Bump Wills.

I should point out that the 6.0 WAR in 1938 is Bill Byrd's peak season. Here's his rank among black pitchers by season

1932 - 27th
1933 - 11th
1934 - 20th
1935 - 27th
1936 - 6th
1937 - 14th
1938 - 8th
1939 - 3rd (5.6 WAR behind Roy Partlow and Jonas Gaines)
1940 - 6th
1941 - 2nd (highest finish, 5.7 WAR, Dave Barnhill first)
1942 - 9th
1943 - 2nd (5.7 WAR, beat out by Dave Barnhill again)
1944 - 7th
1945 - 7th
1946 - 23rd

Compare to another famous spitball pitcher who gets votes here - Burleigh Grimes. Grimes' best finishes among NL pitchers in bWAR were 1st, 2nd, 2nd, 3rd and 3rd. That is a more impressive peak.

Hilton Smith bounces up and down in every MLE revision

I'm not sure he bounces all that much more than lots of players bounce around. The Fosters, Conrado Marrero, Webster McDonald, Davis Rooselvelt, and Roy Welmaker all have bigger shifts; Barnhill and Holland seem to swap around roughly as much with revisions. Bragana is up 7 WAR and 7 WAA. Byrd has generally been fringey to ignore-y, until the last few revisions have him decent to solid.

On the hitter side Marvin Williams, Julian Castillo, Bunny Serrell(!!), Carlos Moran, Ray Dandridge, and George Scales have way bigger moves...in fact there are dozens more with much bigger moves among hitters. There are a not-inconsiderable number of hitters with 20+ WAR swings.

The MLE's get translated into one calculator but white players' numbers get sliced into bWAR, fWAR, gWAR, Win Shares, pWORL, etc. I wonder what would happen if we translated NGL numbers into all of those different calculators.

I wonder what would happen if we translated NGL numbers into all of those different calculators.

Well, at the level of WAR for Negro-League play, without the MLE reconstruction, we can get a look at those kinds of differences right now, with three different versions of NeL WAR being available at Seamheads, Baseball Reference, and Fangraphs.

With respect to using Dr. Chaleeko's MLE pitching data for making single-season comparison, as DL does in post #102 above, I would strongly recommend being cautious about placing much weight on the result of such comparisons at the level of individual pitchers, primarily because we don't yet have a really good technique for modeling and translating pitcher workload from an NeL context to an NL/AL context, partly because we still don't have good data of what that workload actually was or what it meant for pitcher performance.

Since we're talking about Byrd, let me present him as an example.

Byrd is certainly a pitcher who looks like he was probably a workhorse; he pitched year in, year out, with no history of arm injuries. Dr. Chaleeko's MLEs project him, though, with a maximum number of IP in a single season as 250. He is given this total in 1939 and 1940. 1939 is one of his best WAR seasons. In that year in the NL and AL, there were eight pitchers who threw more innings than that, with Bucky Walters topping the majors with 319. I think that it is extremely likely that if Bill Byrd could have been a top pitcher in the NL or AL during this period, his maximum single-season IP would have significantly exceeded 250 in several seasons, but Dr. Chaleeko's system caps MLE IP in most cases at 250 for this period, with a few 260s scattered around.

The amount of MLE WAR that NeL pitchers earn on a seasonal basis is strongly influenced by their seasonal IP totals, and these totals do not closely map onto what an NL/AL pitcher's usage on a seasonal basis would have looked like. We can't readily compare Grimes to Byrd on a single-season basis because Grimes' IP have a range that Byrd's don't, and we can't readily compare Byrd to Dave Barnhill on a single-season basis, either, because their single-season IP totals are highly artificial.

That's not a knock on Dr. Chaleeko's MLEs in particular on this problem. It's the most difficult MLE problem we face.

As data becomes available, as it appears to be starting to through Retrosheet work on Negro-League games, it may become possible to figure out how to model a translation of Negro-League pitchers into NL/AL contexts that makes sense at the seasonal level for purposes of comparison, but we're not there yet.

DL's data on how many pitchers earned a given number of WAR in a single season, on the other hand, is still salient data for assessing the overall plausibility of the MLEs as an estimate of NeL player performance!

The single-pitcher comparisons are also interesting, but I don't think that we can say with any confidence that the pitcher with the most MLE WAR in a given season was the best pitcher that year. To make determninations of that kind, we would need to work with (not just look at) the actual seasonal numbers.

Updated ballot for updated MLEs from Dr C (as well as minor movements on other players):

1. Adrián Beltré
2. Chase Utley
3. Buddy Bell
4. Tommy John
5. Joe Mauer
6. George Scales - new MLEs say he was possibly an obvious miss
7. Sal Bando

* Small drop in quality, but still easily qualified IMO *

8. Kevin Appier
9. Roy Oswalt
10. Bob Johnson

* Drop off in quality here, all these guys are fringey I think *

11. Robin Ventura
12. Brian Giles
13. Chuck Finley
14. John Olerud - a clump of minor(?) stars from the 90s-00s all right here
15. Ron Cey
16. Chet Lemon
17. David Wright
18. Mark Buehrle
19. Sam McDowell - nobody talks about Sam McDowell, in fact he's only gotten 1 vote, ever. Well the expanded ballot let's me make it two. If you're looking at Gooden...why not McDowell?
20. Mickey Lolich

* Just off ballot *

21. Jerry Koosman
22. Cliff Lee
-- Mule Suttles - will go to pHOM in the next few years
23. César Cedeño
24. Dwight Gooden
25. Jason Giambi

-- Others moving from MLEs --

27. Heavy Johnson
38. Hurley McNair
44. Tetelo Vargas
50. Lazaro Salazar
57. José Muñoz - an oversight from DL's list of top pitchers in the revisions? Roosevelt Davis and Barney Brown may be others.
64. Bill Byrd
70. Bus Clarkson
75. Ramón Bragaña

I keep thinking a NGL MMP project could be useful. Negro League players were mostly overlooked or had token representation in our MMP voting. Rank just the players in the Negro Leagues from 1906 to 1946.

I keep thinking a NGL MMP project could be useful. Negro League players were mostly overlooked or had token representation in our MMP voting. Rank just the players in the Negro Leagues from 1906 to 1946.

I think this could be very useful! If this project were to be undertaken, in might make sense to do separate votes for position players and pitchers, just because the analysis of pitchers is going to be complicated. Having a carefully considered, season by season assessment of the top 5 to top 10 position players and pitchers in the NeL could be very useful and illuminating, and would be a good process for developing a solid approach to pitcher assessment at the seasonal level.

News on the merging of Negro League Stats with AL/NL.

https://theathletic.com/4503613/2023/05/11/negro-leagues-statistics-mlb-records/

Behind a paywall, some of the key takeaways, kudos to Kiko's continued work:

"MLB’s plan to integrate Negro League numbers and statistical legacies with its own remains years from completion. More than two years after its announcement, MLB is still in the initial phase of the project: data acquisition.

The league office was unable to reach an agreement with Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, the most complete set of Negro League statistics ever compiled, to use its data. The league ended its protracted negotiation with Seamheads this spring and now intends to use Retrosheet’s nascent database — a work in progress that Retrosheet president Tom Thress said likely won’t be finished for at least five years — as the basis for its records.

Representatives from the league office and Seamheads met on and off over the past two-plus years, but after a meeting around Opening Day this spring failed to result in a deal, MLB elected to pursue Retrosheet as an alternative. According to sources familiar with the negotiations, the sticking point for Seamheads was not compensation but rather concerns about control of the data, how it would be used and who would have a say in its implementation.
​
With Retrosheet’s Negro Leagues database, which Thress began in the summer of 2020, he hoped to provide what did not already exist publicly: game-level stats. For as comprehensive as the Seamheads database is, the data is displayed in season and career totals. “When they say Josh Gibson hit 18 home runs in 51 games in 1936, I don’t know what those 51 games are,” Thress said. Ashwill told The Athletic in 2021 that Seamheads planned to eventually display day-by-day numbers. That has yet to happen. That means others, like Thress, can’t simply look through Seamheads game logs to recreate season schedules. He had to start from square one.

