Doesn't matter what the comparisons are. By the writers' criteria, Biggio is a no-brainer hall of famer. However, amongt racists, wife beaters, alcoholics, pill poppers, and gamblers, the writers decided to point to steroids and the 90s for their moral high ground.
You do realize Biggio was a leadoff hitter, and Puckett primarily hit out of the 3 spot? You also realize Puckett played in the AL, which gives more RBI chances thanks to a DH? So I guess Jeff Bagwell was a 1st ballot HOFer? His first 12 seasons: .302/.414/.551 1293R 1321RBI 380HR 185SB He crushes Puckett in every stat except BA.
His team went to the playoffs twice in his 12 year career. Granted they won both those WS, but that was a lot of luck. The 1987 team might be the worst team to ever win, but Puckett was their best player (though they had 3 guys hit over 30HRs, and Puckett wasn't one of them). On the 1991 team, which was far better, Puckett wasn't the best player on his team, but he had a clutch WS.
And it's 2013, why are we talking about RBIs. It's like judging a doctor by how many leeches he prescribed. Completely irrelevant.
I find this utterly hilarious coming from an Astros fan who's team was swept in their first try no thanks to the performances of Bags and Biggio. Granted they were old but give credit where it's due.
Pretty sure I gave credit. That 1987 team should have never been in the playoffs. Their pitching was mostly terrible. You can't claim a guy regularly carried a team, when he only went to the playoffs twice, and wasn't the best guy (not even 2nd or 3rd) on one of those teams.
i watched a lot of baseball in the eighties and ninties. My favorite player was ricky henderson. Ill even argue he is the best. Im much more of a fan of baggy than bidge even though i appreciate craigs stats more as i have gotten older. However when geeks claim rbi arent important they lose me.
They are less important, since it is partially a team stat. Hard to get RBIs without good players in front of you.
It's simply a context-dependent stat that tells you little about the hitter himself and more about the players around him (same goes for runs scored). A player can have a great season but relatively few RBI if the hitters ahead of him don't get on base. Likewise a player can have a poor season and accumulate 100 RBI batting behind guys who consistently get on base due to the sheer number of opportunities. In roughly the same number of AB in 2012, Hunter Pence had 104 RBI and Andrew McCutchen had 96. Pence had, IMO, an average to below-average season (.743 OPS), while McCutchen had an MVP-caliber year. But he had players hitting ahead of him who never got on base and, thus, denied him RBI opportunities. Given the exact same opportunities that Pence had, he probably would drive in 130+ Additionally, a good leadoff hitter like Biggio will always pale in comparison to a good middle of the order hitter like Puckett.
For further discussion, here are the OBP of the players batting ahead of Pence & McCutchen (who finished with an OPS of .953). SF: Angel Pagan - .338 Marco Scutaro - .385 Pablo Sandoval - .342 Buster Posey - .408 PIT Alex Presley - .279 Neil Walker - .342 Josh Harrison - .279 Jose Tabata - .315 With SF, Pence batted .219 with a .671 OPS, but had 45 RBI in 59 games (a pace of 122 over a full season). That's why RBI is a bad stat to compare the value of individual players.
Sabermetricians hate stuff like RBI and wins for pitchers. I agree they are less useful than other stats and sometimes you get outliers like Jeriome Robertson who won 15 games for the Astros one year but was profoundly bad. They still have their uses though. In 1972 Steve Carlton won 27 for a Phillies team that only managed 59. In that instance no "new" stat tells you more about Lefty's dominance than W/L. In all other games the Phillies were historically, epically bad...but in games he started they had as good a chance to win as any team in baseball.
it would seem that folks poo-pooing Bidge's defense are remembering more of his late-career than his prime. dude was constantly measured against Alomar. Why? Because he was in that league. Had Alomar stayed around, his defense would have gone downhill, too.
Disagree, WAR for example works just fine. In fact, if you look at WAR (using which Lefty's '72 is equivalent in dominance to Ruth in '27), you don't even need to know the context of his team's terrible W/L record to realize how ridiculously dominant Carlton was in 1972. The W/L stuff does add to the narrative though.
i never look at wins/losses, nolan ryan is the perfect example of that. i understand biggio was a lead off guy so i'm not knocking him for rbi production. however for a leadoff guy who didn't bat 300 consistently that is a knock. 98 and 99 are his best offensive years and they are more outliers than the norm
97 was actually his best offensive year, although 98 was close. 99 is somewhere in the back end of his top 10 offensive seasons. Look, obviously by quoting stats like avg and RBI as the basis for your beliefs, you dont subscribe to the consensus, now both within the industry and outside the industry, of how to evaluate baseball performance. Like that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, just realize that this argument was settled years ago. It's not only "geeks" (or bloggers living in their moms basement or any other ad hominen attack you have to resort to making when actual facts and math don't back you up) that realize stats like RBI as near worthless in evaluating performance (especially when you have a million stats that are more efficient). The people that actually run baseball operations in these teams worth 9-10 figures believe it as well. For example, Puckett hit 356 one season. The same season he only got on base at a 375 clip. Biggio surpassed that clip 9 years. Biggio best year, where he only hit 309 and drove in 81, was about 20-30% more valuable then puckett's best year when he hit 356 and drove in 121. Avg doesn't tell you that and neither will RBIs. They also don't tell you about the context of the parks he played in; or how many RBIs opportunities he had; or how much he got on base; or the million factors that determine how good a player actually is.
All of baseball KNOWS Biggio deserves to be in... this was simply a case of sports writers being assholes to the "era." He'll get in next year, and I'll be flying to Cooperstown to welcome him in.
do we have to get tickets? Are they difficult to get? I tried to look into it this year before I realized I'd be out of town and unable to go. Never figured out how to attend the ceremony
No tickets are needed. Hall of Fame Weekend (when the inductions take place) is free of charge. Seats are first come first serve, and demand would obviously be dependent on who is being inducted and how many of them are. Here's a video of the 2010 ceremony, they don't seem exactly lively.
