ahead of Pinson, Doby, Davis and Lynn. Of those guys only Dawson and Doby (VC) have made the HoF.
Jim Rice of course has no business being in the HoF and, yes, I see no reason he's in and Murphy's not. But as we all know, if you use Rice as a lower bound, there are probably 80 guys who need to be inducted ASAP. Hell, there may be 20 on this year's ballot alone.
Of course one doesn't need to use WAR to comp Murphy to others but he's not going to shine for a long period over any measure. He has "only" 7 seasons with an OPS+ over 113. Dawson has 8 (plus a number of 114-116s I didn't count). He does have a better oWAR7 than Dawson (I'd look further but P-I doesn't support oWAR)
I don't want to disagree too strongly though. Without looking at it too closely, he would seem as deserving as Puckett and Perez too. But then Fred McGriff seems as or more deserving than Perez and he's going nowhere. But I can't necessarily disagree with the claim that Murphy (and McGriff ... and lord knows Lynn and Wynn and some of those others) deserved more support than they got.
What's odd is that the 2 MVPs and the "good, clean guy" image would have seemed the sort of narrative that might have pushed him up higher. It was much harder for them to weave the mythical Rice together than it would have been for Murphy. Between Murphy and Dave Parker I certainly would have bet that Murphy would do much better in the voting.
In the end the explanation is what it too often is ... the voters are inconsistently nutty.
I must have missed something. I've heard relatively little out of Murphy, up until a few weeks before his 15th year on the ballot, and even then in a campaign pretty clearly driven by his legion of children. Even then, he's been super polite, fairly cool about it, and even said some nice things about Sabermetrics.
You should only refer to the Great Satan Garvey's spawn as legion.
Dale Stephenson (who started his peak lists to try and put Murphy's case in context. Dale was a Braves fan and a Murphy fan) has Murphy with the 10th/11th best offensive peak (Tied with Cesar Cedeno)
The real problem with Murphy's HOF case is Jimmy Wynn.
Why? Jimmy Wynn has a good HOF case. Having a worse case than Wynn isn't necessarily a disqualifier.
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