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Your New Bright and Shiny HOF Thread


OSJ

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Okay, first and foremost I promise to behave myself and not call either MLB Team in NY funny names that rhyme with their actual name, nor will I make fun of our neighbors to the north. Also, now that Larry Walker is in can we please stop bringing up members of the Colorado Rockies being eligible for the HOF? It's just silly talk. Now I'm going to try something a little different (mostly to placate Phil, who thinks I'm a mean-spirited curmudgeon who is obsessed with kicking people out of various HsOF.)  While it is true that I have such tendencies, it is also true that I am the bringer of sweetness and light and the Champion of Fair Play! So what I'm going to do is this, for every person that I advocate kicking to the curb, I will put forth the name of a superior replacement player. And to tie it all back to the pro wrestling that this Board was built on, you'll note that right after the tag of "Throw the Rascals Out!" is "Give Them Allocades!" Now I have no idea what "allocades" are, and in over thirty years of writing professionally I must say that I've never come across the word being used by anyone other than Lex Luger. However, ol' Lex was very fond of the allocades that he had received and made a point of mentioning them on more than one occasion. In fact, it has been speculated that the whole rationale behind Brody pulling his no-selling shit on Luger in Florida was due to jealousy over Luger's allocades and his refusal to share them. Anyway, if allocades were that important to Lex Luger and Bruiser Brody there's no reason that we shouldn't co-opt them for our use.

Oh, I almost forgot... If you are new here, these are some things that you may consider: Using the argument of so and so is in and so and so was just as good so he should be in too. This is horrible reasoning and will get you brutally mocked. Comparing two disparate players to try and get one of them over. For example: "Dave Kingman hit a lot more HRs than Ozzie Smith and thus was more valuable to his teams. Obviously comparing a one-dimensional lumbering oaf with arguably the finest defensive player to ever live is foolishness. Make sure you don't do this. Saying that a player's main argument for induction are the intangibles that they brought to the table. This is just horseshit on every possible level. Baseball. more than any other sport lends itself to measurements and mathematics, if you know where to look and why. I'll buy the argument that some guys are just pleasant to be around and their attitude makes everyone else seem to be better. By the same token a surly, unpleasant asshat may seem to drag his team down. The reality is that the actions or attitude of one person really have little influence on another person. Let's look at the reality, while I don't know the man, and consider his brand of religion to be more ludicrous than most, I have never, ever heard anyone say a bad word about Dale Murphy and based on what I have heard it would seem unlikely that a finer gentleman walks the earth. Did the fact that Murphy is a credit to his species make winners out of the rest of the Hotlanta Braves? No,. it did not. In fact, even after Murphy  was replaced by Dave Justice losing was so engraved into the Braves collective psyche that even with the finest starting rotation that the game has ever seen,, they still didn't win at the level they were projected to.

Okay, I'd like to see someone else start things off, I'll be back later with my picks.

 

 

 

 

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Well before this gets shut down, I think we have to rule out the low hanging fruit of the Hall. I think its too easy to kick out guys like the Maranvilles' and Rick Ferrell's of the world, or maybe its just me.

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6 hours ago, RIPPA said:

Making two threads sure isnt going to make me want to have this open

Sorry, cats on the keyboard... You know how it goes...

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7 hours ago, Kuetsar said:

Well before this gets shut down, I think we have to rule out the low hanging fruit of the Hall. I think its too easy to kick out guys like the Maranvilles' and Rick Ferrell's of the world, or maybe its just me.

Well, you managed a pre-emptive strike there, I was going to cite Maranville as he was one of those guys that seemingly benefitted an awful lot from what I call the "Pie Traynor Syndrome", this is where you basically have an older generation banging on forever about how great a given player was until a younger generation who never saw the guy play starts accepting it as gospel. I use Pie Traynor as I am of the generation that was told he was the greatest 3rd baseman who ever lived despite Eddie Mathews and Ken Boyer in the twilight of their careers and both of them had succeeded in making Traynor an afterthought to anyone who was really paying attention.  Funny thing is Mathews got in early as he should have and Ken Boyer is still waiting (more on him later). The only thing that jumps out is that Mathews hit the then magic number of 500 HRs. Otherwise, the voters have never known what to do when it comes to 3rd base. The concept that it is 50% offense and 50% defense just seems to be too much for the BBWA to get their heads around. Anyway, the reason that I was going to bring Maranville up as I wanted to talk about the very deserving Vern Stephens and kick the Rabbit to he curb, but I can pick on Luis Aparicio instead. 

