Rice, Andre, and My Retroactive Hall of Fame Predictions
Rob invited us to pitch in with our Hall of Fame predictions on Sunday night, but I didn't have a chance to reply until now. Here goes:
I predict Ricky Henderson will receive somewhere around 511 votes, Jim Rice will finally get in the Hall with, oh, I'll say 76.4% of the vote, and two clowns will even cast ballots for Jay Bell.
Speaking of Rice and the Hall, Dan Turkenkopf of Beyond the Box Score came up with the 10 best player comps for each of this year's leading HOF candidates.
(Turkenkopf tweaked Bill James' formula for player Similarity Scores to better account for park effects and playing era, thus the differences between the lists below and what you'll find at Baseball-Reference.com.)
Rice's comps, starting with the most similar hitter, include:
1. Willie Horton
2. Frank Thomas
3. Ellis Burks
4. George Hendrick
5. Vic Wertz
6. Bobby Thomson
7. Roy Sievers
8. Fred Lynn
9. Andres Gallaraga
10. Gil Hodges
Here is what Turkenkopf has to say about the Rice comparisons:
Not a Hall of Famer on the list. In case you were wondering, that's not the Big Hurt in the number two spot. Rice's most similar players were all very good players, but no one really is pushing any of them for the HOF except for Hodges. There's been a lot of virtual ink spilled discussing whether or not Rice deserves to be elected and I'm not going to rehash them here, but I will say that I think Rice will be one of the least-deserving players elected when he goes in.
Now here are Turkenkopf's 10 best comps for the guy who finished third in this year's HOF balloting, former Cub Andre Dawson:
1. Billy Williams
2. George Foster
3. Goose Goslin
4. Chuck Klein
5. Dave Parker
6. Tony Perez
7. Dave Winfield
8. Duke Snider
9. Juan Gonzalez
10. Al Simmons
And his commentary:
Dawson's top ten strongly suggests he should be elected. However, this
is one of those cases Bill James warned about where similarity scores
can be deceiving. All of the Hall of Famers on the list were
substantially better offensive players than Dawson. I think Dawson is
helped by the lack of an explicit category for OBP in the sim score
calculation...Dawson's
one of those players who almost perfectly represents the dividing line
between the Hall of Fame and the Hall of Very Good. He doesn't make my
Hall, but I don't begrudge any one who would vote for him.
For the record, the Dawson list includes seven Hall of Famers--Williams, Goslin, Klein, Perez, Winfield, Snider, and Simmons.
You can look up Jay Bell's top 10 comps on your own.
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