The HOF does not recognize the leading HR hitter, the career hits leader, many of the top 10 HR hitters so what, these players never played? Let’s e real, MLB knew players were taking steroids and did nothing. So articles like this might be interesting as but who care who is inducted into what has become a bogus yearly event.
I agree, even Rose, it's not like he bet against his team, that would be different, but I can see why people don't want to put him in the HoF. You can always say Ichiro is the all time hits leader, if you count Japan.
> it's not like he bet against his team, that would be different
its not different, and still destroys the integrity of the game unless he literally bet the same amount on every single game he played. Rose would have an incentive to purposefully play poorly in games he didn't bet on so that he would get better odds/value to bet on the games that he did.
We can't know if Rose did this or not. It probably wasn't some conscious conspiracy (I'm gonna play bad this game so I get good odds next game), but also probably did affect Rose's decisions on the games he bet, "i.e. I feel better today about my game" or "the odds are better today so I'll bet" (possibly because he played worse in past games).
"Just betting on your team" still absolutely leaves open the door for destroying the integrity, and I don't think the ambiguity of whether it ever did or not (or if it did, how much is acceptable) should be considered instead of being immediately disqualifiable.
I really appreciate Nate’s approach to the sportsmanship issue. There’s a lot of scapegoating and moral high horse riding around PED use. It shouldn’t be condoned and justifies some demerits but it cannot be disqualifying. There’s also the question of post-career behavior or infractions that occurred during a player’s career but only show up later. When they occur or are discovered creates a double standard: no one is likely to be kicked out of the HOF for having been found after election to be guilty of most of the things that kept other players out.
I paused and decided to respond because I saw angleshooting in your post:
Angleshooting is 'not technically' cheating, but it's a lot of asshole behavior meant to just distract and confuse people. I'll warn you, you try to pull the "I didn't fold" or "Pushing my chips out like that wasn't a actual raise" to a dealer where I live, and you will find yourself effectively banned from any table of any serious stakes. Argue about that, they'll toss you out for causing the scene.
I believe we had a discussion on another post about why Casinos were starting to curtail access to live games with whales and the big fish, and angleshooting is one of several culprits.
Now, I say this as someone who was guilty of the blind bluff on occasion, when the game's gotten too stuffy for me or as a flex or because I want to give a friend a shot at a come back, but since it's started to become associated with angleshooting I've stopped doing so as a matter of etiquette and because I like having the pull to go to the medium-big games on occasion.
But you gotta respect that all the players are there to play poker and *have some level of fun as they lose their money.* If you drive away the big fish and the players the big fish like to play with, *and you don't bring the equivalent amount of money to the rake*, then you won't be welcome.
Thanks for the reply! Yeah, folding or raising and then trying to deny it seems to me to be very much cheating and in violation of the rules, not even angleshooting. So I'm confused - what's the asshole behavior that's not cheating?
Blind bluff, meaning raising without looking at your cards? I don't see the problem with that. Unless you secretly did look at your cards.
Sorry, post *about* angleshooting, wasn't clear, your post was 100% fine.
Betting and raising and just not looking at a hand period. The issue is that people usually sneak a peak at the cards and then pretend they didn't.
But a lot of angleshooting real boils down to bluffing in such a way that you can walk back your bluff or effectively shifting your bidding by doing a 'plausibly deniable' motion.
My opinion, it's cheating. But it's not QUITE to the level, as a good dealer will state what your action out loud in that case and force you to play the game. "If you were really holding, you should have corrected the dealer when he said 'fold'." And it's a common enough mistake among green players who fidget that you don't want to kick people out over these things. So, there's that.
To answer the Schilling question, he fell off the BBWAA ballot after using up all 10 years of his eligibility without getting elected. It was a cluster-mess almost entirely of his own making, and while it started with politics, antagonizing journalists (who are the people who vote for the HOF) was what killed his chances of regular election. He'll have to wait for an 'era committee' to get in, and he probably will someday. I hope he does; i don't agree with his politics, and am not a fan of jokes about lynching journalists but Schilling's a definite Hall of Famer for me.
Unhelpfully for short answers, the Hall changes the rules from time to time. Yes, it is now 10 years maximum eligibility, and if a player doesn't ger voted in after 10, they fall off of the ballot. Every few years there is a small committee made up of a small number of players and general managers etc. that votes on a set of players who didn't get in the regular way. The most recent one, the Classic Baseball era committee, voted Dick Allen and Dave Parker into the Hall in December.
