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Hall of Merit — A Look at Baseball's All-Time Best Thursday, February 04, 2021Most Meritorious Player: 1935 DiscussionThe Detroit Tigers defeated the Chicago Cubs 4 games to 2 in the World Series. The Pittsburgh Crawfords defeated the New York Cubans 4 games to 3 in the East-West championship series. Vote for 10. Player bWAR Arky Vaughan 9.7 Jimmie Foxx 8.1 Lou Gehrig 8.7 Mel Ott 7.3 Hank Greenberg 7.7 Charlie Gehringer 8.5 Buddy Myer 6.4 Augie Galan 5.9 Billy Herman 7.0 Luke Appling 7.0 Joe Vosmik 5.6 Joe Medwick 6.0 Gabby Hartnett 4.9 Mickey Cochrane 5.1 Ripper Collins 5.1 Bill Rogell 5.4 Stan Hack 4.9 Bill Terry 5.0 Paul Waner 3.8 Jo-Jo Moore 3.2 Red Rolfe 4.1 Hank Lieber 4.6 Wally Berger 5.8 Pete Fox 4.2 Cecil Travis 3.6 George Selkirk 4.1 Ernie Lombardi 3.7 Bill Dickey 3.0 Josh Gibson 2.6 Ray Brown 4.0 Martin Dihigo 3.0 Cool Papa Bell 2.2 Willie Wells 2.7 Buck Leonard 2.1 Turkey Stearnes 1.6 Mule Suttles 1.4 Leroy Morney 1.3 Rap Dixon 1.3 Lazaro Salazar 1.0 Ray Dandridge 0.8 Pitcher bWAR Wes Ferrell 8.2 Lefty Grove 9.4 Dizzy Dean 7.1 Cy Blanton 7.2 Curt Davis 7.1 Mel Harder 7.3 Schoolboy Rowe 3.8 Bill Swift 4.9 Syl Johnson 5.2 Pat Dean 5.7 Ivy Andrews 6.4 Red Ruffing 3.8 Hal Schumacher 4.6 Willis Hudlin 5.1 Johnny Marcum 4.1 Lon Warneke 4.2 Carl Hubbell 4.7 Ted Lyons 4.9 Larry French 3.9 John Whitehead 4.9 Lefty Gomez 4.1 Tommy Bridges 3.1 Satchel Paige 2.3 Leroy Matlock 3.7 Willie Foster 2.6 Leon Day 2.1 Ted Trent 1.9 Roosevelt Davis 2.9 Johnny Taylor 2.0 |
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1. DL from MN Posted: February 04, 2021 at 01:46 PM (#6003764)Paige is at the top of his abilities in 1935 but isn't playing much NGL baseball because the pay is better elsewhere.
1) Arky Vaughan - big gap between him and the rest of the field. Average glove but 190 OPS+ from a SS.
2) Wes Ferrell - led the league in batters faced (with great results), hit very well. 35 pinch hit appearances.
