Charlie Pavitt: Open the Hall of Fame to sabermetric pioneers

This guest post is from occasional contributor Charlie Pavitt. Here's a link to some of Charlie's previous posts.

-----

Induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame (HOF) is of course the highest honor available to those associated with the game.  When one thinks of the HOF, one first thinks of the greatest players, such as the first five inductees in 1936 (Cobb, Johnson, Matthewson, Ruth, and Wagner). But other categories of contributors were added almost immediately; league presidents (Morgan Bulkeley, Ban Johnson) and managers (Mack, McGraw) plus George Wright in 1937, pioneers (Alexander Cartwright and Henry Chadwick) in 1938, owners (Charles Comiskey) in 1939, umpires (Bill Klem) and what would now be considered general managers (Ed Barrow) in 1953, and even union leaders (Marvin Miller, this year for induction next year). There is an additional type of honor associated with the HOF for contributions to the game; the J. G. Taylor Spink Award (given by the Baseball Writers Association of America) annually since 1962, the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters annually since 1978, and thus far five Buck O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Awards given every three years since 2008.  Even songs get honored ("Centerfield", 2010; "Talkin' Baseball", 2011).

But what about sabermetricians? Are they not having a major influence on the game?  Are there not some who are deserving of an honor of this magnitude?

I am proposing that an honor analogous to the Spink, Frick, and O’Neill awards be given to sabermetricians who have made significant and influential contributions to the analytic study of baseball. I would have called it the Henry Chadwick Award to pay tribute to the inventor of the box score, batting average, and earned run average, but SABR has already reserved that title for its award for research contributions, a few of which have gone to sabermetricians but most to other contributors. So instead I will call it the F. C. Lane award, not in reference to Frank C. Lane (general manager of several teams in the 1950s and 1960s) but rather Ferdinand C. Lane, editor of the Baseball Magazine between 1911 and 1937. Lane wrote two articles for the publication ("Why the System of Batting Should Be Reformed," January 1917, pages 52-60; "The Base on Balls," March 1917, pages 93-95) in which he proposed linear weight formulas for evaluating batting performance, the second of which is remarkably accurate.

I shall now list those whom I think have made "significant and influential contributions to the analytic study of baseball" (that phrase was purposely worded in order to delineate the intent of the award). The HOF began inductions with five players, so I will propose who I think should be the first five recipients:

George Lindsay

Between 1959 and 1963, based on data from a few hundred games either he or his father had scored, George Lindsay published three academic articles in which he examined issues such as the stability of the batting average, average run expectancies for each number of outs during an inning and for different innings, the length of extra-inning games, the distribution of total runs for each team in a game, the odds of winning games with various leads in each inning, and the value of intentional walks and base stealing. It was revolutionary work, and opened up areas of study that have been built upon by generations of sabermetricians since.

 

Bill James

Starting with his first-self-published Baseball Abstract back in 1977, James built up an audience that resulted in the Abstract becoming a conventionally-published best seller between 1982 and 1988.  During those years, he proposed numerous concepts – to name just three, Runs Created, the Pythagorean Equation, and the Defensive Spectrum – that have influenced sabermetric work ever since.  But at least if not more important were his other contributions.  He proposed and got off the ground Project Scoresheet, the first volunteer effort to compile pitch-by-pitch data for games to be made freely available to researchers; this was the forerunner and inspiration for Retrosheet. During the same years as the Abstract was conventionally published, he oversaw a sabermetric newsletter/journal, the Baseball Analyst, which provided a pre-Internet outlet for amateur sabermetricians (including myself) who had few if any other opportunities to get their work out to the public.  Perhaps most importantly, his work was the first serious sabermetric (a term he coined) analysis many of us saw, and served as an inspiration for us to try our hand at it too. I might add that calls for James to be inducted into the Hall itself can be found on a New York Times article from January 20, 2019 by Jamie Malinowski and the Last Word on Baseball website by its editor Evan Thompson.

Pete Palmer

George Lindsay’s work was not readily available. The Hidden Game of Baseball, written by Palmer and John Thorn, was, and included both a history of previous quantitative work and advancement on that work in the spirit of Lindsay’s. Palmer’s use of linear-weight equations to measure offensive performance and of run expectancies to evaluate strategy options were not entirely new, as Lane and Lindsay had respectively been first, but it was Palmer’s presentation that served to familiarize those that followed with these possibilities, and as with James these were inspirations to many of us to try our hands at baseball analytics ourselves.  Probably the most important of Palmer’s contributions has been On-base Plus Slugging (OPS), one of the few sabermetric concepts to have become commonplace on baseball broadcasts.

