This post is for voting and discussion in the 127th round of balloting for the Circle of Greats (COG). This is the third of four rounds adding to the list of candidates eligible to receive your votes those players born in 1973. Rules and lists are after the jump.
The new group of 1973-born players, in order to join the eligible list, must, as usual, have played at least 10 seasons in the major leagues or generated at least 20 Wins Above Replacement (“WAR”, as calculated by baseball-reference.com, and for this purpose meaning 20 total WAR for everyday players and 20 pitching WAR for pitchers). This third group of 1973-born candidates, including those with K-Q surnames, joins the eligible holdovers from previous rounds to comprise the full list of players eligible to appear on your ballots. The remaining 1973-born candidates, with R-Z surnames, will be eligible to receive your votes in the next round of balloting.
In addition to voting for COG election among players on the main ballot, there will be also be voting for elevation to the main ballot among players on the secondary ballot. For both ballots, which may be voted at the same time or in separate posts, voters must include three and only three eligible players. For the main ballot election, the one player who appears on the most ballots cast in the round is inducted into the Circle of Greats, while for the secondary ballot election, the one player appearing on the most ballots cast is elevated to the main ballot for the next COG election round. In the case of ties, a runoff election round will be held for COG election, while a tie-breaking process will be followed to determine the secondary ballot winner.
Players who fail to win either ballot but appear on half or more of the ballots that are cast win four added future rounds of ballot eligibility. Players who appear on 25% or more of the ballots cast, but less than 50%, earn two added future rounds of ballot eligibility. One additional round of eligibility is earned by any player who appears on at least 10% of the ballots cast or, for the main ballot only, any player finishing in the top 9 (including ties) in ballot appearances. Holdover candidates on the main ballot who exhaust their eligibility will drop to the secondary ballot for the next COG election round, as will first time main ballot candidates who attract one or more votes but do not earn additional main ballot eligibility. Secondary ballot candidates who exhaust their eligibility will drop from that ballot, but will become eligible for possible reinstatement in a future Redemption round election.
All voting for this round closes at 11:59 PM EST Sunday, February 18th, while changes to previously cast ballots are allowed until 11:59 PM EST Friday, February 16th.
If you’d like to follow the vote tally, and/or check to make sure I’ve recorded your vote correctly, you can see my ballot-counting spreadsheet for this round here: COG 1973 Part 3 Vote Tally. I’ll be updating the spreadsheet periodically with the latest votes. Initially, there is a row in the spreadsheet for every voter who has cast a ballot in any of the past rounds, but new voters are entirely welcome — new voters will be added to the spreadsheet as their ballots are submitted. Also initially, there is a column for each of the holdover candidates; additional player columns from the new born-in-1973 group will be added to the spreadsheet as votes are cast for them.
Choose your three players from the lists below of eligible players. The current holdovers are listed in order of the number of future rounds (including this one) through which they are assured eligibility, and alphabetically when the future eligibility number is the same. The 1973 birth-year players are listed below in order of the number of seasons each played in the majors, and alphabetically among players with the same number of seasons played.
Holdovers:
| MAIN BALLOT | Eligibility | Secondary BALLOT | ELIGIBILITY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kevin Brown | 9 rounds | Andre Dawson | 4 rounds |
| Luis Tiant | 6 rounds | Ken Boyer | 2 rounds |
| Dick Allen | 4 rounds | Dwight Evans | 2 rounds |
| Bill Dahlen | 4 rounds | Ted Lyons | 2 rounds |
| Graig Nettles | 3 rounds | Willie Randoph | 2 rounds |
| Manny Ramirez | 3 rounds | Rick Reuschel | 2 rounds |
| Ted Simmons | 2 rounds | Nomar Garciaparra | this round ONLY |
| Bobby Wallace | 2 rounds | Todd Helton | this round ONLY |
| Richie Ashburn | this round ONLY | Andy Pettitte | this round ONLY |
| Mordecai Brown | this round ONLY | ||
| Don Sutton | this round ONLY |
Everyday Players (born in 1973, ten or more seasons played in the major leagues or at least 20 WAR, K-Q surname):
Neifi Perez
Tomas Perez
Ricky Ledee
Eli Marrero
Corey Koskie
Pitchers (born in 1973, ten or more seasons played in the major leagues or at least 20 WAR, K-Q surname):
Derek Lowe
Chan Ho Park
Guillermo Mota
Trever Miller
Ramon Ortiz
Antonio Osuna
Matt Mantei
C.J. Nitkowski
VOTE
Main Ballot:
Manny
Mordecai
Sutton
Not sure if there is anyone on the secondary ballot that I would consider voting for in the main ballot. I’ll think about it for now.
Here are the WAR cumulative and rate numbers for both lists, together with the ERA+ and OPS+ ratings:
Primary Ballot Candidates
Pitchers
P(Tot)WAR…Peak5..Top5…WAR/9IP…WAR/Yr….ERA+…Career length
68.5 (68.3)……37.0…37.0……0.189……4.0 (17)……127……1.0………K. Brown
55.1 (56.4)……34.2…34.2……0.148……4.5 (12)……139……1.0………M. Brown
66.1 (66.7)……28.7…34.7……0.171……3.9 (17)……114……1.2………Tiant
68.7 (67.4)……22.5…27.3……0.117……3.0 (23)……108……1.6………Sutton
Position Players
WAR……Pk5……Top5……WAR/G…WAR/Yr……OPS+…Career length
58.7………31.5……36.7……0.034……4.2 (14)……156………1.0………Allen
63.6………31.6……32.7……0.029……4.2 (15)……111………1.3………Ashburn
75.2………22.6……29.8……0.031……4.0 (19)……110………1.4………Dahlen
68.0………28.7……32.2……0.025……3.4 (20)……110………1.4………Nettles
69.2………28.7……29.9……0.030……4.1 (17)……154………1.3………Ramirez
50.1………23.3……26.4……0.024……2.6 (19)……118………1.4………Simmons
70.2………28.6……31.3……0.029……4.2 (17)……105………1.3………Wallace*
* Wallace’s total WAR (incl. pitching) is 76.3.
WAR/Yr. includes only those seasons with 10 GS or 100 IP for starters, 20G for relievers, and 50G for position players. I use Kevin Brown (3256.1 IP) and Dick Allen (7315 PA) as the reference points for career length (both = 1.0).
Secondary Ballot Candidates
Pitchers
67.2 (71.6)……24.2…29.0……0.145……3.6 (19)……118……1.6……,,,Lyons
60.9 (60.8)……20.3…28.4……0.166……3.4 (18)……117……1.0……,,,Pettitte
68.2 (70.1)……31.0…32.8……0.173……4.0 (17)……114……1.4……,,,Reuschel
Position Players
62.8………33.0……34.0……0.031……4.5 (14)……116………1.2……,,,Boyer
64.4………32.4……33.7……0.025……3.4 (19)……119………1.5……,,,Dawson
66.9………23.7……28.3……0.026……3.5 (19)……127………1.4……,,,Dw. Evans
44.2………28.1……33.0……0.031……3.7 (12)……124………0.8……,,,Garciaparra
61.4………37.4……37.4……0.027……3.8 (16)……133………1.3……,,,Helton
65.5………27.2……29.5……0.030……3.7 (18)……104………1.3……,,,Randolph
Mordecai, Ashburn, Dahlen
Helton, Evans, Dawson
This round’s tidbits.
1. Derek Lowe recorded ten consecutive seasons (2002-11) of 30 or more starts that included 90+ starts for three different franchises. Which other pitcher did the same? Jeff Suppan (2000-09)
2. Chan Ho Park is one of seven Dodger pitchers with 5 consecutive seasons of 190 IP, 12 wins and a winning record. Which of those pitchers won fewer career games for the Dodgers than Park? Doug Rau
3. Guillermo Mota’s three seasons of 80+ IP, zero starts and zero unearned runs allowed are the most ever. Which pitcher has the highest WHIP in such a season? Jose Mesa (2000)
4. Trever Miller compiled a 13 year major league career but never recorded 60 IP in a season. Which two pitchers have the only longer such careers? Randy Choate, Javier Lopez
5. Ramon Ortiz’s 1.38 HR/9 ratio is the 3rd highest AL career mark among pitchers with 1000+ IP in the junior circuit. Ortiz is one of 9 pitchers to start and win in his World Series debut despite allowing two or more home runs. Which one of those nine was making his post-season debut in that game? Bob Walk 1980 World Series game 1
6. Neifi Perez is one of 5 expansion era players with 40 triples in fewer than 600 games over the first five seasons of a career. Which of those players recorded fewer home runs for those seasons than Perez’s total of 36? Dexter Fowler
7. Tomas Perez posted a career BA of .214 batting 9th, but .240 overall, a -.026 difference that is the third largest negative split among all players since 1913 with 2000 PA, incl. 750 PA batting 9th. Which two players, with over 20,000 career PA between them, also make the top 10 on that list? Alan Trammell, Omar Vizquel
8. Antonio Osuna is one of 7 Dodger relievers to compile 120 ERA+ in 300+ IP before age 30, but is the only one in that group with fewer than 50 saves over that period. Osuna’s 21 career saves are the fewest by any pitcher having no starts and finishing more than one third of 400+ games. Which pitcher recorded the fewest career saves among those with 10 starts or less and who finished one third of 400+ relief appearances? Dave Tomlin
9. Ricky Ledee is one of 6 retired players to have a career of 2000-2500 PA with 40% of hits for extra bases, and walks in 10% of PAs. Who was the first player with such a career? Pat Seerey
10. Eli Marrero caught in over 80% of 350+ games through his age 27 season, but in less than 20% of 350+ games afterwards, one of only four such players in the modern era. Which of the four was an All-Star as a catcher? Mike Napoli
11. C.J. Nitkowski posted a .314 W-L% (11-24) as a Tiger, the worst by any Detroit pitcher with 300+ IP, incl. 80% of appearances in relief. Which 3-time All-Star (but not with the Tigers) is second on that list? Fernando Rodney
12. Matt Mantei is the only retired pitcher with no starts in his career, three 50+ IP seasons with ERA under 3.00, but no other seasons of even 10+ IP with ERA under 4.50. Which two pitchers recorded 5 or more 30+ IP seasons without a start, including three of 50+ IP with ERA under 3.00, and the rest with ERA above 4.50? George Caster, Bill Caudill
13. Corey Koskie is the first AL third baseman to record a season (2001) with 25 home runs, 100 RBI and 25 stolen bases. Who is the only player in either league with more than one such campaign? Howard Johnson
Answer to question #2: Doug Rau won 80 games for the Dodgers compared to Park’s 84.
Answer to question #1: Jeff Suppan had 30+ GS for 11 consecutive years, 1999-2009, that included 132 GS for KCR, 95 GS for STL and 95 GS for MIL.
Welcome back, Richard.
Right on both counts.
Doug, Cristian Guzman came to mind for #6. By his 600th game (in his fifth season) he had more than 40 triples and fewer than 36 HR. Am I interpreting the question correctly, though, in thinking he can’t be the answer because he played in more than 600 games by the end of his fifth season?
Only players with fewer than 600 games at the end of their fifth season.
Then I’ve got nothing. ;o) Thanks for your reply, Doug.
The player you are looking for is active.
– Since his fifth season, he has hit more than twice as many home runs as triples.
– In the same season, he recorded his 1000th hit, was an All-Star selection and played in the World Series, the last two for the first time.
Looks like it’s Dexter Fowler:
Through Age 26 Season: 50 3B, 28 HR
Since: 31 3B, 68 HR
Is #13 Howard Johnson?
Indeed it is.
I’m going to throw Joe Mauer’s name out there for #10, though I suspect he might still be a little over 20% of games caught since his age 28 season.
Good guess, but not quite.
This player is also notable for being one of only two players to appear in 5 or more WS games for each of three AL franchises.
Sounds like Mike Napoli.
Answer to question #4: Randy Choate (15 seasons) and Javier Lopez (14 seasons).
For #9, Ken Phelps is one of the 6. But it seems the earliest one from that category is Mr. I Hit 4 Home Runs In A Game Once, No Seriously, I Really Did, Even Babe Ruth Never Did That – Pat Seerey.
I suppose Seerey was a prototype of the modern TTO guy – his 39.6% TTO number would be tame nowadays, but I have to think it was decently high for his time.
These are the top pre-expansion TTO seasons (min. qualifier: 15 HR, 60 BB, 60 SO).
Answer to question #8: Dave Tomlin
Answer to question #7: Alan Trammell and Omar Vizquel.
#11 is Fernando Rodney who won 1/3 of his decisions with the Tigers, but did rack up 37 saves with them in his final season with them (2009)
This looks like a fun party, better to join it late than never.