3) Jimmie Foxx - 2nd best bat (tie with Gehrig) and decent fielding statistics
4) Mel Ott - great defensive season for Ott
5) Lou Gehrig - a little less fielding than Foxx. 3-5 are very close
6) Josh Gibson - best NGL player, best C
7) Lefty Grove - Best pitcher in baseball, didn't hit like Wes Ferrell and 50 fewer innings
8) Satchel Paige - Best NGL pitcher
9) Hank Greenberg - MLB talent has shifted to 1B
10) Charlie Gehringer
11-15) Martin Dihigo, Buddy Myer, Dizzy Dean, Babe Herman, Gabby Hartnett
16-20) Augie Galan, Luke Appling, Willie Wells, Mickey Cochrane, Johnny Vosmil
21-25) Turkey Stearnes, Curt Davis, Joe Medwick, Mel Harder, Ray Brown
Source
Arky Vaughan - 39.5
Mel Ott - 34.8
Wes Ferrell - 34.3
Lou Gehrig - 34.3
Hank Greenberg - 33.2
Augie Galan - 32.9
Joe Medwick - 32.3
Buddy Myers - 32.1
Billy Herman - 31.9
Charlie Gehringer - 31.1
Dizzy Dean - 30.0
Jimmie Foxx - 29.9
Lefty Grove - 29.4
Joe Vosmik - 27.8
Hank Lieber - 27.7
Ripper Collins - 27.4
Mel Harder - 27.1
Gabby Hartnett - 25.7
Carl Hubbell - 24.7
Cy Blanton - 24.0
Jo-Jo Moore - 23.9
Luke Appling - 23.5
Mickey Cochrane - 23.5
Hal Schumaker - 23.5
Bill Terry - 23.3
Schoolboy Rowe -23.0
Bill Rogell - 22.5
Pat Dean - 22.4
Paul Waner - 22.1
Stan Hack - 22.1
Wally Berger - 22.1
Red Rolfe - 21.9
Earl Averill - 21.9
Lon Warneke - 21.5
Willis Hudlin - 21.0
Pete Fox - 20.9
Paul Derringer - 20.8
Ivy Andrews - 20.8
Ben Chapman - 20.8
Red Ruffing - 20.7
Curt Davis - 20.5
If anybody has requests for any other 1935 WS numbers for certain players, let me know.
1. Arky Vaughan: not even that much of his almost 10 WAR this year was from defense. 194 wRC+ from a plus defensive shortstop
2. Wes Ferrell: lots of innings at a good not great rate, the bat puts him over Grove
3. Lefty Grove
4. Lou Gehrig
5. Jimmie Foxx
6. Hank Greenberg (is the whole league just 1B??)
7. Josh Gibson
8. Satchel Paige
9. Mel Harder
10. Mel Ott
11-21) Dizzy Dean, Charlie Gehringer, Billy Herman, Cy Blanton, Willie Wells, Martin Dihigo, Luke Appling, Joe Medwick, Turkey Stearnes, Augie Galan, Curt Davis
Dr. C's MLE for Matlock is a bit more "smoothed" out (https://homemlb.wordpress.com/tag/leroy-matlock/)
I should add that, this year and until the problem is fixed somehow, I am going to be weighing Win Shares MUCH more strongly than WAR, because WAR is badly broken and Defensive WAR is broken even worse than Offensive. Right now, WAR is trying to claim that 1) They can get away with using DIFFERENT Replacement Values for offense and defense. That's badly broken right there. 2) But also they have decided, somehow, that the Replacement Rate (which is, of course, also the zero point in their math) on defense is actually right at .500!!! This is just the Linear Weights mistake all over again. A .500 Zero Point is catastrophic to any system, just as it is for Linear Weights. I'm not going to get into their Positional Adjustments, because it would involve a separate and long analysis.
But I am going to count Win Shares twice to WAR's one this year, and every year until WAR gets its act together.
That's not how replacement level works. Replacement level isn't a level of offense or defense; it's a level of overall ability combining both. You can have a replacement level player who's average as a hitter and a lousy fielder, or vice versa, or someone who's below average at both.
I can understand not wanting to use oWAR and dWAR as presented on B-R, because they are kind of weird (especially in that they don't add up to WAR, because both include the position adjustment). But WAR isn't intended to measure purely offense or purely defense (which is why it behaves strangely when you try to force it in that direction); it's meant to measure the player as a whole, in comparison to the level of other entire players who you can pick up on the cheap.
I wouldn't hold my breath. I think you are misunderstanding how WAR works. I wish they wouldn't even list oWAR and dWAR since I think it confuses people.
For position players the components of WAR (pretty much any system) are RBat, RField and RPos. RBat is versus an average hitter. RField is versus the average fielder at that position. RPos is where the replacement value adjustment ends up. There's also RBaseR (baserunning vs average) and RDP (GIDP vs average) but those are smaller components.
Waiting "until WAR gets its act together" doesn't even make sense.
