Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 116: Has the Sabermetric Movement Helped or Hurt Jack Morris?

Episode Date: January 10, 2013

Ben and Sam try to figure out whether the sabermetric movement has helped keep Jack Morris out of the Hall of Fame or given him a better chance to get in.

I don't want to drive the conversation, but if you make cookies, I'll have one. Good morning, and welcome to episode 116 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives Daily Podcast. In New York, New York, I am Ben Lindberg, and in Long Beach, California, still sick, even more sick than yesterday, Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. Hello. Hello, Ben. Hi. I think it's like it's all the ugliness and the controversy of the Hall of Fame has somehow

rooted itself within you. It does. It hurts my soul to see Ken Rosenthal and Rob Nye are sniping at each other on the internet. Yeah. And it's just, it's manifesting itself physically. So then you should recover hopefully soon. Uh, because this is probably the last time that we will talk about the hall of fame on the show for a while. Um, I would think, and pretty soon no one else will be talking about it until we all rehash the same arguments next year yeah this is basically the last time that anybody talks about anything for

a while um and until the season starts right i mean this is the last kind of conversation point uh that of the baseball year yeah i guess so or the first i guess you could say. Is there anything in general that you want to observe about the results, which were pretty much what we thought they would be based on people who published their ballots beforehand? Do you know what the story is with Sandy Alomar Jr., why he got so many? I didn't see that address anywhere. I don't mind the courtesy vote at all. And so the Aaron Sealy vote is totally fine with me. Yeah, I guess how much better is the Sandy Alomar vote than the Aaron Sealy vote? Well, see, Sandy Alomar got 2.3%, I think, which means that he got like 20 votes or so, or like 15 votes. He got as many as Kenny Lofton, basically. He got like maybe one or two fewer than Kenny

Lofton. And so that puts him in, as far as I can tell, not courtesy vote range at all. He got as many as Bobby Gritch got when Bobby Gritch was eligible. He got as many as Lou Whitaker got when Lou Whitaker was eligible. So I'm guessing that unless there's a story about Sandy Alomar that I'm not aware of, that there must be some people who think that Sandy Alomar Jr.'s career needs to be recognized as, if not a Hall of Fame career, as a great career that we should all observe. And Sandy Alomar was not really much of a ball player as I recall. Yeah, Aaron Sealy's career warp is 24 and Sandy Alomar's

career warp is 11. Yeah, there you go. And yeah, I mean I don't know. I don't get it. He was... The case for Sandy Alomar The case for Sandy Alomar's greatness, as far as I can tell is that he was a really good

prospect he made some all-star games yeah he made six all-star games uh which is three times as many as aaron seeley made uh-huh so there's that that is a lot of all-star games yeah but uh legitimate hall of fame candidates who have not made that many all-star games he got uh he got mvp votes one time in his career he was 14 he wasn't apparently considered a great defender because he won just one gold glove in his first season which is kind of strange that's really weird somebody should write about that how does how does a catcher win his only gold glove in his rookie year yeah at age 24 you'd think that that'd be the sort of thing that, I guess maybe because he hit too well to maintain that reputation or something.

But he didn't. Like the Nichols law. No, no. The next year, he had a 47 OPS plus. And the year after that, it was 75 OPS plus. I mean, he was the Yadier Molina through age 26 and just with no second act, you know? There was no

resurgence where he was. I guess maybe there was. Maybe when he was 31 he had a good year. But anyway, I mean, the point is that Sandy Alomar does not hold up to the 2% guys, you know? I mean, Kevin Brown got 2%. It's a particular type of player that gets 2% and not you know point two percent and it's just it was weird so i didn't

know if there was i don't care but i don't i was wondering if there's a story about that i guess it's just the fact that he played forever uh and if you play 20 years i guess people maybe have a tendency to think you were better at baseball than you were. And I guess maybe he's a nice guy and people like him. Royce Clayton in Yetany. Royce Clayton played 18 years. That's true. And he's an accomplished actor. He is.

Yeah, that's strange. You should write an entire article about it. Okay. All right. That is literally the only thing that I had. So that's the takeaway from the Hall of Fame voting today is that Sandy Alomar was overrepresented on ballots. Strangely so. They're not like offensively so. Not like a way that we should be like insulting people on the Internet or anything. But like what? What is that? What is it? Does anybody know anybody know if anybody knows send an email to podcast at baseball perspective yes thank you uh so i have one thing about the hall of fame that is ostensibly tonight's topic um and it is a thing about jack morris which i

apologize in advance for even bringing up and adding to the Jack Morris discourse. We're going to talk about Zach Morris? That would be much better. I stole that joke straight out from under Brandon Warren's. But he did it at me, so I think that I... Oh, so you're entitled to... I have 6% ownership of it.

