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Debating the resumes of Hall candidates has become contentious in recent years. The steroid era clouded the results of this hallowed ground. Two players, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, might have been the all-time best hitter and pitcher. Neither has gotten the call from Cooperstown. This year’s class is shaping up to be one of the biggest in history. Two players, Lee Smith and Harold Baines, have already been elected by the 16-member electorate of the Today’s Game Era ballot. If I was lucky enough to have a ballot, this is how I would vote.Class of 2019 Roy Halladay: Tragically, Halladay won’t be in Cooperstown to give an acceptance speech. He crashed his plane into the Gulf of Mexico in November 2017. Halladay might be the last pitcher of a former era. He compiled 67 complete games in his career and he needed fewer than 100 pitches in 14 of those complete games. Halladay won two Cy Young awards (2003, 2010) and he finished in the top-five another five times. There may not be another pitcher like Halladay. Edgar Martinez: With the recent election of Baines, it makes no sense to keep Martinez out of the hall. He is one of the best designated hitters of all-time and he is in his final year on the ballot. Paul Molitor spend 44% of his career playing DH and Frank Thomas spend 57% of his career at DH. Both have been elected to the Hall. He received over 70% of the vote in 2018 so he should easily break the 75% threshold in the current election cycle. Mariano Rivera: Rivera utilized one of the best pitches, a cut fastball, in baseball history to become one of the best pitchers in baseball history. He set the all-time record for saves (652) but he might be most remembered for his dominance during postseason play. He was part of five World Series winners and he collected the final outs in four of those championship seasons. Rivera was also a great influence off the field and he could end up with one of the highest voting percentages in Hall of Fame history. Future Inductions Mike Mussina: Mussina’s long career stacks up well, especially when compared to the era that he pitched in. Other pitchers from the era have garnered more recognition but Mussina was strong throughout his career. In one 10-year stretch, he received Cy Young votes in eight different seasons. After finishing at 63.5% in 2018, he’s going to be borderline this year to get in. I think he has to wait one more year and he will be part of the Class of 2020. Omar Vizquel: Vizquel follows the mold of Ozzie Smith in the fact that nearly all of his value came on the defensive side of the ball. Think of him as the anti-Edgar Martinez, whose value came completely on the offensive side. His 11 Gold Gloves at shortstop are second most all-time behind Smith. Smith was a first ballot Hall of Famer. Every shortstop ahead of him on the all-time hits lists is enshrined in Cooperstown or on their way. He should get in, but he will need to gain more support in the years to come. May Never Get In (But Still On My Ballot) Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Larry Walker, Andrew Jones, Todd Helton Bonds and Clemens are two of the greatest players of all time but their connection to the steroid era has kept them out of Cooperstown. Walker continues to gain ground, but recent crowded ballots have kept him from getting elected. He is in his ninth year of eligibility, which means 2020 will be his last opportunity on the writer’s ballot. Jones is a long way from being elected in his second year on the ballot. He is one of the best defensive players of all-time and I think he will can some traction in the years ahead. Helton gets little support due to playing his entire career in Colorado. Still his offensive accolades put him on the borderline for enshrinement. To be transparent, some things have changed on my ballot from last year to this year. I correctly predicted the four players who would be elected last year (Vladimir Guerrero, Trevor Hoffman, Chipper Jones, and Jim Thome). I have replaced those four players on this year’s ballot with two first time candidates (Halladay, Rivera), while adding three new candidates (Walker, Jones, and Helton). Johan Santana fell off the ballot in his first year of eligibility, but I tried to make his case in a series of posts last year. If you missed any of the series on Johan Santana’s Cooperstown Case, there were three parts to the series. The first post looked at the Kirby Puckett Clause and how it can be applied to Santana. The second article touched on the similarities in careers between Santana and the great Sandy Koufax. The third and final piece touched on his missing third Cy Young. Here is the official list of players available to be voted for by the BBWAA. Who makes your list? Leave a COMMENT and start the discussion. Click here to view the article

Recently when I was looking for an objective way to numerically describe how good Engelb Vielma's glove for my Minnesota Twins' top 40 prospect list, which is fairly easily understood as a concept, I came up with a simple metric: The percentage of putouts that resulted in a double play.--- This is an edit to clarify a few points that were made previously that may have been confusing. I did a bit of research to see whether it will pass the stink test, and so looked at Omar Visquel's Gold Glove seasons (1994-2001). Visquel's percentage of putouts that occurred during double plays (DP/PO) was 40%, so I concluded that Vielma's 39.6% was indeed encouraging. Furthermore, I used this metric as supportive of what I have seen with my eyes this season to suggest that Jose Polanco, with a 52.3% DP/PO rate, despite the rumors, is a very good fielding shortstop. This resulted in a major upset on the top 10of my Twins prospect list, and a hearty discussion of the metric, among other things, here. Conceptually it is very simple metric: An effective shortstop will turn more batted balls into outs than a less effective shortstop. It is affected by many things like range and arm, but it is not perfect. It misses the number of chances for double plays as a normalization, and it does not help describe how the shortstop was with the glove when there were no putouts. So I did three things : a. When I first thought of this, I thought that putouts were the way to go, because for some reason it helped tell more about a shortstop than assists. After a bit of discussion and noodling, this is not really valid. I was wrong to use putouts for the denominator. I think that total chances (TC) are a better denominator, so that is it. Instead of percent of putouts that were DPs, I am using percent of total chances that resulted in double plays (%CDP, from the DP/TC formula) b. To add something into the measurement that describes a shortstop in a non-double play situation, I went back to an old (and tired) friend and gave it new life by marrying it with %CDP. This is fielding percentage (FP), which by itself is inadequate to wholly describe fielding, but is a very simple conceptual metric: Errors over chances. So this compound measurement is simply: The percent of total chances that resulted in double plays multiplied by fielding percentage, or FP. Because that is a mouthful, I am calling it shortstop fielding effectiveness, or SSFE. (The name is similar to the other metric I devised to simplify pitching effectiveness: Pitching Effectiveness.) For the equation-inclined: DP/TC x FP=SSFE. c. To normalize for the chances of a double play, or what percentage of total chances were with a man on base, I normalized against the league for a full season, assuming that the chances for a double play are pretty much the same for all teams over the course of 2280 games (152 times 15). A league normalization would be good enough. So I calculated the average SSFE (which was 13.5) and divided each player's SSFE by that average, resulting to a normalized value, which I call nSSFE. A nSSFE of 1 is average, everything above 1 is above average and everything below 1 is below average. To make it look numerically a bit more familiar (think ERA+ and OPS+,) I multiplied by 100, making the average 100, like those other two metrics, creating what I call nSSFE+ (still a mouthful). 139 players played shortstop in the bigs in 2014. Does it pass the stink test? Here is the nSSFE+ for all MLB shortstops in 2014 with more that 200 innings at short. In blue are the above average shortstops (nSSFE+ 110 or more) and in red are the below average (nSSFE+ 90 or less.) Since this is a Twins-focused blog, the Twins' players are in bold. I think that it does pass the stink test if you look who are in the blue categories (JJ Hardy, S. Drew, et al) and who are in the red (Derek Jeter, Jimmy Rollins et al.) Is it a perfect metric? No; because there is no such a thing. But I think that it is easily understood and can be valuable. And it is better than the "eye" alone. The two together may be awesome. Could it be translated to other positions? I will try to play around, but feel free to play and tell me I will eventually look to see how the average moves with history, and potentially refine it, but this is the first attempt. Originally published at The Tenth Inning Stretch Click here to view the article