It quickly became clear to Thress that he wouldn’t be able to achieve Retrosheet’s gold standard: the full play-by-play rundown. In many cases, it simply did not exist. Some box scores were available, but other times he’d find a line score with a sentence of summary. “In some cases, we don’t even have a line score,” he said. “There’s a two-sentence blurb that the Memphis Red Sox beat the Birmingham Black Barons last night, 3-2. That’s all you know. The challenge there is, how do we present this data? Because it doesn’t fit in Retrosheet’s baseline format.”

The answer was to modify Retrosheet’s standard. Now, the requirements for a game to be added to the site’s Negro Leagues database are that it be clear when a game was played, where it was played and its final score. “If that’s all you know, that’s all you know,” Thress said, “and we want to be able to present that.” For the 1948 season, Retrosheet found 542 games. It has box scores for 242; the others give as much information as possible.

It is agonizingly slow work, but rewarding. Researchers liken unearthing a box score lost to time to striking gold. Once, while at a speaking engagement in Excelsior Springs, Mo., author Phil Dixon mentioned he couldn’t find a certain 1920s Kansas City Monarchs game in any newspaper in the state archives. An audience member told him bound editions of the local newspaper were kept in the vault at a bank in town. Dixon descended into the basement of the bank and emerged a short time later with photos of the lost Monarchs box score on his phone.

While working on the 1943 Negro American League season, Thress saw a reference in the Chicago Defender to a Chicago American Giants game against the Birmingham Black Barons in Kewanee, Ill. “I lived in Chicago for 29 years,” Thress said. “I had never heard of Kewanee.” None of the three newspaper archives he’s subscribed to have access to the Kewanee Star Courier. Then he discovered it was searchable through the town library’s site. “And damned if I didn’t find a box score for that game,” Thress said. “That was the most amazing thing.”
​
​Currently, the team working on Retrosheet’s Negro League database comprises Thress and four volunteers. Thress builds season schedules. Volunteers fill out a game file for each contest and return it to Thress. More volunteers might help, Thress said, but the bottleneck is at his desk. This isn’t the only thing he’s working on. On a recent Saturday, Thress was proofing the 1913 AL/NL season when he paused to discuss the Negro Leagues project with a reporter."
​

Bleed, thanks for linking that! I like that you included the Kewanee story. That's one of my favorite stories from doing this. Incidentally, I found not one, but THREE Negro League games played in Kewanee in 1943. It ended up being a little tournament. In June, Birmingham beat Chicago. In July, the Clowns beat Memphis. So, in August, Kewanee matched up not only the two winning teams from earlier in the season, but the two winning pitchers from those games.

Here are all three games.

110. Kiko Sakata Posted: May 13, 2023 at 10:21 PM (#6128215)
Bleed, thanks for linking that! I like that you included the Kewanee story. That's one of my favorite stories from doing this. Incidentally, I found not one, but THREE Negro League games played in Kewanee in 1943. It ended up being a little tournament. In June, Birmingham beat Chicago. In July, the Clowns beat Memphis. So, in August, Kewanee matched up not only the two winning teams from earlier in the season, but the two winning pitchers from those games.

Here are all three games.

I grew up about a half hour from Kewanee, my mom currently resides, and I try to visit on Wednesday nights for Rolle Bolle during the winter months, small world!

SPOILER ALERT - I have seen the light on Willie Wells, and he'll enjoy his new ranking from me.

whoops, that should be on the HOM SS Discussion Thread, obviously.

Some analysis of George Scales

As there is a surge of interest in George Scales following the latest MLE updates from Dr. Chaleeko, I thought it would be a good idea to take a close look at Scales. My own MLEs for Scales using the Seamheads data, while they certainly present a view of Scales that should cause him to get a close look for a ballot spot, do not present him as a slam-dunk, top-of-ballot player. The conversion factors that I use are somewhat lower than those in Dr. Chaleeko’s MLEs, but the distance between my construction of his value and Dr. Chaleeko’s is quite a bit greater than is usual, so I want to raise some questions about Scales to see if the sources of the discrepancy can be identified and explained.

Here's the basic issue with Scales. Dr. Chaleeko’s calculations for Scales find that he would have earned a major-league equivalent 84.4 WAR in his career. My calculations come up with an MLE for Scales of 67.9 WAR.

For Mule Suttles, an exact contemporary of Scales, Dr. Chaleeko’s system finds Suttles’ career MLE to be 68.5 WAR. My calculation for Suttles finds his career MLE to be 65.9 WAR.

I think that the difference is occurring in Dr. Chaleeko’s calculations and not in mine. If I do a season-and-fielding-adjusted projection of Scales’ and Suttles’ Seamheads WAR by (a) dividing the fielding WAR by 1.75 to convert it to the Total Zone scale used by pre-contemporary bWAR and fWAR and (b) season-adjusting each season to 154 games, I get these results:

Scales: 92.2 adjusted NeL WAR
Suttles: 89.6 adjusted NeL WAR

My system finds Scales’ career MLE value to be .736 of his NeL season-adjusted value.
Dr. Chaleeko’s system finds Scales’ career MLE value to be .915 of his NeL season-adjusted value.

My system finds Suttles’ career MLE value to be .735 of his NeL season-adjusted value.
Dr. Chaleeko’s system finds Suttles’ career MLE value to be .764 of his NeL season-adjusted value.

Scales’ career was 1923-46; Suttles was 1923-44. They were not always in the same league, but I doubt that the superior competition level Dr. Chaleeko’s analysis has found for the ECL over the NNL in the 1920s is sufficient to account for such a large difference between the players in the ratio their NeL value to their MLE value.

A next step in the analysis would be to look at career segments. Because Dr. Chaleeko’s MLEs include regression, single-season values don’t map directly onto one another. There are good reasons to include that regression, and so we shouldn’t expect to find a constant ratio between Seamheads’ NeL WAR and MLE WAR. With competition levels varying also from year to year, the expectation of a constant ratio is further diminished. Still, it could be illuminating.

I haven’t done a full analysis of this kind yet. I have, however, started it by looking at Scales’ peak from 1929 to 1932, because Scales’ 9.0 WAR in his 1929 MLE from Dr. Chaleeko stands out as a historically huge season.

Here’s what a fielding-and-season-length adjusted projection of Scales’ 1929-32 seasons looks like in Seamheads’ WAR

Year – Raw – G – Proj. G – Proj. War
1929 – 2.8 – 66 – 154 -- 6.1
1930 – 3.1 -- 55 – 154 – 8.1
1931 – 2.3 – 48 – 154 – 7.4
1932 – 0.7 – 28 – 154 – 4.6
26.2 projected WAR in 616 games
Rate = 6.55 WAR/154

Here’s what those seasons look like in Dr. Chaleeko’s MLEs
Year – WAR
1929 – 9.0
1930 – 6.9
1931 – 5.2
1932 – 3.7
24.8 projected WAR in 582 games
Rate = 6.56 WAR/154

For these four seasons, Dr. Chaleeko’s MLEs estimate that George Scales would have been just as much above replacement level in the NL as he was in the Negro Leagues. This seems unlikely.

DL in MN has already flagged this period in general and 1929 season in particular as ones that Dr. Chaleeko’s quality of play measures appear to overrate somewhat relative to others.

There may be good reasons why Scales’ MLEs come in significantly higher in relation to his Seamheads’ WAR than Suttles do, and it would be good to see what those reasons are, if they are there.

Until such reasons are identified, I would suggest being cautious in taking Scales’ MLEs from Dr. Chaleeko at face value.

I can buy Scales as a little better than Suttles. I'm not buying Scales as Chipper Jones / Charlie Gehringer.

I think it's helpful to use the numbers to rank the Negro League players among themselves first, then try to fit them into the larger context.

I agree with DL on this point. And thanks to Chris for his valuable post above (and of course to Dr. Chaleeko and everyone else who works on Negro League stats/evaluations).

I think it's helpful to use the numbers to rank the Negro League players among themselves first, then try to fit them into the larger context.

This is a great point. And, of course, arguing that George Scales is similar in value, maybe slightly ahead of, Mule Suttles is still a pretty compelling Hall-of-Merit argument.

