THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

My gut reaction was that you’d need two of the top 10 seasons ever (let’s say, by broad position, so pitcher/non-pitcher, defense/forward/goalie in hockey, etc) if that was all that was on your resume.

Looking at Bonds’ b-ref WAR, he had the 8th and 10th best seasons for a non-pitcher, post-1900.  He also had the 11th best.  I’d say the first two are enough, and the third makes him a lock.

Crosby though, isn’t really close to this level of performance, is he?  I’m not too familiar with advanced hockey stats, but while he might be the best or close to it, it’s certainly not a landslide.

I think it comes down to the circumstances within which he left the game. Morbid thought, but if Bonds has those four best seasons in his first four years, and then in spring training of season 5 he suffers a beanball and never plays again, AND has no steroid suspicion, he’s in the Hall of Fame for sure, IMO. He would have a tremendous outpouring of fan support (even the BBWAA) from people who wanted to honor him. 

Does Crosby have a squeaky-clean image?  I don’t follow hockey enough to know.  But I think that’s a factor here.

I’m a Pittsburgh native, so I’m a Crosby fan. I’d say no, it’s not enough. To me, immortality implies a certain body of work. Dryden and Orr made it in shorter periods of time because they so dominated the competition. Same would apply to Gretzky and Lemieux. Crosby showed himself to be the best in the game before he was injured last season, and the best or close to it in several years before that. Good as he has been, he has not dwarfed the competition as the other four did upon entry into the league.

I don’t think the argument really applies to baseball, as no one truly dominates when entering the league, which I think is a prerequisite for immortality if one has a short career. Play five good seasons and explode in years 5-10 and your end up like Edgar Martinez, who was a hell of a player late in his career, but he’s not going into the Hall.

I can see the argument all the way down to 1 season.  If Roy Hobbs plays 1 year, hits 400/500/900 with 80-90 HR, I’d like to see his plaque when I visit the Hall of Fame.  Basically, that one year would be enough for me to consider that he was probably the best ever, but for whatever reasons didn’t have the opportunity to play more.  The quality threshold would slowly slide down as the number of years increased.  Sandy Koufax seems to be the obvious example here.  Would it have mattered to anyone if his career started in 1962 instead of 1955 (ignoring eligibility requirements)?

Does any player in any sport meet the one outstanding, otherworldly season requirement? If not, who’s the closest?

The “one season” threshold would have to be astoundingly high.

New readers may be interested in this thread I had on the subject:

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/observed_performance_inferring_true_talent_opitt/

DavidS - Don’t the reasons why that guy only played one season matter? Since HOF isn’t JUST about numbers (and the voters are told as much), it would for me.

What if he played one season because he murdered someone and went to prison? What if it’s because he went to war and either died, was injured, or was at war for 10 years and was too old to play when he returned? What if it was a freak on-field injury? What if it was a freak off-field incident? Does it change things if he’s alive or dead, or if the reason for him getting in or not is perceived as his own fault?

Maybe none of that should matter, but it certainly would. And I think some of those hypothetical scenarios are valid points of argument.

@JD/7

After thinking about it a little, I don’t think the reasons matter any more than they would for someone with a longer career.  Is the issue just that he could have physically kept playing but didn’t?  Which reason of yours provides the best case for HoF entry?  What about the worst?

I don’t see any of your scenarios keeping out Koufax (or Pujols as of 2009) except possibly murder.  While I obviously don’t want a lot of murderers in the Hall of Fame, I’m not convinced even that should keep them (or our mythical Roy Hobbs) out.

Red/5

There are players who have had unprecedented statistical seasons, but they typically have other years nearly as good. Babe Ruth comes to mind, as his 1920 season was something completely new, yet he replicated it, and then soon after, others posted similar numbers, at least on a raw counting basis. Nobody came close in advanced percentage stats until Bonds, yet Bonds himself posted multiple amazing seasons on that basis.

From another sport, Wilt Chamberlain had some amazingly dominant raw statistics seasons, especially early in his career. He still holds 6 of the top 7 seasons in rebounds per game, and 5 of the top 6 seasons in points per game. In 1961-62, his third year in the NBA, he averaged 50.4 points per game, and even had one game where he scored 100 points. The following year he still averaged 44.8. Now a single player scoring 40+ is newsworthy in just one game, yet Wilt did that on average for two full seasons.

Both Wilt and Babe played long enough to set career marks in counting stats (albeit ones which have since been surpassed). Jim Brown similarly retired fairly young after setting then-unprecedented single-season records, but he too was the all-time NFL rushing leader when he did so. So none of these were really like the fictional Roy Hobbs.

Maybe Roger Bannister, who was the first man to run under 4:00 in the mile, is the closest example. Bannister never even won an Olympic medal (he was 4th in the 1500 2 years before going sub-4), but in 1954 he broke the barrier in May, then beat fellow sub-4 miler John Landy of Australia in the Empire/Commonwealth Games, and added a European Championship in September. After that season he retired to pursue a career in medicine, leaving the sport as its most famous athlete.

But in U.S. team sports, I can’t think of anyone who become quite dominant but then don’t continue their career for a reasonably long time.

Oh, and while I expect readers here know this already, I should mention that you need to have played 10 years in MLB to be eligible for the HOF. I think they’ve tweaked the rules occasionally (I recall that after his death in a plane crash, they put Thurman Munson on the ballot despite being just shy of 10 years), but they’d need to change the rules to admit someone under a Roy Hobbs like scenario.

An interesting research project might be to find the greatest seasons for players not eligible to be on the HOF ballot.

Lyman Bostock was murdered in 1979 after having an all-star season the previous year, so his career obviously ended way too soon. But he was “only” an all-star. ...

10 years: yeah, let’s not talk about sh!t like that.  I don’t care what the BBWAA rules are, nor about the role as trustee of the rules.

This is slightly tangential on Bonds, but I looked at his HR/FB rates over his career today.  From 1988 to 1999 he had a HR/FB of about 15.2%.  Fom 2000 - 07 that jumped up to 24.3%.  If we just assume that he would have continued to see 15% of his flyballs leave the yard then you’re still projecting him to hit around 644 homers.  http://i273.photobucket.com/albums/jj216/SayHeyRays/BondsTable.png

It blows my mind that voters would throw the baby out with the bathwater just to grandstand, though I don’t find it surprising.