While I’m sort of happy for Aroldis Chapman who has reportedly agreed to a five-year, $30MM deal with Cincinatti, I have one primary question for him.

If you were escaping Communist Cuba for American shores, would you really want to sign with a team called the Reds?

Just asking.

When Randy Johnson announced his retirement earlier this week, baseball lost it’s greatest nickname. “The Big Unit” was perfectly descriptive (he is big) and raunchy.

With Johnson’s departure, we’re left to wonder, what’s the best nickname of the rest? If you can think of a great nickname that we neglected to include in the poll, please click “other” and tell us your choice in the comments section.

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If you read his column, you know ESPN’s Buster Olney regularly links to pieces by sportswriters all over the country.

Today, Olney writes, “Bill Conlin wonders why there is not more support for Tim Raines.”

I read that and I thought, “No way.”

As a rule, Conlin and I don’t agree. He thinks Jimmy Rollins is better than Derek Jeter. I don’t. He thinks the Phillies were smart to sign Raul Ibanez to a three-year deal. I think they’ll regret it by year three, if not sooner. Conlin thinks modern statistics are just “wishful fan numbers.” I think numbers are valuable.

So when I read that Conlin, unlike a majority of Hall of Fame voters, supports Raines’ candidacy, I was shocked. Finally, some common ground! Maybe Bill and I weren’t so different after all?

Then I read his column.

It turns out that while Conlin supports Raines, he didn’t actually vote for him. Not this time.

From the Daily News:

It is simply not fair to keep placing your bet each year on candidates who simply have not been as highly regarded by your BBWAA colleagues as a man you consider worthy of a vote. I voted for Tim Raines his first year of eligibility. But when he failed to get 25 percent of the vote, he was moved to the back burner. Sorry, that’s just the way it has to be.

Who did Bill vote for this year?

You can only vote for a maximum of 10 players. I checked six names on my ballot and have never voted for more than six. Three are guys who have been knocking on the door and need to be affirmed by the BBWAA before they wind up being passed onto a dazed and confused veterans committee that last year honored World War II second baseman Joe Gordon. I voted for two pitchers, Bert Blyleven and Jack Morris, whose numbers look a lot better now that the 300-game winner is being excised from history by the pitch-countniks, and The Hawk, wonderfully talented rightfielder Andre Dawson.

From the impressive list of ballot virgins, I voted for Alomar, Martinez and McGriff. I’m already feeling guilt for not giving a nod to Gallaraga. Next year.

Tim Raines, if you’re reading this, please understand — it’s not that Conlin thinks you don’t belong in the Hall. He just doesn’t want to waste one of his six votes on a guy who doesn’t have a chance of getting voted in, unless that person’s name is Fred McGriff. Even though, technically, Conlin gets 10 votes. But he’s never voted for more than six, you see, and if he went over that self-imposed limit the world would spin off it’s axis.

I’d like to think that this kind of illogical thinking about HOF voting is unique to Conlin, but it’s pretty clear that lots of voters employ similarly arbitrary rules, to the detriment of deserving candidates like Raines, Alomar, and Blyleven.

I can’t say I’m surprised, considering it’s the BWAA, but still, when it came down to it, I was actually pretty sure that Roberto Alomar was going to get into the Hall on his first ballot, if only because he obviously deserves to be in and because the ballot was so thin this year, at least relatively speaking. But I obviously underestimated the extent to which the baseball writers fetishize this whole “first ballot or not” thing, and the extent to which some of them still hold the spitting incident against Alomar, despite the fact that Hirshbeck and Alomar have long since made up, are now friends, and Alomar has actually raised money for Hirshbeck’s charity.

Where does Alomar rank all time?

Oh well.

But in any case, after what I felt was the success of my recent experiment with “crowdsourcing” the ranking of the best players of all time to random internet websites, I decided to see where Roberto Alomar might (or might not) rank among the best second basemen of all time, at least according to the collective wisdom of ye internets.

Again, my method was, I randomly searched google to find the first top-10 lists that came up, on the presumption that if they come up first on google, than the clicks and links of millions web surfers must have decided that these are the best, and then aggregated the results.