I got the WS numbers with decimals from the now-defunct thebaseballgauge.com. Before its demise, it had excel downloads available of bWAR, gWAR, WS, and any customizable metric you might have created from their numbers for 1871-2019. DL just asked me to post some of the top WS performers for 1935.
I can send you the full WS file if you are interested. I believe I still have your email address.
Eric and DL - I know what WAR is trying to do. But there are consequences to naming a Replacement Rate. One of those is that your Replacement Rate, whatever it is, becomes the zero point in your mathematical system. You can't get out of that. And setting the Replacement Rate too high leads to problems. For one, you will end up with players whose numbers say that, if they had retired 3 or so years before they did, they would have had better CAREERS. I've been working up a comparison of Bobby Abreu to Lou Brock (Abreu isn't doing well). But BOTH of them suffer from this problem, at least on BB-Ref. Both players would have higher WAR numbers if they had retired three years before they actually did. Brock's last three years include two negative numbers and one positive one, but the positive one isn't large enough to outweigh the negatives, so he shows as, very literally, having HARMED his teams by playing during those last three years. The same thing is true of Abreu, although his numbers have one quixotic item - he didn't actually play, if I'm reading the numbers right, at all, at least in the Majors, the year before his last year in the Majors. That year is surrounded by two negative ones. So, again, he would have a better career if he had retired three years before he did. But what's worse, that year that he did not play, because it counts as zero, is the BEST year of the three, according to WAR. It's zero; the other two are both negative. This happens (or used to happen, back when I was buying Total Baseball every year) a lot in Linear Weights, because the zero point is .500. WAR doesn't have the zero point set THAT high, but it is set high enough so that the career ending problem exists.
I agree with the oddity of oWAR and dWAR and the positional adjustment (let's call it pWAR). The oddest thing is that it isn't necessary. What you do to find the Final WAR (fWAR) is to add oWAR and dWAR together and then subtract out pWAR, because it's included in both oWAR and dWAR. What I want to know is what it's doing in oWAR at all. Positional adjustments apply to defense; no one hits as a second baseman, everyone hits as a hitter. If you just didn't include pWAR at all in oWAR, you could save the subtract-out part of the process, and your oWARs would make more sense, since they would not be complicated by this irrelevant defensive adjustment.
What I mean by WAR getting its act together is that the .500 zero point in defensive analysis is obviously wrong (it's the Linear Weights problem), and having a different Replacement Rate for offense and defense is indefensible, and eventually the people who do WAR will recognize this, and then they will do something to fix it. That's what I mean by getting its act together. Right now, it's a mess.
I know nothing except the basic concepts about how WAR deals with runs, except that they apparently reconcile everything to the team's Pythagorean W/L, instead of the team's actual W/L. I do know that RBat, RField, etc, are measured in runs, not wins, and so some calculation must be going on that renders the runs into wins. It's the Wins that make no sense.
You can always zero out those years when making the comparison. Every year there SHOULD be players who get playing time where the numbers say they hurt their team with their performance. The Orioles would have been better off cutting Chris Davis in 2017, for example. Hall of Fame caliber players often get to play beyond when they are able to contribute because they have name recognition that will drive ticket sales (Ichiro) or they're still playing under a big contract and they're good enough to be a bench player (Pujols). There are always teams that aren't actively trying to win the pennant that year but they still have to field a team. Why not bring in a famous player who might be able to pass a milestone and sell some tickets?
No, what you do to find WAR is add RBat + RField + RBaseR + RDP + RPos. That gives Runs above Replacement which is converted by a formula from Runs to Wins. oWAR and dWAR are customized reports of the components, not actual inputs to the calculations. Quit looking at oWAR and dWAR; look at RBat and RField, since that's what you're really interested in.
But none of this is meaningful to WAR as a whole; it only matters to oWAR and dWAR, which, as mentioned, are unnecessary. WAR as a whole doesn't have different zero points for offense and defense because it doesn't apply the replacement-level baseline until offense and defense have already been combined.
