If you’re like me — and you know you are — you’ve always known the moon landing was fake but never could place your finger on exactly why. Well, never fear! John Moltz has taken time off from getting lit the fuck up by the Orioles of all teams and wrote this handy list of ten reasons why he knows it was fake. So go read that and then you can feel all smug about yourself when you explain to those stupid establishment drones at the office why they’re such idiots.
This guy says he is. I’m pretty thoroughly unconvinced by his argument, though. And, yes, I realise it’s a few years old, but given that Jim Ed was just inducted into the hall, it was just pointed at me.
Let me start by saying that, when I was a kid, Jim Rice was my absolute favourite baseball player. I don’t really know why, since I’m too young to have seen his real glory days; he was declining hard by the time I even knew what baseball was, but he was still my favourite. I love Jim Rice, and I’m thrilled to see that he finally got into the hall, but I am compelled by his numbers to point out that Jim Rice was a very marginal Hall candidate. He was solidly above-average offensively for almost all of his career, but he was at best acceptable defensively, and he declined early. But is Dale Murphy really a better candidate? I’m just not sold. Let’s take this in order.
Fenway Park was a better hitter’s park. The point here is that Rice’s numbers are inflated by Fenway. This is pretty much correct, and he makes good use of OPS+ to illustrate the point (OPS+ is park-adjusted). He is correct that Rice’s OPS+ at his peak wasn’t much better than Murphy’s. But there’s a little cherry-pick here: he goes on about how Murphy’s fourth-best OPS+ is better than Rice’s third-best (which it is, by one point), but fails to mention that Rice has only two seasons of OPS+ under 100 — his rookie year (which consisted of 74 PA), and his final year (228 PA). Murphy has seven seasons of below-average offensive production, and his worst posted OPS+ is 0, as compared to Rice’s 70. You could argue that, at their peaks, Dale Murphy was comparable to Jim Rice, but Rice was better than average even after he declined. Murphy simply was not.
The National League was better than the American League. This is a weird point, and he supports it with weird data. All-Star Game wins is probably the worst single data point you can use to support anything, and 1970-1985 career wins leaders is also pretty flimsy. Wins are so massively team-dependent that you can’t just look at the leaders in wins for that period and say "yup, them’s some awesome pitchin’" and be done with it. I realise I’ve said this before, but, if you’re really convinced that the best pitcher is the pitcher with the most wins, well, congratulations Jason Marquis on being the best pitcher in baseball.
Of course, the real comedy moment is that, of the ten leaders in wins over that period, a whopping four were "primarily NL pitchers," which isn’t exactly setting the World of Datacraft on fire with its importance.
Rice hit into a ton of double plays. Yes he did: 315 of them, to Murphy’s 209. This is closely related to the next point, so I’m going to deal with them together:
Murph walked a lot more, at least in his best seasons. 986 BB to Rice’s 670 is nothing to sneeze at. That’s a big difference, and it’s Rice’s biggest weakness as a hitter: he wasn’t particularly patient. Had Rice swung at fewer bad pitches, his BB would go up and his GIDP would go down. This is a point in Murphy’s favour, though it’s worth noting that his career OBP is a bit lower than Rice’s, even with all those extra walks taken into account.
Of course, another thing that’s worth considering is that GIDP is also a team-dependent stat; if there’s nobody on base ahead of you, you can’t have a double play. Murphy’s Braves teams were rotten, whereas Rice’s Red Sox teams were good. Good teams will have more GIDP opportunities; it’s very likely that Murphy hit almost as many hard ground balls to short as Rice did, but there was nobody to double off of second.
Murphy was a Gold Glove centerfielder, Rice an average-at-best left fielder. This is a valid point made in a bad way. Murphy may have been superior to Rice defensively, but Gold Gloves are not useful for demonstrating that. Why? Because Gold Gloves are not a statistical award — they’re a voted-on award. The hacks at the BBWAA hand them out, which is why The Captain has three of them despite being, at the very best, an average defensive SS. This is a hard point to argue, since defensive statistics are not exactly robust, but probably the moat useful measure we have is Fielding Runs Above Average. I’m seeing 24.2 for Rice (which is actually way better than I expected), and, uh, -33.4 for Murphy. So Murphy’s glove was worth 58 runs fewer than Rice’s. Murphy’s CF-only numbers? -40.4. In RF he was a lot better: 27.6, which is just a hair less than Rice’s LF numbers (27.7). (None of these numbers are outstanding, of course: Ozzie Smith (for reference) posted a ridiculous 238.7 at SS.) So, actually, it looks like Jim Rice was a somewhat above-average LF, and Dale Murphy was a somewhat above-average RF who played CF for some reason, and didn’t do such a great job. And won a bunch of Gold Gloves for the exact same reason a SS with a career FRAA of -122.6 has three Gold Gloves: because they’re a popularity contest voted on by uncritical writers.
Dale Murphy is not a superior Hall candidate. He was a good player who is, by all rights, more borderline even than Jim Rice. If you’re a big-hall kind of guy, and you believe it should include players like Dale Murphy, that’s fine. But he was not better than Jim Rice.
And don’t you even get me started on Dave Parker.
