TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Friday, January 14, 2005

Another View on the Steroids "Scandal"

Marvin Miller is alive and well at 87, and had a cogent argument about why steroids are a non-issue in an article in today's Boston Globe. With no real interest or axe to grind, but with plenty of trips around the block, it's interesting to note some echoes of some commentary from TDA writers:

• Miller's belief that steroids aren't performance enhancers
  
• An interesting comparison between Babe Ruth's physical development and that of Barry Bonds
  
• His belief the whole episode is media-driven frenzy, heightened by political opportunists as a distraction
  
• His recollections of the collusion of owners in providing amphetamines to players during the 1960s and 1970s
  
• His observations on the dignity of being told to urinate on command by one's employer
  

Miller has been discussed in recent years in some quarters as a potential Hall of Fame entrant in the "Other Contributors" category, as the father of the modern union and the person who is most single-handedly responsible for the free agent system. That won't happen: the inner circle wisdom is that this has been bad for the game, even though we've had an explosion of attendance and participation in the sport since free agency, after a steady twenty-five year decline in the popularity of the sport prior to free agency. Miller clearly isn't spending his retirement years sucking up to the establishment to get himself into Cooperstown, that's for sure.

posted by The Crank 3:24 PM

Monday, January 10, 2005

Thoughts on some of the players in The Crank's most recent article...

Albert Belle - Man, at this guy's peak he was amazing to watch. It's a shame that the media will probably drop him like a hot potato the first time his name shows up on the ballot (he won't even get Mattingly's support, and he was a better player than Don). He didn't put up enough numbers past his peak, but what a peak!

Herr Old - One of my favorite players, Baines is going to be held out of the Hall of Fame because his knees made him a DH well before his time. Note that he finished with 1628 RBIs. The only reason I bring this up is because for years the Tony Perez crowd argued that Doggie's 1652 made him Hall-worthy. "Most RBIs for a guy not in the Hall" does not a reason make - mainly because there will always be a guy with that title around his neck.

Eric the Red - Chili Davis didn't get much support for the Hall of Fame. The only reason I put these two in the same sentence is because they both suffered from Bobby Bonds disease - they got hung with the tag "The Next Willie Mays." He was amazing early in his career; he had the magic glove that went above the wall to take away homers, and that electric blend of speed and power... 80 steals in a season, and good pop in his bat. He was a player you feared when he came to the plate. Like Straw, his career went south after he joined the Dodgers. He was able to put things back together and have a nice twilight, but what could have been...

Tony "Donut" Gwynn - I spent five year in San Diego, watching Gwynn play. I remember sitting at a Padres game and they ran a highlight film in between innings. A fellow fan sighed and remarked "look, another Tony Gywnn single." Tony was very good at making contact with almost any pitch, but he didn't walk and he didn't hit for power. His 1930's batting average might have impressed back in the day, but now that OPS is such a big deal, it should be noted that he broke 1.000 only once in his career, when he finished fourth in the league in 1994. He finished 5th in 1987, and two top-fives in a 20 year career just isn't that impressive.

Some report that he was stat-driven, that in a locker room full of players unhappy over yet another Padres loss, he would be grinning from ear-to-ear over his three-hit day. Others dispair over the fact that he let his girth expand to the point where he almost affected the tides, that with a little more time on the exercise bike he could have made a run at 4000 hits. I found my insight into Gwynn at an SDSU batting practice a while back. After each college hitter took his swings, he got an in-depth conference with Tony. How many Hall of Famers are giving back to baseball by training the next generation like Gwynn?

McGwire - I don't think you get homers out of a bottle. On the other hand, you can get homers out of a toaster-sized strike zone and the new smaller parks. There's been a huge change in the power game since they powers that be cancelled the World Series in 1994. There used to be a guy called Jolting Joe who had a .579 slugging average. A decade ago that was good for #7 all time. Since then he's dropped to #11. Twelve of the top 20 sluggers of all time have played in the past ten years. McGwire - The Bringer of Dinger - stood out because he was at the start of this surge. Not all of his numbers are due to the higher environment - remember that he broke Al Rosen's rookie homer record with 49, but his 70 are tainted by era if nothing else. Palmeiro will eclipse his homer numbers, that's revealing fact.