 

David Smith

I’ve already mentioned Project Scoresheet, which lasted as a volunteer organization from 1984 through 1989. I do not wish to go into its fiery ending, a product of a fight about conflict of interest and, in the end, money.  Out of its ashes like the proverbial phoenix rose Retrosheet, the go-to online source for data describing what occurred during all games dating back to 1973, most games back to 1920, and some from before then. Since its beginning, those involved with Retrosheet have known not to repeat the Project’s errors and have made data freely available to everyone even if the intended use for that data is personal financial profit. Dave Smith was the last director of Project Scoresheet, the motivator behind the beginning of Retrosheet, and the latter’s president ever since. Although it is primed to continue when Dave is gone, Retrosheet’s existence would be inconceivable without him.  Baseball Prospectus’s analyst Russell Carleton, whose work relies on Retrosheet, has made it clear in print that he thinks that Dave should be inducted into the Hall itself.

 

Sean Forman

It is true that Forman copied from other sources, but no matter; it took a lot of work to begin what is now the go-to online source for data on seasonal performance. Baseball Reference began as a one-man sideline for an academic, and has become home to information about all American major team sports plus world-wide info on “real” football. 

 

-----

Here are two others that I believe should eventually be recipients.

Sherri Nichols

Only two women have been bestowed with HOF-related awards; Claire Smith is a past winner of the Spink Award and Rachel Robinson is a recipient of the O’Neill Award.  Sherri Nichols would become the third. I became convinced that she deserved it after reading Ben Lindbergh’s tribute, and recommend it for all interested in learning about the "founding mother" of sabermetrics. I remember when the late Pete DeCoursey (I was scoring Project Scoresheet Phillies games and he was our team captain) proposed the concept of Defensive Average, for which (as Lindbergh’s article noted) Nichols did the computations. This was revolutionary work at that time, and laid the groundwork for all of the advanced fielding information we now have at our disposal.

 

Tom Tango

Tango has had significant influence on many areas of sabermetric work, two of which have joined Palmer’s OPS as commonplaces on baseball-related broadcasts. Wins Above Replacement (WAR) was actually Bill James’s idea, but James never tried to implement it. Tango has helped define it, and his offensive index wOBA is at the basis of the two most prominent instantiations, those from Baseball Reference (alternatively referred to as bWAR and rWAR) and FanGraphs (fWAR).  Leverage was an idea whose time had come, as our blogmaster Phil Birnbaum came up with the same concept at about the same time, but it was Tango’s usage that became definitive. His Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) corrective to weaknesses in ERA is also well-known and often used. Tango currently oversees data collection for MLB Advanced Media, and has done definitive work on MLBAM’s measurement of fielding (click here for a magisterial discussion of that topic).

There are some historical figures that might be deserving; Craig Wright, Dick Cramer, and Allan Roth come to mind as possibilities. Maybe even Earnshaw Cook, as wrong as he was about just about everything, because of what he was attempting to do without the data he needed to do it right (see his Percentage Baseball book for a historically significant document). Perhaps the Award could also go to organizations as a whole, such as Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs; if so, SABR should get it first.

Charlie Pavitt: Steroids and the Hall of Fame

This guest post is from occasional contributor Charlie Pavitt. Here's a link to some of Charlie's previous posts.

------

I am writing today about a much-discussed topic, performance enhancing drugs and Baseball Hall of Fame enshrinement. My goal is not to defend a particular opinion about it, but rather to attempt to lay out five possible positions and some strengths and weaknesses each has. In fact, one reason why I will not defend a particular opinion is that, given these strengths and weaknesses, I am torn among several of the options.

But before I start, a few preliminaries. First, research of which I am aware provides strong evidence that steroid use significantly increases offensive performance, whereas there is little if any evidence that human growth hormone has any impact.

Second, none of this is new. Ancient Greek athletes took then-known stimulants before competitions, and nobody back then batted an eye.

