29 thoughts on “December 9, 2024: Best Of 2024”

        1. There's nothing like cooking up some thanksgiving day leftovers the Saturday after Thanksgiving listening to the newly released WGOM summer mix. A tradition like no other.

  7. This time of year, I can't help but look away from the trainwreck that is FBS football trying to determine a champion. If you use the Sagarin ratings, which are probably just about as good as any of the statistical ranking systems, you have:

    #2 Oregon plays the winner of #3 Ohio State and #9 Tennessee
    #5 Georgia plays the winner of #1 Notre Dame and #11 Indiana
    #30 Boise State plays the winner of #8 Penn State and #10 SMU
    #12 Arizona State plays the winner of #4 Texas and #18 Clemson

    It's pretty wild to see the worst-ranked team (by a wide, wide margin) get a first-round bye. That's some Juan Gonzalez MVP shit. On top of that, if there are no first-round upsets, Boise State would have the easiest second-round game, too. Incredible.

    All of the conference realignment has been pretty sad to me, in even parts because they are ripping up the historical conferences and because the new conferences aren't regional.

    For FBS, they could drastically simplify things now if they split the P4 from the G5. A 4-team playoff with the B1G, SEC, ACC, and B12 winners would settle the whole thing on the field and there would be no rankings or committees necessary. It would effectively act like an 8-team playoff with the first round being conference championship games. The G5 could also realign into four conferences of 15-16 teams each. Winner of each conference goes into a 4-team playoff.

    I guess there must be more money in it for the G5 to do it this way, but it's pretty ridiculous to have this 2-tier system where half the teams basically never have any chance of winning the championship.

  8. Bookface reminded me that today is the anniversary of the JJ Hardy-to-Baltimore trade.

    Hardy was barely a win above replacement in his lone season with the Twins, but averaged 3.5 rWAR over his first four in Baltimore. Jim Hoey was below replacement with the Twins for part of a season, then waived.

    An awful trade.

    2. Eh, Hardy was 2.1 fWAR for the Twins in 2010 -- that was solid for what they were paying him. They should have just kept him.

      I also feel like I can't think about that Hardy trade without thinking about the Gomez trade that got us Hardy in the first place. Gomez in his age-22 and age-23 seasons with the Twins averaged 1.35 fWAR, and I think people had a skewed perception of his contributions because he was the one real asset we got from the Santana trade. He had a down 2010 for Milwaukee, but was an average-to-above-average center fielder for the next 5 years.

      Considering the contracts involved, the Twins actually won the Santana trade if you look at Santana-for-Gomez, but then they pissed away all of that value by trading away Gomez and then Hardy. I think if they'd held onto Hardy, they still more or less would have won the Santana trade.

      The problem with trading Santana wasn't really the return they got for him, it was more that it just illustrated that the team wasn't willing to spend. They could have been even better with Gomez or Hardy if they'd spent on good talent with the money they saved.

  10. I also noticed HOF talk yesterday and was wondering what people consider to be a small Hall versus a large Hall.

    I think my standard is something like "small Hall, gradually expanding over time." Something like one player per position per decade when there are 30 teams in the league. So roughly one player per position per two decades back when there were only 16 teams in the league. That also gets you an average of about one player inducted per year, which doesn't seem all that wrong to me.

    Right now, that would be about 9 players per position for C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, RF, and 4-5 at DH. I would accept reducing the DH count to 2-3 because I think it took until somewhere around the '90s for teams to really use it as a real position. So, Frank Thomas and Edgar Martinez.