In: Vern Stephens 

Out: Luis Aparicio 

Why: Stephens goes in for several reasons, not the least of which is being one of the premier power hitters in the AL for a decade. When you are being mentioned in the same breath with Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio and you actually have a couple of years in which you drive in more runs than either of them you're making a pretty strong argument for the HOF. What's that? You're not an outfielder or first baseman? Not even a power-hitting third baseman? You're a fucking shortstop driving in more runs than Stan Musial??? How is this even possible? Oh, and you led the Browns to the World Series? The Browns? Surely you jest... No, you really did and we won't call you "Shirley". How do we explain that the same writers who lauded Vern Stephens as one of the best players in baseball and certainly the best shortstop in the American League fail to give him a single vote when he became eligible for the HOF? Keep in mind, these were guys that actually saw him play and described him in all sorts of glowing terms. What happened? Did he take a shit on the head table at the Winter Meetings? Fondle a member of the BBWA in an elevator? No, he was simply the first victim of the Scooter Rizzuto bullshit. Something that even Bill James bought into as it helps his argument for Win Shares. Yes, Phil Rizzuto with his legendary SPEED! GLOVE! LITTLE THINGS! was somehow deemed to be more valuable than the guy that was driving in over 100 RBIs a season (or something like eighty more than Mr. Rizzuto), this says nothing of Stephens' legendary arm, essentially the guy had a cannon attached to his shoulder and if you weren't already on first by the time he got to the ball, you were out, it was just that simple. The sad fact is that whereas other players stick around as coaches, scouts, broadcasters, etc. Vern Stephens did none of those things, when injuries put him out of the game in his mid-thirties he shifted to his second favorite past-time which was drinking. Having a good deal of money saved up and nothing else to do, Stephens drank himself to death within a decade... I'll be back with my less than charitable thoughts on Luis Aparicio shortly. Right now it is time for chili and pot-stckers, yum! 

 

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Vern belongs but don't overstate his case to get him there. 3 of those years of his "decade" as a top power hitter were during the War. He led with 24 homers one year because literally every quality hitter was gone.  He hit 20 or fewer homers five times during that decade.

C'mon.

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4 hours ago, Tabe said:

Vern belongs but don't overstate his case to get him there. 3 of those years of his "decade" as a top power hitter were during the War. He led with 24 homers one year because literally every quality hitter was gone.  He hit 20 or fewer homers five times during that decade.

C'mon.

That's fair. I'll also play the no protection in the line-up card to balance things out a bit. Without indulging in hyperbole, I think we can agree that at the very least Vern was the best SS in the AL for a decade. He hit like Stan Musial and was an excellent defensive player. He wasn't as fast as Rizzuto or Aparicio but he had a cannon for an arm that compensated quite nicely. The tendency to write his big seasons off as war-time production is really a mugs game, if pitching was that bad why didn't Marty Marion drive in 130 RBIS? Why didn't Rizzuto drive in 80? Sure, Vern wasn't facing peak Lefty Grove every day, but he was still putting up astonishing numbers in a pretty poor hitters' park. Go ahead and deduct 10% or 15% of his wartime hitting stats and he's still in the top five as a SHORTSTOP! 'Nuff said, Vern's a no-brainer.

Now how does Luis Aparicio manage to get in? Luis is what I call a DFP. Damn Fine Player who falls short of the HOF. You've all seen guys that fit this description, MLB is loaded with them, Matt Williams, Mark Grace, Will Clark, John Olerud, Nomar Garciaparra, etc.,etc., etc., 

