As the likes of Jose Canseco and Fred McGriff draw closer to the 500 home run mark and Harold Baines slowly, painfully creeps toward 3,000 hits, there has been some talk about whether these and other figures should still be traditional benchmarks for Hall of Fame consideration. Perhaps, the argument goes, the last decade or so of high offensive output has cheapened the traditional luster of these numbers.
Already 400 has ceased to be the watershed point for home runs, with such 400-club members as Dave Kingman and Darrell Evans on the outside of the Hall of Fame. Can 3,000 hits be too far removed from joining 400 homers on the scrap heap? Maybe the figure should be 3,500 or so.
I've got news for the people who are wondering about this - these numbers have been wrong for a very, very long time. Many people, especially voters from the BBWAA, will disagree with the notion that all such benchmarks should be eliminated, that 400 or 500 home runs never meant anything in an of themselves, nor did 3,000 hits. Although I firmly believe this to be true, I acknowledge that I'm never going to convince most Hall of Fame voters of this viewpoint.
I've got much better luck if I tell them this - there is already a member of the 3,000-hit club who does not belong in the Hall of Fame. Sadly, he's already in there and we have little or no hope of ever getting him out.
Now, that's a broad statement and no matter what I do, some people will say it's wrong. Even among those who don't think 3,000 hits should be an automatic ticket-punch, there are multiple, vastly different methods of measuring players' careers. I'm not even going to attempt to pick just one method. I will, however, list four that should encompass most people's views.
The first measurement I'm going to use is a modified career OPS, which is short for On-Base Percentage Plus Slugging Percentage for those of you who aren't familiar with it. It's become a relatively widely-accepted method of measuring a player's offensive contribution.
I'm going to modify it to account for the various eras players played in. That could be done in a few ways, but I've decided on one of the simpler methods. I've calculated that maximum possible OPS for every player's career (at least all those eligible for the Hall of Fame) by assuming that the league-leading figure each season was the maximum attainable OPS. So a player who played in the National League from 1961 through 1979 would have to be compared against the conglomerated "career" of Frank Robinson's 1961 and 1962 seasons, Hank Aaron's 1963 season and so on, all the way up to and including Dave Kingman's 1979 campaign. Those nineteen seasons combine to produce an OPS of 1.010. Any player whose career spanned that time period would have his actual OPS divided by the imaginary "best" OPS to determine his personal OPS Ratio.
I know this is not the most scientific method for calculating modified OPS. It ignores some important factors like park effects and the possibility that the league's best in any given year could have been a monstrous aberration that didn't accurately represent that league in that year - like much of Babe Ruth's numbers from the 1920s. Point taken. But I'm just trying to get a reasonable estimation of how a player compared to the best hitters in his league during his career. If we're going to consider a player for the Hall of Fame, I think this is an important bit of information.
The other factors I'm going to consider are more widely accepted. Total Player Rating, or TPR, has been around for a while now and has become a standard of sorts among sabermetricians. It would be hard to exclude TPR from this study.
Bill James introduced two other measurements - Hall of Fame Standards and Hall of Fame Monitor - is his book about Hall voting. I won't use his Monitor measurement here because it deals more with perception than reality, but his HOF Standards are valuable and very consistent. They're also readily available through Baseball-Reference.com, an invaluable web site.
The final measurement I'll use is MVP voting, specifically the number of MVP "points" a player received during his career. I determined this by attaching point totals to top-ten finishes in MVP voting, 14 for 1st, 9 for 2nd, and so on down to 1 point for 10th. These points are then summed for a final career total.
Looking at these four measurements, we find that the 22 retired members of the 3,000-hit club (Gwynn and Ripken weren't included since they're still adding to their totals as of this writing) had the following averages:
OPS Ratio TPR HOF Standards MVP Points
All w/ 3,000 hits .847 53.3 62.35 46.3
All except Player X .852 55.2 63.3 47.8
Player X .746 12.7 43.0 24
Clearly, Player X compares terribly to other members of the 3,000-hit club. He is easily the worst member of this group. Player X finished last in OPS Ratio, last in TPR, last in HOF Standards, and 14th in MVP Points (out of just 16 since 6 members of the club played most or all of their careers prior to the advent of the MVP award). If we sum his rankings in these four areas we get a total of 80 - the worst possible score would have been 82. The next highest total is 64 for Robin Yount. (FYI - The worst of the six players who don't have an MVP ranking, Cap Anson with a total of 37 for three categories, would still total just 59 even with a last-place MVP finish.)
So who is Player X, easily the worst member of the 3,000-hit club? He's Lou Brock, a first-ballot Hall of Fame inductee in 1985.
