On Trevor Hoffman and Significance

First, a couple of concessions. This post is about Trevor Hoffman, but it takes a long time to get to him. It is also several months too late or too early, inasmuch as the 2018 Hall of Fame class has been announced but the induction ceremony is still a few months away. It's also pretty long. Maybe nobody wants to read 2800 words about the Hall of Fame, but I wanted to write that much and this site is inherently self-indulgent. Perhaps somebody will humour me by reading the entire thing but if nobody does that's cool, too. With the next Padre Hall of Famer yet to emerge I probably won't write about the Hall again for quite some time. But, until July at least, the Hall of Fame still matters to me. I guess I figured I'd go out with a bang. Now on with the show...

I acknowledge and accept that the idea of caring whether a player is in the Hall of Fame or not is, on its face, ridiculous. For example: in the 20 seasons between 1970 and 1989, the Dodgers winning percentage was .546, which means they averaged between 88 and 89 wins a season. Every season. For twenty years. There were some down years sprinkled in here and there, but if you were a kid born in the Southland in the 1960s or '70s, you grew up watching not just a great team but a truly great franchise. And, if you were to make the trek to Cooperstown, New York and peruse the Hall of Fame plaques, who is the only Dodger player from that 20-year period of success you would find? Don Sutton, and he skipped town just before things got really good. Does the fact that not one guy from the "longest running infield" is in the Hall of Fame take away from how great they, and by extension their team, were? Of course not. If you saw that Dodgers team, you knew what you were watching. So, like I said at the start: getting riled up about the Hall of Fame is stupid, and rationally we shouldn't care.

And yet, it's probably safe to say that most baseball fans do care, on some level. Why is that? Several years ago I read somewhere, I don't remember where, that the reason fans care about players getting into the Hall of Fame is because when a player makes it, it reassures us that we did in fact see what we remember seeing, that the player we saw in person was actually as good as we thought he was in the moment. A variation of this concept was reiterated by Jay Jaffe on Joe Posnanski's Poscast in August of 2017. People care about the Hall of Fame, Jaffe claimed, "because we want our experiences validated, to have seen some of these greats when they were in action, and look forward to a time when they're housed under the same roof as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, etc." Validation and reassurance are not exactly the same thing, but the basic sentiment is the same: fans watch a player, play after play, month after month,  season after season, and at a certain point the player's performance inspires a thought - "I think he could be a Hall of Famer." And once that thought has entered a fanbase's collective consciousness, the player is spoken of differently, thought of differently. Once a player is associated with that thought, the fanbase no longer simply cares for him the way they care for all the players wearing their team's uniform, they also care about him, which is something different. And when one of those players does make the Hall, it confirms that we were right to think the way we did. The subjective turned objective, our experiences validated, our understanding of the game reassured.

I think this goes some way to explaining why the Hall matters, but I don't think it's entirely sufficient, especially for fans of unglamorous teams that rarely make the playoffs and never appear on national (and, increasingly, international) television. With his highly-publicised JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) ranking system Jaffe has, of late, become the seemingly definitive voice on whether a player deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Hell, he even wrote a book about it. The JAWS system, basically, is an algorithm that takes into account various factors from a player's career and, after algorithming them for a while, spits out a number. If the number is high enough, according to Jaffe, the player should be considered worthy of the Hall of Fame. ("Worthy," I should mention, is Jaffe's word, not mine.) This is in keeping with something else Jaffe said on the same edition of the Poscast I already mentioned. Expanding on why the Hall matters to people, Jaffe claimed that "because baseball lends itself so well to the numbers, and because we have such consciousness of those numbers, we have at least some vague understanding of what makes a Hall of Famer. Or we think we do."

This statement, by itself, is not particularly problematic. And if that statement had been made by anyone else, if Joe Posnanski had said it instead of his guest, I probably would have skipped past it. But Posnanski didn't say it, Jaffe did. Jay Jaffe, the same guy who created a ranking system to determine the exact location of the finest of fine lines that demarcates an all-time great from just a really great. After thinking about it for quite a while I think I'm finally able to identify what exactly about Jaffe's statement bothered me so much. 

Before I continue, let me be clear that I don't mean this as a personal attack on Jaffe. In the interviews I've heard him give he has always seemed like a nice guy, so if any of this post comes across as critical of him personally that is merely a reflection of my inarticulateness (that word is a case in point), not any sort of genuine malice.