Shawon - 203 career walks in 18 seasons. That's 29 fewer than Barry had in 2004. Shawon was fun to watch, but in the end was a more frustrating than anything else.

Rock Raines - The Crank swept Tim's drug use under the rug. I think one thing that hurts Raines here is the fact that Rickey went on to put up crazy numbers. Had Rickey hung them up in the early 1990s, one would look at Rickey and Raines and perhaps think that Raines was a National League Rickey-lite, and if Rickey was a good pick, then Raines was a marginal pick. But Rickey became The Greatest in more than a few categories and left Raines in the dust.

Matt Williams - It's still hard for me to believe that Matty is a broken-down retired ballplayer. I can remember the potential he had when he first came up. If he could only patch that hole in his swing... but he never did. He also never caught on to how pitching worked. Everyone in the ballpark knew that the way to pitch to him was to buzz him high and in to back him off the plate, then to go low and away and he would flail for strike three. His first big cup of coffee was as emergency replacement for Jose Uribe when Uribe's wife died in a childbirth-related incident. They stuck the not-yet-ready Williams out at short and told him not to worry about hitting. He did worry about hitting, mainly because he was so overmatched at that point. In some respects I don't think he ever got over feeling so clueless at the plate. One of the sweetest gloves you ever saw at third...

Robin - He still holds the Division I hitting streak record at an amazing 58 games (ping!). He also holds the record for most nuggies in one trip to the mound. He was a very good player, but never the best on his team. Best in baseball at his position is also a stretch, and a team would have a hard time going to the playoffs if he was the best player on their roster. Simply put, there always had to be a Batman (for a good chunk of his career, vintage Frank Thomas) to his Robin for things to go anywhere. A star, but not a Hall of Famer.

posted by David 10:36 AM

Sunday, January 09, 2005

Hall of Fame Drought on the Horizon

Gosh, what's a better Hot Stove League activity than arguing over this year's Hall of Fame ballot? How about arguing over the next five years' ballots?

Courtesy our Cooperstown Correspondents, here's a list of the eligible players (I think there may be a few omissions, but probably not anybody to notice) eligible over the next five years. Looking ahead, assuming none of the players currently on the ballot but not yet elected, we may have as few as three new Hall of Famers in the next five years. After 2010, we will get a steady stream of better candidates: Rickey Henderson (ifhe doesn't get back in it soon), Roger Clemens (ditto), Barry Bonds, Randy Johnson, Tom Glavine, Curt Schilling, Robby Alomar, Frank Thomas, Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Barry Larkin, et alia.

If the voters are bored with electing nobody, they may also end up voting in some of the more marginal guys out there -- so Rice, Sutter, Gossage, Smith you may yet get in.

Here are the next five classes:

2006: Albert Belle, Will Clark, Gary Gaetti, Orel Hershiser.

Comments:

I probably would give the nod to Belle were it not for the astonishingly large number of players with similar numbers at the age he retired, 33, due to hip problems. But I doubt a half dozen writers will bother to give a check mark to the hated Belle.

Clark will undoubtedly get more support than he deserves for the inverse reason, and if he'd phoned it in as a DH for another three or four years he'd have a better case, but he retired young and without a significant credential other than batting average.

Hershiser sure hung on a while but in the end has only five outstanding seasons to recommend him -- we'll table discussions of Sandy Koufax for now.

Gary Gaetti was definitely a gamer, but the .308 career OBP says it all for him.

Likely electees: none, possibly opening the door one last time for Jim Rice.

2007: Harold Baines, Scott Brosius, Jose Canseco, Eric Davis, Tony Gwynn, Stan Javier, Wally Joyner, Mark McGwire, Paul O'Neill, Cal Ripken, Bret Saberhagen.

