Normally, I wouldn’t even address a pitcher’s won/loss record.  They aren’t useless, they aren’t irrelevant, but they are something that should be overlooked when evaluating a player’s performance.  Front offices don’t look at a pitcher’s wins and losses, so why should we?  Exactly.  They should be nothing more than a fun little stat to add to all the other fun little stats that have use, but are closer to useless than practical.

But 305 wins for a pitcher, well that’s extraordinary.  But an extraordinary number doesn’t necessarily translate into extraordinary performance.

The 305 wins (and 203 losses) HAS to be looked at, and addressed.  Because in 2014 when Tom Glavine is considered for induction into baseball’s most prestigious sanctuary, those 305 wins are going to be discussed, frequently.  Very frequently.  Nearly every old-school writer, former player and most fans of Glavine’s era, are going to be backing him up, using that number: The number 305.

Just to delve into wins and losses for a second if you happen to have come across this article in an old-school mindset:

A pitcher controls less than half of the outcome of a baseball game.  The offense controls 50 percent.  The fielders control some.  And we can add in that a manager affects some of the game too, we just don’t know how much.  So we will just use a manager’s impact, whatever it may be, and include that in the production of the offense, pitching and defense.

So you can see there why wins and losses should not be looked at when determining the quality of a pitcher.

So what is it that makes a Hall of Famer?  Greatness.  Yes, simply put, greatness makes a Hall of Fame player.  They do great things on a baseball field, for a long enough period of time, to allow us as critics to say, “Wow, that guy was a great player.”  A player can actually go through his career without being exceptional at any one aspect of his game, yet still be an exceptional player, a Hall of Fame player, a great player.

Yet, when it comes to pitchers, the guy kinda has to be great at pitching.  Because pitcher fielding is nearly useless.  And a pitcher’s bat is normally about the equivalent of Jeff Francouer’s swings against sliders out of the strike zone.

Bad.

Tom Glavine was a very good pitcher.  He accumulated 63 fWAR in his career, 74 bWAR, 118 ERA+, 3.54 base ERA.  Very, very good pitcher.  His WAR totals are right in that threshold where Hall of Famers “on the brink” usually sit.  Players that could be looking in, or looking out, based on a little subjectivity and bias from the writers who induct these guys.

But Tom Glavine had a 3.95 FIP.  And if you believe in FIP; that’s not great.  He pitched in the National League, so that FIP includes the pitchers he faced — which are easier to strike out, less likely to walk, and extremely unlikely to go deep.

Two times in Glavine’s career, he struck out more than seven batters per nine innings.  He kept his walks under control, walking 3 per nine throughout his career.  But that’s not “exceptional.”  Neither that nor his strikeouts per nine innings are.

Glavine won two Cy Youngs, and finished in the top-five in voting six! times.  Remarkable, yet equated to the subjective.  I’m not saying he didn’t deserve those awards, I’m just saying that a lot of noise goes into the process of who receives the award.

Dwight Evans was a very good baseball player.  One of the better defenders at the corner and well above average offensively.

Orel Hershiser racked up 204 wins in his career and once went 59 consecutive innings without allowing a run.

As for Tom Glavine, he pitched very well, for a long, long time, on one of the greatest runs by an organization that any sport has ever seen.  He made it to the postseason several times because of the talent of he and his supporting cast.  And during his time in October, he performed incredibly well.  To the tune of a 3.30 ERA in 218 innings.  And that probably meant his opponents were better than average offenses than he faced in the regular season, given that they were good enough to qualify for postseason play.

But listen to some of the deserving  names for the potential 2014 Hall of Fame ballot:

Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza, Tim Raines, Curt Schilling, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Edgar Martinez, Alan Trammell, McGwire, Frank Thomas, Mike Mussina and Jeff Kent.

Then you have a few outsiders that aren’t quite in the same caliber: Sammy Sosa, Jack Morris, Rafael Palmeiro, etc.

There are so many more deserving players than Glavine in next year’s class.  But there are clouds overhead with many of them.  And Glavine doesn’t have a cloud following him around wherever he goes.

