2019-20 HOF talk

Just saw that Dwight Evans will be up in December for the Hall as part of the Modern Baseball Era committee. Hopefully, it is his time to get in.

With somewhat of a watering down of the HOF recently, I'd go with Simmons & Whitaker as definites, Evans & John as bubbles.

Marvin Miller should also be there.

Here are the players ranked by my Hall Worthiness metric, without an adjustment for era.

HW is WAR of 5 best seasons plus 1/2 of career WAR. That combination was derived empirically and does the best possible job of discriminating who's in and who's out from the pre-expansion era. I later discovered that it also does a great job separating guys who got in on the first ballot versus those who waited.


66.7 Buddy Bell
66.3 Graig Nettles
65.7 Dwight Evans, BOS/BAL RF, 1972-1991
65.6 Ted Simmons, STL/MIL/ATL C, 1968-1988

62.9 Keith Hernandez
57.2 Tommy John, NYY/CHW/LAD/CAL/CLE/OAK SP, 1963-1989
55.2 Dale Murphy, ATL/PHI/COL OF, 1976-1993
52.4 Dave Parker, PIT/CIN/OAK/MIL/CAL/TOR RF, 1973-1991
50.0 Don Mattingly, NYY 1B, 1982-1995
41.0 Steve Garvey, LAD/SDP 1B, 1969-1987

The list mostly tells you how inept baseball writers of old were at identifying players worthy of recognition. Playing 3B was almost a disqualification (Dick Allen, from the previous era, is 66.8). And compiling a high hit total was considered far more important than getting on base, hitting for power, or fielding your position well.

Dwight Evans had 14 3.0+ bWAR seasons, so the consistency qualification is there easily. He's a player whose quality wasn't recognized in his time and that's used as a justification to underrate him now. "He only made three All-Star teams" is true, sure - but he also had three 5.0+ bWAR seasons where he wasn't named an All-Star!.

He was also my favorite player as a kid so I am tremendously biased here. I am right, but also tremendously biased.

That was a big part of it, along with the fact that nobody really cared about OBP yet. He had a .398 OBP at the break in '82, but that wasn't really on people's radar. (Also, there was just no good reason for him not to be an All-Star in '84).

The other thing that sorta hurts Evans is that his defense was great in the '70's and his bat in the '80's, but he really just had those couple years in the 1981-82 sweet spot where it all came together at the same time. The lack of interest in OBP probably hurt him as he tried to extend his career as well. In his last two seasons (the "bad" on in 1990 and the weird Orioles season in '91) he hit .283/.415/.398 against left-handed pitching. And he didn't retire by choice - he was released in Spring Training 1992 and never got signed.

He also had some sciatica problems near the end, and could not really make the transition to 1b in part because, ironically, he couldn't throw the ball like an infielder.

This is a great story by Gammons, subscription only, about the 101 degree day in July of 1980 that Evans first worked with Hriniak, with Yaz watching, and Yaz could tell he had turned a corner.  I had forgotten that beanings had made him a little tentative; the story says that Hriniak's teaching gave him a reassuring sense of balance.

"During the 1980s, [led mlb] in extra-base hits and ranked second to Rickey Henderson in times on base, with 2,447... led the American League in homers (256) ... second in RBI (900), total bases (2,657), and walks (919)."  Competitors were Murray, Yount, Henderson, HOF.

"from 1972-1991, he was first in the AL in walks, second in homers, third in RBI, second in runs scored, third in doubles."

theathletic.com/1355829/2019/11/06/gammons-the-hall-of-fame-case-for-dwight-evans/