My father is about as anti-SABR as you can possibly be, and he refuses to even mention wins in a CY argument. He has no idea what FIP or tRA are, but he knows looking at win totals is a bad way to judge talent. Maybe “traditional” writers/voters have started to come to the same conclusion?

Obviously I wish they’d check the numbers a little more often, but if my father is on the “don’t look at wins” bandwagon, maybe we’re moving into a golden age of baseball reason.

Just a thought.

And radio guys can get away with a lot of homerism, as the radio audience is basically limited to the metro area; based on radio ads the target market for broadcasts (especially football, but baseball to some degree too) seems to be contractors and maintenance guys driving around between jobs.

At best, Lofton was equal to Raines, at worst, Raines was significantly better. And Lofton has a real Hall case.

So Raines should, logically, range from “A Hall Case” to “A Dwight Howard in the 2008 Slam Dunk competition Dunk”

Leadoff hitters still have a much bigger bar than Home Run hitters. Adam Dunn, for example, has a legit shot at 550 HR, which would put him in the top 15 of all time, and you have to go all the way down to Dave Kingman (currently 35th with 442, and FWIW only 106 ahead of Adam Dunn, meaning he could pass him easily by the end of 2012) to find someone that isn’t in the Hall of Fame, and we all know Kingman’s deficincies in every area outside of HR hitting. But as much as I love Adam Dunn, does his hitting balance out the poor defense? I can’t bring myself to say yes.

Other examples (positional in nature) are 1Bs being overrated, while Second and Third basemen have historically had harder times getting to the Hall.

18 1B
16 2B, but at least 3, and up to 5 of those were when 2B was one of the weaker defensive positons, closer to 1B than SS.
10(!) 3B, and three of them are Batting Average wonders Pie Traynor, Freddie Lindstrom and George Kell.

Third base is to baseball what Small Forward is to basketball, too many people really don’t grip the importance of the position because it’s really an unspectacular positon. Bob Elliott, Stan Hack, Darrell Evans, Ron Santo, the list goes on. For the here and now, Adrian Beltre and Brandon Inge, two lowish-OBP, average-SLG, big glove 3B.