Decking the Hall, Sabermetrically
If, when I was a twelve-year-old growing up in a small midwestern town, you’d have told me that eventually I’d live within a few miles of two major league baseball teams, I would have been unimaginably happy. If you’d also told me that I would take no interest in these teams or, for that matter, in baseball itself, I wouldn’t have believed you. Baseball was that important to me. Now it’s not. Last season I watched, in person on on TV, a grand total of zero games, and this season I probably will do the same.
My current lack of interest in matters pertaining to the National Pastime explains why until yesterday I knew nothing about Bill James’s “Hall of Fame Monitor.” Bill James, for those who don’t already know, invented and is the foremost practicioner of sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of baseball records. It turns out, according to a Wall Street Journal article by Allen St. John, that James has been ranking today’s major leaguers in terms of their prospects for being granted entry to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, where the sport’s greatest players are enshrined. I don’t know exactly how he does this, but in principle it sounds pretty straightforward. One could, for example, fit a logistic regression model for past players, using their single-season and/or lifetime records to predict whether they were subsequently granted admittance to the Hall; then one could substitute into the model the records of current players to determine the probability that they, too, would get in. Of course, in such an exercise certain assumptions come into play — perhaps most crucially, the assumptions that pertinent factors haven’t been left out of the model and that future selections will be based on the same considerations that have prevailed in the past. Those assumptions may prove to be inaccurate. For example, highest-ranked among today’s players is the embattled Barry Bonds, who would be a shoo-in based on his stats but could get blackballed based on his steroid-related misdeeds and, for that matter, his dour demeanor.
A player who scores at least 100 points on James’s scale has a 50-50 chance of making it into the Hall; those who score 130 or above are considered very serious contenders.
Here’s the list of leaders among position players:
Barry Bonds (352)
Alex Rodriguez (316)
Ken Griffey, Jr. (225)
Derek Jeter (221)
Ivan Rodriguez (217)
Mike Piazza (205)
Sammy Sosa (201)
Frank Thomas (194)
Manny Ramirez (187)
Vladimir Guerrero (174)
Ichiro Suzuki (170)
Albert Pujols (166)
Todd Helton (162)
Gary Sheffield (146)
Chipper Jones (141)
On the bubble are:
Jeff Kent (121)
Andruw Jones (101)
David Ortiz (86)
My comments:
The demographic composition/national origin of the game’s leading players certainly has changed over the years, hasn’t it?
Such is my estrangement from baseball that I don’t even know who Todd Helton is.
I’d vote for Frank Thomas based purely on his nickname (“The Big Hurt”), which entitles him to a place in the Hall of Fame.
I’d vote against Chipper Jones on the same basis. Rules of thumb: No crying in baseball, and no one named Chipper in the Hall of Fame.
Comments
So why the 100% lack of interest in baseball today? Baseball was incredibly important to me when I was younger -- I literally never missed watching a Cubs game on television across an entire season -- and it's still pretty important to me today. The slight dropoff in importance is simply due to football and basketball becoming more important to me as I've gotten older.
Sidebar: sports in HD is just amazing. It's like a religious experience.
Posted by: Jeff Jenkins | December 23, 2007 09:19 PM
Big Hurt probably has the last good nickname in sports. Basketball has a few ok ones (The Answer, Big Aristotle, The Truth), but as a general matter, they just don't make 'em like "The Sultan of Swat" anymore.
Posted by: Jason | December 23, 2007 10:16 PM
How about Caron Butler's nickname: "Tough Juice"? That's a GREAT nickname. And, of course, upon hearing that nickname, Bill Simmons immediately declared that Vince Carter should henceforth be known as "weak juice."
Posted by: Jeff Jenkins | December 24, 2007 08:43 AM
Lee,
Bill James has written extensively about who gets into the Hall of Fame. He doesn't use logistic regression; he uses discrete rules, such as a pitcher getting a certain number of points for having won 300 games. He talks about how these rules don't make much sense for evaluating players, but they seem to be the rules that the Hall actually uses.
Posted by: Andrew![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.themonkeycage.org/nav-commenters.gif)
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December 24, 2007 09:46 AM
Andrew: Thanks for the information. Using rules as you report that Bill James did strikes me as pretty arbitrary (whose rules are they?), but he's the king of sabermetrics and I'm not. It would be interesting to survey the HoF voters to see what factors they really consider.
Jeff: You're kidding, right? "Tough Juice" is a GREAT nickname? De gustibus non disputandum. On another point, I almost never watch football, but I happened to see a game in HD on a huge screen, and it was amazing -- just like being on the field.
Posted by: Lee Sigelman | December 24, 2007 04:23 PM
I think Andrew is right, although we don't know what method he uses to construct the weights used in his system. He might use regression/logit or some other method, but he doesn't make that explicit. At least, he doesn't make it explicit in Chapter 14 of _Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame_, a book that should show up in your box in hopefully a week or so.
You can also find the standards here.
On the more important issue at hand, James has sections on nicknames, decade by decade, in his historical abstracts. My favorite is the 30s, which James asserts was a decade of nasty nicknames, such as Nick "Old Tomato Face" Cullop, Red "The Nashville Narcissus" Lucas, Ernie "Schnozz" Lombardi, and Hugh "Losing pitcher Mulcahy" Mulcahy. Gimpy, Wimpy, Blimp, Stinky, Inky, Pinkie, Rowdie Richard, Twitchy, Snooker, and Ducky Wucky comprised his all-nickname team of the decade. On the latter, James asserts (p. 157, BJHBA 1988):
"Joe Medwick's name has been politely shortened to 'Ducky' by future generations, because people today are reluctant to believe that a Hall of Famer was actually called 'Ducky Wucky.' but he was."
The upshot, in my view, is that if there is room for Ducky Wucky, there's room for a Chipper.
Posted by: Eric L. | December 25, 2007 11:12 AM