The Futility Infielder

Today's Baseball Prospectus/ESPN Insider double dip concerns the Rockies' Todd Helton, and in particular his Hall of Fame chances. If you were quietly minding your business by not thinking about Helton's Cooperstown case, you weren't alone; I was somewhat surprised when I was offered the assignment:

Is Todd Helton bound for the Hall of Fame? On the surface, that's not exactly a burning question, even given the resurgent Rockies first baseman's .323/.400/.505 showing to date. At 35 years of age, under contract through 2011, and approaching no major milestones, it's not as though his moment of reckoning has arrived, though he did recently become the 50th player to reach the 500-doubles milestone. That has to count for something, right?

When it finally arrives, Helton's Cooperstown candidacy will be built upon numbers compiled under what have been arguably the most optimal conditions ever afforded a hitter over an extended period of time. He did his best work in high-altitude Coors Field at a time when scoring rates soared higher than they had been in seventy years. His monster performance of 2000 — 42 homers, 147 RBI, and a .372/.463/.698 line — was produced while playing half his games in a ballpark that increased scoring by 25 percent relative to the league, this in a year when the league average of 5.0 runs per game was higher than any year since 1930 (although it did match 1999's rate). His decline from that lofty peak has been masked by his hitter-friendly park, to the point that his career rate stats are still a sterling .328/.427/.569, numbers he hasn't exceeded since 2004 (save for a .445 OBP in 2005).

The first line of that second graf now has some additional information to back it up. Via Baseball-Reference.com's Sean Forman, I've obtained a long-sought leaderboard for B-R's AIR stat, which indexes the combination of park, league and era scoring levels into one number to provide an idea of how favorable or unfavorable the conditions he faced were, scoring-wise, with 100 being average. Helton tops the list:

Player                PA    AIR
Todd Helton          7494   124
Neifi Perez          5365   123
Vinny Castilla       7305   120
Dante Bichette       6777   118
Fresco Thompson      2780   117
Mel Almada           2702   117
Beau Bell            2997   117
Terry Shumpert       2159   117
Larry Walker         7958   117
Garrett Atkins       3002   117
Brad Hawpe           2620   117
Ed Morgan            3205   116
Jack Burns           3900   116
Ski Melillo          5402   116
Earl Averill*        7160   116
Rip Radcliff         4398   116
Quinton McCracken    2700   116
Matt Holliday        3420   116
Don Hurst            3681   115
Dick Porter          2790   115
Max Bishop           5678   115
Odell Hale           4057   115
Moose Solters        3651   115
Joe Vosmik           6007   115
Mike Lansing         4486   115
Rusty Greer          4370   115
Jeff Cirillo         6026   115
Chad Tracy           2493   115
Sammy Hale           3067   114
Gene Robertson       2415   114
Butch Henline        2331   114
Bing Miller          6675   114
Mickey Cochrane*     6055   114
Mule Haas            4749   114
Marv Owen            4147   114
Billy Rogell         5819   114
Bruce Campbell       5337   114
Charlie Gehringer*  10096   114
Eric McNair          4805   114
Luke Sewell          5896   114
Jimmie Foxx*         9599   114
Danny Bautista       2681   114
Darren Bragg         2790   114
Pokey Reese          3082   114
Chris Stynes         2539   114
Jeffrey Hammonds     3354   114
Richard Hidalgo      3884   114
Tony Womack          5299   114
Todd Walker          4991   114
Henry Blanco         2480   114
* Hall of Famer

Eight of the top 11 players on the list spent some amount of their careers with the Rockies. Of the four Hall of Famers who make the list, it's interesting Averill ranks as one of Helton's top 10 comps via Bill James' Similarity Scores method; I listed the three HOFers who are among his top four comps (Johnny Mize, Chuck Klein and Hank Greenberg) but didn't mention Averill in the actual article.

In any event, the older Jamesian metrics (Similarity Scores, Hall of Fame Monitor and Hall of Fame Standards) suggest Helton is a Hall of Famer and provide a chance to (re)introduce JAWS in on the ESPN site. I've written about JAWS for SI.com (not once but twice), and former BP colleague Jonah Keri used JAWS for an ESPN piece a few years ago, but this breaks a small bit of new ground for me, which is exciting.

According to JAWS, Helton makes for a decidedly below-average Hall of Fame candidate at present. He entered the year with 54.6 WARP for his career and 46.1 for his peak, for a JAWS of 50.4. He's currently on pace for a season WARP of 4.4, which would not only boost his career total but rank as his seventh-best season, upping his overall JAWS score to 52.6. The average Hall of Fame first baseman, by comparison, scores at 75.8 for career, 48.4 for peak, and 62.1 overall. Just four of the Hall's 18 first basemen score lower than Helton, and three of them—Frank Chance, Jim Bottomley, and George Kelly—were elected by the much more permissive Veterans Committee. Helton needs to defy age and his bad back to produce four more seasons equivalent to this one to reach the career average for Hall first basemen, and even then his peak would rate as slightly below average.

JAWS is a prescription to improve the Hall's rolls via the election of above-average candidates. It is not, however, a predictor of what the voting body will do, as the 2009 balloting clearly illustrates. While Tim Raines (94.3 career/54.9 peak/74.6 overall JAWS) is clearly ahead of the Hall's established standard for left fielders (84.2/.52.5/68.4) in career, peak, and JAWS, but Rock received just 22.6 percent of the vote. On the other hand, Jim Rice (55.1/39.6/47.4) was elected with 76.4 percent on the ballot, a result that has as its foundation the lack of recognition of the influence that hitter-friendly Fenway Park had inflating Rice's statistics (to say nothing of inflating his legend). Indeed, the Hall is littered with hitters who accumulated hefty stats in favorable environments, though many owe their elections not to BBWAA voters but to the cronyism of the VC, which made a habit of grabbing flash-in-the-pan offensive stars from the 1930s, including the aforementioned Klein, whom JAWS ranks as 20th out of the 22 right fielders in the Hall.

I took the assignment thinking Helton really had no chance in Hell at the Hall, and while I remain unconvinced that he belongs — barring an especially productive late-30s run — I did come away with more respect for his accomplishments. Guys with .307 EqAs, excellent plate discipline (1095/862 career K/BB) and defense worth about five runs above average per year don't grow on trees. That doesn't mean we should put them all in the Hall of Fame, however. Consider the contemporary first base/DH types who rank above Helton according to JAWS:

Player           Career  Peak   JAWS
Frank Thomas     105.4   66.4   85.9
Jeff Bagwell      97.2   62.8   80.0
Albert Pujols     78.7   71.9   75.3
Rafael Palmeiro   96.0   52.6   74.3
Jim Thome         84.7   50.6   67.7
Mark McGwire      79.7   52.4   66.1
John Olerud       79.9   50.2   65.1
Will Clark        74.4   50.2   62.3
AVG HOF 1B        75.8   48.4   62.1
Jason Giambi      64.3   50.3   57.3
Fred McGriff      65.6   45.8   55.7
Carlos Delgado    61.3   42.8   52.1
Mark Grace        60.2   41.0   50.6
Todd Helton       54.6   46.1   50.4

Helton's surpassed Grace and has more or less pulled even with Delgado, but it will take one outstanding year or two OK ones to move past McGriff, and yet another one to top Giambi -- and he'd still be shy of the Hall standard. Suffice it to say, he's got his work cut out for him.

Labels: baseball history, ESPN Insider, Hit and Run, JAWS