For awhile now, we at 643 Sports have blustered over devoting an entire show to the identification and removal of the worst and least-worthy parts of baseball’s Hall of Fame.
So, inspired by the hand-wringing we have done over the induction of the Jim Rice and Andre Dawson ilk, I decided to get the ball rolling and put together a definite list of players that, in my humble opinion, do not deserve Hall of Fame recognition.
Let me first set some ground rules for the list, as I can already envision the arguments of disgruntled baseball puritans that are sure to be hurled my way, and I would like to quell those while they are still a gleam in their respective eyes:
-Defense is not accounted for. Yes, I know defense is currently an understudied and perhaps undervalued phase of the game today, but I feel that many people use the ambiguity of defensive valuation as a shield to deflect proper blame from finding its way to the players that deserve it.
Simply put, the players on this list aren’t good enough to profit from the dubious nature of defense valuation, at least when talking about their overall worth as it pertains to inclusion in baseball’s tallest ivory tower.
-Off-field or non-production-related facets of player’s contributions to baseball are also not considered. Admittedly, though not to tip my hand, I was not around to follow these players during their time in the big leagues, so I would not know of any subtle contributions to the game that might warrant their inclusion in the Hall.
However, all of these players were inducted (whether by the BBWA or the Veterans Committee) under the moniker of “player”, so it follows that their inclusion should be subjected to the same form of criticism as everyone else, and thus they warrant no special treatment or indemnity from criticism for sucking at baseball.
-The statistics used here will be rate-based for the most part (AVG, OBP, SLG, etc), though league adjusted metrics such as OPS+ will be used to show the performance of players relative to their peers around the league. Weighted on-base average (wOBA, the more slugging-neutral version of OPS, scaled like OBP) and weighted runs created plus (wRC+, Runs Created based on wOBA, adjusted for league and scaled like OPS+) will also be used in concert with the more common statistics to ensure that proper league and player type adjustments are made.
With that, let’s start cleaning out that Hall, shall we?