A few months ago, my colleague Joel and I introduced a new statistic called FAME (Fanfare and Acclaim Metric Extraordinaire) to measure not how good a player was, but how highly he was thought of during his playing days. In my first article, I compared the FAME results of great players to their WAR. The results: Yogi Berra was the most overrated player of the past eighty years, and Tony Phillips the most unsung. (After expanding my numbers for today’s article, Berra remains atop the leaderboard. Second place, amazingly, belongs to Manny Trillo.)

Today, my inquiries center on the upcoming 2013 Hall of Fame ballot. Having read the first seventeen pages of The Signal and the Noise, I believe I’m ready to turn my mental powers toward the art of prognostication. My goal: to try to predict the outcome for the first-year eligible hitter’s on this year’s ballot.

The natural first step would be to use each hitter’s WAR to estimate their chances at Cooeprstown. Remember that FAME only concerns itself with position players, because pitchers don’t get enough awards to quantify them properly, and thus will be omitted. Here’s a graph that correlates the percentage of every first-ballot hitter from 1993-2012 with their career WAR:

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As a member of the middle class, my childhood was in no way free of tragedy. My parents, thoughtful as they were, crippled my future writing career by failing to die or even divorce during my upbringing. Nor were even the holidays free from suffering: how I remember that fateful Christmas when, tense with anticipation to receive the NES game Baseball Stars, I ripped open that familiar rectangular present to find… Bases Loaded II. I still carry the pain of that moment to this day.

But despite the hardships that I endured, the fact that I never got a Pogo Ball and that my parents allowed me to watch Smokey and the Bandit at least a hundred times on LaserDisc, I would be remiss to leave you with the impression that my youth was unending disappointment. As proof that my parents did in fact feel some sort of affection for me, twenty-three years ago, they gave me this:

The picture sports an autographed rookie card and the prized Upper Deck headshot of 1989. Still, the eye is drawn upward to a pair of Ken Griffey, Jr. candy bars, made with 100% milk chocolate, which are probably still at least 98% chocolate today. But wrapped in its thin foil is more than just processed cocoa with alkali: they also trap in the heady potential of youth on the cusp of achievement. One sees them and imagines a group of boys sitting a patch of grass, biting down on Griffey’s head and tasting summer.

Thank you, Dad, and thank you, Mom. And a Happy Boxing Day to you and yours, dear reader.

A while back, a certain “Carson” “Cistulli” wrote a short piece about wit as it is reflected in sport, employing both Zinedine Zidane and Brandon Phillips as examples of the satisfaction we feel when a player uses creativity to succeed where he might otherwise fail. Having established the phenomenon, he refuses to elaborate further, his need for sandwiches mightier than his need for truth. I face no such obstacle.

I would refine Cistulli’s definition of wit by adding necessity and result. It is not enough that Brandon Phillips makes his spectacular toss to first; it must be the only necessary means of achieving the desired result. If Phillips makes this play and beats the runner by three steps, he would be called flashy at best and perhaps far worse. At the same time, if his throw arrives a half-second too late, we quietly applaud his efforts and then forget them an inning later. This last aspect is troubling; we want to believe, I think, that our virtues are inherent and not tied to our success or failure.

No, the more narrow the out, the more we feel satisfaction in its completion. This is what drives us to the paradoxical conclusion that it is the athletes with the least physical prowess that we find most endearing, those who must rely most heavily on their creative powers to compensate for their natural ability. Talent, after all, is arbitrary. Talent is fascist. And though this admiration for the unfortunate can admittedly reach fetishization, and the exploits of the appointed Ecksteinian heroes can become exaggerated to the point of lore, there is an undeniable pleasure in the success of the little guy. Few people, after all, identify themselves with Goliath.

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As my beleaguered comrade Eno Sarris has already emoted, R.A. Dickey is leaving the fair city of New York. The casual fan might assume that the Blue Jays-Mets swap is one of those unfortunate deals necessary for a rebuilding club to get younger. They might then accidentally go on to miss the intelligent, witty veteran with the lovable knuckleball. Fortunately, the New York Post is there to dispel these illusions, and remind the reader that R.A. Dickey is in fact a clubhouse cancer and possible convicted felon, who has fled north to escape his inevitable tarring/feathering.