Actually in the case of second basemen, though, I could not find even the ten top-10 lists that I was hoping to find, so I had to go with just the eight lists of top-10 all time second sackers that appear to be all that exists on the internet. So in order to make the scores similar to my shortstop ranking, and have them still be out of 1000 possible points, I “normalized” the points allocation so that each 1st place ranking would be worth 125 points, where as each 10th place ranking would be worth 116 points.

In total, only 15 second basemen were ranked across the 8 lists. Here’s what resulted…

Top 15 Second Basemen of All Time

(Total number of points out of 1000, with number of first-place votes in parentheses)

1. Eddie Collins – 992 (5)
2. Rogers Hornsby – 992 (2)
3. Joe Morgan – 984 (1)
4. Nap Lajoie – 855
5. Charlie Gehringer – 841
6. Jackie Robinson – 840
7. Ryne Sandberg – 831
8. Craig Biggio – 712
9. Roberto Alomar – 711
10. Rod Carew – 591
11. Frankie Frisch – 587
T12. Bobby Grich – 235
T12. Jeff Kent – 235
14. Bobby Doerr – 118
15. Lou Whitaker – 116

Once again the internets, at least collectively, basically got this one exactly right. The top three at second base are very close and you can almost go with any combination, but you basically can’t really argue with those three guys being on top.

There were several really close races this time. Eddie Collins and Rogers Hornsby were exactly tied on points, with Collins getting the edge due to his 5 first place votes to Hornsby’s 2. Meanwhile, Charlie Gehringer just barely edged out sentimental favorite Jackie Robinson for 5th place by one point, while Biggio’s longevity edged out Alomar’s superior peak also by just one point. Rod Carew was rightly dropped down the list for having played more games at first base than second, but he still was a heck of a second baseman for a long time, and enough people gave him credit to keep Frankie Frisch out of the top 10 by a mere 4 points.

There was a pretty big dropoff in points after Frisch at number 11, though. It seems that there is a near consensus on who the top 11 second basemen are, if not the exact order.

As for Alomar, he got ranked 9th all time, which seems about right: good enough to be in the top 10 ever and thus an easy case for the Hall of Fame, but definitely outside the true inner circle.

So yeah, it’s a good list, although soon to be outdated, obviously, if Chase Utley keeps churning out MVP-esque seasons year after year.

Original Lists

“The Best 11 Second Basemen of All Time” (Bleacher Report)
“Top 50 Second Basemen of All Time” (The Baseball Page)
“MLB’s 10 Greatest Second Basemen of All Time” (Bleacher Report)
“Top 10 Second Basemen” (About.com)
“Rating the Top Baseball Players of All Time” (The Baseball Guru)
“All-Time Top 100s: Second Base” (Seth Speaks)
“Top Keystone Sackers” (Baseball Think Factory)
“The 25 Second Basemen with the Best Careers” (Seamheads.com)

This is interesting: MLB.com’s Matthew Leach reports, “If (Matt Holliday) finishes in the top-10 in MVP balloting in 2016, a $17 million option vests for 2017.”

You know what it takes to finish in the top 10 in the MVP voting? This year, it would have taken a total of 49 points. That’s about four first-place votes. Or 2 fourth place votes, 1 fifth place vote, 2 sixth place votes, 3 seventh place votes, 1 eighth place vote, 1 ninth place vote and 2 tenth place votes (that’s what 1oth place finisher Matt Kemp got).

If Holliday has a decent season in 2016 and the Cardinals even sniff the playoffs, he’ll get some MVP love. Maybe he won’t get any first or second place votes. But he could get a handful of sixth and seventh place votes. And that could be enough to put him within spitting distance of the top 10.

If just one first place vote could be the difference between Holliday’s option vesting or not, what’s to stop an enterprising sports writer from approaching Holliday and offering his vote in exchange for some of that cash?

It wouldn’t be a matter of compromising one’s journalistic integrity, as MVP voting has nothing to do with journalism.

It would be a matter of sacrificing personal integrity.

How much money would Holliday have to pay you for your (theoretical) vote?

