Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 595: Jay Jaffe Explains the Hall of Fame

Episode Date: January 5, 2015

Ben and Russell preview the Hall of Fame voting results and review election season with Sports Illustrated’s Jay Jaffe.

Good morning and welcome to episode 595 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, normally joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus, who is on vacation until Friday's episode. So joining me today is a frequent guest and frequent guest co-host, Russell Carlton of BP. Hello, Russell. They're sending in the B team. And we have another guest today sam and i haven't done a ton of cooperstown talk this winter

typically we save it all up for one big blowout episode with a mustachioed man who at some point this year will be able to say that he has written the book on the Hall of Fame, but can already say that he writes a book's worth of Hall of Fame articles every winter, Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated. Hey, Jay. Hey, good to be here. So most of you are listening to this on Monday. Tomorrow is the day when the Hall of Fame voting results will be announced. The votes have already been

submitted. So somewhere in the depths of the BBWA, they are now being tabulated, presumably. So looking at the information we have, the various sources that have compiled all the public votes, and just the sense that you're getting from people who aren't saying, what do you expect that we will see on Tuesday? Boy, you know, I think we're going to get a bounty of Hall of Famers. And, you know, I think at the very least

we're going to get three. And it's quite possible that we get four. And boy, if you look at the public ballot tracker, I don't think it's out of the question that we could even get five, which would be miraculous if that happened. But at the very least, I think we're almost certainly going to get three, which it would be the first time since 1954, 1955, that we've had at least three in back-to-back years. And there's usually a pretty big gap for some of these candidates between the pre-release exit poll numbers and the actual ones. So right now, Mike Piazza is just tracking above the 75% threshold. So he might not make it. BGO is maybe out of the danger zone or he's he's close to you

know i've got when i'm looking at the um at the the the uh ryan tibbs i guess that's how you say it uh tracker which has 134 ballots in uh he and biggio and piazza are separated by one vote. One's, uh, a BGO is that just above 80% and Piazza is a 79.85%. Um, you know, I guess it's a little bit wider in the, uh, the, the baseball think factory,

uh, one, um, you know, with Piazza, there's about a 5%, uh, first five percentage points of separation there.

So, yeah, I think it's, I think it's quite possible that, that Piazza doesn't get in, but he's going to be positioned well to get in next year at worst. And I think we're going to see some progress up the ladder here for some other guys too. Yeah. So what are the biggest surprises in these numbers that we have yet or the biggest gains that surprise you?

Optimistically speaking, it looks to me like Tim Raines could top 60 percent. He's at 67.16 percent on the on the detailed tracker and 60 66.2 percent on the ThinkFactory one. So even allowing for some fall-off there among the anonymous hordes, I think there was about an 8% percentage point gap last year. I think we're going to see him come close to 60%. That would be a nice gain for him after he got, I think, 52% in 2013, then fell back to about 46% last year. So to restore that momentum, especially considering that he's only got two more cracks at it on the writer's ballot, I think would be an encouraging sign because that's about the

gap that you could make up in two years there if you're above 60 percent. So, Jay, we've got Randy Johnson, we've got Pedro Martinez, and we have John Smoltz. How did he get in there? You know, I think there is definitely something to the fame aspect of this. You know, let's not forget that it's right there on the title of the institution. And, you know, Smoltz is famous. He has the benefit of having been on that Braves dynasty that made all those postseason appearances from 1991 to I guess it was 2005 and was part of five World Series teams and a great postseason pitcher. And the veneer of versatility because he was successful both as a starter

and as a closer, even though when you look at him, his numbers, you know, to me, and I think to a lot of other people are, you know, short of say, Curt Schilling or Mike Messina, you know, he's the one who's getting the benefit of the doubt because of that fame aspect and because of his association with that Braves dynasty. Are we, are we just seeing kind of a Greg Maddux really long coat tail basically? Yeah, I think more Maddux and Glavin. Yeah.

And Cox, um, you know, we had three Braves go in last year. So the electorate is obviously, uh, uh, something of an Atlanta mind right now.

