Throughout the winter months, this site has been primarily devoted to history.  We’ve dissected Hall of Fame cases, debated the relative merits of Circle of Greats candidates, and mulled over the value of the stats we use to measure value.  With meaningful baseball on the docket for tomorrow, let’s get back to the present.

Thirty men will take the mound in their teams’ first tilts of 2013, each representing said team’s greatest hope.  Someday we’ll dissect the Hall cases of eight to twelve of these guys, making sure to properly adjust for parks and eras and defenses.  But tomorrow is not about objective analysis and advanced metrics- it’s about baseball.  Let’s celebrate (after the jump) by slicing and dicing the 30 opening day starters by their rankings in a few categories, some more meaningful than others.

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It’s pretty obvious that there was a lot of talent at the top of the 2013 Hall of Fame ballot.  With Kenny Lofton, and to a lesser extent, David Wells, failing to garner the five percent needed to see another ballot, it was one of the deeper ballots in recent memory as well.  The 2014 ballot drops those two, but adds Greg Maddux, Frank Thomas, Tom Glavine, and a handful of viable candidates for whom voters may struggle to find room in a year with so much talent on the bill.

The first Hall of Fame ballot, in 1936, was obviously top-heavy and deep as well, naming not only inductees Ruth, Cobb, Wagner, Johnson, and Mathewson, but snubs like Cy Young, Tris Speaker, Nap Lajoie, and the still-active Lou Gehrig.  The interceding years cycled through ballots with several obvious Hall of Famers and those on which Bruce Sutter looked like the best choice, as various Veterans Committees were tasked with clearing out ballot backlogs and did so to various degrees.

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Soon after I posted my piece about the Hall of Could’ve Been, commenters started naming players who fit the title of the Hall better than most of the players I included.  Herb Score, Tony Conigliaro, Dickie Thon, J.R. Richard, Pete Reiser, and many other players had practically unlimited potential, only to see their careers derailed, usually by injury.  The two sets of criteria I established put the spotlight on a few players who could have been much more than they were and a few who actually did achieve greatness, but who just happened to have the right mix of single-season and career WAR to make the cut.

The players I listed may fit better in the Hall of Peak Value than in the Hall of Could’ve Been.

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Everyone with an opinion about the Hall of Fame falls somewhere on the continuum of peak value vs. longevity.  A player can’t be a Hall of Famer if he was never among the best players in the game, or at least those at his position.  Similarly, a player who dominates for a year or two and then fades into obscurity isn’t likely to garner much support from Hall voters or fans (though past Veterans Committees have felt differently).  But we all put different emphases on peak vs. longevity.

To me, some of the most interesting baseball careers are those of players who do achieve true greatness for a short time, only to burn out or fade away.  Following are two possible rosters of the Hall of Could’ve Been- lists of players who had multiple MVP-type seasons, but didn’t sustain their peaks long enough to be obvious Hall of Famers.

First, all retired players with at least three seasons since 1901 with 7 or more WAR (per fangraphs), but fewer than 60 career WAR.  A 7-WAR season generally puts a player in the MVP conversation, while 60 career Wins are typically enough to put a player in the Hall of Fame. Continue reading →

This is an attempt at my first post at High Heat Stats without any baseball stats.  Rather than digging through WAR leaders, I’d like to take a moment to tackle a prejudice that irks me too often in sports arguments.  Yesterday, I read this Sports on Earth piece by Jonathan Bernhardt, which explains why Barry Bonds was the best baseball player ever.  A comment in response to the piece included this gem:

“…to argue that Bonds is better than Mays is, well, simply ignorant, something that I will ascribe to the writer’s youth”.

No, what’s “simply ignorant” is dismissing another’s opinion without any defense of one’s own argument other than an age difference.  Is there a sorrier phrase in the English language than “back in my day…”?

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About a month ago, Doug gave us an accounting of the best players at each position who never played in a World Series.  The list included a Hall of Famer or Hall of Fame-worthy player at every position except catcher, where Jason Kendall and his 38.3 WAR took the honor.  Doug noted in the comments that Joe Torre never won a Series as a player, and was far better than Kendall, but Torre played more than half his career at positions other than catcher.

It probably doesn’t mean much beyond coincidence that no superstar catcher has ever gone a whole career without winning a World Series, but it leads one to suspect that a team with a great catcher might be better equipped to win a title than a team with a superstar at another position.  I certainly wouldn’t be the first to posit this, as many writers before me have trumpeted the importance of a catcher as an on-field leader, manager of pitchers, influencer of umpires, and a stifler of baserunners who gets to bat every couple of innings too.  Both keepers of WAR admit that catcher defense is an area of weakness, and that there may be things catchers do on the field that show up in neither the box score nor the advanced metrics.

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The Baseball Writers Association of America, whose contract with Major League Baseball references as many third-party transactions with Satan as Fox’s World Series contract and the liner notes to a Robert Johnson collection combined, has declared its intentions to make future baseball award votes more transparent than in the past.

Sure enough, the BBWAA released all individual ballots for last night’s Rookie of the Year voting.  While it seems like transparency can only help to legitimize a process that has been under scrutiny longer than Strom Thurmond’s voting record, a glance at the RoY voting suggests that we may be in for some trouble.  See why after the jump.

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With the Giants’ impressive sweep of the 2012 World Series, the National League claimed its third straight championship.  The senior circuit has won each of the last three All-Star Games, affording its membership home field advantage in all three World Series.  They’ve then vanquished their cross-newspaper rivals each time, only once playing enough games to render that advantage meaningful.  That’s 15 wins and four losses for the small-ballers when it counts.

The only argument against the Nationals’ dominance is those pesky interleague games in the regular season, of which the burly sluggers have won 53.8% (407-349) since 2010.  The message is clear: the American League is assembling the talent to compete its double-switching counterparts, but the junior circuit lacks the grit, hustle, and determination to win when it matters.

I recommend that the AL trade for Marco Scutaro this offseason.  And see if they can get David Eckstein back.

Even before the addition of the second Wild Card, baseball’s postseason was not structured to reward the league’s best team with a championship.  It is the nature of baseball that a 162-game season says far more about a team’s abilities than a best-of- five or best-of-seven (or one-game!) series.  Most of the teams who have recently won championships- most notably the 2006 and 2011 Cardinals- have little claim to the title of Best Team in Baseball other than the rings they wear.

One convenient narrative to describe the 2012 postseason to-date is that four up-and-coming teams, whose preseason expectations varied from last place to fringe contenders, were exiled by four usual suspects, each of whom has played in a League Championship Series in the past two seasons.  If this is true, why does it feel like all of the good teams have been knocked out of the playoffs, leaving two weeks to determine which mediocre team can take advantage of bracket chaos and back into a championship?

Who were the best teams in Major League Baseball in 2012?  We could answer this question a number of ways.  Find out after the jump.

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Perhaps the most fascinating of this year’s award debates is the National League Cy Young race. Johnny Cueto, RA Dickey, Gio Gonzalez, and Clayton Kershaw all have compelling cases, and if voters are looking for dominance over accumulated value, Ar

oldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel, Kris Medlen, and Stephen Strasburg are worth discussing as well.

A quick look at fangraphs’ pitching WAR leaderboard suggests that Cliff Lee may have a place in this conversation as well. Lee ranks third in fWAR, just .6 wins behind Kershaw and .5 behind Gonzalez. Baseball-reference ranks Lee eighth, bunched up with five other pitchers behind Kershaw, Cueto, and Dickey at the top. After the jump, I’ll examine 12 candidates based on some key numbers.

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