Also, a side question: How exactly do you set offense and defense (or to be more specific, batting and fielding) to the same baseline, if that baseline is not average? They are completely different tasks that operate in different directions and under different sets of circumstances. If you were to set them to a common, non-average baseline (which again, WAR is not doing because it only applies the baseline to the player's entire contribution), what would it be and how would it be applied?
For one, you will end up with players whose numbers say that, if they had retired 3 or so years before they did, they would have had better CAREERS.
As DL said in 17, you can zero out the negative seasons if you want; that's what I do. (I have a whole spiel on this if anyone is interested.) The negative values exist for a reason and I agree that they should, but I also don't consider them when evaluating an individual player's career by WAR, because they reflect more on the team than on the player.
On top of that, though, the negative WAR scores you occasionally see from players who had good careers aren't usually especially large; Brock has one of the larger negative totals I can remember, and they come out to all of -3 spread over three years ('61, '77, '78). 3 WAR over the course of more than 11,000 plate appearances is basically rounding error.
The results can be astonishing. I was looking at Lou Brock, and I realized that he has three contemporary left fielders who are in the Hall and whose careers are very close contemporaries of Brock's: Yaz, Stargell, and Billy Williams. And everyone wants to compare Brock to Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines, who played later - in the 1980s and 90s, but who were even better at stealing bases than Lou was. Here are the results of the pWAR computations, listed in order of pWAR (they are all negative because Left Field is not the most difficult position to play, but it's obvious that the higher the number, the harder LF was to play):
Rickey: -8.3
Raines: -8.7
Stargell: -12.9
Brock: -13.2
Williams: -14.2
Yaz: -19.2
What do these numbers say? Well, they are supposed to measure how difficult Left Field is to play on defense. My friend Don Malcolm thinks they may be ballpark adjusted, and I tend to believe Don when he says things like that. But, still. These are supposed to be measures of how difficult Left Field was to play in the player's time period. So, I guess Left Field must have been MUCH harder to play in the 1980s and 90s than the same position was in the 1960s and 70s. I have never seen this massive change in difficulty noted anywhere else. Except for in pWAR, it's completely undocumented. And I don't believe it for a second. Also, the numbers say that the EASIEST Left Field was Fenway Park in the 1960s and 70s. Left Field in Fenway Park does not hold a reputation for being easy to play. There's a concept called "playing the monster" that says the exact opposite.
At this point, I'm probably better off just telling you where to find the Bill James essay that goes through the problems of using the average as your mathematical zero point, using Linear Weights as the model of a .500 zero point. It's in the book Win Shares, on page 102. The essay itself is untitled, but it's the first essay in the Whys and Wherefores section of the book. It makes the case against using .500 in some detail. I can't really copy the whole 4 pages of this essay (for one thing, BTF won't allow a comment that long), so I just have to give you the place where you can find it. I am fully aware that there are people here who are nowhere near as old as this 73-year-old geezer, and that Win Shares has not been reprinted since its release in 2000. Hopefully, anyone who is interested either has a copy or can find someone who has one and will lend it to them. Best I can do, right now.
These guys did not have equal playing time in the corner OF, although you are glossing over that when trying to make a point about pWAR. Rickey had 400 fewer innings in the corner outfield, and 2600 more innings in CF than Brock did. That is a pWAR swing of roughly 3 wins. Raines had 3800 fewer corner outfield innings than Brock did, again a pWAR value of roughly 3 wins. Just accounting for their playing time gets them basically to a rounding error with Brock on pWAR.
As Eric tried to explain here, and I tried to explain in a previous MMP thread, there is no such thing as replacement level on defense (or offense), there is only replacement level as a player overall. You can be replacement by being a godawful corner outfielder who hits well, or a Mendoza level hitter who is a genius defensive catcher, or anything in between. If you set replacement level defense as "bad corner outfielder" and replacement level offense as "bad middle infielder," as you wish to do, what you will get as a result is not a replacement level player. You get a guy who washes out in A ball. This is patently obvious. Would you like to address this observation?