Main ballot:
Don Sutton — for me, 324 wins and 3,574 K’s fits into a Hall or Circle of any size.
Mordecai Brown — as a peak value fan, I like 1904-1911 (avg. 23 wins, 1.72 ERA, 158 ERA+). Through 1911, he had the best career ERA+ in the early history of the game (sure he was very proud of that stat). Also key contributor to two World Series, including the one-game playoff against the Giants to get to the Series in 2008.
Dick Allen — with 6,000 or more PA, third highest OPS+ among non-active players not in some other elite body of players in upstate New York (behind Bonds and McGwire). He was one vote short on the Eras Committee vote in 2015 for that Hall, don’t want to be the one not to check his name here and keep him out of the Circle.
Secondary ballot:
Andre Dawson — great career as it was, wonder what it might have been if it weren’t for the toll of artificial turf for over 10 years.
Dwight Evans — as a lifelong Red Sox fan, always thought he was underrated, and knew it for sure when I got his Strat-O-Matic card for the 1981 season. Brilliant right fielder, excellent hitter. Before knowing about WAR or OPS+ I knew he was better than Jim Rice.
Andy Pettitte — borderline case but an important figure in the history of the last 25 years of baseball. I’d want to study longer in terms of how he compares to the players already in the Circle.
Thanks for letting me play.
Welcome Chris.
Glad to have you join the discussion.
For the 1999 Denvers, Neifi Perez batted leadoff or 2nd (and led the league in AB).
Todd Helton batted 6th.
.280 / .307 / .403 / .710 / 62
.320 / .395 / .587 / .981 / 122
Lowest ops+ with 190+ hits:
62 … Neifi Perez
77 … Juan Pierre
80 … Doc Cramer
81 … Jose Reyes
82 … Lou Finney
82 … Juan Pierre
84 … Carl Lind
84 … Doc Cramer
84 … Dick Groat
Lind led the league in PA/AB in his only qualifying season.
Cramer is was good for 8.4 WAR with 2705 hits.
Doesn’t quite make the list, but Matty Alou’s 1970 season is notable, 718PA, 677AB, 201H, .297/.329/.356 OPS 87, -.4WAR
First in AB, First in 1B, Led in AB/K (37.6…think about that today)
I’m just beginning to think through whom to vote for in Round 127, but having been a booster to get Mordecai Brown back on the CoG ballot, I thought I ought to work through in more detail just how to assess his record – a brief career, unusually dependent for value on a terrific 5-year peak. (It’s going to be important to my vote, because I’ll probably wind up picking between Brown and Tiant, whom I think is a very strong candidate.)
One approach I had was to test the quality of that peak, 1906-1910, with the type of peak record a true inner-circle CoG contemporary had. One the most famous aspects of Brown’s career was that in 1905, he and Christie Mathewson matched no-hitters for eight innings, until Brown weakened in the ninth, while Matty completed his gem. After that, Brown ran off nine straight victories over the premier pitcher of the decade, culminating in the legendary Merkle make-up game in 1908. Thinking of the Brown-Mathewson rivalry, I decided to compare their contemporary peaks. For Mathewson, 1906-1910 isn’t really a fair choice, because 1906 was sort of an off year for Matty (he was only 22-12), so I swapped it for 1905, when Matty had his best year in ERA+ and won a respectable 31 games. This is how Brown’s 5-year peak compares to Mathewson’s about the same time (I hope the columns sort of line up):
…………………………………….IP……..W-L…..Pct……CG….ShO…..ERA+….WAR
Brown (1906-10)………..1461…127-44…743…133….38…….182…….34.2
Matty (1905, 07-10)……1638…144-47…754…150….37…….161…….44.3
Obviously, these are both terrific peaks (Matty, of course, had others: you could get him in the CoG twice), but notice an odd thing: Brown really dominates in ERA+, while Matty has a very significant edge in WAR. About 50% of the WAR discrepancy can be attributed to the number of innings Matty threw. But that still leaves about an average of 1.0 WAR/Year where Mathewson exceeds Brown, despite the fact that Brown’s average ERA+ is far superior.
I’m working on unpacking this apparent anomaly (it can’t be a real one), but it struck me that while this was a comparison between contemporaries, the same sort of factor applies when comparing Mordecai and Kevin Brown’s career figures:
P(Tot)WAR…Peak5..Top5…WAR/9IP…WAR/Yr….ERA+…Career length
68.5 (68.3)……37.0…37.0……0.189……4.0 (17)……127……1.0………K. Brown
55.1 (56.4)……34.2…34.2……0.148……4.5 (12)……139……1.0………M. Brown
In careers of similar length, Kevin dominates in almost every WAR category, including both cumulative WAR and WAR/IP, but Mordecai is about 40% further above average in ERA+ than Kevin. Mordecai Brown and Tiant have a similar comparative issue, and it would be true with Reuschel and, to a lesser degree, Pettitte too. Clearly this is something that has mostly to do with Brown.
I suspect Mordecai Brown is being penalized (perhaps justly) for the high quality of the team he pitched for during his peak, both in terms of its fielding excellence (credit for which is, de facto, deducted from Brown’s pitching, even if his pitching contributed to the fieldability of balls in play) and, to a lesser degree, perhaps in terms of the strength-of-schedule issue: Brown never had to pitch again the dominant 1906-10 Cubs. (I thought that perhaps a difference in unearned runs as a contributing factor, but Brown and Matty had almost identical figures here: 33% of Brown’s runs were unearned, 32% of Matty’s.)
I’m going to pursue this in more detail, but I thought I’d flag it now because it seems to me a significant issue for any early voters trying to choose between the two Browns or between Mordecai and Tiant, and also because someone else might see a flaw in my approach and save me from wasting more time.
You’re definitely right; it’s the Cubs’ fielding for which he’s getting docked. It was one of the great defensive teams of the age – and not just when Brown was pitching. In fact, looking at Brown’s record outside his stint with the Cubs, I think also a fair assessment by WAR – he was a very good pitcher, especially for a couple of years, but he was helped tremendously by playing in front of one of the most famous defenses in baseball history.
Ricky Ledee was a first-year player with 87 regular season PA in 1998, and he went 6-10 in the WS.
Missed the opportunity to play in WS his first 3 seasons by being traded for David Justice in June 2000.
Splendid move by the NYY, as Justice did this the rest of the way:
.305 / .391 / .585 / .977 / 145 … and was ALCS MVP
…
Derek Lowe had multiple seasons as a reliever with 3+ WAR, and a 7+ WAR season as a starter.
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Chan Ho Park is perhaps most famous for illustrating one of the differences between ‘merican and Korean culture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GIEHPGj9sI
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Guillermo Mota hit a 3-run HR in his first PA.
This is less-surprising because he was an infielder for his first 4 years in the minors.
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Ramon Ortiz led the league with 40 HR allowed in 2002.
Gave up 2 more in his only WS start (but won the game) (he chose to pitch to Bonds with an 8-2 lead)
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Through 2005, Matt Mantei’s last year, the career leaders in SO/9 with at least 300 IP:
12.17 … Dibble
11.99 … Billy Wagner
11.17 … Benitez
11.05 … MATT MANTEI
10.97 … BJ Ryan
…
Nice stuff, Voomo.
In fact, Derek Lowe had 5 relief seasons with 3+ WAR, one of only 7 live ball era pitchers to combine that with a 7 WAR season as a starter. Which of those seven posted that 7 WAR campaign in his only season as a starter?
The answer to the Ricky Ledee quiz question was also traded in June from a world championship team-to-be.
Has to be Hoyt Wilhelm, right?
Had to be.
Wilhelm also shares the record of three 12 win seasons without a start, a mark famously achieved (surpassed, actually, with 14+ wins) in consecutive seasons by Mike Marshall (1972-74). But, who is the third pitcher to post those totals?
The answer to the Ricky Ledee question is Pat Seerey who, along with Willie Mays, is one of 2 players with at least 2 games of 15+ total bases.
Ledee had an interesting career. In his age 26 year, he had 531 PA. Never had more that 291 in any other season. Played for 7 different teams in ten years, 3 times switched teams in the middle of a season.
Ledee was the first player to retire with 200 extra-base hits among fewer than 500 knocks.
#13 has to be Howard Johnson
Indeed it does.
CoG
Allen
M. Brown
Sutton
Secondary
Reuschel
Evans
Dawson
Maybe it’s me, but it’s hard to believe Rickey Ledee (2.8 bWAR, and CJ Nitkowski (-.8 bWAR) make the ballot.
The magic of the 10-year qualifying minimum. (Charlie Silvera was qualified as well, with his 541 lifetime PAs.)
A brief interruption: It as reported yesterday that Wally Moon died last Friday at 87. Moon is notable in having been chosen Rookie of the Year in 1954, beating out Ernie Banks and Hank Aaron. Moon was a good player, but this is surely one of many examples of how the RoY vote falls short as an oracle.
Moon delivered solid outfield play and a good bat for the Cardinals for his initial years, and then was traded to the Dodgers just in time to be a key force in lifting them from 7th place to World Champions in 1959, as they adjusted to the sadness of life away from Brooklyn. (I was amazed and delighted when the Dodgers traded for Moon because I was a fan of his — I think it was his unibrow that first got my attention.) Moon was a grown up among players, with a strong sense of value outside baseball (he was devoutly religious), and he had sacrificed some of his early career in order to pursue his education beyond a bachelor’s degree, earning an M.A. One of the New Yorker Rogers — either Kahn or Angell — made a point of contrasting Moon with Dodger VP Fresco Thompson, who also had a Masters degree, and who habitually steered conversations so that he could mention it. Moon never did that, and few people knew he had an advanced degree: he kept it in the background. That was also the type of player he was: he didn’t seek or seem to like the limelight, but he was a steady contributor, the only player I’m aware of who was chosen by teammates to be their player rep from his rookie year on.
RIP.
In his first three seasons in LA, Moon hit 49 home runs, 37 of them at the LA Coliseum, many of those his famous moon shots over the short left field screen. In four seasons at Dodger Stadium, Moon hit just 4 home runs in 454 PA.
Sutton is getting a lot of love in the early voting. After all, he has 324 wins. But if you look at the surprisingly large cluster of eight pitchers who all pitched at some point in the 1980s and wound up with 303-329 wins, you’ll see that one of them is not like the others:
………………Wins………..IP……..WAR…….WAR/9IP
Carlton……329………5217…….84.1……. .145*
Ryan………324……….5386…….83.9…….. .140*
Sutton…….324……….5282……68.7…….. .117
Niekro…….318……….5404……97.4……. .162*
Perry………314……….5350…….93.7…… .158*
Seaver…….311………4783…..106.3…… .200*
Glavine……305………4413…….74.0…… .151*
Johnson…..303………4135….104.3…… .227*
*In CoG.
The reason Sutton is the odd man out in this group and the only one not in the CoG is because he is not in the others’ league. Doom pointed out last time that Sutton has the distinction of having the most seasons ever with 1.0 or more pWAR – not even Cy Young can match him. That fits: Sutton hung around for a very long time compiling big career numbers out of many modest season numbers.
Most career IP with WAR/9IP under 0.120
Sutton’s WAR is dinged by playing in extreme pitchers’ parks with great defense behind him.
Of course, he got to 324w by playing almost exclusively for really good teams.
I’m in-part responsible for getting him back on that ballot. Doesn’t mean I’m going to continue to vote for him, though…
An interesting and quite homogeneous group — generally good pitchers who were either steady performers, like Sutton, or who had two-tier careers, with strong and weak phases, like Wynn and Ruffing. (Joe Niekro stands out a bit for the low level of his overall mediocrity.)
If you look at the ERA+ rankings for this group, they average 106, ranging from a high of 115 for Rixey to Niekro’s 98. Sutton’s just above the middle at 108.
Since Sutton stands out for his high number of wins, which exceeds any of the others’, a more appropriate measure might be his comparative rate of wins, using W/9IP. The group average is .554 W/9IP. Sutton, who generally played on above average teams, generated .552 W/9IP, just below the group average.
They WARRED to the score.
Digging deeper into Sutton’s stats for some context:
The shiny stat for Sutton is the 324 wins that for some represents “greatness”. He also had 256 losses, meaning he pitched deep enough into games to get many decisions. Yet Sutton’s average W-L record of 14-11 over 23 years does not exactly stand out as “dominant” (particularly since he played on good teams most of his career). WAR/IP and ERA+ are measures that Sutton pales at next to his contemporaries.
What comes to mind when I think of Sutton is durability (almost 5300 IP, 7th all-time), consistency (756 Games Started, 3rd all-time) and longevity (23 years – tied for 9th all-time).