Okay, looking over Luis Aparicio's career numbers a couple of things leap out, one is that by any standard you care to apply he falls short of actual HOF stats. Now that gets contradicted by two things that need to be viewed in context Gold Gloves and All-Star Games. Luis played 18 seasons as a shortstop which is in itself pretty remarkable and speaks well of his durability (same can be said of Derek Jeter, and in addition to that Jeter better than anyone else I've ever seen specialized in making the routine seem difficult, but I digress...) 50% of his career Luis was awarded the Gold Glove and I'm not at all sure that they weren't deserved. I tend to cast a jaundiced eye at players that seem to have been awarded the GG as a matter of routine (see also: Kaat, Jim) but 50% of the time indicates that at least some thought was involved. I don't think that we'll find anyone that will dispute the fact that Aparicio was an excellent defensive player, the very epitome of SPEED! GLOVE! but is that enough to get into Cooperstown? How about leading the league in stolen bases several times? I might point out that this is tempered by leading the league in being caught about 50% of the time, in other words his antics on the basepaths hurt his team half as much as they helped. No, I think his candidacy is in large part based on his ridiculous amount of All-Star Game appearances,  13 times out of 18 years he represented his team as one of the game's elite... Or did he? I think what we have here is a split in the voting, by this I mean there were a number of older guys that watched him play but there were also a bunch of younger guys who glancing at career numbers saw the 13 All-Star appearances and were duly impressed  without stopping to think about what it really means... Every team has to send SOMEBODY.

1958- The Sawx should have sent Nellie Fox. 1959 Aparicio clearly deserved it. And it goes like this throughout his career, it became automatic for the Sawx and later Baltimore to send Luis to the AS Game because he was a popular choice if not always the best one. A close examination  reveals a guy very much like Joe Tinker (who doesn't deserve the mountain of shit he gets for being part of the Tinker-Evers-Chance trio. Tinker was actually a DFP and Chance was an okay manager and decent 1B, leaving only Crab Evers as an embarrassingly bad choice for the HOF. The thing with Luis is not that he wasn't a good player, he was, in fact he was often excellent. The problem I have with him is not what he did well, it's just that a dozen other guys did equally well and they never got so much as a look when it came to HOF voting. Aparicio was one of the SPEED! GLOVE! guys that supposedly did all the "little things" and possessed all the "intangibles" that make one a HOFr. To this I say "bullshit" it's this sort of nonsense that put Rizzuto in the HOF (though he's far from the worst player in) and if the BBWA isn't careful the guy who was at best the fifth or sixth best player on his Cleveland teams and doesn't even rate a mention for his Seattle teams. Omar Vizquel is going to scoot in based on SPEED! GLOVE! when he really did nothing that one wouldn't expect from a Major League SS, it's very much like Luis, he did it for an extraordinary length of time. One usually expects SPEED! to diminish with age usually resulting in a move to another position or retirement; it's just that in the cases of Aparicio and Omar they maintained their quickness well into their late thirties. Does that make them HOFrs? No, it makes them DFPs that any team would be happy to have, but there are just far too many guys that were every bit as good. The HOF doesn't need to be loaded  up with DFPs, it needs to be reserved for those players who were truly elite, like  Vern Stephens for example...

 

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20 hours ago, OSJ said:

That's fair. I'll also play the no protection in the line-up card to balance things out a bit. Without indulging in hyperbole, I think we can agree that at the very least Vern was the best SS in the AL for a decade. He hit like Stan Musial and was an excellent defensive player. He wasn't as fast as Rizzuto or Aparicio but he had a cannon for an arm that compensated quite nicely. The tendency to write his big seasons off as war-time production is really a mugs game, if pitching was that bad why didn't Marty Marion drive in 130 RBIS? Why didn't Rizzuto drive in 80? Sure, Vern wasn't facing peak Lefty Grove every day, but he was still putting up astonishing numbers in a pretty poor hitters' park. Go ahead and deduct 10% or 15% of his wartime hitting stats and he's still in the top five as a SHORTSTOP! 'Nuff said, Vern's a no-brainer.

 

Oh man...where to start. Stephens "hit like Stan Musial"?  The guy who hit over .300 exactly once? C'mon.

Also, Sportsman's Park was a hitters' park. As was Fenway.

 

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Just a thought(not trying to cut the knees out from you again OSJ ? ) have we talked about where the exact hall of fame "line" is for every position? You mentioned it a bit on the SS, but figure out where the line should be and dump guys out below and suggest guys higher than that? 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/13/2020 at 9:25 PM, Tabe said:

Oh man...where to start. Stephens "hit like Stan Musial"?  The guy who hit over .300 exactly once? C'mon.

Also, Sportsman's Park was a hitters' park. As was Fenway.