Um, but you know, look, I don't want to take anything away from, from what he accomplished. I mean, Smoltz was, is a,

uh, you know, was a great strikeout pitcher, top 3,000 strikeouts, and like I said, he won a Cy Young Award, probably after Curt Schilling, the best postseason pitcher of this,

you know, of the past 30 years or so. You know, it's a compelling resume. It's worth remembering that, you know, with this class is going to see, you know, since 1991, we've only seen one pitch, one starting pitcher with less than 300 wins get elected by the writers. 14 years in a knockdown drag out fight and the introduction of jaws and other same metric ways of looking at things for him to get in. So we're going to get Pedro in this year. And, you know, if we get Smoltz in too, that's two guys with well under 300 wins.

I think we, you know, might be sticking the fork in that as the only route into the hall for a starting pitcher and which is good news eventually when it comes to guys like Schilling and Messina and down the road Roy Halladay. And who knows who else? We'll have to see who else stays healthy long enough to put themselves in range. And has there been any progress in the PED department looking at the numbers so far? Is there any evidence of an evolution in the thinking of voters?

You know, I think we're seeing – I think we're going to see, you know, Bonds and Clemens creep upwards a bit, maybe not much. They always – they tend to fall off between the public ballots and the non-public ones, the private ones, shall we say. But I think they're going to be above 40%, which, you know, would be their highest in the three years. I think we're seeing the whisper campaign guys, Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza, move upwards, Piazza to just about, just, you know just right around the threshold of election, I think that'll be a victory in and of itself.

Stick the knife in the people who would point their finger without having any evidence of wrongdoing. And I think it's slow progress, and it's agonizingly slow in some ways, but, um, I think that that's, that's progress. On the other hand, I look at Gary Sheffield with his 500 home runs and, and, uh, uh, some pretty impressive credentials and, and he looks like he's in danger of, uh, winding up, uh, below 5%. He's at 7.46% on the public tracker here. That's 10 votes so far out of 134. You know, he's a guy who was named in Balco supposedly, you know, she trained with Barry Bonds for a while and by his own admission, you know, unwittingly used the cream on scars on his knees without knowing that it was,

you know, full of testosterone. And, you know, so for him to fall off, I think would be a disappointment and evidence that, you know, maybe the electorate's not evolving as quickly on PEDs as we might hope. Is Sheffield possibly just a casualty of the 10-man ballot? I think that's very possible, yes. I think that that can't be discounted, especially when we've got, by many people's count, 15 or 16 guys that they would consider voting for. He falls below my mark on Jaws

because he's got an outlier of a negative defensive total. But when I look at it and compare it to other methodologies that aren't such outliers, by a difference of maybe like 80 or 90 runs, in baseball perspectives, I think is one of the friendlier ones to him. You know, maybe he's a lot closer. So, yeah, maybe it's just, maybe it's just the crowd on the ballot. It's still one way or the other. It's going to, you know, it's, it's going to be a bit of a, a drag to see him fall off so quickly,

uh, without really getting, uh, you know, a shot on his own merits. Well, all right. I'm going to, I'm going to bring up my favorite, uh, my favorite, uh, pet cause and, uh, Mike Mussina and I'm as small hall as they favorite pet cause and Mike Mussina. I'm as small haul as they get and my ballot this year had five names on it. That's just the way I am, but I understand others might see it. But one of those five names was Mike Mussina. What's it going to take to get him into the Hall of Fame? It seems like he's got about the same resume as Curt Schilling minus a bloody

sock. I mean, is it, I don't think, I don't think, you know, I think, I think so far Messina's problem is also the crowd on the ballot and the fact that he has gone up against pitchers with 300 wins, you know, and, and pitchers with Cy Young awards, multiple Cy Young awards. And, you know, he, he doesn't have that. He doesn't have either of those. But he's polling at 38% right now. I think it's just going to take time. I think he's on – he looks like he could possibly come close to doubling his support from last year.

There was initial concern that he wouldn't even get the 5% he needed to stay on. He's out of those woods. I think it's just going to take, you know, seven, eight years for him to climb in, or at least five or six years, you know, there's going to, there's not going to be anybody with anything close to his 270 wins to fall back on, you know, a metric that I don't really advocate using as a yardstick, but certainly... But it's used. Yeah, a number of the voters are still using it, let's put it that way.

