Rolen into the Hall

The Hall of Fame ballot, we all know, is absurdly crowded. A great many writers are prohibited from voting for all the players they believe to be worthy because of the 10-vote limit. This is a problem; I get it. But whatever complications may contribute to vote totals, I refuse to ignore the injustice of Scott Rolen getting only 10.2 percent of the vote.

Scott Rolen belongs in the Hall of Fame. We shouldn’t even be having this debate. But here we go.

I will admit to some personal bias. I grew up not far from where Rolen grew up, and he’s only a few years older than me. His name was known both as a basketball and baseball player in the region before he graduated from high school. I followed his career more closely than one might otherwise follow the career of a star who doesn’t play for your favorite team. And then he did me the favor of finishing his career with the Reds, who are my favorite team. But absent that, he still has a pretty obvious case for Hall of Fame inclusion.

Let’s start with a discussion of why Rolen was left off so many ballots.

First, there’s the lack of counting stats. He barely cracked 2,000 hits (2,077); he had only 316 homers. He didn’t drive in or score 1,500 runs (1,287 and 1,211 respectively). He did manage 517 doubles, which is nice, but if you’re a counting stat person, that’s probably not enough to get someone on your ballot.

The counting stats were so low, of course, because of injury. Rolen had only 10 seasons in which he played more than 120 games. He topped 150 only five times, and not at all during the final 10 years of his career. That hurts him.

He also played on four different teams. Indeed, his career numbers have an approximate similarity to those of Barry Larkin, but Larkin had the shine of playing for only one team. It also doesn’t hurt that Larkin won an MVP (though, oddly, not for his best season) while Rolen never really got much of a sniff in the MVP voting.

And then there is the way in which he fails by comparison. Scott Rolen’s career overlapped almost perfectly with the career of Chipper Jones. And there’s no way to argue Rolen was better than Jones.  So, I suppose I know a bit how Jonah Keri felt trying to convince people that it didn’t matter that Tim Raines wasn’t as good as Rickey Henderson. For a long time, two of the greatest third basemen ever were playing at the time. We should be able to appreciate that without penalizing one player.

And that brings us to the last reason Rolen might have been left off. Voters have never known what to do with third base. It is a notoriously underrepresented position in the Hall of Fame. The expectation seems to be that, offensively, third basemen should be in the neighborhood of first basemen in terms of production. Equal, at least, to corner outfielders. But that’s almost never been the case. Historically, third basemen have been much closer to second basemen in terms of offensive output than they have been to any of the other corner spots.

And with that, it’s time to start making the case for why Scott Rolen belongs. Let’s start here:

Third base is hard. Defensively, it falls only behind short and catcher on the accepted defensive spectrum. A third baseman is expected to provide much more defensive value than a corner outfielder or first baseman. And Rolen was fantastic at third.

I understand that we cannot yet perfectly measure fielding. Indeed, we may not measure it that well at all. I also understand Gold Glove voting can be a poor barometer of how good someone actually was in the field.

That said, our best statistics—which should be reliable over an entire career, if not over a single season—tell us Rolen was the third-best third baseman ever at preventing runs, behind only Brooks Robinson and Adrian Beltre. Further, excepting the year in which he changed leagues and his rookie year (when he also was Rookie of the Year), Rolen won the Gold Glove at third every time he played more than 120 games. That’s eight Gold Gloves.

The stats and the eye test agree. Rolen was one of the greatest fielding third basemen of all time. I don’t see that there’s any real argument about that.

So now it comes down to the context argument. Time for some lists.

Here are the players who played all (or most) of their careers at third and accumulated more WAR than Scott Rolen:

Alex Rodriguez
Mike Schmidt*
Eddie Mathews*
Wade Boggs*
George Brett*
Chipper Jones*
Adrian Beltre
Brooks Robinson*
Ron Santo*
*Hall of Fame

That’s eight Hall of Famers and two players who aren’t eligible yet. (And yes, like you, I am very much looking forward to the endless A-Rod debate that’s coming for us all.)

Of course, having a bunch of Hall of Famers above you doesn’t make the case on its own. There will always be a best-player-not-in. The line has to be drawn somewhere. But Hall of Famers Paul Molitor and Harmon Killebrew and Tony Perez are all below Rolen on the list, and they all spent some portion of their careers at third. Also below Rolen is Edgar Martinez, who seems primed to be elected next year and who played third when he was able to take the field with a glove on his hand.

According to Baseball-Reference, Rolen’s career WAR, peak WAR, and JAWS score are all slightly above average for a Hall of Fame third baseman. (And we have talked already about how the standard seems to be extra high for someone playing third.)

Rolen also had one of the truly great seasons in the history of third base. His 2004 campaign, in which he generated 9.0 WAR while hitting .309/.404/.598 and playing his normal spectacular defense, stands as the 11th-best season ever by a third baseman according to FanGraphs.

For the last part of my argument, I want to compare Rolen to one other player specifically: Vladimir Guerrero.

Guerrero sailed into the Hall of Fame in his second year of eligibility with 92.9 percent of the vote. That there should be such a disparity between Guerrero and Rolen makes very little sense. They both debuted in the same year. Rolen played one more season than Guerrero but about 100 fewer games overall. So, sure, there’s the durability thing, but my goodness, look at these charts comparing their WAR totals by age and by their nth best seasons:

Source: FanGraphs — Vladimir Guerrero, Scott Rolen

Source: FanGraphs — Vladimir Guerrero, Scott Rolen

Guerrero was never better than Rolen. Never ever. Further, Rolen managed to be a solid player until the very end of his career, whereas Guerrero was below average for his last four seasons. (I suppose we can have an argument about whether it’s better to be a good player who can’t stay on the field or a poor one who can.) Rolen’s best season was far and away the best season either of them ever had. And, well, you can see the graphs.

Last, I want to stress again the extreme importance of context. For his career,  Guerrero had a wRC+ of 136, meaning he was about 36 percent better than the average, but given that, historically, the average right fielder has been eight to 10 percent above average, he’s something like 16-18 percent better than the reasonable expectation for a right fielder.

Rolen, by comparison, has a career wRC+ of 122. The average third baseman has historically been three to five percent below average, however, meaning that Rolen was a better hitter relative to other third basemen than Guerrero was relative to other right fielders. AND Rolen was regarded as the best fielder you could get, whereas Guerrero never won a Gold Glove, and the fielding numbers agree he was pretty bad in right.

None of this is to run down Guerrero or any of the other players mentioned who haven’t quite hit Rolen’s levels of excellence. Rather, it is to make clear that Rolen is so thoroughly qualified for the Hall of Fame, as the standards are currently constructed, that I don’t know of any truly reasonable argument not to vote for him. And heck, if you need an unreasonable one, he made Tony LaRussa, really, really mad. And that’s certainly worth a vote, don’t you think?

References and Resources

• Baseball Hall of Fame “BBWAA Elects Four to Hall of Fame”
• Baseball-Reference, “Third Base JAWS Leaders”
• Jack Curry, The New York Times, “Rolen Enjoying New Address: With Toronto, and Far From La Russa”
• Jonah Keri, CBS Sports, “A letter to BBWAA voters: Why Tim Raines deserves to be in the Hall of Fame”