That is genuinely the best thing I’ve read today. 

The House That Singles Built

It’s a brave new world and Jamie Moyer is your God-King.

Yeah, you’re probably right. I’m probably just a little spoiled with the Hockey Hall of Fame being here in Toronto right at a major subway stop.

If it works for you, the best defensive player of all time is probably Ozzie Smith and dude skated into the HOF with ease so no worries there. The best defensive 3B and C are all also in the HOF so that’s all good. Bill Mazeroski, who’s probably the best defensive 2B of all time is in. Andruw Jones, who may have a…

Auto Racing, Canned Tuna, Sex...is there anything Millennials won’t destroy?

Side issue but while I know Major League Baseball values its relationship with the people who run the BBHOF and I don’t want to deprive Cooperstown of what I’m sure is a good thing for the local economy but I sure wish that MLB would eventually care about the actual history of the game and put some sort of museum in…

Oh I agree. Baseball HOF conversations are great. There’s no real standard, everyone has their own strong opinions of what the HOF should be and they all make me unreasonably angry. It’s my sports meth.

I haven’t been since I was a kid(Seriously, Cooperstown, be more of a pain in the ass to get to) but thank you for saying this. The idea that the HOF is only about inducted members is just flat out wrong.

To be clear, I’m not really arguing that any of those guys should be in(although I’d take a few of them over Vizquel) just that you can love a guy and think he was an awesome ball player and still be like “Nah, not a hall of famer”.

It’s a tough one because rating defense is probably the least nailed down thing in sabermetrics(or, at the very least, everyone seems to have their own proprietary metrics). If you use Baseball-Reference’s version of Defensive Wins Above Replacement then Vizquel rates as the 9th best defensive player of all time and…

“I’m so honored that they chose Ricky Henderson to speak about one of Ricky’s teammates. Ricky played with Helmet-Man two different times and Ricky played great on both teams.”

Hey man, look at who you’re talking to. My name here is based on a piece of trivial ephemera about my favourite 90's ballplayer. So my thing with Vizquel isn’t that it’s not true, it’s that it’s true of so many guys to me. I could just as easily be here talking about my love for Devon White or Carlos Delgado or Ed…

I think my problem with the “story of the game” argument is that how that story gets crafted depends on so many things. What teams you watch and who happens to be on winning teams and whether those teams are in big East Coast media markets and whether players fit an easy narrative hook the way Vizquel does(light…

Yeah, Fernandez is also representative of something Bill James wrote about before. The HOF has always favoured specialists like Vizquel, who do one thing really well, and not all-around guys who are pretty good at every aspect of the game even if something like WAR has them as being much more valuable.

Ricky Henderson says Ricky Henderson says go fuck yourself

His defense alone made those games worth watching? Didn’t those teams have Albert Belle, Manny Ramirez, Roberto Alomar, Kenny Lofton and on and on? It seems like those games would be worth watching even without Vizquel. 

I think it’s a mistake to confuse “HOFs make stupid decisions sometimes” with “Representing the history of the game” nobody who votes on the Hockey Hall of Fame is out there arguing that third line grinders or back-up goalies should get in. They just occasionally fuck up and put Glenn Anderson and Clark Gillies in. 

But that’s why you can’t choose to look at some numbers with context(dWAR) and some without(BA and OPS). WAR shouldn’t be the be all and end all but Smith and Aparicio are both considerably ahead of Vizquel and I’d already agree that Aparicio is probably on the very low end of what I think the HOF should be about.

Olerud out WARed Vizquel by 20 or so but sure.