Unfortunately, durable/consistent/long-timer players could be considered workhorses/grinders/compilers (T. John/Kaat/Moyer for example). Sutton’s rate of value generation (WAR/9IP) was so low that he had to throw more innings than most to even get 300 wins. He had a very long, steady, consistent career that was ultimately hall-of-fame-worthy, but mostly based on longevity.
The Circle of Greats hopefully represents the best of the best, the elite & dominating players of all-time. Yes, Sutton deserves the hall recognition for a fine career, but putting him in the COG seems a bit of a stretch to me.
Corey Koskie was a helluva baseball player. I really enjoyed him. So sad it had to end the way it did.
Primary vote:
Allen,
Dahlen,
Tiant
Secondary:
Boyer,
Evans,
Lyons
Primary: Kevin Brown, Three Finger Brown, Ramirez
Secondary: Evans, Randolph, Boyer
Main ballot: Kevin Brown, Manny Ramirez, Ted Simmons
Secondary Ballot VOTE:
Ken Boyer
Dwight Evans
Willie Randolph
Ken Boyer had a 9-year peak averaging 6.1 WAR, and he was above average in every aspect of the game. This is my first time voting for him. Both Big Daddy and Sunday Teddy are compelling, but I have to continue to champion the undervalued masters of the base on balls.
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It would be an interesting exercise if we could project the stats of Don Sutton and Rick Rueschel, if their teams were reversed.
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Ugh, this is tough. I’ll start with the secondary ballot:
Rick Reuschel
Todd Helton
Ken Boyer
Boyer deserves to be on the main ballot, I think. Reuschel is the best player on the secondary ballot. Helton… well, he was a LOT better than you think. Don’t chalk it all up to Coors, either; he was a legitimately great player on offense and defense for a few years. It’s a shooting-star kind of peak, but I’d take him. It hurts to leave Dawson off, but hopefully one of these guys will be elevated this round, and I’ll be able to include him again next time.
On the Primary Ballot:
Kevin Brown
Luis Tiant
Richie Ashburn
I’m SO HAPPY that Satchel got in, but it leaves me in a conundrum; I only really believe in two players on the main ballot – Brown and Tiant. So I’m throwing a vote to Ashburn, but Nettles could’ve gotten it instead. I considered Simmons last round. I almost included him over Tiant, actually. However, I researched it a little bit. We’ve inducted 10 catchers to the COG already out of about 90 position players. I’m not so obsessed with numerical balance that I think we need EXACTLY 11 at each position. As thing are now, I think there’s a big enough gap between Simmons and the other ten that I’m comfortable leaving him on the outside looking in. I’d rather have the top position players (Helton, Boyer, and Dawson, in my mind) than have Simmons. So Ashburn gets my third spot, but it’s a half-hearted vote; I would’ve given it to Nettles, but he has plenty of breathing room and Ashburn is on the bubble. I’m just really glad we get a certain Japanese candidate whom I’ll full-throatedly support jumping onto the ballot next round – and it’ll be fun to vote for someone who’s still active, if as yet unsigned.
Main ballot:
Mordecai Brown
Dick Allen
Manny Ramirez
Secondary ballotr:
Dwight Evans
Ted Lyons
Todd Helton
In consideration of Ashburn… he retired after his age-35 season, with plenty left in the tank.
The defensive numbers we have say he was no longer a centerfielder, but he did this, playing for the ’62 Mets:
.306 / .424 / .393 / .817 / 121
Then, seeing the fans swooning for Marvelous Marv, he said, “What’s a pro like me doing in a clown show like this?” And he quit.
Primary ballot vote:
M. Brown
Dahlen
Wallace
I’m going all-old on this ballot. I wrote a long advocacy post for Dahlen and Wallace in Round 125 (about 2/3 of the way down, if anyone’s interested). It would be an imposition to re-post it so soon, but I do want to reaffirm it. I’m glad to see both are now off the bubble, but I suspect they may slip back, and if they do, I’ll consider a new version — these are 70 WAR guys: they’re worth a careful look. I’ve been writing a lot about Mordecai, and I won’t add to those comments here, except to say that I do think his WAR may be distorted low by RA9def calculations (and that I do not have this clear enough in my head to explain well yet).
There are four current balloteers who are not going to be on my list at any point: Kevin Brown and Manny, because of the PED issue, which sinks them below the threshold, in my view, and Simmons and Sutton, whom I see as solid players who compiled high career numbers simply because of longevity. I think the WAR/ERA+/OPS+ numbers I post each round make this case clearly. I’ve written unkind things about both this round and last, and don’t think I want to repeat them: they deserve nice words for their fine careers.
I think Tiant, Allen, Ashburn, and Nettles are all solid CoG candidates, probably in that order. However, if Lyons or Boyer came on the ballot, I think Lyons might lead the list and Boyer squeeze in front of the more acrobatic Nettles. (I think Boyer/Nettles will make a great comparison if they wind up together on the ballot.) If we didn’t have the secondary ballot, I might cast a vote for Ashburn, who’s on the bubble, but falling onto the secondary ballot might actually lead us to focus more positively on his case. After all, Paige popped up from redemption and leap-frogged into the Circle, and Mordecai is doing very well this round — might do the same thing. For some of the perpetual candidates, a change of status might refresh everyone’s view of them.
Secondary ballot vote:
Boyer
Lyons
Dawson
I wrote lots about Lyons in the redemption round. Maybe next round I’ll add a recap. I may swap out Dawson for Evans, Randolph, or Reuschel before the vote-change deadline, because I’m still searching for satisfying ways to get clear on which should rank ahead of which. (I think we’re probably due for a good Reuschel/Tiant comparative analysis . . . it’s been a while.)
Primary
Tiant
M. Brown
Ashburn
Secondary
Lyons
Dawson
Evans
I remain open to the idea that Evans is more worthy that Dawson and I’d like to see some more discussion on that.
A few bullet points on Lyons
– he missed 3 full seasons to WW2 and very likely would have wound up with 80+ WAR had that not happened.
– he has the second most complete games of ANY pitcher who’s career was entirely after the dead ball era
– had he pitched for the Yankees instead of the lowly White Sox there’s every reason to believe he would have been the second pitcher who’s career was entirely after the dead ball era to win 300 games
– even after a 3 year layoff and as a 45 year old he was still highly effective- 2.32 ERA and completed 5 out of 5 starts and the only reason he stopped pitching was because he was named manager of the White Sox
Hartvig, not arguing with your selections, but wanted to start a more Luddite discussion. I see Evans as in the same mold as Nettles and Randolph; players who were considered very valuable during their playing careers, and got some hardware-AS game selections, GG, etc. but were not “Hall” types. I realize that part of the pleasure of looking at advanced stats is to unearth under-appreciated stars and “prove” they belong with the recognized greats (or at least be in the conversation) but it always makes wonder just a bit how far we (meaning the larger “we”, not the esteemed and highly educated HHS crew) should go in replacing older contemporary opinion with our own.
Mike L:
The word is not the thing. The map is not the territory. Statistics stand in parallel to words and maps, in that they give only a partial representation of the reality they represent. It seems to me that, if “we” are to be esteemed, we ought to use our presumed “highly educated” abilities to assess not just the words, maps, and statistics, but all other data we can access. It’s common among self-propelled intellectuals of all ages to scoff at the opinions and practices of earlier times, to point out, for example, the laughable ignorance of physicians laboring under the delusions of Galen and Aristotle about what makes the body tick, or, as Bill James has done, to make wry digs about the tendency of retired players to claim that the quality of play and players has declined since their prime.
In contrast, not enough attention is given to the mistaken assessments of more recent intellectuals, often respected scientists, who in their wisdom have condemned and then backed away from condemning such consumables as eggs and coffee, who have created miracle drugs that turn out to be far from miraculous and sometimes deleterious in the extreme—think thalidomide— and who often seem unable or unwilling to admit that the distrust of or skepticism toward experts by large blocks of the population is often founded not on ignorance or intransigence but the track record of those experts, which, far from beating a straight path forward meanders when it doesn’t reverse course.
Awards, contemporary assessments, traditional views of statistics, consideration of personalities for such things as character and leadership qualities or their opposites, acceptance of the idea that not all players fit the establish statistical conception of the position they play, evaluation of performance not as a final sum but in minute detail, which means taking a vastly more comprehensive look at individual statistics than the prepackaged, formulated, one-size-fits all attempt to distill the territory of baseball or any human endeavor into a neat numerical equivalent of a three or four digit obituary—but you’ve heard this rant from me before.
To close, the map will never be the territory, and the devil is in the details.
NSB, there’s no chance I can match that in erudition, but I’ll add something else. William Harvey, who worked out and described the basics of circulation in Du Motu Cordis, missed something big (capillaries) because he didn’t have an early microscope. A remarkable advance in understanding which changed the way people thought, but still incomplete. So, yes, I agree we should use all tools and not be bound to evaluations, no matter how acute, by contemporaries. I’d add that we probably agree with the idea that efforts to express the sum of all a player’s contribution in one happy number (we can call it WAR) falls well short of a fair evaluation for many of them.
I remember when I graduated from pharmacy school there were all kinds of headlines about the risk of cancer associated with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in women. Within a decade those findings had been largely debunked (more accurately, put into context with regards to other risk factors) and HRT was then believed to be cardio-protective and soon became the most commonly prescribed drugs on the market. Fast forward another decade or two and it was discovered that not only was HRT not cardio-protective but that there might actually be a slightly elevated risk of heart attack in some women.
So yes, even modern science is far from infallible.
Fortunately most scientists I have met- and it’s a fairly large number- tend to be pretty skeptical bunch so there’s rarely a shortage of someone looking to disprove someone else’s new theory.
I think the same holds true in baseball. Things that Earl Weaver was doing 40 years ago or Tony LaRussa was doing 30 years ago or even what Billy Beane was doing 20 years ago are now almost- for better or worse- de rigueur for every manager and GM. Some of it makes a lot of sense. Some of it- and here I’m thinking of limiting starting pitchers to a 100 pitch count while keeping the 5-man rotation or having a middle infielder swing from his heels so he can hit 10 home runs while striking out 150- do not.
I wholeheartedly agree that we have reached a point on the graph where the differences between the current tier of candidates are getting harder and harder to quantify. And that does mean- especially for those that played before our time- that the views of contemporary observers should at least be given some consideration in informing our views. But it’s also fair to say that they also need to be viewed with a certain amount of skepticism as well.
Basically we are having to weigh more and more factors when making our decisions and for almost every plus there’s a minus offsetting it.
Anyways, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Hartvig, my dad was a pharmacist. In the summer we would go to these pharma fraternity conventions, and I remember everyone drinking just a wee bit (there was smoking as well) and talking about the horrors of when some crazy Doctor wrote out a prescription for some compounded ointment that could take youhalf a day to make. And some organization my mom belonged to “Pharmacist’s Wives League”. Now I’d bet the majority of pharmacists are women. I don’t know how old you are, but Lascoff’s Pharmacy (they stocked leeches) has finally closed.
Leeches have made something of a comeback in modern medicine, altho primarily to promote post-surgical circulation. The only ones I’ve seen for sale in pharmacies are in rural areas to use for fishing.
In college I was the “social chairman” for the Student American Pharmacy Association for a year but the following year I became one of the founding members of the college rugby club, who’s idea of a good time was much more in line with my way of thinking than SAPhA ever was.
Mike, While I share your feeling, a comment made by birtelcom when he popped back up recently seemed to me very on point . Paraphrasing: The CoG’s size is not under our control, and as it grows, we may face a pool of candidates whom we wouldn’t have envisioned in a Circle whose size we could set. But that is where the BBWAA has stretched the borders of the circle, and our task is to discuss who the best candidates available are, not whether they fit our concept of CoGworthyness.
Looking at this pool of 20 holdovers of one variety or another, I think that we’re pretty close to a set whose members each possess various strengths and weaknesses that average out to a reasonably homogeneous level, representing where the CoG border has now stretched. I didn’t vote for Nettles, Evans, or Randolph, but I see them as within the same value range as other good position-player candidates I both did not vote for (Allen, Ashburn, Dawson, Helton) and those I did (Boyer, Dahlen, Wallace). While their total value may approximate a single range, they aren’t alike: there are flashy super-peak guys like Allen, the grayer steady guys like the ones you mention, problem juicers, and old-timers who are harder to evaluate. But I think with just a few exceptions (and those just in my view), we have a group of players in the right range for this point in the CoG’s growth.
What makes this stage harder, I think, is that without doing close comparisons and statistical analyses within each of those subgroups (as, for example, Doom did in comparing Kevin Brown and Manny), which can be time consuming, sorting these players into an order of CoG precedence could become pretty arbitrary. (Right now, I’m working on ways to distinguish in my own mind among the steady, comparatively gray types, including the ones you mention and others, like Dawson, Boyer, and Ashburn.)
