Not every position has someone ready to knock on Cooperstown’s door. Only one significant shortstop has ten or more seasons in. Elvis Andrus has the service time, but his index score is not a significant threat. Andrelton Simmons probably comes closest on the index end, but he has only eight

When we get to the modern third basemen we get to an interesting question as it pertains to the Hall of Fame. It is called the Baseball Hall of Fame. It isn’t called the MLB Hall of Fame or the Professional Hall of Fame. So, how much do we count

The Hall Fame Index Part IIwent beyond the first edition by breaking each position into tiers with the top 50 position players at each position. The idea behind that was to make it easier to compare players. After all, if someone finished with 317 index wins there is no telling

One of the hallmarks of greatness is when your choices on similarity comparisons are limited. Everyone knows Albert Pujols is the greatest living first baseman. We could compare him to the two other possible players with him in that stratosphere, but everyone gets dwarfed by Lou Gehrig, and we really

Similarity scores were a terrific invention by Bill James. Essentially, every two players start at 1000 and get points deducted for the differences between the basic counting numbers. The concept was simple. If you want to know if a player is a Hall of Famer then you look at who

Now that we move to the last four guys selected by the Veterans Committee, our focus changes considerably. In short, none of these guys should be anywhere near the Hall of Fame. I’m on pretty firm footing making that statement and I’m not stating anything that anyone else has said

As we move to the second list of Veterans Committee pitchers we suddenly run head long into the distinction that was made in the book The Hall of Fame Index Part II. Asking whether any of these individual pitchers are legitimate Hall of Famers is the wrong question. The question

As we move to the mound, we have some issues to sort through. The book pretty well addressed the 19thcentury pitchers, so I will address primarily those pitchers selected by the Veterans Committee that we didn’t address in The Hall of Fame Index Part II. That ends up being 20

We can put Veterans Committee selections into three categories. There are those from the 19th century. Most of those were warranted because the BBWAA were not in a position to select those players because they had not seen them play. Of course, there were some errors in those categories, but

We see a number of different fallacies at play when we look at the center field group of Veterans Committee selections. The two biggest ones are the notion of the magical season and the dying embers that is batting average. Of course, we are getting ahead of ourselves. The Hall