It was agonizing leaving off Blyleven and those for whom statistical arguments can be made such as Jeff Bagwell, Barry Larkin, Don Mattingly, Tim Raines and Larry Walker. Oh, and Alan Trammell, who should be more than an afterthought. But the Hall should be reserved for the very best of the best, not the best of the rest.

— Dave van Dyck

Dave van Dyck’s ballot

Roberto Alomar

Jack Morris

Lee Smith

[Juan] Gonzalez: A two-time MVP and an RBI machine. Like Jim Rice, the American League’s most-feared hitter at his peak.

This is pressing all my buttons at once. I am so annoyed at reading this sentence that I have to right about why.

First off, Gonzalez’s MVPs were terrible and he should have not won them if the award means “Best Player in the League” and not “Dude Who Hit Homeruns in Texas”. Check out the voting billboard on B-R: 1996, 1998. His winning two MVPs has irked me basically since it happened and is one of those things that just makes me irritation irritated.

Next let’s say Gonzalez’s peak was from 1993-1999. His line during that time was , .307/.356/.599 which is really good even if you take into account Arlington. It’s important to note that he was good.

Now let’s take a look at some people hitting in the American League at the same time as Juan Gonzalez. This is just an off the top of my head list sampling.

Gonzalez winds up in the middle of the pack here, which is certainly excellent company but by any measure he’s not the best hitter of the group. “Most feared” then does not mean “best hitter” (which we already knew). In that case, what does it mean? Does it mean he was intentionally walked the most because pitchers and managers were so scared of him that they refused to throw him anything to hit? From 1993-1999 Gonzalez was intentionally walked 55 times. Edgar Martinez who missed much of 1993 and a big chunk of 1994 due to injuries was walked 56 times in the same time period.

Calling someone “most feared” really means–as far as I can tell–that you want to say someone a really good hitter, but can’t call him the best because it’s clearly not true and need to come up with some way of saying that he was really good with a bit of extra impact. That’s silly, Juan Gonzalez was an excellent hitter during his peak and doesn’t need any kind of silly mythos to emphasize that. Especially when you want me to believe that pitchers would rather face Ken Griffey or Frank Thomas rather than Gonzalez. That’s without even considering that it’s a ridiculous question to pose anyway because who would want to face any of these guys??

I’m not even going to touch “RBI machine” because it’ll cause my brain to explode.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Queens), who released a report a day after the Daily News’ broke the story, blasted Major League Baseball for its exorbitant tack-on fees at a news conference Saturday.

“There’s not a lot of rationality with these fees,” Weiner said.

“Major League Baseball is nickel-and-diming the public, and it adds up to big bucks.”

Once again the local NYC government is barking up the wrong tree which should be no shock to anyone who actually lives here.

We all hate the fees tacked onto ticket sales from vendors but if you’re going to complain and use your position of power as a way to get heard, you need to focus on the people charging those fees. That would be Ticketmaster, tickets.com, StubHub and all the other vendors out there.

And focusing it on baseball is also pretty ridiculous. These fees exist for all events, and they’re actually less worse for MLB than they are for some concerts. I bought tickets through TM/LiveNation for a show where the face price was $25, and then I was charged a $10+ “convenience fee” and then the processing fee on top of that.

It’s easy to go out and hold a press conference to get some attention like Anthony Weiner, and most people out there probably think that it is the Yankees and Mets and MLB or whoever setting the fees but if you ever want it to change, you have to point the fingers in the right direction. Just saying “Hey MLB don’t be mean with fees!” is a quick, populist move that doesn’t even make any sense if you sit back and think about how the system works for two seconds.

In addition to that, the entire article from the NYDN about this never once mentions that the large fees are imposed by the ticket vendors, choosing to go the easy route and go along with the political huffing and puffing rather than pointing out where the fees are coming from. For example, they mention that you get charged a fee to print out your ticket? Who charges that? That would be Ticketmaster and other vendors and not MLB, but readers are lead to believe otherwise. That’s just lazy, hazardous reporting  and writing that misinforms the general public. Shameful.

I’m also not funny like the guys from Fire Joe Morgan so it doesn’t seem worth it to go for that type of post.

Today, however, the Post let Larry Brooks who is a long-time hockey writer for the paper pen a column about baseball. And it ends with the flat out dumbest conclusion paragraph I have ever seen about a team many games over .500 and I just wanted to share it with anyone who stops by.

Instead of going into these next seven games against the Red Sox, Rays and Mets as an all-powerful 25-12 behemoth able to leap tall buildings and all obstacles with a single bound, they’re a 24-13 second-place team that needs more help from its marquee players than its been getting.

That’s right, losing one game of a three game series is a total failure. The Yankees season is now doomed. They’ll never win another game.

Nevermind that the team would still be in second place if they had won yesterday. The Rays were already a game up on the Yankees and beat the Mariners but it doesn’t seem to matter to Larry Brooks. Maybe he doesn’t even know that it would be the case.

Stick to writing about hockey, Larry. You clearly have no idea what’s going on in this whacky baseball land.

