Author: sbarzilla

The Hall of Fame voting process is ripe with bias and the combined cases of Joe Torre and Ted Simmons represent those biases well. In general, the voters don’t tend to like catchers that move out from behind the dish before the end of their careers. Torre played both third and first base in addition to catcher and enjoyed his best season as a third baseman. So, some want to consider him a third baseman or first baseman. Simmons became a designated hitter late in his career as well.

The natural assumption for both players is that they were moved because they were subpar defensive players. As we know, WAR includes both offensive and defensive elements, so if you are a poor defender you will suffer in the index. It is just as likely that the teams that moved them wanted to take advantage of their bat and moving them from behind the dish allowed them to play more often. We can look at their three systems outlooks on their fielding to test this theory out. In order to do that, we will look only at their numbers as a catcher.

This is a tale of two cities. Torre was actually a solid defensive catcher. He wasn’t going to make anyone forget about Johnny Bench or Gary Carter, but he was a perfectly good defensive catcher. When he moved to third base he was brutal defensively. So, you could conceivably look at his overall numbers and assume he was a bad defensive catcher. Ultimately, you are responsible for the value you bring to the table, but he would have likely been more valuable had he stayed behind the plate.

Conversely, Simmons wasn’t necessarily a disaster behind the dish, but he wasn’t one of the better catchers either. He also played some at first base and first basemen don’t create the same defensive value as catchers even in the best of conditions. Either way, the facts don’t necessarily match the reputations in both cases.

So, we begin by looking at their career value numbers and comparing that with the lowest guys in the Hall of Fame. Usually, people start using what we might refer to as the “if…then” argument. For instance, if Gabby Hartnett is in the Hall of Fame then these guys should be. That works most of the time, but occasionally you get outliers that only serve to muddy the process.

Both players are on the right track with these numbers. They both are in the same neighborhood as those other catchers already in the Hall of Fame. We would hate to look at just the index, so we should probably evaluate them on their bread and butter. Offensively, both players were solid and had top reputations. So, let’s compare them directly with the bottom three catchers in the Hall of Fame.

These things usually become like an SAT exam question. Which one of these does not belong? If you answered Ted Simmons you would be partially right. Yes, his wOBA is much lower and his OPS and OPS+ are lower, but we also have to remember the eras in which these players played. Still, you could use this data as a way to say yes to Torre and no to Simmons. However, to keep both out seems far-fetched when looking at this data alone.

That being said, there is an argument to be made based on the totality of the numbers. Even if we ignore the basic counting numbers, we see that he had more runs created than any of the other catchers on that particular list. Still, this is one of many reasons why we include a peak value element. Not all career value totals are created equal. We have to give the nod to players who achieve some level of greatness in their careers over players that were consistently good, but never great. We can see that by looking at his peak from the point of view of the MVP voters.

It should be noted that Simmons also finished in 19^th place in the voting in 1983 when he produced four bWAR that season. There is something to be said for a player that produces three or more wins ten seasons in a row. He had twelve such seasons in his career. Life as a catcher is difficult, so if you can put twelve seasons together like that you’ve done something. If ten of those seasons come consecutively you’ve really done something. However, it isn’t difficult to imagine why he had difficulty capturing the attention of the BBWAA when they never put him in the top five of the MVP voting.

Torre was the MVP in 1971 and had one other top five finish in 1964. While his record doesn’t compare to the likes of the others in the BBWAA, that 1971 season gives him a leg up on Simmons. This is especially true when it comes with a .363 batting average, 230 hits, and 137 RBI. It’s those kinds of seasons that capture the imagination of fans and writers alike. Still, the tale of the tape comes with the peak value numbers.

I honestly would have never predicted that given the numbers we just looked at, but clearly Simmons was consistently good in comparison with Torre’s occasional greatness. This puts us back into sports bar mode where we have a lengthy debate over whether you would rather have consistent solid production or occasional great production. I suppose if you could predict the great production or couple it with other great production that would be preferable, but life is never that predictable.

When taking a look at the index, both are considerably better than Gabby Hartnett, so your debate comes down to how exclusive you want to make the Hall of Fame. There are those that look at it as a museum and therefore want to include as much as the game’s history as possible. Others want to honor only the very best of the best. I’m sure it doesn’t help when you consider that they generally played at the same time as Johnny Bench, Gary Carter, and Carlton Fisk. There are those that start to feel like an era may be over-represented and that is very prescient when you add in the likes of Thurman Munson and Bill Freehan (who we mentioned in the introduction).

