Santana's Case Stretches Thin

Joe Posnanski is doing a whole series on all the ex-players on the 2018 Hall of fame ballot.  He has, of course, an interesting take of some kind on just about everyone.  This one is about how Johan Santana, despite being no Sandy Koufax, is perhaps also a Hall of Famer himself.

Koufax won three Cy Youngs and an MVP in a four-year period. In Santana's heyday, he won two Cy Youngs and should absolutely have won in 2005. He did not win an MVP award but certainly had a case in 2006, when his teammate Justin Morneau won it.

Sounds pretty similar. So what's the problem? Why does comparing Koufax and Santana hurt Santana's case?

He then goes on to explain that much of Koufax's case for Cooperstown was wrapped up in his superhuman performances in the World Series, and that therefore it is hardly fair to compare Santana to him, and he's right, partly.

Santana's Hall of Fame case must stand on its own. To me, that comes down to the basic question: How long does someone have to be truly great to merit entry into the Hall of Fame?

Santana's case is that from 2003-08, he was absolutely the best pitcher in baseball, and nobody was all that close.

Wins Above Average 2003-08
1. Johan Santana, 27.4
2. Brandon Webb, 23.3
3. Carlos Zambrano, 20.8
4. Roy Oswalt, 19.4
5. Roy Halladay, 19.2

For those six seasons, he was the best in everything. He had the most wins. He had the lowest ERA. He had the lowest ERA+, the lowest WHIP, the lowest batting average against, he was the best pitcher, absolutely and without question. If you are the best pitcher or player in baseball for six seasons, should you be in the Hall of Fame?

Yes. I think you should.

I said Joe was 'partly' right. The other part of it is not just that Koufax was the best pitcher in baseball for his six peak seasons, but he was so much better than everyone else.  Here's that same list for 1961-66:

1. Koufax 30.9
2. Juan Marichal 23.1
3. Jim Bunning 17.9
4. Jim Maloney 15.8
5. Bob Gibson 15.7

Koufax is in a class by himself, far better than the next pitcher on the list, who was elected to the Hall on his third try in 1983.  Koufax and Marichal had similar totals of innings and Wins in that stretch, but Koufax allowed about 100(!) fewer runs.  His adjusted ERA was about 20 points better, which is huge, so it wasn't just Dodger Stadium.  The other three guys, two of whom are also in Cooperstown now, are nowhere near Koufax, and not particularly close to Marichal either, for that matter. 

The trouble with Posnanski's approach - and I say this as one who thought Santana was awesome and wished the Twins would have let him start full time much earlier - is that being the best in baseball for a six-year stretch is not that impressive or unusual.  And if that's all you've got, well, in my mind, it's not enough. 

Even if you grant that WAA or WAR or whatever is a perfect and comprehensive stat, such that Santana's superiority in that span is unquestionable - and that's hardly a given - you still have to consider:

A) How impressive is such a feat, really? and

2) The value of the rest of his career.

The second one is easy.  If we use WAA, then the rest of his career (i.e. the other 6 seasons) are worth a total of about 5 WAA, which is not much.  (For Koufax, the rest of his career is -0.7WAA, so his case really does rest almost entirely in those six seasons and his October resume.) 

The first one is harder, but not much harder. If you look at other six-year spans, some of the pitchers you find leading the majors in that category are pretty clearly HoF qualified (based on their stats): Clemens, Maddux, Scherzer, Kershaw, maybe even Roy Halladay.  Typically, though, these guys were also pretty good, maybe very good, outside of those six-year spans. 

But then you also have Cliff Lee, who led the majors in WAA from 2008-13 (about 3 WAA ahead of Kershaw).  You have Dave Steib, who did it from 1981-86 (also '82-'87).  For 1955-1960, just before Koufax really got going, it was Billy Pierce.  Good, occasionally great pitchers, all, but hardly worthy of Cooperstown. 

You see the problem here.  None of those guys is ever getting into the Hall of Fame, despite an arguably similar accomplishment to what Santana did, at least by one metric.  Santana was great, but he wasn't that much better than Webb or Zambrano in that same span, or Halladay, or Roy Oswalt or other guys in similar stretches in that time frame. 

Unless you're not just head and shoulders above the competition, but also torso, waist and maybe pelvis above everyone else, too, as Koufax was, being the best for six years just isn't enough. 

