… and I missed something right in my wheelhouse, a comparison of baseball to classic movies. From Buster Olney, by way of Fire Joe Morgan:

If you want to quibble with the fact that he won the award in 1978, or with his placement in some particular year, OK, I get that. But to ignore the MVP voting entirely, as if it isn’t at least some kind of barometer of his play over the course of his career, is embarrassing. This is like saying, “Hey, forget the Oscar voting of the 1950s. Marlon Brando was clearly overrated.”

I think that’s a fabulous idea. Let’s compare the mindblowing stupidity of MVP voting to the mindblowing stupidity of Oscar voting. For example, guess how many combined non-honorary Oscars Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Federico Fellini won?

One.

That’s right – just one, won by Welles, for writing the screenplay to Citizen Kane. Three of the greatest directors in the history of motion pictures died with a total of zero Best Director statues.

Citizen Kane itself was nominated for best picture (one of ten in 1942), but lost to How Green Was My Valley. When the American Film Institute published its list of the 100 best movies of the 20th century, Citizen Kane was #1. How Green Was My Valley wasn’t on the list.

Paul Newman didn’t win a Best Actor Oscar until 1986, for The Color of Money, a Lifetime Achievement Award in all but name. Cary Grant never won an Oscar. Humphrey Bogart won one, for The African Queen, but not for Casablanca, a movie that didn’t yield a single win in any of the four acting categories. Peter O’Toole never won an Oscar; he was nominated for Lawrence of Arabia but lost to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird. Audrey Hepburn won once, for Roman Holiday, but wasn’t even nominated for My Fair Lady in one of the most blatantly political votes in the history of the Oscars. (The award went to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins; Andrews starred in the Broadway version of My Fair Lady but was replaced by Hepburn for the film.)

Stanley Kubrick won one Oscar, for Best Effects/Special Visual Effects for 2001, but was 0-for-3 as a director. An American in Paris beat out A Streetcar Named Desire (which was nominated) and The African Queen (which wasn’t) for Best Picture in 1952, while Singin’ in the Rain – an infinitely better picture than An American in Paris, and possibly the best musical ever – received just a pair of minor nominations two years later. Stanley Donen was never even nominated for an Oscar.

Consider some of the best contemporary figures too. Johnny Depp has just two nominations and no wins. Nicole Kidman has one, for The Hours. Martin Scorsese has just one Best Director win, this past year for The Departed. And everyone knows how long it took Steven Spielberg to win his first Best Director award – long enough that he won the Irving Thalberg Award first.

So yes, please, let’s compare MVP voting to Best Picture/Director/Actor voting. We could argue all day about which is worse.

Quick note: ESPNEWS will replay the Jim Rice segment from my appearance at 5:20 pm EST. Enjoy.

I’m not surprised by anything except Raines’ poor showing.

Anyway, here’s a comparison of my final tally to the actual percentages, with the last column representing a straight difference (my % – actual %)

My tally’s estimates were within five percentage points of the actual figures for five of the top six guys; I’m pleased with that. I ended up a high on the three main stathead favorites (Bly, Rock, Tram), and low on the three guys who really don’t have any business in the Hall (Rice, Morris, Smith). Assuming I do this again next year, I’ll try to identify a few more retired voters, since that’s a good chunk (as many as 200?) of the voter pool.

But seriously, who the fuck voted for Shawon Dunston?

A little hit-and-run on yours truly in today’s Canton Repository:

SAY WHAT? Scouts Inc. analyst Keith Law said during a Jan. 2 chat on ESPN.com that he does not agree with the line of thinking that says Omar Vizquel should be considered for the Hall of Fame because another great defensive shortstop, Ozzie Smith, already is there. “The difference here is that Smith was a far, far better defensive player than Vizquel is,” Law said. Indians fans who saw Vizquel play every day would beg to differ.

Let’s just question someone’s credibility without providing any evidence to back it up. But hey, I’m sure those Cleveland fans who saw Vizquel play (but almost certainly never saw Smith) are unbiased, expert sources.

