Last year’s entries in the Future Hall of Fame series marked my tenth anniversary of writing the series. I remarked at the time that it felt like less time than that because Hall voting moves at such a glacial pace: you need to play for at least ten years (but almost certainly more), and then you need five years of retirement and another year of voting on top of that. Given that I started the series to look at younger players, it made sense that there weren’t many actual Hall results to compare it against; the youngest players from those early articles are still largely in their primes, for the most part!
But we actually did reach a new milestone this year: Adrian Beltre and Joe Mauer are the first players I covered in this series to actually get inducted to Cooperstown! I didn’t actually mention them until the second year of the series, since the 2013 article was focused on players who were 30 or younger. I extended that to 35-and-under the next year, which roped in those two as well as Albert Pujols and Chase Utley (among others), but left out older stars like Derek Jeter or David Ortiz. Those would have given me an easy inductee several years ago, but I didn’t extend the boundaries of my coverage to cover players older than 35 until the 2017 article (which means that I’ve also covered likely upcoming inductees Ichiro Suzuki and Carlos Beltran).
Sure, it’ll still be a while before we see a non-shoo-in player from the series inducted, let alone one who I tracked over the entire course of their career; but like I said, that’s just a big part of covering the Hall of Fame. We’ll have to take the small milestones as we hit them.
Before we start going into this year’s numbers, let’s first take a moment to go over what this method actually is, what it tracks, and all of that other stuff. First, I used Baseball-Reference’s Stathead search feature to look at every Hall of Fame position player, ordered by (their version of) Wins Above Replacement. That makes it easy to find the median Hall of Famer, right in the middle of the pack. Then, I search for the same set by age, looking at where the median fell for all Hall of Famers through their age 20 season, then their age 21 season, and so on, all the way until we’re back to the overall median. That gives us our “Median WAR by Age” line, which we’ll be comparing the players to.
From there, we can get our approximate odds for players who are at or above the median at different ages. First, we look at those median marks for each age and the half of the Hall of Fame members who are above it. Then, I compare it to all of the eligible players who were also above that mark at that age but did not eventually get elected, and take the percentage of players who made it to the Hall out of total players above the median.
To use some fake round numbers as an example: say we had 100 Hall of Famers, and our median for the set through age 22 was 5.0 WAR. We’d have 50 Hall of Famers above 5.0 WAR. Say also that there were 100 other players, who had 5.0 WAR through their age 22 season but did not make the Hall of Fame. That would give us: (50 5.0 WAR Players in the Hall) divided by (150 total 5.0 WAR players), equaling out to roughly 33% chances of induction.
Remember, none of this is necessarily commenting on whether a player will be worthy of induction, or should be inducted; there are of course things like normal snubs above the Hall line who are not inducted, below-median players who make Cooperstown anyway, below-median players who are inducted for extenuating circumstances, “worthy” players who aren’t in for non-play reasons (e.g. steroids), players who might yet get in via the Veterans Committee, and a whole host of other caveats. Those are all interesting and important, but not really a thing that we can universally account for. All this method does is serve as an objective measuring stick to give us an unusual perspective: how do active players stack up against average Hall of Famers when they were the same age, and how did those average Hall of Famers stack up against everyone else through that age?
For additional errata, I’m grouping players by their age during the 2023 season, so the players in the Age 23 group will be in their Age 24 season in 2024. Player Age for a year is based on what their age will be on July 1st in a given season, as is the standard convention. And lastly, I’m only including American League and National League stats, because this whole system is based on comparing precedent to current players, and while the Negro Leagues results are major league stats, I’m not sure they make for a conducive yardstick given the differences in the leagues and the Hall induction methods.
Okay, all that out of the way, we’re ready to jump in to the position player results (with active pitchers to follow in the next article):
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Monday, February 26, 2024
Friday, February 9, 2024
Backyard Baseball 2024: Revisiting the Idea of a Revival
I’ve had a fairly busy month for writing. There was of course all of my Hall of Fame coverage; that always keeps me pretty packed.* I also just published a very large playlist covering the music I listened to over the last few months of 2023 over at Out of Left Field; as a reminder, if you want to see my non-baseball writing, I have a separate mailing list for that! I’ve even started prepping for the 2024 installments of my Future Hall of Fame series, so expect that in the next few weeks.
*I also had another Hall of Fame article that I put a lot of effort into, but I ultimately had to scrap because I couldn’t get it to where I wanted it before the results came in. However, I may try to rework it into something new once the Future Hall updates are done, so maybe keep an eye out for that. Plus, I have a few other music and video game pieces in the works.
