Sutter voted to HOF

[MusicMan]

No one else made the cut this year.

And someone please tell me, other than making all of his kids eligible voters, how the hell Steve Garvey gets more votes than Alan Trammell.

 The Link.

[HudsonHawk]

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No one else made the cut this year.

And someone please tell me, other than making all of his kids eligible voters, how the hell Steve Garvey gets more votes than Alan Trammell.

 The Link.

Or more importantly, who the fuck voted for Walt Weiss.  Probably was that jerkoff John P. Lopez.  I swear, people like him ought to have their HOF voting credentials revoked, if they're gonna continue to treat it like some sort of joke.

[MusicMan]

Surely you meant Walt Fucking Weiss.

[HudsonHawk]

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Surely you meant Walt Fucking Weiss.

And I can almost guarantee you that the same idiot who voted for Weiss did not vote for Trammell.  So that leaves one of two choices: 1)he felf Weiss is a deserving HOFer, a better SS than Trammell, or 2) he didn't take the HOF voting seriously.  Either way, the guy should be forbidden to discuss baseball let alone vote for HOF.

[Uncle Charlie]

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Surely you meant Walt Fucking Weiss.

Honestly, it brings up another point.  Why in the hell is the cut-off for being reconsidered for the next year's ballot only 5%.  This year, it took 390 votes to get elected.  Who REALLY thinks that anyone with less than half that number will ever get an additional 145 people to change their mind?!?!?

[HudsonHawk]

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Honestly, it brings up another point.  Why in the hell is the cut-off for being reconsidered for the next year's ballot only 5%.  This year, it took 390 votes to get elected.  Who REALLY thinks that anyone with less than half that number will ever get an additional 145 people to change their mind?!?!?

Well, Bruce Sutter maybe.  In 1994, Sutter received 109 votes (23.9%).  13 years later, he'd picked up an additional 291 votes.  That's more than triple the percentage of votes he had in his first year of eligibility.  I'm pretty sure he's glad they didn't set the cut-off at 50%.

[HurricaneDavid]

The constant lowering of the bar.  Jimmie Foxx was elected on his FIFTH try, while Ryne Freaking Sandberg was elected on his THIRD.  I look forward to Alan Zinter's induction ceremony in 2012.

[HudsonHawk]

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The constant lowering of the bar.  Jimmie Foxx was elected on his FIFTH try, while Ryne Freaking Sandberg was elected on his THIRD.  I look forward to Alan Zinter's induction ceremony in 2012.

I don't think they're lowering the bar at all.  The percentage of HOFers to major leaguers have remained remakably consistent over the years.  When they are elected is irrelevant.  I mean there were voters who didnt' think Ted Williams was a HOFer, fer cryin out loud.

[HurricaneDavid]

The bar is lowered everytime a Tony Perez or a Bill Mazeroski or an Orlando Cepeda is elected.  Electing a "borderline" player with a resume = (X) undeniably results in the reevaluation of everyone else on the ballot with a resume of (X * .95).  Then again, the criteria for election - "Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played" couldn't be less objective.

I think it's safe to say that the voters who voted against Ted Williams for the Hall were some of the same clowns who voted Joe Gordon MVP in Williams's triple crown season, basing their votes mostly due to off-the-field reasons and biases.

[HudsonHawk]

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The bar is lowered everytime a Tony Perez or a Bill Mazeroski or an Orlando Cepeda is elected.  Electing a "borderline" player with a resume = (X) undeniably results in the reevaluation of everyone else on the ballot with a resume of (X * .95).  Then again, the criteria for election - "Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played" couldn't be less objective.

Well, by your logic, the HOF would consist of exactly one player.

[HurricaneDavid]

No, not at all - great and deserving HOFers will continue to be produced into the future.  Nothing is precluding a (Babe Ruth * 1.05) from coming along.  All I'm pointing out is that the bar is lowered everytime a borderline player is admitted with the resume of (Honus Wagner * .50).  Once the bar is lowered for one of those borderline players, it's lowered for every subsequent candidate.

[HudsonHawk]

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No, not at all - great and deserving HOFers will continue to be produced into the future.  Nothing is precluding a (Babe Ruth * 1.05) from coming along.  All I'm pointing out is that the bar is lowered everytime a borderline player is admitted with the resume of (Honus Wagner * .50).  Once the bar is lowered for one of those borderline players, it's lowered for every subsequent candidate.

But if you start with the best player, you're always comparing the next guy, the second best guy, with the best.  You're constantly lowering the bar.  Every.  Single. Time.  

And you can't seriously be saying Honus Wagner, the greatest SS to ever play the game, is a "borderline" candidate.  If so, you've just lost all credibility on who is deserving and who is not.

