Okay, after three whole articles to this series, it’s time to bring it all home. In Part 1, I broke down the problem with the Hall of Fame’s recent stances on electing pitchers and why it looked like it would be getting worse. In Part 2, I looked at the problem and its sources, and began kicking around some alternative things voters might consider looking at. In Part 3, I proposed Cy Young Shares as a solution, and went through their history and issues; they won’t be able to serve as a straight milestone number in the way that a stat like Wins or Strikeouts does. However! They are still useful at looking at pitchers in their context, and more importantly, they already seemed to have some relation to how voters are voting now.
So there is clearly a point to looking into this more deeply, even if the hope of a single unified Award Shares milestone is gone. Having an easy-to-understand stat would be nice, for appealing to the bloc of Hall voters that skews more traditional (and besides, it’s not like Wins are going to escape being heavily affected by the context of the game, as career win totals continue to drop). And since the BBWAA seemed to consider Awards success before the crush of 300/3000 inductees, perhaps the induction of guys like Mike Mussina and Roy Halladay is evidence that they’ll start moving back in that direction. If so, it seems like the best way to look at pitchers through this lens is going to be within their respective eras.
So what do our Cy Young Shares leaderboards look like if we divide them into “1970 to 2009” and “2010 to Present”? This is just a simple division based on each pitcher’s career midpoint rather than a full era adjustments, because this is the third full article of what was originally supposed to be a single piece that I’ve been working on and completely re-writing for months and I just want to finally get it out the door, but it’s a good-enough starting point for now. (I can throw “in-depth look at fully era-adjusted Cy Young Shares” on the “potential future article” pile for the time being.)
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Rethinking What Makes a Hall of Fame Starting Pitcher, Part 3: Can We Make a New Pitching Milestone?
The last two articles in this impromptu mini-series have been building to this question: since the Hall of Fame has been struggling to induct starting pitchers, is there a big, easy-to-understand metric that could serve as a new milestone for Hall of Fame voters and writers? I think that this is a particularly important thing in the context of Hall voting, given that such a large chunk of the electorate does rely on more “traditional” ways of thinking about their votes, and giving a big, round number to easily signal “this is a historic player!” could go a long way in helping those voters see what the rest of us are seeing. In fact, it’s something I’ve tried before in other areas, like when I tried to determine if there was a milestone for Walks to match 3000 Hits and 500 Homers, or when I repeatedly tried to emphasize how Scott Rolen was a top-ten all-time player at his position.
But as part of answering this, I felt like I had to tackle the Hall’s recent history and their existing standards, and I found that the voters have largely just looked at pitcher wins, with a little bit of focus on strikeouts sometimes. And their recent logjam seems to be in part triggered by the Hall ballots in the 1990s that were heavy on milestones; six pitchers with big milestones under their belt came up for induction in short order, and rather than hurrying to get the obvious picks inducted, Hall voters instead seemed to respond to this by delaying the induction of “weaker” 300 win/3000 strikeout guys, and ignoring everyone else.
However, this was already kind of a big shift in voting behaviors, as before then, the voters would regularly induct players with less than 300 wins and 3000 strikeouts. So part of the answer to our overarching question is just “get voters to accept that not every starting pitcher needs to be a big milestone guy”.
Of course, that’s only one of the two sides of the issue, so having another milestone to point to could be useful, especially given the increasing rarity of 300-Wins pitchers. If some number of old-school voters want milestones, we might as well try to find another milestone for them, to help avoid this type of logjam in the future. And one thing that I noted last time was that, with the attention given to Jack Morris and subsequent candidates like Roy Halladay, it seemed like some of them might have been starting to move towards “most wins over a decade span”.
But as part of answering this, I felt like I had to tackle the Hall’s recent history and their existing standards, and I found that the voters have largely just looked at pitcher wins, with a little bit of focus on strikeouts sometimes. And their recent logjam seems to be in part triggered by the Hall ballots in the 1990s that were heavy on milestones; six pitchers with big milestones under their belt came up for induction in short order, and rather than hurrying to get the obvious picks inducted, Hall voters instead seemed to respond to this by delaying the induction of “weaker” 300 win/3000 strikeout guys, and ignoring everyone else.