I expect Glavine to get voted in:  305 wins.  No storm-cloud.  Played for a great, winning organization.  Seemed to be well-liked by anyone that came across him.  Or at least I know of no incidents surrounding him.

This will be why Tom Glavine gets into the Hall of Fame.  Because of very good pitching, along with very well-known variables by anyone that knows anything about Tom Glavine.

But I don’t think he should be inducted.  He was never an exceptional pitcher.  It wouldn’t be an egregious decision by any means.  And he wouldn’t be the worst player in the Hall of Fame

But the most exceptional thing about Tom Glavine’s career was that he, or anyone for that matter, could pitch that well, for that long.

I was sitting on a park bench reading Veeck as in Wreck, the memoir of legendary ballclub owner Bill Veeck, when I came across this passage:

Ken Keltner, our third baseman and one-time power hitter, had a miserable season in 1946. There seemed little doubt that he was on the downgrade. Still, when I signed him for the next year, I gave him the same amount of money and told him that if he had what I considered a good year I’d give him a bonus of $5,000.

The next year, Kenny hit the ball better than anybody on our club, with less luck than anybody in the league. If you walked into the park late and saw somebody making a sensational leaping, diving backhanded catch, you could bet that Keltner had hit the ball.

On the last day of the season, he was hitting under .260 and had driven in around 75 runs. I called down to the locker room, got him on the phone, and said, “Hey, where have you been? Weren’t you supposed to come up and see me at the end of the season?”

“I didn’t win anything,” he said. “I’m having a lousy season.”

I suggested that he wander up anyway. As he came through the door I said, “I’ve got $5,000 for you.”

And he said, “I didn’t earn it, Bill.” And he started to weep.

“You hit the ball better than anybody else on this club,” I told him. “It wasn’t your fault they kept catching it.”

As a loyal FanGraphs reader, I immediately thought: BABIP! For those who need a quick reminder, batting average on balls in play (BABIP) measures just that: batting average on balls hit somewhere the defense can get to them. It’s expected that BABIP will generally hover around .300, modified by such factors as the enemy defense (this averages out over a season), whether the balls you hit go over outfield fences, and, most of all, luck.

Now, Veeck’s comment that Keltner “hit the ball better than anybody else” was probably a kindness rather than a hypothesis. But his observation that “they kept catching it” checks out. I looked at the leaderboard for the BABIPs of every qualifying hitter in 1947. Sure enough, Ken Keltner’s down near the bottom, ranking 68th of 86 with a BABIP of .264. The median that year was almost thirty points higher: .292.

Ken Keltner had lousy luck, but was still an average hitter (102 wRC+). And the next year was the best of his career (7.9 WAR), so it looks like Bill Veeck saw the Keltner case exactly right. Only there’s a twist. One of Veeck’s 1947 Indians had it even worse. Down there at 74th is the .256 BABIP of Joe Gordon. Joe Gordon slugged 27 doubles, 6 triples, and 29 home runs, so things turned out well for him, but if Veeck’s latecomer had bet that “a sensational leaping, diving backhanded catch” was on a ball hit by Ken Keltner, you’d want to bet against him. Joe Gordon’s luck was worse; he compensated by putting more balls in the outfield bleachers.

There’s weirder to come. Dead last, 86th of 86, is Roy Cullenbine, Tigers first baseman, who paired a grotesque .206 BABIP and .224 average (83rd of 86) with the second-highest walk rate in baseball. His 22.6% walk rate was topped only by Triple Crown winner Ted Williams. (By the way, in the previous year, Williams had been introduced to the defensive shift, as pioneered by, yes, Bill Veeck’s Indians.)

No player in 2012 came close to matching Cullenbine’s bizarre season. The lowest BABIP of any qualifying hitter in 2012 was .242 (Justin Smoak); of all hitters with BABIPs below .256 (fifty points higher than Roy Cullenbine’s), none came within fifty points of Cullenbine’s .401 OBP. The best analogy is this: Cullenbine hit for average like Dan Uggla, had Justin Smoak’s luck, and still drew walks at the rate of Barry Bonds.

