If You Want to Subtract the Steroid Guys, You Should Add Someone in Their Place

Well, that was anticlimactic. No one got voted into the Hall of Fame this afternoon. No one. From a ballot with quite a few of the greatest names in baseball history on it. Not Bonds, not Clemens, not Sosa or McGwire or Palmeiro. Not Biggio or Bagwell, or Mike Piazza. Not Jack Morris or Tim Raines or Lee Smith. Not Curt Schilling or Edgar Martinez or Alan Trammell, or Larry Walker or Fred McGriff or Dale Murphy, who was in his last year of elligibility (though he by no means deserved to get in). No one. Since I would have voted for quite a few of those players, obviously I disagree with that outcome, most emphatically when it comes to my favorite player, Mike Piazza, the best-hitting catcher of all time. At least there's always next year.

But I do have one point I want to make, which is that any voter who wants to weed out the steroid users and vote against them on the grounds that they cheated really ought to find replacement people to put in in their stead. Now, some of the voters said that they just plain refuse to vote for anyone who played in the Steroid Era at all, which strikes me as being deliberately unfair to any player who played clean and was therefore the victim of all the cheating. I am not addressing those voters; there would be no point, other to say that they're being pompous, obnoxious, and mean. No, this point concerns only those voters who believe that all and only those players who we have decent reason to believe were themselves cheating should be excluded from the Hall. Those voters should, in my opinion, couple their withholding of votes for the likes of Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, etc. (and hopefully they'll leave Piazza off that list in the future) with the awarding of votes to some guys who would have looked a whole lot better had Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, etc. not been in the league playing the way they did.

Take John Olerud, for example. Over a 17-year career spanning 2234 games, in which he had 9063 plate appearances and 7592 at-bats, Olerud had 2239 hits, of which 13 were triples, 255 were home runs, and 500 were doubles. He scored 1139 runs and drove in 1230 runs. He drew 1275 walks but only struck out 1016 times. All that is good for a .295/.398/.465 batting line, which is good all-around but in particular is an elite on-base percentage, the 31st best in the integration era (1947 onwards). Olerud was an integral part of not one but two championship teams with the Blue Jays and the nearly-championship 1999 Mets. He won a batting title, hitting .363 in 1993, and in a sense deserved to win another, hitting .354 in 1998 and finishing second behind Larry Walker's Coors Field-aided .363. In each of those years he was clearly an MVP-level player, and in quite a few other years he was an All Star-level player. And while he was a first baseman, he was a really really good defensive first baseman, winning three Gold Gloves, probably deserving quite a few more, and (according to Baseball Reference) contributing almost enough high-quality defense to cancel out the penalty for being a first baseman in the first place.

All that adds up, according to Baseball Reference, to 53.7 career wins above replacement and 27.4 wins above average. Those are borderline Hall of Fame numbers, and probably slightly on the wrong side of the border. But keep in mind, WAR is an adjusted-for-league-average stat. And Olerud was playing in a league full of cheaters, like McGwire and Palmeiro and Sosa and Bonds. They make his adjusted numbers, which are already on the borderline for Hall consideration, look worse than they should be. And he was playing in a league full of cheaters like Roger Clemens, who he faced 107 times, more than any other pitcher, and against whom he hit just .205/.335/.373. So, first, Olerud's numbers are worsened because a good chunk of the pitchers he faced were cheating, and second his numbers get worsened again in the adjustment process because he gets compared to other hitters who were cheating. What that means, I think, is that if you want to try to pretend the steroid thing never happened, i.e. to imagine that all the cheating players just hadn't been there, John Olerud has a pretty strong Hall of Fame case.

Now, you don't necessarily have to agree with me about Olerud. But I think the basic principle is sound: if you're the kind of voter who wants to go through the list of great players from the previous two decades who might look like they deserve induction and strike the names of anyone we have sufficient reason to believe used steroids, you ought also to take a second look at players like Olerud, and see whether they deserve a few bonus points for having been really really good while playing clean in a league of cheaters. Merely subtracting is not enough; you should add something back as well.