What’s Your bWAR Cutoff for Inner Circle and Small Hall HOF?

[RiceBondsMT2Yng]

What’s your approximate bWAR cutoff if we were to draw the line at inner circle position players for the HOF? What about if you’re a small hall guy (and you presumably let some more players in)?

We all know WAR isn’t perfect but it’s a decent list/ranking of who the best players in history were:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/l...t_career.shtml

[coachnip13]

Any list that doesn't have Zack Wheat in the top 100 is worthless in my opinion.

[pewe]

Originally Posted by coachnip13

Any list that doesn't have Zack Wheat in the top 100 is worthless in my opinion.

Congrats… you made me figure out who that is

What makes you so specifically call him out like this??? His super low k%?


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[coachnip13]

Originally Posted by pewe

Congrats… you made me figure out who that is

What makes you so specifically call him out like this??? His super low k%?


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LOL....I was scrolling through the list and saw that name and thought it sounded cool.

[pewe]

Originally Posted by coachnip13

LOL....I was scrolling through the list and saw that name and thought it sounded cool.

Haha! I’m going to have to figure out how to integrate him into causal BO conversation


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[NYBBFAN]

70 bWAR

[Silent George]

I have a spreadsheet I run on all fWAR numbers I can look up by percentiles. There’s a tad over 200 regular players in the hall. The 90% is a tad over 100 WAR. That’s where you’d find inner circle to me - the top 10%. Mays. Ruth. Mantle. And believe it or not...Bert Blyleven.

[Silent George]

Originally Posted by coachnip13

LOL....I was scrolling through the list and saw that name and thought it sounded cool.

Zack Wheat played in the dead ball era, refused to choke up, and was criticized for rarely bunting because he said he was more valuable swinging away.

He’s also the reason you’ve heard of Casey Stengel.

Respect the Renaissance man. That’s Mr. Wheat to you.

[kabrune2]

Originally Posted by Silent George

I have a spreadsheet I run on all fWAR numbers I can look up by percentiles. There’s a tad over 200 regular players in the hall. The 90% is a tad over 100 WAR. That’s where you’d find inner circle to me - the top 10%. Mays. Ruth. Mantle. And believe it or not...Bert Blyleven.

Blyleven is seriously underrated, he’s the 2nd most underrated player imho… Lou Whitaker is my #1 underrated player.
- Blyleven tidbits - 17x 200+ IP, 3701 K’s, career whip 1.198, career era 3.31… only 2 All-Star appearances, no Cy Young, only led his league in K’s once (again, he had 3701 k’s), had 275 IP 8x but only led his league once. Welcome to playing in the same era as Nolan Ryan. Blyleven has a lot of Tim Raines in the era of Rickey vibe going for him. Great player overshadowed by inner HoF player

[Silent George]

Originally Posted by kabrune2

Blyleven is seriously underrated, he’s the 2nd most underrated player imho… Lou Whitaker is my #1 underrated player.
- Blyleven tidbits - 17x 200+ IP, 3701 K’s, career whip 1.198, career era 3.31… only 2 All-Star appearances, no Cy Young, only led his league in K’s once (again, he had 3701 k’s), had 275 IP 8x but only led his league once. Welcome to playing in the same era as Nolan Ryan. Blyleven has a lot of Tim Raines in the era of Rickey vibe going for him. Great player overshadowed by inner HoF player

Blyleven also had the misfortune of being great early in his career and having the latter part - the part people that remembered - be less than amazing. Unless they are monster like a Pujols or a Griffey, players with a long slow fade tend to be seen as lesser than those that peaked later.

For current players see: McCutchen, Longoria

[ThoseBackPages]

eye test

[no10pin]

It would be really tough to say x amount of bWAR gets you into the small HOF or the inner circle.

Bobby Grich and Carlos Beltran have a higher bWAR that Tony Gwynn, Miguel Cabrera & Ernie Banks.

[MoreToppsPlease]

Although unfair, people will place a disproportionate emphasis upon oWAR.

[texmcpherson]

Originally Posted by ThoseBackPages

eye test

Seconded

[pewe]

Originally Posted by ThoseBackPages

eye test

Like 20/20 is ok, but 20/200 is not??? How about astigmatism?


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[pip]

The inner circle? Best of the best? 100.

Basic entrance requirement: 71. Tony Gwynn falls just short.

[Silent George]

Tony Gwynn, almost a hall of famer, is quite a take.

[pip]

Originally Posted by Silent George

Tony Gwynn, almost a hall of famer, is quite a take.

He'd have to get the nod from the Veterans committee. He lacks the power of many of the top-tier players.

[WizardofOz1982]

Originally Posted by Silent George

Blyleven also had the misfortune of being great early in his career and having the latter part - the part people that remembered - be less than amazing. Unless they are monster like a Pujols or a Griffey, players with a long slow fade tend to be seen as lesser than those that peaked later.

For current players see: McCutchen, Longoria

There's some truth to that though Blyleven had a 4 fWAR, two 5 fWAR, and a 7 fWAR season in the last 11 years of his career so almost half his seasons the second half of his career were excellent to elite. One of the 5 WAR seasons was his last full season in 1989.

I think it has a whole lot more to do with him playing on obscure teams than anything. Nobody cared about the Twins and Angels when he was putting up monster seasons and he was overshadowed by guys like Parker and Stargell on the Pirates.

