By all means keep up the voting and discussion in the first Circle of Greats round of voting, but you can also mull the question: What feat has been accomplished in major league history only by Raul Ibanez and Tris Speaker? Clue: It has nothing to do with post-season play.

This past Tuesday I posted a proposal for a series of votes to elect members to a circle of baseball greats, with competitive elections organized by player birth-year. The post seemed to generate enough interest to try out the voting in practice to see how it goes. The comments to that thread offered a number of creative and productive suggestions regarding changes to the rules that I had initially proposed, and this first vote will incorporate several of those proposed changes. I’ll review the rules, as now amended, after the “Read the rest of this entry” thingamabob.   Continue reading →

The prospect of an upcoming Hall of Fame voting process that may now be preoccupied for years by PEDs issues rather than more sporting matters, provokes me to suggest the creation of an alternative “all-timer” voting process for High Heat Stats (HHS) readers.  My proposal is that readers vote every few weeks, in response to a series of posts, to elect one MLB player to an HHS “Circle of Greats” until we have reached a number inducted that is equal to the number of players that the BBWAA has elected to the official Hall of Fame over the years.  As of today, that’s 112 players.  Specifics of the proposal are after the jump. Continue reading →

I have long viewed the 207 players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame for their play in the major leagues as comprised of two entirely separate categories.  There are  the 112 players (36 who were primarily pitchers and 76 who were primarily position players) in the “Writers’ Hall”, consisting of players elected to the Hall by members of the the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.  95 other players (26 who were primarily pitchers and 69 primarily position players) have been inducted through the separate mechanism of the  the various veterans committees.

The average career WAR (baseball-reference version) for the 76 position players in the “Writers’ Hall” is 76.9 WAR — or 77.1 if you include Babe Ruth’s pitching WAR into his total.   The median career WAR for those 76 players is 67.7.

The average career pitching WAR for the 36 pitchers in the “Writers’ Hall” is 69.0 WAR.   The median career pitching WAR for those pitchers is 67.7.

With the BBWAA picking most (though not all) of the very best players of all-time, the most obvious choices for a Hall of Fame, before the various veterans committees have had a chance at them, the average WAR numbers for the veterans committees’ selections will of course be lower.   The average career WAR for the 69 position players selected by the veterans committees is 48.5 WAR (the median is 46.5), while the average career WAR for veterans-committee-selected pitchers is 58.7 (the median is 57.5).

The lowest career WARs for position players elected by the BBWAA are Rabbit Maranville’s 39.4, Pie Traynor’s 33.8 and Roy Campanella’s 31.6.   In contrast, there are 15 different position players who have made it into the Hall (based on their major league play) via a veterans committee with career WAR totals lower than Maranville’s.

If I had a vote in the annual BBWAA Hall of Fame balloting, my test of whether a particular player belongs would be whether his accomplishments fit well within scope of the Writers’ Hall — I would not use the looser standard implied by the 207-player number that combines the Writers’ Hall and veterans committee selections.   I have long thought that the size (though certainly not all the individual selections) of the “Writers’ Hall” is close to ideal for a Hall of Fame honoring the greatest major league players.  In part that’s because I find it elegant and appropriate that the number of players in the “Writers’ Hall” (112) lines up rather neatly with the number of years that have passed from the early seasons of the earliest-era players that the writers have elected (Cy Young and Willie Keeler) through the last year a player currently in the Hall could have been active (2006).  That is, broadly speaking, the writers have elected on average about one player for each season that has been played, starting with the era of the earliest players the writers have inducted.   That one-player-per-season result strikes a certain resonant chord with me — it seems a fair, intuitive goal for establishing a truly elite level of the greatest players.   In my next post, I’ll suggest a potential format for High Heat Stats readers to participate in a fresh type of discussion and voting process towards an improved selection of the best players ever, while working within the framework of averaging one player inducted per major league season.

For the 2012 season, Baseball-reference.com’s formula for pitching Wins Above Replacement (bWAR) makes Tampa’s David Price the pitcher with the most bWAR among all left-handed pitchers in the majors, by a small margin over Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers and Matt Harrison of the Rangers (Harrison’s 6.2 pitching bWAR was the highest season total ever for a lefty pitching for the Rangers franchise, breaking Jon Matlack’s record from 1978).  Over the past five seasons, the bWAR formula has produced six different major league season leaders in the category of most pitching bWAR among lefty pitchers:

2012 David Price
2011 Cliff Lee
2010 Clayton Kershaw
2009 tie, C.C. Sabathia and John Lester
2008 Johan Santana

Over major league history, there have been several eras of this kind of extended multi-year diversity when looking at the top bWAR lefty in the majors each season, but there have also been periods of dominance by a single pitcher.  A full table of each season’s top lefty by pitching bWAR, going back to 1901, is after the jump, along with some notes on the list.   Continue reading →

Win Probability Added (WPA) is a stat that estimates how much the outcome of each plate appearance has changed the chances of each team’s winning the game, as compared to how those chances stood just before the plate appearance took place.  WPA assigns to the hitter the amount of that change as it affects the hitter’s team, and to the pitcher the amount of the effect on the pitcher’s team.    So, for example, just as Jayson Werth stepped to the plate for the Nationals in the ninth inning of Game 4 of the NLDS this season, Washington’s chances of winning the game were estimated (based on the score, the inning, the outs, and the man-on-base situation) at 67%.  After Werth hit his walk-off homer, those chances, obviously, rose to 100%, so Werth is awarded a +.33 amount of WPA for that plate appearance, while Lance Lynn, who threw the home run pitch, has a -.33 WPA applied to his account.  If you add up a player’s WPA for each of his plate appearances in a game you get his total WPA for that game.  Any player with more than a few games played in his career will have some games in which his WPA comes out positive and some where it comes out negative.

David Freese’s +.97 WPA in the sixth game of the 2011 World Series was the highest one-game WPA for any hitter in the history of the major league post-season, breaking the record previously set by Kirk Gibson’s limping, pinch-hit walk-off home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.  But what about the Anti-Freese, the hitter with the absolute worst, the most negative, WPA over a single post-season game?  More about that after the jump. Continue reading →

The Cardinals, Giants and Dodgers have each represented the NL in the World Series 18 times. Somebody is about to make it 19.

A miscellany of numbers on David Wright, Boston Red Sox pitching and a slugging second baseman, all after the “Read the rest of this entry” thingie. Continue reading →

On Sunday, in their most recent appearances, Craig Kimbrel and Fernando Rodney again avoided surrendering any extra-base hits. Rodney and Kimbrel have each allowed only four extra-base hits all season. For Rodney, that means he’s allowed an extra base hit on average about one every 17.6 innings he’s pitched this year. For Kimbrel it’s about one in every 14.6 IP. Where those numbers fit historically is described after the jump. Continue reading →

Since Major League Baseball went to an alignment of three divisions in each league, back in 1994, there have been a total of 550 post-season games played. A simple list of the number of those games won by each franchise is after the jump. Nothing complicated, just a format for expressing recent baseball history in a somewhat different manner than usual.  Starting at the beginning of the six-division era represents a particularly harsh dividing line for Toronto.  The Blue Jays were coming off back-to-back World Series Championships just when MLB shifted to the current three division per league alignment, but they haven’t been back to the post-season since. Continue reading →