Bringing this to 1929, which appears to be the big anomaly year flagged by Chris, Retrosheet hasn't gotten back that far, so I can't really add anything authoritative there. But I will note that, according to Seamheads, George Scales ranked 25th in the Negro Leagues in WAR. Two teammates of his on the NY Lincoln Giants - Connie Rector and Charlie Smith - ranked 4th and 5th. Seamheads has him splitting time between the Homestead Grays (12 g) and the Lincoln Giants (54 g) that season. Is it possible that's generating some double-counting somewhere?

Quick hit on the MLEs - I really like the idea of looking at the NeL players ordinally. For a quick-and-dirty gut check, for the 1920-1948 period, here is everyone who shows up at top 10 in WAR in at least 5 seasons:

Josh Gibson - 14
Buck Leonard - 12
Turkey Stearnes - 12
Oscar Charleston - 11
Martin Dihigo - 11
Willie Wells - 11
John Beckwith - 10
Jud Wilson - 9
George Scales - 8
Charlie Smith - 6
Lazaro Salazar - 6
Dick Lundy - 6
Mule Suttles - 6
Cristobal Torriente - 5
Bill Wright - 5
Willard Brown - 5
Heavy Johnson - 5
Alejandro Oms - 5
Dobie Moore - 5
Bus Clarkson - 5

My initial reaction is that this looks awfully good - the top results are all the top players are exactly who'd we expect, and the more borderline HoMers are mixed in with reasonable candidates or extreme peak guys like Charlie Smith. It's also another good showing for George Scales, who comes in closer to the no doubt guys than the borderline guys. Of course, if the MLEs are off on Scales in particular this doesn't change that narrative, but comparitively he looks strong. The arc in his career looks a little Beltre-esque - one BIG year when he's young and then a really nice run at the back of his career. This look should be a little less prone to single year weirdness (1929 and 1932 look very screwy, and 1924 and 1934 look a bit off too) and still points to Scales as a guy of note.

Quick hit on the MLEs - I really like the idea of looking at the NeL players ordinally.

Honestly part of me thinks we should look at players ordinally within their league more often in general. There are some contexts in which it's just easier to accrue WAR than others; for instance, I don't think it's entirely a difference in elite talent that led to the post-expansion years 1969-73 having 16 8-WAR seasons among pitchers (per B-R) while the entire decade of the post-war, ongoing-integration, pre-expansion '50s had just 6 8-pitching WAR seasons.

I have something brewing in that regard for pitchers, hoping to have it ready to present for the relatively modern candidates before election time.

Hey, gang, I haven't checked in for a while, and I was especially concerned about the 1929 comments I saw upthread. Looked like an error on my end for sure.

Well, it was. What happened was that I had not recalculated league wOBA coefficients for the 1929 ANL as I had for the other leagues, which led to inflation of batting lines.

Please accept my apologies for this error. I'll be returning in MLEv2023 1.2 with recalculated 1929 batting numbers. In addition, I'm working on recalculating trad stats for pitchers. They were veering off course, and now I've got something better though not perfect. This will take a little time to get fully updated, so don't count on it tomorrow.

George Scales' case was being discussed earlier. Scales' 1929 season drops to a still-very-respectable 6.0 WAR and 145 OPS+. It's safe to say that other outlier seasons from the 1929 ANL will probably follow a similar pattern.

Thanks as always for your patience as well as your eagle eyes! I welcome feedback and want to get it right!

Thank you, Eric, for sharing—it is sincerely appreciated!

Eric:

I was reading over your new site and it wasn’t clear to me: are you still including a segregation adjustment for pre- and early-integration ML players? If so, are these included in the NeL MLEs you have available for download?

I know the NGL information keeps getting better over time. I am interested in doing a NGL MMP project after we get done re-ranking the positions. That should be about 2 years from now. I'd like to start with the season that has the most complete data. Is that the 1930s?

I'd like to start with the season that has the most complete data. Is that the 1930s?

Not sure if you mean "season" or "decade" here, but here's my understanding of where things are at with the available data. The foundational data that would be needed to make MMP determinations is present for all seasons from 1920-48, that being at least partial season data for all teams in the organized major Negro Leagues and the top independent teams. The completeness of data is uneven, in that some teams have a larger percentage of their games recorded and included in the database than others, and there are some seasons for which fielding data is not available, and so on.

The most abundant statistical records are from the 1920s, as the leagues played more games, and a larger percentage of those games were tracked with box scores, than in the 1930s and 1940s, where press coverage was less comprehensive. There may be more fielding gaps in that decade than for the 1930s and 1940s, but there's not much difference.

My suggestion would be to start with the beginning of the organized major Negro Leagues in 1920 and go forward to 1948. Then we could circle back and do the decade of 1910-19. I don't think there's enough data for Black Baseball before 1910 to make MMP a really meaningful designation.

Most of the information in this post is derived from Gary Ashwill's latest explanatory post about the Seamheads database on the Negro Leagues blog at seamheads.com.

My suggestion would be to start with the beginning of the organized major Negro Leagues in 1920 and go forward to 1948. Then we could circle back and do the decade of 1910-19. I don't think there's enough data for Black Baseball before 1910 to make MMP a really meaningful designation.

I like this plan

I'm very pleased to let you all know that Retrosheet released its summer update today.

I'm sure y'all will like all of it - we've completed 1918 and 1919; released partial pbp for 1913; improved the website - but I'd particularly direct your attention to the Negro Leagues section of the website, which I think is much improved. Negro League data is downloadable as a set of csv files that I think should be very easy to work with. I'd suggest reading about the data here. I'd note this in particular:

The level of detail at which Negro League data can be determined is highly variable across games and the data "known" is highly uncertain in many cases. For example, for many games, we have no box score but may have a reference to the fact that a particular player had at least one hit in the game. To attempt to convey this uncertainty in our data, teams and players are given three sets of statistical lines for each game within the data files which are available for download. These are identified within the .csv files by the variable 'stattype'. For each game, each player's record will include three 'stattypes':

stattype 'value' is Retrosheet's best estimate of the relevant statistical total
stattype 'lower' is the lower bound on a player's total
stattype 'upper' is the upper bound on a player's total

Enjoy!

12. Wally Schang. Second best WAR at C.

This is only true if all of Schang's career is counted as production as a catcher, which is a bit unfair to full time catchers. His catcher WAR is pretty similar to Darrell Porter, Jason Kendall, and Lance Parrish, behind guys like Posada and especially Munson. By bWAR (I'm pretty sure you're using that), Munson has the best catching WAR after Mauer. So how can we combine Schang's value as a catcher to his value at other positions to fairly count all of it, without unfairly saying he beats all the other catchers who actually did more as catchers - an important consideration when you rank within positions so that catchers are only compared to catchers (supposedly).

Schang's ~39 WAR as a catcher is about 85% of the leader for (his ballot spot for) catching WAR, his ~9 WAR as an outfielder is about 16% the value of leaders for those spots, which gives him 101% credit of the ballot spot. Turns out he would still win this spot by 1% over Munson (using this weighted average type method), so that's interesting (and partially thanks to the current OF candidates being kind of weak as a group).

The point may be more appropriate for Tony Phillips, who actually spent more time in the OF than at 2B in his career, plus a big chunk of time at 3B and good chunk at SS, all of which positions are more competitive for ballot spots than 2B. It's by virtue of saying "Phillips only competes with second basemen for his ballot spot" that allows him to be balloted.

Since the question of how to deal with catchers who did not spend their entire careers at catcher came up, I have a question about the real early guys. How do you deal with a catcher who gets moved out from behind the plate NOT because he is no longer able to play catcher, but because playing 19th-century catcher costs him so much playing time that his teams want his full-time-player impact more than they want his dominance-at-catcher impact?

Just to get a grip on what the problem looks like, there are three catchers, one from each of the 1870s 80s and 90s, who very obviously went through this:

Deacon White (without the National Association, White is a 3b, not a catcher at all)

Buck Ewing (by far the best catcher in the 19th century, if you don't heavily discount all those years where he isn't actually playing catcher)

Tom Daly (who was moved to 2b, suggesting that his arm might have been a factor in this one)

All of these three have bats that you obviously want in your lineup every day. Which you can't get if they play catcher in the 19th century.

