Camera Eye Maxie Bishop is one of my favorite all time players and he is absolutely a unicorn. He took walks like a guy that the other team wanted to walk, when in reality they NEVER wanted to walk him. When the guys behind you have lifetime splits of .334/.380/.535 (Simmons), .320/.419/.478 (Cochrane) and .325/.428/.609 (Foxx), you have NO business drawing well over a 100 walks/year when your career SLG is .366 (nearly 60 points lower than his OBP). They never, ever, ever wanted to walk him and yet time after time, they did.
Joe didn't say this about Abreu, because he actually did have a long career, but he's another guy whose entire case is basically his peak: in 7 seasons from 24 through 30, he was between 5.2 & 6.6 bWAR every year, with 27.5 WAA. His full career was 28.3 WAA, with just 2 other seasons above 1.0 WAA.
Is that enough peak? It's not a spectacular one: he was never once a top 10 position player, and mostly outside the top 15. It just feels like a very not-exciting place to be: a top-20 player for 7 years, a pretty good player for 2 more, then utterly blah for 9 more. And WAR is a stat designed to identify players like him, without a dominant tool. But even that stat doesn't make him look like more than a nice player.
Part of the problem with WAR/WAA-first views of the Hall is that it's going to miss why some marginal players make it and some don't. Like, we know about the cronyism of the '60s, and we know some undeserving guys get in because of narrative (Dave "The Garter" Parker doesn't get in). That's just how it is. Well, Abreu doesn't have a narrative other than "he was better than you thought." OK, but he wasn't great by any objective measure, and very few people, then or now, got excited by him. Them's the breaks. Be a better or a more exciting player or a more lovable or quotable person.
Let me be more succinct: I'd like to see comparison stats that weed out the universally known mediocrities. We all know there are undeserving HoFers at every position (except 3B maybe?), there's broad agreement about at least a dozen players. Stop including them in the counting stats, because we really don't want them to be the standard. Like, even Big Hall advocates don't think the line should be set at Lloyd Waner (29.8 WAR, 3.09 WAA, 99 OPS+). Sure, median numbers aren't dramatically pulled down by those guys, but they still fuzz up the comparisons we're trying to make.
I really appreciate the Wright breakdown, because it's exactly what I've been wondering about in light of Parker & Baines and CC & Felix. I actually think too many fans have gotten too worked up about accomplishments from young players (more on that in a sec), and that it goes against the spirit of the long season to decide that 10 seasons of excellence is enough—we don't award MVPs in July.
But the discussion has been really vague, because we've lacked exactly the context that BAT provides. The guy I always bring up, because I'm a Pirates fan and because he is/was awesome, is Andrew McCutchen. We all agree he has no HoF case, right? Anyone want to guess what his BAT is?
That's right, it's 23.1, right on the median for HoFers. And he got almost all of that value in just 5 seasons. So unless you want a truly huge Hall, one that honors every guy with 5 great years, you need to come to terms with the concept of sustained excellence.
[Young player rant: ever since teams started promoting hot prospects young, we've seen constant comparisons to HoFers. But it's always been a mirage, because back in the day, you needed HoF talent to get ML PAs as a teen. Sure, Trout & Harper have lived up to the hype (the former much more than the latter), but how is Jason Heyward's HoF case looking? Or either Upton, or a bunch of other guys who, at age 20 or 24, had HoF comps not because they had that much talent, but because practices around prospect handling (and probably amateur training as well) have changed? And soon we're going to see players with relatively good BAT numbers not because they're as good as HoFers of the past, but because they played 3 more seasons in the bigs. Denominators matter, people.]
I just checked Cutch's numbers again: 115% of his career WAA came through his age 28 season. He had a disastrous, sub-replacement age 29 season for unknown reasons, bounced back a little, but has never since had more than 1.0 WAA.
Point being, at 28, he was already above the median BAT for HoFers. Does anyone think that should be enough?
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he's unique, and stopping the clock as soon as a guy hits 23 WAA wouldn't let in a bunch of players who didn't stand the test of time. But I think the 10 season eligibility requirement isn't a bad one, and actually being good for 10 years doesn't seem like asking too much.