But I can’t resist taking a break for a fun idea. So when I learned that Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce is a fan of the Backyard Sports series and has actually looked into buying the rights to revive it, it was too good to pass up. And it makes sense; for people of a certain age, those games were incredibly influential, and for pretty good reason! I wish him luck in his quest to bring them back!
My angle on this is pretty obvious: What would a Backyard Baseball roster look like going into the 2024 season? I’ve actually looked into the idea twice before, back in 2017 and then again during the delay of the 2020 season, so it’s been a little while. Back at their peak, Humongous Entertainment’s individual sports series were releasing new games every year or two, so four years should give us a decent amount of turnover.
As a quick refresher, I’m using the rules of Backyard Baseball 2001 and 2003, where the developers would include 31 real pro players (one from each team, with one team getting two, which I’ll get into more later). Later games would stray from both rules somewhat,* but this gives us a little more structure. Plus, I think it’s more fun this way, sort of like getting to pick the face of a franchise at a given time.
*Also, those later games just generally weren’t very good anyway, although that’s less of a deciding factor.
While there weren’t hard-and-fast rules beyond those, there were a few other you could see trends. You’d generally want mid-career stars, although older stars at the end of their careers could be added if they were big enough names, like Cal Ripken Jr. or Tony Gwynn (sometimes, though, neither were available). Players were strong favorites to return if they were still on the same team, although not guaranteed (about 14 out of 18 eligible players from 2001 were back in 2003), and some big enough names came back even after changing teams (i.e. Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi). Positionally, there wasn’t a huge attempt to balance things, so it’s not a huge issue if we’re not even ourselves. However, one thing to note is that pitchers did feel like a bit of an afterthought (2001 included just 2, 2003 had 3), so it’s probably fine if we focus on position players first and foremost.
Let’s begin with the spots that give us an easy starting point: only thirteen players that I picked for the 2020 roster were even still with the same teams in 2023. However, three of those thirteen are already guaranteed to be elsewhere for 2024 (the retired Miguel Cabrera, the released Madison Bumgarner, and the traded Chris Sale), and another, Joey Votto, is still a free agent (and one who seems likely to sign elsewhere).
How are the other nine looking?
*I also had another Hall of Fame article that I put a lot of effort into, but I ultimately had to scrap because I couldn’t get it to where I wanted it before the results came in. However, I may try to rework it into something new once the Future Hall updates are done, so maybe keep an eye out for that. Plus, I have a few other music and video game pieces in the works.
But I can’t resist taking a break for a fun idea. So when I learned that Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce is a fan of the Backyard Sports series and has actually looked into buying the rights to revive it, it was too good to pass up. And it makes sense; for people of a certain age, those games were incredibly influential, and for pretty good reason! I wish him luck in his quest to bring them back!
My angle on this is pretty obvious: What would a Backyard Baseball roster look like going into the 2024 season? I’ve actually looked into the idea twice before, back in 2017 and then again during the delay of the 2020 season, so it’s been a little while. Back at their peak, Humongous Entertainment’s individual sports series were releasing new games every year or two, so four years should give us a decent amount of turnover.
As a quick refresher, I’m using the rules of Backyard Baseball 2001 and 2003, where the developers would include 31 real pro players (one from each team, with one team getting two, which I’ll get into more later). Later games would stray from both rules somewhat,* but this gives us a little more structure. Plus, I think it’s more fun this way, sort of like getting to pick the face of a franchise at a given time.
*Also, those later games just generally weren’t very good anyway, although that’s less of a deciding factor.
While there weren’t hard-and-fast rules beyond those, there were a few other you could see trends. You’d generally want mid-career stars, although older stars at the end of their careers could be added if they were big enough names, like Cal Ripken Jr. or Tony Gwynn (sometimes, though, neither were available). Players were strong favorites to return if they were still on the same team, although not guaranteed (about 14 out of 18 eligible players from 2001 were back in 2003), and some big enough names came back even after changing teams (i.e. Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi). Positionally, there wasn’t a huge attempt to balance things, so it’s not a huge issue if we’re not even ourselves. However, one thing to note is that pitchers did feel like a bit of an afterthought (2001 included just 2, 2003 had 3), so it’s probably fine if we focus on position players first and foremost.
Let’s begin with the spots that give us an easy starting point: only thirteen players that I picked for the 2020 roster were even still with the same teams in 2023. However, three of those thirteen are already guaranteed to be elsewhere for 2024 (the retired Miguel Cabrera, the released Madison Bumgarner, and the traded Chris Sale), and another, Joey Votto, is still a free agent (and one who seems likely to sign elsewhere).
How are the other nine looking?
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