What I want to ask you guys is how you would deal with these three, if they were candidates. White and Ewing are already in the HoM, which means I should probably phrase the question as "how DID you guys deal with this at the time?".

Deacon White (without the National Association, White is a 3b, not a catcher at all)

Buck Ewing (by far the best catcher in the 19th century, if you don't heavily discount all those years where he isn't actually playing catcher)

These are kind of different questions. Ewing had a relatively modern-looking "catcher whose bat you don't want to lose" workload, often playing decent amounts of time at other positions even in his catcher years. (Sort of a Joe Mauer who was more flexible on secondary positions.)

White was more frequently a near-full-time catcher on shorter schedules (he caught 63 of the White Stockings' 66 league games in 1876, 75/82 for the Red Stockings in 1875). And then, as you note, he moved off of the position almost entirely in the 1880s.

Actually, looking at ages, both White and Ewing were no longer primary catchers after age 31. It just looks different for them because the majors didn't exist until White was 23 (or 28, if you ignore the NA), and Ewing was done at 37 while White was still an effective regular at 40.

For Ewing, like Eric said, he was a full time catcher, who saw time at other positions to maximize his offensive contributions. It's not an uncommon practice at all for great hitting catchers. The basic positional adjustment inherent to WAR-based systems accounts for this quite well - while I might quibble with the figures, the method is sound.

Now if you are adding an additional 'catcher bonus' on top of that, you do have to watch your methodology to make sure you don't end up overrating part-timers, but there are a number of ways to handle that - my method is to manipulate the positional adjustment to give more credit to time at catcher, as well as give additional credit to catcher defensive metrics (I try to account for the fact that catchers play less as well as the fact that most defensive metrics aren't giving a full view of their contributions until the lst 20 years). For someone who moves off the position at some point in their career, they just cease to get any additional credit. For classification purposes I conside Joe Torre and Joe Mauer to be catchers, and they get all the bonuses that come along with that for the seasons that they caught, but the fact that they were at one point catchers gets them no bonus when they aren't doing it anymore.

I don't think that the 19th century deserves any unique consideration in this regard - there really isn't any era where catchers never move off the position.

What I want to ask you guys is how you would deal with these three [White, Ewing, Daly], if they were candidates. White and Ewing are already in the HoM, which means I should probably phrase the question as "how DID you guys deal with this at the time?".

The way I deal with part-career catchers in general is to treat them as catchers for the seasons of their career when their primary position was catcher--that is, they played more games at catcher than at any other position--and to assign them whatever adjustments I make for catchers from that period for those portions of their careers.

Usually, that adjustment is to increase career value by 30% and measure value above average in each season as value earned above 1.4 WAR, instead of value earned above 2.0 WAR, which would otherwise be "league average." These adjustments are based off of estimates about the extent to which catchers' career size and games played within seasons are reduced by playing catcher.

In the nineteenth century, these adjustments are phased in gradually. I don't see evidence of catching affecting playing time until the late 1870s, so I start making adjustments in 1878. Those start out at 10%. They ramp upward across the 1880s, peaking at 40% from the late 1880s through about 1908, when they drop back gradually to 30% in the live-ball era, where they remain.

Therefore, I make very little adjustment to Deacon White's value, because he moved off of catcher about the time the effects of the position start to become significant. Ewing and Daly both get significant adjustments, but applied only to the catching portions of their careers.

It would be possible to make even more fine-grained adjustments to apply just to the portions of seasons in which a player was at catcher, but I haven't found that level of granularity to be worth the trouble of carrying it out.

I do basically the same as Jaack does, except that I apply bonuses pro-rated within season for the proportion of games played at catcher vs other positions. I also have elements of Chris Cobb's system in that the bonuses only add (non-negligible) value when the season is above 2 WAR.

No wonder I usually like Jaack's and Cobb's ballots, lol, we arrived at very similar ways of looking at/adjusting for things, it seems like.

Not sure if this is the place to put this, but... since BTF is becoming increasingly unreliable these days, has any consideration been given to setting up a backup discussion forum in case the site goes down permanently?

Not sure if this is the place to discuss this, but with BTF being increasingly unreliable lately, has any thought been given to setting up a secondary option in case the site goes down permanently?

And we can finally post again. Same question as above, which I first submitted 4 days ago but which didn't appear until now.

I think that a fallout shelter/gathering spot is probably a good idea. While I'd prefer to stay here as long as the lights are on (I do enjoy the quaintness of this site) somewhere to regroup should the worst come to pass is probably not a bad idea. And I also think we should try and have such a place set-up by the time the next election comes up. I'm not too worried about losing track any of the year-round partipants since this isn't the only place where baseball history and analysis gets done on the internet, but for the voters who mostly swing by for the main election, it's probably a good idea to get the word out of where to go if BBTF collapses on itself in the future.

Long term, it's probably worth considering a more stable permanent home, at the very least to archive some of the most important discussions and research.

I would agree that a shelter/gathering spot, an independent back-up archive, and a long-term alternative to be turned to if necessary (and I hope it would not be) would all be good things. Unfortunately, I don't have any knowledge or expertise to offer in identifying or creating such resources, and not much available time to try to acquire them. Are their members of this community who do have the requisite knowledge and expertise, andtime to apply them?

A gathering spot for August 8 and the days following, when the site will be down for an unspecified length of time for maintenance, would be particularly handy. I hope that the maintenance work will take care of a lot of the problems that have raised concerns about the long-term viability of the platform, but I guess we'll see.

It's likely beyond my abilities to make any sort of true alternative, but I can probably put together a little fallout shelter that can do the job okay for any short term outages. I'll cobble something together prior to the outage.

Okay, got a barebones shelter set up: https://hallofmerit.boards.net/.

Intentionally, this is very barebones, but I'll probably use some time this weekend to archive some of the most important HoM discussions (feel free to assist!).

Thanks, Jaack! I've bookmarked and visited the site. I hope others will do so as well, so that we can have continuity during the outage, if it lasts a while.

I’ve copied my preliminary (and probably final version) ballot over at the new website Jaack set up. It might not be the worst idea for others to follow suit in case the BBTF website goes under.

Eric dropped a new MLE post this week:

https://horsehidedragnet.wordpress.com/2023/08/14/newly-available-negro-leagues-mles-v2023-release-1-4/

It's been several days longer than it was supposed to be before this site went down for migration. It's never gone down. There are no new messages. Did anything happen? Is anything going to happen? If so, when? I don't have a Twitter (s) account, so I can't check there. I'm just confused. Thanks in advance.

Did anything happen? Is anything going to happen?

I believe yes, there was some maintenance. Yes, more maintenance will happen by the end of the month.

127. Kiko Sakata Posted: June 30, 2023 at 12:17 PM (#6135547)
I'm very pleased to let you all know that Retrosheet released its summer update today.

I'm sure y'all will like all of it - we've completed 1918 and 1919; released partial pbp for 1913; improved the website - but I'd particularly direct your attention to the Negro Leagues section of the website, which I think is much improved. Negro League data is downloadable as a set of csv files that I think should be very easy to work with. I'd suggest reading about the data here. I'd note this in particular:

The level of detail at which Negro League data can be determined is highly variable across games and the data "known" is highly uncertain in many cases. For example, for many games, we have no box score but may have a reference to the fact that a particular player had at least one hit in the game. To attempt to convey this uncertainty in our data, teams and players are given three sets of statistical lines for each game within the data files which are available for download. These are identified within the .csv files by the variable 'stattype'. For each game, each player's record will include three 'stattypes':

stattype 'value' is Retrosheet's best estimate of the relevant statistical total
stattype 'lower' is the lower bound on a player's total
stattype 'upper' is the upper bound on a player's total

Enjoy!

Thanks for sharing Kiko...did you find any big changes with the update?

I responded to a question on a different forum regarding the work you've done with Player Win-Loss Records, when I went to view articles that you've posted, they've come back as an error.