You know, I think that we're not going to see anybody with that many wins on the ballot for a long time. So he's, you know, and I think he's going to fare better than, let's just say, Jim Cott and Tommy John did. Both of those guys aged off the ballot despite having win totals in the 280s while Burt Blylevin got elected because he was a much stronger pitcher in terms of strikeouts and run prevention. What's your position on strategic voting? And are you surprised that we haven't seen more of it? Because with a quarter of the ballots in, roughly, it looks like only one guy has not voted for Randy Johnson, and maybe three have not put Pedro on their ballot. I think it's, you know, I think it's

inevitable. I don't have, I don't really have a problem with it. I don't want to see everybody doing it. But I don't mind somebody who, you know, says in good conscience, they feel like, you know, their vote on rent, like, you know, Mike Berardino, twins beat writer said, you know, Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez, you know, Mike Baradino, Twins beat writer said, you know, Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez, you know, I fully believe they're Hall of Famers. They don't need my vote, though. Larry Walker, you know, and some of these other guys do, you know, and I think that they're worthy. So, you know, he's he was somebody who, you know, threw, you know, threw himself in front of the bus, so to speak, in order to cast those votes. And he's taken a fair amount of criticism.

And I think he's stood up to it. And I don't have a problem with it. I want to see somebody explain their rationale. And if they're doing it to uh let's say to give uh rich aurelia a vote you know because he would you know he was nice to them one day on the field or something like that or you know or if it's uh um i don't you know i mean just any one of a number of guys that that are going to be one and done and probably shouldn't even get the token vote um if somebody was doing it for that, I would have a problem with it.

But I don't have a problem with that. I don't have a problem with, you know, some of the strategic voting. I think it's inevitable. I think it shows just how broken the system is that, you know, people are looking for coping strategies and that, you know, they're coming up with some different ones. In my case, you know, I, you know, when I looked at it, I did mine. I had to bigger cultural clashes, if you will, in baseball. The Clemens and Bonds and the PD issue is the obvious one. But then you get into a case like Larry Walker.

How do you feel about park effects slash Colorado slash – how can you adjust those numbers and do that? How can you adjust those numbers and do that? Bagwell is kind of the avatar for the guy who had the Whisper campaign, but there's never been any sniff of anything resembling evidence against him. I'm wondering whether you feel that that's accurate, that we're kind of now where Hall of Fame balloting has become something more than just about the players and more about the cultural issues. Or maybe it's always been like that. I'm wondering what your take is on that. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure that I entirely – I see your point. I'm not sure if I entirely agree with it. I think that each of these players and having written, you know, in some cases more than 3,000 words on them. I, you know, I think I see them as individuals and I see, you know, Bonds and Clemens, yes, I think you could sort of pair them together because of, you know, the heights to which

they scaled and the depths to which they scaled and, you know, the fact that both were, you know, targets of, you know, publicly funded legal trials that probably should never have gone forward. They were great wastes of taxpayer money. I think Bonds, I heard something like $50, $60 million was wasted on prosecuting him, which is just appalling when you think of what that money could have gone towards. I'm reluctant to try to let these guys be reduced to symbols. You could say Edgar Martinez carrying the banner for the DHS, Larry Walker for the Park Effects guys, Mike Messina for the non-300 win guys or whatever. You could probably attach a cause to just about any of them at a certain point.

But I think that – I don't know that that's necessarily the only explanation. I think we, you know, the electorate is large enough and unwieldy enough that those patterns may not necessarily hold because these guys are so,

you know, these players are so, you know, idiosyncratic in and of themselves that, you know, it's not just automatic as to, you know, who gets in. So we got a couple of questions from listeners. One named Alex asked us whether anything and if so, what would actually make us angry at this point, given how repetitive and played out these debates are.

He mentioned that Messina falling off the ballot would make him angry. he mentioned that Messina falling off the ballot would make him angry. Is there anything that at this point has the capacity to anger you after doing this for so many winters? You know, well, I think Bijou not getting in this year would anger me, you know, just because I,

you know, look, I don't even, I'm not even sure he's one of the 10 best candidates, you know, but I don't want to see the poor bastard languish, you know, two votes short one year and like five votes short another year.