The Post’s Mr. Davidoff doesn’t actually supply much hard evidence for the selfishness of the 38 year-old pitcher whose performance the past three seasons has has surpassed his pay six times over. Fortunately, we here at the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team have uncovered a list of some of Dickey’s petulant demands and grotesque personal charisma. An anonymous source revealed the following unforgivable sins:

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Of course, they were never your first choice. Maybe they were all that the store carried; maybe it was the only Gregg Jefferies you didn’t have yet. Maybe you had time to kill in the drug store while your mom looked at cosmetics, and so you sat cross-legged on the floor, pressing down the cellophane on each pack so that you could read the name on the bottom card. (Was that a Ricky Jordan rookie or a Ron Jones?) No matter the reason, sooner or later, a few Score baseball cards found their way into your collection.

Score probably didn’t deserve the scorn it inevitably received. The quality of the cardstock was better than Donruss, the photography was better than Fleer, and the backs had about ten times as much information as Upper Deck. But despite a bold graphic design at its inception, and about two dozen Bo Jackson cards in its 1990 set, the collectors never developed an attachment to the latecomer. By 1991, Score was already becoming a forgotten brand.

Ultimately, Score’s legacy, its gift to the hobby, is a dubious one: the rise of the subset.

Score didn’t invent the subset, of course. Highlight cards, record breakers and the like have been around since time immemorial; Topps had its Turn Back the Clock series, Donruss its Diamond Kings. Score lacked the history to lean on for a staple brand, and lacked the patience to create them. Instead, they had tasted the fruit of Bo Jackson and saw that it was good, and by 1991 had developed half a dozen subsets to fill out their overcrowded, 893-card regular issue.

The subset is, economically speaking, a reasonable solution to an age-old baseball card conundrum: what do you do with commons? Nobody likes to open a pack of baseball cards and get nothing but Steve Buecheles and Jerry Don Gleatons. But if you take all those guys out and include only the stars, the excitement of landing a Ruben Sierra wears off. Score’s answer: keep the scrubs, but include different versions of the stars to increase the odds of finding a familiar face in a pack. It seems good in theory, but the erosion still takes place: all those secondary cards lose value, and devalue the name of the player they depict along with them. Scarcity is a harsh mistress.

The other problem with subsets is that they’re often pretty dumb. Not all, mind you; highlight and record breaker cards are important, and might actually be the only reason to have baseball cards today. The stats you can find everywhere; baseball cards should commemorate a year, rather than a player, and should stand as a photo album of that season’s highs, lows, and quirks. But after you get those out of the way, how do you squeeze another Jose Canseco into your set?

Score went with two choices. The “Master Blaster” subset and its pitching and defense equivalents framed players against space-age laser lighting similar to what you had as a backdrop to your fifth-grade school pictures. Their “Dream Team” subset, an even stranger choice, employed black-and-white photographs of famous players in an artistic style, sometimes, holding apples, sometimes sans clothing. The Dream Team set was particularly wonderful and bizarre: you had your shirtless Jose Canseco with brewing storm clouds behind him. You had Doug Jones staring into flickering flames leaping from one of his 84mph fastballs. You had Roberto Alomar unable to stand upright.

These subsets, which eliminate statistics in favor of a paragraph or two of filler text on the back, are nothing more than the final projects of a community college graphic design class. As the insert craze exploded, this trend grew worse and worse, with the design being the reason for the card, and the player on it an afterthought. After all, shiny!

But what’s sad is that some of these ridiculous subsets offered a real opportunity to create interesting cards. The “Rifleman” subset examines the best arms in baseball, a subject rarely talked about and never quantified. Rather than say, “Shawon Dunston has a super strong arm y’all”, Score could have clocked his fastball, or at least throw up some defensive statistics that never make the cut on an average card. How about a subset devoted to caught stealing rates? Outfield assists? All-Star vote totals? Some of them may be silly numbers, but they’d be new numbers. Something interesting to look at and talk about. An actual reason to have a card.

In the end, style triumphs over substance, and America got the baseball card it deserved. And it was of Bo Jackson.

Last Friday, on these very electronic pages, one Carson Cistulli talked about things no one is talking about, one of which being the Hall of Fame status of former Blue Jay third baseman and tastemaker Kelly Gruber.

(Kelly Gruber, last known photograph.)