                

Third, one must be careful throwing rocks when one’s own house could potentially, in a different context, be made of glass. When I was in graduate school, if someone had come to me and whispered, "Hey man, I have this pill you can take every day that will make you read, write, and think more quickly and efficiently," I would have been sorely tempted to partake.  In fact, one of my grad school cohort-mates imagined a situation in which you took a pill that provided you with the information you are supposed to learn from assigned reading, with lighter doses for undergraduate students and heavier doses for us grad students. Mighty tempting fantasy.

                

Fourth, and this is critical: Before throwing rocks, one needs to defend the claim that there is something wrong with taking performance enhancing drugs.  The fact that it may be illegal is, in my view, irrelevant, as many illegal items are not only harmless but helpful. For example, without getting into the marijuana debate, it is the case that any use of hemp has been illegal in some places, despite its many many positive applications. And taking something into the body to improve athletic performance is often a good thing. After all, a person can improve athletic performance by eating better, and perhaps taking supplements of necessary vitamins and minerals in moderation. So what’s the difference?  Here’s an argument for that difference; eating better and taking supplements in moderation promotes overall health whereas taking steroids (and overdosing on vitamins/minerals) does quite the opposite. The early deaths of many professional rasslers (I reserve the word "wrestlers" for the real sport), perhaps some football players (Lyle Alzado?), and two well-known baseball players (more on this later) has been linked with steroid use. 

One could then make the claim that it is the use of a substance that causes bodily harm that warrants rejection from the HOF. After all, the criteria for entry include "Integrity, sportsmanship, and character" along with "record, playing ability," and "contributions to the team(s) on which the player played."  

So, the argument continues, PED use is contrary to the former three criteria.  I think the best angle for this argument is that it sets the wrong example for others, particularly young people, whereas eating well and getting one’s vitamins/minerals sets the right example. Fair enough. But: Lots of HOF players were smokers or used chewing tobacco, and Babe Ruth certainly did not set a good dietary example by reportedly eating multiple hot dogs just before games.  And speaking of setting bad examples, if there is anybody enshrined who does not deserve it for absence of integrity etc., it is Adrian "Cap" Anson, who was proactive in the successful attempt to get Moses Fleetwood Walker, the first African-American major league baseball player, banned for the color of his skin.

So this argument leads to a slippery slope. But let us assume that we accept it.  Here are five possible responses, ordered from most lenient to most strict.

Position Number One: Let everyone in. The argument here is that great performers deserve entry no matter why they performed greatly. Buttressing this position is the seeming fact that until the public response to Jose Canseco’s confession among other events forced action, the powers-that-be in MLB’s establishment knew what was going on and intentionally turned a blind eye to it. After all, fans like offense, particularly home runs, and attendance was swelling, so all seemed right with the world. So if that was what baseball was in those days, goes the argument for this position, one must accept it and its great performers no matter what.  ne strength of this argument is that one must not make always-problematic non-performance-related judgments about players, as we will must for the other positions on this issue to be discussed in turn below.  The problem with this argument is that it is contrary to the "integrity, sportsmanship, and character" criteria, condones unhealthy behavior, and as such if anything encourages youthful copy cats.

                

Position Number Two: Let everyone in who deserves enshrinement independently of PED use. This implies that one likely accepts Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, and Barry Bonds, because if one mentally subtracts the PED-fed "value-added" part of their performance, they are still HOF material. But one rejects those who would not have reached performance criteria otherwise: Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro among others come to mind.  Perhaps this makes some sense, but one is still condoning bad behavior by allowing in known users while making questionable judgments about whose performance would have been "good enough" without PEDs.

                

Position Number Three: Ban known users. So Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez, and some others who reached supposed HOF performance levels are out. Also some who approached HOF levels and might otherwise deserve consideration (Miguel Tejada, Jason Giambi) get none. In so doing, we clear the deck of those guilty of poor integrity etc.  Also, it might allow us to consider those whose performance would have reached criteria in another era; think Fred McGriff, who hit as many homers as Lou Gehrig.  But what about those suspected of use? Take Jeff Bagwell for an example. Although there is no clear evidence of his use and he has steadfastly denied it, he did get a lot bigger fairly quickly, hit way more homers than anyone originally expected, and associated closely with the first known user alluded to earlier, Ken Caminiti, whose early death has been partly linked with use. If we lower our performance criteria to allow for McGriff, it also allows for Bagwell.  So now we’ve admitted someone who may have been as guilty as Bonds et al. but whose usage (if any) has not been publicly verified. Setting the in versus out boundary is a pretty questionable judgment call.

