Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 596: Hall Hypotheticals and Other Luminous Emails

Episode Date: January 8, 2015

Ben and Zachary answer emails about Hall of Fame voting, stats in other sports, baseball with no projections, and more (plus a Play Index about plunkings).

Good morning and welcome to episode 596 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined today by Zachary Levine of Baseball Prospectus, who was with us very recently and is back again already thanks for joining us again thanks for having me i uh always enjoy it joining me again i guess i should say because the whereabouts of your friend and mine sam miller are unknown sam is somewhere in mexico i hope that he

will return to us in time i thought he'd be today, which is why we pushed the email show back a day, but he has not returned to us yet. I may have to go rescue him like Seth goes to rescue Ryan in season four of DOC. It brings him back safely from Mexico. But no, I'm sure Sam will be back probably in time for tomorrow's episode. I have a lot of faith in Sam's survival scale. I do too. Although he's probably with his family, so he's got a wife and a small child to deal with, so that probably makes it more difficult. He can't just fend for himself.

So do you have any observations about Hall of Fame voting results that we should mention just because we haven't had a podcast since those results came out? Yeah, so I think for the third year in a row, I had to be off Twitter during the announcement of the results, which is just a wonderful thing. Had to be, yes. Make it sound like an imposition.

No, it was great. I was in a class yesterday pretty much all day. And so I found out who won, who was elected, maybe 2.30, 3 o'clock Eastern. And I didn't really get a chance to look at everything until closer to 7 or 8 p.m. And really the two things that that struck me, and I have no idea if this is something that everyone said for five hours before I got on there. But it was the difference between Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez, which the five percentage point or six percentage point difference between those two guys, which I tweeted this out and all I got back was wins.

So, yeah, maybe. And then the one, I never care about the down ballot guys. Right. But the one that really surprised me was Nomar hanging out another year. Uh-huh. Yeah. I didn't see it. 5% is a lot when you're talking about 549 voters or whatever. I didn't think that there would be nearly that much support, and I can't imagine what his case is based on. But I guess it's all peak but yeah he i

mean he was at a hall of fame level for half a decade several several years i guess which is not enough i don't think but he was super famous uh-huh yes that's right yeah i think that was mostly a private private ballots driven thing, if I recall. Yeah, it definitely was. Louis Paulus wrote an article at BP where he looked at the difference between the ballots that were released publicly and the private ones. And Nomar was on a much higher percentage of the private ones. I don't know why that is, I guess. I don't know, more old school friendly stats,

high batting averages, I don't know what it is. But I don't mind anyone hanging around. Anyone can hang around as long as they want as far as I'm concerned. It's the guys who get cut off who occasionally bother me, like Kenny Lofton falling off after one year. And I was happy to see that Gary Sheffield did not fall off because I was kind of worried that he would. I love Gary Sheffield.

Gary Sheffield is one of my favorite players to watch, and he's got a decent case too. So I'm glad that he'll be able to stick around, hopefully until the ballot clears out a bit. But it was mostly positive news i mean four four people got in who who should be in and that's nice and we'll have a more exciting induction day than usual and some people made progress who i was happy to see make progress so all in all a pretty good day

and plenty of nits to pick, of course, and flaws in the process and all the rest. And many of you have sent Hall of Fame-related questions that we will get to in a minute. But all in all, a positive day. I was sorry that Brian Giles was not one of the players who got down-ballot votes. Because if Carlos Delgado got 21 votes

and Troy Percival got four votes and Darren Buhn got a couple. Yeah, right. And Ryan Giles is like almost a legitimate Hall of Fame guy. He's kind of almost borderline or he's better than those guys. So I would like to see him get one or two, but that is the most insignificant thing that I can imagine.

Yeah, and I mean, to throw out one more insignificant thing, I guess it's the percentages of guys who got over 75%. And I'm always a little surprised when I see guys not on their first ballot just blow by 75%. There's no drama at all. Like with Craig Biggio, just almost 83 percent uh for him and uh you i would say i was surprised but then i went back a couple years and saw that rabbi alomar got 90 percent on something that wasn't his first ballot so yeah that's kind of

stuff baffles me but that baffles me i mean it sort of baffles me that we all just accept how the typical trajectory of a player on a Hall of Fame ballot is you start somewhere low and then you gradually climb over time if you're not a no-doubt guy, and then you end up a Hall of Famer. And somehow twice as many people think you're a Hall of Famer as Did a few years earlier even Though you have done nothing to improve Your credentials it's kind of Absurd but That's the way that the Hall of Fame voting works Oh and I always enjoy the The mismatch the very

