gregmag

Not meaning to start a fight or anything, but those numbers make the distance between Lee and Cruz look pretty slight -- next year. Fortunately we have some time to see how Cruz and Hart shake out, but I can sure think of some uses for a giant trading chip and $8 million. Hardy's and Weeks' numbers probably understate their true potential, assuming they're both healthy, because injuries (or injury recovery, in JJ's case) appear to have dragged both guys down for a good chunk of last season. Greg.

I didn't mean to suggest that I didn't think much of your opinion, and I apologize for coming off that way. I always put a lot of stock in your opinions. I was feeling defensive rather than offensive -- your post read to me like a very negative critique of the basis for my argument, and I just didn't get the basis for your objection and what alternative you were pitching. Sorry I misunderstood you. Let me try to move back onto more constructive footing: What do you see as the best way to use different kinds of info in evaluating players for the HoF? How does the human element figure into your thinking, and how do you weigh that kind of info with/against stats? Because I made the Allen-Koufax point, I'm especially interested in knowing whether you think something else is going on there that favors Koufax. I'm sorry if I'm just failing to get some of this from your earlier Blyleven example; your point there may be eluding me because I think the pure statistical case for Bert is so strong. Greg.

Patrick, that's a pretty nice job of dismissive mockery, but I'm really interested to know what your positive point is, if you have one to make. I was just making one effort -- and I stated pretty clearly that I didn't consider it an exclusive or conclusive method -- to put these comparisons into a perspective that could bridge our subjective views. After all, one of the objectives of the Hall of Fame -- and one of the things that makes it fun and interesting -- is to reach some kind of consensus. Nobody suggested a rigid criterion for admitting people to the Hall, like the ridiculous chart you posited. What I'm saying is, here's an initial reason (and in this case, IMHO, a convincing one) to believe Dick Allen is at least as deserving of HoF consideration as Sandy Koufax and Ralph Kiner. You want to reject that methodology? More power to you. But I hope you bring to the discussion something more than "Well, darn it, I just think Sandy Koufax was a more dominant player because that's what I think; and Dick Allen just didn't play long enough, no matter how many games he played, and don't bother me with facts." Because if that's enough for you, then you can have your Hall of Fame, and I can have mine, and none of this is worth discussing. Greg.

Bando, what do you base that on? Dale Murphy was nowhere near as good as Allen. He played four years longer, but his career OPS+ was only 121. He topped 140 five times, with a peak of only 156. The other guys you mentioned couldn't shine Allen's shoes. George Foster? Only 500 more career PA than Allen, career OPS+ of 126. Andres Galarraga? Same career length as Murphy, career OPS+ of 118. Joe freakin' Carter? Sixteen years, career OPS+ of 104. I'm not saying OPS+ tells the whole story, but it's a very good starting point for comparison, and the guys you mentioned don't even get out of the blocks with Dick Allen. Actually, the best HoF comparison to Allen is probably Ralph Kiner. Kiner played ten years, 6256 career PA, with a career OPS+ of 149. He was a dominant hitter for six years (OPS+ over 140 each year), with a peak of 184. To me, Kiner is a very borderline Hall of Famer. Allen had the same kind of career, but he was quite a bit better. Allen actually played, not counting his first cup of coffee, 14 seasons, 7314 career PA. As I noted before, his career OPS+ was 156, and he had a run of 11 seasons over 140, all but two of them over 150, peaking at 200. If Kiner belongs in the HoF, then Allen obviously belongs. If Kiner doesn't -- which I tend to believe -- then the question is whether Allen's advantage over Kiner is strong enough to get Allen in. I think it is. Greg.