So Jack Morris, as we all know, he got three more votes than he did last year, one percentage point more, which was not nearly as much as he needed to get elected. He still has one year on the ballot. And we will be sure to hear much more about Jack Morris in that final year of the ballot, probably than we have heard in any year before now. I don't know, because there's so many other people on the ballot. Maybe that kind of logjam will drown out the Jack Morris debate, but probably not. So John Heyman, who is someone who supports Jack Morris and advocates— Also Juan Gonzalez.

Let's not forget that John Heyman was the most vocal proponent for Juan Gonzalez. It was on Juan Gonzalez brochure. Yes, right. So John Heyman was not pleased about Jack Morris's showing. He said it was a real shame. He said it was unfair. He went so far as to suggest that Morris was mistreated. And so he talked about that a bit on TV and then he went on the Internet and he tweeted, time to start pro Jack Morris Hall campaign. Guy can't get break. All ALSP in DH era hurt by roid guys and net internet negativity. Wow, there's a lot of articles missing from that sentence. Well, I didn't count up the characters. I assume he omitted the articles for a reason. So that was kind of funny because of the suggestion that there has not been a pro-Jack Morris movement to this point.

But aside from that, I was kind of more interested in the reaction that the latter part of that tweet prompted in people who are more sabermetric slanted. The net negativity part, which we can probably interpret as a sabermetric negativity. And so a bunch of people tweeted that they didn't really understand the perception by Heyman that the sabermetric movement has hurt Morris. Colin Wires, for one, said, it still blows my mind that people view Morris as a guy harmed And there were a few people who tweeted sort of the same thing. idea being that the sabermetric movement and all the people writing about Jack Morris every year and trying to change people's mind clearly have not been ineffective or have not been effective because Jack Morris has continued to gain votes. He started out with 22% of the vote and kind of stayed level for a few years and then has been climbing gradually since to the

point that he's almost at 70%. And so the idea is that there's no way that sabermetric movement has made a dent in Jack Morris's support, because if it had, then he would have lost votes, presumably, or he'd have less support than he started out with. And I wonder whether that's true. I could see it either way, I guess, because it's certainly possible that Jack Morris would have been elected by now, if not for the internet negativity. And I guess it just kind of depends on what you think the motivation for voting for Morris is with most people. figurehead of the old school, and that if there weren't a whole legion of internet people writing these screeds every year about how Jack Morris doesn't deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, then no one would actually be advocating that he does deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. Or you could see it the other way, that all the sabermetric responses are just that,

they're responses to the pro-Morris stuff that predated the sabermetric stuff. And so the fact that Morris has continued to gain support could have to do with a lot of things. It could have to do with the perception that he is a clean player, whereas the recent players who have come onto the ballot are perceived to be not clean or in a few cases perhaps proven not to be not clean, or in a few cases, perhaps proven not to be completely clean, and that he's being held up as a paragon of virtue and people are voting for him because of that. Or it could be because of changes in the electorate, people who grew up watching Jack Morris play and maybe didn't have a Hall of Fame vote yet at the beginning of his candidacy, who do now. So it's kind of a chicken or the egg situation. Do you think that the sabermetric stuff is a backlash or is it driving the pro-Morris stuff?

And I'm not sure. I'm kind of gone back and forth. I'm not sure. I'm kind of gone back and forth. And I guess the reason that I care which it is, is it kind of, I don't know, it's sort of a referendum on whether all of the words that people have written and all of the words that people have said about Morris and his candidacy have made any kind of difference. Because if you think that the net negativity has harmed Morris, then that would suggest that some people have been persuaded by the arguments that people have made against him. Whereas if you think that it's just made more people support him, then that seems to suggest that we should all stop talking about Jack Morris. And then if we'd never started to talk about him to begin with, it wouldn't be an

issue. He wouldn't even be close to being elected. So I've gone back and forth on this and I don't know exactly where I stand, but I think I might kind of lean towards Heyman's perception more so than the response to Heyman about this? Huh. Well, okay. So I think that it's probably, I think, well, first off, I do think that there are some voters, I don't know how many there are, but I would say that there are certainly some voters, maybe not a huge portion, maybe a huge portion, but who kind of unknowingly or like sort of semi-knowingly define themselves in opposition to the people on the internet. And I don't think that the specific arguments are very influential one way or the other. I've come to sort of believe that nobody is ever swayed by an argument, ever,

that you simply cannot ever convince anybody of anything through evidence and argument. You can only convince people through peer pressure and that people choose packs to align themselves with and they feel pressure from the packs. And I don't mean pressure in like a sort of deliberate sinister way, but just they start to model the behavior of the sort of groups that they've aligned themselves with. And so there is, I mean, there seems to definitely be a group of people on the internet who, um, you know, I, I sort of, uh, mentioned this with