For those of you who don’t already read Joe Posnanski’s blog – I’m assuming most of you do – he posted the results of the Pozcar Hall of Fame voting yesterday. No big shockers here: Gossage, Blyleven, and Raines got in. That’s my ballot, without McGwire (held down by scandal) and Trammell (a borderline choice, but one on which I’ve decided to put my imprimatur).

Some interesting observations:

Brady Anderson received 1.18% of the vote.

One of the three people who voted for Brady Anderson — former major league pitcher Al Fitzmorris. Why? “Because of Brady Anderson, I got to meet Ashley Judd.” Now THAT’S a Pozcars voter.

I would vote for Darin Erstad for the Hall of Fame if he introduced me to Ashley Judd, so I can understand this. Heck, if Erstad got me a night with Ashley Judd – who has been #1 on my theoretical laminated card since roughly 1996 – I’d hand-carve his plaque.

Pete Rose received 46.85% of the vote.
Joe Jackson received 52.76% of the vote.

It did surprise me that quite a few Pozcars voters gave Jackson the vote but not Rose. I’m only guessing, but I suspect it came down to three things: The movie portrayals of Jackson as the innocent (or as the Michael Landonesque angel who saved James Earl Jones and brought Kevin Costner and his Dad together); the fact that Jackson’s been dead for more than a half century while Rose signs autographs in Vegas; the fact that Pete Rose lied.

I think Joe’s right on. The media portrayals of Jackson as an innocent rube who still played his heart out (but who, in reality, was more than happy to suck when the gamblers wanted him to suck) have altered the perceptions of a lot of casual fans of his role in the scandal, and the horror of what Jackson and the Black Sox did has faded with time, while Pete Rose – as unsympathetic a knucklehead as you can find – just keeps making a colossal ass of himself at every opportunity.

Anyway, read the rest. The end of his Trammell comment is particularly funny.

From Mike Fine’s lament on the BBWAA’s failure to elect Jim Rice through last year:

Suffice it to say that Rice’s offensive accomplishments were rather remarkable, but he still continues to be less than unimpressive amongst the voters. Maybe that’s the beauty of baseball-that statistics can be manipulated and debated and interpreted in so many different ways.

Or maybe there should be some guidelines for voters rather than to rely on subjectivity and personal feelings.

Rice is paying the price for the lack of guidelines, and he doesn’t deserve it.

This comes after he quotes a number of stats from Red Sox PR hack Dick Bresciani, the King of Selective Endpoints, who has been campaigning for Rice for at least a decade. So subjectivity is now hurting Rice? Where’s the objectivity in all this nonsense about how “feared” he was?

UPDATE: Okay, the spread of the Dick Bresciani bullshit is really getting under my skin. Let’s look at how badly he’s abusing statistics in Fine’s article:

The retired players with career home runs and average as high as Rice are Hank Aaron, Jimmy Foxx, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Mel Ott, Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, all members of the Hall of Fame.

Talk about cherry-picking. Look, Rice had a pretty good and very limited peak, but compared to those guys, he’s a midget dwarf. Look at how many times each player on that list posted an OPS+ of 130 or better in his career, counting only full seasons:

Oh, but it gets better:

Seventeen players with 350-plus home runs and a .290-plus average have been on the Hall of Fame ballot, and all but Rice are in the Hall of Fame: Aaron, Cepeda, Joe DiMaggio, Foxx, Gehrig, Al Kaline, Mantle, Mays, Johnny Mize, Musial, Ott, Frank Robinson, Ruth, Snider, Billy Williams and Ted Williams.

Same criterion (full seasons with OPS+ >= 130), more players:

Bresciani is counting on one simple thing: Voters will be so impressed by the names to whom he’s comparing Rice that they won’t bother to check his math. The worst player on that second, longer list had 50% more seasons of 130 OPS+ or better than Rice did. And I’m not saying that a 130 OPS+ is even a Hall of Fame season per se – it’s merely a good season; Frank Robinson posted a 150 OPS+ or better thirteen times in his career. That’s a Hall of Famer. Rice? He was a good player who now has a good PR guy. If you really think he belongs in the Hall, Dick, stop playing games with his stats to prove it.