[EasTexAstro]

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No, not at all - great and deserving HOFers will continue to be produced into the future.  Nothing is precluding a (Babe Ruth * 1.05) from coming along.  All I'm pointing out is that the bar is lowered everytime a borderline player is admitted with the resume of (Honus Wagner * .50).  Once the bar is lowered for one of those borderline players, it's lowered for every subsequent candidate.

But if you start with the best player, you're always comparing the next guy, the second best guy, with the best.  You're constantly lowering the bar.  Every.  Single. Time.  

And you can't seriously be saying Honus Wagner, the greatest SS to ever play the game, is a "borderline" candidate.  If so, you've just lost all credibility on who is deserving and who is not.

I believe he meant a Honus Wagner *.5 (half the player wagner was).

[HudsonHawk]

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No, not at all - great and deserving HOFers will continue to be produced into the future.  Nothing is precluding a (Babe Ruth * 1.05) from coming along.  All I'm pointing out is that the bar is lowered everytime a borderline player is admitted with the resume of (Honus Wagner * .50).  Once the bar is lowered for one of those borderline players, it's lowered for every subsequent candidate.

But if you start with the best player, you're always comparing the next guy, the second best guy, with the best.  You're constantly lowering the bar.  Every.  Single. Time.  

And you can't seriously be saying Honus Wagner, the greatest SS to ever play the game, is a "borderline" candidate.  If so, you've just lost all credibility on who is deserving and who is not.

I believe he meant a Honus Wagner *.5 (half the player wagner was).

I sure hope so.  But it was confusing.

[Foghorn]

Time:  1979
What:  HOF voters gather round to vote...

Result:  5% of those who voted didn't think Willie Mays was worthy of the Hall of Fame


Time:  1974
What:  HOF voters gather round to vote...

Result:  11% of those who voted didn't think Mickey Mantle was worthy of the Hall of Fame


Time:  1982
What:  HOF voters gather round to vote...

Result:  10% of those who voted didn't think Frank Robinson was worthy of the Hall of Fame, and an additional 2% didn't think Hank Aaron fell on the side of being worthy.


Time:  1990
What:  HOF voters gather round to vote...

Result:  18% of those who voted didn't think Joe Morgan was worthy of the Hall of Fame


Somehow, Jim Eisenrich pulled 3 votes one year.


BBWAA = monkey spunk

[HurricaneDavid]

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But if you start with the best player, you're always comparing the next guy, the second best guy, with the best.  You're constantly lowering the bar.  Every.  Single. Time.

I didn't say they started with THE best.  Willie Mays wasn't on the 1936 ballot.  CLEARLY though, Tony Perez doesn't fit in with those original 5, or even the first 25.  That is one reason why in my mind the bar has been lowered.  I don't understand why you think the bar HASN'T been lowered.

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And you can't seriously be saying Honus Wagner, the greatest SS to ever play the game, is a "borderline" candidate.  If so, you've just lost all credibility on who is deserving and who is not.

No, I wasn't.  ETA got it.

[HudsonHawk]

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I didn't say they started with THE best.  Willie Mays wasn't on the 1936 ballot.  CLEARLY though, Tony Perez doesn't fit in with those original 5, or even the first 25.  

This is it in a nutshell.  You're saying that when you compare Tony Perez to Babe Ruth, you've lowered the bar.  That's true I guess.  But when you compared Mickey Mantle to Babe Ruth, you also lowered the bar.  Does that mean that Mantle has watered down the HOF?  When you compared Honus Wagner to Ty Cobb, you lowered the bar.  You could start from any point, and if you always compare that player to someone who is better, you could make your same argument all the way until you only had one player who was "worthy".

Your's is a common complaint, always based on the same assumption:  that voters look at Player X and say "He was almost as good as Player Y, and Player Y is in the HOF; therefore, Player X probably deserves it too".  That wouldn't be a bad complaint execpt for one thing:  it simply doesn't happen that way.  Voters do not look at a new player on the ballot and compare him to worst player who is already in the HOF to determine his worthiness.  They look at how he compared to his contemporaries, not to Honus Wagner or Babe Ruth or Tony Perez.  

 

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I don't understand why you think the bar HASN'T been lowered.

Because I think the HOF is reserved for the top players of their eras.  That doesn't mean that the top player from one ERA is necessarily as good as a player from another.  But that doesn't lower the standard either.  It keeps the standard about where it belongs.  How many players are in the HOF?  A few hundred, out of the tens of thousands who have played.  I'd say that's pretty damn selective.

[Arky Vaughan]

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The constant lowering of the bar.  Jimmie Foxx was elected on his FIFTH try, while Ryne Freaking Sandberg was elected on his THIRD.  I look forward to Alan Zinter's induction ceremony in 2012.