Can you see if these can be restored, they do an excellent job of laying the groundwork for why someone should leverage the work that you've done!
If they can't be restored, I'd love to have a copy, marchandman34 @ yahoo . com if you can, thank you!


https://baseball.tomthress.com/OldArticles/Fielding.php
https://baseball.tomthress.com/OldArticles/eWORL_v_WAR.php
https://baseball.tomthress.com/OldArticles/UltimateStat.php
https://baseball.tomthress.com/OldArticles/HittingPositions_v_FieldingPositions.php
https://baseball.tomthress.com/OldArticles/ComparingPositions.php
https://baseball.tomthress.com/OldArticles/Value_v_Talent.php

Bleed, to be honest, I am too busy collecting data to have any time to actually analyze it. I think I've finally figured out what I'm going to do about the stupid zombie runner extra-inning abomination that screws up win probabilities but don't want to make a commitment as to when I'll get a chance to actually implement it. And I have a grand scheme bouncing around in my head of a way to use Player won-lost records to flesh out Negro League records for games with only incomplete data. But that project is probably 5-10 years away.

I had taken down the 'OldArticles' folder of the website because I've been using my website to share stuff for Retrosheet - mostly newspaper accounts for the volunteers helping me compile Negro League games - and I was worried about taking up too much space on the server. But I went ahead and put that back and the six articles listed in comment #146 should be back at those links. I can't promise that all links within those articles will still work - if you hit a dead link that's trying to go to something at '/Articles/', try changing that to '/OldArticles/. Otherwise, let me know if you really want to see a link and I'll try to find it for you.

to Kiko, Bleed, DL, Dimino, Murphy, and so many others re HOM...

I'm proud to have been around since Day 1, and to contribute a ballot each year.

but those modest efforts very much pale in comparison, obviously.

and not only because the site's future is uncertain, either.

I consider it a much-needed wakeup call - and better late than (hopefully not) never.

again, I tip my cap to all of you.

147. Kiko Sakata Posted: August 29, 2023 at 11:28 PM (#6139953)
Bleed, to be honest, I am too busy collecting data to have any time to actually analyze it. I think I've finally figured out what I'm going to do about the stupid zombie runner extra-inning abomination that screws up win probabilities but don't want to make a commitment as to when I'll get a chance to actually implement it. And I have a grand scheme bouncing around in my head of a way to use Player won-lost records to flesh out Negro League records for games with only incomplete data. But that project is probably 5-10 years away.

I had taken down the 'OldArticles' folder of the website because I've been using my website to share stuff for Retrosheet - mostly newspaper accounts for the volunteers helping me compile Negro League games - and I was worried about taking up too much space on the server. But I went ahead and put that back and the six articles listed in comment #146 should be back at those links. I can't promise that all links within those articles will still work - if you hit a dead link that's trying to go to something at '/Articles/', try changing that to '/OldArticles/. Otherwise, let me know if you really want to see a link and I'll try to find it for you.

Thank you on these!!!!!!

148. Howie Menckel Posted: August 30, 2023 at 12:52 AM (#6139961)
to Kiko, Bleed, DL, Dimino, Murphy, and so many others re HOM...

I'm proud to have been around since Day 1, and to contribute a ballot each year.

but those modest efforts very much pale in comparison, obviously.

and not only because the site's future is uncertain, either.

I consider it a much-needed wakeup call - and better late than (hopefully not) never.

again, I tip my cap to all of you.

Thank you for the kind words, I watched as an avid follower until the annual elections started...happy to help put a foot print on things the last ~15 years.

All of us help shape what's happened here over 20 years, what a group of baseball junkies!

All of us help shape what's happened here over 20 years, what a group of baseball junkies!

It's crazy that BBTF has been around basically my entire adult life! I second your opinion.

It's been quiet here. Given the most recent updates from Eric's MLEs, there have been some changes to my preliminary ballot.

1. Adrian Beltre, 3B, PHOM 2024
2. George Scales, 2B, PHOM 1948
3. Bob Johnson, LF, PHOM 1960
4. Chase Utley, 2B, PHOM 2024
5. Joe Mauer, C, PHOM 2024
6. Tim Hudson, SP, PHOM 2021
7. Thurman Munson, C, PHOM 1985
8. Bill Byrd, SP, PHOM 1950
9. Babe Adams, SP, PHOM 1933
10. Joe Tinker, SS, PHOM 1926
11. Heavy Johnson, RF, PHOM 1939
12. Jorge Posada, C, PHOM 2021
13. Roy Oswalt, SP, PHOM 2022
14. Bus Clarkson, SS, PHOM 1967
15. Dwight Gooden, SP, PHOM 2006
16. Buddy Bell, 3B, PHOM 1996
17. Tetelo Vargas, SS, PHOM 1968
18. David Ortiz, 1B, PHOM 2023
19. David Wright, 3B
20. Mark Buehrle, SP, PHOM 2023
21. Ramon Bragana, SP, PHOM 1965
22. Urban Shocker, SP, PHOM 1937
23. Kevin Appier, SP, PHOM 2012
24. Wally Schang, C, PHOM 1987
25. Robin Ventura, 3B, PHOM 2012

19. David Wright, 3B

A BIG question for the group is whether Wright leaps the backlog or falls in the swath of bubble guys.

He's bubble for me...

Beltre, Mauer, Utley, +1

If the MLEs are correct, then it should be George Scales, even letting some air out?

Should #4 be Scales or someone else?

Haven't posted a prelim yet - here's where things stand:

1. Adrian Beltre
2. Tommy John
3. Chase Utley
4. Joe Mauer
5. Babe Adams
6. Mickey Lolich
7. Roy Oswalt
8. Tim Hudson
9. Orel Hershiser
10. Ron Guidry
11. Bob Johnson
12. George Scales
13. Jim Sundberg
14. Bert Campaneris
15. Kevin Appier
16. Don Newcombe
17. David Wright
18. Buddy Bell
19. Jerry Koosman
20. Kiki Cuyler
--
21. Larry Jackson
22. David Ortiz
23. Dwight Gooden
24. Bill Byrd
25. Cliff Lee

My Scales placement is transitional here - he looks like a pretty easy choice, but since his candidacy is so new, I'm not eager to get overaggressive with his placement. If he's not elected, and the MLEs don't see a major downward push, he's an elect-me level candidate for me going forward.

The ballot expansion+some adjustments have suddenly put Larry Jackson as a ballot contender for me.

It looks like Scales is on the fast track to election either way. Even with people letting air out of the MLEs, it's likely that everyone will have Scales mid-ballot at worst, which is enough consensus to easily get him elected next year probably. All the other candidates do well to get on half the ballots overall.

I am not going to have Scales mid-ballot. He is probably not going to be on my ballot at all, although he will probably be in my top 30. Right now he's at 25 in my rankings. My analysis suggests that he's on the good side of the overall in-out line, but not far above it. Among 1930s infielders, he's a bit ahead of Billy Herman and a bit behind Joe Cronin. His bat is a bit better than Cronin's, but he was only an average fielder at a mix of 2B/3B, which sets him back significantly relative to Cronin's good glove at short.

I agree with Chris's assessment of Scales.

Trimming off seasons at the beginning and end of his career when his performance was below (quality-adjusted) replacement level and adjusting for league quality, I think a reasonable Scales MLE would show about 18 seasons with about a 123 OPS+ (compared to his unadjusted 138 NgLg OPS+) and with slightly below-average fielding. To me, that looks comparable to someone like Ron Cey, who is certainly a legitimate candidate but not someone who currently makes my ballot. Scales may be the best 2B in the backlog, but in my opinion, he ranks behind Bando, Bell, and Ventura in the 3B backlog. He's probably the best available NgLg candidate, but to me the 1920s/30s seem overrepresented in the HoM, so I think some skepticism is warranted for new candidates from those decades.

Am I deducting too much for the difference in league quality? I suggest that you might compare the Seamheads page for the Cuban League play of Miguel Angel Gonzalez with his major league record. Now interpreting Cuban League data is tricky because in some seasons non-Cuban players weren't allowed to play, which obviously lowered the overall quality well below the NgLg level. But for the other seasons when a lot of American NgLg players were playing, there were also enough MLB players there to give us a somewhat direct comparison to MLB quality of play. That evidence, along with the studies that Chris and others have done of 1940s players making the transition to MLB play, seem more convincing to me than the indirect index that Dr C is currently tying his MLEs to.