you, but, um, our, our hall of fame, um, ballots were very similar. Uh, we both had hall of fame ballots exactly like other writers on the internet. And in fact, I don't think there was a great deal of variety among writers on the internet. So there's. So I think there's a pack of people on the internet, and it's not exactly groupthink, but there is a sort of a coalescing of ideas. And I think that there's another group on there that we don't hear from a whole lot because they're mostly writing to their senior citizen readers who still take the newspaper. But there is a large group of people out there who define themselves kind of in opposition to that group. So I think that there's some influence by that. I don't think

that the specific arguments for Jack Morris or against Jack Morris have much power i would have thought though that um the move away from using pitcher wins as a leading metric uh would have hurt morris's case that's where i would have thought that you would have seen it it's just that there's so many fewer writers who i think look at wins and winning percentage now whether they know it or not they just they don't see it as much and they don't you know you don't cite it as much i wouldn't think when a lot of people don't cite it as much and i would have thought that would have hurt yeah i mean he also has 254 which is not an overwhelming total i mean if you if you're gonna treat 300 as the magic mark that you have to surpass to be a hall of famer he is not there so i guess you could kind of say that maybe the reduced appreciation for wins has helped him possibly i don't know or maybe

it's just the change in era and people don't expect 300 wins anymore yeah so where does it do you have any idea how his winning percentage ranks because i've always taken the case for morris to be a lot of wins, good winning percentage. And he's not the best at either of those, but he combines the best. So you can name a lot of pitchers with more wins than him, or a few who have more wins but aren't in the Hall of Fame, but they don't have better winning percentages than him. So that's what I've always sort of taken the case for him to be. I don't know if that's true.

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I can look it up. It's 577, which is good. I don't know if that's true. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe I can look it up. It's 577, which is good. I don't know where that ranks. So Morris, though, it's interesting because like you mentioned that maybe it's that he stands in for the clean generation. But in 99, 2000, 2001, 2002, he was on the ballot in 2000. For those three years, he was basically identical with Dale Murphy. And Dale Murphy, I think Dale Murphy is a fairly similar player to Jack Morris, the pitcher. And yet Dale Murphy hasn't seen any of that bump.

So I don't know. Maybe – I don't know why he wouldn't have gotten that bump if it were the case. But Morris, once you get to 50, I think once you get to 50, there's a tendency for voters to coalesce around you because you've kind of been validated by the mass. To me, the growth for Morris is really from 2004 to 2009 when he went from like 25 percent to 50 percent. And those were some fairly contentious years, but they also weren't as far as the fighting that happened. But they also weren't the Twitter years. years and so the idea that um that this is uh older writers backlashing against jerks on twitter who send them insulting uh responses to their hall of fame columns i don't think necessarily holds up either because the the the growth that mattered happened really before any of them were on twitter yeah i mean i guess the first kind kind of definitive Jack Morris sabermetric article maybe is like

Joe Sheehan's investigation of whether he actually pitched to the score at Baseball Prospectus in 2003. I mean, in 2003, Baseball Prospectus was so niche that I don't think that I would bet on the 570 people voting or the 500 voting at the time i would be surprised if 50 of them read it and the 50 who did probably you know aren't the ones who are backlashing against any right and well i mean just the fact that that argument that pitching to the score argument which is so often bashed by sabermetric writers, it's not as if they invented that argument themselves and then wrote about how silly it was.

It was an argument that was being used by people in support of Morris that they were responding to, right? Because who would ever think of that argument in favor of him? Because it doesn't make that much sense. But, I mean, when Joshian wrote that article, of that argument in favor of him because it doesn't make that much sense but i mean when when joshian wrote that uh article he was responding to someone he had talked to who who used that argument in a conversation um so it was a response and i guess it's possible that a response and i guess it's possible that someone who was on the fence about morris before that could have read joe's article or someone else's article and somehow taken offense or or been so

annoyed by it that he decided to support morris when he wouldn't have before. It just, it doesn't seem like there are a whole lot of people switching from not supporting Morris to supporting Morris. It seems like there are a few going the other way, like Ken Davidoff, who I think has cited Jaws and other sabermetric stats as having persuaded him to stop supporting Morris. But it doesn't seem like there are a whole lot of people who start out not supporting him and then switch to supporting him. Yeah, it is weird, right? I mean, it is interesting that you never read columns from voters

who explain why they vote for Morris now when they didn't, right? When's the last time you read that column? But in fact, it is now the majority of the voting body. That's weird. That's weird that we haven't heard conversion stories from Morris. It's always like the columns you read are always like, what's wrong with you idiots? Why don't you vote for Morris? He was the best pitcher. But I mean most of the people who are writing those columns by definition didn't support him five years ago or ten years. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, unless it's new people on the ballot, but it doesn't –

