BOOG and the Hall of Fame, Part 2: Infielders

Having presented the concept of BOOG Score in my previous article, we can now use it to discuss Hall of Fame candidacies for specific players. If you don’t have time to review the introductory piece, the CliffsNotes version is this: BOOG Score is an accumulating stat measuring overall player value, intended for comparisons between elite players. It’s a player’s career Wins Above Average (WAA) total, but with all negative seasons zeroed out and ignored. This rewards longevity, but only for players who continue to contribute at an above-average level; for example, George Brett’s final three seasons, when he was a below-average hitter as a full time DH, add nothing to his career total.

The rest of this article will be devoted to reviewing the state of the Hall of Fame as it relates to BOOG Scores, broken down by primary position. Each table that appears below will detail career BOOG totals for one position. I’m going to focus on infielders who have already had a chance to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot; outfielders, catchers, pitchers, and active or recently retired players will be discussed in future articles.

Readers who are familiar with Jay Jaffe’s work on the JAWS metric will understand the concept of the positional average — the average total for all currently inducted Hall of Famers at this position. Being above the positional average is often cited as a point in favor of a player’s election to Cooperstown. I’ve chosen to use median instead of mean, but the concept is the same. I’ll also list what I’m calling the marginal threshold, which can be thought of as a lower threshold of excellence that still conveys something meaningful about a player’s candidacy. To explain by way of illustration, using the shortstop position as an example: There are 25 shortstops currently enshrined in the Hall. That suggests that the 25th-best shortstop in major league history should be considered a reasonable candidate – not necessarily a strong candidate, but at least worthy of review. I define the marginal BOOG threshold at each position to be the Nth best BOOG score of any (retired) player who primarily played there (regardless of whether that Nth player is actually in the Hall), taking N as the current number of inductees. For the shortstop example, that 25th-best shortstop is Nomar Garciaparra with a BOOG score of 26.9. Along with Garciaparra, two other shortstops are outside the Hall with career totals at or above the marginal threshold, but below the Hall of Fame median of 37.9. For that reason, they probably still merit some discussion even if they are not slam dunk inductees.

In all the tables below, Hall of Fame inductees are highlighted in blue; the Hall of Fame median BOOG score at that position is highlighted in yellow; and the Hall of Fame marginal BOOG score is highlighted in red. I’ve also listed each player’s “BOOG Stats” – these are their career totals in key statistical categories when you count only their >0 WAA seasons. Returning to George Brett: Instead of his actual career totals of 3,154 hits and 317 home runs, I list 2,444 hits and 267 home runs because those “compiling” seasons have been excised. On the other hand, that has the effect of boosting his already impressive 132 career wRC+ up to 144! Instead of looking at Brett’s full-career rate stats that say he was 15 percentage points worse than Mike Schmidt as a batter, “BOOG Stats” tell you that when comparing their primes, they were both almost identically dominant at the plate (Brett 144 “prime” wRC+ vs. Schmidt “prime” 148 wRC+). This adjustment is for illustrative purposes only, to demonstrate what subset of a player’s career actually counts toward his BOOG accumulation. Truly elite players will have nearly their entire career totals listed; players who were not always above-average performers will see their numbers pushed down more.

One final introductory note, with an apology: A small number of Negro League Hall of Famers have been excluded from the calculation of positional medians. I didn’t want to artificially lower the thresholds by counting the BOOG score of players for whom much of their playing career is insufficiently documented. To be clear, this is a data coverage problem, not a reflection on the quality of the Negro League players themselves. In a way, it would be more disrespectful to include their totals in the median calculation, because that would suggest that white AL/NL players who had the advantage of more complete data coverage have a lower bar to clear to be Hall of Fame worthy. Regardless of the positional median calculation, all Hall of Fame inductees (who were inducted as players) are listed in the below tables.

Three of the six players outside the Hall of Fame who are above the marginal threshold have PED allegations, and at least two of those (McGwire and Palmeiro) would almost certainly be inducted otherwise. John Olerud was on a Hall of Fame trajectory but petered out a little early, and Norm Cash got started a little late.

That leaves Keith Hernandez, whose unusual player profile as a first baseman seems to have confounded voters. His low home run total is offset somewhat by his very respectable 426 career doubles, but not enough to bring his slugging percentage up to what you would expect for a hard-hitting first baseman. However, what really stands out is his defense – he has the highest total Fielding Runs Above Average for any pure first baseman in the integration era. This is simply not a skill that Hall of Fame voters have historically attached much importance to, if any – but it’s a significant part of Hernandez’s case. In the view of BOOG, it’s enough to nudge him barely over the Hall of Fame median and make him a strong candidate for future Eras Committee consideration.