 

You really don't like it when I do the hyperbole thing, do ya? ?

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Oh goodie - hyperbole is the best way to make HOF cases

KEVIN MAAS HIT LIKE BABE RUTH FOR THREE WEEKS!!!

PUT HIM IN THE HALL OF FAME! EVERYONE ELSE GET THE FUCK OUT!!!

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12 hours ago, Tabe said:

Not when you're making the HOF case for a guy, no. ?

Okay, fair. Here's the real case for Vern Stephens as a HOFr. Your thoughts are most welcome.

Leaving aside the "hitters' park" talk, which, let's face it is fairly meaningless unless we want to measure ever hit or HR by the inches and re-evaluate the entire game. I'll concede that Stephens played 50% of his career in places that were suited to his strengths, this is hardly unusual or anything to demean him for. Ted Williams played in Fenway, I don't see anyone pooh-poohing his stats. I don't have time to do a complete H/R split on Stephens, but memory tells me it was pretty damn similar. 

Regardless of where he played, Vern Stephens was a holy terror with the bat and was commonly regarded as the best shortstop in baseball during the time he played. The nonsense about Rizzuto started to catch on when Stephens had already retired. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if Rizzuto had played in Washington no one today would have any idea who he was and that would be just fine by me. 

Okay, we have a shortstop, (a defensive position at the time),  a shortstop who was matching or exceeding the RBI production of Ted Fucking Williams!  In his career, Stephens led or tied for the league top spot in RBIs on three occasions, that's a pretty compelling stat when you're evaluating a corner outfielder or first baseman, oh, did I mention that he played shortstop? All hyperbole aside, the game hadn't seen this kind of offensive production from short since Honus Wagner retired. I'm not for a second suggesting that Stephens is in Wagner's league, but what he did was pretty damn awesome. 

A short career, like many guys at the time Stephens idea of "training regimen" consisted of a fifth of bourbon. He got hurt, wasn't in great shape to begin with and couldn't come back. After a relatively short career and still in his mid-thirties, Vern went home to drink himself to death. The same writers who had lauded him as the greatest shortstop in the game couldn't be bothered to give him a single HOF vote. 

So what does it all mean in context? For a player in the 1940s-1950s to be out of the game at 35 or thereabouts is nothing unusual. We didn't have the sort of year-round training we do today and these guys either worked regular jobs in the off-season or sat around and drank. Pretty damn obvious what Vern Stephens preferred to do. The facts are this, until the remarkably silly nonsense of Reese and Rizzuto being superior players began to take hold (as both were in NY and stories about them individually or singly helped sell newspapers), Vern Stephens was rightly considered the finest shortstop in the game. There may have been players with superior range, but he had a cannon for an arm and was devastatingly accurate.  Were it not for the fact that when he left baseball he left it completely, he'd be in the HOF, keeping him out isn't just a mistake, it's fucking rude.

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I think Stephens also suffers in hindsight, since RBI are increasingly seen as a team/circumstance stat, rather than one that measures individual excellence. 

This is digressing a bit, but I’d actually argue that Williams’ power numbers were hurt by Fenway. The green monster is a great target for opposite field power... but Williams was way ahead of his time in preferring to pull and elevate almost exclusively. In The Science of Hitting, he basically says no one should ever swing at pitches low and away. Could he have hit against the shift and collected more hits? Certainly. Cobb criticized him endlessly for not doing so. But his OBP and SLG would have suffered and he’d have been less valuable overall.

My present curiosity/frustration on the ballot is Visquel getting so much more support than Rolen and Jones. All played premium defensive positions very well, but only the latter two added value at the plate. Neither had Visquel’s longevity, but I would favor the much higher peaks. They both accumulated more total WAR anyway. (Jones has a real argument for being the best defensive CF ever—at least since Mays—and combined that with more than 400 HR. I don’t care that he hit .250.)

At present I’m not sure I’d put any of them in, but I also think John Olerud, Keith Hernandez, and Kenny Lofton are relatively recent players who deserve another look: greater than 50 WAR, who were really good at everything for a long time. Bill James has written quite a bit about this, that players who accumulate WAR by being good hitters/base runners/fielders get less love than those who have a narrative of real greatness behind one aspect. (Though you can argue for Hernandez as the best defensive 1B of the modern era, at least.)