Birtelcom was right (Birtelcom was usually right) I think we are running into a type of headwind in which we are choosing between players whose career value, if measured by a single metric, converges. My argument could have been better expressed. When comparing 10 players whose career WAR is within a ten percent range, it’s pretty much guesswork. On an older thread, I also suggested that, to an extent, certain players adapted their talents to what was conventional wisdom at the time, particularly when it came to things that we dismiss as wrong now. There were managers who disliked players who took too many walks, and managers who sacrificed and hit behind the runner when “science” should have instructed them to do otherwise.
That is a really good point. Players always played to the success norms of their times, and we should make every effort not to exact a penalty for their effort to meet professional standards. I don’t think there’s any way to tease those factors out of the stats, but we should keep them in mind as part of the qualitative narrative behind the quantitative assessments we make.
In 1942 Lyons completed every one of his 20 starts making him the last pitcher to complete all of his starts with a minimum of 20 starts. He also completed the last 28 starts of his career. Don’t know if that’s a record.
Since 1908, it appears to be the record for consecutive CGs, regardless of whether it was career ending. Obviously, if you go back far enough . . . after all, Old Hoss completed all 73 of his starts in 1884.
What would make Lyons’ streak more like to be a record back to, say, 1893, is that he not only completed all 28 of his starts, but he made 28 consecutive pitching appearances in which he notched a CG: no relief interruptions.
I just ran the BR PI Streak Finder. It shows that Lyons’ streak of 28 is the record, followed by Red Lucas with 27 and Burleigh Grimes with 26.
If you look only at starts, the longest CG streaks since 1913 are 37 games, by these guys.
Doug: Perhaps you could check this out for me but I think Lyons 28 CG in his last 28 GS is the record for concluding a career with no relief appearances mixed in.
Jack Taylor completed every start for four straight seasons (1902-05) plus at least the first 17 starts of 1906 (after which he was traded for Three Fingers Brown). That’s a minimum 157 consecutive CGs and probably many more, since he completed 30 of 31 starts in 1901 and 15 of his last 16 in 1906.
Great find, Doug. Taylor’s career is fascinating — I’ve never looked at it before. How did you search him out? His rather melancholy SABR bio says his CG streak actually reached 187.
Taylor’s overall CG rate from his rookie year,1898, to 1906 was 99% (271 for 274), followed by a final 13-start season during which he failed to complete more starts (5) than he had his entire career prior to that point. He had only career 24 appearances in relief, and in all 24, after coming in to pitch mid-game he continued to the finish. In other words, in 311 games, a relief pitcher took over from him a total of only 8 times, all but three in his final year.
Taylor showed up in my memorial piece on Roy Halladay.
Taylor’s four seasons in the modern era completing every start (min. 20 starts) stands out, as nobody else has more than one.
Good work Doug.
At Saturday’s crackerbarrel in Aberdeen, I asked our legislators to weigh in on two competing bills dealing with ballot access. House Bill 1286 defines “alternative party” status, allows new parties to organize by July 1 of an election year, and allows new and alternative parties to nominate candidates for statewide and Legislative offices after the primary for that year’s general election ballot.
Despite the big doings at the Crackerbarrel, we’re going to keep counting CoG votes without fear of political upheavals in Aberdeen. And since the main ballot now has 11 votes, it’s time for an update.
Primary Ballot
With 11 votes in:
8 – Mordecai Brown*
=================50% (6)
4 – Dick Allen, Manny Ramirez
3 – Richie Ashburn*, Kevin Brown, Bill Dahlen, Don Sutton*, Luis Tiant
=================25% (3)
=================10% (2)
1 – Ted Simmons, Bobby Wallace
Voters: Chris C, Jeff, Chris Bodig, T-Bone, JEV, Hub Kid, Jeff Harris, Doom, Richard Chester, epm, Hartvig
Note that Nettles has not yet received a vote. (He is not on the bubble.)
Secondary Ballot
There have been only 10 secondary ballot votes so far.
8 – Dwight Evans
5 – Ken Boyer, Andre Dawson
4 – Ted Lyons
3 – Todd Helton
2 – Willie Randolph, Rick Reuschel
1 – Andy Pettitte
====================10% (1)
Voters: Jeff, Chris Bodig, T-Bone, Hub Kid, JEV, Voomo, Doom, Richard Chester, epm, Hartvig
The secondary ballot is an all-bubble ballot. Pettitte’s is in danger of popping (he has just the minimum 10%), while Nomar has yet to receive a vote.
As always, please let me know if you see an error or missed vote.
Because we’re at a point where we don’t even get 30 voters anymore, once anyone gets 3 votes, they’re basically completely safe (barring vote changes, of course). I don’t know how that affects anyone’s choices, but it’s something to consider while voting, if you’re more strategically-minded or if you’re trying to decide between a couple of guys who might need saving.
Allen, Dahlen, Simmons
Boyer, Evans, Lyons
1,400 PAs OPS+ 27-30 60% G @ catcher
1 Mike Piazza………..159
2 Ernie Lombardi….143
3 Mickey Cochrane 143
4 Ted Simmons…….142
5 Roy Campanella…137
6 Bill Dickey…………..136
7 Gabby Hartnett…..135
1,400 PAs OPS+ 22-26 60% G @catcher
1 Buster Posey…… 142
2 Joe Torre…….. 138
3 Joe Mauer……. 136
4 Johnny Bench 136
5 Ted Simmons 125
6 Brian McCann 124
7 Yogi Berra….. 124
8 Bill Dickey…… 123
9 Gabby Hartnett 122
Last go-round, we were discussing careers that fell short, I don’t believe anyone mentioned Austin McHenry. Hopefully, the link will work
http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/0dbc4896
McHenry’s 1921 season was just the third in the modern era by an NL left-fielder of 60 XBH and 100 RBI, following Sherry Magee (1910) and Ed Delahanty (1901). That compares to seven in the AL over that period, including four just in that season, led, of course, by Babe Ruth with 119 XBH and 168 RBI.
The most such seasons belongs to Barry Bonds with 11, followed by Ted Williams with 8. Third place is a big surprise, with 7 seasons for Bob Johnson, followed by several players with 6, including Manny, Albert Belle. Goose Goslin, Joe Medwick and Delahanty.
Another death today, as we learn that Tito Francona 1.0 has passed away at age 84.
Players with an OPS+ greater than 170, at least 60% of games in CF, Age 25 or younger:
Trout, Griffey, Mantle, DiMaggio, Benny Kauff (in the Federal League), Speaker, Cobb, Mays, Al Simmons, Bobby Murcer, and Tito Francona.
Murcer had a 169 OPS+ in his Age 26 season and combined for 14.6 WAR in those two years, just under half his career total.
Tito would never be as good as his Age 25 season, though he was still a very good hitter in 1960 and 1961. 1959 was the only year where he played the majority of his games in CF, and dWAR is pretty bearish on his defense, so it’s probably a stretch to call him a CF. But it wouldn’t have been at all out of line to consider him a budding star in 1959.
The 1959 Indians had a 4-man OF of Rocky Colavito, Jim Piersall, Minnie Minoso and Tito Francona. That’s a lot of talent in one OF, even though none are Hall of Famers. Colavito and Francona finished 4th and 5th respectively in MVP voting, The 59 Tribe was a solid team, actually had a slightly better Pythag. record than the pennant winning Go-Go Sox. It would be a loooooong time before the Tribe finished as high as 2nd again in the AL.
A rule change took the 1959 batting championship from Francona. Until 1958 the qualifying requirement was 400 AB. Due to Ted Wiliams nearly being ineligible for the 1958 BA title, that he won, because he received too many walks the qualifying rule was changed to 477 PA. Francona finished the 1959 season with 443 PA, 399 AB and a .363 BA, thereby not qualifying. Harvey Kuenn won the title with a .353 BA. After the Indians’ 150th game Francona had 395 AB and could have easily attained 400+ AB if he played all of the remaining games.
Except that, if the qualification was now 477 PAs, there’s no way Francona was making that, needing 40 PA in Cleveland’s last four games. He did well to get as close as he did considering he was used only as a pinch-hitter until June 2nd.
That ’59 season was Francona’s second with 20 games at 1B, CF and pinch-hitting; he’s still the only player with a pair of such seasons.
What I remember is that Francona was basically a platoon bat who had never hit over .260 shuttling from Baltimore to Detroit to Chicago in the 3 previous years. Because he was so unexpectedly hot at the plate in ’59, the Indians had to put him someplace against right handed pitching. Big hitters Colavito and Minoso were entrenched in the corners, so Piersall in center was the one who got platooned, along with some shifting around at first base with Vic Power, who played at 2nd or 3rd instead, also to keep his bat in the lineup. Piersall added 1.7 dWAR and Francona subtracted .7.
A classic career year.
As for the Indians, not April, but August was the cruelest month, when they went 16-13 to the ChiSox 21-9, then trailed by 5 games or so all the way home.
I’ve gotta say, I’m just not drinking the Three-Finger Brown Kool-Aid. He’s winning in a rout, and I understand the attraction – strong traditional numbers (that ERA!!), good winning%, fair amount of Black Ink. I get it.
To me, though, it just ignores too much. I don’t think Brown was ever really the best pitcher in his league – not for a season, not for a group of seasons. He was on a fabulous team, and that earned him a marginally better record than he maybe deserved (I have him deserving of a 124-38 record by ERA+ in his five-year peak, which is pretty dern close to his actual 127-44 record in that time); his FIPs, though, are not nearly as good, which makes sense: he was playing in front of one of the great defenses of all-time. I estimated his record using FIP- rather than ERA+, and instead reached a record of 106-56. That’s a spectacular record; however, it’s 20 games worse than what he actually did. That’s a HUGE difference. If he hadn’t been playing for the Cubs, I honestly don’t think we’re HAVING this discussion.
Additionally, he is getting some credit for his performance in the Federal League. I don’t see why; he was done, and playing in a minor league. Now, you might want to say that he didn’t get to play in MLB until age 26, and he deserves some credit for the time before that, when he probably could’ve been a Major Leaguer. I can be sympathetic to that argument (as the Minors were a lot different at the time than they are now). But I’m honestly not sure he was ready. And even WITH that credit, I don’t think he really stacks up.
Now, you can feel free to disagree with me on this – obviously, so far, most of you do. I just don’t see him as one of the two best pitchers on this current ballot, much less one of the best players. I think his statistical record is every bit as suspect as the steroid guys because of the team for which he played and the era in which he played. I don’t have a problem with him being elected, if that’s what happens. I just think someone needs to make the case that he was more Dwight Gooden or Bret Saberhagen than he was a COG member. He had a phenomenal peak, but little-to-no value outside of it; his peak is drastically impacted by the quality of the team he played on for his best seasons, and the sum total of his achievements is nowhere near that of the other pitchers we have to choose from on this ballot. That’s my two cents. Happy to hear counterarguments, but he’s winning in a rout right now, and I haven’t even really heard a case made against him (though there have been some nice pro-Brown posts, including Chris Bodig’s and epm’s) so I’m going to start that conversation. I don’t want him sliding in because no one’s bothered to explain why not to vote for him.
Doom,
Re “I don’t think Brown was ever really the best pitcher in his league”, was he ever going to be better than Mathewson? Was Jenkins ever the best pitcher in the league with Gibson, Seaver, Carlton, Palmer, etc… being contemporaries? I don’t even know if Pete Rose was ever the best player on his own team, let alone the entire National League. But, I understand- believe me. I really like the idea of “was he ever the best player on the field” as a litmus test of a player’s greatness. I just don’t know if it’s fair to pick on Brown (1904 -1912 Cubs) because he played on great teams or Rose (Robinson, Bench, Perez, Morgan, Schmidt) because he had great teammates.
Among all the guys in either the main ballot or secondary, which were the best players in their league for even a single season? Perhaps this should be the basis of the Circle of Great(ness)?
Well, Jenkins, for example, led the NL in WAR in 1971. So… yeah, there’s a pretty easy stretch to find in which he could be defined as “the best pitcher in his league.” Additionally, on the ballot, Kevin Brown led the NL in WAR in 1996 and 1998, plus for various 2-year stretches, a 3-year stretch, and a 5-year stretch (four-year could be true, too; I’ve just never checked). Luis Tiant bested 30-game winner Denny McLain in WAR in 1968. So… that’s two guys just on the current ballot who did it. And that’s only looking at bWAR, which is more forgiving than fWAR is to M. Brown.
I would confidently say that virtually every (starting) pitcher in the COG led his league in WAR over a one-, three-, or five-year stretch at SOME point. And those who didn’t are the very borderline. The reason I bring it up is because Brown is SAILING in right now, and I don’t think he merits that inclusion.