I think many of us in the sabermetrically-inclined crowd tend to discredit older sportswriters as less likely to consider strong statistical arguments and more likely to use specious reasoning to justify their award or Hall votes. I haven’t found that to be true while collecting Hall ballots, and here’s some proof that younger sportswriters can be just as specious:

1. [Tim Raines] admitted sliding headfirst the year he used because he kept coke in his uniform pocket and didn’t want it to fall out — which is an act as disrespectful of the game as you can imagine.

I presume Buscema will be leading the “recall Mickey Mantle” campaign, since we know Mantle showed up drunk for games on multiple occasions. And, of course, his last phrase is pure hyperbole, since I can imagine many more disrespectful acts, like throwing games for money. Except I don’t have to imagine it at all.

Raines had an addiction. He admitted it, sought treatment, has been clean for something like twenty years, and became a model citizen and good clubhouse guy for the second half of his career. His cocaine problem is a non-factor in discussing his Hall candidacy.

2. As a player whose key Hall of Fame attribute was his speed, I want to examine a little further whether the use of a stimulant could have enhanced his performance whether he used it for that purpose or not.

That’s just pathetic. Cocaine is now a performance-enhancing drug? Perhaps cops should take a sniff of coke before setting off to chase down suspects on foot. The perps wouldn’t stand a chance against those juiced-up cops!

And how is Buscema going to examine this further? Will he review the peer-reviewed studies on the effects of cocaine usage on athletes?

3. He wasn’t a surefire Hall of Famer without that issue by any means; in fact, I had only seriously considered him after several compelling columns turned my head.

This is perhaps as damning to me as the first point. Here we have a first-time Hall voter who, at certain points in his article (such as explaining why he didn’t vote for Dawson), shows awareness of stats like OBP. And yet when presented with Raines, whose .385 career OBP sits comfortably aside Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn’s (.388) and eventual Hall of Famer Derek Jeter (.388), Buscema needed other writers to point out to him that Raines is a surefire Hall of Famer … and still isn’t convinced.

When you only use statistics that support the point you already wanted to make, or you weigh statistics that support that point more heavily than those that don’t …

Bert Blyleven … but ultimately I still would have liked to have seen at least a little better winning percentage and/or more Cy Young votes, an ERA title and more than one 20-win season in 22 years.

… you raise a question, at least to me, of whether you understand the statistics at all. If we’re still talking about Blyleven’s win total – and acting as if that’s unconnected to Cy Young votes – then we’re still running uphill.

One ballot doesn’t prove the point that we may be discriminating a bit too much by age when talking about voter tendencies, but based on the 80-odd ballots I’ve got, I haven’t seen anything to convince me that the voter’s age is a major factor in affecting his Hall choices. Buscema was just kind enough to display his logic in public.

A staffer at Minnesota Public Radio has about as tired and lazy a take on the Santana trade talks as you will ever find:

The Big Market Teams (BMT) are low-balling the Twins with offers that won’t include another star player (like Jose Reyes or Robinson Cano) or two-top shelf prospects (like Jacoby Ellsbury and Jon Lester). This is a travesty.

The travesty is that my tax dollars are going to fund an outlet where a man who apparently failed out of his high school economics class on day one gets to speak his empty mind.

The team that acquires Santana gets ONE YEAR of his services, plus the value of an exclusive negotiating window, blunted somewhat by the fact that the acquiring team would then have to extend Santana for 2009 and beyond before seeing what he does in 2008. This writer wants another team to give up, say, four years of Jose Reyes signed to below-market salaries PLUS something else for that one year of Santana. It is conceivable that there would be a GM stupid enough to make that trade, but the fact that no one is willing to make that trade is not a travesty; it is common sense.

The writer in question, David Zingler, says that this situation demonstrates “exactly what’s Wrong with Baseball.” I think his article shows exactly what’s Wrong with Public Radio. Despite a simple economic argument that trading Reyes for Santana would be a terrible deal for the Mets, and despite mountains of evidence that there’s nothing substantially wrong with baseball, Zingler plows right on ahead with his argument, because he’s a Twins fan and he’s angry. He can be angry if he wants to be, even if his reasoning is fault, but it would be nice if he wasn’t doing it while on the dole.

UPDATE: Great minds, etc., etc.