THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I remember that Cyril Morong had a piece mentioning Bill Dahlen as the best eligible player not in the Hall, but I can’t remember where I read it or when.

Rally’s WAR agrees. On that list, among position players, Whitaker is second among eligibles-but-out. Larkin is third (well, he’s not been through an election yet, so maybe he shouldn’t be here for about a week), Grich fourth, Trammell fifth. Ah, middle infielders.

Ron Santo (6th) is the first non-middle infielder. Tim Raines (7th) is the first outfielder.

Of the top ten eligible-but-outs by rWAR, Bobby Grich has the highest career rWAR/600 PA, at 5.03, followed by McGwire at 5.00.  Whittaker is down at 4.26, and Larkin is at 4.62.  (Anyone have a better divisor than PA?)

Whittaker, Larkin, and Grich were all still above replacement level at the end of their careers.  If you project out the following few seasons using the 0.5 WAR drop, and have them retire right before the season they would drop below replacement level, you get 70.8 rWAR for Whittaker, 69.9 rWAR for Larkin, and 69.7 rWAR for Grich. 

Grich coming in 14th in MVP voting despite quality D at 2nd and leading in HR, SLG, and OPS+ in 1981 is pretty puzzling.  Was there some knock on Grich amongst media types?  He’s a bit before my time.

Bill #2, Patriot makes a good case for normalizing PAs across different eras http://walksaber.blogspot.com/2009/12/caution-on-use-of-baselined-metrics-per.html

Bill L, it’s not before my time, so here are a few thoughts:

1.  Toss out the home run thing.  He was tied for first with 22 home runs with about half the world, all of whom finished above him in the MVP race.

2.  It was a strike year.  A lot of writers were angry at the players for the season stopping mid-way and probably weren’t spending a lot of time worrying about awards.

3.  The first nationally available Bill James Baseball Abstract came out in 1982.  So everyone was ignorant as hell.  And every quality Bobby Grich possessed above the guys who finished ahead of him that year was carefully hidden by many of the stats that you think of as second nature but literally did not exist at the time. 

4.  The top two pitchers in the voting pitched 78 and 46 innings, respectively (including Fingers, who won the award).  Things were topsy-turvy.

5.  In those days, the number one stat for the MVP was usually RBI.  The fact that guys like Henderson and Grich got votes at all with low RBI totals is good.  The fact that Dwight Evans got his highest career placement in MVP voting that year is good.  Take what you can get.

I would say that the chances the best player not in the HOF was a middle infielder from a team that isn’t in Boston, New York or Chicago (north side) whose career was centered on the 1980s is pretty good.  Grich, Whitaker or Trammell, all good choices.  Somehow after the 1994 season, the collective memory about a lot of players who played in other markets and didn’t have great counting stats or a single World Series moment disappeared.  I suspect a lot of people may only remember Whitaker from forgetting to bring his uniform to the All Star Game and playing in a replica Tigers jersey-shirt with a “1” stenciled on the back in Magic Marker.

Rene

Here is a link to the article you mention.

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/story/2006/1/8/20133/13493

Cy