The New York Yankees are hitting .275/.384/.469 as a team through Tuesday’s games, leading the American League in on-base percentage, slugging and runs scored. But Nick Johnson hasn’t been a huge asset thus far, despite his .407 on-base percentage.

The veteran is hitting .146 and has just three extra-base hits all season. He’s hitless in his last 12 at-bats and has 15 punch outs to go with his 16 walks. Might the Yankees consider another option?

I went and looked this up because Greg from Pending Pinstripes made a comment on his Twitter feed.

I honestly read that and then read it again and then spent a few minutes just looking at it with my head tilted and…stared.

Quickly:

1. A .406 OBP is always a pretty big if not huge asset from a full time player.
2. 15 strikeouts to 16 walks means he has more walks than strikeouts and yet it’s noted as a bad thing. He has more walks than games played! Talk about grasping at straws.
3. Using the language “all season” when we’re 13 games in is incredibly stupid.
4. Might the Yankees consider another option? Not after they’ve played 13 games, no. Maybe they should also cut Mark Teixeira who is currently sporting a .125/.300/.229 line

This isn’t any kind of rumor, and while I try to stay away from giving dumb things attention this was just so incredibly stupid I couldn’t let it be. Completely made up, irresponsible and dumb things like this are exactly why I and many others take everything ESPN reports with a giant grain of salt.

I voted for Tim Raines his first year of eligibility. But when he failed to get 25 percent of the vote, he was moved to the back burner. Sorry, that’s just the way it has to be. Maybe more eligible ballwriters should have measured the Rock’s career numbers in all phases against those of analog basestealer and first-ballot inductee Lou Brock. Try it, you’ll be amazed.

Good news for Raines, however. Yesterday, in one of the most bizarre elections in a bizarre process, he collected 30 percent and is now back on my radar.

So yeah it’s hard to get worked up that he wrote yet another stupid thing. The proper approach is mockery since like Murray Chass (who doesn’t have a blog!!!) he’s not interested in discussing anything. Just making a splash to keep getting attention until he is inevitably put out to pasture.

That sure doesn’t look like Bagwell went from hitting homers to a power outage overnight to my untrained eye.  Forgetting the arthritis condition that Bagwell had is a pretty big memory wipe as well since it by all accounts turned him into a Giambi-esque firstbaseman after being quite good. As you grow older things like arthritis become worse, and baseball skills (like hitting for power!!!) decline. To put it simply: Injury + age = decline.

I mean really it takes three seconds to look at that table and come to the conclusion that he was in a decline phase after 1999-2000 rather than experiencing a “power outage”.

But hey I’m not the professional so maybe I’m making this all up.

Marty Noble – Barry Larkin, Dave Parker

You may say that he got one out of two right, I would say that it is ridiculous to think only two people on the ballot deserve induction and that one of them is Dave Parker. This ballot simply doesn’t make sense in any context. Small hall? Then probably neither of them should be included. Big hall? If your Hall is big enough for Dave Parker it should have half the people on the ballot and you’d run out of votes.

The Jack Morris but no Bert Blyleven Crew

Murray Chass, Jon Heyman, Bruce Jenkins, Danny Knobler, Buster Olney, Dan Shaughnessy, Joel Sherman and Tom Verducci all voted for Jack Morris but not Bert Blyleven. If you don’t think Bert is a Hall of Fame pitcher and don’t buy the arguments of people like Rich Lederer that’s fine.We all have different ideas about what the cutoff for the Hall should be. But if you don’t think Bert belongs then there is absolutely no way that Jack Morris should be one.

Bert outclasses Morris in every important pitching category. Rate states, counting stats, you name it. Not even the fancy things that Shaughnessy thinks suck out all the joy of the game. The only thing he doesn’t have is a 10 inning Game 7 of the World Series shut out. On the other hand, he also doesn’t have two horrible losses in the 1992 World Series like Jack Morris.

The worst part about people citing the post season appearances Morris had is that they completely ignore what Blyleven did.

If Morris gets a boost for his postseason pitching, which was pretty similar except for one game to his regular season pitching than so should Bert. Maybe Jon Heyman’s eyes were closed when Blyleven was in the games, I don’t know.

Jack Morris was a good pitcher and had a good career and I really don’t want to take anything away from him, but it’s like saying you’d pick Andy Pettitte for your team instead of Mike Mussina. Then again I expect to be annoyed at people voting for Andy and not Moose in the future.

The Jay Mariotti Idiot Achievement Award

Jay Mariotti is an attention whore, I get that. This year he decided to play attention whore and send in a blank ballot. I don’t really have an issue with blank ballots as a concept. There are people who want to vote for no-one and have their ballot count because they’re very small hall type guys, for example. But Mariotti decided to use his 2010 ballot as something to get people to pay attention to him.

Now, the baseball gods can strike me down, Reali, but guess what? I didn’t vote for anybody in the baseball hall of fame this year. Ya know why?  To me…the first ballot is sacred. I think Roberto Alomar is an eventual Hall of Famer, not the first time. Edgar Martinez, designated hitter, eventually, but not the first time. Same goes for maybe Fred McGriff. As far as Blyleven and Dawson…if they haven’t gotten in for years and years I cannot vote them in now. Ripken, Rickey Henderson and Gwynn. They are true first ballot Hall of Famers, but I didn’t vote for anybody, throw me out of the Baseball Writers. I don’t care.