What I think Jaffe gets wrong, and he got it wrong the moment he created JAWS, was in thinking that any understanding of what makes a Hall of Famer, even a "vague understanding" as he said in his talk with Posnanski, is to really be found in the numbers. This isn't an attack on numbers, per se. I realise that if numbers aren't the air baseball breathes they are at the very least the fuel that keeps the sport functioning. (Well, numbers and UCLs, but Jeff Passan already covered that...) But let's be perfectly honest here: when it comes to Hall of Fame voting, numbers are actually meaningless. Obviously, they matter in the sense that someone like Sterling Hitchcock, he of the 4.80 ERA, the 1.435 WHIP, the lifetime 8.2 WAR, was technically eligible for the Hall of Fame. Of course he didn't even make the ballot, because his numbers were terrible. (One glorious week in October 1998 excepted.)

I'm thinking of someone more along the lines of Johnny Damon. If you look at the numbers - just look, don't scrutinise - you might be able to argue that Damon should be a valid candidate for the Hall of Fame. In fact, from a numbers standpoint Damon's career is astonishingly similar to a player who is, by all accounts, an absolute lock to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. That player? Ichiro. Damon hit for more power, and scored and drove in more runs, while Ichiro has more hits, a better batting average, and was a better defender. Ichiro is still playing so those numbers are in flux, however it's a safe bet to assume that the longer he plays the more harm (such as it is) he is doing to his rate stats. It doesn't really matter, though, because nothing Ichiro can do at this point, aside from maybe being caught using PEDs or something, can affect his candidacy. Ichiro will be a Hall of Famer.

Johnny Damon? In his first year of eligibility he didn't even get 2 percent of the vote, let alone the necessary 5 percent needed to remain on the ballot in future. Just as certainly as Ichiro will be in the Hall, Johnny Damon will never be there to join him. Sterling Hitchcock didn't even have the numbers to get on the ballot, so his candidacy is a pure technicality. Damon did have the numbers to get on the ballot, however, yet we now know that he had as much chance of getting in as Hitchcock. Why is that? If, as Jaffe claims, we can assume that the numbers give us "some vague understanding of what makes a Hall of Famer," how is it that a player with more career WAR than Tony Pérez or Jim Rice is not even close to being considered a legitimate candidate? Are the numbers lying to us? Or is it because, once a player reaches a certain standard, numbers actually play very little part in determining what makes a player worthy of the Hall of Fame?

I suspect it's the latter. I suspect it's because what we actually look for in a Hall of Famer isn't great numbers, it's significance. And, despite the role his beard played in the 2004 Red Sox season, Johnny Damon is not a particularly significant player in the sport's history. What lasting influence did Johnny Damon leave on the game? When we watched Johnny Damon did we wonder if he was a future Hall of Famer? I lived in Boston between 2001 and 2005, a period that coincided with pretty much the entirety of Damon's Red Sox career. People in Boston were excited when he arrived in 2002, and his importance to the 2004 team can't be denied, but I don't really remember anyone talking about him in terms of the Hall of Fame. When the Hall was brought up it was almost exclusively in the context of Pedro or Schilling. Perhaps if Damon had re-signed with Boston after 2005 things might be different. Perhaps if he had remained with the Red Sox for the rest of his career he would have become a modern-day Jim Rice, and he would have gotten more than the 1.9 percent of votes he got in this year's voting. But he didn't re-sign with Boston. And whatever significance he had amongst Red Sox fans disappeared along with the beard he was forced to shave upon reporting to Yankees camp.

Which brings me, finally, to Trevor Hoffman.

Along with the Jaffe interview I mentioned earlier, the other main inspiration for this post was Keith Law's somewhat inexplicable decision to send this tweet out into the ether on the day it was announced that Hoffman had been elected to the Hall. Law was roasted pretty hard by Padres fans, many of whom considered "I voted for Hoffman #DisappointMeIn4Words" to be either a form of trolling or an expression of legitimate dislike for Hoffman, the Padres, Padres fans, or all three. For better or (more likely) for worse, he engaged with plenty of the people who called him out. Law's public persona is a pretty testy one - based on every interview I've ever heard with him he takes himself and his work incredibly seriously, which is... whatever - and that testiness shone through in his responses to people. He claimed he wasn't taunting Hoffman so much as the people who voted for him, which I suppose is true, but doesn't diminish the fact that stating publicly that you are disappointed in someone for voting for a player is pretty insulting to the player in question.

