For the first time in Hardball Stitches history, we have a player on the HOF Nominations page. PaleHose72 suggested that we vote him in on the basis of being the initial nominee in Stitches history, which I would be 100% on board with 😀 However, I also want to use his candidacy to illustrate the HOF process that I've used in a couple of other worlds that has had pretty good success.
That process relies on a number of statistics and also a Hall of Fame Committee. In short, we track the statistics and then, as a committee, use those to come up with up to three "Hall of Fame Locks" for the season that the world then pools their votes around to make sure we get at least a few people elected each year. To start with, I want to do a quick rundown of the stats that mini and I have been tracking that will be useful for evaluating HOF candidacy:
- Hall of Fame Monitor Score - My personal favorite of all of Bill James' Hall of Fame metrics, which assigns point values to certain statistical milestones both for individual seasons and overall careers. A score of 100 is a player who "should" be in the Hall while a score of 130 is your "no-brainer, should probably be elected on the first ballot" type. Conversely, a score of 70 could get in but represents a borderline case. I've also seen players with scores in the 50s get in if they have some sort of special circumstance or specific feat they accomplished as well.
- Wins Above Replacement - The general concept is fairly self-explanatory to those who pay attention to SABR metrics, but there are a couple of quick things that are worth noting in this space. First and foremost, the method of calculating WAR that Mini and I have developed is as customized to Hardball as possible (i.e., calibrated to an HBD run environment, incorporating HBD park factors, etc.) Secondly, Around The Horn will probably be our best reference point for what makes a Hall of Fame player in terms of WAR...I have been a member since Season 1 and also tracking WAR for the blog there the whole time. With one exception (a pitcher who was a no-brainer HOFer before the merger that created Around The Horn) everyone who has been elected to the Hall there had at least 43.9 WAR for their careers.
- Hall of Fame Standards Test - Another Bill James metric, this one is on a 0-100 scale with a hard cap at 100 but in MLB Babe Ruth is only a 79 and the highest score in history is Christy Matthewson at 84. {NOTE: Babe Ruth the hitter was a 79, Babe Ruth the pitcher would combine to bring his total score over 100} I don't have any HBD reference for this, but the linked explainer says an "average Hall of Famer" would score 50 so I'd imagine that I would have a hard time voting for anyone who did not score at least 40 points.
- Importance Score: This 2021 article by Mike Petrellio, ranking the best ever free-agent signings, is the origin of the metric I've come to call "Importance Score." It combines WAR per year with bonus points for winning WS Rings and individual awards, and since there are typically three camps in HOF voting (personal performance, "the ring is the thing", other hardware) this has always felt like the perfect blend of those three things. As a result, this has become my go-to HOF gauge when I have all of the pieces needed to calculate it (I've found that a score of 10.0 or higher is HOF quality and the highest score I've seen is 36.8, but that was a 9x Cy Young who also had multiple rings.)
Typically if a player meets the standard on one of the above, they meet the standard on the majority if not all of them. The job of the committee in my experience, has been to do a bit of hair-splitting and decide which of those should be considered locks and which should be up for a world vote.
At long last, let's examine the case of our first nominee: Aaron Cepicky.
- HOF Monitor Score: 5 points
- Wins Above Replacement: -3.68 through S4, S5 was probably positive but not 3.7 wins so he's almost certainly a net negative for his career
- HOF Standards: 21.9 points
- 2 points for OBP, 19.9 for C defense
- Importance Score: Negative WAR, 0 MVP, 0 WS Rings, 0 seasons above 4 WAR = Negative Importance Score
- Conclusion: His one and only claim to fame is being the first guy on the ballot. But I'm for it, personally.