A Saber-Slanted Baseball Community

Jeff Bagwell: Mark McGwire, listed further down, kicked off the consideration of what is called, for better or worse, the "Steroid Era." And on this ballot, we're really starting to get into the heart of it.

There's concern that we're going to honor every hitter fortunate enough to go deep a few times over the last 20 years or so. I don't view it that way. Thanks to comparable stats like WAR and OPS+, we can measure players against their contemporaries and act accordingly.

And compared to his contemporaries, Bagwell kicks some major tail. He put up an excellent rookie year and just kept getting better. If you look, he didn't revert back to his rookie year (1991) value until 2002, and that was because his defense - very good for the bulk of his career - started to slip, according to the metrics used by baseball-reference.com.

So he's a Yes.

Practically speaking, we can't put all the great first basemen of the last 30 years into the Hall of Fame. There are just too damned many of them (in addition to those mentioned already, we've also got Keith Hernandez and Todd Helton).

I just happen to think Bagwell was the best of them. My guess, though, is that he doesn't get named on more than 50 percent of the ballots in this, his first try.

OK, this is the part where I strenuously object to relying solely on WAR when evaluating a player's Hall of Fame candidacy.