Barry Larkin Is Heading To Cooperstown

What about the wild-card era World Series winners, starting in 1995? It’s probably too early to make any conjectures about winners over the last three or four years, but what about the teams from 1996 through 2007?

The ‘97 Marlins had a man who eventually hit over 500 home runs and had eight years when he hit 30 or more HR and eight with 100+ RBI. He had almost 2700 career hits, a career OPS of .907 and 63.3 career WAR, which ranks 89th all-time, below some current Hall of Famers but above others.

This time of the year especially, you read some crazy stuff about the Hall of Fame. But this, from a newspaper writer named Joe Palladino, just might be the craziest:

Whom would I pick?

Monday, the Hall of Fame announced the results of the 2012 Baseball Writers’ Association of America election:

Barry Larkin.

Barry Larkin was elected to the Hall of Fame today. Alan Trammell was not. I’m not going to argue that this is some grave injustice that needs to be rectified with civil disobedience and letter-writing campaigns, but the difference between how the two players were treated by the Hall of Fame voters is striking. Let’s take a look at the career statistics for both:

Larkin takes him in most categories. I think that most people would acknowledge that Larkin had the better career, even after injuries are taken into account. But look at those WAR margins -- razor thin, both with the Baseball-Reference metrics and the FanGraphs metric. Trammell played 20 seasons; Larkin played 19. Over their respective careers, they were pretty comparable in value.

In honor of Barry Larkin having been voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, below please find a few things you might not have known about Barry Larkin. These are not all of the things you might not have known about Barry Larkin. They are just some of them. Onward!

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So maybe that’s kind of an exaggeration - there’s no mention of the word “sandwich”, and I’m pretty sure that at some point Barry Larkin made a sandwich - but over at The Hardball Times, Chris Jaffe is nothing if not thorough in reviewing the career of the newest Hall of Famer. From 1986 through 2004, there are factoids followed by factoids, and if you look, over there, in the corner, there are more factoids.

A randomly-selected sample:

Disgruntled over the Hall of Fame voting? Can’t get enough Hall of Fame chatter and debate? Head on over to the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s website, where they’ve collected and linked to a plethora of articles in which writers explain their ballots. For example, there’s Ken Gurnick:

Ballot: Morris, SmithSet nerd-lasers to “rage!”

By now, you know: Jeff Bagwell, one of the six or eight greatest first basemen who’s ever played this game, failed to gain election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. You need to be named on 75 percent of the ballots; after being named on 42 percent of the ballots a year ago, this time around Bagwell reached 56 percent.

Well, at least Jayson Stark voted for Bagwell:

The Baseball Writers’ Association of America has voted Barry Larkin into the Hall of Fame. A year ago - Larkin’s second year on the ballot - the shortstop received 62.1 percent of the votes. This time around, he received 86.4 percent of the votes. That’s a huge, huge jump - the biggest jump out of all the holdovers.

What about the rest of them, though? How did their 2012 results compare to their 2011 results? I have constructed a simple table, for your convenience. Here you are:

Barry Larkin was elected to the Hall of Fame on Monday with 86% of the BBWAA vote. Over at Mental Floss, they’ve set up a quiz that asks you to name the 27 Hall-of-Famers who received more than 90% of the voting. Take the ten minutes and test your knowledge.

↵Note: When Morris gets in, it will be because the BBWAA voted to the score.

You’ve heard that Barry Larkin has been voted into the MLB Hall of Fame. You’ve heard that Barry Larkin is the only player to be voted into the MLB Hall of Fame this year by the BBWAA. Larkin picked up 86.4 percent of the vote, good enough for a dramatic improvement over 2011, and good enough for induction.

What about the rest of the ballot, though? The rest of the results are shown below, courtesy of the BBWAA website. Note that BBWAA stands for Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and not Baseball Website developers’ Association of America. If you can believe me, the site actually used to be worse. Now it’s something I could show to somebody. This sentence makes sense if you know what it used to look like.

Larkin was the fourth-overall pick in 1985, which is widely considered the greatest amateur draft in baseball history. After a nondescript debut in the Eastern League as a 21-year-old, he only spent one more season in the minors before becoming the Reds’ starting shortstop for 19 straight seasons. Only 24 players in the history of baseball have played more games for just one franchise in their careers.

An aside: one of those players was Dave Concepcion, who was the Reds’ shortstop from 1970 until Larkin’s emergence in 1987, which means that the Reds had two different shortstops over a 35-season stretch. The last starting shortstop before that was Woody Woodward, and whenever the Reds would try to alter the plans of the universe, the universe would respond:

One of the odd things about the Hall of Fame is that nobody seems to have a different idea of what the Hall of Fame should be. Should it be reserved for players like Willie Mays and Ty Cobb? The best of the best? Or should the doors be thrown open to any player as good as (say) Freddie Lindstrom and Travis Jackson, in the Hall of Fame already?

Granted, most people are somewhere in the middle. That’s where I am. Right down the middle, actually. If there are 20 shortstops in the Hall of Fame, I want my candidate to be better than 10 of them. Or close.

Over at the New York Times, Tyler Kepner writes about how the Hall of Fame and the Baseball Writers Association of America is wrestling with the issue of performance-enhancing drugs and the Hall of Fame. Kepner breaks down the glut of current and future candidates into four categories:

And in that latter category, he breaks the candidates down into subcategories: based on suspicion, based on admission, based on evidence, and based on admission/evidence/playing career.

The Baseball Writers Association of America will announce the results of their Hall-of-Fame balloting on Monday, and there have been some whispers that this might be the first year since 1996 without a player getting inducted. Is that a possibility?