It's like just get it over with. Get him in so that people can use that slot to vote for somebody else because it's inevitable that he gets in. You know, I just I hate seeing I hate knowing that there are guys who took ridiculously long to get in and did not have the chance to enjoy it as individuals. You know, Ron Santo elected one year after he was in. Gary Carter took six years to get in and then, you know, died young because of a brain tumor. Shit like that. You know, that kind of stuff infuriates me. You know, beyond that, I mean, I'd be disappointed for, you know, in certain

trends or outcomes, I would certainly be disappointed, you know, be angry if, if, if Tim, if it turned out Tim Raines lost ground instead of gaining ground. Um, beyond that, I mean, I think I have, I'm pretty braced for, you know, for a lot of, uh, uh, a lot of the ways this can go. Like I suspect Larry Walker and Gary Sheffield could fall off the ballot. I, you know, I know Alan Trammell's never going to make it. That makes me angry, you know, in and of itself. But I don't know that there's anything that I can foresee coming out of left field that would suddenly, you know, make me incredibly angry, except maybe that BGO not getting in

this year's scenario. incredibly angry, except maybe the BGO not getting in this year scenario. Are there any annoying narratives that you've noticed new ones this winter or ones that have become repeated more often or popularized? The one that I've seen a lot is the John Smoltz saves total and combining his saves and wins total a, a super milestone total of saves plus wins. I haven't, you know, to be honest with you, Ben, the only person I've seen do that was you in a great article, you know, that you did for, you know, for which you, you, you know, you do ask me some questions and whatever.

I am not reading a whole lot of the explanations of these guys. I'm, you know, I'll read the explanations of the writers that I, you know, that I'm friendly with and the ones that I know are fairly John's flavored. I'm not reading the ones that I know are going to infuriate me. I just, my capacity is just, you know, overdone. I'm not going to, I don't want to read Howard Bryant's explanation just to, just to throw a name out there for a ridiculously short ballot. I was on set having to hear Marty Noble's three-man ballot. You know, I, like, I guess the one, the one narrative, the one narrative that really bothers me is just the idea that there's, that nobody from this era should get

in and why why should i even keep voting i'm never going to elect you know i'm never going to vote for anybody from the steroid era you know guys who turned in their ballots you know and say they're never going to vote again from you know from last year i think ken gurnick was one of them and that narrative you know please i i just if you think that the hitters were the only ones you know, please. I just, if you think that the, that the hitters were the only ones, you know, using PEDs, I certainly have, you know, several bridges I'd like to sell you. So that narrative bothers me. The Smoltz one, you know, he's so unique. It's such a unique career. I mean, it's, you know, not quite Dennis Eckersley, but it's unique enough that like, you know, it's going to find its own niche in terms of a story.

So I'm not sure that there are any others that really bother me to that extent. So Jay, I'm sure that after the votes are announced, we'll start hearing again about changes in the balloting structure. I'm wondering, do you think that's actually going to happen or are we just kind of stuck here for the time being? Well, okay. I was on the committee that, you know, the BBWA committee that examined various ways that we could change the process. You know, it was strongly hinted to us that certain things were not going to change at all. 75% isn't going anywhere, for one. The morals clause isn't going anywhere.

And I think that those two aspects were stuck with for better or for worse. you know, we're stuck with for better or for worse. But when the hall made that change to shorten the eligibility from 15 years to 10, it opened the door for us to, you know, to try to, you know, get our own tweak in there. And, you know, we've produced a fairly lukewarm suggestion of expanding from 10 slots to 12, and that was because we did not think that the hall would go for 15, even on the committee, which was created to sample a broad spectrum of consent of viewpoints within the BBWA. You know, there were people on the committee who didn't think that we needed to do anything, you know, to the size of the ballot.