Slight mismatch between Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds votes Like for this year right for yes Clemens got 206 votes. Bonds got 202 votes. And I always try to figure out what the difference is between those guys because obviously the people voting for one are not the people who will not vote for a PED guy. So they are, for some reason, distinguishing between the two

who obviously have all of the qualifications to get in if you don't if you don't keep them out because of that so i don't know whether it's that one of them is perceived as being further along the ped use spectrum than the other maybe maybe people believe that bonds did more stuff or that there's more evidence that he did that stuff or maybe it's just that he was not as well liked i don't know but that always always amuses me that there is a difference there all right uh so that's enough hall of fame banter because we're about to get into some more hall of banter i did want to provide a ryan webb update just because there was a ryan webb update this week it was not really a new thing but it was a thing that we found out happened a ryan webb update this week it was not really a new thing but it

was a thing that we found out happened to ryan webb shortly after the season ryan webb had surgery to tighten the capsule in his left shoulder he had been dealing with instability in his non-throwing shoulder and that has now been repaired and he's expected to be fully ready to begin spring training. Was the surgery before or after the wedding? It was shortly after the season ended. Oh, okay. Could have been before the wedding, then. Yeah, I think it probably would have been before the wedding.

You probably want to get that squared away before the honeymoon. You're a BBWA member, correct? I am. Have you calculated your 10 years, and if Ryan Webb plays 10 years and makes it onto a ballot, whether you will be the guy to give him his one vote? That, yeah, I wonder. I guess I would have the chance. I fear that he might not make the ballot.

I don't know. Maybe if he picks up a save at some point between now and then, that will get him onto the ballot. Maybe now that his non-throwing shoulder surgery is tight, or his non-throwing shoulder capsule is so tight, he'll be more closer material. I don't know. But that's the news in Ryan Webb.

All right. So let's switch over to some questions here. Okay. I'll start with a player-specific sort of question. It's from Mikey who says, So I know Larry Walker's case for the haul isn't that great, and Todd Helton seems like a borderline guy at most, but do you ever see a hitter who spent his most productive seasons in Colorado making the hall

on anything but the first ballot, assuming any Jeter-type very obvious Hall of Famer would make it first ballot? Or is the Coors effect, barring some type of technological tectonic shift that neutralizes it, enough to always turn maybe into no for most voters the question could also be reversed and asked for a pitcher in colorado so can you imagine a a non-slam dunk hall of fame candidate making it from colorado or or is there such a thing as a slam dunk hall of fame candidate from colorado okay i think i understand question. It's could someone get in on something other than the first ballot? Yeah, that is, it could someone take this sort of like path up the just because of awareness, and I think it can happen. I think that in the coming

years, 10 years, 20 years, we'll understand Factors better, will understand that it's not something that you should dismiss, rather something you should adjust for. And I do think that you'll have guys who will have maybe some statisticians leading a campaign for them or something like that. It would certainly help if Colorado won, if they were able to build in, because I would think winning championships is something that could get a borderline case elected at some point.

But yeah, I do think that we will start, we will become as a voting bloc, better educated as to what Coors Field is and what it isn't. It's no longer what it was. So I think if a Larry Walker type were to come along today and spend his career in Coors, then he would not be dinged as much by the voters. Because the thing with Walker is that he's playing at the height of the offensive era and also the height of the crazy Coors era. And so when you look at his home stats, he was like slugging 900 at Coors in some years, and it's really hard to Figure out what to do with that So in the post Humidor era if the Rockies had a viable candidate I think he would have a legitimate Chance to get in

Alright Andrew says So let's say you've got a guy who hits 200 with a 550 OPS For his whole career how long would he Have to play and how good a defender Would he have to be To make the Hall of Fame So you get this kind of question every now and then And this particular formulation

Is sort of extreme I think if a guy who hit 200 with a 550 OPS And was Ozzie Smith was on the ballot I don't think he would make it That's just too bad I don't think there's a length of time that a bad player can play that will make him a Hall of Fame candidate. Because you can't just be, I don't think you can be below average and last for, you know, some crazy hypothetical number of years if a guy had a 30-year career and we're just the same every year that would make him

a marvel of some sort but i don't think it would make him a hall of famer so how i would also feel bad for the team that had no better option that's okay um yeah he would he would have been like a royal second baseman forever um so how good would a guy have to be let's say on average for him to make the hall sheerly through longevity like he never has a hall of fame peak he never exceeds the the hall of fame average peak jaws score but he lasts forever he plays 30 years or something and somehow is well preserved at the end of that time can he be uh a two wins above replacement guy a year just average can he be three how good would he have to be well yeah so if he were two uh for 30 years he would pretty much hit a standard i mean he wouldn't hit uh he wouldn't hit the Jaws standard because he wouldn't hit the peak standard.