Recently, as I was writing my post on why Barry Larkin deserves to be a first-ballot hall-of-famer, I got to wondering who the top 10 shortstops of all time are. In order to get an answer, I decided to crowdsource my question to the internet!

What I did was I went to Google and looked up the first ten top-10 rankings of shortstops that I could find, and tallied up their rankings to get a final top-10.

Honus is still the king.

As for the question of whether the first ten random top-10 lists I found are reliable or not, I crowdsourced that too, in a manner of speaking – because these lists were the ten highest ranking according to Google’s PageRank formula, by some definition they are the best lists, because they are the lists more people want to link to.

Taking each player’s ranking from each of the ten top-10 lists, I subtracted that number from 101 to get a point total, which I added to their score. In other words, a first place ranking on a list was worth 100 points, for a theoretical maximum of 1000 points over the 10 polls, and a 10th place ranking on a list was worth 91 points. This ensured that appearing low on two lists was still worth more than appearing high on just one list. If lists listed more than 10 players, I did not give points for any ranking after 10, in order to ensure that all lists were weighted equally.

So without further ado, here are the top ten shortstops of all time, according to the average of ten random internet top-10 lists, along with total final score and total “first place votes” in parentheses:

1. Honus Wagner – 992 (5)
2. Cal Ripken Jr. – 974 (1)
3. Alex Rodriguez – 885 (2)
4. Derek Jeter – 858
5. Ozzie Smith – 765 (2)
6. Robin Yount – 669
7. Ernie Banks – 671
8. Barry Larkin – 657
9. Luke Appling – 562
10. Arky Vaughan – 561

Amazingly, given the rather ridiculous method I used, this is not a bad list at all. In fact, it is pretty close to a list I might have made myself using some sort of advanced statstics-based measures. A-Rod got left off of one ballot on account of his time at third base, so his ranking of #3 seems fair, especially given that by the end of his career he will almost certainly have more innings played at third base than at shortstop (not to mention his admitted steroid usage).  Even if we leave A-Rod out, assuming he is going to wind up remembered more as a 3B, it’s pretty hard to argue with a top 5 of Wagner, Ripken, Jeter, Ozzie, and Yount.

Ernie Banks was similarly left off some ballots since he played more games at first base, so it’s right for him to not be in the top five, but given that he still played 1125 games at shortstop, was one of the first power-hitting shortstops, and is best remembered as a shortstop, #7 doesn’t seem like a bad spot to have him at.

All in all, I find myself quite encouraged by this little experiment in crowdsourcing, as this is really a pretty decent result. If people are interested, it might be worth doing this for other positions, and seeing what comes up.

By the way, altogether across the ten top-10 lists, 20 different players appeared at least once.  Although I was mostly interested in the top ten, where outliers were not likely to appear, in case you are interested the next best ten shortstop according to the average of these lists were:

11. Luis Aparicio – 369
12. Lou Boudreau – 373
13. Joe Cronin – 279
14. Omar Vizquel – 187
15. Alan Trammell – 184
16. Phil Rizzuto – 183
17. Dave Concepcion – 94
18. Pee Wee Reese – 93
19. Nomar Garciaparra – 93
20. George Davis – 91

Here are the ten lists I used (again, these were the first ten lists to come up on Google):

“Top 50 Shortstops of All Time” (The Baseball Page.com)
“Top 10 Greatest MLB Shortstops Of All Time” (Bleacher Report)
“Top 10 Shortstops In Baseball History” (About.com)
“Best Shortstop of All Time?” (FanIQ)
“Top Ten Shortstops of All Time” (World in Focus)
“MLB’s 10 Greatest Shortstops of All Time” (Bleacher Report)
“FSN Sports Top 10 Shortstops” (Baseball Fever)
“Greatest Major League Baseball Shortstop All-Time” (Rankopedia)
“All-Time Top 100s: Shortstops” (SethSpeaks)
“Best Shortstops in History” (RateItAll)

This year UmpBump continues its annual tradition of honoring the greats by casting our vote for who we think deserves to be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. As always, we vote not just on players currently eligible for Hall of Fame voting under baseball’s arcane eligibility rules, but for any and all players retired at least five years and not currently in the Hall of Fame.

