I’ll be posting the results of the 2016 BJOL HOF vote tomorrow, right in line with the BBWAA announcement. Just before we get to that, I’d like to touch on one of the questions that our HOF ballot shares with the BBWAA ballot.
How should we consider the candidacy of relief pitchers for the Hall of Fame?
It’s a vexing question. Lee Smith had a record of 71-87 with 478 saves and a 2.98 ERA. John Franco had a record of 90-87 with 424 saves and a 2.89 ERA. Lee Smith has been on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot for thirteen years, where he’s gotten as much as 50.6% of the vote. John Franco, a direct contemporary of Lee Smith, received 4.6% of the vote in his first year of eligibility and was promptly dumped off the ballot. How does that made sense?
Bruce Sutter was 68-71 with 300 saves and an ERA of 2.83. Doug Jones is 66-78 with 303 saves, and an ERA of 3.29. They weren’t direct contemporaries, and offensive contexts probably get their ERA’s a little closer. Bruce Sutter is in the Hall of Fame. Doug Jones isn’t.
So how do you sort through the modern closers, and determine which candidates to support for the Hall?
Part of the challenge is that it doesn’t seem particularly hard to be an effective closer: every year we see a dozen reclamation starters switch to the bullpen and post ERA’s that would make Bob Gibson jealous.
There’s a sense that good closer are failed starters….that they are lesser than starters. Wade Davis might be the best closer in baseball, but he wasn’t great as a starter. Luke Hocheaver was great in the bullpen, but couldn’t hack it as a starter. Ryan Madson has a 6.82 ERA as a starting pitcher, 2.94 out of the bullpen. That’s just one team….I haven’t left Kansas City.
Another part of it is that it’s a high turnover position: if you want to know who the best 1B in baseball is going to be in 2016, you’re going to pick from a small group: Goldy or Rizzo or Votto or Miggy. Try picking the best closer, and you’d have to cast a wider net: Kimbrel and Chapman are obvious choices, but Kimbrel ranked 18th in fWAR last year, while there’s a good chance Chapman isn’t the best relief pitcher on the Yankees in 2016. Cody Allen led the majors in relief pitcher WAR, and Melancon led in saves. Roberstson, Familia, Betances, Giles, Rosenthal, Davis, Jansen, Britton….take your pick.
The third part is that the position is still in flux. The usage patterns of closers have evolved drastically over the last fifty years, and there’s strong evidence that that evolution is continuing.
All of those elements work against the candidacies of closers. It’s tough to care about a failed starter when you are considering a candidate’s career against the careers of successful starters. It’s tough to judge a pitching career that is sometimes 800 or 1000 innings in length. And it’s tough to judge someone by what the position was in their era, instead of by what the position is now.
It’s a difficult process.
* * *
There’s another issue, which is that the Hall has seemed a little iffy about which closers they elect. Rollie Fingers was elected because he was, for a brief moment, the all-time saves leader. And because he won an MVP. Then they elected Sutter, who seemed to be a little short on ‘career length’. Then they went with Gossage.
The message seemed to be that 300 saves was a standard of greatness: get to 300 and you’re a candidate.
It is easy to see, in retrospect, why 300 saves wasn’t a particularly good metric for pitching greatness. Hell, it was easy to see at the time why that was going to wind up a poor benchmark. A good closer will save 40 games a year, which means that an eight year run as a good closer was a Hall-of-Fame career.
If we upheld 300 saves as the benchmark, we’d have 27 closers either in the Hall, or posing for their plaque. Jason Isringhauser has 300 saves. Jose Mesa has 321. John Wettland has 330. Randy Myers has 347.
And saves are a stupid stat. They aren’t a particularly useful way of judging performance. We all know this.
