Monday, January 16, 2012

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!



I hope that everyone has a safe and enjoyable Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I will use this day as a time to give thanks for what I have and reflect on the many folks who have helped make that possible and who continue to do so. As I suggested a year ago, this seems like a much more appropriate day for that than Thanksgiving.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

A Racial Inequity of Hall of Fame Proportions?

Every year since he has become eligible, Alan Trammell has received a significant enough amount of votes to remain on the Hall of Fame ballot, though he has not been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. This includes appearing on 36.8 percent of the ballots this year. Meanwhile, the ballplayer whose name very prominently complemented Trammell’s through almost the entirety of Trammell’s career, Lou Whitaker, did not receive the five percent needed to remain on the ballot during his first year of eligibility back in 2001, when his name appeared on just 2.9 percent of the ballots cast.

As I grew up in the 1980s, Trammell and Whitaker were seemingly inseparable amid baseball discourse. Both came up, with Trammell at shortstop and Whitaker at second base, for the Detroit Tigers in 1977, and both played nearly their entire careers together for the Tigers, mostly as the team’s starting double-play tandem, through Whitaker’s retirement after the 1995 season. Trammell retired one year later.

In the end, their statistics look very similar. Whitaker played in 2390 games and had 8570 at bats, while Trammell played in 2293 games and had 8288 at bats. Whitaker scored 1386 runs and drove in 1084 RBIs, while Trammell scored 1231 runs and drove in 1003 RBIs. Whitaker had 2369 hits, of which 420 were doubles, 65 were triples, and 244 were home runs. Trammell had 2365 hits, of which 412 were doubles, 55 were triples, and 185 were doubles. Whitaker walked significantly more than Trammell (1099 vs. 874), but he also struck out significantly more than Trammell (1197 vs. 850). Trammell stole significantly more bases (236 vs. 143) and had a significantly higher batting average (.285 to .276), but Whitaker had a higher on base percentage (.363 to .352) and a higher slugging percentage (.426 to .415).

At the time of Whitaker’s retirement, he ranked as follows all-time among second basemen: ninth in hits, fifth in home runs, eighth in runs score, ninth in RBIs, ninth in doubles, fourth in walks, and seventh in at bats. All of those are higher than where Trammell ranked all-time among shortstops at the time of his retirement. Trammell’s rankings were tenth in hits, sixth in home runs, fifteenth in runs score, fifteenth in RBIs, eleventh in doubles, thirteenth in walks, and fifteenth in at bats. Trammell’s ranking of 26th in stolen bases does significantly outperform Whitaker’s ranking of 71st. Also, Trammell ranked 18th in average and 11th in slugging percentage among shortstops, while Whitaker ranked 30th and 12th, respectively. Both were ranked seventeenth in on base percentage, and neither ranked particularly high in triples, though Whitaker did rank higher among second basemen than Trammell did among shortstops. In other words, at the time of retirement Whitaker ranked higher against his positional peers than Trammell in more of the most prominent statistical categories than Trammell ranked higher than Whitaker.

In the time since these two retired, some second basemen have passed Whitaker and some shortstops have passed Trammell. Still, Whitaker remains more highly ranked among second basemen than Trammell does among shortstops on all from the above statistics that he did at the time of retirement except hits, where Trammell is now ranked twelfth among shortstops while Whitaker is ranked thirteenth among second basemen. Meanwhile, Trammell remains more highly ranked in batting average among shortstops than Whitaker does among second basemen (23rd to 42nd), and Trammell is now barely ranked higher among shortstops in on base percentage than Whitaker is among second basemen (20th to 21st), but Whitaker is now ranked slightly higher among second baseman in slugging percentage than Trammell is among shortstops (19th to 20th).

Meanwhile, to make this about at least a little more than batting statistics, Whitaker has a lifetime fielding percentage of .984 (all at second base), while Trammell has a lifetime fielding percentage of .977 at shortstop (along with 944 in 9 games in the outfield, .950 in 11 games at second base, and .950 in 43 games at third base).

All of this considered, there is a strong case to be made that Whitaker actually outperformed Trammell. At the very least, it suggests that there is anything but a clear-cut case of Trammell outperforming Whitaker. Still, the results of a little over a decade of Hall of Fame voting provide a different story, as indicated in my first paragraph above.

In the end, I can’t help but wonder if race is playing a role here, given that Trammell is white, while Whitaker is African American. There are well-documented histories of stereotyped depictions of black athletes as more naturally gifted than white athletes alongside overly generalized characterizations of white athletes as scrappier and more intelligent than black athletes. These characterizations have helped produce a history of Major League Baseball folks seeing white athletes as more fit for managerial and coaching roles than black athletes, and perhaps that has played a role in the fact that Trammell has gone on to become a major league coach and manager, while Whitaker has not. It would seem like these racialized perceptions could also easily lead Hall of Fame ballot holders to give Trammell more credit for his performance than they give Whitaker and thus produce the inequity of these two players’ ballot results.

