The Hall of wWAR welcomes Billy Pierce. (image via Wikipedia)

The beautiful thing about the Hall of wWAR is that it is a fluid institution. Just because you're in there one day doesn't mean you'll be in there the next. As the formula is improved, the population of the Hall is adjusted accordingly.

I've made a few tweaks to the formula recently and we had some turnover. But before we honor the new "inductees" (and say goodbye to the old ones), I wanted to talk about the changes I made.

1. WAR/162 and 19th Century Players

John Autin of High Heat Stats emailed me with some questions about WAR/162, the modified version of WAR that projects WAR totals for seasons with shorter schedules. John (rightfully) pointed out that in some cases, players were getting over five times the credit for the WAR the earned (like in 1871 when Ross Barnes earned 2.9 WAR in a 31-game schedule).

After some discussion and experiments, I decided to take John's advice and put a cap on the adjustment. A player's WAR/162 can now be no more than twice his WAR. This affected only seasons that were shorter than 81 games—essentially, 1871–1878).

The following players saw the biggest decrease in their wWAR:

1. Ross Barnes (–25.1 wWAR)
2. Cap Anson (–16.8)
3. Deacon White (–14.9)
4. Ezra Sutton (–9.2)
5. Jim O'Rourke (–8.0)
6. Al Spalding (–5.0)

As a result, Sutton falls below the induction line, so he will need to be replaced. He does, however, now sit close to Hardy Richardson. It was a Richardson/Sutton comparison that John made when he emailed me. That's what sparked this change. Their wWAR difference didn't match up with their relative value.

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See the full visualization.

"The Hall of Fame is for the immortals of the game—Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson…"

You hear people say things like this when discussing the Hall of Fame credentials for players like Tim Raines, Alan Trammell, or Larry Walker. Everyone agrees they were good players. But some people simply believe that the Hall of Fame should be reserved for players of a much higher caliber.

The only thing is… it’s not. And it hasn't been since the 1930s.

Thanks to the Hall of wWAR, we now have a list of which Hall of Famers actually deserve to be there. Currently, 63 of the 208 players in the Hall of Fame (30.3%) didn’t deserve to be inducted (and deserve to be replaced by better players).

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Today, Barry Larkin is expected to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. And that's great—Larkin is a deserving candidate.

I feel as though I've made my opinions on the matter very much known. But in case you aren't sick of it yet, I throw my support behind Jeff Bagwell (first and foremost), Edgar Martinez, Barry Larkin, Alan Trammell, Tim Raines, Larry Walker, Mark McGwire, and Rafael Palmeiro.

How about the others? Well, I certainly wouldn't mind it if Fred McGriff was inducted. And I'd actually kind of like it if Dale Murphy was inducted. I want to support him, but can't bring myself to do it. As for the reliever question, if you support Trevor Hoffman you should support Lee Smith. And as for Mr. Jack Morris, I don't support him but I would gladly trade a Morris induction for a Bagwell/Edgar/Larkin/Trammell/Raines induction.

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Peter Abraham is a writer who, even if you disagree with him (which I do on many issues), you have to respect for one simple reason: transparency.

Abraham is very good about disclosing how he votes on post season and Hall of Fame ballots and then providing the reasoning behind his votes. That's more than we see from many writers.

Abraham recently disclosed his Hall of Fame ballot for the class of 2012. In that article, he does an about face on Jeff Bagwell's candidacy. Outside of some typical moralizing about PED use, Abraham is upfront about how leaving Bagwell of the ballot last year was a mistake.

In the same article, Abraham provides his perspective on players that didn't make his ballot. One of them is Edgar Martinez, the long time DH for the Seattle Mariners. Abrahams has this to say about Edgar:

Edgar Martinez will go down as one of the best designated hitters in history. But if he spent his career at third base or first base, he's a borderline Hall of Famer. Being a career DH means you're a lousy fielder, not worthy of extra consideration.

This strikes me as wrong on a number of levels, and arguably Abraham skirts the DH issues just as much as he skirted the PED issue with Bagewell last year.

