Page 1 of 2

Just Shut the HOF Down

Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2021 11:46 pm
by FolesMVP09
Career War

Dick Allen 58.7 - 15 seasons

and these 3 good, not elite players,got in over him

Minnie Minoso 53.8 - 18 seasons
Gil Hodges 43.9 18 seasons
Tony Oliva 43.0 - 15 seasons

Allen was an elite power hitter for 11 seasons 64-74. It is quality not quantity (Kaat got the quantity nod as well)
Plus all the racial crap that Allen had to deal with. In what way is Hodges more deserving? Not even close

Just disgraceful

Re: Just Shut the HOF Down

Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2021 11:51 pm
by FolesMVP09
Allen - higher career OPS+ then Aaron, Mays, Dimaggio, Schmidt, Pujols, Killebrew, etc etc etc

Re: Just Shut the HOF Down

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 1:35 am
by Michael Jack
Do we know who voted against Allen?

Re: Just Shut the HOF Down

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 1:55 am
by FolesMVP09
Michael Jack wrote: Mon Dec 06, 2021 1:35 am Do we know who voted against Allen?

5 out of 16 did not vote for him. Missed by 1 vote

Panel was Fergie Jenkins, Ozzie Smith, Joe Torre, John Schuerholz, Bill DeWitt, Ken Kendrick, Tony Reagins, Adrian Burgos, Steve Hirdt, Rod Carew, Mike Schmidt, Bud Selig, Al Avila, Kim Ng, Jaime Jarrin and Jack O’Connell.


https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2021/12/ ... -fame.html

Re: Just Shut the HOF Down

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 2:20 am
by headclown
FolesMVP09 wrote: Sun Dec 05, 2021 11:46 pm Career War

Dick Allen 58.7 - 15 seasons

and these 3 good, not elite players,got in over him

Minnie Minoso 53.8 - 18 seasons
Gil Hodges 43.9 18 seasons
Tony Oliva 43.0 - 15 seasons

Allen was an elite power hitter for 11 seasons 64-74. It is quality not quantity (Kaat got the quantity nod as well)
Plus all the racial crap that Allen had to deal with. In what way is Hodges more deserving? Not even close

Just disgraceful
Agree 100%, a complete joke that he is not in when you have some of these other guys getting in...what a travesty as it relates to the HOF. I really want to know who voted how....this is some bullshit. Harold Baines with his 38 WAR is in the hall.

Re: Just Shut the HOF Down

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 3:19 am
by Christopher
I try not to get worked up about Cooperstown any more, but this is indeed some bullshit.

Re: Just Shut the HOF Down

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 3:26 am
by FolesMVP09
Christopher wrote: Mon Dec 06, 2021 3:19 am I try not to get worked up about Cooperstown any more, but this is indeed some bullshit.
They have lowered the bar too much on who gets in. However, Allen deserved to be in when he was initially eligible
Being elite for 10 years should far outweigh just being good for 20

Re: Just Shut the HOF Down

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 3:48 pm
by ConnieMack
Nice article on Allen :

Dick Allen’s numbers haven’t changed, but how we view them should:
Jayson Stark


By Jayson Stark 1h ago 20


I can still recall the sound of my phone ringing, back on a frosty January evening in 1997. On the other end of the line was my wonderful mom, the baseball lover. She wasn’t just calling to say hi.

“How’d Dick Allen do?” she asked — a question that made me smile then and now, nearly 25 years later.

It was Dick Allen’s final year on the baseball writers’ Hall of Fame ballot, you see. And across the Philadelphia metropolitan area, where he’d spent so many memorable years with the Phillies, that was a huge topic, even though everybody knew how this vote would turn out.

“He didn’t make it,” I told my mother.

“Jayson,” she replied, “he didn’t have the numbers.”

He didn’t have the numbers. I can still hear her delivering that pronouncement in my head. I’m not totally sure why. But heck, this was my mom casting judgment, so who could forget that?

My mother was no sabermetrician. She knew everything about Roger Angell; whereas Bill James — ehhh, not so much. But she knew enough to understand why Dick Allen collected a mere 16.7 percent of the votes cast in that election.

He didn’t have the numbers.

Or did he?

Once again Sunday, the members of the Golden Days Era Committee decided he didn’t — and got this all wrong. For the second election in a row, that committee’s vote left Dick Allen exactly one vote short of Cooperstown. Five of the 16 committee members left him off their ballots, and that was one too many. Heartbreaking.

The committee held that election seven years after Dick Allen’s last near-miss, 44 years after he played his final game, a quarter-century after his final appearance on the writers’ ballot and, tragically, almost a year to the day after he died of cancer at his home in Wampum, Pa.