* * *
Because of this, a lot of us throw our hands up and ignore closers. We’ll vote for Mariano Rivera, but that’s it. We’re going to ignore Lee Smith, or Hoffman, or Wagner, because there’s just no way to differentiate them. If you vote for Hoffman, don’t you have to vote for Lee Smith? Asking that differently, what characteristics would make you support just one of those pitchers?
I think this is a mistake. Like it or not, relief pitchers are hugely important figures in the game. If the Hall of Fame exists to honor the best players of each era, it should honor the best closer of this era.
So how do we decide which candidates to support, and which ones to ignore?
* * *
You ever make up junk stats?
I do. It’s just something fun to do, some way to fiddle with the numbers. Bill makes up real numbers, numbers that attempt to answer something decisively. I just do it to have a little fun. I don’t put any stock in any metric I invent, and I wouldn’t encourage you to do it, either. We’re just having some fun.
So junk-stat time.
I was trying to figure out how to evaluate closers….how to figure out what was a reasonable benchmark to judge a relief pitcher.
I started with WAR…with the FanGraphs version. I did that because it’s really easy to build spreadsheets with their database. God bless everyone at FanGraphs.
Career WAR, for relief pitchers, is pretty unsatisfying. Trevor Hoffman has a career WAR of 26.1, which is about what Mike Trout put up in his first three years in the majors. That seems like very little, but it ranks Hoffman third among closers since 1950, behind Mariano and Goose.
Just an aside: Mariano ranks first in everything. Any way you try to look at closers, with junk stats or fancy metrics or just ‘saves’, Mariano is ahead of everyone, by a huge margin. He almost ruins the conversation…no one compares to him, and no one really comes close.
Anyway, I adjusted the WAR of relief pitchers to ‘per-60-innings-pitched’, but that didn’t really help. I got a list with 1.8 and 2.2 and 2.5 and 1.9. How you do separate the great pitchers from the pretty good ones. The number was too small to ‘see’ the mark.
So I jumped it to WAR/200 IP. Counting only players who pitcher 600+ innings as a reliever, Here are the top-ten:
Name
|
WAR/200 IP
|
Mariano Rivera
|
6.4
|
Billy Wagner
|
5.4
|
Dennis Eckersley
|
5.1
|
Trevor Hoffman
|
4.8
|
Lee Smith
|
4.1
|
Doug Jones
|
4.0
|
Goose Gossage
|
3.7
|
Fr. Rodriguez
|
3.7
|
Bruce Sutter
|
3.7
|
Tom Gordon
|
3.7
|
This is a pretty good list. Mariano is first, and it’s not surprising to see the likes of Wagner, Eck, Hoffman, and Smith on the list. If you told me those were the top-five relief pitchers in baseball, I’d listen.
But it’s not a perfect list. You can probably guess why.
Tom Gordon has a WAR/200 of 3.7, but his career as a relief pitcher was 857 innings long.
Rollie Fingers had a WAR/200 of 3.3, but his career as a relief pitcher was 1553 innings long.
Who you gonna take?
You’re taking the moustache. No hesitation. Rollie Fingers might’ve been the wrong candidate for the Hall, but he’s a better candidate than Tom Gordon.
So we need to balance things out.
The tension with relief pitchers is similar to the ‘peak-versus-longevity’ debate that we have about position players. Should Nomar Garciaparra be in the Hall of Fame because he was really great for six years, or should Rafael Palmeiro be in the Hall of Fame because he was pretty good for twenty years?
I had already calculated WAR/200 innings pitched. To balance things out, I backed up to find out just how many 200 IP sections a pitcher had. Really simple: I divided each pitcher’s innings pitched by 200, and rounded to the first decimal.
Here’s the top-ten on that list. I’ll give you a dollar if you can guess #1.
Name
|
IP/200
|
Hoyt Wilhelm
|
9.2
|
Lindy McDaniel
|
9.0
|
Goose Gossage
|
7.9
|
Rollie Fingers
|
7.8
|
Gene Garber
|
7.5
|
Kent Tekulve
|
7.2
|
Tug McGraw
|
7.0
|
Sparky Lyle
|
7.0
|
Clay Carroll
|
6.6
|
Don McMahon
|
6.6
|
Rollie’s on the list again. So is Hoyt Wilhelm, the one HOF reliever who didn’t make the first list.