Okay, so maybe it's not fair to compare Lou to the other members of that club. After all, this group is generally considered to be an elite within the elite, kind of like what Delta Force is to the Army's Special Forces. Wouldn't it be more fair to compare Lou to all other outfielders in the Hall of Fame before we declare his election to be faulty? Okay, I'm a fair guy, so let's look at just that.
Excluding former Negro Leagues players, there are 57 outfielders in the National Baseball Hall of Fame (and Museum if you care about official titles). Here are the averages for the same group of measurements for these 57 players:
OPS Ratio TPR HOF Standards MVP Points
All HOF OF .839 34.1 50.9 37.9
All except Lou Brock .841 34.5 51.0 38.3
Lou Brock .746 12.7 43.0 24
Still a pitiful showing. At least he doesn't finish dead last in this group of 57. No, he's risen all the way to 52nd. Whoopee! Only Lloyd Waner, Earle Combs, Heinie Manush, Tommy McCarthy, and Chick Hafey finished lower. In fairness, there are a few players who didn't receive an MVP ranking that might have dropped below him if they had. If we exclude that measure, Brock moves up two spots to 50th, meaning he is still easily in the bottom ten of all Hall of Fame outfielders.
So Brock is a bit of a misfit. Maybe he doesn't belong, maybe he does. That's a pretty subjective call. Personally, since he was widely known to be one of the worst defensive outfielders in baseball, I wouldn't have voted for him, even with his glorious batting record in post-season play. But, I can understand how he garnered substantial support, particularly since he is supposedly one of the finest gentlemen ever to play the game.
What I don't understand is how he could have been a first-ballot selection. That's really disturbing in light of the fact that there are literally dozens of better outfielders who not only failed to get in on the first ballot but failed to get elected at all.
If we extend our four measurements to encompass all Hall-eligible players ever, Brock would finish in the 24th-ranked outfield of all time. Now that might not sound too bad, but take a look at the other players who ranked 24th at their positions:
1B Cecil Cooper
2B Larry Doyle
3B Doug DeCinces
SS Herman Long
C Mickey Tettleton
OF Greg Luzinski
OF George Van Haltren
OF Brock
Sorry, but I don't see anyone on that list who deserved to be included with the game's immortals, do you? Even worse, take a look at the group of eligible outfielders ranked higher than 24th who are not yet enshrined:
Jim Rice
Dwight Evans
Dave Parker
Jack Clark
Sherry Magee
Reggie Smith
Rusty Staub
Dale Murphy
Bob Johnson
Fred Lynn
Bobby Bonds
Minnie Minoso
Ken Singleton
Rocky Colavito
George Foster
Tony Oliva
Jimmy Ryan
Harry Stovey
Al Oliver
Pete Browning
Jose Cruz
Frank Howard
Brian Downing
That's twenty-three players who finish higher. Now, certainly these rankings can, and should, be manipulated to account for other factors that aren't included. Post-season play, "specialness", civic responsibility and general good citizenship, all that good stuff. But even with those manipulations done, I find it hard to believe that Lou Brock passes each of these twenty-three men.
Personally, I think Rice, Evans and Parker have all earned places in the Hall. I don't think any of the others really deserve a plaque, but if I had to pick just one player as a direct replacement of Brock, I'd take Sherry Magee.
Magee played primarily the same position as Brock, left field, and enjoyed a relatively lengthy career for that era (over 2,000 career games). Magee was one of the premier power hitters of the Dead Ball Era, which is why we hear so little of him. Still, in the ten years from 1905 through 1914, Magee finished in the top-10 in home runs and RBI seven times, including thrice leading the NL in RBI. He led the league a fourth time in the war-shortened 1918 campaign. He had a batting title to his credit as well, while also being known as one of the finest defensive outfielders of his day. To top it all off, he stole over 400 bases in his career.
All of these accomplishments combined earn Magee a spot in the 14th-ranked "team" ever. In fact, he's the only eligible member of that team not already in the Hall of Fame (The ineligible Joe Jackson is on that team. It should also be noted that John McGraw made the Hall as a manager, though his career as a third baseman presents a strong case for his inclusion as a player as well.) He was a much more complete player than Brock, and if we have to include a speedy National League left fielder, Magee is a better choice.
But poor Magee didn't compile 3,000 hits, did he? Funny what that one number can do.
» Despite the opinion expressed above, Paul White still thinks Lou Brock should get brownie points for putting up with Rickey Henderson's ego. You can read more of Paul's work at www.lostinleftfield.com.
Also by Paul White
» Frankie Frisch's Sad Legacy: The Cheapening of The Hall of Fame
» Babe's MVP Snubs
» The Schalk-Schang Redemption: Two Men Who Prove That The Hall of Fame Veterans Committee Was a Sham
» Being Tony Muser
» More submissions
Copyright © 2001 by Paul White. Posted November 21, 2001.
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