Is Gary Sheffield a Hall of Famer?

If you look at his career splits, he was just as effective, if not more, in situations like RISP, close games, "high-leverage situations," contributed a 1.063 OPS in team wins, and on and on. He has a .950 OPS in tie games, .043 higher than his overall career OPS.

Sheffield was not the mythical "player who hits a solo home run in a 10-0 game (if that player even exists). He had 11,000 career plate appearances, and the overall statistics in that length of a career tend to be a pretty accurate reflection of a guy's value in the lineup, because the solo home runs in 10-0 games and the walk-off home runs all tend to even out to what you would expect.

 

I don't think he's a HOF, by the way. The lack of "black ink" on the back of his baseball card is a pretty good shorthand indication that he was a good, but not dominant, hitter in a very offense-friendly era.

 

Being a "good clubhouse guy" and "doing the little things that don't show up in the stats" is overrated in baseball. Hit the ball. Get on base. That's what matters. So much of the rest of it is rah-rah hokeum.

Sheff isn't a HOFer but he certainly helped teams win.

 

That's a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

 

I know there are plenty of seamheads who think this way, but it is such a limited and lazy point of view. The numbers are there. Use them.

 

Isn't this the entire premise of Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink"? That in about every human endeavor, our first impulse is usually the correct one? So, in other words, this idea isn't unique to baseball Hall of Fame voting. It is stolen from every other area of our existence.

So if baseball writers had 10 seconds to decide on a player, they would probably be correct using this method 95 percent of the time. But they don't have 10 seconds to decide on a player. They have practically unlimited time - certainly more than they need - and unlimited resources in this day and age. Stats. Advanced stats. Game logs. All at their fingertips.

Mizzou's method is just a shortcut. But I think that people get confused into thinking it's a superior method of decision-making. It's not. It's inarguably inferior. It's only benefit is it saves time. And that's irrelevant when it comes to a Hall of Fame vote decision.

 

DD, I guess you're lucky not to have worked with a talented asshole who brought down the whole vibe of things and made it harder for a lotta folks to be productive. You know you have worked with such folks, tho. Yet you don't think this concept applies to baseball?

 

I actually strongly question how much those people actually impact working environments. People like to assume they work better when they are happier, but I don't think that's the case. The connection between morale and productivity is a lot murkier than people think.

But if Sheffield was bringing his teams down, it shouldn't be that hard to at least try to prove it. Come up with some befores and afters for guys he played with, or even look at the teams. It wouldn't be conclusive, but at least it'd be getting away from the almost magical formula where "Nonstatistical value or devalue" happens to coincide exactly with the difference between the player's statistical value and how good the opinion-holder wants to believe he is.

 

To determine who's a Hall of Famer? Hell no. Someone being a clubhouse pariah without Barry Bonds numbers can certainly have that held against them when considering who should be inducted among the game's greatest figures. It's the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Stats.

 

That's reasonable. Do whatever you want with the Hall of Fame.

 

Dools, I don't deny that talented individuals can affect morale to an extent, but I think the impact in baseball is overstated. It is a team game in a literal sense but it's more about individual match-ups. Other than when Sheff threw a ball onto the stands at age 22 I'm not sure how he hurt teams he played for. He played hurt a lot late in his career. He worked counts. I don't remember him causing problems in New York.

I think "clubhouse chemistry" is something that we waste a lot of oxygen on we can't define it. Bonds was a raging asshole who loved only himself. But he is the best player of this era. Hard to argue otherwise. Sheff wasn't as good as Bonds but he also wasn't as big of a prick. I'm not suggesting you'd rather have David Eckstien than Sheff, but I do think Sheff's moody attitude is a little too much emphasis here.

 

I always thought it was amusing how Sheffield acted as if he expected the gold medal of human perfection when he only shoved that guy at Fenway in 2005.