    I really like JAWS as a HOF starting point at least. If we used that as the standard, then we'd have:

    DH: Thomas, Martinez
    C: Bench, Carter, I. Rodriguez, Fisk, Piazza, Berra, Mauer, Dickey, Cochrane
    1B: Gehrig, Pujols, Foxx, Anson, Connor, Bagwell, Brouthers, Mize, Thome
    2B: Hornsby, Collins, Lajoie, Morgan, Gehringer, Carew, Grich, Frisch, Robinson
    3B: Schmidt, Mathews, Boggs, Beltre, Brett, Chipper, Brooks, Santo, Molitor
    SS: Honus, A-Rod, Ripken Jr., Arky Vaughan, George Davis, Yount, Appling, Banks, Ozzie
    LF: Bonds, Williams, Henderson, Yastrzemski, Delahanty, Simmons, Raines, Goslin, Billy Williams
    CF: Mays, Cobb, Speaker, Mantle, Trout, Griffey Jr., DiMaggio, Snider, Lofton
    RF: Ruth, Aaron, Musial, Ott, Frank Robinson, Clemente, Kaline, Betts, Reggie Jackson

    Notes:
    - Technically, Cano's JAWS is slightly higher than Grich, Frisch, and Robinson, but I think it's fair to dock him for testing positive for drugs when it's a close call to other candidates. Second base is really tight around the 9-player cutoff anyway. Just 2 wins covers 7th to 12th -- Cano, Grich, Frisch, Robinson, Sandberg, and Utley. So there's a lot of leeway for arguing there if you want a different top 9.
    - Rolen's the bubble guy at 3B, less than a win short of Molitor. We're counting Edgar as a DH, so next up is Graig Nettles who is 3.6 wins back from Molitor. Not a huge gap, but not a tiny gap.
    - Leave out A-Rod if you want, but his numbers are so undeniable that I think if Selig's in the HOF, I'd put A-Rod there, too. There's some room for argument around the cut-off. #8 to #14 are separated by 4 wins -- Banks, Smith, Trammell, Dahlen, Larkin, Jeter, Wallace, and Boudreau.
    - For LF, I'm putting Bonds in for the same reason as A-Rod, and leaving Manny Ramirez out for the same reason as Robinson Cano. Billy Williams is in the HOF, but arguably a bit underrated (in that I rarely hear his name come up) since he didn't really get much in the way of counting stats with his prime being in the '60s.
    - For CF, leaving off Beltran in favor of Lofton since Beltran was involved in the Astros sign stealing debacle. Also, it seems utterly ridiculous to me that Kenny Lofton is not in the HOF when there are 19 CFs in and he's at worst middle-of-the-pack in that group.
    - Betts and Trout both are already top-9 at their position without even finishing out their careers

    Ideally the split would work out historically so you have about 3 per position from 1901-1957, 1958-1995, and 1995-2024. (The initial period is larger because there were fewer players in the league.) You wouldn't want to be too strict about that, because you're not always going to have the same quality at each position exactly evenly over time -- by definition these players are rare -- but you also wouldn't want huge gaps historically.

    Not sure what to do for pitchers, especially with how the starting pitching role has changed over the last 50ish years and how relief pitching has changed in that same time period. Currently there are roughly 20ish position players per position and about 60 starting pitchers, so maybe look at the top 27 starting pitchers as a start, and then figure out something for relievers.

    I guess with relievers, I like Rivera, Eckersley, and Hoyt Wilhelm for sure. Gossage and Hoffman seem like reasonable choices to me, but then maybe I'd add Wagner. Joe Nathan's really close in R-JAWS to Wagner and Hoffman, but I don't know, having lived through that time, he seemed more like a Hall of Very Good kind of player. Definitely had some really good seasons, but practically no black ink and only a 5-time All-Star during a period where they would routinely pick 5-7 guys per league for the All-Star team.

    3. - Betts and Trout both are already top-9 at their position without even finishing out their careers

      Trout had 64 rWAR at the end of his seventh full season. I don't recall what the median WAR for an outfielder is, but he probably met it after six seasons. Everything after that is him compiling. Unfortunately, he's also had only a single great season since.

      1. Yeah, it's really too bad that Trout hasn't been able to stay healthy. His career is kind of following Griffey's progression, hopefully he can turn it around a bit.

    5. I’m not sure what gating induction by position quotas would achieve? For example, Goslin & Billy Williams are in, but Nettles is not despite having a higher career rWAR and JAWS. Left field being a weaker position (players with better arms play right field, players with better speed play center) favors Goslin & Williams, while Nettles is penalized by the greater depth at third despite having a more valuable career.

