Baseball 2012 Archives

Age 57. The brain tumors got the third strike past him that Calvin Schiraldi never could. A good man and a great ballplayer, gone too soon.

I put Carter in context in my Hall of Fame catchers column in 2009:

Gary Carter carried the heaviest catching workload of anybody whose prime spans eight or more years - a staggering 144 games caught per 162 team games (and this for a team, in Montreal, that often stacked up doubleheaders in August due to April snow-outs). If you watched Carter at the tail end of those years and the seasons that followed, you saw what a brutal toll the workload took on his body, as every aspect of his game unraveled. Carter is the classic guy whose numbers make more sense when you extract his prime from the wreckage that followed. Besides being a devastating power hitter, Carter was a very tough guy to run on until his last year in Montreal, and in an age when base thieving was running rampant in the National League. In New York he also mentored a talented young pitching staff, or rather shared that role with Keith Hernandez.

As I noted in that column, over the decade of his prime from 1977-86, Carter caught 38.5% of base thieves, while facing an enormous volume of opposing stolen base attempts. And while carrying that heavy defensive load, Carter averaged .274/.347/.474 with 26 HR and 92 RBI. I'd rank Carter behind Josh Gibson, Johnny Bench, Yogi Berra, and Mickey Cochrane, and maybe Mike Piazza given how much better a hitter Piazza was than Carter or any other catcher. But you'd have a hard time finding anybody else with a good case to rank above Carter (I'd put him ahead of Campanella, Dickey, Fisk, Pudge Rodriguez, Simmons and Posada), which in my book makes him the 5th best catcher in MLB history (given that Gibson never played in the majors).

Carter was baseball's Tim Tebow before there was a Tim Tebow - a cheery Christian off the field, tough as nails on it. Carter was the ultimate guy who never backed down, never gave up, never begged out. I loved, loved John Stearns as a kid; Carter had Stearns' toughness with more talent. He battled Stearns to a draw in home plate fight around 1978 or so. In the famous 1986 Mets-Reds brawl, after Ray Knight clocked Eric Davis, Carter took Davis out of the fight by tackling him with his mask under Davis' ribs, knocking the wind out of him.

Carter, of course, arrived with a bang in New York. His first game as a Met, April 9, 1985, he caught the whole game and hit a game-winning walkoff homer in the 10th inning against the Cardinals. His second game, two days later, he caught all 11 innings of a 2-1 win against the Cards. His third game, the next day, he homered in a 1-0 win. He caught the next day (another win), then homered and drove in two runs while catching a 4-0 win the following day. And yet Carter would get better: the last 62 games that year, while catching a young staff including the incomparable season by Dwight Gooden, Carter hit .300/.367/.599 with 21 HR and 59 RBI, while striking out just 18 times (this included his 5 homers in two days rampage in San Diego in September. This after a 1984 season when Carter became one of just four catchers (the others being Bench, Campanella and Darren Daulton) to lead the league in RBI.

By 1988, Carter was a shell of his former self, with his months-long home run drought stuck at 299 career homers a sad joke. But he still had one last great moment left, when he doubled in the winning runs in a 3-run rally in the ninth inning of Game One of the LCS, the Mets rallying to win after Daryl Strawberry snapped Orel Hershiser's scoreless streak earlier that inning.

Rest in Peace, Kid. Thanks for the memories.

UPDATE: Gus Ramsey has a great story about Carter at the Hall of Fame.

SECOND UPDATE: An emotional Keith Hernandez breaks down on air. Keith's a cool customer by nature, but this is what we're all feeling.

How tough was Carter? People forget exactly how many doubleheaders the Expos played in those days because of early season snow. From 1977-83, Gary Carter caught both ends of a doubleheader 40 times in 7 years (I counted games in the game log where he entered the game as a catcher and caught a few innings). In 1978, Carter caught both ends of ten doubleheaders. Ten. In September 1979, Carter caught both ends of a doubleheader 6 times in 13 days. In September 1981, Carter caught both ends of doubleheaders on consecutive days.

Carter drove in 101 runs in 1980 batting behind tablesetters who hit .257/.337/.363 and .224/.307/.293. In 1984, he led the league in RBI hitting behind a guy with a .301 OBP, on a team whose leadoff hitter was 43 years old, slow, and hit .259/.334/.295.

I should do roundups like this more often of the stuff I do on Twitter.

-Jose Reyes' hair sells for $10,200 in charity auction. The hair will play SS for the Mets.