Hey y'all, I've asked this before, but does anyone have a spreadsheet with yearly or career z-scores? I've heard this mentioned before, but I don't have the time to try to recreate them (wish I did)

Not sure if this discussion has been had previously, but I was thinking of best player final seasons lately, and I had thought of Mike Griffin.

When I read through his bio, I noticed he had a contract dispute and retired after his age 33 season, following a 3-4 win campaign.

Had Griffin played his age 34 season + more, does he have a HOM career?
Does he deserve credit of any kind?
If you believe in how Dra sees his defense, he's at least a player to ponder.

Thanks all!

157. Brent Posted: October 31, 2023 at 05:13 PM (#6146081)
I agree with Chris's assessment of Scales.

Trimming off seasons at the beginning and end of his career when his performance was below (quality-adjusted) replacement level and adjusting for league quality, I think a reasonable Scales MLE would show about 18 seasons with about a 123 OPS+ (compared to his unadjusted 138 NgLg OPS+) and with slightly below-average fielding. To me, that looks comparable to someone like Ron Cey, who is certainly a legitimate candidate but not someone who currently makes my ballot. Scales may be the best 2B in the backlog, but in my opinion, he ranks behind Bando, Bell, and Ventura in the 3B backlog. He's probably the best available NgLg candidate, but to me the 1920s/30s seem overrepresented in the HoM, so I think some skepticism is warranted for new candidates from those decades.

Chris/Brent/others, do you have Hurley McNair, Bus Clarkson, or Heavy Johnson in consideration?

Chris/Brent/others, do you have Hurley McNair, Bus Clarkson, or Heavy Johnson in consideration?

The short answer is "yes," although I have not revisited them yet using the more precise competition adjustments I used to run the numbers on George Scales. I intend to do that before submitting a 2024 ballot.

There are assessment challenges, of course, with these three players that do not exist for the well-documented Scales. McNair's documented play in the 1910s is very scanty, for Johnson we have to figure out how to value his Wreckers' years (at least we now have data to work with!), and Clarkson's career is patchily documented after 1946. Of the the three, Clarkson seems to me much the weakest: I don't think any of his play after WW2 suggests that he would have been an above-average player in the majors during this period. My last review did not find him to be a serious candidate. I want to revisit his minor-league play with the help of Dr. Chaleeko's STAR-system measures of league quality, but I am doubtful. McNair and Johnson have better cases, but neither is likely to be better than borderline.

Chris/Brent/others, do you have Hurley McNair, Bus Clarkson, or Heavy Johnson in consideration?

I have Heavy Johnson 27th best available, so pretty close to ballot. Hurley McNair 38th, Bus Clarkson 70th. So I can see Johnson possibly getting to ballot territory at some point, the others probably not, unless there are updates to their careers/MLEs. Does that count as "in consideration?"

BTW, thanks to Chaleeko's MLEs, ranking NgL players is so much easier than it used to be. I make various adjustments to them, and love the various discussions about the candidates here (which cause further adjustments), but at least now there's like an actual, tangible starting point to work from.

Hey, gang, Happy Black Friday. Got a win-expectancy question for y'all.

I'm considering incorporating a small amount of win expectancy-based information into my evaluations of individual player seasons. I'm not convinced by the (Bill James-led) argument that value stats MUST add up to actual wins. But I do see the logic in recognizing that players' context-based performance is a fact, and it does drive team gains/losses in visible ways...even if it doesn't reflect a repeatable skill we can isolate and measure. It happened.

But I'm also very much a WAR guy who believes that you got to keep a lid on context to ensure fairness of comparison. I read an older piece from Rany J linked from BBREF's WAR explainer, that the WAR framework can account for about 87% of MLB teams' wins, and that most of what wins it misses are due a combo of bullpen effectiveness in high leverage and offensive sequencing (batting) or limiting offensive sequencing (pitching).

This gives me the thought that I might evaluate each player season as 90% WAR (I make a few mods) and 10% some type of win-expectancy stat. So here's the question:

Should I use WPA, REW, or some derivative denominated in wins?

Thanks!

If you're married to this idea, I would say WPA/LI or REW. WPA/LI gives the player credit for the performance, without giving him credit (or debit) for finding himself in high-lev situations more or less often than average. Otherwise, you're starting to go down the Win Shares path, where a player gets credit for how good his teammates are. REW would also be fine I think. Fangraphs has a "Clutch" metric that measures a player's performance in high-lev situations baselined against how he performs in context-neural situations. The thing is, every above average offensive player (anyone we would consider for HOM) is above average in WPA/LI, RE24, and REW. Because the player is above average at hitting. So you have a case like Sammy Sosa: 380 runs (37 wins) above average by RE24, compared to 308 runs context neutral, even though he hit way worse than his own standard in high leverage situations (negative 15 wins in Clutch). Do you want to give Sammy Sosa extra credit for being a #3 hitter and performing above average, even though he got way worse than his own self in these situations? To me it doesn't make a lot of sense. Sosa was a much worse hitter in high-lev, but if you add context stats he's going to gain WAR (or whatever you want to call it) because his worse self is still above average. If you're going to do this, make sure you back out his context neutral WAR before you add context WAR, otherwise you are double counting. You want to give extra credit (or debit) for the difference, not for the whole enchilada.

Also, I think you might find it's a lot of effort for little difference, if you're doing a 90/10 split here. Sosa, just about the most extreme case you can find, would gain less than 1 WAR? 72 runs = 7 WAR divided by 10 = 0.7 WAR added from considering context (if you do as I did: RE24 - context neutral hitting * 0.1).

Also, if you do this for MLEs, personally I would be appreciative if you could keep the two values separate, as well.

I've kind of come to appreciate the run expectancy stats (RE24/REW) as being a key portion of player evaluation.

For hitters, I think there is a dynamic contextual and non-contextual stats similar to the one between RA and FIP for pitchers. We know that sequencing runs are mostly out of the control of the hitter, but a hitter does have some degree of control over their approach in different situations, which means there is likely some signal in there. I don't think the added layer of win probability adds much beneficial signal on top of that though - I think that the base-out state has a lot more impact on a hitters' approach than the score/inning.

For pitchers, I think that run expectancy stats are actually just strictly superior to any sort of RA evaluation. For innings with only one pitcher involved, the difference is non-existent, but for innings split between pitchers, RE24 is more accurate assigning credit/blame for runs than the traditional method.

Should I use WPA, REW, or some derivative denominated in wins?

Use the numbers from Player won loss records

https://baseball.tomthress.com/

Thanks for endorsement, DL! Player won-lost records do not include Negro Leaguers (yet), so they may not work for Dr. C. That said, yes, the difference between pWins and eWins (or any of their derivatives) should capture the difference between a player's actual impact on wins versus his expected win impact. And yes, win expectancy is the centerpiece of that.

As for Negro Leagues, I definitely plan to eventually include them. But first, we need to compile the data. I have a long-term plan for how to deal with Negro Leaguers. I think Player won-lost records will work really well here because they tie to the thing about which we have the highest level of certainty for Negro League games: which team won and which team lost. For (a) games where we can deduce play-by-play, we can calculate Player won-lost records directly. My thinking, then, is that for (b) games where we don't necessarily have play-by-play but know something about a player's performance (either a box score or even just a game story), we can estimate a player's won-lost record by looking at Player won-lost records for other players with similar game performances (e.g., guy goes 1-for-4 with a run scored in a game his team wins 5-2; look for guys who went 1-for-4 with a run scored in games their team won by, say 2 to 4 runs; do that for everyone in the game and then do a final adjustment that ensures that the team's pWins and pLosses add up correctly for the game). Given (a) and (b), we can, then, perhaps get a sense of what share of a team's pWins were earned by a particular player and we can use that to make (what will admittedly be very crude) estimate sof how many pWins (and pLosses) we would expect said player to get across the games for which we don't have any information. This is all probably 5-10 years away from completion and probably 2-3 years away from even starting to experiment with it to see how well it might work. But I think the fact that pWins tie to team wins will be an advantage in something like this; any errors for one player will necessarily be at the expense of that player's teammates and, I think, will have a natural bound on them that open-ended stats (hits, WAR, whatever) won't have. But we'll see. That's a ways off for now.