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Little O is the Rizzuto of his time. A bunch of writers have decided that he was a defensive wizard far and away superior to what he actually was. Rolen deserves a very close look, I've got at least one guy I'd put in first (Ken Boyer), but Rolen was a terrific player. 

As you know, I'm a Braves guy so I watched lots and lots of Jones, no player has done more to fuck themselves out of the HOF by end of career laziness than has Andruw Jones. His last six years were an abomination which I would excuse if it were a case of an oft-injured guy trying to help his club. That wasn't Jones, he turned into a lazy choad who should have been cut about two years after he started his antics. 

The latter three guys that you cite all deserve a seat with Matt Williams in the Hall of the Really, Really Good. They aren't HOFrs, we did Lofton in detail a couple of years ago, it's still here on this thread. Being a Seattle guy, I was able to meet John Olerud on three or four occasions and a classier act does not walk the face of the Earth. If he could have played longer and been more dominant, he'd be an easy pick. Thing is, what we have is a really, really good hitter and an okay defensive player, that's not quite a HOFr. 

Hernandez: Jeebus, I get tired of this. What exactly does "best defensive first-baseman" even mean? Could Keith get to balls that prime McCovey couldn't? No, of course not. I watched prime McCovey and he was sublime defensively, so was Keith. Did he lead a talented team to the WS? Yes, he certainly did, so have roughly 50 other fine players who are not now nor ever will be in the HOF. Ultimately, all the arguments about Hernandez devolve to "What about his defense?" Yes, he was certainly much better than Frank Thomas could ever dream of being; now ask me who I'd rather have batting clean up. Hernandez was a very good offensive player who was somewhat of an anomaly at his position which has become synonymous with high power numbers. He was a defensive wizard at what is arguably the easiest position to play effectively. Team leader? Sure! But all of these things do not add up to a HOFr.

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The argument for Hernandez hinges largely on how credible you find advanced defensive metrics. He has the 11 gold gloves, sure, but is also the all-time leader among 1B in total zone runs, defensive runs saves, and defensive WAR. None are especially close. 

To compare their Rfield scores on Baseball Reference: McCovey is -80, Hernandez is +117. That’s an enormous gap. 

That said, you’d of course rather have Thomas or McCovey, because 1B isn’t a premium defensive position, and Hernandez was only a very good offensive player. His career OPS+ is 128, right there with Jim Rice and Ryan Klesko. 

Mostly I find him interesting, because there’s an obvious narrative hook—best defensive 1B ever!—and 60 career WAR is usually a good sign you’re getting in, barring steroids, gambling, or being Curt Schilling. Though we’ll see, since Todd Helton and Joey Votto both have greater than 60 WAR also—plus strong defensive metrics—and I suspect both will struggle on the ballot. (Another caveat could be: be a second baseman. Lou Whitaker and Bobby Grich more than 60 WAR, and didn’t make it; Chase Utley does too, and I suspect he will fall short.)

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That Sweet Lou and Grich aren't in isn't just a mistake on the part of the voters; it's fucking rude. I watched both guys entire careers and there is nothing that anyone could say to convince me that I wasn't seeing two all-time greats. Lou is easier to evaluate than Grich, but that is only because Grich did so many things well that it becomes hard to distill his career into your thirty-second elevator speech.

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Oh, to address the other players that you mentioned... Votto is interesting, I'm not sold, but I could be persuaded. The only way Todd Helton should get into Cooperstown is by buying a ticket. 

Curt Schilling is the latter-day Don Drysdale (except that Don was a genuinely decent human being); a very good pitcher on mostly very good teams, he's a strong candidate for Hall of the Really, Really Good. My opinion has nothing to do with the fact that he's a right-wing jackwagon, and everything to do with the illusion of greatness that isn't really there.

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3 hours ago, OSJ said:

Team leader? Sure! But all of these things do not add up to a HOFr.

I don't know if "team leader" is high on his list of pluses if you watched the Doc & Darryl 30 for 30.  Unless he was leading them to the nightclub bathroom for toots 3 nights a week.