-I largely agree with Victoria and with John McCain about Syria; the US has much stronger case for taking sides in Syria than it did in Libya.

-Looking back at the sad death of Ron Luciano.

-The one thing that's really booming in this economy - despite the best efforts of liberal activists and the Obama Administration to the contrary - is domestic oil and gas production. Frack, baby, frack!

-Science fail: an Oklahoma state Senator is apparently unaware that baby-making requires both a sperm & an egg.

-Yeah, sure, and being against Nazis is just what Elie Wiesel does to feel young & virile again. It is true that older people overestimate recurrence of the troubles of their youth. Ascribing this to "testosterone" is juvenile.

-Yet another "better Romney argument than Romney is making" column, this one with good ideas from Jim Pethokoukis. Call it a Prospectus for America.

-Dan Abrams debunks some of the myths around Citizens United.

-Then: "core symbol of right-wing radicalism" Now: Democratic mainstream. We always knew a lot of the anti-war stuff was just partisanship. Of course, unlike Greenwald, I regard this as a good thing for the country.

-Elvis Andrus focused on getting better. This seems like a unique goal to have.

-It's not even remotely inconsistent for Mitt Romney to profit from something while saying it should not be compulsory.

-John Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign is still spending money, even though it's in debt to taxpayers.

-The media's blind spot on religious liberty.

-Vin Scully on not retiring.

-I'd forgotten that, for idiosyncratic reasons, Reagan actually won the popular vote in the GOP primaries in 1968.

-The Wilpons try to get the Supreme Court interested in reversing a decision in the Madoff litigation.

While I write a lot about baseball and politics, I generally try to avoid mixing the two. But once this analogy occurred to me, having lived through both of their tenures as a Mets fan and Republican in the 1990s, it was irresistible:

Bobby Valentine is the Newt Gingrich of baseball managers.

Think about it. Both are essentially relics of the 1990s who have spent a good deal of the past decade as TV pundits, and have had to overcome the initial instinct to laugh at the sudden re-emergence of a once-controversial figure so long out of power. Both are restlessly intelligent, talkative to a fault, energetic to the point of being a whirlwind of activity, devious (in the "what will he think of next?" sense of being constantly alert for ways to exploit opportunities and gaps in the rules), prone to conflict with peers and occasional mutinies among their subordinates, and often overly impressed with their own intelligence. Both have that odd Kermit the Frog lump-in-the-throat tone to their voices, yet are nonetheless compelling speakers. Both had their first go-round ended by George W. Bush, more directly in the case of Bobby V (who Bush fired, rather than just stepping into a power vacuum he left behind). Both have been mostly successful throughout their careers, yet are back pursuing the largest prize that has evaded them. Both need to overcome the creeping suspicion that they're better suited to being scrappy insurgents than frontrunners.

The parallels are not perfect, of course. Valentine lacks Newt's command of history and his ugly marital record; Newt lacks Valentine's family connections (as Ralph Branca's son in law) or his status as a former phenom felled by misfortune (in 1970, Valentine hit .340/.389/.522 as a 20 year old shortstop in the Pacific Coast League, winning his second straight league MVP award - 39 doubles, 16 triples, 14 homers, 29 steals - but was just getting his sea legs as a 23 year old in the majors when he suffered a gruesome leg injury). But once you think about it, the similarities are obvious.

Time will tell which of them ends up with more to show for their return to the arena.

The results of the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot will be announced this afternoon at 2, and expectations are that Barry Larkin will be the sole candidate elected. There being no pitchers on this year's ballot worth discussing that I haven't beaten to death in years past (short summary: no on Jack Morris, no on Lee Smith), let us a take a look at the non-pitchers.

I've already laid out my case for Tim Raines by comparing him to the other tablesetters in my December 2007 Hardball Times column here and for Barry Larkin and against Alan Trammell in my January 2007 THT column on the middle infielders here. I touched on Javy Lopez, new to this year's ballot, in my January 2009 column on the catchers. In my first column in the series, in January 2006, I discussed the case for Fred McGriff and sort of for Bernie Williams, and against Tim Salmon, Dale Murphy, and Don Mattingly. To complete the picture you can check out my April 2010 column on the third basemen, which endorses the Veterans Committee's latest selection, Ron Santo.