Well, there was a "Golden Days" committee or some such for a while in the recent iterations. For most of the existence of the HOF, there was a single Veterans' Committee, but the HOF has tinkered with its structure a lot in recent decades. From 2022 there have been three committees, Classic Baseball (before 1980), and two separate Contemporary Baseball committees, one for players and one for managers, executives, et.
I am having this argument in Joe Sheehan’s slack channel. Way too much emphasis is being placed on Andruw Jones’s dWAR from the 90s like it is Gold Standard Value , when the calculation for dWAR in the 90s is pretty different from present day dWAR calculation.
I wrote a whole sarcasm loaded post here commenting on all the ways that baseball stats have had to be adjusted decade by decade, and how they are "all the same!"
Then I remembered that this is the internet, where all sarcasm is lost, deleted that post, and put this one up instead to say that comparing any stats older than a decade is a risky business in the game of baseball.
Will part 2 ever actually come out, or will it be like part 3 of the Kamala Harris campaign autopsy, promised on December 6th to be coming "next week"?
Maybe for Nate! But in that case, why promise a part 3 in the first place? I mean, on a hobby blog that's one thing, but charging money complicates everything, and he hasn't even addressed my question in the past when I've asked it - pretty crummy!
"Curt Schilling (no longer on the ballot), whose main crime was just having some, uh, inelegantly stated right-wing political opinions?"
I think this misstates the situation. Schilling could have been a first-ballot selection by either sabermetric or traditional criteria, and certainly deserved more than 221 out of 567 ballots his first year. Moreover he should have increased his second year rather than falling to 167 out of 571. He came closest in 2021 with 285 out of 401 ballots.
Back in 2013 when Schilling first came up, right-wing politics (common among MLB players) was nowhere near as big a deal as later. Being a loudmouth never helped, but that was not Schilling's big sin. Schilling was hated by baseball writers of the 1990s because he came out strongly against PEDs before it was fashionable, and complained justly that writers who had covered up and even celebrated PEDs were now punishing players with holier-than-thou zeal, while enshrining the managers and league officials who were the real scandal.
I think it was those writers who cost Schilling early enshrinement. By 2021 with many of them gone, replaced by more politicized writers without the 1990s grudge, he almost made it. Sure, he would have made 75% in 2021 without his big-mouth politics, but that was a loss of maybe 10% the votes you might expect, while in 2013 and 2014 he got 30% or 40% less than expected.
The major steroid scandal should have been coaches, managers and league officials pressuring players to take PEDs, and rewarding them for it, and covering it up. Yes, and writers too. These people were old enough to know better and weren't risking their own bodies. It's hard to blame young, highly competitive players, trying to retain their livelihoods and recover from injuries; especially with both rules and laws often unclear, and many not knowing exactly what they were taking.
I can also blame the Bonds and Clemens who were not protecting livelihoods but inflating great accomplishments to even more greatness--and who slandered truth tellers and played the martyr in stomach-turning fashion. But I'd ding them for dishonorable off-field conduct. For cheating I'd just adjust their stats downward and see if they still qualify (both do).
Most baseball journalists do not understand analytics, but they have some appreciation that it's an effective tool. WAR gives them a one-size fits all tool that they can use without having to give it a lot of thought. WAR is a useful tool, but then one needs more analysis to see where the value for a particular player comes from, and Nate's example shows that.
I'm re-reading the 2nd edition of Bill James' Historical Abstract. In some ways, it is great, but I miss the explicit differentiation that he provided between peak and career value that he provided in the 1st edition. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows that methodologies change to answer different questions, and that book applies well here.
I like Nate's political posts, but I also like the sports posts.
Thanks for writing this, even if I completely disagree with you. This topic is a pet peeve of mine. I absolutely hate the current process. Sportswriters are way too biased, and they have way too much power given to them by giving them the keys to the Hall. We spend way too much time talking about it, and I'm convinced this is a conspiracy of the sportswriters to give them something to write about before spring training.
Making a 50.0 WAR (I call it "The Roy Oswalt Line"), makes a lot of sense. You would need an exception process to allow for shortened careers (Sandy Koufax) and relief pitchers. Torii Hunter is in and Bernie Williams isn't, it doesn't matter which one played for the Yankees. We could celebrate when Andrew McCutcheon qualifies sometime this season before he retires. That would be better than waiting five years to find out what some sweaty beat writer in Buffalo thinks about his career and assesses his moral character. It's not Heaven, by the way, it's a tourist trap in the middle of nowhere we go to celebrate guys who played a game. Let Roger Clemens burn in hell if he fails to repent, but he was a really good baseball player whether or not he juiced and/or lied about it. Pete Rose not being there is just weird. It certainly was not worthy of a forty-year debate. Again, fodder for countless sports columns.