Todd, all of your HoF articles have been great, but this one was absolutely brilliant. Really an amazing job. I think Colby has the standard about right, but the conclusion wrong. If we want to talk about dominance, then OPS+ and ERA+ are useful metrics. Check this out: Sandy Koufax had a career ERA+ of 131, with peak seasons of 161, 187, 160, and 190 from 1963 to 1966. Those were his only four seasons with ERA+ numbers over 150. Dick Allen had a career OPS+ of 156, with peak seasons of 181 and 174 in 1966-1967 and then 200 (!) and 177 in 1972-1973. He put up nine seasons of OPS+ numbers over 150. Dick Allen was a more dominant player than Sandy Koufax. Sandy's numbers look more impressive because he peaked in the greatest pitcher's climate since the dead ball era, and we remember him because he pitched for some great teams in huge media markets. But air out the numbers and Allen was more impressive at his peak and for his career. Like I said, I basically agree with Colby about the standard. You have to play ten years to be eligible for the Hall, so a career of "only" ten years shouldn't disqualify anyone. I'm not a fan of counting stats, and I think we sometimes overrate guys who pad their counting stats during long declines. Even so, the best players in the Hall were very good for a long time; if you don't have a long career, you have to have monster numbers over a short one. Allen was basically Henry Aaron for ten years. That makes him less than Henry Aaron -- because Hank was Henry Aaron for 20 years -- but for me, it puts Allen right in line with Stargell and Killebrew. I vote yes. Greg.

I haven't seen this discussed anywhere else, so I thought I'd bring it up here. Jeff Sagarin does statistical analysis for USA Today online, including player ratings. He uses a Markov chain analysis to calculate how many runs a team made up entirely of, for example, Brady Clarks would score each game, taking into account all of the "raw" offensive stats (i.e., everything the player does himself -- not runs or RBI). I don't think he uses park adjustments. He breaks the players down into broad groups based on numbers of plate appearances. Here's the link: www.usatoday.com/sports/s.../nlb05.htm He also does a "fantasy analysis," which assigns a dollar value to each player based on runs, times on base, total bases, RBI, and steals discounted by caught stealings. Here's how the Brewers' regular and semiregular batters ranked based on the Markov analysis, with fantasy values in parentheses: PLAYERS WITH 502 OR MORE PA ( 67 players total): 23. Jenkins 6.59 ($20.08) 31. Overbay 5.84 ($18.10) 33. Hall 5.80 ($18.28) 35. Clark 5.70 ($18.49) 42. Lee 5.40 ($23.30) PLAYERS WITH 162 TO 501 PA (135 players total): 12. Cirillo 6.10 ($1.92) 15. Branyan 6.03 ($3.21) 22. Helms 5.66 ($0.21) 55. Weeks 4.76 ($12.12) 57. Miller 4.70 ($10.12) 75. Hardy 4.39 ($9.66) 122. Moeller 3.30 ($0.00) I'm not going to bother with the "small sample" category, because I'm lazy, but it does confirm that Chris Magruder sucked. These numbers are what they are, just one method. They do confirm to me that the argument for Carlos Lee's value, at least last year, depends a lot on (a) staying in the lineup and (b) being in the batter's box at the right time. They also make a good case for Overbay's and Clark's value, and they underscore the fine year Jenkins had. Hack away. Greg. Edit: Unwanted emoticons

I love Wise, but remember that BABIP is a very luck-heavy stat. I don't know enough about this to have an opinion about how much pitchers can control BABIP at the margin, but we do know that both hitters and pitchers tend to regress toward the BABIP mean. This suggests that we should expect Wise to be not quite so effective next year. Greg.

Me too. I especially echo Colby's point -- we need to have a serious and hopefully informed discussion about the effect of steroids on performance if we're going to talk about discounting people's achievements on this basis. Greg.

Is there a way to find the average decline in a players stats after changing leagues? If there is, look at it, then come back with an argument. When you're the one who is arguing that something matters, it's your own responsibility to support what you're saying. The rest of us aren't just going to assume you're right, let alone take orders from you to go off and prove your point. Greg.

Of course you can road test the approach. People have been calculating MLEs for years. Baseball Prospectus uses MLEs, prorated based on age, predicted development, etc., to calculate likely performance for hundreds of prospects. BP predicts performances for major league vets as well, so the book would seem to provide a good test for the relative accuracy of minor league performance and past major league performance as predictors. I haven't made any systematic study of their predictions, so I'm not offering a substantive defense right now. I'm just saying that anybody can open up BP and check the methods for himself. Geno, please stop resorting to the rhetorical game of treating MLEs as if they're exceptionally arcane and unrooted in logic. I understand your argument, which I take to be that minor league stats have too many variables to equate them with MLB performance. That's fine; maybe you're right. But your repeated suggestions that the method is entirely random and not thought through is tantamount to calling those of us who disagree with you stupid. Greg.