The argument for the shortish careers of Pedroia, Wright, and King Felix is about peak over longevity. I’m okay with this kind of argument. But I don’t think any of these players had peaky enough peaks to get by on this merit. None of them had even one 9 WAR season. Pedroia (8.0) and Wright (8.3) each had one 8+. That’s a nice season and they both had a great career. But the shooting star kind of HoF argument falls a bit flat. There are players most years that hit those totals, so a few seasons like that don’t end the argument. Felix’s best was the 26th best fWAR season in the last 20 years. So it’s nice, but it doesn’t scream unusually dominant.
The short peak argument can work: I think Aaron Judge punched his ticket in 2024 with his second 10+ WAR season. If he never plays again, I think he should be in.
Agreed. There's a reason everybody refers to Koufax—he's basically the only one who had a clear Hall case in such a short career. You can't pretend that Koufaxes come along every few years, but voters are too hidebound to notice. When there was a real Koufax, they noticed!
You could argue that they missed it with Santana, but, while he was clearly better than Hernandez, he didn't stand out like Koufax did (timing again, as Joe would say): when your (older) peers are all-timers like Clemens, Johnson, and Martinez, even 3-4 brilliant seasons don't look like a shooting star.
That is a great question, but like a lot of questions, it requires you to define some of your terms. In general, when we say someone is a "clear Hall of Famer" we mean he has already done enough to merit an induction. If Mike Trout had gotten hit by a bus or died from COVID in 2020, he would have easily been elected to Cooperstown when he became eligible 5 years later. He'd already won an Roy and three MVP awards by then. He'd in fact never finished below 5th in the AL MVP vote in any of his nine full seasons. He had over 300 HR, 250 2B, 200 Steals, almost a thousand runs scored, almost 75 bWAR.
Ditto for Albert Pujols in 2010, when he was ostensibly 30, but probably more like 33 or 34. He'd hit over 400 HR, 400 doubles, 1200 RBI, over 80 bWAR, won 3 MVPs and a Roy, and probably deserved a couple more.
But David Wright? He had almost 350 doubles, 222 HR (same as Mattingly!), over 800 Runs and RBI, 46 WAR. He'd won two Gold Gloves, two Silver Sluggers, made 7 All-Star teams. He got some down-ballot MVP votes, finishing in the top 5 only once, and never getting a single first-place vote. If you're going to say he was a "clear Hall of Famer" at that point, you have to mean that he would become a hall of famer if his second act followed a normal career path.
Sadly, for all of us, it did not. And I say this as someone who idolized Don Mattingly growing up and I would say the same about him. Donnie, I think, has an even better case, in terms of both quality and fame, but injuries robbed him, and us, of the kind of slow downward trend that would have allowed him to accumulate the kinds of stats we think of as appropriate for a hall off fame slugger. Donnie may yet make it on on total career merit, since he also managed pretty successfully, but on his playing days alone, clearly he falls short, and Wright, even shorter.
The writers have to adjust their minds to the changing in pitcher stats or WE will never have another "qualified" pitcher in about 10 years. And guess what, the writers have done it before.
In 1947, Lefty Grove was elected to the HOF. Now you might say, well so what, he was a great pitcher, we all know that. Well Lefty's career ERA was 3.06. Here is the list of the pitchers elected before him and their career ERAs:
Mathewson: 2.13
Johnson: 2.17
Young: 2.63
Alexander: 2.56
Radbourn: 2.68
Walsh: 1.82
Waddell: 2.16
Plank: 2.35
Chesbro: 2.68
And then Hubbell (2.98) and Grove get in in 1947. Now, obviously we can see that Grove (and Hubbell) pitched in VERY different pitching environments than the 9 guys put in before them. If the writers didn't at least understand a little bit that this was true and adjusted their thinking about what makes a great pitcher, Lefty might have been waiting a few more years before he made the HOF. (and My guess, given Grove's election % (76.4%), there probably WERE a few writers who didn't think he passed muster, and they were wrong)
That isn't that much different then our having to adjust our thinking now about pitcher wins and the HOF. As for Felix Hernandez, I am not suggesting he should be at the head of the line. There are some convincing arguments that he doesn't qualify anyway, but we HAVE to adjust.
It was a pleasure to see Parker on the bottom 5 of value before 31 and at the top of the worst after 31 in the Knight portion. I have put analysis of why he was perhaps the least or 2nd least deserving guy on the ballot, and said much about my complete distaste for his election, and how he is one the worst 4 players in the Hall in the post 1900 era. But it makes me feel good to see him stand out on a list not even meant to point him out.