I really thought Nate Silver, of all people, would push for using the numbers over buying into the easy content conspiracy. Sigh.
idk if you don't remember a guy playing baseball after 5 years of him not being around, doesn't that contribute at least a little to whether he should be in the hall of "fame"
As Nate says in notes, I believe WAR distorts defensive value, as the two models use completely different and sometimes contrasting sub-models for evaluating Defense. Andruw Jones regularly took multiple runs off the board in ATL and early NYY years. Yeah a poor career tail but absolutely a game changer in his 7-10 year prime.
And GG is problematic, as none other than notoriously poor RF Juan Soto was nominated for one this year. I guess the metric was number of balls hit over fielder head.
He was an undeniably great great player with those Mets teams. Waino’s bender was just that much better that night, esp strike 3 which you could argue was as perfect a pitch as has been thrown in such a high pressure situation.
Beltran should definitely be in and the fact that MetFan is stuck on this one AB hurts his overall HOF case.
“Let's take the example of two hypocritical players:”
hypoTHEtical, surely.
Yikes, fixed. We're batting 1.000 on typos so far in the new year.
The HOF does not recognize the leading HR hitter, the career hits leader, many of the top 10 HR hitters so what, these players never played? Let’s e real, MLB knew players were taking steroids and did nothing. So articles like this might be interesting as but who care who is inducted into what has become a bogus yearly event.
I agree, even Rose, it's not like he bet against his team, that would be different, but I can see why people don't want to put him in the HoF. You can always say Ichiro is the all time hits leader, if you count Japan.
> it's not like he bet against his team, that would be different
its not different, and still destroys the integrity of the game unless he literally bet the same amount on every single game he played. Rose would have an incentive to purposefully play poorly in games he didn't bet on so that he would get better odds/value to bet on the games that he did.
We can't know if Rose did this or not. It probably wasn't some conscious conspiracy (I'm gonna play bad this game so I get good odds next game), but also probably did affect Rose's decisions on the games he bet, "i.e. I feel better today about my game" or "the odds are better today so I'll bet" (possibly because he played worse in past games).
"Just betting on your team" still absolutely leaves open the door for destroying the integrity, and I don't think the ambiguity of whether it ever did or not (or if it did, how much is acceptable) should be considered instead of being immediately disqualifiable.
I really appreciate Nate’s approach to the sportsmanship issue. There’s a lot of scapegoating and moral high horse riding around PED use. It shouldn’t be condoned and justifies some demerits but it cannot be disqualifying. There’s also the question of post-career behavior or infractions that occurred during a player’s career but only show up later. When they occur or are discovered creates a double standard: no one is likely to be kicked out of the HOF for having been found after election to be guilty of most of the things that kept other players out.
Let me be "THAT frickin' Braves fan" and ask where Dale Murphy fits into this conversation.
I love this post and I'm not even much of a sports fan!
A few questions -
* What's the deal with angleshooting in poker? How can you violate the spirit of the game in poker?
* Why shouldn't SuperMoyer or even regular Moyer be Hall of Famers?
* And what's up with Schilling? Was he left off ballots for his political views? Why isn't he on the ballots and will he come back?
I paused and decided to respond because I saw angleshooting in your post:
Angleshooting is 'not technically' cheating, but it's a lot of asshole behavior meant to just distract and confuse people. I'll warn you, you try to pull the "I didn't fold" or "Pushing my chips out like that wasn't a actual raise" to a dealer where I live, and you will find yourself effectively banned from any table of any serious stakes. Argue about that, they'll toss you out for causing the scene.
I believe we had a discussion on another post about why Casinos were starting to curtail access to live games with whales and the big fish, and angleshooting is one of several culprits.
Now, I say this as someone who was guilty of the blind bluff on occasion, when the game's gotten too stuffy for me or as a flex or because I want to give a friend a shot at a come back, but since it's started to become associated with angleshooting I've stopped doing so as a matter of etiquette and because I like having the pull to go to the medium-big games on occasion.
But you gotta respect that all the players are there to play poker and *have some level of fun as they lose their money.* If you drive away the big fish and the players the big fish like to play with, *and you don't bring the equivalent amount of money to the rake*, then you won't be welcome.
