Figures and Figurers

Jayson Stark argued in Monday’s The Athletic that Dick Allen belongs in the Hall of Fame (Golden Days Era committee members thought otherwise) because, well, because Edgar Martinez got in with stats that Stark believes in. And what are those? Why, OPS+ and wRC+, of course. For you dinosaurs out there, that’s on-base and slugging percentages adjusted to the player’s home ballpark along with weighted runs created adjusted for important (and who gets to decide what’s important?) external factors. So, Martinez, so good a third baseman he spent most of his career DHing, got into Cooperstown not on account of World Series Rings (zero), 3,000 hits (2247) or 500 homeruns (309). No, he was a career .312 hitter with great OPS+ and wRC+ numbers. Stark is fine with that. I’m not. Oh, and you have to look at Allen’s most productive years, that being the period from 1964 to 1974. If you do that, he has a better OPS+ than Hank Aaron, Willie McCovey and Frank Robinson, and a better wRC+ than those three. And who would you rather have on your team? According to baseball-reference.com, Allen also has a higher OPS+ than Joe DiMaggio. How interesting. Allen managed 100-plus RBIs only three times in his career; DiMaggio did it nine times. But shame on me for not using the “modern metrics” Stark cites to show what a “historically special force” Allen was. Yeah, right. I keep thinking of a comment made about Ginger Rogers, how she did everything her dance partner Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. To me, that’s Minnie Minoso paired with Jackie Robinson, breaking a barrier without the benefit of his own culture or language. Now, compare Minoso’s “old” stats to Allen’s. That’s a Hall of Famer. For my money, so are Maury Wills and Billy Pierce, both passed over by the Golden Days Era Committee. But not Dick Allen.