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As always, Bill does a great job of presenting a formula and then backing off to let you do what you will with it.  Some minor cavils regarding his list, there is no way that you can tell me that Vern Stephens, Lou Whitaker, & Ken Boyer are not HOFrs. I'm too young to have seen Vern Stephens, but years ago, one of my clients (a much older man, originally from the Boston area), told me hours of stories about watching Vern Stephens play. Ken Boyer retired when I was a little kid, but I recall this, if you couldn't trade for Eddie Mathews card, Boyer's was considered just as good. (Not too long ago I bought a 1963 Fleer of Boyer, just because I missed having it.

The only reason that I can see that Sweet Lou has not been inducted starts with an "r" and ends with "ism". I watched the man's whole career and thought he was better than Trammell, and as a shortstop myself, I thought Trammell was damn godly!

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17 hours ago, Contentious C said:

I don't know if "team leader" is high on his list of pluses if you watched the Doc & Darryl 30 for 30.  Unless he was leading them to the nightclub bathroom for toots 3 nights a week.

C'mon, Hernandez is only three years older than me, what do you think I was doing during the 1980s?

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On 4/26/2020 at 9:32 AM, OSJ said:

Thing is, what we have is a really, really good hitter and an okay defensive player, that's not quite a HOFr. 

Olerud was a lot better than "okay defensive player".  He's the best defensive 1B since Hernandez and an all-time elite guy at eliminating throwing errors by his fellow infielders.  

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Joe Posnanski wrote about Minnie Minoso today, whose HOF case rests in part on time (unjustly) missed, and his status as a barrier breaker. (So, the below list does not and is not meant to do him justice.) Still, removed from that context, I found it interesting:

Arbitrary minimums:
-- 7,000 PAs;
-- 20 Wins Above Average (WAA); and
-- 125 OPS+.

Ordered by most WAA:
(with WAA & WAR rounded to nearest whole number)

Rank) Player ... WAA ... WAR ... OPS+
1) Barry Bonds ... 124 ... 163 ... 182
2) Bobby Grich ... 44 ... 71 ... 125
3) Reggie Smith ... 38 ... 65 ... 137
4) Mark McGwire ... 37 ... 62 ... 163
5) Manny Ramirez ... 36 ... 69 ... 154
6) Jim Edmonds ... 35 ... 60 ... 132
7) Todd Helton ... 33 ... 62 ... 133
8 - Dick Allen ... 33 ... 59 ... 156
9) Dwight Evans ... 33 ... 67 ... 127
10) Keith Hernandez ... 32 ... 60 ... 128
11) Bobby Bonds ... 32 ... 58 ... 129
12) Sherry Magee ... 31 ... 59 ... 137
13) Rafael Palmeiro ... 30 ... 72 ... 132
14) Will Clark ... 29 ... 57 ... 137
15) Bob Johnson ... 29 ... 55 ... 139
16) Jim Wynn ... 29 ... 56 ... 129
17) Lance Berkman ... 28 ... 52 ... 144
18) Bobby Abreu ... 28 ... 60 ... 128
19) Sammy Sosa ... 28 ... 59 ... 128
20) Brian Giles ... 27 ... 51 ... 136
21) John Olerud ... 27 ... 58 ... 129
22) Minnie Minoso ... 27 ... 50 ... 130
23) Joe Torre ... 27 ... 58 ... 129
24) Gary Sheffield ... 26 ... 61 ... 140
25) Norm Cash ... 26 ... 52 ... 139
26) Jack Clark ... 26 ... 53 ... 137
27) Fred Lynn ... 24 ... 50 ... 129
28) Ellis Burks ... 23 ... 50 ... 126
29) Larry Doyle ... 22 ... 45 ... 125
30) Rocky Colavito ... 21 ... 45 ... 132

I was very surprised that Fred McGriff didn't make the cut. His career WAA is 19.8, and so just slightly too low. Interesting too, I think, is how high Edmonds ranks, as well as Keith Hernandez. (I know we've talked about him already, but this is another chance for me to point out that he was a very, very good hitter, in addition to being so good defensively that MLB instituted a rule change.)

Abreu is going to be interesting to track. Sort of a poor man's Larry Walker, very good at everything but lacking traditional counting totals, will be more popular among the analytics set. (Of course he's right next door to Brian Giles, who was unceremoniously dropped with zero votes. It almost feels like there needs to be a "he was really, really good, but no one should vote for him just to spare him the indignity of getting no votes" vote.)

Edited by Beech27
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