Two prominent VC candidates go under the microscope
A large part of what I did with the catcher position is profile every player outside of the Hall of Fame that was within 80 percent of the median Hall of Fame catcher. I’ll do the same with first basemen, but there are always a few names that are left out. I call these guys the “what abouts” as in “what about this guy?” I dedicated a part of the last book to this and probably should continue because I get these questions frequently.
Admittedly, it is a delicate balance. On the one hand, I am openly saying these guys are not fits for the Hall of Fame and that can seem disrespectful to some pretty good ballplayers. On the other hand, it seems more disrespectful to ignore them entirely. Furthermore, some of these guys are on the Veterans Committee ballot, so it seems timely enough.
Steve Garvey and Don Mattingly are those guys at first base. I guarantee if there is a guy that you are wondering about that does not include these two, he probably will be among those I profile later. These two guys are fan favorites that were prominent members of some pretty good teams. The conversation usually starts with the counting numbers and goes from there.
Nearly 2600 hits is a lot of hits. However, this is one of those logical fallacies that gets thrown around a lot. Garvey does not have the most hits for someone not in the Hall of Fame, but there will always be someone with that designation. So, simply saying he has a ton of hits is not as compelling as you would think. Both hitters were .300 hitters and good run producers during their time, but there is a reason why we don’t rely much on counting statistics.
For one, they lack context. How good were they in comparison with the rest of the league? Both players played at a time when offensive numbers weren’t outrageous, but we also know that the percentage statistics aren’t quite as good as the counting ones. This is why we rely on those more sabermetrically minded numbers because they answer some of those questions for us.
We always start with the index and move on from there. That gives us an idea of how they combined offense, fielding, and base running. Keep in mind that the median Hall of Fame first baseman had an index in the neighborhood of 220. So, roughly 180 tended to be the cut off for the 80 percent category.
Quite frankly, I will be very disappointed if Steve Garvey gets serious Hall of Fame consideration. We should be beyond this by now. In short, he just didn’t get on base enough to be a quality offensive player. He was a good player on a very good team and those players almost always put up gaudy counting numbers. However, I’ll illustrate this below with a special table I haven’t busted out in awhile.
I am a lot more sympathetic to Mattingly and his fans. He was clearly a Hall of Fame caliber player in his prime. His prime just didn’t last long enough due to his health concerns. I just am not generally impressed with the “well if he were healthy…”. Yup, I could say that about any number of guys. We have to assess players on who they were and not who they would have been had they not been injured.
There are notable exceptions to this stance and it usually involves players involved in World War II, affected by the color barrier, or who died prematurely. Still, there has to be a logical stopping point and I feel pretty good saying that in Mattingly’s case. However, forgive my indulgence here as I introduce a new number called “bases per outs.”
Outs are the blood currency of the sport. Every team gets 27 of them, so you need to make the most of them. Listed above are the prominent contemporaries for Garvey. We could have included Mattingly here as well, but the point is that we have two Hall of Famers here and three players not in.
Boog Powell looks a lot more like a Hall of Famer than Garvey. Heck, he looks more like one than Tony Perez does, but Perez obviously enjoyed a much longer career. Garvey is better than Chris Chambliss, but is he considerably better than Chambliss? Garvey had a couple more years to his credit, but otherwise they aren’t all that different and no one thinks Chambliss belongs in the Hall of Fame.
These are pretty solid numbers, but they only have value in comparison with other first basemen. When you compare them with those in the Hall of Fame they just come up short. Mattingly was obviously more effective overall and his numbers would probably be good enough at most other positions. First base is just not one of those positions.
I’m just not a Garvey fan. He just didn’t walk enough and that can be seen when we look at the OPS+ and rOBA. I certainly wouldn’t turn down a 2025 equivalent for my team, but I also wouldn’t build anything around him. To bring this back locally, his career numbers are not dissimilar from Yuli Gurriel’s numbers between 2017 and 2021. Gurriel was a fan favorite, but no one considered him an all-star level performer.
A commenter mentioned Mattingly’s great defense. Great might be doing a little too much heavy lifting there. Sure, he was very good and particularly good when he was healthy, but he was not amongst the best fielders at the position. The best he can hang his hat on is that he was good offensively and good defensively. Those players are very good overall and when you add in that he was a better than average base runner (as compared to a typical first baseman) then you could claim that he was an excellent overall first baseman.
As a kid, there was no one better in baseball overall. Before the steroid era, the numbers he put in the 1980s were video game type numbers. He just couldn’t sustain it into the 1990s. Garvey was clearly mediocre defensively. There is nothing wrong with mediocre. It is certainly better than being bad, but there is nothing in his profile that says Hall of Famer.
First place votes get ten points, top five votes get five points, and top ten votes get three points. Clearly, you are seeing a difference between how the voters at the time perceived these players and what their production actually warranted. Garvey won the MVP award in 1974. He wasn’t even in the top ten in BWAR.
I don’t mean to be hostile towards Garvey, but I do mean to be hostile towards those that put too much emphasis on how people do in the awards voting. Mattingly is obviously closer to his actual production. At least he finished in the top five when he won his MVP award.
Mattingly’s numbers look spectacular, but they always come with a context. They came in one playoff series and it was a series his team lost. It is not his fault that his teams were never good enough to make the playoffs, but it is hard to give him a ton of extra credit either.
Garvey on the other hand does get a boost. He appeared in multiple World Series and even won one in 1981. You could say he played an integral part in pennants for the Dodgers in 1974, 1977, and 1981. He also played a key role in the Padres advancing to the World Series in 1984. However, playoff performance is usually a tie breaker when guys are very close one way or the other. Garvey is not particularly close.
Who knows who will read this and whether it will make a difference at all. I know Garvey will have some support and Mattingly has some support amongst fans. Neither of them is particularly close to having the credentials to get in and as we will see, there are any number of guys that have the credentials.