Law's basic argument against Hoffman, it would seem, is that Hoffman only had a career WAR of 28, pitched less than 1100 innings, wasn't great in his limited postseason appearances, and played a position - closer- that is either overrated or, more likely, entirely fabricated.

Those are all, I suppose, legitimate arguments if you want them to be. If you agree with Jay Jaffe that the numbers gives us a vague understanding of what makes a Hall of Famer, as Keith Law seems to, you have all the statistical evidence you need to argue that Hoffman doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame. But, like all statistics, Hoffman's numbers need a bit of context. After all, the closer role as it was embodied by Hoffman and his contemporaries such as Billy Wagner or Mariano Rivera was still quite new when those players were breaking in. Until the mid-1980s Goose Gossage regularly pitched over 100 innings a season; by comparison Hoffman pitched more than 80 innings only three times in his career, and both Wagner and Rivera each broke the 80 innings-as-a-closer plateau only once. (Rivera pitched over 100 innings in 1996 when he was the understudy to John Wetteland.) So Hoffman can probably be considered part of the first generation of true 9th-inning-only closers, which partially explains his low innings pitched numbers when compared to someone like Gossage or Bruce Sutter.

Similarly, though the death of the closer role may be somewhat exaggerated, it is certainly true that the idea of saving your best relief pitcher for the 9th inning is fast being replaced by the idea of pitching him in the highest leverage situation, whenever that may arrive. Baseball had yet to arrive at that mode of thinking during Hoffman's career, however, so he was played the way thinking at the time demanded he be played. The era of the Hoffman-style closer was a particular one that was, all things considered, relatively short-lived in baseball history. But it's the era Hoffman played in, and he did what was asked of him better than anyone not named Mariano Rivera.

But, of course, the whole point of this piece is the conviction that when it comes to Hall of Famers numbers are not actually that relevant. Far more important, from my point of view, is the way in which Law seems to entirely ignore the significance of Trevor Hoffman. I truly believe that it is not an exaggeration to say that Hoffman is, to a remarkable extent, directly responsible for the Padres remaining in San Diego. If you are not a Padres fan (as I am sure Keith Law is not) then it's easy to forget that the 1998 season was, essentially, one long referendum on whether the Padres were going to stay in San Diego or not. In order for Prop C to pass it wasn't enough for the team to be good, the way they were in 1996. Rather, people needed to be excited by the Padres. It might be argued that making the World Series was enough to ensure a successful vote, but I don't think that's entirely accurate. I think that what stuck with voters went they went to the ballots in November of 1998 was the energy the Padres create throughout the city over the course of that summer. It was an energy that you could feel the moment you entered Qualcomm Stadium, an energy that exploded into life during those playoffs, an energy manifested in "Hells Bells." Even now, two decades later, every time I hear that song I get flashbacks to the 1998 season. And when I think of the last great Padres team, the team that ensured the franchise would remain in San Diego, the team that got a damn ballpark built, I don't think of Tony Gwynn, or Kevin Brown, or Ken Caminiti. I think of Trevor Hoffman. How many players in history can say that? That may sound ridiculous to someone like Keith Law, but I believe it. Is that the reason Hoffman got elected to the Hall of Fame? Maybe, maybe not. To my mind it goes a hell of a long way in explaining it.

I celebrated when Hoffman was voted in. Not because it validated my experience, or because it disappointed Keith Law, or because it was a victory for old-school stats over sabermetrics, but because when you're a fan of a shitty team like the Padres you don't get to celebrate very often. And that, I think, is why the Hall of Fame matters to people. Because having one of your team's great players elected to the Hall of Fame is an objectively good thing. It's something worth celebrating. It's a moment to be proud that you are a fan of your chosen team. Maybe if you're a Yankees fan, or a Cardinals fan, or a Red Sox fan it doesn't mean as much, because you get to celebrate your team all the time. But for the rest of us? The majority of us? We can't be sure, but seeing one of our guys get elected to the Hall of Fame might just be as good as it ever gets.

How do you quantify that?