It has certainly been awhile and we have now moved to an offseason where there will likely be a work stoppage. These are usually the perfect times to take a deeper dive into things we really can’t do during the season. The Hall of Fame Index is really in book form and there have been two volumes of it. So, in order to give this time it deserves, we must go through multiple volumes at each position.
The first volumes are about establishing what the Hall of Fame standard is. We do that by looking at current
Hall of Famers after eliminating the very top and very bottom of the Hall of Fame register. I don’t want to compare a Jose Altuve with a Rogers Hornsby or a Bill Mazeroski. When we establish what the middle looks like then we can get an idea if Jose Altuve or any other player fits within that group.
In this edition, we will take a look at WAR in three different ways to get a grip on what the norm for the position is. In the second edition, we can take a look at Jose Altuve and any other active second baseman with ten or more seasons to see how closely they resemble that norm. In further efitions, we will take a look at offensive value numbers, defensive value numbers, playoff numbers, and MVP voting. Finally, in the fifth and sixth editions we will look at counting numbers. Between all of those, we will probably get a handle on where Jose Altuve fits historically. Let’s start with the Hall of Fame Index itself.
Second Base HOF Index
I should talk first about the names missing. Joe Morgan, Eddie Collins, Nap Lajoie, and Charlie Gehringer are missing from the top with guys like Nellie Fox, Joe Tinker. and Bill Mazeroski missing from the bottom. Essentially we would call those guys outliers. The first thing you notice when looking at these scores is in how similar they are. The HOF Index was never meant to rank order players. It is meant to find similarities and differences.
I’d never dream of saying Sandberg was better than Alomar based on these numbers alone. It would be silly either way. It is more instructive to say they are similar. If we expand that out, we notice that Biggio and Gordon are also similar to Alomar and Sandberg. This doesn’t tell us who is better. It simply makes the point that Hall of Famers tend to look similar when put under this microscope.
The HOF index is set up to account for the differences in baseball-reference.com’s WAR and Fangraphs.com’s WAR. We know from prior labs that the main difference is in how they account for defensive value. Obviously, advanced mathematicians will have some issues with combining two different metrics. That’s fair. This is the main reason why the index is not designed to rank order guys. It is meant to find similarities and differences. We combine a career value and peak value (best ten seasons) element to get a more comprehensive look at a player’s career.
As much as I love the index itself, looking at only the index is not the best way to get a full picture of each of these players. Peak value is intriguing by itself and we can get another look at it by looking at the total of five win, four win, and three win seasons for each player. In this case we are looking at just BWAR, but in general the results should be similar if we included FWAR. A five win season is at or near the top of the position for that season. Four win players are typically all-stars or borderline all-stars. Three win players are solid producers at the position.
Obviously, some of these deserve some explanation. Gordon and Doerr lost seasons serving their country in World War II. McPhee played at a time where schdules never got to 154 games, so it was harder for him to put up those five WAR seasons. However, in general this gives us a pretty good aggregate of what we should be able to expect from a Hall of Fame. We are expecting between ten and eleven prime seasons with around five of those being five win seasons.
Bill James often described good statistics as taking on the properties of langauge. I prefer an art motif. Most of us draw stick figures and put the sun in the upper corner of the paper. Others add color and some level of dimension. Great artist either make it as lifelike as possible or are able to capture something in the abstract that we are unable to catch in the conventional. Great numbers add dimension and color. The index by itself is a great tool, but it was never meant to stand on its own. When we add in tables like the above and the next table then we start to see those added areas of dimension.
This isn’t art class, so if we set aside that motif for a second we can instead focus on the different dimensions of the WAR conversation. Many people claim Biggio was a compiler and not a truly great player. They are both right and wrong at the same time. On the one hand, they are underestimating him when he was at his very best. Yet, when you look at the table below you can see what they were talking about. We are tabulating wins per 150 games. This will also show us something about McPhee, Gordon, Doerr, and Robinson since their index doesn’t tell us the full story.
Going back to the art motif for a moment, one of the common complaints about advanced analytics is that the traditional crowd sees them as a crutch for people that don’t understand the game. I know what I’m seeing. The numbers help describe that for those that did not get to see it for themselves. I never saw Jackie Robinson play baseball, but these numbers help describe how dominant he was. It also demonstrates how the criticisms of Biggio begin to make some sense.
He played in nearly 500 more games than anyone else on the list and yet those three plus seasons added very little in overall value. So, it ends up detracting from his greatness because it feeds that perception that he was solid and never really great. I mention that because that is the very dilemma that Altuve will face as he continues to keep playing. He will add counting numbers (which we will get to in the last part of our series) but that will be offset by what we see above.
At any rate, the numbers we see here are the numbers we can reference when we look at the currently active second basemen including Jose Altuve. How closely does he resemble these guys already? What else does he need to do to get there? That will be the same question for our other two second basemen that have made the final list of currently active second basemen.