Utiliizing the same methodology from those columns - that is, excerpting the "prime" seasons for each hitter and translating them into a common offensive context (you can get the details explained in the THT columns), let's put the whole lot of them in a chart with a number of of the other sluggers of the past 30 years (I included some but not all of the tablesetters, third basemen, middle infielders and catchers for additional context). They are sorted by the "Rate" metric (using the context-adjusted numbers, I multiplied SLG * OBP * Plate Appearances per 162 scheduled games) - obviously you then have to modify that with the things not included in the Rate (baserunning, double plays, fielding, and team/postseason successes) as well as bear in mind how many seasons each player is rated on and how many other more modestly productive years he had. It's a rough metric, but the basic concept of rating Hall of Famers mainly on their prime years is one I feel strongly about.

Player	Yrs	Oth	Ages	PA	Avg	SLG	OBP	SB	CS	DP	Rate	Ballot
Frank Thomas	10	2	23-32	684	0.314	0.573	0.423	3	2	17	165.7	Not Yet
Jeff Bagwell	13	0	23-35	685	0.294	0.541	0.396	16	6	16	146.8	YES
Wade Boggs	9	3	25-33	705	0.338	0.481	0.425	2	3	16	144.1	IN
Don Mattingly	6	1	23-28	684	0.329	0.550	0.372	1	1	15	140.2	YES
Albert Belle	9	0	24-32	674	0.293	0.573	0.362	10	4	20	140.1	Off
Edgar Martinez	9	4	32-40	618	0.313	0.537	0.422	3	2	13	139.9	YES
Jim Thome	10	4	24-33	631	0.277	0.556	0.397	1	1	8	139.3	Not Yet
Todd Helton	9	1	25-33	673	0.303	0.525	0.391	4	2	13	138.2	Not Yet
Manny Ramirez	14	2	23-36	621	0.302	0.566	0.392	2	2	16	137.8	Not Yet
Jason Giambi	9	2	27-35	613	0.287	0.540	0.415	1	1	11	137.5	Not Yet
Gary Sheffield	10	3	27-36	632	0.298	0.537	0.404	12	5	12	137.2	Not Yet
Rafael Palmeiro	12	2	26-37	698	0.283	0.532	0.363	6	2	12	134.9	YES
Fred McGriff	9	3	24-32	658	0.283	0.544	0.375	6	3	15	134.1	YES
Sammy Sosa	10	1	25-34	670	0.282	0.570	0.351	14	6	13	134.0	Not Yet
Ken Griffey jr	11	2	20-30	643	0.290	0.567	0.366	15	5	11	133.7	Not Yet
Dale Murphy	8	0	24-31	681	0.276	0.535	0.361	17	6	12	131.7	YES
Eddie Murray	14	1	21-34	671	0.296	0.519	0.374	6	2	15	130.0	IN
Mark McGwire	13	0	23-35	549	0.266	0.601	0.389	1	1	11	128.3	YES
Chipper Jones	13	3	24-36	621	0.303	0.529	0.390	10	3	15	128.1	Not Yet
Mike Piazza	10	4	24-33	590	0.319	0.572	0.379	2	2	18	127.9	Not Yet
Criag Biggio	9	4	25-33	720	0.299	0.459	0.385	34	10	6	127.3	Not Yet
Jim Edmonds	6	4	30-35	590	0.285	0.557	0.387	6	4	7	127.0	Not Yet
Bernie Williams	9	1	25-33	649	0.309	0.504	0.388	13	7	15	126.8	YES
Dwight Evans	10	5	28-37	659	0.274	0.505	0.377	4	2	13	125.4	Off
John Olerud	10	3	24-33	650	0.301	0.475	0.399	1	1	17	123.2	Off
Keith Hernandez	11	1	23-33	666	0.301	0.473	0.388	9	5	12	122.5	Off
Paul Molitor	10	7	30-39	667	0.316	0.484	0.379	26	6	12	122.3	IN
Kirby Puckett	10	0	25-34	678	0.317	0.506	0.356	10	6	18	122.2	IN
Rickey Henderson	14	7	21-34	621	0.296	0.476	0.413	78	17	8	122.0	IN
Jim Rice	12	0	22-33	665	0.294	0.530	0.345	5	3	23	121.4	IN
Robin Yount	10	0	24-33	658	0.306	0.507	0.364	15	4	12	121.4	IN
Tim Raines	9	6	21-29	645	0.304	0.481	0.389	67	10	8	120.9	YES
Bobby Bonilla	10	1	25-34	651	0.285	0.514	0.359	3	4	13	120.2	Off
Will Clark	12	2	23-34	606	0.302	0.510	0.377	5	3	7	116.6	Off
Tony Gwynn	14	2	24-37	624	0.342	0.480	0.389	22	8	16	116.2	IN
Darryl Strawberry	9	0	21-29	571	0.267	0.554	0.360	22	9	6	114.0	Off
Mark Grace	11	3	25-35	667	0.303	0.450	0.373	6	4	15	112.0	Off
Tim Salmon	11	0	24-34	614	0.276	0.489	0.372	4	4	8	111.7	YES
Al Oliver	11	2	25-35	626	0.312	0.503	0.348	6	5	15	109.8	Off
Juan Gonzalez	11	0	21-31	586	0.290	0.559	0.333	2	2	15	109.0	YES
Larry Walker	13	0	24-36	541	0.294	0.535	0.369	16	5	10	106.9	YES
Jack Clark	14	0	22-35	534	0.271	0.522	0.383	4	4	12	106.7	Off
Andre Dawson	11	4	25-35	607	0.285	0.530	0.330	20	6	12	106.2	IN
Dave Parker	12	2	24-35	595	0.295	0.518	0.342	12	8	12	105.3	Off
Jorge Posada	8	3	28-35	574	0.275	0.474	0.377	2	2	15	102.5	Not Yet
Barry Larkin	9	4	27-35	567	0.295	0.473	0.377	28	5	11	101.3	YES
Alan Trammell	11	1	22-32	613	0.292	0.451	0.358	17	8	9	99.1	YES
Javy Lopez	10	1	24-33	472	0.282	0.483	0.326	1	2	14	74.3	YES

