I’ll make the edit.

That’s a great question—heck, it’s one of the fundamental questions of sabermetrics.

My feeling is that player value is best measured as that talent that a player possesses, expressed in performance, which helps a team win games. In theory, everything that a player does and is that comprises value is measurable, but in practice, we really have no way to measure things like work ethic, leadership, and similar ‘intangibles’. This doesn’t mean those things don’t count—but neither does it mean that, if one player seems to be of equal or inferior value to another, you can simply even or rebalance the scales in the former player’s favor by talking about that player’s ‘leadership’.

For instance, there’s is clearly value in a player being able to hit .325/850 for a full season; there’s plenty of analysis to back up the idea that such a player has value, and plenty of ways in which to measure precisely how much value that player brings to his team in terms of wins. There’s value in that player playing a particular defensive position (such as catcher), especially if it’s a position where players don’t normally perform at that high of a level. There’s value in that player’s defensive ability, even if we’re still not really at a point where we can easily quantify how defense translates into wins and losses.

My premise is that, if you have a .325/850 hitting catcher with excellent defense, that’s worth a certain amount of value to his ballclub. If that player happens to be the ‘best’ catcher in the league, this doesn’t make the player any more valuable in terms of the number of games his team will win or lose.

Keep in mind that I’m not saying that the player’s relative performance level doesn’t matter - if your catcher is the best in the league and the average catcher only hits .280/725, obviously that’s a good thing. I’m not sure there’s actual value there, but I can’t completely rule out that there may be value that we just don’t know how to measure yet. At the same time, Value Over Replacement Player isn’t a separate declaration of value than simply stating the player’s value; VORP simply sets a different ‘zero point’ - if someone has a VORP of X and Y Win Shares, that’s the same value, just expressed in two different ways, just as 2*5 and 4+6 are the same value expressed in two different ways.

What I’m saying is, if the average catcher hits .280/725, it doesn’t matter if the second-best catcher in the league bats .290/735 or .310/825—or even .335/875 with bad defense. It doesn’t matter if the worst catcher in the league hits .230/600 or .250/700. Your catcher’s value doesn’t change just because another catcher hits closely or farther away from his numbers. Joe Mauer doesn’t get less valuable when the Twins replace Henry Blanco with Mike Redmond; Mike Redmond is more valuable than Henry Blanco, which allows the Twins to replace more of the value they lose if Mauer isn’t available.

Your premise that players need a sense that they have something special when they head into the dugout against another team is interesting, and I’d be curious to see if any studies might support the idea that less talented rosters with ‘star’ players perform better than rosters with more balanced talent. Heck, that effect, if it exists, would almost exactly duplicate the effect of what baseball men have been calling ‘leadership’ for some time now, and it might make a good way to quantify leadership and make it more measurable rather than leaving it as the ‘we don’t know how to explain this, so we’ll just claim God did it’ answer that it is now. And if true, that would be a form of value that would derive largely just from being the best at something.

As it stands right now, though, fans give far too much credit (IMO) to players who are the ‘best’ at something, especially when that something is based on statistical measures that, I’ll even admit, aren’t always precise in measuring the underlying talents that we assume they’re measuring.

To go back to the idea that sparked the essay—Ozzie Smith was elected to the Hall of Fame on his first-ever BBWAA ballot, with over 91% of ballots listing his name. I would be shocked if Barry Larkin was even elected on his first ballot, much less elected with as much as 90% of the vote, despite a very good argument being available that, in terms of value to their franchises, Larkin was just as valuable if not more so than Smith was. I would argue that people who claim Smith is a better shortstop than Larkin are giving Smith a bonus for being ‘the best defensive shortstop of all time’, and I don’t think that bonus is necessarily warranted.

Good response, though.

...each man won one World Series – Smith with the Cardinals in 1982, Larkin with the Reds in 1990. Smith’s Cardinals beat the Brewers in ‘82; interestingly enough, the Brewers had made the playoffs in the strike-shortened 1981 season, but were known as “Harvey’s Wallbangers” in 1982 (and not in 1981) because of manager Harvey Kuenn who was hired in mid-season and led the club to the playoffs. The Brewers fell out of contention in 1983 and haven’t been to the playoffs since. Larkin’s Reds swept the Oakland A’s, a team some are willing to argue was a dynasty (despite losing two of three Series they played), and a team that remained competitive through 1992, after which they were sold (and eventually became the Moneyball team we now know).

It’s also interesting to note that Smith’s teams (he played four seasons with the Padres before being traded, straight up, for Garry Templeton) were a combined 1485-1472 in Smith’s 19 seasons, 13 games above .500. If you don’t want to penalize Smith for his final three seasons when he was reduced to part-time play, you can say his clubs were 1282-1256 while he was a regular, 26 games over .500. During Smith’s time in St. Louis, the Cardinals had exactly three managers: Whitey Herzog, Joe Torre, and Tony LaRussa. (Oddly, Smith had the same number of managers in his four seasons in San Diego: Roger Craig, Jerry Coleman, and Frank Howard.)