Comments:

Baines will never get in, since he was a DH, he never had any black ink, didn't hang on long enough for the magic 3000-hit milestone, and was never dominating. With 2884 hits, he'll remain the test case for a borderline hall of famer, and the question of whether DHs should be penalized for playing the role under the rules of the game of the time (how many Hall of Fame hitters were liabilities on the field? A lot.)

Brosius will get a few undeserved votes from New York writers.

Canseco won't make it, but would get my vote: he was a dominating player in his prime, the best offensive player in the league, and came back from injuries and self-imposed performance hindrances (his own nature) to prove he could still hit on an elite level. A couple of years were cut off his career because of his behavior, and the tell-all book he wrote a few years ago (which didn't tell all, or sell wel, but still ticked off just about everybody in baseball) assured he will be an outsider forever.

Stan Javier was a great extra piece to many clubs but not even close to an average player in his time.

Joyner, after a pair of thumping opening seasons, faded for all the tiny reasons that keep most phenoms from becoming true stars; his career ended up looking like Keith Hernandez' without the gold gloves or MVP seasons.

O'Neill will be touted by Yankee lovers for his contributions as a team leader to the great Yanks clubs of 1996-2000 and his place on the 1990 Wire to Wire Reds, but his career credentials for an outfielder are so short of the standards of the Hall that he'll have to wait for his Phil Rizzuto-stack-the-veterans-committee year to get in.

Saberhagen was a Hall - of - Fame-caliber player, but injuries cut into his career early, and he couldn't get the longevity required to go with his peak value that is a requirement for even weaker Hall of Fame pitchers.

Davis was a prodigious talent, a phenomenal bat and speed combination, who with more tutelage and patience might've become an inner-circle talent. But he was another victim of his own predilections and the drug culture of the 1980s, and somewhere his motivation and concentration were sapped. To Davis' immense credit, he retired at 33 to take a year and get himself in order, performing (voluntary) community service back home in LA, and came back to show what sober dedication could make of his talents with a fine comeback year at Detroit. Unfortunately, Davis blew the five peak years of most Hall of Famer players, so we'll never know quite how good he could have been. What makes me feel good about Davis was that, unlike some of his contemporaries mired in similar problems, he seemed to have genuinely found the better self within, and if he isn't a Hall of Famer, he's now a much happier person, and that's all that counts in the end.

Which leaves us with Tony Gwynn, Mark McGwire, and Cal Ripken.

I'll start with Gwynn, since after Boggs' election he's such an incredible no-brainer first balloter, the only real question is whether he'll be elected unanimously or not. I think he will. He had the batting eye and intellect of Ted Williams, and a shared intellectual love of the science of hitting. While never boasting the power that Williams always insisted he could have, he boasted great speed in his early days and was a gold-glove centerfielder, legitimately so. In the end, he didn't have anywhere near the OBP of Boggs, since Tony never quite mastered the annoyance walk -- his career high was 82 BB -- and as a result wasn't quite the run-scoring machine Boggs was at his peak. Did you know Gwynn only scored over 100 runs twice? That's very odd, but his teammates were not always helpful, and he batted third for a good while. He was great fun to watch, an ungainly figure who just did everything with a special flair. One oddity about Gwynn: I've been listening (and enjoying) to his occasional color analysis on ESPN broadcasts since his retirement, and he's still got an oddly conventional take on the strategy of the game which is definitely way old school.

I'd rather have Tony Gwynn over to dinner, marry my daughter, etcetera, more than just about any other Hall of Fame caliber player I could think of.

Ripken, O Ripken. I'd bet money, if I bet money, he'll certainly be a unanimous selection. 19-straight All-Star selections? Even with a couple of gimmes at the end of that streak, that's pretty amazing. I'll skip over his long list of accomplishments; any guy who can hit that well and who changed his batting stance nearly every time he got in the box has not only talent, but courage unmeasurable. His career OPS of .787 is so far off the leaderboard, though (not even in the top 200), and so many of his career numbers attributable in part to his endurance, that it's important to reiterate that Cal as a Hall of Famer is the Hall of Fame of the complete player: hitting, defense, leadership, personal perseverance (to the point of vanity in the case of The Streak), love of the game, a sense of fun, hard work, and a certain looseness. For those of you who didn't seem him play short in his prime, he was a wonder of range and anticipation, using his tall frame in a way counter-intuitive to the conventional wisdom of the time that had shortstops as speedy guys who played close to the ground.

