Scott Rolen's Hall of Fame Resume, and the Larger Context of Third Base, Part 2

Last time, I wrote about Scott Rolen’s Hall of Fame induction, and started moving beyond Rolen and into the wider context of his position, third base. Go back and check that out if you didn’t see it, because it’s going to be context for the rest of this piece, where I move from talking about third base and the Hall in general, to talking about specific third basemen.

<Moving Beyond Rolen>

The Hall has always undervalued having a mix of skills, that’s something that happens across positions. Especially players who don’t fall in the top seven or eight at their position; sure, sometimes they nail it, but not always. Shoot, that’s part of what hurt Duke Snider, who had the record for “lowest first-ballot vote to get inducted by the BBWAA” prior to Scott Rolen’s election this year; like Rolen, he’s even tenth-best at his position by bWAR!

If there’s something stand-out about third base in this regard, a big reason why it’s especially undervalued in Hall voting, my guess is that doing a lot of different things well seems like the default way to build up an overwhelming amount of value at this position, and it leads to them being more likely to slip through the cracks.

For instance, let’s take a look at the players roughly in the tier below Rolen. I went through and looked at the top third basemen by Baseball-Reference WAR, this time using the designations Jay Jaffe uses for JAWS so that each player will only be featured at one position (specifically, at the position where they accumulated the most value in their career).

Using those designations, Rolen is tenth. Edgar Martinez is eleventh (again, Jaffe doesn’t have a DH designation yet, so Edgar and Molitor both count as third basemen), so we’ll ignore him. The twelfth-through-sixteenth spots for third base are: Graig Nettles, Buddy Bell, Home Run Baker, Ken Boyer, and the late Sal Bando. Of those five, only Baker is in Cooperstown, an early Veterans Committee pick (he retired in 1922, and thus got overlooked in the initial Hall shuffle). Nettles, Bell, and Bando have combined for six appearances on any Hall ballot, four of them from longtime Yankee Nettles, and all of them from the BBWAA process. None of them has been reconsidered by the VC since then.

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Boyer by himself has reached 21 appearances between the BBWAA and Veterans Committee, but even that feels misleading; he actually was dropped after five ballots because he failed to reach 5% on any of them (the voting rules were a little different back then). The BBWAA actually reinstated him five years later and he immediately started hitting the 15%-25% range, although he has yet to climb much above that since then (even in his VC appearances). It’s also worth noting that Ron Santo (speaking of overlooked third basemen) got this same special treatment following his own one-and-done BBWAA appearance. And while we’re on this subject, when Boyer hit the ballot for the first time in 1975, he was vying to become just the second third baseman elected by the BBWAA, ever. Yes, despite forty years of Hall elections up until that point.

The Best Players Getting Snubbed by the Veterans Committee, Part 3

Today, we have the third and final part of my series looking at the thirty best players who have been totally overlooked by the Hall of Fame's Veterans Committee process. It's a direct continuation of the first two parts, which can be found here and here. Also, if you'd like to see my chart summarizing Veterans Committee ballots since 2000, that can be found here, with the annotation notes: non-player candidates are highlighted in red (Joe Torre gets an off-red color, since his first few ballot appearances were as a player), each column is a different year’s VC ballot, and X’s show seasons that they were nominees. Yellow means a candidate was inducted that year (with subsequent years blacked out), green means the player hadn’t been retired long enough for VC consideration, and light blue is years where the candidate wasn’t up for consideration (for example, how they currently consider certain eras at a time).

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Bob Caruthers (SP/OF, 59.6 WAR)

If you’ve read any of my Hall snubs coverage in the past (or similar articles from other writers), you might be familiar with Wes Ferrell, the pitcher from the 1930s who could hit like a position player. Ferrell has had plenty of VC ballots (including 6 since 2000), but the 1880s equivalent Bob Caruthers (who even finished within half a Win of Ferrell’s career total) has not. His career, like many of the other 1800s pitchers I’ve covered, was relatively short, at ten years exactly, and he did pitch in fewer games than most of them. He makes up for some of that by being an actually good hitter, though, with a career 134 OPS+ to go with his 122 ERA+. I don’t know if I’d put him ahead of Ferrell, but that certainly is an interesting narrative hook that puts him ahead of some of the other 1800s pitchers I’ve touched on so far.



Sherry Magee (LF, 59.4 WAR) #

Magee had some bad luck in building a Hall of Fame narrative. He was one of the better offensive players of the deadball era, but retired in 1919, the year before Babe Ruth went to the Yankees, hit 54 home runs, and rewired how everyone thought about offense in baseball. He played for mostly mediocre teams, primarily the 1900s-1910s Phillies, but was dealt away in 1915, at which point the Phillies made a surprise pennant win. He finally won a World Series as a part-time player on the Reds in 1919, but that was probably the only World Series where the losing team is more famous than the winner. Magee had been retired for a bit when the Hall of Fame opened, but wasn’t really old enough to qualify for early attempts at Old Timers Committees. He made a handful of BBWAA ballots in the early years (which featured very different rules), but never got more than 1% of the vote, as he was already something of a relic from a different era. Magee did make the pre-1943 ballot of the 2009 Veterans Committee induction, where he got 3 of the required 12 votes, but did not make the 2013 or 2016 ballots.