Cooperstown Conundrum

Ryan Thibodaux has been tracking all of the baseball Hall of Fame balloting for the last several years so you can see in real time who's voting for whom, including links to the columns or twitter or whatever where the writers made their, oh, let's say "arguments" for the votes they cast. 

Some of the voters - BBWAA members with at least 10 years experience - actually admit to basically punting their votes, or voting just for the hometown boys from their local team’s glory days, or to actively avoiding any information that disagrees with their preconceived notions of who belongs in the hall and who doesn't.  Others complain that there can’t possibly be 10 worthy candidates on the ballot, while ignoring the fact that, having sent their ballots in blank in previous years, they are part of the reason that there are still so many qualified candidates on the ballot right now.  Some won’t vote for suspected PED users.  A few seem only to vote for those guys.  It’s a weird process. 

I can tell you this much: There's going to be a lot of sunburned folks in Cooperstown in July. At least three, maybe four or five new members from the BBWAA voting (Chipper Jones, Jim Thome and Vladimir Guerrero are all sitting comfortably over 90%, and Edgar Martinez is at ~80%. Trevor Hoffman's in the high 70's and Mike Mussina is in the low 70's, though both - and maybe Edgar? - could fall below the requisite 75% mark when the final tally is announced.  More conservative writers tend to be the last to share their votes, if they do at all. 

Plus, you've got Alan Trammell and Jack Morris from the veterans' committee, not to mention Bob Costas and Sheldon Ocker, who won the Frick and SPink awards, respectively. So that's at least half a dozen long, boring speeches at the induction ceremony, maybe a lot more.

The thing that really amazes me is Omar Vizquel's 29% right out of the box. Granted, it'll probably drop a bit and it's not close to the necessary 75%, but that's a LOT for a first time ballot. Trammell took 15 years to top out at 41%! Fred McGriff, Dave Parker, Dale Murphy: Never more than 25%. Dave Concepcion never even sniffed 20%. Lou Whitaker was once-and-done!

And yet if you gave any competent GM a chance to take Vizquel for, say five or even 10 years in his prime, vs. any of those guys, I doubt many (any?) would pick Omar. I mean I get that there's more to it than that, who/what you need on your roster at any given time, etc. You can't play nine Fred McGriffs or Greg Madduxes. Heck, you can't even play nine Barry Bondses, though I think that would still be a hell of a team. ;-) But one-to-one, would you take Omar over any of those guys in his prime, or even for the long haul?

I have made my opinion on Vizquel's qualifications, or the lack thereof, pretty clear in this space in the past.  Though that was a quite distant past, and perhaps he's done something in the intervening years to make me change my mind?  Lemme check...

Nope.  

A few of the numbers in that post could stand to be updated, but the net result is the same: Not just "No", but "Hell, no". Vizquel's career value, his WAR compared to others who spent a significant portion of their careers at shortstop, is pretty low, about 30th overall, right between Vern Stevens and Tony Fernandez.  He's behind about eight other guys who aren't in Cooperstown and won't ever be, including Jim Fregosi, Miguel Tejada, Bert Campaneris and someone named Art Fletcher, whom I would have sworn was a host of a 70's game show.  

Granted, there's something to be said for longevity. Vizquel did play 24 seasons and has more games at shortstop than anyone in history, but it's only a few dozen more games than Derek Jeter, who could actually hit.  Jamie Moyer played 25 seasons, and is also in his first year on the ballot, but so far as I can tell nobody has voted for him.

Vizquel amassed 2,877 hits (mostly singles) by sticking around for that long and won 11 Gold Gloves, so I guess that's the narrative driving his high first time vote total, but I just can't see it. Keith Hernandez won 11 Gold Gloves, and an MVP Award, and never got more than about 10%.  Other defensive wizards with better bats (Garry Maddox, George Scott, Yadier Molina) have won eight or more Gold Gloves, and nobody thinks of them as Hall of Famers.  

Comparisons to Ozzie Smith seem frequent, but these are off base.  Smith was a better hitter (87 OPS+ vs 82), a better base runner (580/148 SB/CS, compared to 404/167 for Omar) and a MUCH better defender.  Ozzie won two more Gold Gloves, sure, but the advanced metrics show that he saved about 100 more runs while playing about 200 fewer games.  That’s a huge difference. 