However, this was already kind of a big shift in voting behaviors, as before then, the voters would regularly induct players with less than 300 wins and 3000 strikeouts. So part of the answer to our overarching question is just “get voters to accept that not every starting pitcher needs to be a big milestone guy”.
Of course, that’s only one of the two sides of the issue, so having another milestone to point to could be useful, especially given the increasing rarity of 300-Wins pitchers. If some number of old-school voters want milestones, we might as well try to find another milestone for them, to help avoid this type of logjam in the future. And one thing that I noted last time was that, with the attention given to Jack Morris and subsequent candidates like Roy Halladay, it seemed like some of them might have been starting to move towards “most wins over a decade span”.
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Rethinking What Makes a Hall of Fame Starting Pitcher, Part 2: What Made Made Things Worse, and a Potential Turning Point
Welcome back as we travel down the rabbit hole of the Hall of Fame’s struggles to induct starting pitchers. If you missed Part 1 of this mini-series, you can find it here, but if you just need a refresher: I ran some numbers, and as of late, pitchers have fallen to just a quarter of Cooperstown inductees, with a strong possibility to fall even lower in coming years. And starting pitchers are just a fraction of that, proving an even more dire situation. Why isn’t the Hall of Fame inducting starting pitchers?
As it turns out, there’s a bit of a history to that: for a long time, Pitcher Wins were the main way voters seemed to evaluate starters, with Strikeouts also getting some consideration. However, that system didn’t traditionally mean that voters only inducted 300-Win guys; in fact, as late as 1980-1990, the Baseball Writers (the traditional first line of electing Hall of Famers) inducted five starters with under 300 Wins (four of whom also fell short of 3000 Ks).
That changed in the 1990s; from 1991 to 1999, the BBWAA inducted six pitchers, all of whom had 3000 strikeouts and five of whom had 300 wins. At basically the same time, any pitchers who didn’t hit those marks basically stopped getting consideration; it would take over a decade for them to elect a starter without both milestones (Bert Blyleven in 2011, who had 3701 Ks but fell short on wins), and two decades for them to elect a starting pitcher who hit neither milestone (Mike Mussina and Roy Halladay in 2019).
Thankfully, the Hall has a back-up for when the BBWAA falls short in their mission: the Veterans Committee! This special group was designed specifically to cover the players the Writers might have overlooked. If the BBWAA forgot how to induct pitchers without big milestones, theoretically the VC is there to step in and pick up the slack, looking for the modern equivalents to Juan Marichal and Don Drysdale who were no longer getting consideration.
As it turns out, there’s a bit of a history to that: for a long time, Pitcher Wins were the main way voters seemed to evaluate starters, with Strikeouts also getting some consideration. However, that system didn’t traditionally mean that voters only inducted 300-Win guys; in fact, as late as 1980-1990, the Baseball Writers (the traditional first line of electing Hall of Famers) inducted five starters with under 300 Wins (four of whom also fell short of 3000 Ks).
That changed in the 1990s; from 1991 to 1999, the BBWAA inducted six pitchers, all of whom had 3000 strikeouts and five of whom had 300 wins. At basically the same time, any pitchers who didn’t hit those marks basically stopped getting consideration; it would take over a decade for them to elect a starter without both milestones (Bert Blyleven in 2011, who had 3701 Ks but fell short on wins), and two decades for them to elect a starting pitcher who hit neither milestone (Mike Mussina and Roy Halladay in 2019).
Thankfully, the Hall has a back-up for when the BBWAA falls short in their mission: the Veterans Committee! This special group was designed specifically to cover the players the Writers might have overlooked. If the BBWAA forgot how to induct pitchers without big milestones, theoretically the VC is there to step in and pick up the slack, looking for the modern equivalents to Juan Marichal and Don Drysdale who were no longer getting consideration.
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