I voted for 8 players, including Carlos Beltran, Billy Wagner, Omar Vizquel, Andruw Jones, and of course, Ichiro Suzuki. In fact, Ichiro was right there with George Brett, Tony Gwynn and Derek Jeter as about as easy a pick as I've had. With the way complex stats are now kept, so that the game and the players can be broken down into numbers like machinery or computer bits, human voters aren’t really needed for Hall selecting--if all that matter are those statistics. I think there’s the human element too. Did somebody ``feel’’ like a Hall of Famer when you watched him play? For his time. For his era. For the way the game was played then. To me that’s big. Otherwise, A.I. might as well vote instantaneously. Someday it might.
So why Omar Vizquel? He doesn’t meet that “human element” standard you have and he’s also apparently a rampant piece of s*** who spent his coaching years abusing young men
Thank you Joe, for the King Felix love. In addition to a Cy Young, in other years he finished second twice, fourth, seventh and eighth. Playing in an isolated corner of the U.S. and playing for an abysmal team that was amazing. His W-L record in his Cy Young year was only 13-12 and that came as a shock to quite a few people. During that year the Mariners were 48-89 in games where he did not get a decision. Those were the same Mariners that thought Edgar Martinez wasn't a full time MLB player for a perennially bad team until Edgar turned 27.
So Corey Kluber is also a Hall of Famer? Why not? How about Tim Lincecum? Of course this means you have to honor Johan Santana. Who will be the first starting pitcher to make the Hall of Fame with fewer than 100 career wins?
I haven't decided how I feel about Felix's case yet, but there is a lot of distance between his 50 bWAR, Kluber's 34 bWAR, and Lincecum's 20 bWAR. Those are not great comps.
I think that the question of the importance of the decline phase is really...ummm...important. But I think Joe is sorta double-counting things. Or asking whether we should double-ignore.
By all means shift from WAR to WAA. Those mere AR (above replacement) seasons are great for counting stats, and some people think that counting and longevity matter. Being AR is still really damn impressive, even if the player is below average. Adding lots of AR after a good run of AA (above average)? Sure, I can see the argument. I don't *buy* the argument, but I can understand why some do. If the player is by guy on my team and I love him, than it's good to keep him where I can continue to experience loving him. But if I am evaluating anyone else? How important or great were they? Above *average* seems a reasonable line.
(I think that average (i.e., mean) a likely a little high. I would prefer above median, but no one is calculating that, I don't think. So, fine, AA).
Once you've switched from WAR to AA, you're *already* wiping out the weak seasons. To say that Wright needed just a little more above average? Well, that's a difference between just talking about peak (Peak 5? Peak 7?) instead of the meaningful for of the career. If you want to call of a Hall of Fame that is just about peak, do that. But if you are not willing to acknowledge that and do that, then why keep chopping off seasons?
Joe is suggesting we ignore the below average seasons, and I can deal with that (if they are not Yankees, obviously). But to then ignore the fact that also weren't enough work above average? No, that's double ignoring.
I've had the same thought about average vs median. Teams see it too: a 1-WAR position player is going to get a 1-year deal for $5M or less, and those deals mostly go to guys with good clubhouse reputations. But a 2-WAR guy is looking at something a lot more like 2/$25M.
Love the shout out for my favorite Deadball Era player, Max Bishop, table setter and unparalleled walk machine for an absolutely stacked Athletics team that dominated for a short but loud amount of time.
J-Roll needs to eventually climb in. Crunch the numbers any way you like, then add in the catalyst factor.
Aren't Wright and Felix really 2 sides of the same coin? Beloved by a fan base, stayed in one place, great BAT, injury shortened careers.
Also, had no idea about the thing with Rollins and the singles. Very cool nugget.
Camera Eye Maxie Bishop is one of my favorite all time players and he is absolutely a unicorn. He took walks like a guy that the other team wanted to walk, when in reality they NEVER wanted to walk him. When the guys behind you have lifetime splits of .334/.380/.535 (Simmons), .320/.419/.478 (Cochrane) and .325/.428/.609 (Foxx), you have NO business drawing well over a 100 walks/year when your career SLG is .366 (nearly 60 points lower than his OBP). They never, ever, ever wanted to walk him and yet time after time, they did.