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Before I wrote for Beyond the Box Score, I had a little blog where I wrote a lot about the best catchers not in the Hall of Fame. I've always been fascinated by catchers—and figuring out who the best ones in history are (since the Hall of Fame has done a weak job of that). Now that I've got Weighted WAR (wWAR) as my tool of choice, I thought I would revisit the topic.

First, I want to tell you about a little tweak I made to wWAR for catchers. It's not for wWAR itself, but rather for the normalized version of wWAR I use to rank players. With wWAR, catchers simply get a different baseline. If I built the Hall of wWAR without going easier on the catchers, there would be about five of them inducted. That's just not right. So catchers have lower single-season bars to clear for Wins Above Excellence and Wins Above MVP credit. That's because they don't play as many games in a season. Now, their careers also don't last as long, so I have a lower career wWAR threshold for induction. What my normalized wWAR does (wWAR/norm in my data tables) is normalize the two induction lines so that we can compare the Hall of Fame case of someone like Gene Tenace to someone like Tim Raines by using a single number.

Speaking of Mr. Tenace, that brings us to the change that I made. For that second (career) adjustment, I was applying the adjustment to the entire career of all catchers. I've decided that was giving guys like Joe Torre and Gene Tenace a bit too much credit (since they played quite a bit at other positions). So, I've only given them a certain percentage of the adjustment (based on the percentage of their career games spent at catcher). I feel we now have some much better results. Here's some noticable movement in the non-Hall of Fame rankings:

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The "Similarity Scores" on Baseball-Reference have been dead to me for a while. Now that B-R added WAR components to the Play Index, I roll my own similarity search when I'm curious about a player. For example, if I want to find players similar to Ken Boyer, I head to the Play Index and search for third baseman with similar WAR batting runs and WAR fielding runs. Why? They are era- and park-adjusted so they actually mean something.

In doing these types of searches I love finding really unique players. And that's what I have for you today.

100 WAR batting runs is an impressive total. 515 hitters have done it, from Babe Ruth (1430) to Max Bishop (100).

100 WAR fielding runs is also impressive—and even more rare. 73 players have done it, from Brooks Robinson (292) to Terry Pendleton (100).

If you're curious, just 29 players have done both. The only one who is retired and not in the Hall of wWAR is Robin Ventura. Willie Randolph, Keith Hernandez, Buddy Bell, Graig Nettles, Bill Dahlen, and Jack Glasscock are in the Hall of wWAR but not the Hall of Fame.

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One of the goals of the Hall of wWAR is to show what the current Hall of Fame would look like if it were populated by a single metric. As a result, it is important to keep the Hall of Fame and the Hall of wWAR the same size. With this week's wonderful news that Ron Santo became the 207th MLB player inducted to the Hall of Fame, the Hall of wWAR also needed to expand to 207 (yesterday, I went into detail about why).

So, today the Hall of wWAR will officially induct a player for the first time. Induction is a simple process. I just need to pick the 207th best player of all time (retired for at least five years), according to wWAR. That player is Frank Tanana.

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Today was a big day.

Sadly, I was forced to be away from the computer for the entire day today. That's too bad because if there's someone who needs to be at a keyboard at the time of a Hall of Fame announcement, you know it is this guy. I couldn't let today's announcement pass without documenting it somehow.

Ron Santo is a Hall of Famer. We've known this for a long time. But now, the rest of the world has to acknowledge it with us.

I lobby for a lot of players for the Hall of Fame. Just to clarify, this isn't because I'm a "Big Hall" guy, necessarily. I just happen to think that the guys who deserve it should be in, regardless of whether or not that "bloats" the Hall. You will often see me support the cases of guys like Graig Nettles or Dave Stieb or WIllie Randolph or George Gore or Stan Hack. I will admit—those guys are basically borderline cases. But you know what? In a just world, they would represent the Hall of Fame's borderline.

Ron Santo isn't in that group.

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