A nice summary of 2014 MLB Hall of Fame voting can be seen at baseball-reference. Greg Maddux tops the list and he scores very high in this data model with a +134 WAA for his career making him close to the top ten baseball players of all time. Maddux isn’t listed in the top bar list because it was made awhile ago and isn’t entirely accurate since I found a few bugs in the code generating it. A more thorough set of pages and ranking tables will come sometime this Spring after I write better code to rifle through the model. But I digress…
Greg Maddux has had a career page on the side bar from the beginning when I assembled the MLB greats. There is no reason to repeat his table here.
Note: Even though pitchers bat and usually put up negative or below average numbers I do not count that against them when tabulating their career numbers. Greg Maddux went –26 WAA as a batter for his career. Even subtracting his batter numbers he still scores above 100 WAA. I chose not to count batting against pitchers since the model doesn’t count pitching against batters.
Frank Thomas got in with +87.5 WAA. My sidebar MLB Greats list was for players with greater than +100 WAA but I made an exception for Frank Thomas because he’s a White Sox and I’m from Chicago and grew up watching him play. In comparison, Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub, had a +79.2 WAA for his career. The sidebar committee also made an exception with him because he’s Chicago’s north side greatest. The purpose of these career tables is to put the WAA rating system into perspective since the same mathematics used to calculate the careers of baseball’s greats are used to calculate every player down to the worst player in A ball.
Since Frank Thomas and Greg Maddux careers have already been enshrined in the sidebar for awhile I’ll post Tom Glavine’s career numbers below.
Tom Glavine HOF 2014
| Year | WAA | IP | ERA | G | W | L | Name_Tm | BAT/PITCH |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1987 | -1.5 | 50.3 | 5.54 | 9 | 2 | 4 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1988 | -3.9 | 195.3 | 4.56 | 34 | 7 | 17 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1989 | 0.2 | 186.0 | 3.68 | 29 | 14 | 8 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1990 | -2.0 | 214.3 | 4.28 | 33 | 10 | 12 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1991 | 8.2 | 246.7 | 2.55 | 34 | 20 | 11 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1992 | 5.3 | 225.0 | 2.76 | 33 | 20 | 8 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1993 | 5.7 | 239.3 | 3.20 | 36 | 22 | 6 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1994 | 2.1 | 165.3 | 3.97 | 25 | 13 | 9 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1995 | 6.6 | 198.7 | 3.08 | 29 | 16 | 7 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1996 | 9.0 | 235.3 | 2.98 | 36 | 15 | 10 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1997 | 8.0 | 240.0 | 2.96 | 33 | 14 | 7 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1998 | 11.1 | 229.3 | 2.47 | 33 | 20 | 6 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 1999 | 2.8 | 234.0 | 4.12 | 35 | 14 | 11 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 2000 | 8.1 | 241.0 | 3.40 | 35 | 21 | 9 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 2001 | 4.5 | 219.3 | 3.57 | 35 | 16 | 7 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 2002 | 6.8 | 224.7 | 2.96 | 36 | 18 | 11 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
| 2003 | -0.1 | 183.3 | 4.52 | 32 | 9 | 14 | Tom_Glavine_NYN | PITCH |
| 2004 | 4.4 | 212.3 | 3.60 | 33 | 11 | 14 | Tom_Glavine_NYN | PITCH |
| 2005 | 4.0 | 211.3 | 3.53 | 33 | 13 | 13 | Tom_Glavine_NYN | PITCH |
| 2006 | 3.1 | 198.0 | 3.82 | 32 | 15 | 7 | Tom_Glavine_NYN | PITCH |
| 2007 | 0.0 | 200.3 | 4.45 | 34 | 13 | 8 | Tom_Glavine_NYN | PITCH |
| 2008 | -1.9 | 63.3 | 5.54 | 13 | 2 | 4 | Tom_Glavine_ATL | PITCH |
Career WAA Value = 80.6
Congratulations to the above three 2014 MLB Hall of Fame inductees. They all represented baseball’s greatest in MLB history, not only according to the whims of sport writers who voted for them but also mathematically according to this data model.