Vlad Guerrero: HOF?

You are a douche. You quack like a douche and you sound like a douche. I wasn't shifting the argument to win anything, but commenting on how the steroid whispers have obviously affected bagwells HOF candidacy. Go have sex with your favorite straw man

 

Bagwell hit 40+ homers three times, and 30+ another six times. Vlad has two and six, respectively. Bagwell also won a gold glove, and IIRC, was considered a very good fielding first baseman, given that he started at 3B. So, while I don't think it's a slam dunk non-sabermetric case, you can at least make the argument for either player over the other, depending on what criteria you value. It's not like we're trying to argue that Tim Raines or Craig Biggio is more valuable here.

 

Pre-"Moneyball," White Sox fans used to gush over Frank Thomas' patience. It's funny now, thinking that Hawk Harrelson was ahead of the curve. These days, he goes radio silent when a saber metric stat is brought up. (And I don't even find stats like how often a pitcher throws a particular pitch to be all that saber metric. That's where the action is these days.)

 

You don't handle butthurt well, do you? Name-calling won't change things. I did a better job evaluating Bagwell and Guerrero in the past and I do a better job of it now. You got caught up in the pretty throws and the line drives off pitches out of the strike zone while I looked deeper and realized that Bagwell was the better player.

 

And this is why you fail, JC. You don't even understand my argument. Where did I say Bagwell was clean? Nowhere. I said there is no viable evidence he is guilty. If you are going to treat a guy as if he cheated, you should have viable evidence. If you are going to make accusations, you should have viable evidence. I'm sorry that continues to escape you. When you claim there is a 99 percent chance he is guilty, you are speaking from the wrong end of your anatomy and it smells like it.

I'm right about all of it. At least you caught on to part of the point.

 

Like I said, you are a douche. You sound like Ignatius J. Reilly without the humor.

 

So angry, but honestly, you will get over this failure. Maybe. The first step is accepting it and learning from your mistake. When you factor in defense and baserunning, Bagwell was the better player. That much is clear. I didn't need Moneyball to help me figure that out. I just had to engage in a deeper analysis than fond memories of Guerrero's highlight reel. I'm sure you will figure it out someday. Please let me know if I can be of any assistance.

 

Good lord.

 

Gosh, I never thought charting pitches was particularly new deep analysis. Neither did Connie Mack when he did it. It would be an interesting research piece to see just how much of what is considered contemporary sabermetric analysis has deep roots in the game but people did it without all the acronyms.

 

This "deeper analysis" you speak of (especially as re: defense and base running) ... of what did it consist?

 

There was a book about the history of baseball stats by a guy who wrote for the New York Times (Alan Schwartz?). Branch Rickey used a statistician who was ahead of his time. The book is also interesting because it shows how the early stats used in baseball party affected how we viewed the game.

 

The precision, volume, and ready availability of the data is revolutionary. I think I've seen it stated that the number of data points gathered in a typical nine-inning game in 2016 match the number gathered in the entire first century of the sport. Is a lot of it noise? Oh, sure. But teams pour a lot of money and resources into finding people who can tease the useful information from the noise and squeeze a few more wins from limited resources. The cat-and-mouse game is fascinating to me. You can pretend that none of this has changed anything. But then you look back and see that the Angels gave Kent Bottenfield a five-fold raise after he registered a 1.39 SO/BB ratio (but 18 wins!) and I pretty much end up rejecting your argument on its face.