For most of these guys, picking the prime years is easy - in a few cases, like Palmeiro, Manny, and Sheffield, you could debate going a year or two more or less, but it doesn't affect the analysis much. But a couple of the candidates can be sliced in different ways. Raines and McGriff both had the same career pattern: a slightly shorter 8-9 year peak of superstardom, followed by a long tail of being a good but not great everyday player, followed in Raines' case by a 3-year coda with the Yankees as a successful and productive platoon/role player on a championship team. This has the unfortunate effect, especially since both players' latter years were much higher-scoring, of people forgetting how dominant they were at their peaks. Bagwell's career path is a better version of the same, with his best 8-year stretch being out of this world. Then there's Edgar, who was an absolute offensive monster for 7 years; the two years after that were good enough that I included them above, while the prior 5 included some great work (his 1991 batting title) but also a lot of time lost to injury. I include 3 different cuts on Edgar so you can judge for yourself.

Player	Yrs	Oth	Ages	PA	Avg	SLG	OBP	SB	CS	DP	Rate	Ballot
Jeff Bagwell	8	5	26-35	695	0.297	0.567	0.409	19	7	15	161.1	YES
Edgar Martinez	7	6	32-38	650	0.318	0.550	0.426	3	2	14	152.2	YES
Fred McGriff	7	2	24-30	650	0.286	0.567	0.385	6	3	13	141.8	YES
Edgar Martinez	14	0	27-40	578	0.311	0.523	0.412	3	2	13	124.4	YES
Fred McGriff	15	0	24-38	644	0.281	0.511	0.367	5	2	15	120.8	YES
Tim Raines	15	0	21-35	631	0.296	0.456	0.382	54	10	8	109.9	YES
Fred McGriff	8	7	31-38	640	0.277	0.468	0.352	3	2	16	105.4	YES
Tim Raines	9	9	30-38	507	0.285	0.416	0.370	25	6	7	78.0	YES

My short answer is that of the 14 or 15 serious candidates (I say 14, discounting Tim Salmon), there are 2 no-brainers: Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines. I realize Raines doesn't stick out as well on this chart as when you compare him to the other tablesetters, but when you roll in his very high-value base thievery, few GIDP and longetivity, I think he clears the bar easily. There's one more to me who is a fairly easy call: Fred McGriff. As I've said before, among the shortstops I go with Larkin and not Trammell, and among the pre-1994 sluggers I find Mattingly's and Murphy's prime years too short, and Dave Parker's numbers weighed down by the big performance-detracting drug phase in the middle of his prime (Edited: I forgot that Parker's off the ballot now). Javy Lopez had a season or two of genuine Hall-worthy production, but he doesn't make the cut; Jorge Posada, who retired this weekend, should but that's another year's debate.