Replacement level defense does not make sense as a concept (in the way that you wish it to). If you insist on defining it in isolation, you would be forced to recognize that among the pool of freely available players, in aggregate they would be able to play defense at a roughly league average level. Therefore, the only reasonable "replacement level" on defense would be average (again if you insisted on deciding replacement level of only one facet of the game which doesn't make sense). Teams don't replace a player's defense, they replace the whole player. If you replace his defense, you are also replacing his offense. Thus you can come out ahead by replacing his defense with worse defense, as long as the offense more than offsets that loss. Replacement level therefore refers to a total contribution in runs from both offense and defense.
In football, there would be a replacement level for offense, and a replacement level for defense.
It's roughly 10. RAR and WAR are in columns right next to each other on the player's page.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/war_explained_runs_to_wins.shtml
Not at all.
oWAR = RBat + RBaseR + RDP + RPos + RRep --> run through the runs to wins calculator
dWAR = RField + RPos (Does NOT include RRep) --> run through the runs to wins calculator
In your calculation what you have listed as "pWAR" would be RPos ONLY, not RRep which gets put on the oWAR side but NOT on the dWAR side.
No, your numbers above are strictly the positional adjustment for those particular fielders based on games played at various positions. It has nothing to do with how difficult it is to play defense but instead how difficult it is to find a left fielder who will give you a total offensive and defensive contribution above replacement level. It's a measure of scarcity of talent and it is calculated mostly by how much OFFENSE teams are willing to give up to fill the particular position.
From the definition of WAR:
There is a lot more information here:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/war_explained.shtml
This feels like an argument made in bad faith. Lots of claiming "I don't know" when the links are readily available and the information is out in the open, appeals to authority (Bill James), misrepresenting what the numbers are trying to say and then arguing against a straw man instead of what the numbers actually represent. I don't think there is some agenda here, other than maybe liking Lou Brock too much and trying to find a system that makes him look good.
I was about to say that this was wrong, but then I looked back at the WAR explainer; they must have changed this at some point, because the positional adjustment definitely used to be based solely in changes in defensive performance among players who played multiple positions. That must at least still be a strong factor, because center fielders outhit right fielders for several seasons in the '50s and the difference in adjustment between the two positions remained +6 for the whole decade. (It's probably good to bring the offense in for some edge cases, such as catchers, since emergency catchers are basically a non-factor in modern MLB. But I think the defensive method is usually better, especially when comparing positions with significant overlap.)
On the other hand, as you and others have noted, comparing Rickey's Rpos to Yaz and calling the position adjustment nonsense is silly. Games by defensive position for those two in particular:
Yaz:
LF 1912
1B 765
DH 412
CF 165
3B 33
RF 8
Rickey:
LF 2421
CF 446
DH 149
RF 27
That's almost 1200 extra games at 1B/DH for Yaz, and not quite 300 extra games in CF for Rickey. Which would explain a lot of difference in position adjustment.
Mauer is still the better player between the two of them, but by less than you might expect from a difference of 1000 PA, 14 points of OPS+ and four Gold Gloves. Because while both of them were "catchers," Rpos gives McCann a +96 and Mauer a flat 0 thanks to the differences in the amount of time they spent elsewhere. That's not a flaw in the system; it's reasonable quantification of a complicated question.
Absolutely.
BTW, is anyone else having difficulty getting onto HOM pages? It took me hours to be able to post this.
I agree.
1. Dr. C has Josh Gibson listed as 1B/C and the positional adjustment suggests he's been evaluated primarily as a 1B. According to Seamheads fielding data for 1935, Gibson caught 60% of the Crawfords' recorded defensive innings, so he should be regarded as a full-time catcher who also played other positions to keep his bat in the lineup. In addition to catching, he played 1B for 15%, RF for 5%, 3B for 1%, and even pitched a couple of innings. Altogether, he played at some position for 83% of the Crawfords' defensive innings. Clearly, though, catching was his main position.