Again, I know that Kevin Brown has the steroid issue that will cause some not to vote for him; but his direct competition was John Smoltz, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, and Roger Clemens (COG members all). I think that’s as good of a group as ANYONE has gone up against in history. K Brown was on top of that group for a while (a FIVE-YEAR while). I don’t think it’s too much to ask that, at SOME point, M Brown should’ve risen to the top of his heap in order to merit my vote; that seems reasonable – Marichal, for example, topped Koufax in WAR in ’65. If Three-Finger had a spectacular unicorn of a career like Nolan Ryan, maybe I could find room for him – but he didn’t. If he had been as good as Doc Gooden or Bret Saberhagen or David Cone, maybe I could find a place on my ballot at this point. I just think he’s a candidate completely reliant upon the quality of his peak, and I don’t think said peak passes the sniff test for the COG. SO many guys can find ONE year at the top, and that tells me that Brown should’ve, too, if he’s a serious candidate.
[The only starters I can see who never led their league in overall WAR or pitcher WAR who made the COG were: John Smoltz (second to K Brown in ’96), Curt Schilling (three times finished 2nd), Eddie Plank, Nolan Ryan (bizarre career – extremely long and quite good – not a “peak” guy), Wes Ferrell (FOUR time runner-up, and then there’s the business of his bat), and Whitey Ford. These are some of our most marginal candidates, and I don’t see how Mordecai Brown stacks up to that group.]
I’m trying not to get ahead of myself and letting my own rhetoric entrench me more in my position, though I fear that could happen here; and dang it – that’s not what’s supposed to happen. It’s just that I have a hard time seeing how Three-Finger belongs at this point. So let me say again clearly: he wouldn’t be a terrible choice; he was a great pitcher, and if we someday get to 50+ pitchers in the COG, I would absolutely, unquestionably think he would belong. But I don’t think he’s among the 35 best starters in history, and we don’t even have that many in the COG yet. I also happen to think that we have better candidates on the ballot. So while it’s not a terrible choice, it’s just a choice I can’t agree with. He reminds me most of guys like Bret Saberhagen, Johan Santana, and Roy Halladay. I think that’s a group that’s very appropriate for Cooperstown, but just shy of the (significantly higher) COG borderline.
Doom,
I should have taken that “typing class in the spring”.
1971 Seaver ERA+ of 194; Jenkins ERA+ of 141. Jenkins WAR was 10.3; Seaver’s 10.2….as a Philadelphian, I am a large Jenkins fan and a Tom Terrific “disliker” but, this is a tossup
I don’t know what exactly WAR does, but it sure does overthink things. Check out the WAR seasons on Zobrist-phew!!
Kevin Brown? He just won’t get my vote since there is a suspicion of steroids.
1968 – I believe Tiant’s H/9 was either an all-time low or the lowest since the deadball era. His arm troubles soon ensued and he had a “down” period of several seasons before resurrecting his career. Sudden Sam, Siebert, Tiant, ahhh, the good old days
Mordecai Brown? When he died in 1948, he was 19th in wins for the period 1893-1948 and 16 of the 18 ahead of him are in Cooperstown. That’s why he’s in Cooperstown since 1949. Never saw him pitch but I don’t trust WAR on this one, either
Not germane to the Mordecai Brown discussion, but I couldn’t help myself.
As for Seaver and Jenkins… yes, they were close in WAR. Why, when Seaver had over a 50-point advantage in ERA+?
Well, for one, Jenkins pitched 13% more innings (325-286). Seaver led in SO, yes, but Jenkins walked so few people that he had one THE most efficient SO:BB season of all-time to that point (7.11 – I’m ignoring a couple of 1880s seasons, but it was then the best of the 20th century, and still ranks 21st since 1900). He faced nearly 18% more batters, yet walked only 60% as many.
So then, we get to the hits. Now, hits rely, to some extent, on the defense behind you. The Mets’ defense turned 73.7% of all balls in play into outs; the Cubs turned only 71.5% into outs, another advantage to Seaver. Yes, it’s only a 3% advantage, but it happened over a larger number of batters faced.
Wrigley was also a much better hitter’s park (nearly 20% above league average) than Shea (about 8% below league average).
So Tom Terrific pitched with every advantage, pitched less, and pitched less efficiently. It’s a testament to both players that they had stellar years. And it’s truly splitting hairs to say that one was better than the other; yet, the points stands – there’s an argument (a pretty strong one, I think) that Jenkins was the NL’s best pitcher in 1971 – best SO:BB ever and leading the league in wins for a sub-.500 team. He won the Cy Young, for goodness sake, so contemporaries thought him the league’s best pitcher, too. It makes sense, I think.
For Brown’s 5-year peak (1906-10), a reasonably strong case can be made that he was the NL’s top pitcher, leading by wide margins in ERA and ERA+, firsts in WHIP, W-L%, CG% (of starts) , SHO and SHO% (of CG), and a close second to Mathewson in Wins and WAR with no other pitcher anywhere close.
Doom:
What’s happened with Mordecai in the voting, I think, is not that he’s everyone’s top dog, but that he’s in a lot of people’s top 3. This phenomenon has happened before, and I think it may have been what put Winfield into the COG. When I look at the list of candidates I see six who are very close Tiant, Allen, Dahlen, Wallace, Ashburn, and M. Brown; two with the PDF stigmata on their persons; Nettles not quite as good,; and Simmons and Sutton who to me fall far short of the rest, long career accumulators. Others, of course, don’t see it quite this way, but with every player listed open to some question, never the same one except for Simmons and Sutton, and all have their proponents, it’s a wonder there isn’t an eleven-way tie.
I had PDF stigmata once. Damn those paper cuts hurt.
Nice catch, Voomo.
I’ll be watching your posts carefully from now on.
I think HHS is at its best when posters argue counter positions hard, and I really appreciate Doom offering the skeptical view of Mordecai Brown’s qualifications. I’ve been an advocate of Brown’s, but I’ve been surprised by the speed with which he’s moved ahead in the voting this round, after languishing in the purgatory of the unredeemed for so long. We should have a debate about his quality.
Although we’re on opposite sides on whether Brown is currently CoGworthy, I agree with Doom that the strength of the Cubs during Brown’s peak years is a key factor, and one that works against Brown. However, in terms of B-R’s calculations of pWAR, this issue is already factored into the figures assigned to Brown. To bring the same factors in on a qualitative, narrative basis is essentially double jeopardy. My own sense is that Rfield is somewhat arbitrary in assigning BIP outcome credit between pitchers and fielders, because in all but more recent seasons, we cannot assess the degree to which outstanding fielding or outstanding pitching accounts for high efficiency rates. The Cubs had terrific fielders for their day, but they had also assembled a terrific pitching staff. I think it is arbitrary to assume that it was the fielders who made the pitchers shine, rather than the other way around (this has to do with my view of the role of pitcher agency in BIP).
As for using FIP or fWAR, I think the approach is fundamentally misguided, based on a mistaken notion that BIP outcomes are basically matters of chance, and that the only agency that truly matters is the fielder’s. On the issue of chance, I’ve written myself out (especially on this earlier string), but, in short, I see BIP as initially the vector outcome of the skilled agency of two actors — the pitcher being one of them — and that any decision to write off as “chance” such a huge portion of a pitcher’s effort as essentially independent of his skilled agency simply elects to elevate an explanatory fiction over reality. Moreover, I question the value of FIP for the dead ball era. In the period of Brown’s prime, the NL generated 120-150 HRs per season in total. All FIP does for that era is reflect K/BB. Brown was generally among the leaders in strikeouts and in K/BB, but he was not a true high strikeout pitcher, like Matty. He got his outs more efficiently. Indeed, what is the point of playing for a top-fielding team if you don’t take advantage of your fielders? Brown pitched precisely as he should have for the 1906-10 Cubs and the results were spectacular.
As for being the best pitcher of his era: Earlier on this string I compared Brown and Matty, and Matty came out well ahead in some respects, especially WAR. But in making that comparison, I helped Matty by switching out a relatively weak year for a strong one. If we compare the two head on for the 5-year second half of the 1900s, this is what we get:
…………………………………….IP……..W-L…..Pct……CG….ShO…..ERA+….WAR
Brown (1906-10)………..1461…127-44…743…133….38…….182…….34.2
Matty (1906-10)…………1566…135-50…730…140….35…….140…….37.7
Basically, the WAR difference tells us that Matty pitched an average of 21 more innings per season. Otherwise, this is about as close to a dead heat as you can get. Included within these figures is Brown’s nine-game winning streak over Matty, head to head. To argue that Brown falls short because he was not “the best pitcher in his league” seems to me unhelpfully one-dimensional. This is not just a CoG-quality peak, it’s a superb CoG-quality peak. Mathewson’s extraordinary ability doesn’t alter what Brown’s was or what he accomplished.
On the other hand, Doom has arguments in opposition that I think are quite strong. Brown’s 5-year peak is over 60% of his career WAR value. I don’t think he is anything like, Dwight Gooden, whose peak was basically a one-year affair, or Bret Saberhagen, whose career was cut short by injuries, two comparators Doom names. The shape of Brown’s career curve is actually pretty normal, other than the height of its apex; it’s just short, because he got started late. I don’t think Brown should get any special accommodation for starting late. I do think his level of excellence after he got started brings him to the point the CoG threshold has now reached.
Another good argument of Doom’s is Brown’s Federal League connection. The FL was a major league, but it clearly failed to reach the level of the two established Majors. I don’t think Brown’s FL record should be discarded, but I’d agree that a discount should be charged against the 5.4 WAR Brown accumulated in his two FL years.
Doom argues that we have better pitchers than Three-Finger Brown on the ballot. I voted for Brown, but I seriously considered voting for Tiant instead; it was more or less a coin flip. I think they actually have a lot in common and I think Doom is right to suggest that we might prefer Luis to Mordecai. As for Kevin Brown, I think his statistical record is superior, but given that a significant but unknown portion (at least about 10 WAR, maybe much more) of it is synthetically derived, I have no idea what value those figures offer us. I think the sketchiness of Mordecai’s two Federal League seasons looks like Vermeer’s brushwork compared to the sketchiness of Kevin’s later career.
Thanks for your kind words, epm. I agree with you that the most surprising thing is the cakewalk Three-Finger is having right now. I recall some of your “batted ball” objections from previous threads on this site. On the one hand, I don’t think YOU are necessarily the audience I’m trying to convince. 🙂 On the other hand, I do think M. Brown’s FIP-based and RA9-based WAR and results are unusually wide for a COG-worthy pitcher. Normally, there isn’t even a reason to bring it up, because the spread for most elite pitchers is not usually so wide. His 49 WAR via Fangraphs (only on season above 5.7 WAR!) makes it unlikely we would ever consider him, so I bring it up.
Otherwise, I think you and I mostly agree on this case. I think, as a “peak” candidate, he falls short, but I think we’d both probably put him in the same general “tier” of all-time great pitchers; we just see him on opposite sides of the line. Like I said, I can see how he would be ranked by some in this place. On the other hand, I think that to do so relies too much on statistics that are too biased based on his other circumstances. Therefore, I would encourage everyone to weigh all the evidence and consider for themselves whether or not Brown stacks up to the high standard of the COG.
I’ve been crunching some numbers concerning Mordecai Brown and I want to discuss a claim Doom made concerning Brown, one I granted earlier. The claim is that Brown benefited from playing with the best defensive team of his time. I’m not going to show that Brown did not benefit from having great defensive players, but rather than he did not benefit from great defense. Here’s what I mean.
Over the period 1906-10, the three best NL teams were the Cubs, Pirates, and Giants, with the Cubs ahead by a large margin (on average, the Cubs bested the Pirates by 10 games per year, the Giants by 14). Offensively, the teams were almost equivalent, scoring 4.16, 4.12, and 4.08 runs per game, respectively, but the Cubs were spectacular on defense, allowing just 2.72 runs per game, vs. 3.18 for Pittsburgh and 3.34 for New York. (The team ERAs average 1.98, 2.31, and 2.41.)
However, if you look at ratios of unearned to total runs, the defensive excellence of the Cubs is not so obvious. Over the five year stretch, 29% of Chicago runs allowed were unearned, vs. 28% for the other two teams. The Cubs, in fact, were at the league average of 29%. Of course, given how few runs the Cubs were allowing, 29% of that total was very few unearned runs. Still, on the basis of this number, one could argue that the Cubs’ defensive excellence was, in fact, a little more about pitching than about fielding.
But, in fact, this seems to have been entirely due to Brown. Over those five years, Brown’s runs allowed were a little over 33% unearned. (I think Hartvig has pointed this out before.) How should we interpret this? Who should be held responsible for that high figure, Brown or his fielders? We don’t have game logs to track how these unearned runs came to be, so we have to infer the answer in some other way.