You know what I did next?
I said this was a junk stat, and it’s about to get very junky. Really simply, I added the first column to the second column. I did addition. That’s horrible. That’s kid math.
And I got this list:
Name
|
WAR/200
|
IP/200
|
RP Score
|
Mariano Rivera
|
6.4
|
6.2
|
12.5
|
Goose Gossage
|
3.7
|
7.9
|
11.5
|
Hoyt Wilhelm
|
2.1
|
9.2
|
11.3
|
Lindy McDaniel
|
2.2
|
9.0
|
11.1
|
Rollie Fingers
|
3.3
|
7.8
|
11.1
|
Lee Smith
|
4.1
|
6.3
|
10.4
|
Trevor Hoffman
|
4.8
|
5.4
|
10.2
|
Billy Wagner
|
5.4
|
4.5
|
9.9
|
Doug Jones
|
4.0
|
5.5
|
9.5
|
Gene Garber
|
1.9
|
7.5
|
9.5
|
Kent Tekulve
|
2.0
|
7.2
|
9.2
|
Dennis Eckersley
|
5.1
|
4.0
|
9.1
|
Sparky Lyle
|
2.1
|
7.0
|
9.0
|
Tug McGraw
|
2.0
|
7.0
|
9.0
|
Bruce Sutter
|
3.7
|
5.2
|
8.9
|
For such a dumb stat, it’s an oddly perfect list. It gets all of the pitchers elected to the Hall of Fame: Goose, Wilhelm, Fingers, Eck, and Sutter. And it gets all the guys who have come closest to getting elected: Smith and Hoffman (if he isn’t elected tomorrow).
The list passes the smell test. Mariano Rivera shows up as the best closer…by a good distance. Behind him are Hoyt Wilhelm and Goose Gossage.
You know why that’s a good top-3? Because it identifies relief pitchers from completely different eras….three pitchers who were used in differently capacities. So our junk metric doesn’t seem to be a bias towards older relief pitchers, or modern ones.
This metric also gives us a satisfyingdemarcation: 10. If you cross over 10 by this metric, you are a serious candidate for the Hall of Fame. Seven relief pitchers are over 10.0…three of those seven are already in the Hall (Goose, Fingers, Wilhelm) and one more is a shoo-in when he gets on the ballot. Trevor Hoffman is getting a lot of love this year, and Lee Smith did really well by the voters. The only guy we’ve ‘missed’ is Lindy McDaniel.
And the guys behind those guy…the guys in the 9.0-9.9 range…are candidates to consider. Sutter is in…he’s not a great choice by this metric, but he’s not so bad. Billy Wagner is a very good candidate, though not as good as Lee Smith. Eckersley shows up….he gets in on the extra years as a fine starting pitcher.
What’s startling is that the list suggests that the BBWAA voters have actually gotten closers right, a statement I never thought I’d ever put to paper. As strangely quixotic as their selections seem, they’ve mostly picked the best relief pitchers…the relief pitchers who have the most convincing blend of peak performance and longevity. There’s a good case that the relief pitchers with plaques in Cooperstown are the guys who most belong there.
* * *
The one pitcher who missing…the one guy I was surprised didn’t make either list…is Dan Quisenberry. Dan Quisenberry was one of the great relief aces of the 1980’s, so how come he’s not on our list?
Simple: FanGraph’s version of WAR gives a lot of weight to strikeouts, and Quiz didn’t get too many strikeouts.
FanGraphs credits Quiz with 14.5 WAR, which puts his WAR/200 at 2.8. That's not quite in the top-ten for relief pitchers. I think he ranked 14th or 16th, but I'm too lazy to check that.
