Hall of Fame Observations, Part I

Clare was having a good day yesterday pregnancy-wise, which means she called to report the Hall-of-Fame voting results, a big fat zero for this year’s candidates. My daughter was happy Curt Schilling didn’t get in based on stupid remarks he made about softball. I’m happy because I question his analytics-driven bona fides. Allow me this story first. In graduate school, we were made to believe that the future of understanding the past would come through the application of “quantitative methods,” as it was known; think sabermetrics applied to history. One of the purportedly great works to employ this approach was Time on the Cross, which concerned American slavery. The authors basically concluded that slavery worked, sort of. Southern agriculture was more efficient than its Northern, free, counterpart, and that was the result of the complex interplay between master and slave. Decades later, and I can still fall into the jargon. Consider this passage in regards whipping on a Louisiana plantation with “about 200 slaves, of whom about 120 were in the labor force [!]. The record shows that over the course of two years a total of 160 whippings were administered, an average of 0.7 whippings per hand per year. About half the hands were not whipped at all during the period.” The authors also noted that, in many ways, “whipping was as mildly applied as the corporal punishment normally practiced within families today.” The numbers in the first passage above were turned into a bar graph, as if that mitigated the horror. Long story short, historians aren’t so cavalier when crunching numbers these days. With luck, maybe a similar discretion will come to baseball analytics. Because, as the saying goes, figures don’t lie, figurers do. If I read baseballreference.com correctly, Schilling with his 216 regular-season wins and 11-2 postseason record possesses the metrics that make him HOF worthy. Plug in the numbers, and Schilling’s WAR comes out to 79.5. Tommy John, with 288 regular-season wins and a 6-3 postseason records, rates a WAR of only 61.6. So, if the numbers strip away subjectivity, or perhaps you say bias, then please explain why it took Bert Blyleven with his 94.5 WAR nineteen years to get into Cooperstown. Gosh, did it have something to do with Blyleven never playing in a major media market as opposed to Schilling, who spent the bulk of his career in media-saturated Philadelphia and Boston? If Schilling wore his bloody sock for the White Sox in 2005, I bet he wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near that 71 percent of the vote he just did. Speaking of the South Side, ex-Sox left-handed Mark Buehrle garnered 11 percent of the vote and thus stays on the ballot. Maybe character counts, after all. That, or two no-hitters, including a perfect game. I could note here that Buehrle has a 59.1 WAR and two fewer career wins than Schilling, but that would just be more figures, and we know what that leads to.