You know, 12 is a start. I suspect that if we get three or four or five in, the hall is just probably going to say, what do you mean? We got, we're electing people left and right here. And, you know know in a short term sense they're not going to be incorrect no longer you know in a big picture sense the longer term you know my numbers show that that there's been a bottleneck that goes all the way back to 1969 basically to that expansion to the

you know to the the you know levels of representation per team per year is way down. And, you know, the idea that, you know, expansion has delivered the talent pool, you know, that idea falls flat on its face when you consider how great, how greatly the talent pool has actually expanded with, you know, more players coming from Latin America and from Asia, from Latin America and from Asia, you know, and things like that. So I will be surprised if the Hall, you know, grants us this expansion to 12. It would be a landmark change, long overdue. But I suspect that a heavy class of four or five is going to make that harder to pass this year.

But I don't think the problem is going away. And I do think that it's an issue that will rear its head again within the next few years. We got another email question from Eric who asked about the possibility of some kind of objective benchmarks or criteria because the subjective nature of the voting can get frustrating at times and as someone who's designed a system that has been very helpful uh in judging whether certain guys are worthy or not would you even want to see that i mean it's far-fetched but if you could, would you try to, would you prefer that we had some system that just put guys in automatically if they met certain statistical standards? I can't really see where, where we want that to happen. I think, you know, I think that, first of all, I can't see the hall that we for it. The hall is explicitly, you know, very comfortable with the idea that voters are applying, you know, some subjective viewpoint of what makes a hall of famer.

I was just reading something that Jeff Idelson said, and I'm trying to remember where it was on one of the newspapers' collections of ballots, like here's how we voted here. I'll think of it in a minute. You know, I think that the game has the capacity to change such that I don't think we want to tie ourselves to given numbers. I mean, 500 home runs now means something different than what it did, you know, 25 years ago. 300 wins means something very different from what it meant 50 years ago. Tying ourselves to number to certain numbers, even to even to like a war total, I think, is is is the wrong move. Because, I mean, with war, you know, which, you know, we those formulas are subject to revision. I mean, when I was using baseball prospectuses, wins above replacement player, you know, the formulas would get tweaked. The fielding system changed a couple of times.

The replacement level rose drastically such that, you know, it locked about 20 warp off of some of the top end players, maybe even 30 warp. You know, tying yourself to a number like that, you know, you, you just, you limit your capacity to evolve, I think, and you've got just one more layer of, of red tape to overcome to, you know, to make change happen. I think the best solution is education. And, you know, I'm encouraged that the work that I've done has has penetrated the electorate. And, you know, that there are people who, you know, they may not be voting exactly, you know, according to Jaws, but that's something that they're looking at. And I had, you know, people vote voters, writers I respect, you know, one on one consultations for, you know, the final slot, final slot in their ballot when they got down to three or four guys, things like that. I'm satisfied that we are getting a more educated electorate slowly but surely. If you look at the votes per ballot, I think we're going to be well above eight again this year,

pushing nine on the public ballots right now. You know, these voters are taking this seriously. They're using their slots that they have. And I think that that's an encouraging sign. And do you think we're going to see an especially active Veterans Committee, or I guess it would be the Expansion Committee? active veterans committee or I guess it would be the expansion committee? The veterans committee is a whole separate problem. I was frustrated by the lack of anybody getting in in December. I thought that there were a few candidates who would be fine additions to the Hall of

Fame with Dick Allen and Minnie Minoso, my top two there, and Ken Boyer and Bob Hausam, I think two very worthy candidates as well. I think via Joe Posnanski, Tom Tango illustrated the problem of having, if you've got 10 candidates who are more or less equal, and each voter can only name four on their ballot and there's 16, there's something like a half a percent chance that anybody gets the necessary 75%. It's a rigged system. You don't have enough slots to produce a result. And there's no reason to...