Thanks for the reply! Yeah, folding or raising and then trying to deny it seems to me to be very much cheating and in violation of the rules, not even angleshooting. So I'm confused - what's the asshole behavior that's not cheating?
Blind bluff, meaning raising without looking at your cards? I don't see the problem with that. Unless you secretly did look at your cards.
And how was my post angleshooting?
Sorry, post *about* angleshooting, wasn't clear, your post was 100% fine.
Betting and raising and just not looking at a hand period. The issue is that people usually sneak a peak at the cards and then pretend they didn't.
But a lot of angleshooting real boils down to bluffing in such a way that you can walk back your bluff or effectively shifting your bidding by doing a 'plausibly deniable' motion.
My opinion, it's cheating. But it's not QUITE to the level, as a good dealer will state what your action out loud in that case and force you to play the game. "If you were really holding, you should have corrected the dealer when he said 'fold'." And it's a common enough mistake among green players who fidget that you don't want to kick people out over these things. So, there's that.
To answer the Schilling question, he fell off the BBWAA ballot after using up all 10 years of his eligibility without getting elected. It was a cluster-mess almost entirely of his own making, and while it started with politics, antagonizing journalists (who are the people who vote for the HOF) was what killed his chances of regular election. He'll have to wait for an 'era committee' to get in, and he probably will someday. I hope he does; i don't agree with his politics, and am not a fan of jokes about lynching journalists but Schilling's a definite Hall of Famer for me.
How does that work? You only have 10 years of eligibility after you stop playing? That's so sad.
What are the era committees?
Unhelpfully for short answers, the Hall changes the rules from time to time. Yes, it is now 10 years maximum eligibility, and if a player doesn't ger voted in after 10, they fall off of the ballot. Every few years there is a small committee made up of a small number of players and general managers etc. that votes on a set of players who didn't get in the regular way. The most recent one, the Classic Baseball era committee, voted Dick Allen and Dave Parker into the Hall in December.
Interesting. So does the era committee restrict itself to a certain time period? When was the Classic era? What's next, the Romantic era?
Well, there was a "Golden Days" committee or some such for a while in the recent iterations. For most of the existence of the HOF, there was a single Veterans' Committee, but the HOF has tinkered with its structure a lot in recent decades. From 2022 there have been three committees, Classic Baseball (before 1980), and two separate Contemporary Baseball committees, one for players and one for managers, executives, et.
I am having this argument in Joe Sheehan’s slack channel. Way too much emphasis is being placed on Andruw Jones’s dWAR from the 90s like it is Gold Standard Value , when the calculation for dWAR in the 90s is pretty different from present day dWAR calculation.
I wrote a whole sarcasm loaded post here commenting on all the ways that baseball stats have had to be adjusted decade by decade, and how they are "all the same!"
Then I remembered that this is the internet, where all sarcasm is lost, deleted that post, and put this one up instead to say that comparing any stats older than a decade is a risky business in the game of baseball.
Will part 2 ever actually come out, or will it be like part 3 of the Kamala Harris campaign autopsy, promised on December 6th to be coming "next week"?
Turns out KamalaKrash III not as compelling as HOF analysis.
Maybe for Nate! But in that case, why promise a part 3 in the first place? I mean, on a hobby blog that's one thing, but charging money complicates everything, and he hasn't even addressed my question in the past when I've asked it - pretty crummy!
Relax. He'll get to it when he gets to it.
Happy January 6 … it is a day of love!
Free the Jan 6 hostages!
"Curt Schilling (no longer on the ballot), whose main crime was just having some, uh, inelegantly stated right-wing political opinions?"
I think this misstates the situation. Schilling could have been a first-ballot selection by either sabermetric or traditional criteria, and certainly deserved more than 221 out of 567 ballots his first year. Moreover he should have increased his second year rather than falling to 167 out of 571. He came closest in 2021 with 285 out of 401 ballots.
Back in 2013 when Schilling first came up, right-wing politics (common among MLB players) was nowhere near as big a deal as later. Being a loudmouth never helped, but that was not Schilling's big sin. Schilling was hated by baseball writers of the 1990s because he came out strongly against PEDs before it was fashionable, and complained justly that writers who had covered up and even celebrated PEDs were now punishing players with holier-than-thou zeal, while enshrining the managers and league officials who were the real scandal.