And, I mean, Jay has a really good explanation for why, you know, why the peak score is part of it. And it's not just a body of work thing. But, I mean, that would give you 60 war, which is in the conversation, but I mean, he would get in as a 60 war player who presumably now has the game and played record and is getting feature stories written about him at 45 at 48 at 50. At, you know, when he passes, when he's older than Jamie Moyer, there would be enough

sideshow there that he would get in. The way I interpreted the question was like, if you were like peak Andrelton Simmons for how many years would you have peak Andrelton Simmons defensively and stat cast showed that it was for real and what was Simmons? Was he a five win defensive player? Yeah, maybe close to that.

And then you'd have to get the voters to realize that there'd be definitely an education campaign there. But I think 15 years of Pete Simmons in a bad hitter could get you into the Hall of Fame. I think 15 years of Pete Simmons in a bad hitter could get you into the Hall of Fame.

I think so, yeah. I agree with that. I don't know if the average guy, the ultimate compiler, the term that people apply to people who sometimes don't totally deserve it, but the ultimate compiler who is average for 30 years, I think would have some sort of exhibit at the hall of fame they would have his uniform in there somewhere yeah they'd they'd it would be some sort of freak of nature acknowledgement in the museum somewhere but

i don't know if he would get in i think he would have to be at least an above average player for that length of time if he never had a peak spike where he was a star, I think he'd have to have at least been like a three war a year guy maybe to get in. But we'll never have someone like that, so we will never settle this either way. So moving on. Okay, I will mix in a couple not Hall of Fame ones, but one more Hall of Fame one from Rich, who says, What do you think the effect would be on Hall of Fame voting if the BBWA were to lower writer eligibility to something less than 10 years, five say, and expand BBWA membership to all media, including the Vince Scully types who are clearly qualified as brighter people than I have said in the past.

If you wanted to go further, you could remove the lifetime eligibility for members who fail to demonstrate a meaningful connection or contribution to the sport or some phrasing that is at least as nebulous as the morality clause. If the Baseball Hall of Fame is so stodgy and slow to turn as it seems, why not flood the electorate with the younger generation? Is the BBWAA as difficult to change? Would this just be a temporary fix for a temporary problem that would have irritating consequences when we are old and feeble-minded?

So say, I don't know, say everyone in the BBWA gets in. So I'm in, or everyone can vote. I'm in, and Sam can vote, and you can vote, and we can all vote. So what does that do to, say, this year's results? I don't know if it changes. I mean, everyone's going to go up. All of the guys in about the 40% to 70% range that we saw this year would go up bagwell

would go up uh tim raines would go up bonds and clemens would go up um edgar martinez who i guess was he in the 20s i don't remember his yeah he was in the 20s yeah trammell and messina were in the 20s 24 25 i think those guys would all up. I think you would get, by having the younger writers, you would have more full ballots. I think that, I mean, what we've seen with the public ballots, which tend to skew younger and newer writers, tend to be better at filling their 10 spots. I'm not sure it would have pushed anybody to up to the 75%. I'm trying to think of how many, do you know your card number? I do not. Yeah. I'm in the 400. I'm a seven-year member and I'm in the 400 somewhere, but it's a slightly different group because you can't lose your

hall of fame vote, but I think you can lose your spot in the bbwa line so i mean it's not like because there are more than 500 voters and i'm number 400 something it's not like all those voters are ahead of me so they don't all have cards but i think there are something like 800 cards so there'd be 325 350 or so writers of my seniority and lower. So then maybe 350, 400 of nine years or lower. So, I mean, you wouldn't be doubling the electorate. This group would still be outnumbered by the, unless you, I mean, I guess you could add MLB.com writers, you could add

broadcasters TV and radio, you could I guess double the electorate but to get so like what was what was Tim Raines at? What was his number? 55 and 64 in the public

ballots. Yeah, so you'd to get like at 55 you'd need 95 if you were strictly doubling it you'd need 95 of this new group to get him there and i just don't know if anything uh with him would have changed uh bagwell and piazza might have been closer but it's still it still would have been a lot to get anybody up there this year. Yeah. Generally, I don't know, most listeners of this show would probably be happier with the results in the long run if that were to happen, but a lot of those people will eventually make it,

