There are a lot of people on Twitter who are just mad.
Mad at the world, mad at their team, mad at their life, mad at everything. And Twitter gives them a place to go be mad anonymously. They can create a profile with a phony name (often with a lot of numbers tacked onto the end), and a phony profile photo, and just start typing little 280-character rants. Or longer ones if they pay for the privilege each month.
And that’s okay, I guess. We all need to vent sometimes. As long as no hate speech or threats are involved, I suppose it could even be therapeutic to get all that anger out of your system.
But sometimes the targets for their simmering anger are, well, a bit odd. Take Chip for instance:
In response to a pretty harmless tweet with a funny Bill Madlock quote and photo, Chip decided that poor Tony Pérez, one of the most respected, nicest guys in baseball, should catch a few strays simply because he was in the background of the photo. Apparently, according to Chip, Pérez’s election to the Hall of Fame was “a joke,” and it was only Pérez’s spot on the roster of the famed Big Red Machine, or “those BRM teams,” that got him elected.
Now, we’re here to educate, so I hope to assuage Chip’s anger for the moment by pointing out a few salient facts about the career of Tony Pérez. Will this calm down poor Chip? Probably not, as his timeline is rife with angry posts about everything from Caleb Williams to cheeseburgers to Suzyn Waldman (spelled “Waldron” by Chip), but we’ll give it a go anyway on the off chance someone else read his unwarranted shot at Doggie Pérez and took it seriously.
There are two points referenced by Chip made that need to be addressed:
Have Big Red Machine members been given some sort of unwarranted boost in Hall of Fame voting?
Would Tony Pérez be on the outside of the Hall of Fame if not for his place on those teams?
Being an orderly sort, I will take those points in order.
I’m not sure there’s a clear definition of when the Big Red Machine began or when it ended, so let’s just say it was the decade of the 1970s. They opened that decade with a National League pennant and closed it with a division title, and had multi-year playoff droughts both before and after that, so it seems like a decent span to look at.
During the 1970s, 118 different players were on the Reds’ major league roster at one point or another. Four of them - Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tom Seaver, and Pérez - were elected to the Hall of Fame. I have never heard anyone try to make a claim that Bench, Morgan, or Seaver do not belong in the Hall of Fame. Here’s where Bill James ranked each of them all-time at their respective positions in his 2001 book The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract:
Bench: 2nd-best catcher ever.
Morgan: Best second baseman ever.
Seaver: 6th-best pitcher ever.
That’s not gospel, obviously, but it’s also pretty representative of the spots those three players typically hold in the collective conscience of people who analyze or rank baseball players. Did their place on the Reds help those views? I mean, I guess it didn’t hurt Bench or Morgan that they have a couple of World Series rings, but it seems pretty clear that they have the rings in large part because they were awesome players rather than by riding on the coattails of their better teammates. And Seaver was barely part of the Big Red Machine years, having been traded to Cincinnati midway through the 1977 season. He was elected to the Hall of Fame mostly for his time with the Mets.
On the flip side, did anyone on those rosters have a pretty good Hall of Fame case but not get a Big Red Machine boost? Yes, a couple of guys.
For instance, George Foster doesn’t have a terribly different Hall of Fame case than someone like Jim Rice.
Rice was a bit better, sure, but if a Big Red Machine boost was a real thing, wouldn’t that have drawn Foster even with him? Whereas Rice never got less than 29% of the votes cast on the Hall of Fame ballots on which he appeared and eventually was elected, Foster never got more than 7%, and was dropped for lack of support after just four tries. I don’t see any BRM boost there.
The same could be said for Dave Concepción. Is his case for the Hall of Fame much worse than Hall of Fame shortstops Travis Jackson, Rabbit Maranville, or Phil Rizzuto?
Concepción is in the general ballpark right? So, if a BRM boost is a real thing, why wasn’t he elected? Why didn’t he ever get more than 17% of the votes cast?
To be clear, I don’t think either Foster or Concepción belong in Cooperstown. I’m just saying each has a case that compares reasonably to others in the Hall of Fame and yet hasn’t been given any discernible boost by virtue of the fact that they were prominent members of the Big Red Machine.