Unfortunately, with his BBWAA vote share peaking at just 10.8%, it hasn’t seemed that the Hall has attached any urgency to reconsider his candidacy. Despite being eligible to appear on six ballots post-BBWAA consideration, he hasn’t been voted on since he dropped off the writers’ ballot in 2004. Meanwhile, five other players from his era (Jack Morris, Alan Trammell, Ted Simmons, Fred McGriff, and Jeff Kent) have been elected via that method. The current Eras Committee structure may be disadvantaging him somewhat, as his career straddles the 1979-1980 dividing line between the purview of the Classic Baseball and the Contemporary Baseball committees; he won his MVP award in 1979, but more of his career (and more of his BOOG accumulation) occurred in the 1980s. Under the current Eras Committee format, he will next be eligible for consideration for the balloting class of 2029.

What more can be said about Bobby Grich? Sabermetric enthusiasts have been pounding the table for his induction for decades. He had Joe Morgan’s power and Lou Whitaker’s defense. In both 1973 and 1974, he had the highest single-season WAA total among all AL position players; in both years the MVP award was given to the RBI leader instead (Reggie Jackson and Jeff Burroughs, respectively). Of the 14 players covered in detail by Jay Jaffe in The Cooperstown Casebook, Grich and Whitaker are the only two that have not yet been inducted. Grich arguably has a similar era problem as Hernandez, in that the 1980 cutoff for the Contemporary Baseball Era committee was smack dab in the middle of his career – although unlike Hernandez, I would lean toward considering him as part of the Classic Baseball Era (primary contributions made prior to 1980).

Whitaker, although very slightly below the JAWS median threshold for second basemen, is comfortably above the BOOG median – as is current BBWAA candidate Chase Utley, who took major strides forward in his third year of eligibility and seems headed for enshrinement. Perhaps Utley’s election will bode well for his compatriots who are on the outside looking in. If Utley can get elected with fewer than 2,000 hits and a .275 batting average, then surely Whitaker can make it with a .276 average and almost 2,500 hits, right?

Willie Randolph, with the same modest batting average and no power, is a tougher sell to the average voter. But his defense was even better than the other candidates mentioned, and he got on base even more often than the on-base machine Grich. His stolen base numbers also outshine the rest of the hopeful group, even if they are not elite by comparison to some of his contemporaries who are already in (Morgan, Roberto Alomar, Rod Carew, and Ryne Sandberg). Randolph was rarely an MVP-caliber player during his career, with only one season above 3.5 WAA – but he had 10 seasons of 2.0 WAA or higher. Forty-three integration-era Hall of Famers came up short of that tally, including Alomar, Ernie Banks, Derek Jeter, Ozzie Smith, Carew, and Ron Santo.

You may be surprised to see how much higher the Cooperstown cutoffs are for third base (47 median, 33 marginal) compared to first (35/27) or second (33/28). The least-represented group in the Hall apart from relievers, third base is a position that has changed somewhat dramatically over the course of baseball history in terms of expectations or prototypes. It transitioned from a fielding-forward position in the first 50 years of professional baseball to a hard-hitting position post-integration, and it remains a position where defensive skill is both extremely valuable and yet perhaps not sufficiently respected by Hall of Fame voters.

The clear casualty of that incredibly high bar is Graig Nettles. He’s below both the BOOG and JAWS medians at third base, but those aren’t the right measuring sticks to use at this position. He’s hampered by two major challenges. First, he debuted during one of the lowest batting average eras in baseball history, which makes his .248 career average look somewhat pedestrian. Second, Brooks Robinson kept winning all the AL Gold Gloves – deservedly, but that makes Nettles’ excellent defense seem less outstanding if you just look at the executive summary of his career. Both Nettles and Buddy Bell were elite fielding third basemen with valuable batting skills who were not properly appreciated in their time. By single-season Wins Above Average, Bell finished top five in the AL three times, including 1981, when he was within spitting distance of leader Rickey Henderson. (The MVP winner that season was Rollie Fingers.) However, Bell’s highest actual MVP vote placement was 10th. Nettles was even better; he led AL position players in WAA in both 1971 and 1976, but finished 28th and 16th in MVP voting, respectively. I imagine that a two-time MVP third baseman with elite defensive skills, almost 400 home runs, and two World Series rings would be an easy Hall of Fame inductee.

One of the challenges of highlighting other specific Cooperstown candidates at third base is that there is not much of a gap between any two adjacent names on the leaderboard. Apart from Nettles as the clear no. 1 contender, the next nine names on the list are all within 1.0 BOOG of their closest neighbor. Darrell Evans at 33.0 is right at the marginal threshold, but six other guys are all pretty close behind him. Nevertheless, the only way to start adjusting the third base median closer to other positions is to get a few of these guys in, and other than Nettles, BOOG doesn’t have a very strong opinion on which of them is most deserving of getting that started.