One might dismiss this sort of inquiry as media satire, and sleep easy at night; one might, that is, if one were a lazy-minded rapscallion. For there are mysteries that lurk within the heart and hair of Kelly Gruber, mysteries that are easily tangled among his cascading locks. Why is nobody talking about Kelly Gruber? Dare we call it… conspiracy?

What else could explain the fact that despite the fact that Gruber fulfilled the requirements for being elected to the Hall of Fame, having played ten seasons in major league baseball, and yet never saw his name on the ballot? Could it be that the commissioner feared the hypnotic effects of Gruber’s shiny golden mane, enchanting writers into voting the hair and not the man?

Why is no one talking about this, indeed.

After all, he may be no Lloyd Moseby, but a vote for Gruber would hardly bring shame upon the Hall. Since his eligibility in 1998, no less than 26 players have appeared on the ballot with a WAR lower than our outcast (16.9). Seven of those twenty-six even received at least one vote. Three of those seven are card-carrying members of the American Communist Party.

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Thou still unravished pride of quietness,
  Thou child of spectacle and facial hair,
Malign’d first baseman, how can time express
  Thy legacy, left in such sad repair
What die-cast legend haunts about thy shape
  Immortalized in resin, and in time?
    In some invis’ble Kingdome standeth thee?
  For semi-anonymity, what crime
Committed thee? By how didst thou escape
    The cavalcade of baseball revelry?

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In which the Royal We insert the name of Von Hayes, uncomfortably apt yin to Dick Allen’s yang, into the used books We purchased while earning Our liberal arts degree from the local state university.

Today’s topic: the End of the World, as foretold by professional doomsayer and Anglican curate, Robert Malthus.

I think I may fairly make two postulata.

First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.

Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain in its present state.

These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations.

Assuming then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of Von Hayes is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

Von Hayes, when unchecked, increases in a geometric ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.

By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.

This implies a strong and constantly operating check on Von Hayes from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall some where and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.

This has been the only episode of Inserting Von Hayes’ Name Into Works of Non-Fiction.

The Hall of Fame announced its 2013 ballot last week, and was nearly drowned out by a choir of angry crickets. The Hall is now facing its own equivalent of the fiscal cliff: fifteen players have legitimate arguments for induction, the writers can vote for a maximum of ten, and will probably vote for one or two.

Frustrations have been boiling over on Twitter, baseball’s stream of consciousness, where events played out like a Syd Finch textbook. You have your old, out-of-touch former baseball writer playing the part of the troll, trumpeting his ability to keep out “the druggies”; you have your young, impassioned bloggers desperate to feed him; and you have your eventual eyerolling from those above (or behind) the fray. This is stupid, they said collectively, each removing and polishing their metaphorical pince-nez. Personal awards are stupid. Caring about the Hall of Fame is stupid.

The Hall of Fame is stupid. But caring about it isn’t. The Hall of Fame, flawed as it is, is important.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been currently reading a biography of Adlai Stevenson, former statesman and bald person. Stevenson ran for President twice, in 1952 and 1956, and lost to the same guy both times by about the same margin. He had a gentle face and a keen wit: when he was on the campaign trail, he was once told that he had the vote of every thinking man in America. “That’s not enough,” he replied. “I need a majority.”

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According to the thinkers, how we are measured by whoever is doing the measuring lies in no small part in how we handle adversity. It’s called “grace under pressure”, as Hemingway liked to tell his poor wife Martha it while he shot down adorable zebras from the back of his rented Jeep.

We see it in Hemingway’s own Catherine Barkley, protesting mildly as she bleeds to death on a Swiss operating table. We see it in Oscar Wao, standing in the sugar cane, losing everything and yet finally a man. We see it in Rubashov, holding to his flawed ideals even with the pistol pressed to his temple. We see it in Hector, pitted against the Gods themselves, thinking only of the honor of his burial.

We see it in all these cases and a million more, the plight of every man and woman caught in conflict with an unfeeling and unyielding world, and knowing themselves in their defeat.

And we see it in Cyborg Tommy Hanson, caught in his own tempest, raising his cry against the heavens:

NO

— CYBORG HANSON TOMMY (@CyborgHanson48) November 30, 2012

And for a full minute, the timelines of everyone on Twitter were filled with naught but the hollow echoes of Cyborg Tommy Hanson, who finally learned what it is to be a man.