The distance between the minors and majors is incredibly vast, and no MLE formula will ever properly account for that. If the gap from the minors to the bigs was so easy to bridge, then there wouldn't be so many thousands of flameouts like Mike Coolbaugh, Kevin Orie and Joey Meyer. Geno, all due respect, but IMHO this statement is just wrong. We've long since agreed to disagree on this point, but I can't let you assert it without at least setting forth the opposite assertion. Prediction of players' performance is uncertain, for all kinds of reasons -- age, injury, work ethic, etc. But nothing about the difference between major and minor league baseball particularly complicates the predictive game. Is MLB a better level of competition than AAA? Hell, yes. So you make adjustments, just like you make adjustments for parks, leagues, and eras within MLB. As the point just made about bad MLB contracts illustrates, major leaguers "flame out" as surely as minor leaguers do. Greg.

I respectfully suggest that folks who like the idea of locking up Lee for three or four years after this one read SoCal's post above very attentively. Nobody can know the future, but you can predict the future with a reasonable degree of accuracy if you have salient facts. SoCal laid out some very salient facts. Like others have said, I'm not itching to trade Lee this offseason. I wouldn't say no to an offer that made the team better (I imagine none of us would), but the status quo is fine for the moment. As I think DougJones said, the '06 break is the critical point of decision, in part because by then we should have a better sense of what Hart and Cruz will contribute. Greg.

I was trying to figure out how to say well what I was thinking -- then Pogo said it much better than I could. The only thing I'll add/emphasize is that nobody who is suggesting we might benefit from trading Carlos is making that suggestion because we want to give up on contending. We're making that case because we think trading Carlos might make this team better over the next several years. There's a risk we might lose something next year, siwtching from Lee to the better of Hart or Cruz (or a combination of the two) -- but remember that, when you trade somebody, you get something back. Doug Melvin is very good at getting useful somebodys back. Okay, just one other thing, elaborating on something I just said about Hart / Cruz. You know what's great about those two, from a gambling standpoint? There are two of them. As the Lee defenders correctly point out, rookies -- even rookies with strong credentials -- carry some risk (although the Lee fans tend to forget that 30 year-old, low-OBP sluggers also carry some risk). But when you have two rookies with good credentials, the odds that one of them, or a combination of the two, will work out start looking a lot better. I don't have MLE numbers, but my quick analysis tells me that a Hart-Cruz timeshare, with PT weighted based on how each does, would at least match Lee's OBP and produce at least 25 jacks. Does that prediction sound unreasonable? If not, then aren't you willing to see what (a) Lee and (b) the salary difference between Lee and Hart-Cruz can get you in exchange for those 7 home runs? Greg.

You may be right. Either way, I think your argument exactly tracks the discussion we need to have. Subjectively, for my money, I think the better of Hart or Cruz probably will do substantially more than the numbers you posited, and I don't buy that Jenkins' success or failure depends so much on Lee's presence in the lineup -- particularly because Lee's inability to get on base (which, DHonks, doesn't magically stop mattering after the first three batters in the first inning) left Geoff with a dearth of RBI opportunities. I definitely get your attachment to a player who does useful things that we've been missing for a long time. My humble suggestion, however, is that such an attachment is a bit premature when all we've assembled so far is a .500 team. We're going to have to cash in at least one of our good-not-great starters -- one of the outfielders, I suspect -- if we're going to contend. Which one that turns out to be will depend on opportunity, market value, and close judgments. Greg.