WAR and JAWS both say he's about the 20th best player currently on the ballot, comfortably behind Moyer and Johnny Damon, who looks like he will fall off the ballot after his first try.

Vizquel was never more than about the 4th or 5th best shortstop in the majors during his career, though there was some stiff competition there for a while.  He made 3 All-Star teams, but then that's not such an accomplishment anymore, when every team is required to have representation there. He got an MVP vote or two one time in his career, 1999, his best year offensively, and that was it. He was a pretty good base stealer for about half a decade in the middle of his career, and he hit .333 once. After the games at short and the Gold Gloves, his argument gets pretty thin.  

Hopefully Vizquel's hype tapers off, as Don Mattingly's did, once the voters have had a chance to think about it for a few years. 

A Call for the Hall to Remain (Mostly) Small

There's no shortage of Hall of Fame election coverage, given that today is set for the announcement of the induction class of 2016.  Neither is there a shortage of deserving candidates, unless you're Murray Chass, though this year's class is likely to include Ken Griffey and Mike Piazza, and perhaps nobody else.

This despite the presence on the ballot of PED-tainted all-time greats like Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, but also seemingly clean but under-appreciated players like Alan Trammell and Tim Raines.  We also have recent additions to the ballot who will probably take a few years to gather the steam to get elected, like Curt Schilling, Jeff Bagwell, probably Trevor Hoffman and hopefully Mike Mussina.

Others are ironically being penalized for the era in which they played, despite the lack of a stain on their names with regard to steroids.  Fred McGriff, for example, performed at a high level and stayed in the majors for 19 years, finishing his career with the kinds of counting stats the voters used to love.  (He'd be top-20 all time in career HR without the suspected PED users in front of him!) But his failure to put up numbers sufficiently higher than the PED-boosted replacement level is keeping his career WAR numbers down, so neither the old school nor the new school voters give him any love.  

One of the more interesting analyses of the general trends in Hall of Fame inductions comes from Neil Paine of the NY Times 538 blog, who thinks that the MLB Hall of Fame is stuck in the 1960's.  I'm not sure he's right, or if he is, whether that's actually a bad thing.

Although players who produced the bulk of their WAR before the 1970s make up only 62 percent of the all-time MLB population, they represent 79 percent of all player inductees. Conversely, the 38 percent of players who made their mark since have yielded only 21 percent of Hall members. If we expect legendary talent to crop up in proportion with the playing population of an era, the Hall of Fame hasn’t been paying attention for a half-century.

He also ran a regression to look at how many Hall of Famers would be expected based on the existing standards set by the Hall itself, using Jay Jaffe's JAWS system, and comes essentially to the same conclusion.   He asserts that as baseball expanded (there are 30 teams in MLB since 1998, compared to just 16 before 1961) the frequency of Cooperstown inductees should also have expanded, but it has not.

Expansion gives more players the opportunity to build Hall of Fame-caliber careers, but it creates a backlog if the voters are slow to account for this by inducting a commensurate number of players. And from the numbers above, it’s clear that the Hall has never quite figured out the expansion time bomb, a problem that continues to grow each year.

The trouble with using JAWS to determine the benchmark is that this is just a metric of what is already there, not necessarily what should be there.  It's a retroactive measurement tool, rather than a predictive one.  Jaffe himself typically uses it to say whether the election of a player would raise the existing standard, but does not, I believe, ever say that a player should be elected because he exhibits a certain JAWS score.   

This comes off as kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Just because expansion has permitted twice as many roster positions now as there were 50 years ago does not mean that the HoF should be enshrining twice as many players as they did 50 years ago.  As the population becomes larger, it is the voters' right to become more selective, recognizing that what seemed really impressive 75 years ago (Herb Pennock's or Lou Boudreau's careers, for example) need not inspire same kind of awe now.

Put another way, and with caveats about counting stats being of limited usefulness when deducing a player's career merits: Hitting 500 home runs once seemed really impressive, because of its rarity.  Only 15 players (all Hall of Famers) had done it in the first century and a quarter of major league baseball, but another dozen would hit that mark in the next 20 years, and now its not such a big deal.  Striking out 2,500 batters was also a rare feat.  Only 16 players had done it up to 1993, and 13 of those are in Cooperstown.  But then the number of people who had done it nearly doubled in a span of 20 years, and now...meh.

