Rickey Henderson to the Hall of Fame
DMZ · January 12, 2009 at 1:51 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Awesome. He’s unlikely to wear an M’s cap. Still, I enjoyed seeing him play here, and beyond that as a fan of the game, this makes me happy.
And I don’t want to be a jerk about this, but the people who didn’t vote for Rickey Henderson should have their votes taken from them and given to people with demonstrable brain activity. There is no way not voting for Rickey can be justified.
Comments
82 Responses to “Rickey Henderson to the Hall of Fame”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Which of course is a dumb argument. If you screw up once you don’t keep screwing up just because you’ve done it before (or just because someone else screwed up before), and if you do then there is something wrong.
Actually, 22nd. Rickey Henderson ranks 6th. C’est la vie.
If Andre Dawson played for the Red Sox, he’d be a Hall of Famer-elect this year. No doubt about it.
Exactly. “Changing now would tacitly admit we were screwing up before, and we can’t have that!”
Better Negro League players weren’t allowed into the Majors before Jackie Robinson, so he doesn’t deserve to be there either. Carry on the injustice in the name of consistency (that hobgoblin of little minds).
Well, he has been retired from MLB. He hasn’t played for any of the MLB teams or their affiliated minor league teams since 2003, which means he’s not been affiliated with MLB(at least not in a playing capacity) for 5 years.
And that’s the only thing that matters(i.e. it matters not to the voters/writers that he played for the Newark Bears. Not one bit.) 😉
Dawson has significantly fewer PA to rack up those outs than the others on the list. The man was an out machine.
My favorite Rickey story: late in his career, somebody asked him when he was going to finally retire. His response was something along the lines of “my grandmother didn’t retire until she was 80. Who am I to retire at 40?” It’s something like that because I’m about 99% positive he said in the 3rd person but I do not want to incur the wrath of the people who write this blog so I am staying away from that. Anyway, that’s like reason #1 why I can’t help but like the guy. If he was white, we’d be talking about him the way people do about Jim Edmonds: someone who wears a hard hat to the park.
As for the 100% thing, it just doesn’t matter. You can’t get a couple hundred Americans to agree on anything, not even the HOF qualifications of the greatest leadoff hitter of all time. Actually, the primary reason I don’t like the 100% kvetching is because there is this sense that there is an “inner” Hall of Fame composed of the people who really, really deserve it, and the level to which they really deserve it is based on how close to 100% of the vote they got.
I’m sorry, but no. There is only one Hall of Fame, and there is no inner or outer circle. If you think there should be one, you should make one or get the Baseball HOF to create one. Me, I’ll celebrate Rickey and Frank Chance and Pete Rose and Pud Galvin equally because as far as the HOF is concerned, they *are* equals, if not in actual talent than in HOF status.
Also, I’m not a huge fan of stat-based analysis of the Hall of Fame. Yes, I get that Tinker to Evers to Chance are not 3 of the most talented players to play the game the way that Willie, Mickey, and the Duke are. But they are *famous*. Tinker to Evers to Chance and the gonfalon bubble is and ought to be part of the fabric of the game. The Hall of Fame ought to be as much about relaying the history of the game to successive generations as celebrating those with the mightiest accomplishments. Many times those things are not mutually exclusive, and I think that stats can be useful for inclusive arguments (for example, now that Jim Rice is in, I’d be hard-pressed to make a good argument for keeping Dewey Evans out). In and of themselves, they’re poor IMO for exclusive arguments.
For a couple of examples… Jackie Robinson, kind of like Andre Dawson, is slightly below the level of a likely HOFer by the HOF Monitor, and has below average stats for a HOFer. His rate stats are incredible and even without the fact that he integrated baseball there’d be a very good argument for him to be in the Hall, but he’d be there even if he was only 90% as good as he really was because, well, he integrated baseball. Ralph Kiner is in there not because he hit 369 homeruns (a number that seems laughably small in today’s era) but because he was the game’s dominant HR hitter in the period just after World War II.