Joe didn't say this about Abreu, because he actually did have a long career, but he's another guy whose entire case is basically his peak: in 7 seasons from 24 through 30, he was between 5.2 & 6.6 bWAR every year, with 27.5 WAA. His full career was 28.3 WAA, with just 2 other seasons above 1.0 WAA.
Is that enough peak? It's not a spectacular one: he was never once a top 10 position player, and mostly outside the top 15. It just feels like a very not-exciting place to be: a top-20 player for 7 years, a pretty good player for 2 more, then utterly blah for 9 more. And WAR is a stat designed to identify players like him, without a dominant tool. But even that stat doesn't make him look like more than a nice player.
Part of the problem with WAR/WAA-first views of the Hall is that it's going to miss why some marginal players make it and some don't. Like, we know about the cronyism of the '60s, and we know some undeserving guys get in because of narrative (Dave "The Garter" Parker doesn't get in). That's just how it is. Well, Abreu doesn't have a narrative other than "he was better than you thought." OK, but he wasn't great by any objective measure, and very few people, then or now, got excited by him. Them's the breaks. Be a better or a more exciting player or a more lovable or quotable person.
Let me be more succinct: I'd like to see comparison stats that weed out the universally known mediocrities. We all know there are undeserving HoFers at every position (except 3B maybe?), there's broad agreement about at least a dozen players. Stop including them in the counting stats, because we really don't want them to be the standard. Like, even Big Hall advocates don't think the line should be set at Lloyd Waner (29.8 WAR, 3.09 WAA, 99 OPS+). Sure, median numbers aren't dramatically pulled down by those guys, but they still fuzz up the comparisons we're trying to make.
Just when it seemed we were safe from a Kevin Stefanski comment until next fall....
I really appreciate the Wright breakdown, because it's exactly what I've been wondering about in light of Parker & Baines and CC & Felix. I actually think too many fans have gotten too worked up about accomplishments from young players (more on that in a sec), and that it goes against the spirit of the long season to decide that 10 seasons of excellence is enough—we don't award MVPs in July.
But the discussion has been really vague, because we've lacked exactly the context that BAT provides. The guy I always bring up, because I'm a Pirates fan and because he is/was awesome, is Andrew McCutchen. We all agree he has no HoF case, right? Anyone want to guess what his BAT is?
That's right, it's 23.1, right on the median for HoFers. And he got almost all of that value in just 5 seasons. So unless you want a truly huge Hall, one that honors every guy with 5 great years, you need to come to terms with the concept of sustained excellence.
[Young player rant: ever since teams started promoting hot prospects young, we've seen constant comparisons to HoFers. But it's always been a mirage, because back in the day, you needed HoF talent to get ML PAs as a teen. Sure, Trout & Harper have lived up to the hype (the former much more than the latter), but how is Jason Heyward's HoF case looking? Or either Upton, or a bunch of other guys who, at age 20 or 24, had HoF comps not because they had that much talent, but because practices around prospect handling (and probably amateur training as well) have changed? And soon we're going to see players with relatively good BAT numbers not because they're as good as HoFers of the past, but because they played 3 more seasons in the bigs. Denominators matter, people.]
I just checked Cutch's numbers again: 115% of his career WAA came through his age 28 season. He had a disastrous, sub-replacement age 29 season for unknown reasons, bounced back a little, but has never since had more than 1.0 WAA.
Point being, at 28, he was already above the median BAT for HoFers. Does anyone think that should be enough?
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he's unique, and stopping the clock as soon as a guy hits 23 WAA wouldn't let in a bunch of players who didn't stand the test of time. But I think the 10 season eligibility requirement isn't a bad one, and actually being good for 10 years doesn't seem like asking too much.
The argument for the shortish careers of Pedroia, Wright, and King Felix is about peak over longevity. I’m okay with this kind of argument. But I don’t think any of these players had peaky enough peaks to get by on this merit. None of them had even one 9 WAR season. Pedroia (8.0) and Wright (8.3) each had one 8+. That’s a nice season and they both had a great career. But the shooting star kind of HoF argument falls a bit flat. There are players most years that hit those totals, so a few seasons like that don’t end the argument. Felix’s best was the 26th best fWAR season in the last 20 years. So it’s nice, but it doesn’t scream unusually dominant.