so we just have to wait a little while. Yeah, it probably would be tough to make that change it's not really a process that you can change all that easily so patience I suppose all right one more before play index because this one was prompted by the last episode that you were on episode 593 when we talked a bit about hockey stats. This is from Samuel, and hopefully you can help me out here because it concerns other sports, which is not my strength. To my knowledge, advanced statistics are and have been more ubiquitous

in baseball than in any other major U.S. sport. I don't know exactly why this is, but I would guess that it has to do with the fact that individual player statistics are more meaningful and easier to aggregate than in other sports. Baseball is great for the baseball card collector and for the average fan who likes to talk about their favorite players. However, it seems to me that the individualistic nature of baseball stats make them less useful than in other sports, where stats might primarily concern in-game strategy. Knowing more about players is great for a GM, someone who is constructing a team, but there are so many sources of unanticipated variation between evaluating a player and the actual team performance

that their actual impact is limited. On the other hand, stats concerning strategy, like what kind of plays to call Against a certain defensive alignment in football Would in my opinion have a more significant And easily measurable effect Than in baseball In other words the win probably added by strategy And formed by stats would be larger And could be measured with a smaller

Margin of error than the effect of using Stats concerning individual players There are strategy focused Stats in baseball, like around lineup construction, but I don't think a significant advantage has ever been gained in baseball by the use of in-game strategy, aside from bullpen usage perhaps. Do you agree that stats have the potential to be more useful in other sports than in baseball? And if so, why do you think it has taken longer for them to catch on in those other sports?

Yeah, that's a good question. And I would say in baseball, the in-game, it's all the platoon advantage kind of stuff. So yeah, it's bullpen use, it's pinch hitting, and the statistics are very useful for that. I mean, as long as you obviously don't go to too deep a level of the individual hitter versus pitcher matchup, there are a lot of worthwhile stats. But I love the football example because that's the one I would have said, too. Like oftentimes that baseball gets compared to basketball and hockey because they're sports that have traditional statistics. sports that have traditional statistics, but anything beyond that is so hard to figure out because players are not operating in isolation. And so much of it is the give and take, the interaction among the five on the court or the five skaters on the ice.

But I love the football example because I do think that's something that's underutilized, because I do think that's something that's underutilized, that teams do have this kind of stuff. And so much of it is because the – I would think so much of the problem is that teams can't adjust fast enough. Like, it would be great if you could – if you had the stats for third downs against a cover two defense, but teams can disguise a cover two defense. They can do last minute substitutions. Then you have a play clock that's at 14 seconds when you see what the defense is doing

and then it's hopeless. I think baseball's advantage in that department is no clock, that you can take a slow walk out there and make your decision. And when it comes to the pitcher-batter matchup, they make one side commit before the other one does. So I think that if you were playing a video game or something, this would be a lot easier in football. But in the bigger picture, like if you were playing a video game or something, this would be a lot easier in football. But in the bigger picture,

like if you are looking just at things that only your own team can control or expectation of what the other team is going to do on defense or something like that, there is some ground to be made up there. Cover two. I don't know. I would try to cover all the players. Oh, okay. Not just two. That would be made up there. Cover two, I don't know. I would try to cover all the players. Oh, okay. Not just two.

That would be my football strategy. I don't know what cover two means. Yeah, I guess that's right. I don't know. The larger team-based strategies would still require some projection of individual player performance though right i mean you would still need to know what the players on the line or in that defense can do in order to figure out what the the whole can do and that would still be difficult maybe in a sport

where you're trying to where it's more difficult to analyze individual contributions? Or does it not even matter if they're just playing as a unit? Then you can just look at the plus minus or whatever when the whole group is together. Yeah, you can look at the unit's effectiveness as a whole, but there's so much substitution that then again, you're getting into smaller samples and things like that. But yeah, in general, it's difficult to isolate what part of performance is, say, the running back

and what part of performance is, say, the offensive line. But I mean, there have been really good efforts at doing it, and some of the stats are pretty good that some of these sites have. But yeah, it's still the pace of it, I think, is what makes it really challenging for in-game strategy decisions. Okay, so let's break for Playindex, and it just so happens that you are a Baseball Reference Playindex subscriber, so you are filling in for Sam in this respect also. Yeah, I'm newly renewed.