2. Lazaro Salazar is evaluated as both a pitcher and as a position player, and as a pitcher he has an off-the charts pWAR of 7.4 and total WAR of 9.6. I assume this is entirely based on his Cuban Winter League performance, as he barely did any pitching at all for the New York Cubans in the NNL. In the CWL, his 1.55 ERA was second in the league, and as a batter he also led the league in average (.407) and triples (6 in 86 AB). It looks pretty impressive, but there are also some big problems. Just a little more than a year after the Cuban Revolution of 1933, the Cuban League did not invite any foreign players to participate; usually the league included a number of top NeLg stars. Also, some of the top Cuban players, like Dihigo and Oms, skipped the season. So the competition was quite watered down. We can see this from looking at the *best* pitcher in the CWL that year, who was 44-year old Dolf Luque, who had a 1.27 ERA and pitched a few more innings than Salazar (his teammate). While Luque was still pitching in the majors in 1934 (and a couple of games in '35), he was at that point just a league average relief pitcher. That should suggest the low quality of CWL play that season. Also, if Salazar had actually been considered a top pitcher, I assume the NY Cubans would have used him more than the 2 innings they had him pitch that summer. BTW, On the other MLE as a position player, Dr. C has him listed as a CF. In fact he played 50% of his team's innings at 1B, 31% in LF, 2% in RF, and only 3% in CF.
3. I'll also mention that Ray Brown leads the league in Seamheads WAR and may be underrated by Dr. C's MLEs if you like two-way players. He pitched 27% of the Grays' innings with an ERA+ of 162, and also played CF for 35% of their defensive innings and LF/RF for 8%. His OPS+ was 136. As a major leaguer, he probably wouldn't have been a two-way player, but in the context he was actually playing that was a very valuable skill.
4. I was disappointed that Paige didn't do better in the 1934 election, which was his best recorded season. I suspect that Paige was just as good in '35, but because he jumped the Crawfords to play semi-pro in North Dakota, we can't really know how good he was.
These comments aren't intended to disparage Dr. C's MLEs, which I suspect may have been done before the most recent iteration of the Seamheads data. I'm just suggesting that it's worthwhile to spend some time looking at the actual Seamheads data to make sure it's telling the same story as the MLEs
1. Arky Vaughn 10.24 WARR
2. Wes Ferrell 9.43 WARR
3. Lou Gehrig 9.22 WARR
4. Lefty Grove 9.05 WARR
5. Cy Blanton 8.13 WARR
7. Jimmie Foxx 7.80 WARR
8. Martin Dihigo 7.48 WARR
9. Augie Galan 7.48 WARR
10. Luke Appling 7.43 WARR
Rest of top 20
11. Mel Ott
12. Charlie Gehringer
13. Billy Herman
14. Josh Gibson
15. Joe Vosmik
16. Leroy Matlock
17. Mel Harder
18. Pat Patterson
19. Syl Johnson
20. Willie Wells
1. Arky Vaughan - Pretty clear cut above. Great hitter, good defense.
2. Jimmie Foxx
3. Lou Gehrig
4. Hank Greenberg - Trio of slugging first basemen.
5. Satchel Paige - Difficult to really evaluate. It's clear that he was very good, and that makes sense in context with the rest of his career. But the competition makes it tough to judge just how good. I do think he's the best pitcher on the planet in 1935.
6. Mel Ott - A tier below the first basemen.
7. Gabby Hartnett - Best offense/defense combo aside from Vaughan.
8. Wes Ferrell - Best ML pitcher, although a lot of that rests on his bat. Still counts!
9. Joe DiMaggio - A terrific MVP season in the PCL. Obviously there are translation issues, and I could be overrating him somewhat, but I think his performance in 1936 suggests it's not totally out of the question.
10. Josh Gibson - Best NgL position player (again).
11-20: Leroy Matlock, Charlie Gehringer, Dizzy Dean (best NL pitcher), Lefty Grove, Lon Warneke, Willie Wells, Wally Berger, Buddy Myer, Joe Medwick, Mel Harder.
I think #1 makes more sense than leaving him off the ballot this year
Yeah, I totally understand anybody not agreeing with my placement of him, but his numbers are too good not to be ballot worthy, IMO.
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