We can blame part of that on expansion. When you move from 16 to 24 (or even 28) teams then you multiply the possibility of having Hall of Fame worthy players at any position. We also can look at the resurgence of the running game and the need for catchers to control that running game. Either way, there are reasons why there were more quality catchers in the era.

Again, it bears repeating, but this does not mean that Torre and Simmons were better catchers than the other three. It means that their fitness for the Hall of Fame is just as good if not better than the guys already in. Granted, there are reasons to prefer not to put either of them in the Hall of Fame. You could say Torre didn’t spend enough time behind the plate or that Simmons was a subpar defensive catcher. You could certainly claim that Simmons was always good, but never great. The index was never designed to tell people who to vote for. It is a tool that we can use to compare players out of the Hall of Fame with those in the Hall of Fame. If you want to be consistent then you take the two guys and put them in.

One of the things you learn in a basic statistics class is the difference between the kinds of data you can get. While this is rudimentary, it is easy to get them confused when you are looking at fairly complex data. No one really confuses nominal data. These usually take the form of yes or no and tend to be binary in nature. The confusion usually comes when we look at the difference between ordinal data and interval data. This happens when we do something like this. When data isn’t scaled in an identical (or even similar) then the combination becomes ordinal because we simply cannot trust the combination. This is even if each individual source was interval in nature.

Ordinal data is what we use when we want to simply rank one player over another. In our case, we are ranking the ten catchers in the Hall of Fame in terms of fielding. The problem is when we start looking at multiple sources we start looking at wins in some cases and runs in other cases. We are then looking at each one in isolation and standing them next to another that we look at in isolation. When we start combining these we start to get into some serious trouble. This is especially true if we attempt to make any conclusions about the actual value of a player. The differences in value are what we would call interval data. Interval data is the holy grail of data because it not only says who is more valuable than another, but by how much.

When we look at players from different eras and compare their fielding numbers we need to eliminate two words from our vocabulary: greatest and best. Those are conversations best left for the sports bar. We also get into trouble when we start using terms like difficulty and importance. When criticizing fielders, some passionate fans will tend to get defensive and say something like, “well, how much baseball do you play?” or “I’d love to see you go out there and catch.” I’ll admit right now. I never played catcher. When I was a kid I played in the outfield so I am saying nothing about the importance or difficulty of the position. At least I’m not saying it directly.

That being said, the data does say something about the relative importance of the individual skills a catcher must possess. Rating catchers is always more difficult than any other position because they must call the game, block pitches in the dirt, and control the running game of the other team. In the current game we also include pitch framing in that equation. As strategy has changed, the relative importance of all of these skills fluctuates. For instances, controlling the running game was huge throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. So, catchers from that period could accrue more value if they were excellent at that particular facet of the game. Conversely, during the live ball era (1920s – early 1940s) hardly anyone stole bases. So, one could be brilliant or not and you wouldn’t see a range of value there.

So, I would have a hard time saying that a Johnny Bench or Gary Carter was a greater fielder than a Gabby Hartnett based on the numbers. Greatness implies that the skills were superior and while that may be true, it is not true based on the numbers. Players are always better understood when they are compared with their own generation. We know more about Hartnett when we compare him with Mickey Cochrane and Bill Dickey then when we compare him with the catchers from the 1970s. Those that saw both could weigh in, but that would be a more qualitative analysis. This becomes increasingly problematic when we include new analysis like pitch framing. The modern catchers become much more understood when we include that, but we can’t include it for the earlier catchers. While we have play by play data going back to the beginning of the century, that play by play data won’t tell us if an individual pitch should have been called a strike or a ball if the catcher were better at framing it.

You undoubtedly did not open this up to hear my caveats about fielding, but it represents the very best reason why I am not comfortable naming a best catcher of all-time. At least, I’m not using the data here to define it. Give me a beer and a good game on television and I’ll throw down on any player, but I’m leaving the charts and graphs at home. We will split the fielding data into two categories. First, we will look at the major career data for our three sources. Keep in mind, since some use wins while other uses runs we will not combine them. Our WAR and WS from the previous article has already embedded that in their totals. Here, we are distilling out the numbers to get a sense as to who was the most valuable fielder of all-time.