Excellent. I went to go do this and saw that my one-year subscription had lapsed. I wrote about Craig Vigio today for BP. I wrote just sort of a quick reaction last night about the Astros getting their first Hall of Famer, but not the one that, while Biggio and Bagwell were playing out their careers, that you would have ever thought would be their first Hall of Famer. Obviously, it would have been Richard Hidalgo. Yeah, exactly. Roy Oswalt, Wade Miller.

There was a parade of them there for a while. But one of the things I wrote in that piece, it was sort of a little aside about Craig Biggio's value from getting hit by pitches. And was this just a fun piece of trivia or did this really add something? And he was hit by a modern record, 285 pitches over his career, 20-year career. And I went back and looked at the average number of hit-by-pitches per plate appearance across Major League Baseball in those 20 years and did an estimate that had he been hit by the league average number of pitches,

he would have, over his number of plate appearances, he would have been hit by 101 pitches during his career. And so he was hit by, I guess, two point, he was hit by pitches at 2.8 times the league average rate, which translated into something like 60 runs, given the linear weights value of a hit by pitch, 60 runs, six wins, whatever you want to call it, which is a lot for a borderline Canada. Yeah, that is a lot. Yeah. I know you have to sort of, if you're going to take those 180 out, you have to replace them with something. And if you replace them with above average offense, like Craig Biggio, it's not quite that difference but but that's still a it is a non-trivial element of what made him so good that's a good deal of his value so what I wanted to know is did Craig Vigio get hit by pitches

at an elite rate or was he a compiler or was he a compiler yeah was yeah was he is is was he someone who uh you know was very good at it and and just happened to play forever uh so the first thing i did was i looked at um some of the single season totals and And Biggio, starting in 1901, 14 guys have been hit by pitches at least 27 times in a season. And Biggio represented one, two, three, four of those. His 1997 season, 34. His 2001 season, 34. His 2001 season, 28. His 2003 season, 27.

And his 1996 season, 27. So he has four of the top 14 seasons in Major League history. But it was funny looking at these top 14 seasons. You have, starting from the number 14 spot, 27 hit-by-pitches, 27, 27, 27, 28, 28, 28, 30, 31, 31, 31. Third place all-time was Biggio's 1997 season at 34. Second place all-time was Don Baylor's 1986 season at 35. Do you know what the record is? Carlos Quentin's not in there, is he? No. He had 23 one year. I'm going to know when you say it,

but I don't know. So it was 28, 28, 28, 30, 31, 31, 31, 34, 35, 50 was the record by Ron Hunt in 1971 with the Expos. And Ron Hunt, just an unbelievable career of getting hit by pitches. He led the league seven years in a row with the Giants and the Expos. And the numbers are funny here too. It's 25-25-26, 50-26-24. So a series of six seasons where five of them were within two hit-by-pitches of each other, and then the other one was all league-leading totals, and then the other one doubled it.

So to me that was just an incredible season, but not the question I was trying to answer. I wonder what happened that year. Yeah, I have no idea. I was trying to read up on it, and I would love to read something about that season. I didn't find anything specifically about that. Huh, 402 on base percentage. Not bad.

So I looked at whether there were other guys, some other guys who had, so Craig Biggio was hit by a pitch one out of every 45 played appearances. And the league average was something like one out of every 125. So I went to the play index. And this is one of my favorite things is that little math equation on the bottom right play index, where you can do greater than one quantity greater than less than or equal to any number times a player's other quantity. So I looked for players whose career plate appearances

were less than 45 times their career hit by pitches. So in other words, players who got hit by pitches one out of every 45 plate appearances like Biggio or more frequently. And I wanted to look at some of the guys who were hit by pitches more frequently than he was but just weren't just didn't play as long as he did so um uh Don Baylor whose record he whose uh modern record he broke when when he did set that mark was hit by pitches more frequently. He had just 18 fewer hit by pitches in about three quarters or so of the plate appearances. So his rate was considerably higher.

Number three in plate appearances for guys who have this kind of rate, also was hit by pitches at a way higher rate than Biggio was Jason Kendall, who had 254, just 30 fewer than Biggio, in about 4,000 fewer plate appearances. The fourth most plate appearances was Manny Minoso, and then Jose Guillen was fifth in plate appearances was mini minoso and then uh jose guillen uh was uh was uh was fifth in plate appearances among guys who'd been uh been hit more than who'd been uh been hit at a higher rate than vizio and so the final thing i did was i wanted to see if anybody current uh might have not necessarily a shot at breaking this because I didn't do it by age, but who are at this point in their careers outpacing him.

