The Futility Infielder

First off, thank you to everybody for the overwhelmingly positive response I received to my Baseball Prospectus debut. The recognition of the long hours I put into that piece and the encouragement I've received for doing so have made it a very gratifying experience, one I hope I can repeat with my follow-up article on pitchers, which, though the vote has passed, should run next week.

In light of that, I'll avoid addressing the pitchers' portion of the vote here. On the hitters' front, the research for my article led me to the conclusion that four were worthy of a vote, all of them infielders: first baseman Keith Hernandez, second baseman Ryne Sandberg, shortstop Alan Trammell, and everywhereman Paul Molitor, who played more games at third than anywhere besides DH. As you've heard, only Molitor got in, and the results for the other three were a mixed bag:

• Hernandez, whose main strength as a candidate comes from his outstanding fielding, actually dropped off the ballot by receiving only 4.3% of the vote. This is just further confirmation of the observation I set forth that the first basemen in the Hall of fame aren't there for their glovework. I'll admit that I have very little emotional attachment to Hernandez -- he always left me even colder than Don Mattingly, to the point that I even dissed him in a dream once. But I'm sorry to see him fall off the ballot, because I think he's a player whose career really holds up under the scrutiny of advanced metrics such as the Davenport statistics.

• Sandberg received 61.1% of the vote, up from 49% a year ago. I'm still mystified that he's not already in, as the man is easily one of the top 10 ever to play second base. His surge in votes is encouraging, and my guess is that he's at most two years away from being elected.

• Trammell's 13.8% showing, on the other hand, is distressing. He's well above the standards of the Hall's shortstops, which are diluted by some players (Travis Jackson, Rabbit Maranville, Dave Bancroft) who really don't stack up all that well as fielders OR as hitters. But he's getting nowhere in the voting.

Of the outfielders, the best candidates were the four contemporaries whom I grew up watching: Andre Dawson, Dave Parker, Dale Murphy, and Jim Rice. The system I devised showed all of them as falling short of the Hall of Fame standards for outfielders, with Dawson being the closest. He polled 50%, the same as last year, while Rice -- the least impressive of the four by my measures -- polled 54.5%, a slight increase from last year. Parker at 10.5% and Murphy at 8.5% are fading quickly, which is a surprise given how close the four really are in qualifications.

None of the other hitters debuting on the ballot got the 5% necessary to remain there. That's a bit of a surprise as far as Joe Carter is concerned -- those high RBI totals sure did impress writers while he was active -- but I'll take it as a positive sign that the voters realized how unimpressive his .306 career on-base percentage really is.

• • •

To touch briefly on Pete Rose (must I?), the backlash is in full effect. Peter Gammons is leading the charge with an article that's among his better recent efforts (I've held for a long time that despite his connections inside the game, the man is an extremely lazy writer who appears to have little respect for the craft of assembling words into coherent, punctuated sentences -- he's anything but an Angell). Gammons writes:

I have always maintained that if Bud Selig decreed Pete Rose eligible for the Hall of Fame pending the vote of the Baseball Writers Association, I would vote for him as a player. Now I hear Bud is going to issue a two-year probation and make Rose eligible only by the vote of the veterans' committee. Fine. Because these last two days have made me rethink my initial decision to vote for him.

First, in betting on baseball as manager -- a position that demands standards higher than those for players -- Rose demonstrated a complete lack of respect or caring for the game.

...This is a man who admitted something in a forum in which he can make money. He has no remorse, no respect for anything but his next bet. Rose is perhaps the lowest figure in baseball in my 32 years of covering the sport.

Ouch. Anyway, as a canary in a coalmine, Gammons puts forth an opinion which suggests that Rose may be better off NOT subjecting his half-assedly contrite self to the whims of the BBWAA voters. Meanwhile, ESPN colleague Jayson Stark has a lengthy post-mortem on the way Rose has handled his admission and how it's been perceived by fans, writers and the commissioner:

Yes, it sure smells like trouble on the best-seller list for the Hit King these days. "My Prison Without Bars," may be turning into the most talked-about book in America. But there are growing indications that good capitalism and good reinstatement strategy might not necessarily go hand in hand.

Asked this week if Rose's book could put his seemingly inevitable track toward reinstatement in jeopardy, one source who has been involved in Rose's reinstatement negotiations replied: "Absolutely."

"If you're asking me where this is headed," the source said, "I'd say he's going to end up worse off than he was a month ago."

Double ouch. Stark goes on to enumerate the ways the past week has damaged Rose's goal of being reinstated, concluding that it will probably take the better part of a year before Selig reaches a decision.

Having watched last night's much-hyped prime-time interview, I'll say that Rose comes off more sympathetically than all of the buildup had led me to believe. No, he's clearly not wired to be emotional in a way which would have pleased those who hoped for more visible remorse. But his statement at the end of the interview is the best thing he said, and he ought to tattoo it on his forehead in reverse so that he reminds himself of those words every time he looks in the mirror:

If the commisioner would ever give me a second chance, there's no way I can let him down. I owe baseball. Baseball doesn't owe me a damn thing. I owe baseball. And the only way I can make my peace with baseball is taking this negative, somehow, and making it into a positive. That's the only way I can do it.

Fair enough. But unless he's planning on donating his million-dollar salary to charity, I don't think Rose managing a major-league ball club is an adequate way of paying baseball back. In my eyes, to gain re-entry, he would need both to abide by the terms of a strict probation (not even the faintest whiff of gambling) and perform some great amount of community service devoted to raising awareness of the dangers of gambling and the reasons it's expressly forbidden for ballplayers and managers. Once he's done that for a couple of years, I'd allow him be a hitting instructor somewhere below the major-league level, or maybe a manager in the low minors, where the outcomes of ballgames aren't of any interest to gamblers ("Put a dime on Rancho Cucamonga and another on the Warthogs for me," doesn't really seem likely). Let Rose show his love for the game in backwaters far from the action and the spotlight.

As for Rose the player, one reader of my BP piece wrote in to ask how Rose measured up with respect to the Hall of Fame standards I set forth:

Enjoyed your work regarding the incoming HOF class and the guys on the outside looking in. Any chance you could do something similar for The Gambler (no, not Kenny Rogers)? I think it would interesting to get away from all the hoopla surrounding his moral and ethical issues and evaluate his candidacy using this new viewpoint.

This was my reply:

Regarding Rose, it's pretty open and shut from this standpoint. Anywhere you put him, positionally speaking, he would be a top-tier Hall of Famer, with a career WARP3 of 153.6, peak of 46.8, and a weighted score of 100.2, which is good for 20th all time among hitters.

From 1965-1976 Rose played at a very high level of 9 WARP a year, which is a remarkable run, even moreso for its consistency. The rest of his career is extremely ordinary, but that run is good enough for the Hall in and of itself.

I have to admit, Rose comes out looking much better by that method than I expected, probably because for most of the portion of his career which I can remember, he was a singles-hitting journeyman who couldn't carry his position offensively. But clearly, he was a hell of a ballplayer for a long while before that. Here's a sentiment you don't hear every day: Rose's induction would RAISE the standards of the Hall of Fame -- from a statistical standpoint, at least.