2013 MLB Hall of Fame Screechfest

The milestones thing kills me, because essentially Sheffield is being punished for walking too much.

Wonder what the equivalent would be in combining walks and hits for a kind of new-age 3,000-hit club.

As Dooley knows, we could only count each walk 0.7 times.

 

Gary Sheffield just seems like the guy slipping through the cracks. Every time his name comes up, people say, "Damn, he was pretty good," but his name rarely bubbles to the top. Probably people like that in every era.

 

Acknowledging that the board doesn't fully embrace WAR, indulge me for a second, just to use it as a rough estimate of a player's career value.

In offensive WAR, all-time, Sheffield is 34th on Baseball Reference.

The next highest ranked non-Hall of Famer (among those already eligible) is Dick Allen at 54th. Then Tim Raines at 63rd. Then Lou Whitaker at 65th. Edgar Martinez at 68th. Then we start to get a few more.

Even if you are a WAR denier, that still gives the formula quite a margin for error to be wrong about Sheffield. It could have overrated him by several spots, in other words, and he's still squarely among the greats.

 

He had just 5 5+ WAR seasons, just 8 at 4+ and 12 at 3+, with a peak of 7.6 largely because he was a poor fielder (-180 runs at position) who played corner outfield.

I'm not saying I would not take a player with 63 WAR, but with personality and PED issues, he's a borderline guy for me.

Now I would not rate a fielder worse overall than the runs deducted if he had been a DH for an entire season which is about -14 per 162 games. He played an equivalent of 16 full seasons, so I wouldn't dock him more than 228 for defense AND position and he gets -180 for defense and -95 for position for a total of -275, so I'd give him back about 47 runs when evaluating his "greatness", but thats about half a WAR.

 

I just don't trust defensive WAR. At all. It's pretty much not reliable enough to even be used as a factor for me.

 

Personality issues?

Christ, we're still talking about those?

 

Anecdotally: Sheffield was always cool the few times I dealt with him. Polite. Thoughtful. Down to earth. He was a Yankee at that point, so take that for what it's worth. They seem to carry themselves differently in that clubhouse than others.

 

Weren't you the one making a big deal out of differences in degree on this very thread? The whole "60 in a 55" that you kept bringing up?

 

Differences in degree matter, yes.

 

Then you shouldn't be dismissing them in these faulty analogies you are using now.

 

I'm not.

 

Sure seems like you are, but we'll just have to agree to disagree on that. The contradiction certainly doesn't help your position.