The short peak argument can work: I think Aaron Judge punched his ticket in 2024 with his second 10+ WAR season. If he never plays again, I think he should be in.
Agreed. There's a reason everybody refers to Koufax—he's basically the only one who had a clear Hall case in such a short career. You can't pretend that Koufaxes come along every few years, but voters are too hidebound to notice. When there was a real Koufax, they noticed!
You could argue that they missed it with Santana, but, while he was clearly better than Hernandez, he didn't stand out like Koufax did (timing again, as Joe would say): when your (older) peers are all-timers like Clemens, Johnson, and Martinez, even 3-4 brilliant seasons don't look like a shooting star.
𝐼𝑓 𝐷𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑑 𝑊𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑎 𝑐𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟 𝐻𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝐹𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑟 𝑎𝑡 𝑎𝑔𝑒 30—𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐼 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑠—𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑𝑛’𝑡 ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑒 𝑎 𝐻𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝐹𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑟?
That is a great question, but like a lot of questions, it requires you to define some of your terms. In general, when we say someone is a "clear Hall of Famer" we mean he has already done enough to merit an induction. If Mike Trout had gotten hit by a bus or died from COVID in 2020, he would have easily been elected to Cooperstown when he became eligible 5 years later. He'd already won an Roy and three MVP awards by then. He'd in fact never finished below 5th in the AL MVP vote in any of his nine full seasons. He had over 300 HR, 250 2B, 200 Steals, almost a thousand runs scored, almost 75 bWAR.
Ditto for Albert Pujols in 2010, when he was ostensibly 30, but probably more like 33 or 34. He'd hit over 400 HR, 400 doubles, 1200 RBI, over 80 bWAR, won 3 MVPs and a Roy, and probably deserved a couple more.
But David Wright? He had almost 350 doubles, 222 HR (same as Mattingly!), over 800 Runs and RBI, 46 WAR. He'd won two Gold Gloves, two Silver Sluggers, made 7 All-Star teams. He got some down-ballot MVP votes, finishing in the top 5 only once, and never getting a single first-place vote. If you're going to say he was a "clear Hall of Famer" at that point, you have to mean that he would become a hall of famer if his second act followed a normal career path.
Sadly, for all of us, it did not. And I say this as someone who idolized Don Mattingly growing up and I would say the same about him. Donnie, I think, has an even better case, in terms of both quality and fame, but injuries robbed him, and us, of the kind of slow downward trend that would have allowed him to accumulate the kinds of stats we think of as appropriate for a hall off fame slugger. Donnie may yet make it on on total career merit, since he also managed pretty successfully, but on his playing days alone, clearly he falls short, and Wright, even shorter.
The writers have to adjust their minds to the changing in pitcher stats or WE will never have another "qualified" pitcher in about 10 years. And guess what, the writers have done it before.
In 1947, Lefty Grove was elected to the HOF. Now you might say, well so what, he was a great pitcher, we all know that. Well Lefty's career ERA was 3.06. Here is the list of the pitchers elected before him and their career ERAs:
Mathewson: 2.13
Johnson: 2.17
Young: 2.63
Alexander: 2.56
Radbourn: 2.68
Walsh: 1.82
Waddell: 2.16
Plank: 2.35
Chesbro: 2.68
And then Hubbell (2.98) and Grove get in in 1947. Now, obviously we can see that Grove (and Hubbell) pitched in VERY different pitching environments than the 9 guys put in before them. If the writers didn't at least understand a little bit that this was true and adjusted their thinking about what makes a great pitcher, Lefty might have been waiting a few more years before he made the HOF. (and My guess, given Grove's election % (76.4%), there probably WERE a few writers who didn't think he passed muster, and they were wrong)
That isn't that much different then our having to adjust our thinking now about pitcher wins and the HOF. As for Felix Hernandez, I am not suggesting he should be at the head of the line. There are some convincing arguments that he doesn't qualify anyway, but we HAVE to adjust.
It was a pleasure to see Parker on the bottom 5 of value before 31 and at the top of the worst after 31 in the Knight portion. I have put analysis of why he was perhaps the least or 2nd least deserving guy on the ballot, and said much about my complete distaste for his election, and how he is one the worst 4 players in the Hall in the post 1900 era. But it makes me feel good to see him stand out on a list not even meant to point him out.