Bret Saberhagen (SP, 58.9 WAR)

I feel like I’ve mentioned this here repeatedly, but I think Saberhagen fits neatly within the Hall’s tradition of high-peak stars, and he (along with Cone) should be one of the first names the VC considers in their effort to elect more starting pitchers. Despite his two Cy Young Awards, Saberhagen was a one-and-done candidate on the BBWAA ballot, getting only 1.3% of the votes back in 2007. That was also Orel Hershiser’s second year on the ballot, and he fell below 5% as well, although he’s made the Today’s Game ballot both times he’s been eligible. I’m really not sure what’s the disparity between those two in terms of Hall consideration, let alone the disparities between Cy Young winners like them and MVP winners like, say, Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy, who hung around the ballot for full terms. There’s a lot around the margins of Hall voting that gets confusing when you look at it too closely.

The Best Players Getting Snubbed by the Veterans Committee, Part 2

Here's the second part of my series looking at the thirty best Veterans Committee-eligible players who have been snubbed in the process. It directly follows the first part, which you can find here if you missed. Also, if you'd like to see my chart summarizing Veterans Committee ballots since 2000, that can be found here, with the annotation notes: non-player candidates are highlighted in red (Joe Torre gets an off-red color, since his first few ballot appearances were as a player), each column is a different year’s VC ballot, and X’s show seasons that they were nominees. Yellow means a candidate was inducted that year (with subsequent years blacked out), green means the player hadn’t been retired long enough for VC consideration, and light blue is years where the candidate wasn’t up for consideration (for example, how they currently consider certain eras at a time).

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Willie Randolph (2B, 65.9 WAR)

Randolph is like what you would get if you crossed Lou Whitaker and Graig Nettles (see part 1). Randolph appeared on the 1998 ballot, hit 1.1% of the vote and vanished. Like Nettles, Randolph was a six-time All-Star and two-time champion on the ‘70s Yankees. I’m kind of wondering if the fame of being a Yankee only extends so far, though (something I alluded to last time); like, those ‘70s Yankees benefitted Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter’s cases (and maybe Ron Guidry, who got a decade on the BBWAA ballot), and that’s as far as it went. Nettles, Randolph, and Thurman Munson were just all out of luck. If that is the case, it’s not surprising that Randolph got the shortest end of the stick. His skillset was extremely un-flashy, with lower power totals (he actually has a higher OBP than slugging percentage) and an only-decent average supplemented with a great eye (he’s 55th all-time in walks!), solid baserunning, and a fantastic up-the-middle glove (but at not-shortstop, so it gets overlooked). For the last part, it probably also doesn’t help that he didn’t win any Gold Gloves (the defense component of Baseball-Reference's Wins Above Replacement has him sixth all-time at the position, but Frank White is third on the same list and was racking them up during Randolph’s peak).



Reggie Smith (CF/RF, 64.6 WAR)

Center field isn’t quite third base, but it’s still overlooked in its own way when it comes to Cooperstown, with fewer members than the corner outfield spots. But it probably also doesn’t help that Smith spent the second half of his career in right field, either, naturally inviting that comparison. Smith had a typical career for an overlooked star (good-but-not-singular average and power with great plate discipline leading for a very good but well-divided total package; above-average defense at a difficult position, but maybe not the best ever). But I’ve also seen some speculation that splitting your career (in a variety of ways) hurts a player’s impression on voters, possibly making it harder for them to consider every facet of a player’s career as a single package. And Smith (8 years in Boston, 9 years in the NL between the Dodgers, Cardinals, and Giants; 800+ games at two positions) certainly fits that profile. He didn’t even reach 1% of the vote in 1988, and has not resurfaced since.

The Best Players Getting Snubbed by the Veterans Committee, Part 1

In my recent article digging into issues with the Veterans Committee, one problem that I noted was that the Veterans Committee tends to repeat the same few candidates over and over, often to the exclusion of other players deserving of consideration. The way I determined this was by going back through every Veterans Committee ballot since the turn of the millennium and listing every player who appeared, then noting subsequent reappearances.

If you’re interested in that mess of a chart, you can see it here. There’s a lot going on there, so as a quick summary: non-player candidates are highlighted in red (Joe Torre gets an off-red color, since his first few ballot appearances were as a player), each column is a different year’s VC ballot, and X’s show seasons that they were nominees. Yellow means a candidate was inducted that year (with subsequent years blacked out), green means the player hadn’t been retired long enough for VC consideration, and light blue is years where the candidate wasn’t up for consideration (for example, how they currently consider certain eras at a time).

Those last two colors may not be perfect, since it was mostly based on my snap judgments for over 100 players, and the Hall’s various rule changes and ambiguities mean those designations aren’t always clear (for example, some players, like Luis Tiant, have actually seen their era designation shift), and I sometimes used gray to convey my uncertainties around the fringes. But it’s mostly accurate, and does its biggest job of showing which names are getting considered the most.

In compiling that info, I couldn’t help but notice how many names that I was expecting to appear just… didn’t. At all. Sure, a lot of big names in the world of Hall of Fame snubs made frequent appearances, like Dick Allen or Minnie Miñoso or Ken Boyer. But with 109 names to get through, there were definitely some absences that surprised me. Granted, some of them (especially older ones) might have appeared on older ballots (although some of those also didn’t publish finalized lists of names they considered, either, so no list will be 100% comprehensive), but still, with two decades to consider, this feels like a pretty long time for these big names to just never show up, or to come up just once.

So, once that was done, I went through Baseball-Reference’s Wins Above Replacement career leaderboards, filtered out everyone who was active or not yet eligible for the Veterans Committee, then matched the remaining players to their count from my chart. My main goal is just to highlight the biggest names to be totally ignored by the process, but when appropriate, I’ll also reflect on the little attention they have gotten, speculate on reasons for that cold shoulder, and look at what it might take to break that streak.

With that, here’s the list of the thirty best players eligible for the Veterans Committee that have nonetheless appeared on one or zero ballots since 2000 (players with one appearance marked with a #).

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.