January 18, 2017

Three Elected

Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, and Ivan Rodriguez won election to the Hall of Fame. Congratulations to all three!

Update: Here is the voting. What I find interesting is that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens finished much closer to 50% than the public ballots indicated. It really seems to me to be a generational split. The younger, more open members vote for those two, the older, more closed off members don’t.

I’m very glad to see Tim Raines elected. He and Rickey Henderson set the bar for what a great lead-off hitter should be. Both were more than just on base machines and base stealers. They hit for power as well, Raines often used in the middle of the order.

Rodriguez was the top of the class of a new generation of catchers that started with Benito Santiago. They could hit, they could throw, they were all-around good athletes.

There is a great story about Jeff Bagwell, Bill James, and STATS, Inc. In 1990, STATS published their Major League Handbook, the first to include projections that included players who had not yet made the majors. One of them was Jeff Bagwell. He was projected to hit .318/.400/.436. Peter Gammons reviewed the book and wrote that STATS had picked Jeff Bagwell to win the NL Batting title in 1991. That was not what was intended. Peter had gone through all the BAs and found Bagwell had the highest.

This was actually bad news, because other pundits thought it was ridiculous to project a minor leaguer that high. James later told me that if he had realized they projected Bagwell to have the highest BA in the league, they would have scaled it back. Luckily, Bagwell hit .294/.387/.437 that season, and while he didn’t win the batting title, the James projection was very good, and people started accepting that you could predict major league performance from minor league stats.

1 thought on “Three Elected

  1. rbj

    That’s what, twelve in the last four years? Good. I hate it when one or none gets in.

    And can we take Murray Chass’s ballot away from him? Didn’t someone lose his vote for letting fans pick his last choice?

    ReplyReply

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