Roy Cullenbine was only 33 in 1947, and in past years his offensive numbers were impressive. Had he been on Bill Veeck’s Indians instead of playing for the Tigers, his unlucky 1947 might have ended as Ken Keltner’s did,with a $5,000 bonus. The Tigers, not valuing Cullenbine’s patience, released him, and he never played a major-league game again.

There’s another interesting name among the ten unluckiest batters of 1947. Coming in at sixth-worst, with a BABIP of .247, is a patient slugger who got on base even more than Cullenbine did, with four more walks than he had hits. He too retired after the season. His name was Hank Greenberg, and that winter he accepted a job in a major-league front office, where he was groomed to be the team’s next general manager. The team was the Cleveland Indians. His new boss was Bill Veeck.

One of the hallmarks of the annual Hall of Fame debates is the comparison to players already enshrined. It can be a very good exercise in determining the merits of a particular player, especially because after so many years, there are now a lot of players in the Hall of Fame. There are plenty of players at every single position. There are pitchers. There are power hitters, average hitters. There are great fielders. One area where the present Hall of Fame lacks in providing a good comparison is the Closer situation.

As Wendy Thurm’s post indicated in evaluating Lee Smith’s candidacy*, it is difficult to judge because the only full-time relief pitchers in the Hall of Fame are Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage and Bruce Sutter. Hoyt Wilhem is not an apt comparison, having retired in 1972 with 500 more innings pitched than even Rollie Fingers. Wendy reached the conclusion that Smith was better than Sutter, not as good as Fingers and Gossage, and put Smith just on the other side of the Hall of Fame. It feels like the right call, but if Sutter is in the Hall what exactly is the standard for relief pitchers?

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Jose Bautista is in the midst of a historic year. Jose Bautista will in all likelihood not make it into the Hall of Fame.

Much has already been said about the unique career arc of Joey Bats, with a particular focus on how ridiculous the number’s he’s putting up this season really are. Through Sunday the Blue Jays had played in 85 games. Jose Bautista has accumulated 5.8 fWAR over that time. Extrapolating that pace (and also taking into account a proportional number of missed games the rest of the way) over the course of the year would give Bautista about 11.1 fWAR.

That is a really large WAR number. In the history of baseball only 37 position players have recorded a season of 11.1 fWAR. Albert Pujols has never amassed such WAR in a single season; Hank Aaron never came close to that.

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Recently, David Appelman introduced all of us to the Automated WAR grids. When I clicked into the WAR grids section, the top-25 all-time leaders in recorded MLB history was illustrated as the sample grid. I took some time to let the awe set in, admiring the absolute dominance of the true legends of the game who seem to transcend even the Hall of Fame.

One of the first things I noticed was that every one of them at least matched 100 career WAR. I got to thinking about which players we watch today that we may someday see on this elite 100+ WAR list. There were 19 players active in 2010 that have accumulated 50 career WAR or better. At the top we already see ARod at 120, the only current player who we know for certain fits into that super-elite status. After ARod there is Pujols, who has racked up 81 WAR to date and will likely only need 3 more seasons to join the club. The rest of the players on the list are all guys who are at least in their late 30s and many of them are on the cusp of retirement and/or are in dramatic decline. Realistically, there were only two other players who I thought may have an outside shot at 100 WAR: Jeter and Ichiro.

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This was originally posted on WahooBlues.com

When the Baseball Writers Association of America announced Wednesday that Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven had been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, two worthy inductees who had waited too long were granted entrance to Cooperstown. But to judge the voting process solely by the selections of two worthy candidates would be to ignore the massive problems with the way the BBWAA does business.

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If some of you have been active in following your Hall of Fame voters, you probably read this post on Jon Heyman discussing his ballot. He spent the majority of this piece stating why he didn’t vote for Bert Blyleven, and then he explained why he voted for Jack Morris instead. I promise this is not intended to be a “Vote Blyleven, not Morris!” post, because I’m more interested in something else. Heyman claims that Morris had a bigger impact in his games than Blyleven. Well then, what happens if I never experienced this impact?

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Note: Article was originally submitted to Bleacher Report on March 22nd, 2010, before the beginning of the 2010 season. For a link to the piece, visit Joe Regan’s bleacher report article.