For me, the primary thing I think of when evaluating whether a guy is a HOFer or not isn’t his stats but Bill James’ HOF criteria he made in The Politics of Glory. Look, I love stats as much as the next person (if the next person lives in their mom’s basement and created Enron; otherwise, I love stats a lot more than the next guy). The Hall of Fame, however, is about fame, not stats. Stats are helpful to the extent that they help to paint a picture of that fame; they’re no more useful (and, in some ways less useful) than the editorial opinions of a sportswriter who’s spent his career figuring out what’s big and what isn’t in the game when they do not.
Of course there is a cut-off; I wouldn’t put Mark Fydrich in there for basically one good year, and I doubt many would think that Alvin Davis deserves a nod for what he meant to Seattle baseball fans in the 1980s. Andre Dawson is so far above that cut-off that I just don’t see the point of using his biggest weakness (an inability to take walks) against him like that.
That’s fine and I respect your view of the HOF. But it isn’t my view and, I think, it isn’t the view of a lot of people. I think the HOF should be reserved for the very best. The fact that, historically, that has not always been the case doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t start adhering to that standard.
And I’ve never been a fan of the notion that “fame,” rather than performance, should be a primary factor. I don’t get the argument that Tommy John should be considered because he had a revolutionary surgery. Big deal.
At the end of the day, the HOF should be reserved for the best of the best. While I like Dawson, I just don’t think he was far enough above his peers (in fact, he was below average in OBP) to justify his inclusion.
Dawson’s 4 peak seasons seem to essentially be 1980-1983. Over that period, he was pretty consistently at about 30 wRAA, even despite his fairly mediocre OBP’s in those years, as long as you don’t dock him for the missed strike time in ’81.
He won a Gold Glove each of those years. Obviously, we know that Gold Glove voting can be severely flawed. He was a good hitter those years, so it could be that his offensive rep seeped over into the GG voting. I would kind of suspect that that would be mitigated somewhat by playing for Montreal. I also don’t know what his competition for GG was like back then. It doesn’t seem like too many people dispute that he was a good fielder. The position shift in ’84 makes me wonder a bit, but Tim Raines was supposed to be a good fielder, too.
Say that through his peak, Dawson was a +15 runs/150G fielder in CF. That’s really good, but not unbeatable, so presumably it could have made sense to put Raines in CF over Dawson. (You could even distribute it as +15, +20, +15, +10 to make a better case for slipping Raines in there.)
I don’t know what the positional adjustment would have been back then, but figure about +2.5 runs for CF. He played full-time in those seasons, so the replacement level bonus is probably about +20 runs.
Add it all together and if you assume that he was an elite fielder, Dawson figured to be about a 6.5-7.0-win player for four straight years during his peak. Or roughly what Grady Sizemore was worth last year.
Is that a Hall-worthy peak? I would lean towards yes. It’s not something that would make you an inner-circle, no-doubt Hall of Famer, but I think it gets you into the argument.
Obviously, there’s more to the argument than just his peak value, but I think that if you value his defense highly enough, he could be a legitimate Hall of Famer. It’s true that OBP is very, very important, but I think it’s within the realm of possibility that his defense made up for it. Clearly, Dawson wasn’t Ozzie Smith with the glove, but he wasn’t Jim Rice with the glove, either. Historical UZR would certainly be useful to settle this.
Hard to delve into the “thinking†of a collectivity like the Baseball Writers, but it’s often been the case that when one player overshadowed another at the same position with essentially the same skills, the secondary player gets far less consideration until the first one is safely in the Hall.
Didn’t it take Duke Snider a really long time to get in? I don’t know if his initial vote totals were anything like Raines’ ~20%, but he was certainly overshadowed by some of his overqualified contemporaries.
I definitely did not say that. Of course, the fact that John had TJ surgery and came back from it to be a pretty good pitcher afterwards is probably a plus in his favor. A plus that overrides the fact that he was really not a lot more than an above average pitcher for a long period of time? I’d say no, but then again I’d have to really look at his career to give a better answer.
Dawson, though, was the best CF in the National League in the early 1980s and one of the best players overall. He didn’t deserve the MVP in ’87 but he was up there, and he was up there 2 other years as well. The Hawk started 7 All Star Games and played in an eighth. He was no flash in the pan. Without even looking at his counting and rate stats, that’s a very solid choice for the HOF. I’m curious, actually, to know if there has been anybody in the history of the sport who was considered the best at their position for so long and a MVP candidate for so many years who isn’t in the Hall. Al Belle springs to mind, although there’s still a chance he might get in (slim, but still). Dick Allen? Pete Rose doesn’t count.
