Two Unrecognized Hall Of Fame Shortstops

Michael Humphreys writes:

Thought you might be interested in or might like to link to the following article. The statistical rigor is obviously not at a professional level, but pitched somewhere around the Bill Jamesian level.

Here’s the link. This sort of thing makes me realize how out of it I am, when it comes to thinking about baseball!

4 thoughts on “Two Unrecognized Hall Of Fame Shortstops

  1. You don’t need advanced stats to know that Trammel was a borderline HoF player. Vizquel was a bit farther off. To me the argument about players is more about why guys like Larkin are in – a few notably bigger years had an impact, I gather, though his reputation exceeded his production overall – and the similar question of whether more players should be allowed in. I’m comfortable with the idea that it’s somewhat arbitrary, that there is no true measure.

    (Grew up a Tigers fan. Trammel was the essence of reliable.)

    • But the point is that Trammel isn’t *borderline*: he’s clearly HoF material. If you grew up Tigers fan, surely you know this! The stats prove it.

      Also, the 1984 Tigers are to teams what Trammel is to shortstops. Get any good computer simulation & play them against ’27 & ’61 Yankees: they hold their own (mainly b/c latter are feast & famine w/ their hitters & b/c Tigers arguably have better starting pitching).

  2. An interesting thought experiment would be to take all possible statistics for shortstop, and see how many players would be in the top 6 in some measurement, and therefore would deserve the Hall of Fame.

    I don’t think that there’s a hospital in Chicago that isn’t on somebody’s “100 best hospitals” list somewhere for something.

  3. I think there was a discussion on this blog (it may have been elsewhere) of someone’s value-over-replacement player calculations where I was surprised to see Trammel come out as one of the better players of all time, not just one of the best shortstops. I was an infielder and loved infield defense. I also loved Jim Albert’s analysis in Curveball that had Joe Morgan as (one of) the best player(s) of his generation (if I’m remembering correctly). Despite growing up in Detroit, I was a Reds fan in the Big Red Machine days.

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