Jeromy Burnitz, Eric Young And Former Brewers On The MLB Hall Of Fame Ballot

Just mumbling a few thoughts on what it takes to be elected to the HOF… I remember when I heard that Greg Vaughn was going to be on the ballot and I actually laughed out loud, but I had forgotten that he had a couple of good years with the Padres/Reds after leaving the Brewers. Even so, I figured it must be an ‘automatic criteria’ thing, because with his career numbers I wouldn’t want to submit myself to a vote… speaking of which, if one of you extremely knowledgeable gentlemen (or ladies) could remind me how a person ends up on the ballot I’d be grateful.

I remember someone talking a few years ago about how he determined whether someone was worthy or not, when looking at career production. Sometimes the totals can be a bit deceiving if people had moderately productive careers that spanned two decades, or short but extremely productive careers, and what he did was take the 10 best years of their careers and compared them. I think he used something less meaningful than WAR, like total bases, but it was interesting to see people graphed against each other.

I was discussing (arguing nicely) in an earlier thread about how I thought Larry Walker was easily as deserving as Barry Larkin for the HOF – and I’m typing this before I run the numbers – what this guy would do is sort out his best years and compare them on a graph to show how different players would have a better performance over time, or a higher peak performance, or sustained ‘all-star-level’ performance, etc. So using WAR and cranking out a quick graph, let’s see how full of crap I am ;)

Ok, what we see is that in his best years, Walker was easily more productive than Larkin. When he was an MVP, he was even more valuable than Larkin as an MVP. After his two best years however, Larkin had a number of years where he put up 3- to 5-WAR seasons, about 1.0 to 0.5 WAR more than Walker per year for the bulk years of his career.

If we cut off the graph to show only the ‘10 best seasons’ they look competitive, but with Larkin being the steady performer, and Walker dropping from ‘MVP’ to ‘almost-all-star’ over the span. You be the judge. I like them both.