In 2008, we inducted Goose Gossage into the UmpBump version of the Hall of Fame, and last year, we inducted Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines. Although Raines is not yet in the real Hall, since he’s already in our Hall we didn’t include him in the voting this year, although judging from the number of UmpBump voters who put him on their ballot anyway as a sign of solidarity, we gladly would have voted him in again this year.

Voters this year included Umpbumpers Sarah, Alejandro, Zvee, Paul, Coley, and Nick, and distinguished guest voters Melissa, a longtime UmpBump reader, and Tyler Hissey, editor of the blog “Around the Majors.”

Here are this year’s results, in order of total number of votes received:

Roberto Alomar – 7
Barry Larkin – 6
Bert Blyleven – 5
Ron Santo – 5
Shoeless Joe Jackson – 4
Pete Rose – 4
Alan Trammell – 4
Andre Dawson – 3
Edgar Martinez – 3
Mark McGwire – 3
Buck O’Neill – 3
Fred McGriff – 2
Jack Morris – 2
Dick Allen – 1
Harold Baines – 1
Albert Belle – 1
Dwight Evans – 1
Gil Hodges – 1
Minnie Miñoso – 1
Dale Murphy – 1
Ted Simmons – 1
Lou Whitaker – 1
Maury Wills – 1

With 8 voters, this years UmpBump Hall of Fame enshrinees are Roberto Alomar with 87.5% of the vote, and Barry Larkin, just edging in with exactly 75% of the vote.

Edgar Martinez, who many consider a sure bet for eventual enshrinement, only got 3 votes from on his first year of eligibility, perhaps a sign of the mild distaste for the DH that many of us seem to share.

Bert Blyleven and Ron Santo just missed again, but held steady at the 5 votes they received last year. Andre Dawson, however, plummeted from 5 votes last year to 3 votes this year, which may not bode well for his future chances at gaining entry to the UmpBump Hall.

Meanwhile, Joe Jackson, Pete Rose, Alan Trammell, Mark McGwire, and Buck O’Neill all gained ground from last year.

See you next year!

UmpBump Hall of Fame Inductees by Year

2010 – Roberto Alomar, Barry Larkin
2009 – Rickey Henderson, Tim Raines
2008 – Goose Gossage

The Rays are having a quiet offseason, making a few small moves so far. They have openly shopped last winter’s main acquisition, Pat Burrell, but have yet to find a taker (though according to this, they came close). So far, the acquisitions of closer Rafael Soriano and catcher Kelly Shoppach have been their biggest moves.

It’s normal for worst-to-first teams (like the Rays in 2008) to fall back to earth a bit the following year (like the Rays in 2009). The Rays still have plenty of talented young players — and the AL East still has plenty of tough teams. The Yankees and Red Sox are both reloading for 2010, the Jays have a new GM who seems to be finally getting the team back on track, and the O’s have a boatload of almost-ready prospects waiting in the wings.

The Rays have a great young infield — Longoria/Bartlett/Zobrist/Pena — except for catcher, where they’ll be hoping for a rebound season from either Dioner Novarro or Shoppach. Plus, Ben Zobrist will have to show that last year’s breakout was no fluke.

In the outfield, the Rays are hoping that a healthy BJ Upton can bounce back from last year’s abysmal .686 OPS. But that’s not a huge leap of faith, given that Upton clearly has the tools, has elite speed, showed power in the past, and is only 25.

Tampa could use an upgrade in right field. Matt Joyce is seemingly primed for a promotion, though he didn’t do much with his cup of coffee last season. But he should get every chance to win the job in spring training, or at least join a platoon.

Tampa’s rotation isn’t as good as New York’s or Boston’s, at least on paper. But it’s a young rotation that should improve this season as the team’s pitchers get a year older and wiser. Price could break through. So could Wade Davis.

Tampa’s big weakness last season was the bullpen, something they clearly focused on fixing this winter. With a tight budget, they don’t have a lot of room to spend, but with all their young talent, they don’t need to. I hate to say it, but what the Rays really need is for the aging Red Sox and Yankees to suffer a few key injuries.

-What They Need Index-