Geno, two responses. First, I think you're right that replacing Lee's value would be a challenge. You couldn't go get a comparable, established guy easily. But that isn't the whole picture. What if Lee and a package gets you a true #2 starter, and that's all you do? Then you've traded Lee plus the risk of our #5 starter situation for serious rotation improvement and the risk of Cruz/Hart/whomever in LF. I'm not sure whether that's a good trade or not, but I think the question is close, and that dimension has to figure into this discussion. Second, I don't really agree with you about the centrality of the Lee trade to the Brewers' success. I absolutely agree that the trade improved us, that it was a great idea. But without it we would have had something like this: Pods cf Clark lf Overbay 1b Jenkins lf Hall 3b Miller c Weeks 2b Hardy ss Again, I agree that I prefer what we had with Lee. But given Pods' bounce-back from his horrible 2004, the lineup above would have represented a major improvement over the 2004 Brewers. The Lee trade looks especially good, I think, because of just how unspeakably awful Pods was in 2004. As I said last offseason, the 2004 Brewers' biggest problem wasn't power -- it was getting on base. The single best thing about the Lee trade, as far as the 2005 season is concerned, was the improvement of Clark over Pods. My main issue with Lee is similar to my main issue with Clark. Both are useful, productive players, but neither is good enough to anchor a contender, and they're both at an age where we should expect them to get worse, not better. Lee gets some bonus points for his health and consistency; Clark gets some bonus points for being cheap and having the sort of broad (if modest) skill set that sometimes forestalls aging. But if we're interested in winning the World Series, we'll have to let go of some decent, reliable guys and take chances on some untested guys with upside. So how about Lee and prospects for Milledge? We see if Cruz or Hart works out in LF this year, and we wait another year for a guy who has a real chance to be a championship-caliber offensive catalyst. I have no idea whether that's a realistic option, but it illustrates the kind of thinking that I'm trying to describe. Greg.

I think Geno makes fair points about Lee's health and consistency. That said, Roto's analysis is very sound. Lee is not a good OBP man. His age and skill set suggest a decline is likely -- it may already be happening. Plus, he's paid more than he is worth. The folks who say you have to consider need and available alternatives are certainly right. Nobody is saying "Give Lee away with no backup plan in place." What I hear Colby and others saying is "Look for a backup plan, because trading Lee would be a good idea if we could pull it off." The argument I'm tired of is that we sucked without Lee and we were better with him. So what? The salient facts are that we used to suck, and now we're better. Lee's contribution to that improvement isn't magical. It can be measured. The facts suggest that Lee helped, but a lot of other factors -- Hall, Jenkins, Capuano, Turnbow -- were substantially more important in the turnaround. Just because Lee is a "name" doesn't make him indespensible. Just because he does some things well doesn't erase the fact that he's subpar in other areas. Any way you slice it, he's a decent but not special player. If we want to contend, we need more special players, and we need to get bang for our buck. Greg.

I think we also have a tendency to be more judgmental when a hitter fails to do something that was clearly the object of a conscious strategic decision. If a guy is up there to bunt, and doesn't get it down, that annoys us because the team *decided* to give away an out but couldn't even pull it off. In contrast, we never say, when Lee or Jenkins hits a single or a long fly ball, "what a bonehead move that was, failing to hit the home run in that situation." The reality is, of course, that hitting home runs and bunting are both skills. If a guy succeeds in either effort, he's doing a good job. But hitting home runs is a much more valuable skill for winning games than bunting is. Greg.

I don't think a player's off-field achievements should land him in the HoF. Flood, for reasons others have given, doesn't make the cut as a player. That said, your recap of Flood's lawsuit is excellent, and I absolutely agree that we should remember Flood as a hero -- especially in an era where the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Give me a choice between the reserve clause and monster contracts, and I'll take the monster contracts without a second thought. Baseball has problems today, but good people of goodwill can solve those problems. The reserve clause was a cheat and a sham, and Flood v. Kuhn is one of the Supreme Court's most blatantly stupid opinions. Greg.