Probably not. Over at Baseball Think Factory, the indefatigable Repoz has collected the results of 134 different ballots so far, and at his last count, Larkin received a vote on 89.6% of the ballots -- even accounting for sample-size concerns, that total hints that he should be well over the 75% required for election. Jim Bowden is, uh, confident that Larkin will get in:

Most Hall of Fame voters like to put check marks in a fair number of those little boxes. That’s my impression, anyway. Which makes plenty of sense, because most years there are five or six worthy candidates. Granted, very few voters who punch more than a box or two actually restrict themselves to worthy candidates. I’m just saying the basic math actually works. I’d vote for a bunch of guys. Shoot, if I could get a ballot in 2014 I’d be pissed off about being restricted to only 10 candidates. It’s going to be insane in ‘14.

But this year, not so much. I would definitely vote for four guys, with another four just missing (for me, for the moment, and yes I’m so very very sorry about that).

The sabermetric-minded among you have already noticed a notable omission. Henning:

You might not believe this, but in some quarters one is actually mocked for taking more time for discussion, research, and thought.

I get it. Jack Morris’s career ERA was 3.90, higher than the career ERAs of Mike Witt, Mike Boddicker, and Tom Candiotti. And if you use ERA+, Morris looks a little better (105 ERA+), but he doesn’t fare as well as … Mike Witt, Mike Boddicker, and Tom Candiotti. Trying to build a statistical case for Morris is like trying to start a car by putting a gas nozzle in the ignition. That has some of the basic ideas involved, but the execution is all wrong.

If I had a vote, Morris wouldn’t even get in to the Hall of Really Neat Players Named Jack. But here’s something I stopped doing a long time ago: I stopped gritting my teeth every time another writer made a belabored case for Morris. I stopped trying to convince people of the error of their ways, hoping to save their mortal baseball-loving souls. I took the sandwich board off my shoulders and recycled the pamphlets I was handing out.

SI.com’s Joe Posnanski, a thoughtful and thorough writer, has written 4,160 words on the future of the Hall of Fame, focusing on the players who are going to be on the ballot in the next two or three years. It’s a large group of great players, some whom have been accused of steroid use. Posnanski:

It certainly is a deep run of great players, and a few of them -- especially Bonds and Clemens -- are connected to PEDs in a way that unquestionably will affect the way the voters judge their careers. I have written before that in many ways the voters -- and I am one of them -- will be trying to determine the soul of the Hall of Fame.

But I realize now that I fell victim to one of the classic blunders. I overlooked history.Posnanski goes on to describe in great detail the history of BBWAA voting for the Hall of Fame; to boil it down to a few words, there appears to have been a dichotomy in the voting over the years between writers who only wanted “the best of the best” in the Hall, and those who want it more inclusive. He details the era in which the writers literally elected no one while the backroom Veterans Committee was electing its buddies, whether qualified or not. He goes on to confront the proverbial elephant in the room, the question of steroid use, and what should be done, if anything, about voting for players like that.

For a player to be on a Hall-of-Fame ballot, he needs to have played for ten years, and he needs to have been retired for five years. There are other stipulations, but those are the main ones.

Over at The Platoon Advantage, there’s a look at the guys who didn’t even make the ballot. This eliminates the chance of even a pity ballot, like the one or two that Vinny Castilla is receiving. TPA rounds up the lot of them:

Every once in a while, I’ll come across a tidbit like this, and I’ll remember just how bizarre the Hall of Fame is when it comes to first-ballot inductions and unanimous votes. From David Schoenfield:

Random Hall of Fame factoid: Eddie Mathews received 32 percent of the vote his first year on the ballot.Eddie Mathews. One of the best third basemen to ever play the game. Almost certainly the best third baseman to ever play at the time he was up for a Hall of Fame vote -- Mike Schmidt and George Brett weren’t around yet. One of the eight members of the 500-homer club when he retired.

This morning, Craig wrote a couple of compelling Hall of Fame-related posts.

In the first, he noted that attendance at the Museum is way, way down: more than 20 percent just from 2007 through 2011, and it looks ever worse if you go back to the early 1990s. Craig attributes the recent decline to the Great Recession, and the larger decline to the perhaps tempered passions of baseball fans. They’re still going to games and watching on TV, but seeing Chick Hafey’s Hickok Belt in a glass case just isn’t on a lot of bucket lists these days.

It’s tempting to write that the Hall of Fame inductees will be announced on Monday, January 9, but we don’t know if there will be any. Whatever the announcement is, it will come via live television and stream. From an MLB Network press release:

he results of the 2012 National Baseball Hall of Fame ballot will be announced on MLB Network and simulcast on MLB.com on Monday, January 9 at 3:00 p.m. ET as part of a two-hour announcement show beginning at 2:00 p.m. ET.

Featuring National Baseball Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson, coverage will include interviews with any electees and be anchored by Matt Vasgersian with MLB Network’s Bob Costas, Greg Amsinger, Brian Kenny and Harold Reynolds, Hall of Fame award-winning baseball writer Peter Gammons, and Hall of Fame voters Jon Heyman, Ken Rosenthal and Tom Verducci.It would be somewhat amusing for the folks on TV to have a drum roll that’s followed by ... no one! But it’s looking likely that Barry Larkin, at the very least, will be inducted this year.

↵The internet is like a blabbermouth who ruins the movie by telling you how it ends.

Hall of Fame ballots are due at the end of every year, so right around the holidays, there are a barrage of writers who feel compelled to share their ballots with us. And I love it. It’s not exactly a guilty pleasure, but it’s something close to it.

Hope you’re enjoying it. It’s a fun time of year for people who like to argue about this sort of stuff. But this isn’t a happy-go-lucky article to convince you how awesome Hall-of-Fame arguments are. It’s a public service and a reminder.