As we all know, Brown had a unique delivery because of his missing finger – his pitches are sometimes said to have behaved like knuckleballs. The chief downside to a knuckleballer, though, is that he often can’t control getting his pitches over the plate. That was clearly not the case with Brown, who was a low-walk, low-WP, and low-HBP pitcher. During his prime he had superb control. But knuckleballs can also behave unusually coming off of the bat because of their unusual spin (or lack of it). Given that Brown had control over his delivery, the most likely reason for what seems to have been a number of errors behind him that was relatively high for those Cub infielders is that the balls in play were tough to field because they behaved oddly.
Now, let’s assume, as I think we should, that the Cub fielders were the best in the league. Are they responsible for the apparently sub-par defensive support Brown received? It stands to reason that any other set of fielders would have done worse, so we can’t assume the Cub fielders screwed up. Is Brown responsible? He was delivering pitches with great control that batters were grossly unable to turn into base hits (not to mention long balls: Brown averaged 1.6 HR per season over this stretch; compare Matty’s 4.0): how is that a defect?
Balls in play off Brown were probably more difficult overall to field than those off other pitchers, but not because of a defect in the pitch: simply because it his pitch was unique. Fielders had less opportunity to master defense against such BIP, and their performance was less successful than their norm, even though it may have been the best possible. I don’t know how to assign responsibility for Brown’s high unearned run ratio, but what does seem to be true is that although Brown may have benefited from having the best defensive players in the league behind him, he did not benefit from particularly successful defense. By league standards, his teammates’ defensive performance behind him was actually pretty bad. That what I mean in saying that although Brown may have benefited from having great defensive players behind him, he did not benefit from great defense; he had to overcome sub-par defense..
Statistically, I don’t think that there’s any way to “accurately” divide up pitcher/fielder credit for BIP in this case, especially without game logs. The situation seems to fall outside the standard parameters for making judgments like these, at last at this remove in time. But we can be aware of this complex situation when assessing claims such as Doom’s, and simply recognize that in this sort of unique situation, even if what Doom is saying is correct on some level, we shouldn’t accept it at face value.
For the 1973 Part 3 election, I’m voting for:
-Manny Ramirez
-Don Sutton
-Luis Tiant
Other top candidates I considered highly (and/or will consider in future rounds):
-Kevin Brown
-Ashburn
-Nettles
-Allen
-Wallace
-Dahlen
-Mordecai Brown
Thanks!
Vote:
Richie Ashburn
Kevin Brown
Bill Dahlen
LONG POST ALERT!!! Since epm thinks it’s best when people advocate for/against people, I’m going to weigh in on an issue I care nothing about, but find utterly baffling: the relative support of Bobby Wallace and Bill Dahlen.
Now, I will not vote for either of these guys. I prefer my COG candidates to be those the BBWAA would seriously have given consideration to, rather than those the Old Timers’ Committee had under their jurisdiction. Obviously, those things were never clearly delineated, but I think those folks who straddled the turn of the century belong to the Old Timers. So I will not vote for either. But IF for some reason I DID change my mind, you know what I would NEVER do? Vote (as most of our esteemed COG voters do) for Bill Dahlen OVER Bobby Wallace. Because it’s clear to me that Wallace was the better player, and I don’t see it as particularly close.
Now, let’s look at some fun old Bill James tools. First Black Ink. It’s easy, because they both stink. Dahlen’s score of 4 (for his one RBI title) is better than Wallace’s 1 (for leading the league in games played), but at that level, it’s an irrelevant number. Similarly, their gray ink scores are WELL below HOF thresholds. Again, Dahlen does better here (96 to 75+5 – I will explain this in a minute), but when neither is ever over 100, it’s hard to take it too seriously. The fact of the matter is, neither is under consideration because he was consistently among the league leaders in offensive stats.
Rather, they are under consideration for two things: #1) long, consistent careers with the bat, and #2) good defense which, when added to solid offensive production, makes for a career which, in sum, can be argued as COG-worthy.
So let’s begin with #1 – long, consistent careers as hitters. Again, let’s turn to Bill James. Besides the Black/Gray Ink tests, James also invented the Hall of Fame Standards and Hall of Fame Monitor. These two numbers can be looked at as reasonable gauges for Hall of Fame worth in the eyes of the voters (at least, it was so 25 years ago when James invented these for The Politics of Glory). The Monitor considers seasons-to-season achievements, while the Standards examine bulk accomplishments over the course of a career. Again, Dahlen laps Wallace. So why do I support Wallace over Dahlen?
First of all, (and you can see this in their WAR calculations), Dahlen played in a MUCH more favorable offensive environment. The James stats cited do NOT adjust for offensive context. But, based on the Runs to Wins calculation on Baseball-Reference, The ratio of R:W for Dahlen was 10.3:1; it was 9.4:1 for Wallace. That’s nearly an entire run per win! Of COURSE Wallace’s stats are slightly depressed, because he played in the more difficult environment – nearly 10% less favorable to offensive players.
Second of all, each of them played in a half-season or more with an OPS+ above 100 in exactly 11 seasons. Yes, Dahlen had the biggest year of the bunch, but that was in 1896 when NL teams were scoring 6 (!!!!) runs per game; Wallace played only 60 games that year (admittedly, he didn’t hit very well in said games, but it’s not even half a season, so he could’ve turned it around). And that gets to another point, which is chronology. Look, I KNOW that people want to compare these guys only to their peers. But here’s the thing: when the distinctions are razor-thin, shouldn’t we consider the quality of those peers? Dahlen and Wallace were only three years apart in age, but those were three really important years. Dahlen’s SEVEN best full seasons via OPS+ were in the 19th century (and two of THOSE were 1891 and 1892, seasons in which the NL was playing professional softball, with pitchers tossing underhand from 40 feet away); of Wallace’s 8 best seasons, only TWO were in the 19th century. Maybe that doesn’t matter to everyone else here, but it matter a LOT to me. By the time the 20th century came around, huge numbers of changes were made to the game, particularly regarding quality of play. Wallace became BETTER as the game became more modern; Dahlen became WORSE as the game came closer to reflecting what we see on MLB fields today.
Their OPSes are 50 points apart, but their OPS+ numbers are only 5 points apart – and again, Wallace was playing in better leagues (yes, Wallace moved to the AL in 1902; but the AL was only vastly inferior it’s first two years; Bill James has argued that they were more similar 1902 onward; certainly the AL in the 00s was better than the NL in the 90s, I would argue). Anyway, even if you wanted to argue just based on the time they were in the same league (1894-1901 NL), you could argue that Dahlen earned 50% more WAR (33.7-22.8) in only 1/3 more playing time (4351 PA-3293). You’d be right. But, of course, Dahlen was already established, whereas Wallace was three years younger, and Wallace was also tried out primarily as a pitcher first. Sure, Dahlen has more WAR (75.2-70.2)… but only if you neglect Wallace’s pitching (6.1 more WAR for Wallace). Suddenly the picture becomes even muddier, as the gap is smaller, but the leader changes… and we have to remember that Wallace had to learn to be a position player at the major league level, rather than just focusing on pitching. Now, we narrow the focus to 1897-1901, when the two were in the same league, playing the infield. Wallace played 16% more, but out-WAR’d Dahlen by 20%.
Finally, we get to big seasons, which I think is a reasonable tie-breaker, if you still think they’re tied at this point. Wallace’s best season was 7.7 WAR to Dahlen’s 7.1; Wallace has two 6-WAR seasons (6.3 and 6.1) to Dahlen’s one (6.1). Each has five seasons in the 5-WAR range, with a .2 WAR advantage to Dahlen, so I think we can call that a wash. And Wallace has four seasons of 4-4.9 WAR to Dahlen’s three. So, seasons of 4+ WAR, Wallace has two more, and the total is 53.7 WAR for Dahlen and 64.2 for Wallace. After that, things tilt decidedly in Dahlen’s favor, but you know what? I don’t really care. COG players don’t get in because they have a whole bunch of 3-WAR seasons (Lou Whitaker aside; and I never voted for him, anyway :P). Players get into the COG because of their excellence.
I know it’s ultimately splitting hairs, and I know we have a lot of Dahlen fans out there. But IF you’re going to vote for one of these ancient guys (and, as a reminder, I have no plans to vote for either of them at any point), consider at least voting for the better of the two players, and throw Bobby Wallace your vote. Thus ends my overlong advocacy for a player whose election I don’t actually support.
Good points, Doom. I too see Wallace as the better player, though not by a lot.
I would add that Wallace has the edge in peak WAR over 5 years, and over 10 years. Also, his defensive prowess in being the first infielder to field and throw in a continuous motion (as opposed to stopping and setting oneself before throwing) was a huge advantage relative to his peers, more especially so in an age of “small ball”.
Great post, Doom. It will take me a while to sort through it all, but I have some quick comments.
First, it’s really hard to get a handle on the dynamics of the HHS voting process: this round, Wallace is languishing with a single vote (mine), while Dahlen is among those in second place with 5. However, last round, Wallace was the one in the second place tie, finishing with seven votes, one more than Dahlen. So I’m not sure it’s true that there’s a lot more support for Dahlen than Wallace. It may just have to do with the timing of the votes coming in.
I’ve been voting for both — you and I disagree about our task vis a vis turn of the last century players; I wouldn’t try to convert you because I understand the logic of your position, and also because it wouldn’t work. When I posted a long analysis of the claims of Dahlen and Wallace to CoG election (on the Round 125 string), I confessed that I didn’t know how to rank the two, and, basically, in previous rounds where I’ve voted only for one the reason has merely been strategic. Your post is the first clear argument I’ve encountered for how to rank these guys, and it’s very welcome. You focus almost exclusively on the offensive side of the comparison (apart from comparing total WAR figures), whereas I spent a lot of my analysis focusing on how these two players stood out from other shortstops of their times, which is where I think Dahlen may emerge as a more important and higher quality force. (It’s an approach that also sees little significance in the low black and gray ink numbers for these two: how relevant would it be for me to object to Ozzie Smith’s Hall election by pointing to much worse ink numbers?)
One point that does seem to me immediately problematic in your analysis is your doubling up on OPS+ and run environments. When you say that Dahlen’s 156 OPS+ in 1896 should be discounted because the offense was exploding, I don’t follow the logic. Whatever the total offense was, Dahlen was still 56% above average, with all adjustments built in to the figure.
I also think there’s a kind of circularity in the way you treat the ages of these two guys. Dahlen was almost four years older than Wallace, so, yes, he has a maturity advantage in the 1890s, which allows you to dismiss Dahlen’s years of clear superiority (plus, you basically say that the 1890s are none of our business anyway). But then you say, “Wallace became BETTER as the game became more modern; Dahlen became WORSE as the game came closer to reflecting what we see on MLB fields today.” What I think you should say in that in the decade of the 1900s, a portion of any growing superiority in Wallace’s numbers over Dahlen’s was precisely the complement to the situation in the 1890s: Dahlen was getting old while Wallace was still in his prime. If youth is Wallace’s excuse in the ’90s, age is Dahlen’s a decade later: it’s not as if Wallace somehow mastered a modern game that Dahlen was incapable of handling. (And to point out a small, related detail, where, I hope, you were being tongue-in-cheek, in Dahlen’s first two years of play, 1891-92, the pitching distance was not 40 feet, it was 55, and pitchers had been throwing overhand since 1884. In that respect, batters had it tougher, not easier, before the 1893 rules change, which helps account for the mid-1890s growth in offense.)
Nevertheless, I think you’re right to stress Wallace’s strengths, including the fact that we should not overlook the fact that he began on a path to becoming a successful pitcher before converting to the infield. A 125 ERA+ in over 400 IP was a real accomplishment, and his total WAR is indeed higher than Dahlen’s (although their WAR figures are so close either way that I would never think of arguing they should be ranked on that basis). I’m going to work through your very rich arguments in detail to see whether they can help me finally settle in my own mind the question of which of these two players should be ranked higher.
FWIW,
WAR, 2B or SS (60% of games played) 1871-1919
1 Honus Wagner 131.0
2 Nap Lajoie…… 107.4
3 George Davis……. 84.7
4 Eddie Collins….. 84.6
5 Bill Dahlen….. 75.2
6 Bobby Wallace 70.2
7 Jack Glasscock 61.3
8 Joe Tinker…… 53.2
9 Bid McPhee…. 52.4
10 Johnny Evers.. 47.7
11 Cupid Childs… 44.3
Collins continued well beyond 1919…. Dahlen didn’t make Cooperstown…but, then again, I guess Fangraphs or whomever didn’t invent this metric until 100 years after Dahlen’s retirement. George Davis was dead 60 years before they put him in Cooperstown. Tinker and Evers? Sounds like a vaudeville team….
