Inner circle HoFer - #92 all time, 6th at 3B

Top of ballot for me.

Behind Chipper Jones and Eddie Mathews, ahead of Boggs, Brett and Rolen

I have Beltre a little further outside the top flight 3B- the best glove years never quite aligned with the best hitting years. He's closer to the Scott Rolen/Frank Baker tier than to Brett and Boggs, but he's indisputably the best player on the ballot.

It appears that I am a little against the early consensus here. I will probably have Beltre at #3 on my ballot, and he's my #10 3b all-time.

A couple of the reasons why:

1) Other than 2004, he didn't really have a high peak - he was just consistently a well-above average player.
2) Related to (1), part of why his other best years (e.g. 2010, 2012) aren't as peaky as they may be for other voters is that, since I incorporate many different WAR/WARP values into my system, most other systems, in particular DRA from gWAR, don't rate his defense anywhere near as high as DRS/bWAR do, which lowers his yearly mWAR totals in my system.

That said, he's still an easy inductee, even for any small-hallers.

ost other systems, in particular DRA from gWAR, don't rate his defense anywhere near as high as DRS/bWAR do

I would be interested in more detail here

Here are Beltre's yearly bWAR and gWAR values that I have in my spreadsheet. And while some of the difference may be due to differences in oWAR, in general, oWAR is fairly standardized and consistent across most WAR systems, so most of the variances should be due to differences in defensive evaluation:

year bWAR gWAR
1998 .2 .6
1999 3.9 3.8
2000 3.4 4.1
2001 .8 2.5
2002 2.0 2.7
2003 3.6 2.5
2004 9.6 7.7
2005 3.2 2.7
2006 5.4 3.3
2007 3.8 3.4
2008 5.6 3.3
2009 3.3 1.2
2010 7.8 5.7
2011 5.6 3.8
2012 7.2 4.7
2013 5.6 3.4
2014 6.7 3.6
2015 5.9 2.0
2016 6.5 3.5
2017 3.5 2.4
2018 2.2 1.1

That's 95.8 bWAR (inner-circle or close to it depending upon your definition) vs. 68 gWAR (definite HoFer, but nowhere near inner-circle).

I also include WS, which as most people know, doesn't value defense as much as most WAR systems, so Beltre doesn't fare as well in that as in bWAR, either - although better than in gWAR (his WS equate to 77 WAR in my system).

What seems interesting to note is that Beltre's gWAR numbers are higher than his bWAR numbers through 2002, but lower every year after. IIRC, between 2002 and 2003 is when bWAR switches from TZ as its defensive component to DRS.

good info

Older defensive metrics compress the range of performance more than the true variance of actual talent. Beltre was universally regarded as an excellent defensive 3B, so if gWAR stayed with TZ for its defensive numbers, I'm not surprised it would be an outlier on the low side for a great defensive player compared to systems that adopted more modern defensive metrics. I assume gWAR is baseball gauge. Since that died, I can't check. Did Jeter come back higher in gWAR than in bWAR, and do you see a similar pattern but in reverse?

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'm pretty sure DRA thought Jeter's defense was dragged before the ICJ in The Hague levels of bad - generally DRA has a variance closer to the modern metrics than to TZ.

kcgard2-

gWAR is indeed Baseball Gauge WAR. I downloaded a spreadsheet of their WAR values before it went under. And BG didn't use TZ, it used DRA for all of its defensive value. BB-Ref used TZ until they switched to DRS in the early aughts.

And Jacacj is right - DRA hated Jeter's defense most of all. While bWAR has Jeter at 71.3 WAR, gWAR has him at 46.5 (49 if you zero out his negative seasons at the end).

Shouldn't we subtract a reasonable estimate for Jacoby Ellsbury's 2010 WaR (probably in the 4-5 range), since Beltre put him out for the season?

Couple random Adrian Beltre factoids:

2nd most games played at 3rd base in MLB history behind some guy named Brooks Robinson.
Career split at Coors Field: .400/.452/.718 in 283 PA.
Last 8 years of his career he had 1, and exactly 1, stolen base a season. Got to love consistency.

So good for so long. Jumping out at me from the stat line: Beltre last struck out 100+ times at age 28, even though he continued to play nearly every day and leaguewide K/9 kept soaring upwards.