Friday, January 13, 2012

A Higher Standard

This week Ohio State University president Gordon Gee appears to have added to the list of awkward statements that he has compiled in recent months. That list includes some disparaging remarks toward the likes of Boise State and TCU in the Fall of 2010. It also includes the unfortunate statement during the investigation of former OSU football coach Jim Tressel last spring that rather than fire Tressel, Gee hoped Tressel didn't fire him. Now, while speaking on Wednesday at the downtown athletic club in Columbus, Gee made an ethnically insensitive statement by referring to a coordination problem among institutions by saying, "It was kind of like the Polish army or something."

For a much-circulated Associate Press account of this latest instance, see here. Now, looking at that again, check out the second-to-last paragraph, which reference other "gaffes" that Gee has made in the past. One listed is from 1992 when Gee called then-governor of Ohio George Voinovich "a damn dummy" regarding funding for higher education.

While this 1992 "gaffe" does reflect upon Gee, it also reflects on a level of agenda setting within the Associated Press, at the very least on the part of the AP writer(s) who wrote the story. Specifically, I'm not sure how this qualifies as a "gaffe." I suppose if it is meant to suggest that his use of the term "dummy" reflects insensitivity to people who cannot speak, I might agree. However, if it's meant to suggest that it was awkward or inappropriate for Gee to refer to Voinovich like that, then it's hardly a "gaffe." I remember higher education changes being proposed and developed by Voinovich's administration at that time, and I remember thinking they were very misguided and antithetical to what I would envision as a thriving and democratic system of education. One change involved the centralization of many graduate programs in the state, which seemed to me that it would take away some of the useful diversity that comes from having multiple degree-granting programs that have different emphases, strengths, and specialities. Indeed, to some extent that change benefited Gee's own institution, as OSU became even more fully (as if it wasn't enough already) a centralized place for research and advanced academic study. Yet, even Gee saw that Voinovich's vision of higher education contained significant flaws.

So, in that context, Gee's comment about Voinovich hardly seems like a gaffe, and it certainly doesn't fit into the same category as his "Polish army" comment. Rather, the mistake here is in the AP story, which sets us up to disallow Gee's comment on Voinovich and thus positions us to accept legitimacy in what Voinovich did to higher education.

Higher education deserves better than this.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

My Hypothetical 2012 MLB Hall of Fame ballot

At approximately 2:00 p.m. tomorrow (Monday, January 9), the 2012 National Baseball Hall of Fame voting results will be announced. Check here for a look at who was on the ballot this past year.

Over the last three years, I’ve posted on this blog indication of those players for whom I would vote if I had a ballot. So, without further ado, if I had an MLB Hall of Fame ballot this year, I would vote for the following ten players (in rough order of how strongly I feel they belong):

Mark McGwire
Rafael Palmeiro
Fred McGriff
Barry Larkin
Tim Raines
Jeff Bagwell
Jack Morris
Dale Murphy
Lee Smith
Alan Trammell

None of these players are new to this year’s ballot. The first nine fall right in line with what I wrote last year, so please read that for more commentary. With Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven from last year’s ballot having been elected, that made room for Murphy and Smith to move onto the ballot. Meanwhile, they jumped ahead of Harold Baines from last year, since Baines unfortunately failed last year to attain the five percent to maintain eligibility for the ballot.

Filling in Trammell in the tenth slot was the toughest call to make (and, though I don’t remember my thought process from a year ago, apparently, a year ago I would have put Larry Walker and Don Mattingly ahead of him). After looking over statistics from the careers of a group of players that included Trammell, Walker, and Mattingly as well as Juan Gonzalez, Edgar Martinez, and Bernie Williams, I decided that Trammell had the best case. That said, it was very tough to select one from among that group of six players, and so, like most years, if I could vote for more than 10 players, I would. In fact, I would vote for 16. That includes all of the ten on the mock ballot above as well as the five players who vied with Trammell for the tenth slot on my list.

Of course, that only adds up to 15, and so the final player who would make it is Ruben Sierra. I actually looked at Sierra’s numbers along with the six players mentioned above whom I examined for my tenth slot. I easily separated the other six from Sierra, though, which left him out of that hunt. However, when I reconsidered him to discuss what I would do with an unlimited ballot, I decided to include him. Statistically, he matches up with some players for whom I would have voted in the past. (See last year’s blog post as well as the posts from 2010 and 2009.) I hesitated, though, and I think that hesitation came from my perception of Sierra as not living up to expectation. When Sierra came up in 1986/1987, he was touted very highly, and for a while in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was my favorite baseball player. I even considered trying to find and purchase the album of music he released in 1994. But then Sierra’s career fell apart, and in the end he didn’t quite live up to the hype. Still, he ended up having a very nice career—one that, in the end, I think was just good enough to warrant Hall of Fame inclusion. Just barely, though.

After Sierra, the remaining candidates on the ballot (all of whom are new to the ballot this year) failed to stack up enough for serious consideration. The only one who seemed to warrant a second look was Vinny Castilla, but his statistics did not stack up enough to merit inclusion, especially when the 1990s Colorado effect seems to need to be taken into account for him. So, in addition to Castilla, Jeromy Burnitz, Brian Jordan, Javy Lopez, Bill Mueller, Terry Mulholland, Phil Nevin, Brad Radke, Tim Salmon, Tony Womack, and Eric Young would not make my ballot.