So you mentioned Carlos Quinton. Right. And he is number five in terms of most plate appearances by guys who are hit by pitches at higher rates than Biggio. Okay. You seem to want to play a trivia game. I only have a couple guesses. Is Shinsu Chu in there?

Shinsu Chu? He is not. He did not pass that threshold. He had 26. He led the majors 26 in 2013, but that was like his own run hunt season, I guess. Or he did have 17 when he did. My other guess is Starling Marte. So Starling Marte is a funny case because he's not among the five highest played appearances

because he just started. But he's been hit at a rate 50% higher than Biggio's rate. Biggio was one out of 45, and Sterling Marte is close to one out of 30. So whether or not that's actually 50%, it is a little late at night for that. But the other guys who are outpacing Biggio at this point, Reed Johnson, 133 hit-by-pitches in 3,968 plate appearances. Josh Willingham, 112 in 4,616. utley on there chase utley number one okay yeah

6,335 plate appearances has been hit 169 times so he is let's see he's 116 short of biggio so how many more years are we giving him? He just finished his age 35 season. Say three. All right, he's not getting there then. Okay. Yeah, probably not. No, and then there's Ricky Weeks is the other one who's up there. 4,700 plate appearances, 125 hit by pitches.

So he's not even halfway there, and he's played from when he was 20 till 31. Biggio's record does not appear to be threatened until maybe Starling Marte gets on in years a little bit. Hit-by-pitches are more common now than they used to be. They were, I think, at their height maybe a decade or so ago when BGO was still playing, maybe because of BGO. But now they're still pretty close to their peak all time. If you click on the Seasons tab at Baseball Reference

and then click on Pitching, you can look at the per game rates of everything, strikeouts and walks and hit by pitches and everything. And they're 0.34 right now per game. And that's pretty high, historically speaking. Although there were, I mean, well, very early in baseball history, it was higher, like in the 1890s. But in modern baseball, that is not far from the high range. So that makes it a little bit easier, I suppose.

Anyway, good play index. Oh, and another to watch, Mike Zunino. If you want to watch a guy out of the gate, pretty high rates so far, about one out of every 33. Cool. Okay. So use the coupon code BP if you are subscribing to get the discounted price

of $30 on a one-year subscription. Okay. I've got a few more. Let's get a couple more Hall of Fame ones out of the way. This one's from Ethan, who says, nothing drives me nuttier than the annual brouhaha over the 10-man limited Hall of Fame ballot. No matter what the Hall itself says about the rule, it is perfectly defensible.

By putting limits on the number of players one can vote for, the Hall is making sure the election means you were one of the best players of your era. Only 12-year-old boys and apparently sports writers believe that numbers from one era are magically comparable to those from another. By artificially limiting ballot space, the hall is ensuring that the elect represent the best of their era. This is such an obvious defense of the practice that I'm baffled by those otherwise intelligent writers who make such a stink about it. So what gives? Why do writers go to such great lengths to emphasize how pained they are by this limit? My working theory is that by doing so, they are thanking former sources whom they're not voting for.

That kind of thing. To put it another way, the limit ensures that election remains scarce, no matter differences between eras. This seems like an undeniably good thing. eras this seems like an undeniably good thing well i can tell you that this would almost like even if you had the same concentration of talent this would almost never be the case except now when there are such differences in philosophies their votes to the top 10 statistical players, and then there are writers who want to give their votes to the top 10 players who are the best players in their era,

but by a different metric or rubric or whatever you want to call it that takes into account some other things. And if nobody is on the same page with what the best players of the era even were, then you could get to a point where, and it happened with Craig Biggio last year, where the writers who came out afterward and said they would have put him on had they had more room would have gotten him over the top. Right. He was only two votes short.

Yeah. So I mean I like what Ethan says in that in most cases this should work fine. But it's not really just guaranteeing that it's the best players of the era when we can't even agree on what best means. Yeah, I agree. You said it's an annual brouhaha but it's really only been for the past few years I think since this huge backlog has built up

or at least it's intensified quite a bit and maybe the difference that it would have made is a little overstated. Even now, only half of the voters are actually using the 10 spots on their ballot. So it may have been that in some of these years, it wouldn't have changed anything. But it probably would have last year. And it's sort of an arbitrary thing i don't know that it necessarily does make people more hesitant to elect players if i mean because in most prior years there haven't been 10 good candidates or deserving candidates or even close to that i would think and it's sort of this arbitrary just 10 instead of letting people just apply their own

standards. And in most years, people haven't come close to using all of those spots on their ballot. So I don't know whether if you took this limit that is not actually constraining people most of the time and took it away, whether people would suddenly start voting for a lot more players. I kind of am skeptical about that. It's possible. But just temporarily, while we have this backlog, it is something that is kind of affecting the results. And if you took it away, it doesn't seem to me like it would be a huge issue in the future once this backlog is cleared out one way or another. I'm not convinced that it really does a whole lot to keep the standards high.

