Season 73 HOF Voting

 The impetus for this blog post is two-fold: first and foremost is the spirited discussion on the World Chat, and secondly is the fact that we've been looking for something to revive the blog a bit so I figured I'd use this space to talk through my thoughts on the HOF debate that we've been having (apologies to those of you on the HOF Committee as you've likely heard a lot of this already!) 

Throughout my time on the HOF Committee, I have used a number of metrics to help me make sense of a player's case for the HOF and/or to prioritize who to vote for in the years we had more deserving candidates than votes to use. The three primary metrics that I go to are Bill James' HOF Monitor Score, Wins Above Replacement and then one that I have adapted from an article a number of years ago about who the best-ever free-agency signing was in MLB up until that point which I have come to refer to as a player's "Importance Score." In short, the "Importance Score" combines a players Wins Above Replacement, Cy Youngs and MVPs (personal performance) with their number of World Series Rings (team performance) to get an overall sense of what they accomplished in their careers. 

In an ideal scenario, I'd have park-factor-adjusted WAR totals that I could use to calculate Importance Scores for each HOF candidate but which metric I use year to year depends on the amount of time I have available to calculate their performance (or if I've calculated some of it in a previous year.) The HOF Monitor Scores take the least amount of time, WAR totals take a medium amount of time, and Importance Scores take the most time, so while it is the metric I'd most like to use, it is also the metric I have recorded for the fewest players. 

This season, to jumpstart the conversation and make a "quick-ish" decision I chose to look at HOF Monitor Scores. Without going into too much detail about how scores are calculated (I'm happy to discuss it via TC, Sitemail or Discord but don't want to take up too much more space than I already have here)these are the categories that I typically sort players into using the HOFM Score:

• Should be Inner Circle HOF'ers (HOF Monitor Score of 130+)
• HOF Quality for sure (HOFM 100-129)
• Good points could be made for and against HOF worthiness (HOFM 70-99)
• Could make HOF given other special circumstances (HOFM 50-69)
• Why am I even on the ballot? (HOFM 49 and below)

Based on the players we had discussed last year and those who had been mentioned in World Chat, I was interested in finding out where Magglio Garza, JJ Jensen, Vic Almadova, David Oropesa, Willie Espinosa, Shane Ashby, Kelly Spiezio, Miguel Fernandez and Carlos Romero each ended up on that scale. The following is what I found out: 

Should be Inner Circle HOF'ers (HOF Monitor Score of 130+)...these are the types of guys I've advocated for "Lock" status across the years

• Carlos Romero, 327 points
• Magglio Garza, 178 points
• JJ Jensen, 158 points
• Vic Almadova, 140 points

HOF Quality for sure (HOFM 100-129)

• David Oropesa, 110 points
• Willie Espinosa, 109 points
• Shane Ashby, 102 points
• Kelly Spiezio, 101 points

Good points on both sides (HOFM 70-99) ...think "Hall of Very Good"

• Miguel Fernandez, 87.5 points

Special Circumstances Needed (HOFM 50-69)

None

Why?? (HOFM 49 and below)

None

By my count, that's 8 players that deserve to be in the HOF based solely on their individual bodies of work, and Fernandez makes a strong case individually plus he won 3 rings so he'd also get my vote in a binary world...which brings me to nine guys I'd happily vote for and I only get to vote for five of them. This means I have to pick and choose and ruffle some feathers (or get WISBob to give us 10 HOF votes! 🙏🏻😂) The four inner circle guys will definitely get my vote, and the fifth one will probably go to whoever among the second tier guys the rest of the committee was lobbying hardest for (but honestly that might even be Fernandez and I wouldn't be mad about that either.)