                

Position Number Four: Ban everyone either known or rumored to be users.  So Bagwell and Gary Sheffield and perhaps Juan Gonzalez if you think he reached HOF performance levels and maybe even David Ortiz are out, and Mike Piazza should not have been recently admitted. Now we know we’ve kept the HOF free of those with poor integrity etc. But at least in the U.S. court of law one is considered innocent until proven guilty. Take Jeff Bagwell.  Although he got a lot bigger fairly quickly, hit way more homers than anyone originally expected, and associated with a known user, there is no clear evidence of his use and he has steadfastly denied it. Again, setting the in versus out boundary is a pretty questionable judgment call.

                

Position Number Five: Not only ban everyone suspected, but kick out anyone currently in who is suspected. Now we are sure everyone in baseball had the proper integrity etc.  Out goes Mike Piazza. Further, and this is the second player I alluded to at the beginning of this essay, out goes Kirby Puckett.  Jose Canseco fingered him, plus the physical problems that ended his career along with those that ended his life along with his violent post-baseball behavior sure seem to be signals of steroid use. In addition, in a 2002 article, statistician Scott Berry calculated that Puckett’s jump from no home runs his rookie year (1985) to four his sophomore year to 31 his junior year was the most unlikely performance increase in the history of MLB, with an odds of one in 100 million, much greater than similar jumps made by other known or suspected users. But this is all indirect evidence, there are other explanations for all of it (maybe Kirby started taking his vitamins or radically changed his swing between the 1986 and 1987 seasons). And if we kick out Kirby, should we kick out Adrian Anson? (Actually, I think we should, but that’s a side issue here.)  How about Ty Cobb for his racism (to be expected, natural attitudes for a Georgian in his time)?  Babe Ruth for eating all those hot dogs? I do not believe I have heard anyone support this position, but I suppose someone could.

                

So – as I noted at the top, I am frankly torn among several of these options. If I had a vote, my heart would point me toward Position Three, but my head would tell me that it would be hard to rationally defend relative to some of the others (particularly Four). Anyway, I hope that I’ve laid out at least some of the arguments on either side well enough that readers can have an intelligent discussion about it and maybe even add some arguments to my list, and that those who are SURE that their position, whichever it is, is obviously correct think twice about its weaknesses along with its strengths.

-- Charlie Pavitt

A neural-net Hall of Fame prediction method

"Predicting Baseball Hall of Fame Membership using a Radial Basis Function Network," by Lloyd Smith and James Downey

This JQAS article, from the most recent issue, is a new system to empirically predict who is and who is not in the Hall of Fame. But it's not a series of formulas -- it's an algorithm called a "radial basis function network," which is a type of neural net. I don't know much about this kind of thing, but it's called a "machine learning approach" because the algorithm figures out the algorithm, as it were.

The advantage, it seems to me, is that you don't have to figure out an algorithm yourself. But the disadvantage is that you have no idea what the "real" qualifications for the HOF are -- the neural net spits out a probability for each player, but you have no idea were that came from. As the authors note,

"A disadvantage of the approach described here is that the neural network model is opaque -- it is impossible to understand, with any degree of confidence, why the model fails to classify a player such as Lou Brock as a Hall of Fame member."

That, perhaps, is an unfortunate choice of example. Obviously, Brock is in the Hall of Fame because of his stolen bases. But the authors didn't feed steals into the model. Indeed, the words "stolen base" don't appear anywhere in the paper!

What *does* the model include? For pitchers, it considers: wins, saves, ERA, winning percentage, win shares, and number of times selected to the All Star Game. And it seems to do a reasonable job distinguishing HOFers from non. For pitchers retiring between 1950 and 2002, it makes only six errors -- it mistakenly calls Billy Pierce, Lee Smith, and John Wetteland Hall of Famers; but omits Fergie Jenkins, Hoyt Wilhelm, and Dennis Eckersley.

For hitters, the model includes: hits, HR, OPS, WS, and again All-Star selections. This time the algorithm misidentifies 13 players (Rice was listed as an error, but now is not). The incorrect selections are: McGwire, Dawson, Garvey, Baines, Santo, and Parker. The incorrect omissions are Brock, Appling, Yount, Kiner, Boudreau, Campanella, and Jackie Robinson.