Perhaps the quality of a ~65 WAR career, which was good enough to get Goose Goslin and Joe Cronin into Cooperstown (though they did not have that metric at the time), should not be enough to give Carlos Beltran and Edgar Martinez the same treatment.  Why should the voters or the Hall itself be compelled to admit a consummate number of players, even very good players, when such players are in some ways not as scarce as they used to be?  Why can't the set the bar higher?

While Paine uses some comparatively sophisticated analytical tools, his column amounts to not much more than a complex way of saying, "If Ralph Kiner is in Cooperstown, then Albert Belle should be too."  Or something of that ilk. 

In any case, I'm not sure they're really all that much more selective than they have been historically.  In the first 30 years of the Hall, the BBWAA did not hold elections every year.  They took a couple of breaks during WWII (since they had met the quota they were given by the Hall by 1940) and then for a decade in the 1950's and 60's went to an even-years-only schedule.

In fact, the writers were so parsimonious with their votes that the Hall occasionally had to instate a run-off system to try to get somebody elected when there was no consensus among the writers the first time around.  This means Charlie Gehringer, Red Ruffing and Luke Appling can essentially attribute their elections to, well, peer pressure.

Hence, there were only 21 votes in that span, and a total of only 39 players were voted in by the BBWAA.  There were also 43 players elected by the Old Timers or Veterans committees, so it could be said that the Veterans were at least doing the job they were assigned, finding deserving players that had been overlooked by the writers for one reason or another.  But an argument can be made that they were a little overzealous with the task, as we will see. 

Here's a look at the elections by the BBWAA and others, decade by decade, over the 80-years the Hall has existed:



The blue columns are the BBWAA elections, including special elections (Gehrig, Clemente) and the three aforementioned runoffs.   The Writers have been mostly consistent, voting in between 14 and 17 players per decade, with two exceptions which mostly balance each other out: They elected 20 players in the post-WWII decade, but only five from 1956-65.

The red columns are the Old Timers and later the Veterans' committees as well as the Negro Leagues elections.  Showing these by decade is a little misleading, I'll admit, because (for example) you frequently had panels or subcommittees meeting and discussing players for quite a while and then large batches of players elected all at once, but few or no elections in between.

There were 19 elected between 1945 and 46, who are broken up in this chart.  The VC and NL committees collectively enshrined 31 players in the 1970's but only a dozen in the 1980's.  Nine players from the Negro Leagues went into Cooperstown in 2006 alone, but otherwise the VC has inducted only a half dozen players in the past decade an a half, which is the trend that spurred Paine to write this article in the first place.

His contention, and Dan Syzmborski's and that of many others, is that the VC should be disbanded, as there is little gold left to mine from the pre-expansion era, and I agree there.  But he also says that the more recent years are underrepresented, that (based on JAWS and the ratio of Hall of Famers to actual players) there should be over 40 more inductees from the last 30-odd years, and this is where I differ.

I certainly see players worthy of induction who are not enshrined, some of whom may eventually get in (Raines, Mussina) but also some who can't without help from the Veterans Committee (Whitaker, Trammell).  But 40+ players?  Who the hell are they?  Where do you find over 40 even marginally deserving names to fill out that list?  It just doesn't pass the sniff test.

For a quick and dirty analysis, I looked at position players since 1970 with at least 65 WAR and pitchers with at least 50 WAR (per Baseball-Reference.com).  There were 44 of the former and 38 of the latter.  Then I took out those who were not yet eligible, those who had already been elected and those with PED connections, and I ended up with 13 of each.  These included Kenny Lofton, Buddy Bell, Willie Randolph, Chuck Finley, Mark Langston and Frank Tanana, among others.

And this was just one measure.  If you went position by position and set the cut-offs appropriately, you could probably come up with the other 15 or so names I didn't, some better, some worse than these names.  

Personally, I find the idea of a Cooperstown with Mark Langston in it kind of disturbing, or at least lackluster.  Forget a Hall of Fame or even a Hall of Merit.  Now we've got a Hall of Pretty Good for a While, which is not a hall worth having.