What if we substitute in his Baseball-Reference WAR, instead? Baseball-Reference credits him with a WAR of 24.9.
That jacks his WAR/200 all the way up to 5.2. His career value is 4.8. So we get:
Name
|
IP/200
|
WAR/200
|
RP Score
|
Mariano Rivera
|
6.2
|
6.4
|
12.5
|
Goose Gossage
|
7.9
|
3.7
|
11.5
|
Hoyt Wilhelm
|
9.2
|
2.1
|
11.3
|
Lindy McDaniel
|
9.0
|
2.2
|
11.1
|
Rollie Fingers
|
7.8
|
3.3
|
11.1
|
Lee Smith
|
6.3
|
4.1
|
10.4
|
Trevor Hoffman
|
5.4
|
4.8
|
10.2
|
Dan Quisenberry
|
5.2
|
4.8
|
10.0
|
Billy Wagner
|
4.5
|
5.4
|
9.9
|
Doug Jones
|
5.5
|
4.0
|
9.5
|
If you use the version of WAR that is less dependent on strikeouts, Quiz becomes a very good candidate for the Hall of Fame.
So that's what our list gets us: the relief pitchers already in the Hall, and the relief pitchers who have the best cases to make the Hall. It's a junk stat, but it's also true, somehow. It's a True Junk Stat.
* * *
We can use it, too, to consider modern relievers
Name
|
WAR/200
|
IP/200
|
RP Score
|
Craig Kimbrel
|
7.4
|
1.7
|
9.2
|
Jonathan Papelbon
|
5.5
|
3.4
|
8.9
|
Aroldis Chapman
|
7.1
|
1.6
|
8.7
|
Francisco Rodriguez
|
3.7
|
4.5
|
8.2
|
Kenley Jansen
|
6.2
|
1.7
|
7.9
|
Koji Uehara
|
5.6
|
1.6
|
7.2
|
Sean Doolittle
|
6.1
|
1.0
|
7.1
|
David Robertson
|
4.8
|
2.3
|
7.1
|
Dellin Betances
|
6.1
|
0.9
|
7.0
|
Ken Giles
|
6.4
|
0.6
|
7.0
|
Wade Davis
|
5.7
|
1.1
|
6.8
|
Jonathan Broxton
|
3.6
|
3.0
|
6.6
|
Huston Street
|
3.4
|
3.3
|
6.6
|
Joakim Soria
|
4.3
|
2.3
|
6.6
|
Joaquin Benoit
|
2.9
|
3.5
|
6.4
|
Sergio Romo
|
4.3
|
2.0
|
6.3
|
Ryan Madson
|
3.2
|
3.0
|
6.2
|
Jake McGee
|
4.8
|
1.3
|
6.1
|
Trevor Rosenthal
|
4.8
|
1.2
|
6.0
|
Craig Kimbrel, at this point, is amassing a tremendous WAR/200 innings pitched. So is Chapman. The challenge, for each of them, is whether or not they can healthy long enough to get their innings pitched up enough to be a serious candidate for the Hall of Fame. Jonathan Papelbon hasn’t been quite as effective as Chapman or Kimbral, but his career length is twice theirs, so he’s building a case. K-Rod’s case is more longevity than peak performance, and I don’t see him as a particularly strong candidate.
* * *
This is a junk stat. But as non-scientific as it is, I like it. It seems to work, better than anything else I've found.
I’ve been on the fence about Lee Smith and Trevor Hoffman, but I think they’re deserving candidates now. I’m sold on Quiz. I think Billy Wagner has a good case. I’m going to have to look into this Lindy McDaniels fellow.
We’ll find out tomorrow if the BBWAA voters continue their surprisingly good sense when it comes to relief pitchers, and elect Trevor Hoffman into the Hall of Fame. And we’ll see if the BJOL readers have come to any conclusions about Hoffman, Lee Smith, and Billy Wagner.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.