It probably makes sense if you – that doesn't – well, so a new voter on the ballot would have – I mean you have ten years. You have to be in the Baseball Writers Association. So maybe add 10 to 20 years out of college. So we're talking about people who are – well, OK. So probably we're talking about people who are about 40 and born in 1972 and would have been 12 when Jack Morris was at his peak. So I don't know. Maybe that is – that would line up. That would make some sense. I mean, I would think that, I don't know if this is true,

but I would think that most players, almost all players, I would think, that stay on the ballot for 15 years, I would think would see their votes go up. Yes, I would think so too. Yeah, because old people hate young people. And so if you get on the ballot who don't hate young people, the more support you're going to get. Yeah, or I don't know, maybe people just kind of abandon ship

after a certain point. If it becomes clear that there's absolutely no upward movement, then people just kind of give up. Whereas if there's at least some climb or some threshold is met where it's not totally unrealistic that they could become a legitimate candidate, then a few more people glom on every year. I will say this, though. If two people read Joe Sheehan's piece, and one goes

into it as a Jack Morris supporter, and the other goes into it as a Jack Morris not supporter, whatever, jeez, I'm sick. Opponent or something? The person who supports Jack Morris, or who opposes Jack Morris, is going to read Joe Sheehan's piece, and he's going to come away thinking Jack Morris didn't pitch to the score. The guy who supports Jack Morris, who has never thought of the concept of pitching to the score, is going to read that Jack Morris piece. And two days later, he is going to have internalized the argument that Jack Morris pitched to the score. And you're saying that Sheehan wasn't even responding to an argument that was already in the culture at the time. You are suggesting really that Joe Sheehan invented or introduced that argument for the proponents of Jack Morris. Well, he said, let me just read. He says, this whole thing started at the winter meetings.

I ran into a newsletter reader who wanted to talk to me about Jack Morris. I had written this in my evaluation of Hall of Fame candidates. So this was what Joe wrote originally. He said Morris wasn't as good as Tommy John or Jim Cott and kind of the reverse of Burt Blylevin in that he put up good records thanks to good teammates. And on that has built a Hall of Fame case. that he put up good records thanks to good teammates, and on that has built a Hall of Fame case. He's also comparable to Joe Carter in that he's a low-borderline candidate whose support stat heads will decry, but who has a World Series moment that is going to carry a lot of weight with voters. For his career, though, all he has are the wins and some moments.

His career adjusted ERA is just 105, meaning he was 5% better than the league. He was a workhorse, that's a valuable thing But durability isn't greatness And there's no need to confuse the two Bert Blylevin was great Morris was good with better support And then He spoke to someone Who kind of

Took issue with that Or said that Morris' value went Beyond the stats or wasn't captured By those stats because he just had more value somehow than those raw numbers indicated and presumably mentioned the pitching to the score thing. So I don't know how widespread the pitching to the score argument was, but it was not something that Joe just invented himself and then tore down himself. It came from someone.

Yeah, no, I don't mean that he invented a straw man. I just mean that if people weren't exposed to that argument before, they were already supporting Jack Morris, they would now start. People are very poor at remembering the nuance of an argument. They're really good at remembering only the broad strokes and the parts that they want to remember so i i would bet that um somebody probably has uh has read joshian's piece and drawn the wrong conclusion and that is why he that person is now using that argument i don't know who knows yeah that's possible it it does seem like the second someone comes up with an argument for a player that sounds at all persuasive, it's suddenly persuasive. It's suddenly pervasive just immediately. Like Danny Knobler. I mean, had you heard the Jack Morris is the only pitcher who spent his entire career in the American League during the DH era before this year? I hadn't heard that until this morning. Yeah, that's a new thing.

So that comes from Danny Knobler's column on December 24th. And what is the point of that? I wasn't sure what the value. I mean, it just it's supposed to say that I guess that's an excuse for why his ERA is so high that I don't know. He spent his whole career in the DH League. OK. is so high that, I don't know, he spent his whole career in the DH league. Okay. So suddenly that argument is everywhere.

Heyman is suddenly quoting it on TV and tweeting about it as if he, I mean, he's just been handed this weapon that he can now use to convince people that Morris is more deserving. weapon that he can now use to convince people that Morris is more deserving. So it's kind of amazing how quickly those things just get co-opted and adopted. Maybe there's a Jack Morris brochure out there. Yeah, right. Well, all right. So we're not sure, I guess, but if you had to guess, if there were no sabermetric movement or if there were no mainstream sabermetric movement, no post-money ball, would Jack Morris have more vote? I guess, would he be closer to the Hall of Fame than he is or farther away? I would say that

Jack Morris has not benefited from Sabermetrics. I would say he would be closer without Sabermetrics. I'm willing to concede or consider that he would be further if not for the internet. Okay. Alright, yeah.

I generally agree. So we're done with the Hall of Fame then, I guess. Probably. You should get better at being healthy. Oh, okay. And we will be back with another show, Sam's Health Allowing, tomorrow.