I think it was those writers who cost Schilling early enshrinement. By 2021 with many of them gone, replaced by more politicized writers without the 1990s grudge, he almost made it. Sure, he would have made 75% in 2021 without his big-mouth politics, but that was a loss of maybe 10% the votes you might expect, while in 2013 and 2014 he got 30% or 40% less than expected.
The major steroid scandal should have been coaches, managers and league officials pressuring players to take PEDs, and rewarding them for it, and covering it up. Yes, and writers too. These people were old enough to know better and weren't risking their own bodies. It's hard to blame young, highly competitive players, trying to retain their livelihoods and recover from injuries; especially with both rules and laws often unclear, and many not knowing exactly what they were taking.
I can also blame the Bonds and Clemens who were not protecting livelihoods but inflating great accomplishments to even more greatness--and who slandered truth tellers and played the martyr in stomach-turning fashion. But I'd ding them for dishonorable off-field conduct. For cheating I'd just adjust their stats downward and see if they still qualify (both do).
Curt Schilling also publicly outed former teammate Tim Wakefield as dying and defrauded Rhode Island taxpayers out of millions.
Most baseball journalists do not understand analytics, but they have some appreciation that it's an effective tool. WAR gives them a one-size fits all tool that they can use without having to give it a lot of thought. WAR is a useful tool, but then one needs more analysis to see where the value for a particular player comes from, and Nate's example shows that.
I'm re-reading the 2nd edition of Bill James' Historical Abstract. In some ways, it is great, but I miss the explicit differentiation that he provided between peak and career value that he provided in the 1st edition. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows that methodologies change to answer different questions, and that book applies well here.
I like Nate's political posts, but I also like the sports posts.
Thanks for writing this, even if I completely disagree with you. This topic is a pet peeve of mine. I absolutely hate the current process. Sportswriters are way too biased, and they have way too much power given to them by giving them the keys to the Hall. We spend way too much time talking about it, and I'm convinced this is a conspiracy of the sportswriters to give them something to write about before spring training.
Just browse down the all-time WAR rankings:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/WAR_career.shtml
Making a 50.0 WAR (I call it "The Roy Oswalt Line"), makes a lot of sense. You would need an exception process to allow for shortened careers (Sandy Koufax) and relief pitchers. Torii Hunter is in and Bernie Williams isn't, it doesn't matter which one played for the Yankees. We could celebrate when Andrew McCutcheon qualifies sometime this season before he retires. That would be better than waiting five years to find out what some sweaty beat writer in Buffalo thinks about his career and assesses his moral character. It's not Heaven, by the way, it's a tourist trap in the middle of nowhere we go to celebrate guys who played a game. Let Roger Clemens burn in hell if he fails to repent, but he was a really good baseball player whether or not he juiced and/or lied about it. Pete Rose not being there is just weird. It certainly was not worthy of a forty-year debate. Again, fodder for countless sports columns.
I really thought Nate Silver, of all people, would push for using the numbers over buying into the easy content conspiracy. Sigh.
Nate knows when the numbers are not only somewhat subjective, but unrepresentative of everything we care about.
WAR isn't everything. The intangibles matter too.
How do you feel about someone who unquestionably cheated? I'm thinking of Shoeless Joe Jackson for instance.
idk if you don't remember a guy playing baseball after 5 years of him not being around, doesn't that contribute at least a little to whether he should be in the hall of "fame"
As Nate says in notes, I believe WAR distorts defensive value, as the two models use completely different and sometimes contrasting sub-models for evaluating Defense. Andruw Jones regularly took multiple runs off the board in ATL and early NYY years. Yeah a poor career tail but absolutely a game changer in his 7-10 year prime.
And GG is problematic, as none other than notoriously poor RF Juan Soto was nominated for one this year. I guess the metric was number of balls hit over fielder head.
Forget the sign stealing, how much do you dock Beltran for striking out looking on 3 pitches with the bases loaded to end Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS?
Signed, bitter Mets fan.
He was an undeniably great great player with those Mets teams. Waino’s bender was just that much better that night, esp strike 3 which you could argue was as perfect a pitch as has been thrown in such a high pressure situation.
Beltran should definitely be in and the fact that MetFan is stuck on this one AB hurts his overall HOF case.
Nate: Despite being a lifelong baseball fan — and a former professional baseball…
Me: PLAYER?!?
Nate: …analyst and writer
Nate - Please be sure to mention/include where Pete Rose would fit in Part 2. Thanks!