Baseball HOF Voting Has Gone Woke

Disappointing to see Garvey’s WAR not higher. I wonder about how that is calculated. He had 200 hits in five straight years. Also played in 1200 straight games. Plus the MVP. I think those items should count in the HoF calculus. His prime, @ ’74-’84, was not the best offensive era either. Dodger Stadium used to be one of the toughest places to hit HR’s. Clearly he’s never getting there, context argument has long passed.

Now you’ve really picked off a scab.

Steve Garvey does not belong in the Hall of Fame.  200 hits, in isolation, is not a big deal.  How did he get 200 hits a year?  He played every day, had 700 plate appearances every year, and didn’t waste many of those with walks.  (If you have 700 at-bats and 200 hits, you hit .286)  So his 200 hits combined with a handful of walks and mediocre power to produce a career OPS of .775.  Here’s a player stat line from 2025 that produced an OPS of .775.  Think he had a Hall of Fame season?

https://www.espn.com/mlb/player/gamelog/_/id/41773/brendan-donovan

Garvey had 38.1 WAR in his career.  Hall of Famers should have twice as many.  His only value to his team was on offense.  He played a low-value defensive position and was hardly a generational talent there.

One of the reasons many people think of Garvey as a Hall of Famer is that when he played no one paid attention to on-base percentage, secondary offensive production (a measure of offensive production beyond hitting singles), or OPS (which may not have been invented yet).   With the benefit of those metrics we get a clearer picture of Garvey’s offensive value.

I looked up Bill James’s similarity scores for Garvey.  At the top of the list — that is, the guy in the history of MLB whose career numbers most closely match Garvey’s — is Garrett Anderson.  We can agree Garrett Anderson, though a solid bat, did not have a Hall of Fame career.  Here are their slash lines side-by-side.  Batting Avg., OBP, SLG, OPS

Garvey                     .294/.329/.445/.775

Anderson                .293/.324/.461/.785

Even before I got turned on to OPS I had a favorite comp for Garvey.  It was Del Ennis, outfielder for the Phillies in the late 40s and 50s.  I doubt Ennis ever got a single vote on a Hall of Fame ballot.  Yet here is his slash line next to Garvey’s

Ennis                       .284/.340/.472/.812

Garvey                     .294/.329/.446/.775

Having said all that, I’m not sold on Andruw Jones, either.  Defensively, he was a generational talent.  He had over 60 WAR, which is probably enough to get you in.  My problem with him is that his last five years were garbage.  So for me the question is whether his first 12 years, all with Atlanta, were enough to get him in.  I say no.  And just on an aesthetic level, I don’t want anyone in the Hall who ever played a full MLB season and hit .158, as Jones did with the Dodgers.  That should be an automatic DQ.

Generally speaking, the Hall is way too big or, in the parlance of the day, inclusive.  It is moving the way of participation trophies and, with it, irrelevance.

Dale Murphy?  I thought he was in.