What might the 2017 Hall of Fame voting results look like? ESPN polled 15 of its Hall of Fame voters to get an idea and it's good news for Vladimir Guerrero, who will appear on the ballot for the first time: He received 11 votes, or 73 percent. That percentage would fall short of the 75 percent needed for election but indicates he'll have a strong showing his first year and, if he fails to get in right away, looks like a strong candidate in 2018.
Guerrero passes the Hall of Fame eye test: By that, I mean the method by which many voters fill out their ballot. When you were watching him play, did you think you were watching a Hall of Famer? Guerrero is a pretty easy "yes" there, even though he spent the first half of his career playing on mediocre Expos teams. While that north-of-the-border obscurity has arguably hurt Tim Raines, Guerrero played in a different era, with a constant stream of highlights and the Internet to push his greatness. Playing in Montreal won't be a factor. He also won an MVP Award with the Los Angeles Angels.
The numbers, however, don't necessarily scream slam dunk:
Player A: .318/.379/.553, 449 HR, 1496 RBIs, 9059 PAs, 140 OPS+, 59.3 WAR
Player B: .284/.376/.527, 393 HR, 1199 RBIs, 7980 PAs, 132 OPS+, 60.3 WAR
Player A is Guerrero. Player B is Jim Edmonds. OK, Guerrero was the better hitter and had a longer career, but it's reasonably close. Then you consider that Edmonds was an eight-time Gold Glove center fielder and Guerrero was an erratic, error-prone right fielder. And in the postseason, Vlad shrank in the spotlight:
Guerrero: 44 G, .263/.324/.339, 2 HR, 20 RBIs
Edmonds: 64 G, .274/.361/.513, 13 HR, 42 RBIs
Seems like, when you add everything together, their cases are pretty similar once you dig past the eye test. And yet Guerrero may get elected on the first ballot while Edmonds was booted off after one year. It doesn't make sense. But Hall of Fame voting doesn't have to make sense!
Anyway, I don't have a vote yet, and I'd vote for Guerrero as well. His uniqueness helped make him special beyond the numbers. Of course, I can't deny that Guerrero was one of the worst percentage ballplayers ever who was also a great player. He didn't walk much (although his intentional walks boosted his overall walk rate), he grounded into a lot of double plays (he's 17th all time in most double plays), he had a strong throwing arm but one that came with a lot of errors (he led his league nine times in errors and has the fifth most among right fielders since 1954), and his career stolen-base percentage was a mediocre 66 percent, below the break-even point. If you think of Joe Morgan as the greatest percentage player ever, Guerrero is kind of his opposite.
What I didn't realize until reading this piece on Guerrero from Paul Swydan at FanGraphs is that Guerrero was such a terrible baserunner. Paul writes:
Guerrero was a really bad base runner. Of the 3,681 qualified position players in major league history, only 11 have/had a worse BsR than did Guerrero. Half of those 11 were catchers (or came up as catchers) and none of them were outfielders. Among the 1,523 qualified outfielders, Guerrero is dead last, and it’s not even remotely close. That matters. To me, anyway. I still remember Guerrero costing the Angels’ a potential rally in Game One of the 2005 American League Division Series with a caught stealing on an ill-advised hit-and-run.
The FanGraphs baserunning metric estimates Guerrero was 49.8 runs below average in his career -- right behind Brian McCann. I mean ... McCann is slowwwwwww; Vlad could run a bit.
Here's the weird thing: Baseball-Reference says he was only three runs worse than average in his career. So, umm ... that's a big difference, about five WAR of value. So this is confusing. It turns out that FanGraphs includes double plays in its baserunning formula; Baseball-Reference separates out double plays. Add them together and B-R has Guerrero as 20 runs below average (still a sizable difference, so there's something else going on in the formulas).
Personally, I'd say the FanGraphs system is a little misleading. Look at the FanGraphs leaderboards and you see slow guys like Paul Konerko, Billy Butler, Aramis Ramirez, Victor Martinez and David Ortiz (the bottom five). That makes sense, but the top of the list is all recent players, in part because double play data doesn't exist for all of baseball history. But are double plays really just about baserunning (or speed)? No. Guerrero grounded into a lot of them not because he was slow but because of his style of hitting -- pretty high contact rate and a high rate of ground balls. A guy like Jim Thome grounded into 100 fewer double plays not because he was faster but because he had a lot of strikeouts and fly balls.
It's important to note that double plays are real negative value; I just like the idea of keeping double plays separate from baserunning.
In that regard, Guerrero took the extra base (such as going first to third on a single) 47 percent of the time in his career (and was well above 50 percent early in his career). The MLB average was 39 percent in 2015 and 42 percent in 2000, so Guerrero was above average in that regard. Early in his career, he was a plus runner; late in his career, his knees went and he was certainly much slower. He was reckless: In 2001, he made 14 outs on the bases, most in the majors; in 2005, he tied for the MLB lead with 14; in 2007, he was second with 13. But that aggressive style did generate a lot of extra bases on things like fly balls, wild pitches and passed balls. The overall picture seems to align with the Baseball-Reference figures: Decent speed that was neutralized by too many outs made trying to get that extra base.
Anyway, I doubt too many Hall of Fame voters will be dissecting Guerrero's baserunning value with all that much depth, but it is part of the complete picture of him as a ballplayer. In the end, however, it's still mostly about the eye test and few players have been as pleasing to the eye as Guerrero.