The problem with the rate of inductions, as I see it, is not that the current voters or committees are too stingy with their votes, but that previous generations - especially of the Veterans Committees - were far too generous.  Perhaps the BBWAA that only elected five guys in the 1940's and 50's had it right after all, and the Veterans committee that went crazyballz in the 1970's to compensate for it screwed it up for the rest of us.  The presence of the likes of Freddie Lindstrom and High Pockets Kelly and Lloyd Waner in Cooperstown tends to dampen its luster and make it easier for the Kevin Appiers and Graig Nettles of the world to look like viable Hall of Famers.  They are not, nor should they be. 

The solution to this problem is not to open the floodgates and let in several dozen marginally deserving players, but to allow the process to play out, to see where the BBWAA and the Hall's committees take us, as they always have.  It is to be patient and hopefully await the day when the average has been able to creep back up to a more impressive level.  I'm all for getting the deserving folks enshrined and I am not a "small Hall" guy who thinks that only the absolute top echelon of players deserves enshrinement.  But neither do I think that letting every player in who managed to stay healthy for 15 or 20 years and occasionally get some MVP or Cy Young votes  is the answer.

We can get Mike Mussina and Tim Raines without having to let in more George Kells and Hack Wilsons.

We just have to be patient.

A Closer Look at Closer usage

Over at Baseball Think Factory, there's a link to and some discussion of a short piece at Banished to the Pen about trends in the usage of closers in the last 20 years or so.   The writer asserts that while there is some downward trend in the amount of work each closer is doing, bullpen usage overall has not changed significantly in that span.  

Even if front offices and field staffs want to begin using closers longer in games, the data suggests [sic] that pitchers are now conditioned to work three outs and rarely more. Because of that, the next step in reliever usage doesn’t appear to be calling on the Aroldis Chapmans of the world for more than one inning during the majority of the season.

Instead, the real sea change will happen when managers begin using their closers in the highest-leverage situations late in the game—regardless of conventional baseball thinking or contract incentives that reward saves.

While I agree with the first part of his final thoughts, I'm also wondering if perhaps the latter isn't already happening, but I'll get to that later.  Right now I want to nit-pick about methodology. 

Banished used the top 10 pitchers by Saves each year back to 1995, but this seems needlessly limiting and arbitrary to me.  Besides the fact that the Save is kind of a stupid statistic for measuring pitcher effectiveness, the top 10 pitchers each year are not the only ones with the right to be called "Closers".  Both very good and very bad teams can have closers that do not happen to end up in the top 10 in Saves, which are sometimes a result of happenstance and usage patterns more than talent.  (Joe Borowski led the league with 45 Saves in 2007 despite an ERA of 5.07.  Brad Lidge twice amassed 30+ Saves with an ERA over 5.00, once over 7!) 

For example, in 1998, the "top-10 rule" would eliminate Ugueth Urbina, who was (among relievers) 5th in MLB with 3.2 bWAR that year, despite amassing "only" 34 Saves for the lowly Expos, and Mariano Rivera, who amassed only 36 Saves for the Greatest Baseball Team in History.  Any of the best sportsbooks would have told you to put your money on the 1998 Yankees.  

Or for a more recent example, using the top 10 rule for 2015 (actually 11, as there was a 3-way tie for 10th) you'd leave out Greg Holland, David Robertson, Aroldis Chapman, and Drew Storen, the last of which he uses for an example in his own article.

Therefore, I instead chose to set the benchmark at anyone with at least 25 Saves in a season, which gave me well over 400 data points for the 26 seasons, which I averaged by season to look for trends.  Still an arbitrary benchmark, I'll admit, but one that gives us a more reasonable look at the pitchers would could reasonably be called mostly full time closers in the last two decades. 

Here are the annual averages for pitchers with 25+ saves per year*:

Year    IP     IP/App    %GF-25S    %GF -Top10
1995   66.2    1.05      89%          91%
1996   68.7    1.05      88%          88%
1997   69.8    1.03      85%          88%
1998   70.1    1.05      86%          90%
1999   70.4    1.05      86%          89%
2000   70.6    1.06      87%          89%
2001   68.1    1.02      87%          89%
2002   70.8    1.06      88%          92%
2003   71.1    1.05      84%          87%
2004   73.2    1.06      86%          90%
2005   68.6    1.03      87%          88%
2006   67.8    1.04      85%          85%
2007   67.3    1.02      86%          88%
2008   63.3    0.99      84%          89%
2009   64.6    1.00      83%          86%
2010   63.4    1.00      86%          87%
2011   64.6    0.98      82%          86%
2012   66.5    0.99      79%          87%
2013   63.6    0.98      83%          87%
2014   64.7    1.00      82%          84%
2015   62.3    0.98      81%          86%

*For the strike-shortened 1995 season, I prorated the innings total for 162 games instead of 144.  