Honestly, I would take issue with several of your comments. Let’s look at one: Dawson was “up there” in the MVP discussion in 1987. He shouldn’t have been. He ranked 17th in the league in EqA and, due in part to relatively lousy defense in right field, 45th in the NL in WARP. He had no business being a serious contender for, let alone winning, the MVP.
So, since he DID in fact play for the Red Sox in 1993 and 1994, that means…?
(I mean, I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think you can play that card for a guy who the MVP while playing for the frickin’ Cubs.)
I won’t argue that Dawson wasn’t one of the best players in the NL in 1987, except that:
a. Like it or not, 49 homers is very attractive to the general public, and
b. WARP has some real issues on defense, particularly for pre-BP seasons. He probably didn’t deserve it by then, but he did win a Gold Glove in ’87 and won another in ’88, and neither of those victories were derided by very many people as a Jeter or Raffy type award. Top 3 defensive OFer in the NL? Probably not, but “lousy”? Not so much.
Dawson may not have been quite as good as the hype generated in the 1987 season (although I have to wonder why you’re focusing so much on his 1987 and not, say, on his 1981, when he had the 2nd best OPS in the NL while playing centerfield full time, or 1980, ’83, or ’90, when he finished in the top 10 in offensive win percentage – that’s a rate stat – or the 7 years he finished in the top 10 in runs created) but he was a very good player for a pretty good amount of time who might not make it in because his numbers don’t look so hot compared to the numbers generated in the 1990s. Which is one of the big issues with stats. They’re often terrible at contextualizing a player’s accomplishments across different eras.
I don’t see much of a case for him over Parker, Murphy, and Baines.
I’d agree with Murphy, disagree with Parker and Baines, again based on the fact that a CF with similar batting stats to a corner OF is CONSIDERABLY more valuable, as Mat’s sort of illustrated.
That being said, there’s a legitimate argument for saying “No”- it’s just that argument also probably excludes some players who’ve already MADE the HOF (like Rice) for similar reasons (I’m of the opinion that Rice wasn’t even the best corner OF on his team- Dwight Evans was quite arguably the better player, but had less sexy HR and RBI league leader stats).
For Henderson, unanimous or not doesn’t matter. But for those who think the voting means something, there are 25 people voting on the Hall of Fame who don’t think Rickey Henderson belongs in. I give the two voters who returned blank ballots a pass.
No passes.
Were there any voters who didn’t vote for Rickey but voted for Bert Blyleven? Should these voters get a pass?
Can’t add anything to that.
No.
But I do want a go at their stash….
My favorite Rickey game (I didn’t actually see him play very many games, in person that is): Ms were playing the White Sox at Safeco; the White Sox pitcher was having a good first half of the season so it looked like a tough matchup for the Ms. But around the 4th or 5th innning Rickey had a looong at bat — I counted it at 10 or 11 pitches — he was simply a tough guy to get out. Eventually he did strike out — but the White Sox pitcher (it might’ve been Buehrle or Garland or someone like that) was never quite the same after that at bat. I think the extra pitches in that long at bat tired him out just enough to make him hittable, and the Ms started pounding him and he had to be relieved after about one more inning.
It was a strikeout by Rickey, but a really good strikeout which I think did help lead the the Mariners’ win that day (now there’s a “productive out”).
And I agree that worrying over how many votes Rickey got is over-wrought. The important thing is to get voted IN, the players don’t get extra brownie points based on whether their vote was unanimous or not. One can make a small case for the added honor of getting voted in in one’s first year of eligibility, and Rickey achieved that.
I have to agree how can anyone not vote for Rickey? Good to see Rice in as he and Dave Parker were the most feared hitters in baseball around that time period. I wonder why Parker did not ever get much love? I am guessing the roid era inflated stats so much people do not understand that hitting 35 HRs is huge! Harold Baines in the HOF? We was a good player and not near HOF IMHO Murphy hmmmm maybe…
I never would have thought being Nolan Ryan’s 5,000th K would be HoF worthy. Shows what I know!