Many of the errors are understandable; McGwire, Campanella, and Robinson, for instance, whose status is heavily influenced by factors other than their statistics. But a couple of the mistakes arise from the choice of data; Brock, of course, but also Robin Yount, who winds up misclassified because he had only three all-star selections -- by far the lowest of any HOFer in the 1950-2002 era. (The next lowest was 6, by Willie McCovey and Billy Williams. And all of the missing HOFers that the model failed to predict had on the list had 8 or fewer.)

The authors defend the use of All-Star selections on the basis that it's a proxy for position played; that's somewhat reasonable, and I guess that's why it somewhat works.

Anyway: is this method better than others, most notably Bill James' algorithms? Strangely, although the authors cite both of James' methods, they don't compare them to their own. My guess is that Bill's methods are probably at least as accurate as the ones in this paper. And Bill's have the advantage that we actually learn something from them -- they help us figure out what it takes to get into the Hall of Fame. The method in this paper, while perhaps being objective, accurate, and complex, doesn't tell us anything except its predictions, and so we don't learn very much about baseball from it.

P.S. The paper assumes that all sabermetrics comes from SABR. This is, of course, not true.

Hall of Fame voters: too easily influenced by their colleagues?

Chris Jaffe takes a novel look at baseball Hall of Fame voting in a new Hardball Times article today.

He finds that the more votes a player gets one year, the more likely the writers who didn't vote for him will come around and vote for him next year. And the reverse: the fewer votes a player gets, the more likely the writers who voted for him will change their minds next year and drop him from the ballot.
.
Here's Chris's chart. The left column is the percentage of votes this year; the right column is the percentage are of dissenting voters who change their minds next year. (Actually, that's not quite true: the right column is the *net* percentage – even though the top group of candidates gained the equivalent of 31.9% of the previously-non-voting-for-them writers, that could be a combination of 45% gained and the equivalent of 13% lost, or some such.)

70%-75%: 31.9%
65%-70%: 21.0%
60%-65%: 17.7%
55%-60%: 11.3%
50%-55%: 12.4%
45%-50%: 3.8%
40%-45%: -2.0%
35%-40%: 4.6%
30%-35%: 0.03%
25%-30%: -2.8%
20%-25%: -2.8%
15%-20%: -6.0%
10%-15%: -7.7%
05%-10%: -7.3%

So it looks like voters are easily influenced by their colleagues.

What to make of this? One possibility is that the writers don't actually have strong opinions, and so they're easily swayed when their colleagues vote differently – that is, they're kind of reluctant to be dissenters. Another possibility, the one that Chris champions, is that the writers ARE fairly confident in their opinions, but that they are convinced and persuaded by the give and take of the "grand national conversation" about who deserves to get in:

"Some would consider this a knock on the BBWAA and call it herd mentality. I beg to differ. It shows a willingness to listen to others, reexamine their position, and accept arguments others espouse. Simply put, it shows a willingness to listen, something I find commendable."

I don’t know much about psychology, so I'm not sure what's going on, but I suspect it's the same thing that drives changes in opinions on social issues. Thirty years ago, the idea that gays should have the right to get married was laughable ... but, over time, and very slowly, people started coming around to the idea, to the point where it's now mainstream (and legal, here in Ontario).

On gay marriage, I don't think people sat down and thought about it in any formal way ... it just kind of happened, as they slowly absorbed the chaging norms over time. Perhaps that's what's happening here.

Or perhaps not. Other suggestions are welcome.

------

UPDATE: here's another suggestion. Voters might think player X should be in the HOF, but, in a year with lots of candidates, they voluntarily limit the number of players they vote for. So 60% might vote for X now, and some of the other 40% join in next year, when there are fewer candidates and they have a vote to spare.

For instance, suppose every voter decides to choose only three candidates. But there are four worthies. The first year, B gets 90%, C gets 80%, D gets 70%, and E gets 60%. The next year, D and E are joined by A and F. Now A gets 90%, D gets 80%, E gets 70%, and F gets 60%.

So D and E have gained 10% each, just as observed. The 10% was the result of many writers wanting them in, but just not feeling they could spare a vote that year.

For this to work, I think you need the maximum number of votes per writer to exceed the (long-term average) number of worthy inductees.