--- In baseballmn@yahoogroups.com, amugalian@... wrote:
>
> Stew and friends: I have the same edition (hardcover, from Macmillan). I
wonder if later editions caught some of these egregious errors, some worse than
others. When I see an error such as the one Stew described on page six, I want
to quit reading right then. How did something like that so early in the
manuscript get past a proofreader? Bill James must cringe when he sees the Jack
Chesbro or Arky Vaughan errors. As for the dangling modifier, it would be hard
to catch if one is not reading for content, although that's no excuse. Somebody
should be reading for content.
>
>
> I too would be interested in discussing the book online.--art


Some things in the book that stood out to me:

Chapter 5 – It's interesting that what happened early in the process with the
BBWAA voting is what's happening now with the Veterans Committee. With the
BBWAA in the 1940s, there were a limited number of spots on the ballot (a voter
could vote for a maximum of 10) and 75 percent needed for election. With many
qualified candidates still on the ballot at that time, it was difficult for any
particular player to get 75 percent when the voters were limited to 10
candidates they could vote for. With the Veterans Committee today, the problem
is a little different but it's related. A candidate needs 75 percent to get
elected, and the candidates are pretty much in the same range of worthiness.
It's not like they're all definitely qualified as was the case with the stars
who still remained unelected in the 1940s. Now the Veterans Committee is
dealing mostly with players who have already passed through the BBWAA ballot and
were rejected. But the point is that there is not a lot of stratification
within those on the ballot, which makes it less likely for votes to be bunched
enough so that someone gets 75 percent of them. (That differs from the BBWAA
elections today where there are only a handful of candidates who clearly deserve
induction.)

p. 51 – A couple policy changes for the BBWAA balloting in 1956 resulted in a
number of years in which no one was elected by the writers. James points out
that, if not for these changes, the BBWAA may eventually become the single
source of elections to the BBWAA, meaning that the Veterans Committee would not
have been around to make its disastrous selections that watered down the Hall of
Fame in the 1960s and 1970s.

p. 56 – James says that writers tend to balance their ballots, looking to
include a couple starting pitchers, a reliever, middle infielder, slugger, etc.
What hurts players on the ballot is the addition of comparable-type players.
For example, in 1988, Jim Bunning made it to 74.4 percent, on the verge of being
elected. But the next year G. Perry and Ferguson Jenkins appeared on the ballot
in 1989 and Jim Palmer in 1990. Comparable players being added to the ballot
caused Bunning to drop back in his vote totals.

Also on p. 56, James says that as time passes, "the vote comes to depend more
and more on the statistics. And, for that reason, the further you get away from
a player's career, the less important defense becomes."

p. 135 – Where to draw the line on who should be in and who shouldn't? It's
clear that if the standards were loosened even more, we would have far more
bitter people, unhappy about not being in the Hall, than we do now. The bitter
people, of course, aren't the ones who clearly have no shot of being inducted;
they are the ones who are close to the line (wherever that line might be), such
as Bert Blyleven. If somehow that line were to be moved to include more
players, those like Blyleven would get in and be happy, but it would create a
whole new group of people who aren't in but are close enough to the line to be
bitter about not being in. And that group would be much larger than such a
group now.

Chapter 8 – interesting discussion of the value of peak value within career
value. James points out that a lot of players have similar career totals, but
some were more consistent while others had a few big years in their careers. He
raises the question of whether a less consistent player (big peak value but a
lot of down years) contributes more to his team in terms of helping them win
titles. He cites Bill Singer and says if he would have had a bunch of 14-14
years rather than some big years offset by some down years, that his teams would
have won at least one title. On the other hand there are examples of players
who have big years that help their team finish first by a small margin and down
years that didn't cost their team a title since the team finished way out of
first. Instead of continuing to cherry-pick examples that show different
things, he ran a computer program to go through thousands of seasons to see if
the consistent player or the big-year player had more of an effect on teams
winning titles. From this program, he determined that the big-year players
helped their teams to win titles more often.

p. 170 – Glory of Their Times effect. Interesting stuff on how some of those
featured in Larry Ritter's book got elected to the Hall of Fame in the five
years after the book was published in 1966 (Goose Goslin, Stan Coveleski, Harry
Hooper, and Rube Marquard).

pp. 232-235 – In his discussion on if players/quality of play have improved over
time, James cites stuff from Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that the
disappearance of the extremes in baseball (.400+ batting averages, etc.) is
proof that the quality of play has improved and Dick Cramer's statistical
research with cross-season comparisons over the years.

p. 253 – I like James's characterization on how old the people on the Veterans
Committee were: "Nobody gets on the Veterans Committee until he drives at least
two hundred miles with his left blinker on."

At various points in the book, James brings up the question of whether it's
worth inducting 19th century players anymore since they're dead and so is anyone
who ever saw them play and that most people never have heard of them. James
places some credence in that position. To me the only way to support that
position is to say the Hall of Fame is so screwed up, especially by the damage
done by the Frisch-led Veterans Committee, that it's no longer about honoring
the top players.

Stew