I like how the NHL just takes the best of the best and inducts them, without leaving it to a vote, when they retire. I mean, “voting” on Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux (a guy whose name means what it says in French) is just silly.
Of course, if baseball had done that with Rose and McGwire when they retired, and they would have been among the few on that pinnacle, they would be looking out from the Hall when the news hit.
No, this has nothing to do with some concept of an “inner hall” or some other arbitrary distinction we’re making. It has to do with these guys — the hall voters — being able to do their jobs, and not making political statements or making up some other random set of criteria to go by — like “nobody gets 100%” or “X didn’t get 100%, so Y doesn’t either” or “I will never vote for anybody who played in the ‘steroid era’ as arbitrarily defined by me.” If anyone is creating an arbitrary “inner hall” it’s them, not us. Can anyone really offer a good reason to have not voted for Henderson? Evan came the closest, and even that seems a bit weak (it’s not like there aren’t other first-time guys you could leave off). So instead we have to assume some of these voters are just chasing their own agenda that departs from the criteria established by the HOF, or they just aren’t taking it seriously, or they’re too old and befuddled to actually do their jobs. Malfeasance, apathy, or incompetence — take your pick — any one of which should be grounds to yank their voting credentials.
I can’t think of a good reason to not vote for Rickey, but I can think of all kinds of bad ones. And my issue with kicking people out because they do things that I disagree with is that, well, down the line what if the people in charge find the guys that I like disagreeable? Then I’m (the editorial me; I do not have a BBWAA vote nor have I ever come close to having one) out of the voting as well.
I suspect that Derek doesn’t really think that either and that he’s engaging in a wee bit of hyperbole to look controversial and so on. This was, like, required from stat guys 20 years ago because there was no other way they could get themselves heard. However, now that statheadosity is beginning to be accepted around the MLB and even agents of the sports press, this tactic doesn’t work nearly as well IMO. Before, you had to yell to get people to listen to you. Now, you have to watch your yelling lest people start to ignore you.
Your speculations on my motivations are wrong. If someone didn’t vote for Rickey this ballot, they should have their ballots given to someone who can read the instructions.
Also, w/r/t “look controversial” etc: don’t.
But, as I already pointed out, Dawson was below average in OBP among his era, not when compared to future eras.
Being below average in OBP should not be fatal to one’s chances, but it is a heck of a hurdle to overcome. In my view, Dawson doesn’t quite overcome it.
I didn’t mean to sound like I was insulting y’all. I was kind of giving you the benefit of the doubt, actually. But if you want to continue to be all radical and stuff, there will likely be a lot of people who are primarily bloggers on the BBWAA, I think. I just don’t see it as a particularly good tactic to tell people who didn’t vote for people you (and I) feel are obvious HOFers to turn in their cards. Just my opinion though, take it for what it’s worth.
Yes, I saw that. And while drawing walks is a hugely underrated aspect of the game, historically speaking, it’s still not the only part. Dawson had a great deal of power for his era, was regarded as a top-quality defender, and was at least a neutral “character guy” in the clubhouse (not bringing this up as a HOF prerequisite per se, just as a potential reason to break a tie). I see him as the best CF in the NL in the early to mid 80s, which puts him in the HOF for me. No, not in the mythical inner circle, but definitely on the level of a Richie Ashburn (actually maybe a couple notches above him).
The other issue with rate stats: Dawson was really, really bad from 1993 on but his teams kept using him. Is that his fault, or more to the point does that make his prime less good? Everybody except JR Richard goes through a decline phase, but not a lot of players hang around for 3+ years as a straight-up below average player because of their rep. That’s certainly not an argument for the Hawk but it’s not one against either.
So now I’m being radical and stuff. And it’s not a good tactic to some end I’m unaware of. But you were giving me the benefit of the doubt in assuming that my opinion is falsely held to generate controversy.
Okay. I’m just going to go about my business, and hopefully you’ll hang around and tell me how I’m doing and why I’m doing it.
I appear to have offended or miffed you with my remarks. Wasn’t my intention. Sorry.
Henderson on Letterman tonight, doing the Top Ten.
[dupe]