Patrick, I haven't seen a thread in the forum about your draft recap article, so I just want to thank you for the hard work. As always, it's an awesomely informative feature, and a big highlight of the dog days. I have one small suggestion. Perhaps you could include each player's birth date with his listing. Age is so important in projecting prospects, and knowing that a prospect is a college or HS draftee doesn't quite nail it down. Just a thought. Greg.

when statistical noise like VORP and MLB-Equivalency numbers for minor leaguers (even for A-ball'ers!) are brought up, they're accepted pretty readily?...and they're crap! Thanks for clearing that up. Statistics are only as good as the thought that goes into designing them. They're information. Some information is more valuable than other information. You can judge a hitter's season based on the raw number of base hits he got, or you can judge it based on his OPS and plate appearances. I'd say the latter information is a lot more valuable than the former. But to say, "some information is crap; therefore, any other piece of information I don't like is crap" . . . wow. It's like a Dark Ages revival party. On Hardy and range factor, here's my two cents: (a) A fielder's range is very important in assessing his value. (b) A fielder's range is measurable. © Measuring a fielder's range in a manner that corrects for extrinsic variables is hard. (d) Straight-up range factor -- putouts plus assists per inning -- does a very, very bad job of correcting for extrinsic variables. I'm not very sophisticated in my knowledge of different defensive stats, but those statements seem clearly right to me. Greg.

I don't like the doctrinaire refusal to use Turnbow in anything other than a save situation, but we do have other guys who aren't chopped liver. Maybe I'm just feeling mellow after surviving a day at the mall with the in-laws (who are lovely people; it's the mall that drains my life force), but I can't feel too bad about this one. Roy Oswalt and Jeff Bagwell beat us. No duh -- they're really, really good. The fact that Rick freakin' Helling is continuing to do his best Pedro Martinez impression just boggles my mind. I do wonder what the past ten days have done to our pythagorean win expectation (I'm too lazy to check). Greg.

Brian and Patrick, I want to hear more. Sorry, guys -- you're too good to get away with conclusory statements about a candidate whom a lot of smart people (and I, but that's nothing) take seriously. Why does he come up short for you? How would his selection debase the Hall's standards, and what undeserving players are you concerned would have to follow him in? Greg.

Brian, I'm curious -- whom do you mean? Bill James has Santo as the sixth-best 3B ever, right ahead of Molitor and Robinson, way ahead of Pie Traynor. His numbers (OPS+ does take park factors into account, as well as era) mark him as a little bit better hitter than Andre Dawson and Tony Perez, a little bit worse hitter than Jim Rice and Dave Winfield, right in that tight group -- but Santo was a gold glove third baseman, giving him much more defensive value than any of those guys. I think we're a little bit spoiled by the recent memory of arguably the two greatest 3Bs ever, Mike Schmidt (no argument) and George Brett. Those guys shouldn't keep Santo out of the Hall any more than Hank Aaron and Willie Mays should have kept Dave Winfield out of the Hall. Yes, there have been better players than Santo -- but not a lot, and some players worse than Santo are deserving Hall-of-Famers. So how does letting Santo in lower the Hall's standards? Also, is there some Cub hate skewing this discussion? I didn't live in Milwaukee long enough to truly hate the Cubs; the Brewers were in the AL, and the Cubs were just that bumbling team I got to watch on TV a lot. So maybe I'm not in the proper spirit.http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif Greg.

The problem I have with Todd's article is that it ignores the poor offensive context in which Santo played. His career centered right around the lowest run environment since the dead ball era. As such, this is a case in which OPS+ can be especially telling. Santo's career OPS+ is 125. For comparison, Pie Traynor is at 107; Brooks Robinson is at 104; Paul Molitor is at 122. Matthews (143), Brett (135), Schmidt (147), Home Run Baker (135), and Wade Boggs (130) are higher, but that's about it; Santo sits right between the first and second tier of 3Bs who are already in the Hall of Fame. Put together the fact that he ranks safely within the top 10 hitters at his position and his excellent defense at a key position, which Todd's article documents, and you have a Hall of Famer. Todd's right that Santo didn't last long, but he's also right that Santo was durable while he lasted. He has my vote. Greg.

Um, yeah -- but we have to get out of this inning before we can think about scoring. Cart, meet horse. Greg.