And next year will be a better year in terms of the backlog. I mean, we've gotten rid of four. We got rid of, I guess, whatever Don Mattingly's small remains of votes he was taking up. And my guess was that Mattingly votes were probably underrepresented on ballots that were using the whole 10, if I may stereotype a little bit. But like if are we four off and then two on next year to pretty much. Yeah. What Griffey and is a is a is a lock, and who's the other one? Jim Edmonds. Oh, right, right, yeah, yeah.

That's who I was thinking of. Yeah, Jim Edmonds and Billy Wagner, but yeah, Edmonds has a pretty good case, but he'll be on the ballot for many years, I would imagine. Right. Or maybe he'll fall off immediately. I'm not sure. But yes, this getting four guys in now does clear up the backlog somewhat. And it could be that a few

years from now, we're not really talking about the 10 player limit so much. Well, we'll have a 12 player limit maybe, right? So I think Ethan's right that maybe it's overstated, but I don't think the world would be worse in any way if we got rid of that limit. And it might even be slightly better. All right. Last Hall of Fame question from Lee. What do you think would happen if a player already inducted into the Hall of Fame were to announce that he used PEDs? A big part of the reason Bonds and Clemens get so few votes is that voters want to keep the Hall clear of PED users. So I think it would almost have to,

because I don't know how many of the voters who are currently not voting for PED users or suspected PED users would change their minds, because they might just feel that as long as they know or suspect that someone is a cheater, then they don't deserve to be in regardless of who else is in. And there are, of course, many rumors about people who some writers know use steroids who are in the Hall of Fame.

And, of course, there are people we know used amphetamines and everything. And yet there is still this kind of hold the line, don't let anyone else who is bad in. So there might be some guys who would not change their minds, but there would have to be some people who probably would and would just say, oh, screw it, we'll just put all these guys in now. And yet there probably wouldn't be anyone who would go the other way right there wouldn't be anyone who would suddenly stop voting for ped guys because someone came forward i i would think

there's one scenario in which i could see something related to that but it would be sort of like if you know if someone that if ken griffey jr goes in next year and then says or if frank thomas says or someone who we all thought was clean and got in with no problem says that hey i used the reaction could be from some i think bonds and clemens would get more support but then from some people it might be i'm not voting for anyone from this era sure if we can like you might get a few of those like i don't think because those would be people who weren't voting for bonds and clemens anyway yeah those guys would have no chance of losing anything but it's everyone else who like you could see some people hold like feel like they got burned and the way they're going to take it out is no one from this era is getting it.

So I think it would be a different story if someone from the 70s and early 80s came out and said it or if it was a group that if it were two dozen Hall of Famers who all admitted it

in one sort of joint statement or something like that. But I think there is some small risk of going down, but in general I agree with you that it would pretty much only help and definitely only help Bonds and Clemens. Okay, a quick one from Kifa who says, is it possible to be horrible and elite as a defensive first baseman at the same time? According to Fangraph's Wins Above Replacement, not a single first baseman has produced positive defensive value at first base over the last two years.

Is this indicative of a flaw on how defensive value is assessed at the position or just general proof of poor play on behalf of the league's first baseman is it fair to say mike napoli anthony rizzo or now joe mauer are in fact elite first baseman when they are not producing positive defensive value at their position despite according to this assessment being the best that there is currently why are first basemen so terrible uh and well kifa links me to uh the page that he is looking at here and just to clarify he is he is sorting first baseman by the fangraphs defense rating which is comparing first baseman to all defenders defenders so you don't then have to

add a positional adjustment this includes a position yes right so that's that's why it's showing this so it's not saying that every first baseman is somehow bad compared to other first baseman that wouldn't really make any sense obviously right we go against the form they would go against what a formula is based on yes some some first baseman are better than other first basemen. This is the defense column, which is trying to put players at every position on the same scale. positive number next to his defensive rating is more valuable defensively than say a shortstop with a below average negative number next to his name whereas the the bad shortstop is probably still more valuable defensively than the good first baseman so that's what this is showing here if you look at actual first baseman just compared to first baseman, then you get guys who are clearly

above average by the standards of the position. So this is, it's a product of the fact that the positional adjustments, which are used to kind of compare positions on a level playing field, based on mostly empirically derived values of guys who have switched from one position to the other. First basemen get the biggest demerit other than designated hitters. So first basemen just get a blanket negative 12.5 run subtraction. And that's why over this two-year span, no first basemen show up as positive defenders. Although if you look year by year, generally there's like one or two first basemen a year who are positive even compared to the whole league. Todd Frazier this year was.

