Hall of Stats

Each year, Graham Womack of Baseball Past and Present invites his readers to vote for the fifty best players outside of the Hall of Fame. He publishes a new version of the project each year:

• Year 4
• Year 3
• Year 2
• Year 1

This year, I had some fun creating a visual to accompany the results.

This Year’s Top 50

Here are the results of this year’s election (along with each player’s previous rankings). Numbers and sizes denote rankings whiile “NYE” denotes the player was not yet eligible for inclusion that year.

There has been a great deal of fluctiation in the vote for several reasons. First of all, twelve of the players on this year’s ballot were not yet eligible in the first election. That alone is bound to cause some shifting. Second, the size of the voting body has more than doubled. That brings in waves of new voters with a variety of different opinions. Yet another reason is that a handful of players have been elected since Graham started the project.

Hall of Famers

These players were a part of the project at one point but are now Hall of Famers.

Deacon White was also inducted to the Hall of Fame despite never ranking in a Top 50. But 19th century players—particularly those who played a pioneering role in the game—are always underrated in this project. Deacon clearly belongs.

The Rest

These players have appeared in the Top 50 in the past, but have since dropped out.

I figured I'd make some comments here about things I noticed while perusing the results…

• I'm actually among those who didn't vote for Greg Maddux, Frank Thomas, and the other new candidates this year. I guess it just didn't occur to me that a player would be part of a project about the best players outside of the Hall when they hadn't actually missed out on induction yet. But it turns out they were indeed eligible. I would have voted for Maddux, Thomas, Tom Glavine, and Mike Mussina (but probably not Jeff Kent).
• Likewise, I voted for Joe Torre because he had been selected for the Hall but not yet inducted. Torre still finished strong (34th), but he dropped significantly—likely because of confusion about whether or not he was eligible. Torre actually finished 11th in Year 2.
• The top three finishers in Year 1 are now in the Hall of Fame—Bert Blyleven, Roberto Alomar, and Ron Santo. Who was ranked #4? It was Alan Trammell.
• Barry Larkin ranked 8th that first year. In addition to Trammell, Jeff Bagwell, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Tim Raines placed ahead of Larkin but are still not inducted (Jackson, obviously, because he’s not eligible).
• Larkin finished second in Year 2 while Jackson actually ranked first. Jackson fell all the way to tenth this year. Fellow ineligible Pete Rose dropped from two straight sixth place finishes to thirteenth.
• Raines has been first for to years running. I love Raines and think he should be a Hall of Famer. But I would not have had room for him on a ten man ballot.
• The first 28 players on this year are all in the Hall of Stats.
• Some players have barely moved over the course of the project. Kevin Brown, for example, has always finished between 35 and 38. Others have moved considerably. For example, Will Clark didn't rank in the Top 50 this year, but in Year 2 he was tied for fourteenth.
• Of the top sixteen players, fourteen are currently on the ballot and two are ineligible. That speaks to how crowded this ballot is. The top eligible players not on the current ballot are: Dwight Evans, Dick Allen, Lou Whitaker, Luis Tiant, Bobby Grich, and Kenny Lofton (who, go figure, fell off last year’s ballot with less than 5% of the vote).
• I was originally disappointed by the poor placement (#42) of Bill Dahlen, who I wrote about on Graham’s site. But he was the highest ranking 19th century player and of the 86 people who voted for him, 81 said he belonged (a phenomenal percentage). 41 players may have finished ahead of Dahlen, but he had more “yes” votes than 18 of them.

Did you vote this year? I did (and here’s my ballot). What do you think of the final results?