Which brings me to Mark McGwire, who will also be elected in this class. I wouldn't vote for him, at least not on the first ballot in the company above. Canseco was a better player: he had speed, better pitch selection younger, and played good defense (really) in a more demanding position. McGwire -- who knows what role Andro played? Of his ten most comparables, only two are in the Hall - Harmon Killebrew and WillieMcCovey, who played in the worst era for hitters since before 1920, in pitchers' parks, often for less than great teams. (The historical irony is that for career value, Canseco and McGwire are rated by the Baseball-reference.com comparison engine as the most comparable to one another; Mac had the good fortune to have his peak at the end of his career, Canseco the misfortune to have his at the beginning.) Mac did develop a great OBP later on, although he was greatly aided by having all-stars around him at all times in Oakland and St. Louis. I don't give the walks as much weight as a result, and I don't give any extra weight to the RBIs. He was injured a lot, and only played more than 150 games seven times. He got jilted out of a deserved MVP by Sammy Sosa in 1998 for reasons that are still beyond me, probably solely due to Sosa being on a better club that year. Unlike Barry Bonds, there was a clear drop off when Mac confessed and stopped using his performance-enhancing drugs, and this leaves me with a strong impression the peak performances were helped a lot by his regimen. Whether this is a real sin or not is up for debate these days, but I simply cannot brook the public and the BBWAA turning a blind eye to McGwire's admitted use of these substances while criticizing Bonds for allegedly using performance enhancers. McGwire whined as much as any star, which is a lot, about things like the media paying too much attention to his son -- after McGwire himself kept bringing him on the field for hugs after milestone homers -- whined about not playing when he was injured, whined about playing when he was injured, and in general to me showed none of the alleged great strength of character which is reputed to him. I will leave it to the reader to try to determine whence this double standard that has elevated McGwire to the level of mythic figure when his performance as a player, while excellent, is at the margins of Hall of Fame standards if you look beyond the padded home run figures and the consequent late-career OPS blossoming.

So, yes, I'd probably end up voting for McGwire were I given a ballot, because as a pure slugger he was on par with the Ralph Kiners and Frank Howards, and I can't unilaterally subtract the extra 150 homers from his record book that I find suspicious. But it wouldn't be with the joy that I would vote for Ripken and Gwynn.

Likely electees: Gwynn, Ripken, McGwire.

2008: Shawon Dunston, David Justice, Mike Morgan, Tim Raines, Randy Velarde.

A popular t-shirt at Wrigley for some years was a list of reasons why "this will finally be the Cubs' year". It was a joke, of course, and the biggest joke was "Dunston finally lives up to his potential." He started out with Rookie of the Year buzz and as an all-star, and ended his career with a .296 OBP. Dunston always seemed to be wound up a little too far: he sure seemed like he was trying hard much of the time, but that meant swinging a little too early at pitches a little too far out of his zone, making slight errors of judgement on the field, throwing just a bit too hard or wide. He was a gamer without a real strong game, and for whatever reason, never seemed to get better. My fondest memories of him, though, were his brief days as a Pittsburgh Pirate at the end of the 1997 season. In an incredibly weak division, Pittsburgh and Houston were battling to reach .500 -- and win the division -- so Dunston was the "big trade" that the Pirates could afford at the time. Dunston played well above himself, won a couple of key games with late hits, and had the fans cheering him on as the savior of the team. As with most of Dunston's career, his contributions were a day late and a couple of dollars short, as the Pirates blew it the last weekend. That great month gave Dunston another five years of being the 'extra player' GMs thought they needed to add to put their team over the top. He was a nice guy, at least during his latter years as a role player.

