Team Hall of Fame Snubs vs. Team Hall Median, Part 2

A few years ago, I covered an interesting hypothetical question: Which team would be better, a team of median Hall of Famers, or a team of the biggest Hall snubs? I encourage you to go check it out, in part because I feel like the setup was interesting, but also to give a bit of background for what I want to do today.

I sort of randomly stumbled upon that article while looking for a reference for something else, but had fun looking back at it. And I couldn’t help but noticed that a good chunk of Team Snub had actually made it into Cooperstown in the seven-plus years since I wrote it. So I couldn’t help but wonder, if I updated it for 2020, would Team Snub still stack up so well against the Hall of Fame Median?

First, as a brief refresher, here was the 2013 edition of Team Snub:
C-Mike Piazza
1B-Jeff Bagwell
2B-Bobby Grich
3B-Graig Nettles
SS-Alan Trammell
LF-Barry Bonds
CF-Kenny Lofton
RF-Larry Walker
DH-Mark McGwire
Bench-Ted Simmons, Craig Biggio, Ken Boyer, Tim Raines, Shoeless Joe Jackson
Rotation-Roger Clemens
Curt Schilling
Kevin Brown
Rick Reuschel
Luis Tiant
Swing Men-Tommy John, David Cone, Eddie Cicotte
Relievers-Lee Smith, Dan Quisenberry, John Hiller

Since then, Piazza, Bagwell, Trammell, Biggio, Smith, Raines, and most recently, Walker and Simmons, have all found their way into the Hall of Fame, and thus, no longer qualify for the team. So that’s almost a third of the team we’ll need to replace, plus we have seven years’ worth of new candidates to evaluate, so we should be seeing a good amount of turnover.

All-Time Lineups by Jersey Number

The other day, Mike Petriello at MLB.com ran a fun article on the most productive uniform numbers ever. It’s pretty comprehensive, and I’d definitely recommend checking it out. And sure, it’s technically not Retired Numbers, but it’s still right up my alley. So I wanted to build off of Petriello’s idea: what’s the best lineup you could make just by picking players who wore the same number?

Generally, I tried to keep it simple: players should have worn a number of a plurality of their career, if not an outright majority. I also tried to keep things to a basic level, so we’ll be using just a starting nine with a designated hitter (to help account for some positional overlap). With that, let’s dive in:

2017 Teams With a Chance to Set Home Run History: The Double-Digit Dinger Club

A few years ago, the Houston Astros shocked everyone by jumping out to a surprising early division lead, and they did it in part by hitting a lot of dingers. As I watched the season progress, an interesting subplot cropped up, beneath the question of whether the surprising young club would hold on to make the playoffs: they had a chance to make home run history.

No individual player was challenging any records, though. Rather, it was a team record the announcers would update viewers on: Most players with double-digit home runs. The all-time record was 11, set by the 2004 Detroit Tigers, who, like the 2015 ‘Stros, had no big masher leading the way; both teams were led by 27-homer guys (Carlos Pena and Evan Gattis, respectively). The Astros ended up tying this mark towards the end of the year, and had two more players finishing the season with 9.*

*Trivia time: almost half of those players aren’t on the Astros anymore, just a season and a half later. I’ll let you know who they are later in the column.

It’s a remarkable set of circumstances that leads to a team having more 10-home run guys than available lineup spots, but MLB was entering a period ideal for this, given the overall upward shift in home run totals. That trend continued in 2016, and another team joined those two atop the leaderboards: the 2016 Twins. Despite losing 103 games, just shy of a dozen Minnesota players went yard ten or more times last year.

MLB has seen yet another increase in home run totals this year, which got me wondering: could we see our fourth 11-10-homer team this year? Is there a better name for that exclusive club? And most importantly, what are the odds that some time has a full twelve players reach that mark? With just over 70 games in the books, lets take a look at the early leaders in 10-homer players, and who else they might see reach that total.

Trivia Time: Best Active Players Without a World Series

Some other sports are having championships right now, but they aren’t baseball, so I won’t talk about them. However, they did make me think of something the other day; baseball is pretty unique. When stars in the NBA or NHL or even NFL don’t win a championship, they get major blame. Championship rings are actual, honest-to-god currency in other sports.

Baseball though? Not nearly. Sure, sometimes people will try and break up championship rings in a “Who’s Better” debate, but then someone will bring up five-time champ Luis Sojo or any number of bench players from the 1950s Yankees* and the debate will quickly fizzle out.

*For example, I just discovered Bobby Brown, four-time World Series victor with six and a half Wins Above Replacement to his name over not-quite eight seasons. Or there’s future manager Ralph Houk, who played in 35 games for five different eventual World Series winners, with 0.1 WAR along the way.

Yep, when you can point out that greats like Ernie Banks or Ted Williams never won a title, you can see why the subject doesn’t come up as much. But the game’s parity has never been better, with nine different winners in the past twelve years and a large number in the running this year; on top of that, free agency lets players move about the league like never before. Are there any more greats in danger of joining that group?

Well, I now have a Sporcle answering that question-the best players by Baseball-Reference’s WAR without a World Series Title. Click here to try it. If you aren’t interested in a game, I’ll examine the results after the break.

The Battle of the Titans: Who Would Win?

Bill James’ Online Mailbag had an interesting question the other day: Could a team of the best players not in the Hall of Fame beat a team of the worst players in the Hall?

Bill’s answer? Of course; you’re picking the best players from one group and the worst from another, and especially with a group with such amorphous boundaries and a lot of overlap, that isn’t really a close call.

But what about a variation of that question: Could a team of the best players not in the Hall beat a team of median Hall of Famers?

The first question would be what would each team look like? The question asker offered his own idea of a full roster, but I want to try and construct my own lineup. Going by position for the best snubs (which is primarily drawing from 50 Best Players Not in the Hall list):

The Replacement Team: What's the Most Balanced Playoff Team Possible?

So, we’ve reached that point in the offseason; there’s not a ton going on, so I figured now would be as good a time as any to look at something I’ve been wondering for a while now: What’s the most underwhelming playoff team you could construct?

By this, I mean, could you build a playoff-caliber roster if every single player was just above average? And what would that roster look like. This evolved from an thought I had a while ago: what if you just had a full roster of starter level players? And team of just replacement-level players (0 WAR) would be expected to win around 43 games*. So, a 25-man roster of 2 WAR players, or basic starter level, should have 50 WAR, and thereby, 93-ish wins.

*I’ve heard estimates ranging from 40 to 50. Based on Fangraphs’ WAR data from 2012, the average team won 43.3 more games than their Wins Above Replacement. This number will vary a little from year to year, but the neighborhood of 43-45 Wins as a baseline is a good estimate if you don’t feel like calculating it out.

The problem with that is you would need 2 Win relievers and bench players. That’s not really practical; if you can get 2 Wins in limited bench time like that, you’re therefore not starter level. If you are starter level, you won’t get to 2 WAR in limited playing time.

MLB's All-Overlooked Team

With the All-Star game just around the corner, we will be seeing some of the most brilliant and visible stars of the game today. I would like to take a moment to recognize something else, though-players who are almost exactly the opposite. These are the players who play just as well as those who will be attending Arizona on July 12th, but are much less likely to be attending themselves. For whatever reason, these players are overshadowed relative to their performance, an All-Dark Matter team, if you will (since dark matter is invisible? Actually, this metaphor works better than I expected).

In any case, even if you didn’t fill out a ballot with these player’s names, you can at least give them some attention now.