      There’s also a question of applying a single standard when positions and how players manned them evolved over time. Applied retrospectively, we have only one third baseman (Mathews) who compiled more than 5.5 rWAR before the Expansion Era. Meanwhile, 6 of the 9 first basemen’s entire careers were pre-Expansion, 5 of those 6 entirely pre-Integration, and 3 of the 6 pre-1900 (less a bizarre 5 hitless PA in two games by 46 year old Dan Brouthers that came eight seasons after his retirement). Something similar happens with second base: 6 of the 9 are pre-Expansion, and 5 of those 6 pre-Integration (the sixth being the player who integrated the game).

      1. I think there should be some recognition that the HOF has been too hard on some positions. I don't know if you'd need a hard quota but there should be some way to recognize this.

        1. Quotas also get you into weird territory with players whose careers don’t fit one position neatly. For example, Banks is on the shortstop list, but he has over 800 more innings at first base than he does at short, amounting to 50.16% of his playing time. Moving him off the shortstop list opens up a spot for Alan Trammell & Bill Dahlen (tied at 57.7 JAWS), but it bumps Jim Thome off the first base list…unless you consider Thome has a 5+ rWAR lead in career value over Banks. A-Rod’s margin between SS & 3b is even smaller: 702 innings (but 51.64% fielding innings at short).

          And then you have Carew, who played 51.86% of his career innings at first base. If you put Banks and Carew on the first base list, they both could stick (if you bump Thome for Banks); Carew bumps Mize for Ryne Sandberg at second. Sandberg is probably a Hall of Famer in his own right, but his career value is still appreciably lower than either Mize or Thome.

          Yount is more clearly a shortstop than a center fielder, but Yount is more of a center fielder (42.20% of his defensive innings played) than Molitor is a third baseman (29.86% of career PA vs 43.99% at DH). Put Molitor on the DH list…except he has more innings at 3b than Jackie Robinson had at 2b, more innings at 2b than Jackie had at 3b, and more innings at 1b than Jackie had at the same position.

          I’m generally in favor of giving players credit for significant time spent at their most challenging defensive position, but I think I’m ultimately in favor of inducting players non-catchers who make it over position-agnostic value thresholds calibrated to different eras.

          2. I hear this argument and you make some good points. I like that you call out catchers as different -- I think they are the primary position that should be judged differently. However, I do think it's harder to have a long career in CF, SS, and 2B, with speed/quickness required there and that not aging very well.

            That said, the 12th-best JAWS at each non-catcher player position (at least the way bb-ref categorizes the positions) is basically in the mid-50s, so that would tend to support your position of having one threshold per era for those players instead of micromanaging it per position.

            I mention in a different comment that I think further era adjustments would be good, too, I was just too lazy to do that at a first pass.

      2. That's why I mentioned that ideally you would partition somewhat by time period as well, I was just too lazy to do that on a first pass.

        I am also not convinced that WAR is sufficiently adjusted for era-to-era comparisons. When the standard of play is lower (pre-integration), it's easier to have outstanding statistics. Like Joe Mauer striking out once in high school. So to make era-to-era comparisons, they should probably look at normalizing the standard deviations of the underlying statistics from era to era, but that's also probably hard to do. So it might be better to try to partition by eras and have a quota per era. It would essentially be like a more exclusive All-Star team.

        Similarly, replacement level is useful for comparing players in different positions for estimating contract values and so forth, but I'm not convinced it's so well tuned that it's actually good to compare the career value of a player at one position to the career value at another position. Players who split time at different positions over their career, do pose an issue, as you mention, but that's kind of always been the case. Mauer getting concussed too many times and having to play for a few years at first base hurts his case. Arguably, the WAR he got at 1B should be adjusted further down for ranking him as a catcher, because you can just play more as a first baseman than a catcher, and one of the things that comparison to replacement level rewards is the ability to play a lot.

        I like what Algonad said about it not necessarily being a strict quota, but the actual HOF has 25 1B and 17 catchers. This is because catching is harder on a player's body and they can't rack up the same kind of counting stats that you can at first base. Having some kind of rough guideline that you have to stay within 2-3 players of would keep from tilting things so far in favor of counting stats and other measurables.

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