A couple quick responses:
1. Thanks for your kind words, epm! Although I have no intention of voting for these fellas, I just love talking baseball!
2. You’re right – I only focused on offense. I intended to focus on defense, too, but the post got long, I got carried away and I, quite frankly, forgot. It was my intention to include Doug’s not below about Wallace innovating the single-motion throw that revolutionized baseball. Dahlen certainly does have the better WARfielding numbers, but… well, those (especially from over a century ago) are often rightly taken with a grain of salt. I don’t think it’s a reason to elevate Dahlen above Wallace, anyway.
3. Re: “doubling up on OPS+ and run environment” there’s a reason I mentioned it, which Inow realize Ishould’ve spelled out. I believe (and I think the numbers bear this out) that OPS+ numbers, by their nature, climb the higher offense climbs. The vast majority of the top-100 season of OPS+ are from the ’20s, ’30s, ’90s, and ’00s. Some of that is the individual players… but even the outlier players seem to come from those eras. I suspect that offensive eras disproportionately benefit better hitters. I don’t think this is a reason to discount OPS+ numbers, but this was an example of advocacy, not just objective analysis, so you’ll have to permit me to lean on something that helps my case. 🙂
4. I think you’re point about age is spot-on. I guess what I’m saying is, Dahlen reached his peak in a less mature (and thus easier) game. Even though Wallace’s offense may not have been as good, I think we have to give him some credit for doing so in a better league. it remains and open questions whether or not Dahlen woudl’ve, had he been younger, able to take as much advantage of the higher quality of play in the 00s. It’s also not as if their peaks are 4 years apart – they’re closer to 10 years apart. So while you’re right that age is SOME of it, it’s not ALL of it. Just something else to consider.
5. Re: their relative levels of support. Yes, they’ve often been the same, and it’s entirely possible the Wallace voters are still coming. But I would ALSO point out that Wallace has only 2 rounds of eligibility stored up, whereas Dahlen has 4. That indicates, to me, a longterm difference in support by the community, regardless of their individual results from a specific round or two.
Finally, yeah – it’s all splitting hairs. They’re ludicrously similar. But, at SOME point, you have to make a distinction. I just wanted to lay out my case for one over the other, and hoped it would inspire some conversation. 🙂
I just wanted to lay out my case for one over the other, and hoped it would inspire some conversation.
You did a great job. I hope you will indeed inspire more members to do this kind of work. But, then, I’m a retired guy, with time on my hands. Most of us can’t afford to get too obsessive (and need to make sure things don’t go overboard!).
Some considerations for Richie Ashburn:
10th most games in CF. 3rd most Putouts (led the league 9 times in 10 years).
Ashburn had seven seasons with more putouts than Willie Mays’ best season.
Did the Phillies have a fly-ball pitching staff? Probably.
But with all the NY press focused on DiMag, Mays, Mantle, and the Duke, certainly this guy was overlooked. Besides, leading the league in singles and walks just doesn’t get the headlines that the long ball gets.
…
Among the best defensive CF ever, rarely missed a game his first 13 years, lead the league in times-on-base 5X, didn’t SO, didn’t GIDP, hit for average, and probably would have stolen more bases in a different era.
okay, D. Doom has convinced me to re-think my approach to the old shortstops.
Vote change:
Ashburn
Kevin Brown
Dahlen
is now:
Richie Ashburn
Kevin Brown
Luis Tiant
M. Brown, Allen, Nettles & Evans, Randolph, Pettitte.
WAR, 51% G @ SS, 1871 – 1950 (Dahlen’s Death)
1 Honus Wagner 131.0
2 George Davis 84.7
3 Bill Dahlen….. 75.2
4 Luke Appling.. 74.5
5 Arky Vaughan 72.9
6 Bobby Wallace 70.2
7 Joe Cronin….. 66.4
8 Jack Glasscock 61.9
9 Lou Boudreau 61.5
10 Joe Sewell…… 53.7
They were all retired , except for Boudreau, at the time of Dahlen’s death in December 1950. If we’e going to take WAR seriously, I suppose that makes Dahlen a serious candidate. Since no one alive probably saw him (or Wallace) play, I would think some sort of objective statistical analysis, like WAR, is all we have.
WAR, 1871-2017, 51% G @ SS
1 Honus Wagner 131.0
2 Cal Ripken….. 95.5
3 George Davis 84.7
4 Robin Yount… 77.0
5 Ozzie Smith… 76.5
6 Bill Dahlen….. 75.2
7 Luke Appling.. 74.5
8 Arky Vaughan 72.9
9 Derek Jeter…. 71.8
10 Alan Trammell 70.4
Current Marlins’ chief saboteur and future 1st ballot HoF’er in 9th position……behind Dahlen
My ballot.
Ramirez
Tiant
Wallace
Reuschel
Randolph
Helton
Secondary ballot only:
Dawson
Lyons
Reuschel
The deadline for vote changes in Circle of Greats Round 127 has now passed. The final deadline for new votes is Sunday, February 18, at 11:59 EST.
Here is an updated tabulation of votes for both ballots to this point:
Primary Ballot
With 16 votes in:
9 – Mordecai Brown*
=================50% (8)
6 – Dick Allen, Manny Ramirez, Luis Tiant
4 – Richie Ashburn*, Kevin Brown, Bill Dahlen, Don Sutton*
=================25% (4)
2 – Ted Simmons, Bobby Wallace
=================10% (2)
1 – Graig Nettles
Voters: Chris C, Jeff, Chris Bodig, T-Bone, JEV, Hub Kid, Jeff Harris, Doom, Richard Chester, epm, Hartvig, Paul E, opal611, Voomo, dr. remulak, Doug
Secondary Ballot
There have been only 14 secondary ballot votes so far.
10 – Dwight Evans
6 – Ken Boyer, Andre Dawson, Ted Lyons
4 – Todd Helton, Willie Randolph, Rick Reuschel
2 – Andy Pettitte
====================10% (2)
Note: Nomar has yet to receive a vote.
Voters: Jeff, Chris Bodig, T-Bone, Hub Kid, JEV, Voomo, Doom, Richard Chester, epm, Hartvig, Paul E, dr. remulak, Doug, nsb
— As always, please let me know if you see an error or missed vote.
I’ve been persuaded by Dr. Doom that perhaps Dahlen is not quite as formidable of a COG candidate as I had previously thought. Plus it gives me an opportunity to acknowledge Manny’s offensive prowess. The PED use and defensive problems don’t make him an ideal candidate, but only Dick Allen can approach his offensive skills among those on the ballot. However, Manny was able to keep it up for an extra 2,400 plate appearances compared to Allen.
Primary:
Kevin Brown
Graig Nettles
Manny Ramirez
Secondary:
Ken Boyer
Andre Dawson
Todd Helton
There have been plenty of compelling discussions on here, and I enjoy reading through all of these comments.
Sticking with my all-small glove guys: Dahlen. Wallace, Ashburn
I still can’t buy Manny because of the PEDS, although on stats I’d put him in. Kevin Brown the same. Thanks again to EPM for laying out the relevant stats.
Main ballot:
Bobby Wallace
Luis Tiant
Dick Allen
Gonna think about the secondary one a bit more.
Hey Doug, I remember a few years ago when the idea of Paige in the CoG first came up, birtelcom suggested that if a write-in, non-eligible candidate were entered, there would be another election, ie. that person would not be counted as a ‘normal’ ballot and we’d have 119 instead of 118 members of the CoG or whatever the number was back then. I have a vague memory of you addressing this, but I’m taking it that since I’ve seen no mention of it we are not going to have an extra round? It just popped into my mind so I thought I’d mention.
Don’t recall that, bells, but I’ll check it out.
Main Ballot:
Manny Ramirez
Kevin Brown
Ted Simmons
Paul E’s post above was constructive. I think what Simmons did as a catcher in terms of production and longevity was rare — rarer than that merits of most others on the ballot. I also appreciated epm’s comment on the closeness in value of the remaining players on the ballot. That made me feel a lot better about how agonizing it has been to vote.
Secondary:
Ken Boyer
Dwight Evans
Andre Dawson
Answer to question #5: Bob Walk in game 1 of the 1980 WS.
Walk, a rookie in 1980, got the win in a 7-6 WS game 1, despite allowing 6 runs, incl. 3 HR, over 7 innings.
Ironically, Walk would go on to be fairly stingy in allowing homers, leading the majors in that regard in 1988, with just 6 HR allowed in over 200 IP. Only two pitchers since have allowed fewer HR in such a season, Joe Magrane the next year, and Greg Maddux in the strike-shortened 1994 season.
Rookies have a 6-5 record with one ND when starting game 1 of the World Series. What is the only World Series with two rookie starters in game 1?
Vote:
Main ballot:
Mordecai Brown
Manny Ramirez
Graig Nettles
Secondary ballot:
Andre Dawson
Rick Reuschel
Andy Pettitte
I still believe Dahlen & Wallace have been overlooked (and glad discussion is turning to them – I stumped for them a few years back when they first hit the ballot and hope they can at last gain momentum) but cannot ignore M. Brown and Ramirez for sheer dominance in their respective eras.
Something I noticed in secondary ballot voting:
If you have only 1 candidate you truly wish to elevate, you are “forced” by the 3 vote rule to cast 2 throw away votes. Since we only have 30 or less voters, 3 votes for any candidate keeps them on the secondary ballot. This would have you unintentionally saving players in secondary ballot slots, preventing future redemption rounds to replenish the ballot unless all but 3 candidates are moved up or totally dropped. Since there is unlikely to be widespread consensus on worthiness at this level (thus a secondary ballot), we would likely continue to reshuffle borderline candidates between the two ballots – since the primary ballot would continue to add new birth years, it may be a very long time (or never) before any redemption candidates see any future opportunity.
Have we created an artificial tier where non-birthyear guys “must” come from? I think over time voters re-think positions and membership fluctuates, and new options to refresh the pool is good. Position players such as Palmeiro/Clarke/B. Bell/R. Smith/Bi. Williams and pitchers such as Coveleski/Cone/Newhouser/Drysdale/McGinnity all merit discussion and have some support (just to name a few) but may not get another shot. If enough good-but-not-great guys are added per birthyear and lurk on the ballots because at least 3 votes are gained each round, redemption will not happen.
I suggest that maybe Doug allow a modification: for the secondary ballot only, allowing 1, 2 or 3 votes. This prevents unintentional “saves” and will promote more turnover. Strategic voting on the primary ballot is fine – they stay in the conversation. Strategic voting on the secondary ballot will still occur, but doing so is by voter choice, not the system.
If tracking secondary balloting in this way is too complicated – or we find despite the above strategic voting avoids whittling down the secondary ballot, a once every 10 round redemption vote to bring 3 new candidates into play (on the secondary ballot)would still seem fair and provide options.
Changing the trigger number on the secondary ballot for redemption rounds to 5 or 6 players remaining may be another way to replenish periodically.
Any thoughts?
I think Dave’s point is very well taken — the sort of thing we might not have anticipated, but once we see how the secondary ballot works, it does seem to have this flaw.
I’d like to suggest a modification of Dave’s final idea for a fix. That would be that each January, before we begin any regular CoG vote rounds that the BBWAA has allowed us to conduct, we have a “secondary ballot redemption round,” the initial post for which would include lists of all primary and secondary ballot holdovers to encourage some comparative thinking and a scan for possible gaps in our previous calculations.
The worst that can happen is that some players are added to the secondary ballot who attract so little enthusiasm that they drop quickly off, while the optimal outcome might be that an overlooked player moves quickly into CoG competition. In addition, beginning with this sort of round might also allow us all to introduce some warm-up thoughts about various players and issues, avoiding the problem of CoG votes beginning to be recorded before the HHS group has really had a chance to begin its annual discussion and search for the focal issues.
Good thought.
Rather than have varying numbers of votes on the ballots, I like epm’s idea of a Redemption round each year to add more names to the Secondary ballot. And then a Secondary ballot election to elevate someone to the Main ballot before whatever COG election rounds there might be.
In voting for Ramirez, Dave Humbert mentioned his troubles with fielding, and I thought I’d do a little research with the B-R Play Index to see just how deep those troubles were in historic terms. I searched on career dWAR, and Ramirez came out with the seventh highest negative total. However, dWAR includes the position penalty for DH, and I was trying to isolate fielding issues, which is different from dWAR issues. So I searched instead on Rfield. In terms of negative Rfield, Derek Jeter laps the field, and I realized that Rfield was a poor measure too, because Jeter’s fielding problems at short and Ramirez’s as a corner outfielder are fundamentally different animals.