No one was in 2013. 2012, Adrian Gonzalez and Mark Teixeira were. 2011, Carlos Lee was. I wouldn't have guessed that. 2010, Derek Barton. 2009, Kevin Euclid. So that is the general idea here. So yeah, you just have to understand what metric you are looking at

and whom you are comparing these people to. I do remember that Carlos Lee season. They moved into first base, and they were really high on his first base. And for a while, we all thought it was, oh, because, you know, how could it be any worse than he was in left field? But he devoted himself to it and was pretty good there. He never could have sustained a positive rating like that forever. There was some fluke involved in that, but for that year he moved, he was not embarrassing at first base.

Yeah, and I mean, the positional adjustments are just a one-size-fits-all thing, and of course, one size doesn't actually fit all particularly when where carlos lee is concerned so uh some guys might make that transition better than most guys make it and so the positional adjustment might uh make you think that they're going to be worse or better than they actually are uh okay last question a quick one one of eric hartman's's trademark philosophical questions about baseball. Would baseball analysis be more or less fun if no reasonable projection systems existed? Do you have any feeling on this? Say we're going back a few decades before Pocota,

before whatever Pocota predecessors there were, and we have nothing to look at. predecessors there were and we have nothing to look at we we cannot uh we cannot cite any number for what a guy is going to do in 2015 other than just looking at what he has done and eyeballing it yeah man and i because i am not one of the bp staff that builds Pocota. I act from October 1st or from the first day of free agency until the day that it gets released. Or I mean, the staff gets a little preview of it, but it's not like we can go and go quoting those in our articles. I act from basically October 1st through February 1st as if I'm in a year where Pocota projections don't exist and these projection systems don't exist. And it's not like I, I wake up on, on February 1st when these come out and

say, all of a sudden I'm good at this now. It's, it's, I don't, uh, I don't think there's a big difference in, in how I look at it. Like if I were to analyze a move that were done during spring training, when we had these numbers, yeah, I would, I would of course cite it. If I were to analyze a move that were done during spring training when we had these numbers, yeah, I would of course cite it. And I would of course, it would be one of the first things I would look at. But I don't think it prevents any other form of analysis or supersedes or anything like that. So I don't think there's a really marked difference there. Yeah, I think that's generally right. How often does a projection really blow you away if you are paying attention to players and looking at stats all the time? I mean, most projections are based on just, you know,

looking at the last few years that the player has had and his age, and you can kind of do that and approximate that in your head. So I feel like if you're already looking at the same stats for pass performance, you're usually not shocked by what the projection says. I guess the exception is maybe if you're looking at a projection for a minor leaguer, for instance, or maybe a guy who's played part-time or something. I think in that way, they make baseball analysis more fun just because you have this semi-empirical way of looking at hypotheticals like, you know, what would a guy at some

medium level of the minors do in the majors right now that kind of thing would be tough to do in your head and we can do that with projection systems which is just a fun what if scenario so i would say for that reason baseball analysis is more fun with projection systems and it's also easier to do aggregate things like if you want to look at a whole team's projection, that would be difficult to do, just eyeballing all the players and synthesizing it in your head somehow. So I'd say more fun because it's not like it's reduced the uncertainty so much that we're ever all that confident in these things. Just kind of gives us a quicker way to get to an

approximation and answer some question that we have so i would say i would say more fun yeah and i guess i do enjoy it around deadline time when you can look at the both the year to date and then the year the uh from today forward uh projections and and look at where the positions of need are and how much an upgrade might help at a certain position for a team. So yeah, what you said, there's no, I can't think of one way in which it's less fun. Right. Okay. All right. That is it for today. This was a long one. Thank you for sticking around with me. And I guess you were obligated to come on because Russell was on earlier this week

so you had to keep your lead or keep pace with him or whatever I just had to hold serve alright well thank you and everyone knows they can find you at Baseball Respectus and on Twitter at Zachary Levine hopefully Sam will return

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