Oh, cut it out.  Jimmie Foxx was elected on his fifth try because the voting process was screwed up for a long time.  You'd be hard-pressed to argue that this represents a trajectory that will throw open the doors of Cooperstown to mediocre players in a few years or even a few decades.  Read Bill James' Politics of Glory: Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame for a useful history of this matter.

[Arky Vaughan]

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I didn't say they started with THE best.  Willie Mays wasn't on the 1936 ballot.  CLEARLY though, Tony Perez doesn't fit in with those original 5, or even the first 25.  That is one reason why in my mind the bar has been lowered.  I don't understand why you think the bar HASN'T been lowered.

I wouldn't vote to put Tony Perez in the Hall of Fame, but the idea that this is some evolutionary degradation of standards is simply counterfactual.  You could field an entire team of players inducted from the '40s to the '70s selected by the Veterans Committee or the Baseball Writers who do not approach the 1936 standard.

Rabbit Maranville?  Roger Bresnahan?  Edd Roush?  Lloyd Waner?  Instead of comparing the modern mistakes or borderline cases like Orlando Cepeda and Tony Perez to Honus Wagner, how about comparing them to these guys?  That would put some historical context into the discussion, but it would also disintegrate the argument.

[Arky Vaughan]

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Your's is a common complaint, always based on the same assumption:  that voters look at Player X and say "He was almost as good as Player Y, and Player Y is in the HOF; therefore, Player X probably deserves it too".  That wouldn't be a bad complaint execpt for one thing:  it simply doesn't happen that way.  Voters do not look at a new player on the ballot and compare him to worst player who is already in the HOF to determine his worthiness.  They look at how he compared to his contemporaries, not to Honus Wagner or Babe Ruth or Tony Perez.

This is spot on.  I would go further and say that comparing a candidate to the very bottom or the very top is counterproductive.  Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson don't come along very often, which is why Barry Bonds (FrankenBarry scandal aside) and Roger Clemens are special.  But there are several quality players today who are as good as some of the bottom of the barrel inducted in the three decades after World War II.  If we were to limit induction to something around the 1936 standards, we'd have maybe 25 members, and if we used the worst-player-already-in standard, they'd have to built a 12-lane interstate across Upstate New York to get everybody into the place.

[Col. Sphinx Drummond]

Which team's cap is Sutter going to wear? Also, I thought that Sutter's money pitch was the fork-ball not the split-finger, as I kept hearing all morning, is my memory that shot?

[HurricaneDavid]

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Your's is a common complaint, always based on the same assumption:  that voters look at Player X and say "He was almost as good as Player Y, and Player Y is in the HOF; therefore, Player X probably deserves it too".  That wouldn't be a bad complaint execpt for one thing:  it simply doesn't happen that way.  Voters do not look at a new player on the ballot and compare him to worst player who is already in the HOF to determine his worthiness.  They look at how he compared to his contemporaries, not to Honus Wagner or Babe Ruth or Tony Perez.

I think you're giving the voters WAYYYY too much credit.

[HudsonHawk]

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I think you're giving the voters WAYYYY too much credit.

If they were electing every Tom Dick and Harry, then I might agree with you.  But the simple fact is, they've kept the HOF extremely exclusive, with only the best players of the day getting in.  Whether you think Tony Perez was as good as Babe Ruth is not the issue.  The fact is, most people thought Tony Perez was in the elite of his generation.  That's the plain fact.  I'm not saying there aren't borderline players, there are.  There always will be.  Your buddy Jimmie Foxx was once a "borderline" HOFer.  This is where your argument breaks down.  You either concede that there are always going to be borderline HOFers, or you make it so exclusive that there's only one player who is worthy.

[Foghorn]

As silly as the BWAA is, the Veteran's Committee has probably been 1000 times worse.  Line up the 25 least worthy HOFers, and I betcha 24 of them were let in through the Veteran's committee.

[Arky Vaughan]

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I think you're giving the voters WAYYYY too much credit.

And you're giving the post-war voters way too much credit.  Perez and Cepeda are by far not the worst picks the voters have ever made.

[Arky Vaughan]

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Your buddy Jimmie Foxx was once a "borderline" HOFer.

Actually, he wasn't.  The voting system was screwed up.  It's difficult to imagine that Foxx's election was very controversial at the time.

[HudsonHawk]

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Actually, he wasn't.  The voting system was screwed up.  It's difficult to imagine that Foxx's election was very controversial at the time.

By "borderline", I mean he was not as good as some already enshrined.  As good as Foxx was, he was no Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb.  That's my point: after you get past the best player you could argue that any player is "borderline" because he's not as good as the guy ahead of him.  You could play that game ad infinitum.