Career Fielding 

The above represents my best attempt to normalize the data. The win shares we simply divided by five to make it roughly equal to defensive WAR from baseball-reference. Unfortunately, I struggled to normalize the total zone runs from Fangraphs because it would change the rankings. Typically, we would add ten runs per season to the totals because that would convert from a comparison against the average to a comparison with the replacement level player. In the end, the desire to present the data as those sites/sources wanted ended up winning out.

However, this is where our discussion of ordinal versus interval data comes in. The above numbers still don’t make a whole lot of sense when you put them together because all three sources have considerably different opinions of how much value individual events (or skills) have. Those change between eras as they change between platforms. However, if we show the same table and replace the win totals with their simple rankings in those systems we see something quite remarkable

Fielding Rankings 

I would surmise that we are actually seeing more variance here than at any other position. Different sources treat each individual skill a catcher must possess differently and with the different weights can come wildly different values. Still, only two players are more than two places apart across the board. When win shares is dropped that moves to zero. Four of the players are exactly the same including the most valuable and least valuable.

That being said, this is one of the areas where we have to be careful. Notice how Carlton Fisk drops when compared to the average as opposed to replacement level. He caught for over 20 years, so he managed to accumulate a lot of value. That’s not the same thing as being the greatest or the best, but it is important to note. This is especially true when we start looking at things like Gold Gloves, Win Share awards, and total zone awards. Lacking in those awards does not mean you lack value. It just means you were never the best in any one particular season.

Moreover, this distinction can be seen more at the bottom of the scale than the top. Mike Piazza was universally regarded as a poor defensive catcher (although he rated highly in pitch framing), but depending on the source he still had value when you compared him to the replacement level catcher. This is where we include the remarks of our critics when they say, “I’d like to see you go out there and do it.” Why yes, we aren’t saying any of these guys were a complete buffoon. It’s all comparative in nature and unfortunately you are stacking each up against the very best to play the position. Some aren’t going to come out looking good in every single category.

All that being said, we will finish our journey by looking at individual season honors. We do have some limitations here. Total Zone awards aren’t an official honor, but we only have data going back to 1953. The Gold Glove awards were awarded in both leagues for the first time in 1958. So, some of our players will not have any chance to win anything and others only a limited opportunity. However, win shares awards were added back through all of our players careers. When all things are considered, these are fairly meaningless, but I know many of you will be interested, so we close with this table.

Win shares is the great equalizer thanks to James’ hard work in breaking down the data for us season by season. When we see how evenly distributed the awards go we can see that greatness is really more evenly distributed than the basic numbers would indicate. It definitely is more evenly distributed than the Gold Gloves themselves. However, we return to our original caveat: greatness and value are two entirely different things. Just because Carlton Fisk won no awards doesn’t mean he has zero value. It’s just that he had the misfortune of catching at the same time as Johnny Bench, Gary Carter, Bob Boone, Jim Sundberg, and Ivan Rodriguez at the end of his career.

The Hall of Fame Index

Most of the same topics we are covering on this site were covered here originally back in 2011. However, I also offered commentary on players elected by the Veterans Committee and also gave a complete list of who should be in and who should be out. I’d honestly recommend both. Please go with the paperback option. Tables and graphs don’t translate well to e-books.

Combating Ignorance: Inside and Outside the Classroom

These are a collection of stories from my first ten years in the classroom. The names, dates, and places have all been changed to protect the innocent, but the stories or all true. They are weaved in a way that will explain the world of education to those that live outside of it. Of course, fellow teachers know how true and believable all of the stories really are.

The State of Baseball Management

This is an earlier book from my writing career where I looked at the decision making of the best five teams and worst five teams between 1993 and 2003. The idea is that money plays a role in team success, but the biggest factor in success and failure are the quality of decisions teams make in trades and free agent signings.

Checks and Imbalances

This was my first book back in 2002. This book looked at the economics of the sport and the history of competitive balance (or not) from history. In the end, I made some suggestions on how the sport could gain more competitive balance.

The Fantasty Fix

I currently write for the Fantasy Fix where I share my thoughts on fantasy baseball. I am currently working on my rankings for players in advance of the 2018 season, but I also comment on trades and signings and how they affect the typical fantasy baseball player.