Ken Boyer is the only player in that cohort to have received significant voting support. He entered the BBWAA ballot at a time when the 5% rule to survive to the next year’s voting was not in place. Eventually that rule was instituted and his name was dropped, but he was one of 11 names re-added to the ballot in 1985 after the BBWAA petitioned for some overlooked candidates to be reconsidered. His vote share peaked at 25.5% in 1988, 16 years after his retirement. He has subsequently appeared on seven Veterans Committee ballots but has not been elected; of the seven players who have reached induction via the same ballots in that timeframe, four have lower career BOOG scores than him (Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva, Dave Parker, and Gil Hodges).

David Wright saw his support on the 2026 BBWAA ballot nearly double, although that only got him up to 14.8% of the vote. Bell, Evans, Sal Bando, Ron Cey, and Robin Ventura each fell off the writers’ ballot in their first year and have not been reconsidered since. If Boyer – with 11 All-Star appearances, a World Series ring, and an MVP – is having trouble making it in, the rest of this cohort is going to have a hard time. Certainly none of them, apart from Nettles, is a slam dunk by BOOG. But when compared to the inductees at other positions over the last 50 years (especially those who were elected by the various Eras/Veterans Committees), any of them would be perfectly reasonable selections and would do a lot to make third base a better-represented position in the Hall.

Shortstop is a position where the stars shine brightly, and good defense is (usually) respected. As such, there are not many glaring omissions from the ranks of Cooperstown here. The median BOOG threshold is a bit high, but at least in the integration era, there is a remarkable consistency of election for those who reach it, Alex Rodriguez notwithstanding, for obvious reasons. That makes this a fascinating position to analyze from the perspective of BOOG, as the “snubs” are players from long ago who have – to the best of our modern understanding – elite defensive statistics when compared to their peers. (Are you sensing a theme yet to the type of player who needs some extra support from BOOG or similar sabermetric value models?)

“Bad Bill” Dahlen has been covered extensively and excellently by Jay Jaffe both on FanGraphs and elsewhere, as his candidacy has been considered by four Eras Committee ballots in the past 20 years. Other than active and recently retired players who have not yet had their candidacies considered by Cooperstown, Dahlen’s 46.6 BOOG score ranks fourth among non-inductees – behind only Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and A-Rod. Compared to the peers of his era, Dahlen hit like Dan Uggla and fielded like Cal Ripken Jr. His 42-game hit streak in 1894 still ranks as the fourth longest in major league history. SABR’s 19th Century Committee named him its 2012 Overlooked Baseball Legend.

Jack Glasscock has also been named a 19th Century Overlooked Baseball Legend, but he’s so overlooked that even SABR didn’t get around to mentioning him until 2016. Similar to Dahlen, Glasscock was a good-hitting elite fielder. He didn’t manage to reach Dahlen’s mark for significant counting stat totals, however, in part because of shorter seasons at the time of his peak (~130 games instead of ~150). Among 19th century shortstops, Glasscock ranks second in fielding runs behind only Germany Smith, whose wRC+ is 33 points lower.

Art Fletcher is a borderline candidate who probably doesn’t need to be in, but his rank on the BOOG list helps reinforce the archetype of the snubbed Hall of Fame shortstop candidate. His wRC+ is even lower than Dahlen’s and Glasscock’s (100 lifetime, 104 in his BOOG-accumulating seasons), his career was shorter, and his defense was excellent, albeit a step behind the two defensive titans of his era, Hall of Famers Joe Tinker (deserved) and Rabbit Maranville (undeserved).

One final note: I’ve elected to include John Ward here rather than as a pitcher, but the listed BOOG total does include his value added in both roles combined. His career split in terms of BOOG score is about 60/40 in favor of his time as a position player, so this is where he shows up. A couple of outfielders with notable pitching careers will be listed according to this style in my next article, as well.

Hopefully these tables have helped you construct some mental benchmarks for what a BOOG score translates to in terms of career accomplishments. As previously shared in my introduction post, this site will let you query the BOOG data for any player in major league history with at least 10.0 career BOOG (5.0 minimum for relievers), as well as any active player who is above zero through the end of the 2025 season (minimum two seasons of major league playing time, as the graphs don’t really work without at least two data points). The only significant change in BOOG calculation since publication of my prior article has been changing the pitcher BOOG total to be based on a 50/50 blend of regular FanGraphs’ FIP-based WAR and Baseball Reference’s RA9-WAR. That modification significantly improved the accuracy of my regression model for estimating Cooperstown induction chances, which will be discussed in more detail when we examine active players in the future.