The dish

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:

Aaron	19
Ott	18
Musial	17
Ruth	17
Mantle	16
Mays	16
Williams	16
Foxx	13
Gehrig	13
Rice	6

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:

Aaron	19
Ott	18
Musial	17
Ruth	17
Robinson	17
Mantle	16
Mays	16
T Williams	16
Foxx	13
Gehrig	13
Kaline	13
DiMaggio	11
Mize	11
Snider	11
Cepeda	9
B Williams	9
Rice	6

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.