These columns are, respectively, the averages for the innings pitched per season, the Innings per appearance, the percentage of games finished for the pitchers with at least 25 Saves, and the percentage of games finished for the top 10 Save leaders each year.  Seems like there are some pretty notable trends here, but in case you're a more visual person...graphs!  

While there was a downward trend in the data for the top-10 Saves closers, and there is one in my own data, the writer at Banished implies that  "...closers throwing only six or seven fewer innings per season now," is somehow "not dramatic," a notion with which I respectfully dissent.    

 

And you can see that this is also born out in the data.   Pitchers used primarily as closers averaged only 62 1/3 IP in 2015, compared with somewhere between 69 and 71 IP in 1996-2003.  (Somehow, 1995 still comes off as an anomaly, even with my data correction.) Then there was a peak of 73 IP in 2004, brought about by the fact that there were seven players with over 80IP that year, including Brad Lidge with almost 94. No other year had more than five such pitchers, and most years -including each year since 2005 - had only one or none at all.  

All seven of those 80+ IP relievers were former starters, and as one of the other trends noted in the banished piece points out, with the tendency to groom closers even from college on to be closers, i.e. not to pitch more than 70 or so innings in a year, we may have seen the end of such groups.

But getting back to that downward trend in innings per appearance, that's about a 10% difference in their total innings.  My data, because it includes some closers who may have lost their jobs or gained them during the season, necessarily shows a slightly less pronounced decline, about 8% lower in 2015 than at the peak in 2002 and 2004, but still, there is a difference.  

If you said that a top position player was playing "only 10-15 games" less per year than was expected of him 20 years ago, and implied that this was somehow no big deal, it would be laughable.  Likewise, if a starting pitcher averaged 20-25 fewer innings per year, and yet expected to be paid more money...OK, that's actually happening.  Bad example.   

But in any case, it does seem to me that this is not an insignificant change.  His argument is that we are more likely to see a change in usage not in total innings, but in situational usage, and I'm not certain if we aren't already seeing that:

This chart shows how frequently these pitchers are used to finish games (i.e. the percentage of their appearances that are used to end games, not the percentage of the team's games they finish.) and is for pitchers with at least 25 Saves each year.  However, the data in the table above also include the percentages for top 10-Saves closers, and you can see a slight downward trend there too, from 88-91% in the mid to late 1990's to only 84-86% now.  

In short, it seems that closers are already not being used as exclusively to close games as they once were.  Some of the differences in the numbers between the two data sets may be attributable to how a pitcher may be used differently, getting promoted or demoted from the Closer role in mid-season.  

The 2012 data for example, mark the lowest percentage, just 79% of appearances to finish games, but these data are skewed significantly by two pitchers going in different directions: 

• Santiago Casilla started the 2012 season as the Giants' closer but had five Losses and five Blown Saves by the end of July and lost his job to Sergio Romo.  

• Tyler Clippard started the 2012 season as the main set-up guy in the Nationals' bullpen, but with Drew Storen injured and Brad Lidge washed-up and Henry Rodriguez wild and ineffective (14 walks and a 4.74 ERA in 19IP through May!) Clippard got promoted and stayed there.  

Take their percentages out of the data and you're up to 83% that year instead of 79%.  All of which is to say, you have to have some idea where these numbers come from.  Picking arbitrary benchmarks without understanding their context can lead to some inappropriate conclusions.

My conclusion, for what it's worth, is that teams are already starting to do matchups in high leverage situations, often keeping two or more "closer-type" pitchers in the back of the bullpen, when possible, as the yankees have with Andrew Miller and Dellin Betances, or the Royals' famous three-headed monster of Holland/Davis/Hererra.  There's probably a way to test that hypothesis, the preponderance of teams with two or more pitchers amassing 10+ Saves, or something like that, but I've crunched enough numbers for today.