As anyone who has read examples of my past writing can attest, I tend to focus a lot of my historical analysis pieces on the Hall of Fame. Today, I will divert myself from that path a little bit to argue my Hall of Fame case for a great in our generation whose contributions have been highly underrated: Scott Rolen.

A lot of words come to mind when discussing Rolen: grinder, a “veteran presence,” scrappy, gritty. I hear these a lot. One thing I do not hear a lot, for whatever reason, is “great.”

A quick look at his hitting numbers, for example, do not scream “great.” In 14 seasons, and 7,382 PAs, Rolen currently sports a line of .284/.370/.498, with 283 HR, good for a 124 OPS+/128 wRC+ . His HR total is good for 146th all time, behind players like Garret Anderson and Miguel Tejada, and he has never led his league in any statistical category, from the “old school” categories of BA, RBI, and hits, to the more analytical categories of OPS, OPS+, and others. Sounds like a classic “good, not great” player, correct?

I disagree completely. His 128 wRC+ puts him in the same category rate-wise (albeit sans-full decline stage) as Paul Molitor and Tony Perez. Molitor, if you recall correctly, spent a good chunk of his career as a DH, while Perez spent over two-thirds of his career at first base. Rolen, on the other hand, has played every inning of his career at third base.

Positional differences, obviously, is not enough. While fangraphs approximates an average third baseman to be worth 1.5 WAR per 600 PA more valuable than an average defensive first baseman with the same batting numbers, this does not address the fact that Perez had a longer career. Heck, Perez is not even the issue here. The issue is Rolen.

Everyone’s favorite new “quick reference” defensive statistic is UZR. Also, most everyone (myself included ) recognizes Adrian Beltre to be a fantastic defensive 3B. UZR reflects this, rating Beltre at +104.5 UZR at 3B since 2002, and a +13.9 UZR/150.

Scott Rolen? 102.1 UZR, 15.5 UZR/150.

I think most people would acknowledge that Rolen can flash leather. I doubt too many would think he is as good as Adrian Beltre.

Total Zone (which can be found on the player pages of Sean Smith’s website ) is not quite as gung-ho over Rolen as UZR, but at +93 since 2002 (and +141 overall), it’s close. The aforementioned Beltre is rated at +79 since 2002, and +96 overall. While I am not prepared to state that Rolen is a better defensive 3B than Beltre, any system that recognizes Beltre’s elite abilities, and then also states Rolen shares said abilities, is a perfectly credible system to me.

So what we are left with is a good hitting, great fielding player at a position that is in the middle of the defensive spectrum, and we are tasked to determine his place in history. Once again, Sean Smith provides a great point of reference for us, which his top 500 positional listing. At 94, we find our subject, Scott Rolen. Behind him are, well, a lot of all-time greats.

One could argue that Rolen still needs to post good seasons to make it to The Hall. Fine. According to Rolen’s fangraphs page , his CHONE projection rates him to be a +3.0 WAR player in 2010 (which is solidly above average). Even if Rolen breaks down rapidly (to the tune of +3.0, +2.0, and +1.0 seasons), that would push him up on Sean Smith’s rankings to Brooks Robinson status.

Maybe he did not peak well enough? Peaks are important, but I would argue that Rolen had many outstanding seasons. According to his baseballprojection.com page, Rolen did not post a season of sub-4.0 WAR baseball from 1997-2004. 4.0 is usually considered the level of an all-star player. At age 34 in 2009, he posted a +4.8 (according to Sean Smith’s system), yet another terrific season.

To further emphasize “excellence,” one can use a “junk statistic” called WAE, or “Wins Above Excellence,” calculated by subtracting four from every individual season’s WAR total, and defaulting to zero if the number is less than four.

Using Sean Smith’s WAR totals, Rolen’s WAE clocks in at 19.9. The aforementioned Brooks Robinson? A WAE of 15.3. Looks to me that Rolen passes the “excellence” test.

I have already written that the Hall of Fame should measure players more about the way they help their team win, rather than the hype they generate. Fact of the matter is, Rolen is a great baseball player, and I hope when his name hits the ballot (perhaps in 2019? 2020?) that the BBWAA evaluates his career correctly.