Had Griffin played his age 34 season + more, does he have a HOM career?
Does he deserve credit of any kind?

@Bleed 159: I somehow missed this comment entirely, but it might be interesting to see people's thoughts.

To the first question, we'll never know, but my guess would be "not quite." Griffin was a consistently good player who never had a great season. One 5 WAR season, and three 4 WAR seasons doesn't make much of a peak. Schedules were shorter in this time, but not by much, and so if you have any offsetting adjustment for league quality (or era representation), you might be back at face value. Sam Thompson is a pretty similar player and exact contemporary, except he has three 5 WAR seasons (one a 6) to go with three 4 WAR seasons, and he's generally viewed as a pretty weakish selection, I believe. So adding two more seasons to Griffin's career at ages 34+, and making them the best seasons of his career at that, would get him to...fringey. Not very likely IMO.

Does he deserve credit? Voters might disagree but my take is no. Players retire due to unhappiness with contracts, unhappiness with offers, unhappiness with missing their families, and other reasons which are ultimately their choices. That's my take. Did people give extra credit to Lofton (2.5 WAR but not happy with contract offers)? Buehrle (still an effective pitcher retired at 36 because Toronto would not allow him to own his pet dogs, and also mad at Florida for trading him away so soon after "assurances" that they wouldn't)? Will Clark ("family obligations")? I don't think these guys were prevented from playing, and so I don't think they get credit. I wouldn't mind finding more credit for Buehrle, but he chose to retire.

2024 Preliminary Ballot. Comments welcome!

Here’s my latest preliminary ballot. I’ve done a lot of work on Scales, McNair, and Johnson in the last six weeks or so and I’ve been integrating the results of the overall update to my rankings that I’ve been working on since prior to the 2023 ballot. Lots of movement from last year, but for the most part the group of players who are serious candidates remains the same.

1. Adrian Beltre (n/e in 23). Career value far beyond anyone else on the ballot. One of the ten best players of the first quarter of the 21st century.
2. Chase Utley (n/e in 23). Outstanding peak. Around the median for HoMers.
3. Joe Mauer (n/e in 23). One of the better-hitting catchers of all time, with solid defense.
4. Buddy Bell (#2 in 23). Long under-rated and overlooked.
5. Tommy Bond (#31 in 23). Best pitcher of the 1870s, and has best pre-1893 pitching peak. Comprehensive review of players reinforced for me his value in context. Deserves another look.
6. Urban Shocker (#9 in 23). Outstanding pitcher, near equal in value to Dazzy Vance.
7. Kevin Appier (#6 in 23). Oustanding peak is somewhat concealed by 94-95 strike.
8. Sal Bando (#13 in 23). Rises as I take into account that his offensive performance came in a historically difficult period for hitters.
9. George Scales (#29 in 23). Rises significantly as part of complete review of 1910-1940 NeL players. 1930s was a boom decade for NL/AL hitters, but not so much for NeL hitters. In NeL context, Scales stands out.
10. Hurley McNair (#17 in 23). Also rises as part of 1910-40 NeL review. Still significant uncertainties about his career, but this placement assumes a couple of uncertainties would not fall McNair’s way—the best case McNair project is above Scales. Since a reasonably conservative placement puts him mid-ballot, he deserves to be there. (I’ll be posting a more detailed study of McNair on his thread pretty soon that explains the basis for this placement in much more detail.)
11. Vic Willis (#11 in 23). Stays in place, which is effectively moving up.
12. Orel Hershiser (#10 in 23). Drops two places with others moving up, but he stays about the same.
13. Jason Giambi (#4 in 23). Drops quite a bit with a strong crop of new eligible, my getting on board with Scales & McNair, and the outcome of the comprehensive review, which established that some of the strong unelected players from the early game ranked higher in their context than I had realized. Giambi is still well worth electing.
14. Robin Ventura (#12 in 23). Drops two places. Well-rounded player, probably underrated because of that.
15. Tim Hudson (#3 in 23). Drops quite a bit in parallel with Giambi. I like Hudson very well, but he had kept getting upward subjective bumps, and I couldn’t continue to justify placing him as high as he was.
16. Bucky Walters (#14 in 23). Drops the more-or-less standard two places for players whose relative evaluation stayed about this same.
17. Brian Giles (#7 in 23). Drops in parallel with Giambi and Hudson.
18. Babe Adams (#15 in 23). Moves in parallel with Hershiser, Ventura, and Walters.
19. John Olerud (#16 in 23). Like Adams.
20. Heavy Johnson (#21 in 23). Makes the extended ballot. Reevaluation boosted him less than Scales and McNair, but it did solidify my sense that he is worthy of induction. Could rank higher than this, but the competitive context for his Wreckers numbers is too uncertain for me to go all-in on my best guess about it. I think more certainty is possible as research on the Wreckers and Hawai’i baseball continues, so I am being a bit cautious with Johnson.

The rest of the players at or above the in-out line:

21. Jim McCormick (#62 in 23). Comprehensive review puts him back in contention for ballot.
22. Chuck Finley (#18 in 23). Pushed out of ballot range by upgrades to Johnson and McCormick.
23. Frank Chance (#22 in 23). Stays about the same.
24. Ned Williamson (#32 in 23). Reevaluation moves him closer to ballot. Electing him, Bond, and McCormick would close out the 19th century for me, pending new statistical tools.
25. Bill Pettus (n/r in 23). Reevaluation puts him firmly in my rankings for the first time. A forgotten star of the 1910s. With more exact competition adjustments, the case for him being slightly better than Ben Taylor is solidifying.
26. Wilbur Cooper (#19 in 23). Drops a bit as others have moved up in reevaluation, but still above the in-out line.
27. Mark Buerhle (#20 in 23). Drops in parallel to Cooper. Hope I’ll be able to vote for him sometime!
28. Chet Lemon (#23 in 23). Also slides as others rise, but still on the in-out line for the 1980s.
29. Roy Oswalt (#24 in 23). On the in-out line for the 2000s.
30. Fred McGriff (#25 in 23). On the in-out line for the 1990s.
31. Don Newcombe (#26 in 23). On the in-out line for the 1950s.

Top 10 Returning Not Receiving Vote

David Ortiz – around #65 in my rankings. Not quite enough bat to make up for defense and make it to the Stargell/Killebrew level.
Tommy John – Not enough peak or in-season durability. My numbered rankings don’t go down far enough to reach him yet.
Bob Johnson – A tricky player to rank. Around #75 in my system, but could be as high as the 40s. It’s a problem of how to evaluate the high-offense 1930s in comparison to the deadball era. If we had elected Johnson instead of Joe Medwick, we’d be in a better place, but we’d still be talking about Joe Medwick, I think, and we we haven’t elected him.
Thurman Munson – Also around #75.
Phil Rizzuto – Around #50. He’s close, but being two spots below the in-out line in one’s decade now means being around 50 overall. We’ve elected a few players who were not as good as Rizzuto, but most of the players in his tier are not elected.

Chris - what has led to the stron positive moves for the 19th century guys - I've always had an eye for Bond as a serious candidate (not so much McCormick) but that's very strong placement. How are you approaching the 19th century pitchers, and where do you perceive Bond and McCormick among those we've elected?

Similar to Jaack's point, I'm curious if you/others are concerned about era representation. The eras from 70+ year ago are already (well) over-saturated, and yet there are still frequently ballots with almost half the players from those times. I also know we've had these discussions before. Segregation has a lot to do with it, I think.

Jaack & kcgard2, thank you for the thoughtful questions!

Chris - what has led to the strong positive moves for the 19th century guys - I've always had an eye for Bond as a serious candidate (not so much McCormick) but that's very strong placement. How are you approaching the 19th century pitchers?