Nobody wants the Hall of Fame to be automatic, but there's no reason to rig the game to such an extent that nobody's going to get in, especially because these guys are human beings and they have their hopes dashed every three years or whatever, and that's just cruel and unfair. I can't even imagine the spectrum of emotions that a guy like Dick Allen must have gone through

the last two months with, you know, public campaign being mounted on his behalf by, you know, friends and colleagues and stuff like that. I think that there needs to be a reform there. You know, they've tinkered with it so much. There's, you know, there's no reason to think they won't tinker with it again. I would expect changes to be announced in July. They usually save that stuff for when everybody's gathered in Cooperstown for the inductions and announce new rules next year. Maybe it's something as simple as allowing each voter to list six

on a 12-candidate slate, increase the odds a little bit better. I don't know. I, I think that the veterans committee is still designed mostly to produce no results at all. And that the fact that the, the, the bench is packed with half, half hall of famers, you know, it's, it's guys who are protecting the country club, you know, protecting their own country club from, from intrusion, you know, it's guys who are protecting the country club, you know, protecting their own country club from intrusion, you know, because when the hall put it in the hands of the living Hall of Famers, nobody got very close in the elections in the mid-2000s. Now, looking ahead to next year's ballot, it's kind of the only no-doubter that's coming onto the ballot is Ken Griffey Jr. I'm wondering what would be your prognostication for what that's going to do

to the bottleneck that we've talked about in the past, and who kind of stands to most benefit from that? Well, I mean, I would say that, that, uh, uh, it's probably going to be a year of consolidation. I would think that if, um, if Piazza and Bagwell donate, don't get in this year, next year is a very clear opening for them to get in, uh, alongside Griffey. Um, I think that, uh, you know, Trevor Hoffman's also going to be there, but I don't think he's going to be anything close to automatic, especially when Billy Wagner's on the ballot. The two have almost identical war and jaws across the board, but Wagner's got a few hundred fewer, 180, 179 fewer saves.

I think people will see the basing it just on the saves total is maybe a bit folly. It's going to depend on what happens, on how big this class is. But, you know, if, let's just say if Piazza gets in, then maybe next year you look to Bagwell and, geez, perhaps even Raines. If Raines, you know, gets above 60%, you know, I think we could see, you know, guys getting a lot closer. I mean, you know, right now Schilling in the public balloting is at 55%. Maybe he gets closer. You know, I think it'll have a ripple effect depending on how big this year's class is. And looking ahead even a year after that, Pudge Rodriguez and Vlad Guerrero as the top candidates, I would say Pudge is probably,

under normal circumstances, would be an automatic, but he was named by Conseco as a PED user. Who knows what kind of effect that's going to have. Vlad Guerrero, certainly a great career, but kind of faded in his mid-30s and so his career numbers are short and advanced metrics don't love him. I have

him just about eight points short on Johns, for example. I think we could see another year of consolidation after that where some of these guys that we've been complaining about not getting enough support do get in, who knows, I mean, might, Messina might, might be about 50% by then. I'm going to have to look at, last year I did,

I did a kind of a five-year roadmap for what I, what I expected to happen. That's going to change, I'm going to have to revisit that this year, you know, in light of the rule change and, and whatever these, this year's results produce. All right. So where can people watch you and read whatever you write in response to the results tomorrow? Okay. Well, I am going to be on MLB Network's MLB Now. It'll be on at 4 o'clock, two hours after the Hall of Fame announcement.

So that'll be on Tuesday. I will have stuff at si.com on Monday, kind of my what to look for on the ballot. And Tuesday, I will have some kind of reaction piece up there. Maybe Wednesday, I'll have what the next five years look like. And who knows, we might have some other fun stuff to spin out of it before we put this topic entirely to rest. All right. And everyone can go back and read your other articles that are already up on the site. Yes. It's linked all over the SI.com MLB page, including my link to my 10 very hard choices, which I referred to actually. And might as well get this in here since we didn't actually but I had

I gamed Smoltz off the ballot because I didn't think he would get in this year and I put Biggio on and I had Schilling on and Messina off for similar reasons and then I had Edgar Martinez on so I had my full 10

and it was tough choices. And you can read about that more at SI.com as well. And you can find Jay on Twitter at Jay underscore Jeffy. Thanks, as always, Jay. Good luck getting through the next day or two. I'll make it. I'll be all right. Thanks, guys.

All right, so that's it for today. Please send us some email questions for Wednesday at podcasts at baseball prospectus.com. You can join the Facebook group to talk about Cooperstown stuff. If you want at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and support our sponsor by going to baseball reference.com subscribing to the play index, using the coupon code BP and getting the discounted price of $30 on a one year subscription. We will be back later this week.