Originally Posted by pip

Still one of the top 5 commercials ever made

[MiamiMarlinsFan]

Originally Posted by pip

The inner circle? Best of the best? 100.

Basic entrance requirement: 71. Tony Gwynn falls just short.

While Harold Baines in the HOF is a bit ridiculous. I’m glad I don’t have to live in a world where you decide who gets into the Hall.

[CardBoredom]

I realize I'm about to step into the woodchipper with this one, and I want to preface this by saying that the Hall of Fame wasn't designed for me. I'm an extremely small Hall guy. Based on the initial Hall of Fame class, I view it as a Mt. Rushmore of baseball greats and should be duly limited to a very select few.

The initial class featured a bWAR range of 130.8-165.6. My cutoff for the inner circle of best Hall of Famers is ~113 bWAR. This is about 20% below the lowest bWAR inaugural inductee and corresponds with a level of where I start to consider it a toss-up as to whether I would consider a player's performance to have been remotely close to the performance of the first HOFers. Under this standard Lou Gehrig and Lefty Grove become the standard that newcomers have to surpass.

[Silent George]

Harold Baines isn't nearly the worst.

Each year people scream about watering down the hall and making it not matter anymore.

If that was true, people would have ignored the hall many, many years ago.

Instead, we have a ton of vested interest (I know I do) and pretty much ignore that Ray Schalk has a plaque. In fact, we often now look at a lot of good players as legends. We hear Lefty Gomez and think what an amazing pitcher he must have been, because we associate his name with the Hall. We don't think of the Hall as less because it associates itself with Lefty Gomez, or High Pockets Kelly, etc.

So far as fWAR goes the 90th percentile - the cream of the crop - has 101.6 WAR or more.

The bottom 10% has 38.3 WAR or less. That's what's hilarious. I was in another thread talking about Bryce Harper's hall chances. He has 38.1 WAR (or close, my last update was 2 weeks ago). He's already better than 10% of the hall! What people THINK the hall is, is dramatically different than what the hall actually is. That's not a statement on Harper going to the hall, just that our personal standards tend to be WAY higher than actual historical standards.

Anyway, this is why I'm a big hall type of person. Baseball's hall is EXTREMELY limited when compared to the other sports. We battle and battle over people for years until finally inducting them, often right after they are dead. I think it's idiotic. Start letting in a lot more people, and let them have decades of their life to enjoy it, and stop pretending the Hall is some sort of exclusive trillionaire's club when it's actually a millionaire's club.

Sorry, I could talk about this non-stop. If any of you need a filibuster, I can do it on this topic.

[WizardofOz1982]

Originally Posted by CardBoredom

I realize I'm about to step into the woodchipper with this one, and I want to preface this by saying that the Hall of Fame wasn't designed for me. I'm an extremely small Hall guy. Based on the initial Hall of Fame class, I view it as a Mt. Rushmore of baseball greats and should be duly limited to a very select few.

The initial class featured a bWAR range of 130.8-165.6. My cutoff for the inner circle of best Hall of Famers is ~113 bWAR. This is about 20% below the lowest bWAR inaugural inductee and corresponds with a level of where I start to consider it a toss-up as to whether I would consider a player's performance to have been remotely close to the performance of the first HOFers. Under this standard Lou Gehrig and Lefty Grove become the standard that newcomers have to surpass.

I kind of get the rationale here but only 20-25 players in the 150+ year history of professional baseball are worthy of the Hall of Fame? That's just taking Small Hall to a whole new, admittedly self aware, level. There have been ~23,000 players in MLB history. Only 0.1% of them are Hall of Fame Worthy?

[Silent George]

Originally Posted by CardBoredom

I realize I'm about to step into the woodchipper with this one, and I want to preface this by saying that the Hall of Fame wasn't designed for me. I'm an extremely small Hall guy. Based on the initial Hall of Fame class, I view it as a Mt. Rushmore of baseball greats and should be duly limited to a very select few.

The initial class featured a bWAR range of 130.8-165.6. My cutoff for the inner circle of best Hall of Famers is ~113 bWAR. This is about 20% below the lowest bWAR inaugural inductee and corresponds with a level of where I start to consider it a toss-up as to whether I would consider a player's performance to have been remotely close to the performance of the first HOFers. Under this standard Lou Gehrig and Lefty Grove become the standard that newcomers have to surpass.

I really am ok with this line of thinking. Everyone has their own opinion, and there isn't a right one. I'm of the opposite end. I do wonder if the people that have these opinions really honestly believe them though.

For example, from a bref standpoint - you'd REALLY have 18 inductions in all of history? would you include Bonds, Clemens, and ARod, or are we down to 15? and if not, you'd have Aaron in 1980, and then not another one for 50+ years?

Mike Trout has 76, it's going to be extremely hard for him to make that threshold if he doesn't who knows who the next player will be. That's really the baseball history museum you want?

That just sounds incredibly boring to me, entire decades of baseball greats forgotten to the dustbins, and I don't believe it when I hear it. Like, under this scenario, I don't even people would care much about the Hall of Fame. We'd know what it is, but it would have so little impact on our life and the game, it would only be a discussion on the rare occasion someone actually gets close. Like going from Hall to Halley's Comet.

[jrosales]

Originally Posted by coachnip13

Any list that doesn't have Zack Wheat in the top 100 is worthless in my opinion.

It's a shame the Dodgers don't honor him at all, considering that he still holds many of their offensive records.