The strong positive moves for 19th-century pitchers are there because I did a lot of close work with them--establishing meaningful average starter innings pitched, working out deductions for the ways in which RA/9 can overrate them by including an FIP component in the evaluation--to get results that I trusted much more than any I had before and that scaled the pitchers reasonably in relation to the position players. On the basis of that analysis, Bond came up very strongly, to the point where I concluded that it would be inappropriate to leave him out on era representation considerations. What really convinces me on Bond is that his WAR rate during his peak is higher than any of the 1880s stars, even though for the most part pitchers' WAR rates were going up steadily from 1871 to 1893 as the number of player IP relative to team IP declined, and Bond was a striking outlier to those trends.

where do you perceive Bond and McCormick among those we've elected?

Here's what I have for the pre-1893 starting pitchers, listing them based on system scores:

151.0 - John Clarkson
142.8 - Tim Keefe
138.3 - Tommy Bond
136.2 - Al Spalding
132.7 - Old Hoss Radbourn
127.6 - Pud Galvin
119.3 - Jim McCormick
115.7 - Charlie Buffinton
111.32 - Bob Caruthers
111.27 - Jim Whitney
106.0 - Tony Mullane
101.9 - Mickey Welch
98.6 - Silver King
91.1 - George Zettlein
89.2 - Bobby Mathews
87.3 - Dick McBride
84.4 - Candy Cummings
80.5 - Charlie Ferguson
74.4 - Guy Hecker

I see Bond as the #3 pre-1893 SP overall and with a system score that is just a little bit below the middle of the Hall of Merit. McCormick is below all of the pre-1893 pitchers whose election I support, but he is above the cohort-based in-out line for the 1880s. Position players behind him but above the in-out line are George Gore (118.7), Ed Williamson (118.6), and Hardy Richardson (116.9). Below them on the other side of the line are Harry Stovey (116.2) and then Charlie Buffinton. McCormick is closely bunched in this borderline group in a way that is pretty similar to the bottom quartile in most later decades, and thus I have him around the bottom of my ballot, but I am not pressing his case as I am doing with Bond's.

The high placement of Bond within this group leads into kcgard2's question:

Similar to Jaack's point, I'm curious if you/others are concerned about era representation. The eras from 70+ year ago are already (well) over-saturated, and yet there are still frequently ballots with almost half the players from those times. I also know we've had these discussions before.

This is an issue that I have been closely concerned about, and my recent ballots have stressed era representation more than I have done this time. Two factors have shifted my sense of this matter a bit from what it was as recently as last year. The first is that a my updating of all of my numbers for every player with over 30 career WAR (or its equivalent in the short-season game) has shown that a few of the unelected early players are no just above but well above the in-out line for their eras. When I see the magnitude of the miss as larger, I have a harder time viewing leaving the player out of full consideration as appropriate. They are outside the margin of (my own) error. Most of the contemporary players we are considering now are within the margin of error. They are in the bottom quartile or quintile, and a few points of difference in evaluation might move them up or down 4 or 5 or 8 spots in the rankings.

Is it more problematic for Tommy Bond, who is the best pitcher of the 1870s, and has a scaled rank in his decade of 25.4 (where 30 is the in-out line) to be unelected than it is for Chuck Finley (10th best pitcher of the 1990s, scaled rank in his decade 29.4) or Mark Buerhle (8.5th best pitcher of the 2000s, scaled rank in his decade 29.5) to be unelected? Much as a I like Mark Buerhle, I think Bond is the player with more "merit." The fact that our big misses for early are all pitchers leads me to see a systemic short-coming of the Hall of Merit's work with early pitchers, so I am giving equal weight to accurate representation of early pitchers to fair representation of recent players.

With the Negro-League players, Scales, McNair, Johnson, and Pettus, I think they need to be considered because their careers have never been in full view (and to some extent in the cases of McNair, Johnson, and Pettus, their careers still aren't in full view.

Basically, we have 35 HoM slots per decade, and that won't change unless the Major Leagues expand. I figure that each decade should have about 30 players elected. That gives us 5 true backlog slots per decade which can be used to expand and adjust earlier rempresentation without seriously "shorting" the present. I have five "long backlog" players in my top 15: Bond, Shocker, Scales, McNair, Willis. I also have 3 players I also have two pre-1990 modern players--Bell, Bando, and Hershiser--in my top 15. I'd like to see five of those eight players elected over the next ten years, along with a bunch of new first-ballot players and some bottom-quintile players from the 2000s and 1990s who need attention. My sense of priority between the early backlog and the bottom quintile of contemporary players will probably shift around, depending on how quickly the electorate moves in one direction or the other.

For the Hall of Merit to be fair to all eras, we need to chart a careful course between improving our treatment of early eras and giving appropriate value to modern players. It's a tough balance to strike, and my preliminary ballot shifts that balance from where I had seen it needing to be last year, mostly because of new things that I learned about early pitchers and this set of Negro-League players. Maybe I've tipped too far -- I'd certainly like to have Hudson, Giambi, and Giles higher. But where would be appropriate, and who moves down as they move up? I'm open to the case for striking a somewhat different balance, but this preliminary ballot represents the best sense that I've been able to arrive at on my own of how to fairly place the two groups of worthy players in relation to each other.

Are the ballot counters ready?

Thanks for the details Chris.

Bond is just a rather tricky case - among his immediate peers he pretty clearly stands out. The only guy who can really compete with his rate and volume for the 1870s is the HoMer Spalding. The 'if player x than player y too' arguments are kind of iffy to me normally, but in this case, it's a situation where two guys are pretty clearly standing out ahead of the pack. For Bond specifically, he's got a five year stretch (1875-79) where he has a good case as the best pitcher in the league - even among more modern pitchers, that's been typically enough for the HoM with Sandy Koufax and Johan Santana have broadly similar career arcs. Add in the fact that his career really isn't that short by the standards of pitchers from that period - he ranks ninth in IP thru 1892 after all.

The question, ultimately, for me though is how to handle the pitching/fielding distinction for this period. To take 1879 as an example - Bond was the best pitcher at preventing runs in the league no matter how you look at it, but that advantage almost exclusively comes from un-earned runs. His 1.96 ERA is league leading, but everyone with 200 IP or more has a sub 3 ERA, so it looks like just the best score of a pretty even league. But by raw RA, Bond leads by a pretty phenominal margin - there is only one >200 IP pitcher that season within a run of his 3.34 mark. (Here is a link to that leaderboard, as BBRef makes these things hard to find, and for some reason fangraphs just doesn't have RA9 as a stat). It's a similar, if less extreme story in 1878 - Bond is allowing fewer runs than anyone else, but his ERA is pretty middle of the road. Those two seasons are the basis of his entire career really - I think he has a lot of value for 1875-77, but the other two are the ones where he very well might be the best pitcher in the game.

Was he the best pitcher in the game, or just a piece of the best defensive unit in the game? It's hard to say - the data we have is limited, and most of the tools we have are poorly calibrated to deal with him.

This is well-trodden territory, but it all matters a lot for someone like Bond, so it's certainly worth a revisit.

Was he the best pitcher in the game, or just a piece of the best defensive unit in the game? It's hard to say - the data we have is limited, and most of the tools we have are poorly calibrated to deal with him.

It should be possible to check whether RA or ERA has a higher year-to-year correlation in the 19th century (I believe I've read that for modern pitchers, RA does better).

Thanks for your thoughts, Chris. I had seemed to recall you being strongly in favor of modern candidates the last time this came up, so I was surprised to see so many old-timers on your ballot. Your reasoning makes sense, and I have a very similar ranking of pre-1893 pitchers as you presented, but I see a demarcation from Galvin to McCormick (my in-out line I guess), with McCormick through Welch in various levels of consideration, but I don't have any particularly close to ballot. For some reason, I just have a large departure from you on Bond in particular, who I have just below Welch (I didn't think he'd be that low in this cohort for me). I have Bond as the worst SP in this cohort who is worthy of being "in the consideration set." It could be because I don't differentiate the 1870s from the 1880s. Bond is the only one whose career was in the 70s among these non-elected, so if you do rankings by decades, he would go straight to the top among this cohort.

Are the ballot counters ready?

I'm ready

Me too