Last year he voted for Blyleven and Dawson, so what changed between now and then? Well enough people weren’t looking at him, I guess and he needed to do something to change that. The BBWAA should take his ballot away. He wants to get kicked out or whatever and they absolutely should comply with that. He can tell the world he got kicked out but then he can’t pull stupid stunts like this anymore.

They probably won’t, however, so he’ll continue to use things like this as an opportunity to get people to pay attention to him. It’s a shame.

For my own crazy purposes, I keep track of the Hall of Fame ballots that are made public by writers every year. You can see the crazy nerdsheet here.

This year, the shocking thing that happened was the difference between the support between online voters and whoever it is with a vote that doesn’t make their ballot public (which is a lot of people, once you have a Hall of Fame vote you have it forever) for Roberto Alomar. I expected a difference in Bert Blyleven for sure and I was disappointed that he missed it by five ballots but Andre Dawson going in by himself was a shock.

So here are some ugly graphs covering the vote over the past two years. I’ll probably write up my oh-so important thought on this later. They’re kinda big so the full-size versions are linked. I may also make the graphs less ugly!

Comparison of return candidates and their vote totals 2009 and 2010.

]]> http://teamnerdrage.com/2010/01/06/2010-baseball-hall-of-fame-results-with-ugly-graphs/feed/ 1 http://teamnerdrage.com/2009/11/20/hot-stove-authority-abuse/ http://teamnerdrage.com/2009/11/20/hot-stove-authority-abuse/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:47:35 +0000 leokitty http://teamnerdrage.com/?p=2315 This article has no by-line but according to the Daily News, here are “Five Free Agents the Yankees are Eyeing”:

1. RHP John Lackey (11-8, 3.83 ERA): The Yankees will be hesitant to pay him what he wants, but if Andy Pettitte retires, they may have to.

2. INF/OF Mark DeRosa (.250, 23 HR, 78 RBI): Jersey native may be perfect fit to give other aging starters their turns at DH.

3. OF Jason Bay (.267, 36 HR, 119 RBI): If Johnny Damon departs, Bay will be less expensive option than Matt Holliday.

4. RHP Ben Sheets (13-9, 3.09 ERA in 2008; did not pitch in 2009): Cashman hasn’t been afraid to gamble on post-surgery pitchers. Sheets could be a bargain.

5. RHP Roy Halladay (17-10, 2.79 ERA): Not a free agent, but he’ll be the story of the winter. It will take a lot to pry him from Toronto, but don’t think the Yankees aren’t going to try.

See this list? Notice that it has no indication other than whatever the writer decided that the Yankees are eyeing anyone. No anonymous club sources, nothing. But by saying that the Yankees are interested, even without sources, you can get people to believe what you write because of the authority afforded to the writer by being a member of the NY Daily News’ staff.

On top of that, the list isn’t “Five Free Agents the Yankees Might Be Interested In”, it is intentionally presented as free agents they are interested in signing which is what makes articles like this annoy me.

Here are some things that instantly make me discredit each point here:

1. Are there any indications Andy Pettitte is going to retire? No. So why even mention this?
2. Does anyone actually believe that the Yankees are going to do the rotating DH thing instead of actually finding a fulltime guy? No? Good.
3. Bay will be less expensive than Holliday, sure, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be worth the money he gets. And don’t think that Brian Cashman doesn’t know this. I mean he just turned down a 4/$60million contract which is already too much money for his skillset.
4. Alright this one makes sense, but I’m not sure what post-surgery pitchers they’re thinking of. Sergio Mitre? Sheets is on a different level, there’s no reason to think he’ll be a bargain.
5. Not a free agent so you shouldn’t mention him in a list of free agents. Sure the Yankees will “try” but I doubt they’ll try very hard given the team’s stance on giving up prospects and money.

This is a list not founded in the reality the Yankees inhabit. It purports to be a list of players that they’re eyeing, then offers no evidence only little blurbs that make varying amounts of sense. At least give me an anonymous source if you’re pretending to know what’s going on inside the head fo the front office.

I also want to add this from their “five overvalued” list because it stuck out to me as the dumbest thing.

2. Aroldis Chapman, LHP (5.68 ERA in World Baseball Classic): Unpolished Cuban defector could be gamble.

Chapman has fantastic raw skill that you find once in a blue moon, and teams like the Yankees and Red Sox would never in a million years see him fall to them in the draft. I guess he’s overvalued because he’s going to get a lot of money but that’s a ridiculous position, nobody is looking at him to fill a spot in their rotation right now. The entire point of Chapman, like all prospects, is that you take a gamble on the talent. You don’t just sit back, make a smug face and sign some high floor/low ceiling guy because he’s more of a sure thing.

I really cannot fathom how you could put Chapman on a list of overvalued free agents if you understand anything at all about how the farm system in baseball works. First you identify the talent, then you acquire it and hope that it all sticks together.You have to invest money in your developing talent or you become the Houston Astros.

The rest of the article is just your typical hot-stove schlock but this one actually annoyed me.