Leading up to that election, it saddened me to think of what this day could have meant to him, to his family and to the friends who worked for years to help make his Cooperstown moment happen. I reflected on all of that a year ago, on the day he died, in a remembrance of my first favorite baseball hero, as a kid growing up in Philadelphia. Instead, I’m almost grateful that Dick Allen didn’t have to endure yet one more near-miss.

It will be five long years before his name comes up again at the next meeting of the Golden Days Era Committee. I hope that’s enough time for the committee to digest how much the world has changed since the night my mom delivered an assessment the Hall of Fame voters clearly agreed with back then:

He didn’t have the numbers.

Numbers don’t change — we do


It starts there, doesn’t it?

Dick Allen’s 351st and final home run came 16,272 days ago — a game-tying ninth-inning home run off Ron Guidry, on May 17, 1977. His 1,848th and final hit came just over a month later — an opposite-field single off a knuckleball king (Wilbur Wood) on June 19, 1977.

He would never play another game in the big leagues after that day. That means his numbers remain frozen in time — right where he left them more than four decades ago. But you know what hasn’t remained frozen? Us.

Think of how differently we look at numbers now, versus 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. Think of how much better our sources of information are now versus then. Think of how those new sources of data and information have framed how we evaluate everybody and everything. So why do I believe, along with so many others, that Dick Allen has the numbers now even if he didn’t then? That’s why —or mostly why, at least.

Why he didn’t have the numbers then

Back in the late, great 20th century, the magic Hall of Fame numbers didn’t come with a “+” sign after them. They weren’t measured in ratios or adjusted for leagues, ballparks or eras. But we could add, subtract and count. So mostly, Hall of Fame voters just counted.

And if it was merely a counting exercise, how could they have looked at Dick Allen as one of baseball’s most dominating sluggers — when he hit just 351 career home runs? How could they have placed him alongside baseball’s most accomplished hitters — when he was more than 1,100 hits short of the 3,000-Hit Club?

You know how many position players whose careers began in the expansion era had been elected to the Hall without getting 2,000 hits? That answer is zero.

And you know who the last hitter was to get elected by the writers whose AL/NL career hit and homer totals were both as low as Allen’s (or lower)? That was Jackie Robinson – in 1962.

So how do we explain why there wasn’t a single Hall of Fame election, in Allen’s 14 years on the writers’ ballot, in which he even got 100 votes — or 20 percent of the vote? That’s how. Repeat after me:

He didn’t have the numbers – well, not those kinds of numbers, anyway.

The numbers that matter now


I’ve heard this a zillion times in the last two years, since Harold Baines was elected by the Today’s Game Era Committee in 2019: If Harold Baines is now a Hall of Famer, how can Dick Allen not be a Hall of Famer?

Here’s my reaction: Wrong. It isn’t Baines — a product of the counting numbers of yesteryear — who should have changed the perception of Dick Allen. It’s actually Edgar Martinez.

Like Edgar, Allen gets no HOF bonus points for anything he ever did with a glove on his hand. And just as they did with Edgar, no voters are seeing Cooperstown through the prism of Dick Allen’s old-fashioned counting numbers.

In Edgar’s case, voters realized his greatness wasn’t defined by his 309 homers or his 2,247 hits. But his 147 OPS+, his 147 weighted Runs Created Plus and his .933 OPS? They were almost unparalleled in his generation. So even though it took a while — until Martínez’s final year on the ballot, in fact — we finally figured it out.

In Allen’s case, the folks jumping on his bandwagon also look right past the numbers in his hit column and home run column. Those aren’t the numbers that tell us what a historically special force Dick Allen was in his time. It’s those modern metrics — the same ones that propelled Martínez onto the Cooperstown podium in 2019. And what a story they tell.

Allen vs. his generation

It’s the 11 seasons from 1964 through 1974 that should paint Dick Allen’s Hall of Fame portrait. Did you know there were 17 Hall of Fame hitters who got at least 4,000 plate appearances during those same 11 seasons? It would be hard to argue that any of them were more feared or productive than Allen. And only iconic Hall of Famers are even in the debate.

OPS+

Dick Allen 165
Willie McCovey 161
Henry Aaron 159
Frank Robinson 159

OPS

Henry Aaron .941
Dick Allen .940
Willie McCovey .937

SLUGGING


Henry Aaron .561
Dick Allen .554
Willie McCovey .541
Willie Stargell .541

wRC+

Dick Allen 163
Willie McCovey 158
Frank Robinson 158
Henry Aaron 158

So how could five of those Golden Days Era Committee voters not have noticed that?
For the same reasons, I suspect, that the writers voting in the 1980s and ’90s didn’t factor any of that into their votes: Not in their personal stats glossary.

In Allen’s spin through the writers-ballot cycle, those numbers didn’t even exist, other than slugging. So you can’t exactly say the voters of the 1980s and ’90s missed them. They were invisible. And I can testify from my own experience, serving on a previous version of one of these era committees, that there was next to no discussion of modern metrics.