I voted for 8 players, including Carlos Beltran, Billy Wagner, Omar Vizquel, Andruw Jones, and of course, Ichiro Suzuki. In fact, Ichiro was right there with George Brett, Tony Gwynn and Derek Jeter as about as easy a pick as I've had. With the way complex stats are now kept, so that the game and the players can be broken down into numbers like machinery or computer bits, human voters aren’t really needed for Hall selecting--if all that matter are those statistics. I think there’s the human element too. Did somebody ``feel’’ like a Hall of Famer when you watched him play? For his time. For his era. For the way the game was played then. To me that’s big. Otherwise, A.I. might as well vote instantaneously. Someday it might.
A Rick Telander sighting!
Always enjoyed your writing in SI.
So why Omar Vizquel? He doesn’t meet that “human element” standard you have and he’s also apparently a rampant piece of s*** who spent his coaching years abusing young men
Thank you Joe, for the King Felix love. In addition to a Cy Young, in other years he finished second twice, fourth, seventh and eighth. Playing in an isolated corner of the U.S. and playing for an abysmal team that was amazing. His W-L record in his Cy Young year was only 13-12 and that came as a shock to quite a few people. During that year the Mariners were 48-89 in games where he did not get a decision. Those were the same Mariners that thought Edgar Martinez wasn't a full time MLB player for a perennially bad team until Edgar turned 27.
So Corey Kluber is also a Hall of Famer? Why not? How about Tim Lincecum? Of course this means you have to honor Johan Santana. Who will be the first starting pitcher to make the Hall of Fame with fewer than 100 career wins?
I haven't decided how I feel about Felix's case yet, but there is a lot of distance between his 50 bWAR, Kluber's 34 bWAR, and Lincecum's 20 bWAR. Those are not great comps.
Just pointing out the wishy washy standard of (1) Have some stellar seasons (2) Have a 50 WAR
Why 50 WAR? As you acknowledge, many pitchers have stellar seasons. Why not also demand a 70 WAR? Why settle for 50? Why not go lower?
I hear you. Is Hernandez definitely higher on my list than Cone, Saberhagen, Stieb, Hamels, Hershiser, Oswalt, Buerhle, etc.? No, I don't think so.
close cases, bit i say pass, except maybe Felix
King Felix is a HOFer for sure. He was so dominant at his best.
Many, many pitchers had multiple dominant seasons. How do you not put them all in the Hall of Fame?
I think that the question of the importance of the decline phase is really...ummm...important. But I think Joe is sorta double-counting things. Or asking whether we should double-ignore.
By all means shift from WAR to WAA. Those mere AR (above replacement) seasons are great for counting stats, and some people think that counting and longevity matter. Being AR is still really damn impressive, even if the player is below average. Adding lots of AR after a good run of AA (above average)? Sure, I can see the argument. I don't *buy* the argument, but I can understand why some do. If the player is by guy on my team and I love him, than it's good to keep him where I can continue to experience loving him. But if I am evaluating anyone else? How important or great were they? Above *average* seems a reasonable line.
(I think that average (i.e., mean) a likely a little high. I would prefer above median, but no one is calculating that, I don't think. So, fine, AA).
Once you've switched from WAR to AA, you're *already* wiping out the weak seasons. To say that Wright needed just a little more above average? Well, that's a difference between just talking about peak (Peak 5? Peak 7?) instead of the meaningful for of the career. If you want to call of a Hall of Fame that is just about peak, do that. But if you are not willing to acknowledge that and do that, then why keep chopping off seasons?
Joe is suggesting we ignore the below average seasons, and I can deal with that (if they are not Yankees, obviously). But to then ignore the fact that also weren't enough work above average? No, that's double ignoring.
Nah gonna do ih. Nor should you.
I've had the same thought about average vs median. Teams see it too: a 1-WAR position player is going to get a 1-year deal for $5M or less, and those deals mostly go to guys with good clubhouse reputations. But a 2-WAR guy is looking at something a lot more like 2/$25M.
Love the shout out for my favorite Deadball Era player, Max Bishop, table setter and unparalleled walk machine for an absolutely stacked Athletics team that dominated for a short but loud amount of time.