One thing I like about Andruw Jones is that you can find him on line with just one word.   Just type "Andruw", and the only thing that comes up is Andruw Jones.   I had a couple of questions in "Hey, Bill" recently about the Hall of Fame stature of a couple of recently departed stars.   Andruw is not actually retired; he is hitting .232 in the Japanese League.   It’s quite a bit like doing dinner theater in Springfield.

                It is my opinion that, while Andruw had a distinguished major league career, he fell clearly and significantly short of the standard of a Hall of Famer.    My standards for the Hall of Fame are:

                1) 300 Career Win Shares, and

                2)  100 more Win Shares than Loss Shares.   

                If a player meets both of those standards, he’s a Hall of Famer.   If he meets neither, he’s not.   If he meets one but not the other, then we’ll look more carefully at the details.   

                Andruw does not meet either standard.  He’s at 247-178. . .70 to 80% of a Hall of Fame career.  Here are his Win Shares and Loss Shares, by season:

                Obviously, that’s a really good player there, with won-lost contributions for different seasons of 22-11, 21-11, 24-10, 23-8, 20-13 and 22-12.  He fell, by my estimates, about three solid seasons short of Hall of Fame stature.

                The key question for Andruw is how much we should rave about his defense.    One of the people who asked the question which prompted this enquiry, Phil Dellio, put it this way:  

                          I’m having a hard time getting my head around his viability because a) he drops off a cliff once he hits 30, b) his offensive stats are good but not great when era-adjusted, and c) I’m not as confident evaluating defense as I am offense.   The last is my problem, I know.

                No, it’s not.  NONE of us are as confident evaluating defense as we are offense, and none of us should be.   Batting stats were well enough designed in the 1870s and 1880s that they (batting stats, collectively) were able to grow and develop, over the decades, to create a complex and nuanced portrait of a hitter’s skills.    Fielding stats were very poorly designed, in the game’s formative years, so that over the decades they didn’t evolve or develop at all.   The fielding stats that existed in 1980 were almost exactly the same as they were in 1880.

                Since 1980 we have worked very hard to improve our understanding of fielding stats and to create better stats, but we’re still trying to catch up.   It is a simple reality that we do not understand the role of a fielder in run prevention with anything like the same level of sophistication that we understand the role of a hitter in run creation.   No one does, even the experts in the field.

                I am quite confident that the Win Shares/Loss Shares system evaluates good fielders as good fielders and poor fielders as poor fielders more than 95% of the time.  The issue is scale.   I credit Andruw with a won-lost contribution, as a fielder of 60-30, which breaks down, incidentally, as 35-9 through 2002, but 25-22 after 2002.     Which is common; almost all defensive players are much better as young players than as mature players.   This is one of the ways that we know our system works.

                Anyway, the issue is scale.  We evaluate Andruw as a very good defensive player, with a defensive winning percentage of .667.    But there are people who would argue that this number does not give him adequate credit for his defensive performance.   There are people who would argue this from an analytical standpoint, based on their reading of his defensive numbers, and there are people who would argue this from a scouting/observational standpoint, based on watching him play.    "Your system doesn’t give enough credit to a great defensive player," they would argue.    My system believes that he was about 50 runs better than an average defensive player, over the course of his career.   An analyst might argue that that’s not enough runs.   An observer might argue that we have given Andruw 335 Win Shares and Loss Shares for his batting, only 90 for his glove, and that defense is simply more important than that.

                I have done the best I could to place Jones in the "right" position as a defensive player, and, as I said, I have confidence that my system is generally right on a certain level.   But I can’t prove that those who would give more weight to his defense are absolutely wrong, just as I don’t believe that they can prove that they’re right.   But based on my understanding of the record, Jones’ fielding

                a)  Was only truly outstanding through 2002; after that his Gold Gloves were mostly just reputation, and

                b)   Was not of substantial enough value that we should consider him an all-time great player.

                I would put Andruw in a class with Vada Pinson, Cesar Cedeno, Fred Lynn and perhaps a few others.   Jimmy Wynn and Dale Murphy.   These men, all center fielders, were all tremendous players when they were young—such tremendous players that they didn’t need to develop in order to become Hall of Famers; they merely needed to sustain their level of performance for a reasonably full career.   But, for whatever reason, they weren’t able to do that, and fell short of a Hall of Fame standard. 

                This chart gives Andruw’s Win Shares and Loss Shares with his batting performance, season by season:

Bill