December 13, 2006

The Class of 2007

The Hitters, Part One

by Jay Jaffe

Cue the JAWS theme. We've known this day was coming for years, the day when the first of baseball's steroid-fueled sluggers would reach the Hall of Fame ballot, when claims to immortality would clash with charges of immorality. With Jose Canseco and the late Ken Caminiti on the ballot for the first time, we've got the juiced era's canaries in the coalmine, two outspoken players who broke the code of the locker room and admitted to their own usage of performance-enhancing drugs while offering chilling estimates of their ubiquity. In Mark McGwire, we have the most widely-suspected player this side of Barry Bonds, one whose thrilling accomplishments may be tarnished by the means he used to achieve them, and whose candidacy may serve as a cautionary tale for those who follow him.

This is the fourth year I've used the very self-consciously named Jaffe WARP Score system (JAWS) to examine the Hall of Fame ballot. The goal of JAWS is to identify candidates on the Hall ballot who are as good or better than the average Hall of Famer at their position, a bar set so as to avoid further diluting the quality of the institution's membership. Clay Davenport's Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) totals are the coin of the realm 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. Pitchers, hitters and fielders are thus rated above or below one consistent replacement level, making cross-era comparisons a breeze.

JAWS does not include non-statistical considerations--awards, championships, postseason performance, rap sheet, urine test results--but that's not to say they should be left by the wayside. They're just not the focus here. While I'll discuss the 800-pound elephant in the room in the context of various candidacies, I don't claim to have a solution as to how voters or fans should handle the dawn of this new era. That's an emotional issue, and JAWS isn't designed to handle emotions.

Election to the Hall of Fame requires a player to perform both at a very high level and for a long time, so JAWS identifies a player's peak using his seven best WARP scores (for this exercise, WARP refers exclusively to the adjusted-for-all-time version, WARP3). Early versions used a player's best five consecutive seasons, but the manual labor to account for injury and war exceptions was a drag, and that was abandoned last year with nary a word of protest. Effectively, we double-count 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, but the lowest-ranked player at each position (and four pitchers) has been omitted before that calculation. Invariably these are Veterans Committee selections who lag far behind the pack, with scores that might be one-third of the position leader and that serve to lower the bar. Nobody will miss them but their mothers.

I'm going to cut through the minutiae to save space; further details on the why and how of this system are here. Below are the JAWS standards, the adjusted positional averages once the low man on the totem pole is removed, to which I'll refer throughout the piece:

POS        #  BRAR  BRAA  FRAA   WARP   PEAK   JAWS
C         13   425   215   70    95.7   59.0   77.3
1B        18   744   489   -9   106.1   62.8   84.5
2B        17   579   304   92   122.8   71.5   97.1
3B        11   668   385   69   117.4   67.3   92.4
SS        20   453   153  120   112.3   67.1   89.7
LF        18   752   477    7   111.1   62.6   86.8
CF        17   720   466   15   109.1   63.7   86.4
RF        22   795   519   36   119.6   65.4   92.5

CI        29   716   450   20   110.3   64.5   87.4
MI        37   510   222  107   117.1   69.1   93.1
IF        66   600   321   69   114.1   67.1   90.6
OF        57   759   490   21   113.8   64.0   88.9

Middle    67   547   283   77   111.0   65.8   88.4
Corners   69   751   479   22   113.5   64.3   88.9

Hitters  136   651   383   49   112.3   65.0   88.6

Other abbreviations: BRAR is Batting Runs Above Replacement, BRAA is Batting Runs Above Average; both are included here because they make good secondary measures of career and peak value. FRAA is Fielding Runs Above Average, which is a bit more meaningful to the average reader than measuring from replacement level.

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