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December 12, 2005

The Class of 2006

The Hitters

by Jay Jaffe

It's that time of year again. Snow is on the ground, the hot stove has been lit, Manny Ramirez is on the trading block, and Hall of Fame ballots have been mailed out. For the third year in a row, I'm examining the Hall ballot through the lens of our Davenport Translated player cards via the very self-consciously named JAWS (JAffe WARP Score) system. The idea is to use a sabermetric approach to identify candidates on the Hall ballot who are as good or better than the average Hall of Famer at their position. By promoting those players for election, we can avoid further diluting the quality of the Hall's membership.

Clay Davenport's Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) figures make an ideal tool for this endeavor because they normalize all performance records in major-league history to the same scoring environment, adjusting for park effects, quality of competition and length of schedule. All pitchers, hitters and fielders are thus rated above or below one consistent replacement level, making cross-era comparisons a breeze. Though non-statistical considerations--awards, championships, postseason performance--shouldn't be left by the wayside in weighing a player's Hall of Fame case, they're not the focus here.

Election to the Hall of Fame requires a player to perform both at a very high level and for a long time, so it's inappropriate to rely simply on career WARP (which for this exercise refers exclusively to the adjusted-for-all-time version, WARP3). In past years I identified each player's peak value by his best five consecutive seasons, with allowances made for seasons lost to war or injury. That choice was an admittedly arbitrary one, and for the 2006 ballot I've revised the methodology to instead use each player's best seven seasons without concern as to whether they're consecutive or not. It's a subtle change that doesn't have a huge impact, but it does require less manual labor to determine the injury and war exceptions, a welcome development from where I sit. Effectively, we're double-counting more of a player's best seasons, but given what we know about pennants added and the premium value of star talent, individual greatness can have a nonlinear effect on a team's results both in the standings and on the bottom line.

The career and peak WARP totals for each Hall of Famer and candidate on the ballot are tabulated and then averaged [(Career WARP + Peak WARP) / 2] to come up with a JAWS score. JAWS averages for the enshrined are calculated at each position to provide a baseline for comparison. Here I've made one further change to the methodology. Browsing through the Hall of Famers' JAWS totals, it's crystal clear that some players--particularly those elected by the Veterans Committee--were downright awful choices; their JAWS totals wind up being about 1/3 of those by the top players at the position. I simply decided to drop the lowest score at each position before calculating its average, effectively raising the bar by about two wins across the board. Having dropped eight out of 136 hitters, the equivalent would be to drop 3.4 pitchers out of 58; I stretched that to four. Nobody will miss them but their mothers.

It should be noted that my oversimplification of career and peak into One Great Number isn't meant to obscure the components which go into that figure, nor should it be taken as the end-all rating system for these players. We're looking for patterns to help determine whether a player belongs in the Hall or doesn't and roughly where he fits. Though this piece is founded on the sabermetric credentials of Hall of Fame candidates, I've also taken the trouble to wrangle together traditional stat lines for each one, including All-Star (AS), MVP and Gold Glove (GG) awards as well as the hoary but somewhat useful Bill James Hall of Fame Monitor (HOFM) scores.

It should also be noted that I simply followed the Hall's system of classifying a player by the position he appeared at the most. Thus Willie Stargell is classified as a left fielder, and all of his numbers count towards establishing the standards at left field, even though he spent the latter half of his career at first base. This is something of an inevitability within such a system, but if the alternative is going nuts resolving the Paul Molitors and Harmon Killebrews into fragmentary careers at numerous positions, we'll never get anywhere.