Meanwhile, Larkin’s teams were a combined 1515-1497 in his 19 seasons, 18 games over .500. (Smith’s career covered two labor stoppages—1981 and 1994/5, while Larkin’s covered only the latter, which is why Larkin and his teams have more games played in the same number of seasons. Again, if you don’t want to penalize Larkin for the performance of his team when he stopped being a regular, you can say his clubs were 1292-1234 when he was playing regularly, 58 games over .500. During this time, the Reds had the following managers: Pete Rose, Tommy Helms, Lou Pinella, Tony Perez, Davey Johnson, Ray Knight, Jack McKeon, Bob Boone, Ray Knight again, and Dave Miley. Some good men, but not nearly the same consistency of quality as Smith’s Cardinal clubs.

Smith’s Cardinals lost the Series in 1985 (to the Royals) and 1987 (to the Twins), and lost the NLCS in 1996 (to the Braves) after Smith had become a part-time player. The Reds lost the NLCS in 1995 (also to the Braves), and were leading the NL Central in 1994 when the season was cancelled.

If you want to give some prestige to a player for his team doing well, then it’s pretty clear that Larkin deserves as much prestige as Smith—each man won the same number of Series, and it could be argued that, if not for the strike in 1994, each man would also have reached the playoffs the same number of times as a regular (Smith played in just three of the seven games against the Braves in 1996 and was hitless in 9 at-bats with no walks.)

I’m not convinced that personality is worth enshrining. I understand that the guys voting for the award probably want to reward the guys who make their lives easier, but I guess I don’t really see the connection between ‘easy player to interview/write about’ and ‘one of the best players in baseball history’.

There is one argument in favor of enshrining Smith over Larkin, and possibly not Larkin as a result—you can call it the ‘Mazeroski Gambit’. There are plenty of second basemen in the history of baseball who hit better than Bill Mazeroski. Depending on how much you want to value defense, you could even argue that there are plenty of players who are better all-around second basemen than Maz who aren’t in the Hall of Fame. The reason Maz is in, though, isn’t that he was necessarily a great all-around second baseman, but that he was THE greatest defensive second baseman in baseball history. If you are legitimately the greatest X in baseball history, and X isn’t a negative, that in and of itself is a reasonable argument for the Hall of Fame, in my view. It’s not that you’re positing that being the best defensive second baseman grants Maz additional value as a player, but that if the Hall is really about recognizing excellence, then you should recognize the most excellent players, in whatever field they excelled.

Even this argument, however, has two problems that I see:

1. It’s not necessarily true that Maz was the best defensive second baseman ever to play the game—just the best over a certain threshold of play. With enough research, you could probably identify players who were better with the glove than even Mazeroski, but who couldn’t hit enough to stay in the major leagues and thus didn’t have long enough careers to be considered for the Hall of Fame, which requires 10 seasons of major league service before a player is even considered for the ballot.

Philosophically, it’s not that much different from arguments about the lines drawn for batting titles and such - for instance, in 1990, George Brett won the AL batting title with a .329 batting average, even though Luis Polonia hit .335 combined for two different AL teams that year. Polonia had 436 plate appearances that year, however, and 502 are required to be considered for the batting title. So Brett clearly won the title - but does that mean he was really the best hitter?

2. The problem with saying that the Hall of Fame should recognize ‘excellence’, even if the players exhibiting that excellence wouldn’t normally meet the overall standards of enshrinement, is that you now have to decide what categories of excellence you’ll recognize as being ‘worth enshrinement’ and which you won’t. For instance, most of the career leaders in triples date from prior to the lively ball era, back when home runs were scarce. The players with the most triples in their careers who started playing after Babe Ruth’s retirement are Stan Musial (177 from 1941-1963), Roberto Clemente (166 from 1955-1972), and Willie Wilson (147 from 1976-1994). So you could legitimately argue that Willie Wilson is the greatest-hitter-of-triples baseball has seen since Clemente, and thus the best triples hitter of the ‘modern era’. Does that make him a Hall of Famer? Similarly, given Gardy’s like of the sacrifice, the list of the top 50 all-time career leaders in sac hits is a bunch of guys from the dead ball era and Omar Vizquel.

Granted, those are pretty marginal stats to use to quantify someone as the ‘greatest X ever’, but the point is you can sometimes find a marginal Hall of Famer who might otherwise qualify based on this criteria. For instance, if you search for the lowest rates of inherited runners allowed to score among relievers from 1961 through the present (with a minimum of 100 inherited runners to screen out starting pitchers who had a couple of good seasons in relief at the end of their careers), you find that the leader is none other than Jesse Orosco. Now Orosco actually would make an interesting Hall candidate; he’ll go on his first Hall ballot in 2009. But if he draws any Hall interest at all, it’ll be for his uniqueness (best LOOGY of all time?), because his career doesn’t match anything that currently exists in the Hall of Fame.

I personally would be tickled to see Jesse Orosco in the Hall of Fame, but I can accept that some folks would be mightily upset—I just wouldn’t expect those folks to be baseball writers is all.