Retired Numbers Series: San Francisco Giants

As the Retired Number Series quickly draws closer to an end, we’re left with only two more teams to cover. But one of them is quite a big player in the retired-number-field. The San Francisco Giants are both the final National League team and the final original sixteen team I have left. With a history dating back to 1883, only two teams have honored as many players as the Giants. Will the future bring even more?


Notes on the Numbers
Some quick notes on the stats: the two most prominent stats I used are similarly named. Both are called WAR, or Wins Above Replacement. They both try to account for every part of a player’s game, including, but not limited to: offense, defense, position, and playing time. So, it is a counting stat, like hits or home runs (with the small difference that bad seasons can actually decrease your WAR, if you are worse than a replacement player). WAR credits a player with how many wins they have provided to their team. They aren’t perfect, but for my purposes (a single number showing roughly how good a player has been), they work perfectly.

There are two major sites that provide WAR, Baseball-Reference (henceforth called bWAR) and Fangraphs (fWAR). The two are mostly the same, with the biggest difference coming from the different fielding stats the two use. Fangraphs has a fairly good summary of what makes up WAR and how it is calculated (for those wanting a more general summary, the introduction works just fine). Pitching is slightly different: Fangraphs’ WAR for pitchers, until recently (as in, after I started this series), only went back to 1974, so for my purposes, I stuck to just bWAR for them.

Best Pitchers 27 and Under, and the Hall: A Continuation of Yesterday's Two Ideas

The other day, I looked at Hall of Fame precedent and young hitters. The article is here, but long story short, you can already say with over 60% certainty* that Ryan Zimmerman will be a Hall of Famer (but go check it out for the reasoning).

*Not accounting for the BBWAA’s bias against third basemen, of course.

I figured,then, why not try it with the pitchers? I again looked at Baseball-Reference’s Play Index for Hall of Fame pitchers from the ages of 20 to 27 (from 1901 on), then looked at how today’s aces compared.