So if a player’s case has to be built around, say, wRC+, that can be a hard case to sell — at least in that group. Maybe in five years, that won’t be as true, as these numbers grow more and more familiar to everyone who cares about baseball. But it isn’t true yet. And that’s a shame.

The 160 club


Chris Bodig is the force behind the invaluable Hall of Fame website cooperstowncred.com. The voters of the 1980s and ’90s didn’t have him around to help them. And it’s too bad he wasn’t in the room when the Golden Days Era Committee met.

He delved recently into a fascinating research project — one that wouldn’t have been possible in any other era. He dug into every modern hitter who has had any 10-year stretch with an Adjusted OPS at least 60 percent better than the average hitter of their eras. Or, to put it in stat-geek terms, he found every hitter with at least 5,000 plate appearances and an OPS+ of 160 or better over any 10-year span.

So why are we dragging that little project into this column?

Because from 1964-73, Dick Allen had an OPS+ of 165.
So he’s on the list.
Here’s everyone who made that list from the expansion era (1961-2021):

Hall of Famers

Henry Aaron
Frank Robinson
Willie McCovey
Jeff Bagwell
Frank Thomas

Still active

Miguel Cabrera
Albert Pujols
Mike Trout

PED asterisks
Barry Bonds
Mark McGwire
Manny Ramírez

Everyone else
Dick Allen

In other words, if you set aside the PED group, every modern masher who has strung together a 10-year stretch at that level of offensive dominance was either a Hall of Famer already or a certain Hall of Famer when their Hall election day arrives. Everyone, that is, except Dick Allen.

Numbers evolve — humans can too

Dick Allen arrived on the writers’ ballot long before I was a Hall of Fame voter. But I still had a few elections where I could have voted for a man who probably did more to make me a baseball fan than any other player of my youth.

I was mesmerized, as a kid, by Dick Allen. I watched him do things I didn’t think humans could do. I watched him hit baseballs over fences and flagpoles and billboards that no humans I knew could reach. I’d never seen anyone or anything like him. I was in awe of his talent and oblivious to his flaws. So you might think I’d have jumped at the opportunity to vote for him.

All right, let me own up to this here: I never did cast a vote for him.

And why was that? He didn’t have the numbers. Why else? Not the numbers of that time, anyhow. Not the numbers I studied and prioritized back then. Not the numbers the voters before me had established as Hall of Fame benchmarks, numbers that shaped my ballots — and the ballots of hundreds of other writers.

But these times aren’t those times. So when I think back now on my mother’s unforgettable review of Dick Allen’s Hall of Fame credentials, you know what I think? She wasn’t exactly wrong. Not then. And I wasn’t either, not at the time.

Now, though, here’s what I’m sure of: The Golden Days Era Committee was wrong. Not all wrong — because I certainly have zero problem with the election of Minnie Miñoso, Jim Kaat, Gil Hodges or Tony Oliva. But wrong on Dick Allen.

If those committee members were willing to overlook the fact that Hodges and Oliva never got 2,000 career hits, it makes no sense that it was Allen who missed their cut. Let’s take the hit and homer totals out of it and see how those three men stack up in the numbers that should matter:

Dick Allen

XBH - 750
AVG -.292
OBP -.378
SLG -.534
OPS -.912
OPS + 156


Gil Hodges

XBH -713
AVG -.273
OBP -.359
SLG -.487
OPS -.846
OPS +120

Tony Oliva
XBH -597
AVG -.304
OBP -.353
SLG -.476
OPS -.830
OPS +131

You shouldn’t have to memorize the definition of every metric on baseballsavant.com to look at those numbers and recognize which player on that list was the most dominating offensive force. It seems obvious.

It also seems obvious, at least to me, that everyone who is asked to vote for the Hall of Fame in this day and age should be up to speed on what every category on modern stat sheets mean — not just the ones that ruled the conversations of 30 and 40 years ago.

I recognize that Dick Allen’s numbers haven’t changed in over four decades. But we humans have. So in five years, when the Hall gets the Golden Days Era band back together, they’re all free to vote however they want to vote. But when it comes time to debate the case for Dick Allen, here’s where that debate should begin:

Turned out he had the numbers after all.

Re: Just Shut the HOF Down

Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2021 7:50 pm
by headclown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLS3nnqKmiY

Here is a podcast that backs up all those numbers and the absolute travesty that is his denial into the hall...He should have made it in during the normal voting, but to not get in under this voting system is just ridiculous.

Re: Just Shut the HOF Down

Posted: Sat Jan 01, 2022 2:46 pm
by jimbomill
I would not miss it if the HoF were shuttered. Or, maybe the present voters need to be dismissed while holding possible successors to some type of competency requirement.