And they’re not even the most obvious people who didn’t get that boost. That would be Pete Rose, key member of the BRM and notably not a Hall of Famer. In his case, though, his ineligibility due to gambling violations means we’ll never know for certain if he would have received a Big Red Boost, but it’s safe to say that the guy with more hits than anyone in major league history wouldn’t have needed anything extra to get elected if he’d been eligible.
So, the answer to the first question is “No, there is no evidence of a Big Red Machine boost when it comes to the Hall of Fame.” At least, that’s the case with every other member of the Reds during their glory years.
But, does that mean Pérez didn’t get such a boost?
It’s possible he did. His case for Cooperstown wasn’t as good as those of Morgan, Bench, or Seaver (or Rose, for that matter), but he had a better case than Foster or Concepción. In other words, he’s exactly the sort of borderline case that might have benefitted from some other factors to push him over the top.
But I don’t think so.
Let’s look at the players most similar to Pérez according to Similarity Scores:
Two of them, Dawson and Baines, are in the Hall of Fame. The other three aren’t. But Pérez has a better statistical case than the other three, doesn’t he? His 122 OPS+ is a touch better than Parker and Gonzalez, and while it’s short of Staub’s 124 mark, he was better than Staub in WAR, hits, homers, RBI, and slugging. He’s also markedly better than Hall of Famer Baines, his most similar comp, largely because he played decent defense at both third and first for most of his career while Baines was mostly a DH. If you looked at that graphic and said that half of them were Hall of Famers and half weren’t, it wouldn’t be Pérez who you placed in the half that were passed over.
The fact is that players who do the sorts of things Tony Pérez did in his career are usually elected to the Hall of Fame. In baseball history, twenty first basemen besides Pérez had more than 40 WAR, 250 homers, 1200 RBI, and a 110 OPS+ through the age of 38. Those players range from legends like Lou Gehrig to more recent players like Adrián González. Of those twenty, eleven are in the Hall of Fame:
Gehrig
Jimmie Foxx
Jeff Bagwell
Johnny Mize
Eddie Murphy
Willie McCovey
Todd Helton
Hank Greenberg
Fred McGriff
Orlando Cepeda
Gil Hodges
A twelfth, Albert Pujols, will absolutely join them as soon as he’s eligible. Three players who didn’t make it have clear PED issues, and two of them, Rafael Palmeiro and Mark McGwire, would absolutely be in the Hall of Fame without those issues.
In other words, of the guys who accomplished what Pérez did and didn’t negate their cases with PED involvement, over 70% are in the Hall of Fame or will be as soon as they arrive on the ballot. None of them were members of the Big Red Machine, and while most of them had better careers than Pérez, several of them (Cepeda, Hodges, McGriff) don’t have any claim to a better career than he had.
Regardless of Chip’s angry assertion, Tony Pérez had the sort of career that is usually rewarded with a plaque in Cooperstown. Throw in his sterling reputation inside the game and his election was pretty much a given. The fact that he did most of that for a legendary juggernaut team in the 1970s is likely just icing on the cake of a career that would have ended in the Hall of Fame anyway.
If you’re reading this, Chip, I hope this calms you down a bit and you don’t go away mad. But, please, by all means, do go away.
Paul, thanks for these occasional reminders of why I am not, never have been & most probably never will be on Twi(x)tter
This is a great piece. To be fair to the Chips of the world, deservedness aside, Perez’ journey to the HOF stands pretty clearly in my mind as a classic “okay, whatever,” where the committee just after the committee that would’ve been totally legitimate just kind of caved.
A couple of thoughts: I also very much recall that, pre-90s power boost, a guy with sub-400 HRs was just in this muddy world where you’d have a meandering path to the HOF at best. It probably wasn’t right (Rice/Dwight Evans), but it was real.
I was glad to see this because we need some BRM backlash. There are still piles of Boomers out there who comment on Concepcion for HOF in every (any) tangentially related FB post.