So I altered my search to Rfield for players with >51% of games at one of the three non-taxing fielding positions: LF, RF, and 1B. From the list of the top 15 negative career leaders, I subtracted from their total of games played the number of games where they were DH, in order to get at an “Rfield/Game-in-the -field” figure, which I then multiplied by 162. (By changing the parameters in this way, I miss many equally problematic players who showed up “lower” on the straight negative Rfield list [e.g, as a random example, Ben Grieve, at -14,9, but in a much shorter career than the guys on this list], but I think I probably captured a reasonable snapshot of Ramirez’s general rank historically, and life is short — to get this list you have to look up every player’s DH record individually, and that’s quite time consuming.)
Here’s the list of the 15 most Rfield-negative low-skill fielding-position players, all with -89 or worse career Rfield, sorted by Rfield/162-games-in-the-field (the number in parenthesis is their total career Rfield):
1. Danny Tartabull….-19.4 (-120.3)
2. Adam Dunn………. -17.1 (-173.5)
3. Gary Sheffield…….-13.9 (-195.3)
4. Prince Fielder….….-11.9 (-100.0)
5. Jeff Burroughs……-11.8 (-103.8)
6. Michael Cuddyer..-11.5 (-106.7)
7. Greg Luzinski…..…-11.0 (-89.0)
8. Manny Ramirez….-10.6 (-128.6)
9. Dick Allen…………..-10.2 (-109.7)
10. Matt Stairs……….-10.1 (-91.3)
11. Frank Howard……-9.8 (-110.1)
12. Dante Bichette….-9.1 (-90.9)
13. Gary Matthews….-7.6 (-94.1)
14. Miguel Cabrera….-6.9 (-91.0)
15. Dave Winfield..…..-5.8 (-91.0)
Manny is not in the worst group here (Tartabull and Dunn). He’s significantly less problematic than Sheffield. But he is among the all-time leaders among corner outfielders and first basemen in rate of producing negative Rfield (and third in total negative career Rfield). (Note how on this measure Winfield comes out significant;y “less worse” than he might otherwise appear.)
Exciting things happening on the last day of voting: Three-Finger Brown’s once-commanding lead (9 of the first twelve votes; no one else had even five at that point) has shrunk to a single vote over Manny Ramirez. On the secondary ballot, Dwight Evans had nabbed 10 of the first 12 votes (it amuses me that epm and I, who see eye-to-eye on so very little, were the only two Evans skeptics in those first 12 voters). Since then, he’s only gained 1/5, while Andre Dawson has been named on 4/5 to close the gap to two votes. Late voters, it looks like you’ve got some real power this round. No one’s in danger of falling off (everyone is at 3+ votes), so you folks who waited until the end have the choices to make to determine who’s in!
Evans vs. Dawson: I’m not so much a skeptic about Evans; I just can’t find a decisive reason to vote for him over Dawson, whose play I thought was great. Here’s what I see:
a) The career lengths of Evans and Dawson are, for all intents and purposes, identical, so counting stats can be compared.
b) Evans starts with a huge advantage because of the disparity of walks: Evans has 802 more than Dawson.
c) Dawson compensates to a point with a surplus in hits (328).
d) Dawson also has more doubles, triples, and HRs, adding a further 229 advantage in TB (beyond hits).
e) Dawson was the base stealer: if you figure that value at (SB – 2xCS), Dawson generates 136 more bases than Evans.
f) Dawson has 10 fewer GDP, 58 more HBP, 13 more sacrifices.
To this point, I see Evans as still retaining about 5% of the advantage he gained through walks. Still on offense:
g) Evans has somewhat better WPA and WPA/LI rates (35.2/38.8 to 29.8/34.8).
h) Dawson has 207 more RBI
i) Evans does better at park-adjusted RC/G: 6.1 to 5.5 (thanks to Paul E)
All this seems to me to give Evans a slight offensive edge, and, indeed, that’s reflected in his OPS+ advantage, 127 to 119, largely a product of the reduction in outs made due to BB (reduced about 8-9% by HBP and GDP differntials). Dawson’s compensating gains in bases added don’t quite match up. Then on defense:
j) Rfield is almost a dead heat: 70 to 66, Dawson having the slight edge.
k) Dawson gains significantly through Rpos (-65 to -120), due to spending 40% of his time in CF (vs. Evans all in corner spots).
l) Dawson winds up modestly ahead in dWAR: 0.9 to -4.6.
This seems to me about as close to a wash as you can get without doing the laundry. One other comparison makes this seem even more the case to me:
m) Evans leads Dawson in WAR, 66.9 to 64.5. . . . but
n) Dawson closed his career with a series of bad partial seasons; his career WAR at its peak was 66.8, about the same as Evans’.
So as a sort of tie-breaker, I consider the following two comparisons, both in Dawson’s favor:
o) Dawson’s 5-year-peak and 5-best-years WAR figures are far ahead of Evans’: 32.4/33.7 vs. 23.7/28.3
p) Dawson won an MVP and received first-place votes two other years; Evans never received a single first-place MVP vote.
That gives me a vote for Dawson, but by no means do I think this comparison is definitive, nor do I feel as if I’m a skeptic about Evans.
Haha, I didn’t really mean we were “skeptics.” I guess it just surprised me that you and I had something in common that no one else shares. Just goes to show you that different ways of thinking can sometimes lead to the same conclusions. Dawson is my current #4 on the Secondary Ballot, while Evans is my #5.
I think our ways of thinking have a lot in common, Doom. We just stand at different viewpoints. I appreciate that you can make so clear how things look from your standpoint; it broadens my view, even if it doesn’t change my basic orientation.
For the Secondary Ballot, I’m voting for:
-Andre Dawson
-Todd Helton
-Nomar Garciaparra
Thanks!
As we head into the final afternoon/evening of voting, here are the specifics of the situation Doom referred to above:
Primary Ballot
With 21 votes in:
=================50% (11)
10 – Mordecai Brown*
9 – Manny Ramirez
7 – Dick Allen, Luis Tiant
6 – Kevin Brown
=================25% (6)
5 – Richie Ashburn*, Bill Dahlen
4 – Don Sutton*, Bobby Wallace
3 – Graig Nettles, Ted Simmons,
=================10% (3)
Voters: Chris C, Jeff, Chris Bodig, T-Bone, JEV, Hub Kid, Jeff Harris, Doom, Richard Chester, epm, Hartvig, Paul E, opal611, Voomo, dr. remulak, Doug, Andy, Mike L, bells, Josh Davis, Dave Humbert
Secondary Ballot
There have been only 18 secondary ballot votes so far.
11 – Dwight Evans
10 – Andre Dawson
8 – Ken Boyer
6 – Todd Helton, Ted Lyons
5 – Rick Reuschel
4 –Willie Randolph
3 – Andy Pettitte
====================10% (2)
1 – Nomar Garciaparra
Voters: Jeff, Chris Bodig, T-Bone, Hub Kid, JEV, Voomo, Doom, Richard Chester, epm, Hartvig, Paul E, dr. remulak, Doug, nsb, Andy, Josh Davis, Dave Humbert, opal611
As always, please let me know if you spot an error.
Just confirming I did not/will not vote in the redemption round.
Assume you the secondary ballot, Mike. Entirely up to you. Voting or not, your observations always enrich the discussion (Tchaikovsky notwithstanding).
LOL–those were my Dad’s opinions, and did not necessarily represent the opinions of your Classical Music Station, WML.
I have the same results for the Secondary ballot, but a bit different totals for the Main ballot (but the same winner).
9 – M. Brown
8 – Ramirez, Tiant
7 – Allen
6 – Ashburn, Dahlen
5 – K. Brown
4 – Sutton, Wallace
3 – Nettles, Simmons
These are the ballots I’ve recorded.
Please let me know where the differences lie, so we can check those votes.
Doug, Here are the differences I see in our records:
bells: Where you have a vote for Ashburn, I have Allen.
JEV: Where you have votes for Allen, Dahlen, & Tiant, I have K Brown, M Brown, & Ramirez
Brendan Bingham: Not on your list; I have Nettles, Simmons, Tiant
Cursed Clevelander: Not on your list; I have K Brown, Nettles, Ramirez
Let me know what you think.
Thanks epm.. I’ve corrected the votes for bells and JEV, and now have the same totals as you.
I missed the Brendan Bingham and Cursed Clevelander ballots (and Scary Tuna’s) because I didn’t see the Load More Comments button. Adding their ballots, I have the same results as you.
Great. If I weren’t sure multiple people were checking this, I wouldn’t venture to do tabulations, and I’m glad to have provided a back-up for you. I’m sure Doom would have chimed in with his tabulations sooner or later. (I’ve noticed lots of posters miss the “Load More Comments” button, and I’ve gotten lost because of it too.)
secondary ballot:
Reuschel
Lyons
Randolph
Main ballot:
Luis Tiant, Graig Nettles, Ted Simmons
Secondary ballot:
Dwight Evans, Willie Randolph, Rick Reuschel
I’ll stick to my same picks as last round
Primary:
Manny
K. Brown
Nettles
Secondary:
Evans
Dawson
Boyer
Main Ballot: Tiant, Boyer, M. Brown
Secondary Ballot: Dawson, Lyons, Boyer
Scary, Boyer is not on the primary ballot.
Well, we have an unusual outcome to the CoG primary ballot voting this round, according to my unofficial tally. The final vote submitted before midnight appeared to break a first-place tie, but because it did not include the names of three eligible candidates, I have not recorded it as a valid vote. Doug will have to be the final arbiter on this, but the tabulation that I have indicates that we will need to have a runoff between Mordecai Brown and Manny Ramirez.
The secondary ballot voting was close, but Dwight Evans prevailed by a single vote over Andre Dawson and should move on to the primary CoG ballot for Round 128.
Primary Ballot
With 23 valid votes submitted:
=================50% (11)
10 – Mordecai Brown*, Manny Ramirez
8 – Luis Tiant
7 – Dick Allen, Kevin Brown
=================25% (6)
5 – Richie Ashburn*, Bill Dahlen, Graig Nettles
4 – Ted Simmons, Don Sutton*, Bobby Wallace
=================10% (3)
Voters: Chris C, Jeff, Chris Bodig, T-Bone, JEV, Hub Kid, Jeff Harris, Doom, Richard Chester, epm, Hartvig, Paul E, opal611, Voomo, dr. remulak, Doug, Andy, Mike L, bells, Josh Davis, Dave Humbert, Brendan Bingham, Cursed Clevelander
Secondary Ballot
There were 22 secondary ballot votes.
13 – Dwight Evans
12 – Andre Dawson
10 – Ken Boyer
8 – Ted Lyons
7 – Rick Reuschel
6 – Todd Helton, Willie Randolph
3 – Andy Pettitte
====================10% (3)
1 – Nomar Garciaparra
Voters: Jeff, Chris Bodig, T-Bone, Hub Kid, JEV, Voomo, Doom, Richard Chester, epm, Hartvig, Paul E, dr. remulak, Doug, nsb, Andy, Josh Davis, Dave Humbert, opal611, bells, Brendan Bingham, Cursed Clevelander, Scary Tuna
As always, please let me know if you spot an error.
That is awesome. Thank you to Sacry Tuna for giving us an extra week of COG action, chock-filled of arguments about deadball metrics and the ethics of modern-day pharmaceuticals.
I’m sure Scary Tuna’s going to feel bad, but. like fielders, we all make errors. I was responsible for preventing Brown from getting on the ballot a few rounds ago because I miscalculated and changed my vote, thinking it wouldn’t affect him.
Now I’m looking forward to bringing together the arguments that support his election. I hope we’ll have sharp pro and con posts for both candidates and get to learn some new things.
Remembered late last night that I hadn’t voted, and I failed to proofread my ballot before submitting it. Just realized my error now, so at least it didn’t prevent a good night’s sleep. ;o) I meant to vote for Dick Allen in the primary ballot, typed “Boyer” instead, and now it looks like we’ll have a runoff.
How would the ballot look if only Manny or Dick Allen were on it? They have similarities, and I wonder if they are splitting votes. Interesting, also, that 3F went from redemption to leaping over K-Bro and Tiant.
Perhaps a bit of “shiny new toy” is happening? Some of our holdovers have seemingly been on the ballot forever – Dr. Doom and I have probably voted for Kevin Brown enough times that he’ll eventually get some electoral votes in our respective states. So I can’t blame anybody if they’re a bit fatigued by some of our holdovers.
I think this is true, which is why I decided not to cast a strategic vote for Ashburn — a change of status could attract attention. But Mordecai has been around the block many times before; I think he’s less a shiny new toy than a candidate who returned after the Circle’s boundary had expanded beyond his point of excellence. (The good Dr. will not agree.)