Then you get to the PED-era sluggers. Realistically, there's actually not a huge gulf between a number of the guys on this ballot who make it, and those who don't. Some just were healthier, more durable, in circumstances more suited to their talents than others. And that's precisely why the PEDs are such a big issue.

A brief digression, since the issue is unavoidable. I'm sort of in the middle on a lot of steroids debates. I reject the simplistic argument that steroids are of no help to performance in baseball. I find something suspicious in, especially, the unique aging pattern of Barry Bonds, and there is no question that Mark McGwire in particular used PEDs to help him get healthy again in the second half of his career. And while I understand why people expect more of baseball players, I accept the argument that there's never been a true age of innocence in Major League Baseball. And I'm sick of the agendas on all sides of the debate. In the end, for a variety of reasons, I say we ignore PEDs, put in the guys who got the job done on the field, and let the arguments follow.

Setting that aside, I start with Palmeiro, who was a paragon of consistent productivity for 12-13 years. To me, the fact that his teams could bank on his performance is a huge factor.

At the other end you have Juan Gonzalez and Larry Walker, Gonzalez with Hall of Fame power, Walker with a more complete package of skills. But you see them even below the less glamorous Tim Salmon on the chart because neither had the in-season durability over their primes. So, an easy no on Gonzalez, Walker and Salmon.

That brings us to the three hard cases: McGwire, Edgar and Bernie. I do think setting them next to the other sluggers of that era is helpful - whether we know it or not, we're already setting the stage for what we will do when Thomas, Thome, Helton, Manny, Giambi, Sheffield, Sosa, Griffey and Edmonds get on the ballot. Poor Albert Belle already got stampeded off the ballot, despite the fact that his offensive prime tops any of those guys but Thomas and Bagwell by this measurement.

Bernie, like Griffey, gets a leg up for being a center fielder (a good one, albeit with a bad arm), and of course for being one of the core players on a legitimate dynasty. I'm inclined to vote yes on Bernie, even though that means a very crowded list of Yankees from that era (Jeter and Rivera will go in, Torre probably will, Raines, Posada and Mussina should, Sheffield should, Clemens and A-Rod will unless the writers are really ridiculous about PEDs, and that's before you get to Giambi and Pettitte, to say nothing of the not-so-far-off-the-pace guys like O'Neill, Ventura, Strawberry, Knoblauch, Gooden, Cone and Justice). But really all that is on 9 years' worth of prime production, not an especially long stretch for a guy who was never dominant.

I'm really conflicted on all three. McGwire strikes me as a Hall of Famer due to his amazing power numbers and great OBPs over a 13 year span, and gets some credit for playing for a team that won 3 straight pennants and a championship. But his injuries put him at the back of this pack, although by this measure he still stands ahead of Edgar over their 13/14 year primes.

Edgar is also a very tough call. Elite, Hall-quality hitter, no doubt. But even aside from the negatives we incorporate here (high-scoring offensive context, durability issues), Edgar has everything else going against him: zero defensive value, slow baserunner, played for teams that consistently underacheived despite an amazing talent core, a career mark of .156/.239/.234 in three ALCS (compared, to be fair, to .375/.481/.781 in four ALDS). I certainly would not be offended at including a guy of Edgar's elite status as a hitter, but the case for him seems much weaker to me than it seems to a lot of sabermetrically-inclined folks who tend to total up his career numbers and ignore the injury-driven holes in his playing time.

The thing that struck me the most is that when you set aside their mystiques and the offsetting virtues of Edgar's high batting averages vs Big Mac's homers, what you see is that their cases are quite similar. That doesn't mean you can't reach opposite conclusions based on the factors at the margins, as I do with Larkin and Trammell, but it does suggest that just writing one of the two in and the other one out should not be done without a thorough analysis. If forced to vote, I'd pull the lever today for Bernie and McGwire but not Edgar, but I could easily be persuaded to the contrary for any of the three. That leaves us:

YES
Jeff Bagwell
Tim Raines
Fred McGriff
Rafael Palmeiro
Barry Larkin
Mark McGwire
Bernie Williams*

NO
Edgar Martinez
Alan Trammell
Larry Walker
Jack Morris
Lee Smith
Don Mattingly
Dale Murphy
Juan Gonzalez
Tim Salmon*
Javy Lopez*

* - First time candidates. Also no on the rest of the first timers, of which the best is probably Ruben Sierra.

Finally, for what it's worth, below the fold is another quick set of metrics on the career numbers.

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