I wrote about Dave Justice a while back, because as the record holder for post-season at-bats, he's the best test case for how much more difficult (or not) hitting in the post-season is. The guy played 112 post-season games! For for different teams. And he probably could've hung on as a role player or DH for another three or four years, but hung them up at 36 because he just wasn't getting much out of the game, and I respect that. I don't know what he's made of his life since, but that's not really the point. He's nowhere near a Hall of Famer, but I don't think he got appropriate credit during his career for being a steady player, with a good eye, who was a real difference-maker in his lineup. A perfect embodiment of a Stars in Their Time electee.

Mike Morgan was a real show business guy: he'd play any town on any bill, and is tied for the record for most major league teams, making 13 stops for 12 teams. His wife once catalogued the number of times they'd moved since he was an 18-year old phenom, and had something on the order of three dozen moves in Morgan's 22 year career. He was drafted as a high school phenom, brought up to the majors for brief stints with the A's in the late 1970s, and played four star-crossed decades. For a righty with a decayed fastball, that's an amazing testament to the useful roles he played, ranging from number one starter to a part-time closer and pretty much every pitching role in between. He bagged a World Series ring as an innings eater for the 2001 Diamondbacks, pitching well in spot situations in three games in the series. In the end he finished with over 2700 innings pitched, and while he's got utterly no Hall of Fame credentials -- he probably wasn't even quite an average pitcher -- my guess is he's got more stories than anyone since Connie Mack.

Velarde was a platoon player, a sort of Greg Nettles without the offense and a somewhat lesser glove, for the Yankees for a decade. They let him go just as they started their phenomenal championship run in 1996, and by the time he came back as a late-season roster insurance in 2001, the Yanks' run was done, so Velarde never got his ring. The really odd thing about Velarde is, like some veteran back-up catchers, he seemed to start catching his rhythym very late in his career: he lead the league in at-bats in 1999, splitting time between Anaheim and Oakland, and managed to hit a career-high (for a full season) .317 while smacking out 48 extra base hits and walking 70 times -- and reaching exactly 200 hits. It wasn't a star turn by any stretch of the imagination, but one has to think it was a year of great satisfaction for the long-struggling Velarde. Gritty is the word that comes to mind.

The Rock, Tim Raines, will likely be a near miss and a perennial subject of debate as a marginal candidate for the Hall. My guess is he won't make it on the writers' ballots but will get in in about twenty years when the right combination comes up on the Veterans' committee. You can insert all the usual excuses about Montreal stars playing in obscurity, but the real reason will be the increasing obscurity of the style of play in the astroturf-laden NL of the late 1970s and 1980s. Rock was a tough out among a generation of speedster centerfielders, with a higher on-base percentage than some flashier contemporaries. He finished in the top ten in MVP voting only three times. He finished fifth on the career stolen base list, at 808, a credential that will likely be forgotten; he's in the top 50 (at 46th) in runs scored, which shows what the combination of secondary average and plate discipline did for his team in a generally less offensive era. Raines is also one of those guys who, between 1981 and 1994-95, lost the equivalent of a full season's worth of games due to labor stoppages. His lack of awards and relative lack of black ink will work against him, but I think there's a case to be made for him as the best player of his type at a time when players of his type were highly valued. Exactly half of Raines' most comparables are in the Hall of Fame: Lou Brock, Max Carey, Harry Hooper, Enos Slaughter, Rod Carew. Astute observers will note these players' primes are from five different decades, which might mean something, although I don't know what. Maybe that Raines will be more appreciated when the wheel turns again.

Likely electees: none.

2009: Mark Grace, Dan Plesac, Matt Williams.

As much as I loved to watch Mark Grace play, he's way too similar to a huge slate of low-powered contact-hitting first basemen, from Wally Joyner and Will Clark to Hal McRae and Bill Buckner, to be considered a serious candidate. He'll get some votes on personality and nostalgia. Grace may be the next Joe Torre, though, if he gets that managing job he covets and does a credible job for 15 years or so -- as a "combined achievements" Hall of Famer. That's a mighty big if, though, since half of Gracie's story hasn't been written yet.

