by GloveCrazy » June 13th, 2010, 8:23 pm
Thanks for the feeback on the book, Brett. Pretty interesting.
I actually agree with MurphUSA, too, about only wanting the best of the best. I think the challenge harks back to the word "best" being so very subjective, so we need to look to other things to help define it. Good or bad what we seem to have is a handful of important key statistics for pitchers and hitters, a handful of lesser important ones, and a bar set by previous voting (certainly influenced by tons of lobbying and factors outside the key stats). I hope that decisions are never made to lower the bar, and I'm even ok with sort of wanting a little bit above the bar (to make sure it isn't lowered), but some people suggest we should ignore the bar which I'm 100% against. Why punish future eras?
In the discussion of Blyleven I provided a link to comparable pitchers from his era (and historical). I had people debating Blyleven with me behind the scenes who eventually told me they didn't bother to look at the link. That was fascinating to me, but in a sense not so hard to believe based on the history of HOF voting. Maybe that's one of the reasons why it takes longer for some people to get in, but they eventually get in.
Another factor to this is that even with numbers there are ones that you can control and ones that you can only influence. For a pitcher, strikouts, walks, era, and to a lesser degree complete games are the ONLY ones in your control. Wins are not because you cannot control how many runs your team scores, and to a lesser degree what the relievers do behind you. We can argue about many things, but we should be able to agree in the concept that some pitcher's win totals were significantly assisted by the production of their teams and some were significantly hampered, right?
The worst part about this scenario is that all-star selections and Cy Young voting have historically been heavily weighted on wins. In effect, if a player played on poor scoring teams he likely made less all-star teams and placed lower in Cy Young voting (triple jeopardy). Modern statistics can normalize comparisons between scoring teams and non scoring ones and they look VERY favorable to some players (especially Blyleven). Catfish Hunter who most everyone thinks was one of the "best" was significantly helped by playing on the A's and Yankees. I'm not saying Catfish Hunter doesn't belong (he does belong), but a reasonable argument based on modern statistics suggests that Blyleven was a better pitcher. He certainly was on the things within his control (and not just compared to Hunter).
Similarly for hitters, average and homeruns are the ones mostly in your contol. Runs Batted In require base runners. Also, there has been a historical bias to teams that have had post season success, which I think should be a factor, but again mostly outside of one person's control in this team sport. But those are debates for another day because Blyleven has post-season success.
Trade with Rob