We've been hearing a lot about the debate as to whether one-inning closers are worthy of induction into the Hall of Fame, and discussions of the emergence of the single-inning guy as a specific role. Plesac was an early example of the eighth-inning lefty specialist that made all those ninth-inning saves possible. He started his career as the closer for the Brewers, but with one off year, the idea of using a lefty in that role suddenly seemed like a bad one to Tom Trebelhorn, his manager, and Plesac lost his job to the immortal Doug Henry. Insofar as it lost a quality pitcher a chance to be a closer for a whole career, it was a set-back for Plesac's pocketbook (and hypothetical Hall credentials), but he made a great career after that, spending 13 years as a specialist. Plesac had a ten-year streak with more appearances than innings pitched, and finished with 1072 IP and 1064 games played; if he'd held on for another 15 games, he'd've been second. That's fifth on the all-time list, and he's 42nd on the Games Finished list with 442 despite having only 158 saves. While he's not on Plesac's comparable list, Jesse Orosco seems like the closest analog. He never got to a World Series, but was a three-time all-star for the Brewers.

Matty Williams is another guy who likely could've elevated himself to a marginal Hall candidate had he decided to hang on for a few years; he ended up with 378 homers, third among third-sackers depending on how you count a few late career changers. If he'd passed Nettles' 390 and gone over 400, he'd have a better case. He was a five-time all-star, four-time gold glover, and appeared in three World Series for three different clubs, winning a ring with the '01 DBacks. He started his career with an atrocious hole in his swing down and away, which gave him ugly strikeout and OBP rates; unlike most such corner-sackers, he worked his way into a .290+ hitter, finishing with a .268 batting average (although still with a below-par .317 OBP). He had a great initial year with Arizona, but his skills declined with nagging injuries, and he became a very, very expensive part-timer for Colangelo's veterans. Williams had signed with Arizona so he could be close to his children following a divorce, and chose again to retire rather than be away from them after being traded. He sacrificed at least $10 million of guaranteed money and an extra shot at the hall of fame and more championships; to me that's a hero.

Likely electees: none.

2010: Edgar Martinez, Robin Ventura.

These guys have just retired, and may as yet unretire -- at least Ventura might -- but we end with a duo of third-sackers. Sort of. Martinez played the latter two-thirds of his career as a DH, of course, and will suffer because of this. He was a very, very late arrival to the show for a star player, with his first full year at age 27, but still ended with 2217 hits, a stellar .312 average and .418 OBP; he was in the top ten in the league in OBP 12 times, and lead the league in OPS once. Despite an early lack of power, he muscled them out more frequently late and ended up with 309 homers. He played every single game in his career with one team, the Seattle Mariners, but never saw a World Series game from the dugout. That by itself, the lack of MVPs and post-season moments, will probably keep Edgar out. I'd vote for him, but he's got nearly three times as many games at DH as in the field, and the prejudices against the DH will keep him and Baines out. However, I think among the two, Martinez had a better shot because of his peak value -- two batting titles, leading the league in runs scored once, 37th all-time in OPS. But if Martinez does get in, it won't be on the first ballot, unless the voters are bored by this point with not electing anybody for a while.

Ventura leaves the game second on the all-time list for career grand slams, which says a lot about the guys who were hitting in front of him and not so much about Ventura. The first part of his career, he batted behind Frank Thomas, then behind Mike Piazza, and then in the tale part of a couple of excellent Yankee lineups. He finished up with 294 homers, a reasonable reputation at third (with six gold gloves), a decent .362 OBP but a marginal .267 batting average. His skills declined reapidly after age 31. None of these numbers scream Hall of Fame, and I can't think that he will get much support unless he unretires and has at least two more very strong years. Ventura's claim to fame, I think, will ever be that he's the guy who charged the mound when Nolan Ryan was on it, and got punched out for his trouble. With the possible exception of Pedro Martinez decking Don Zimmer after being charged, it was one of the poorest decisions by an attacker on the baseball diamond this side of Robert Fick. A classic Stars in Their Time Candidate.

Likely electees: none.

posted by The Crank 11:06 AM