Season 69 Hall of Fame Voting

 Last season, we were able to elect Antonio Frandsen to the HOF. He was certainly deserving, but in my opinion, there were a number of others who could and should have joined him. As a result, this season I am going to try to compile a full list of HOF-worthy players in this post so that we can figure out just how much of a logjam we have. I still believe that the metric I have used traditionally (Importance Score, which is a mix of WAR/year and bonuses for individual awards) is the best blend of personal and team achievements, but Bill James' HOF Monitor Score is nearly as good and also quicker to calculate. Therefore, I am going to break down this year's ballot into tiers using that metric to see where we should consolidate our voting efforts:

I Should Have Been In Years Ago (130+ HOFM Score)

• Chick Prades, 186 points  (got my vote last year)
• Randy Pose, 178 points (got my vote last year) 
• Alex Salas, 178 points 
• Julio Gonzalez, 164.5 points
• Jose Cedeno, 150 points
• Timothy Walker, 141 points
• Riccio Olivia, 135 points 
• Maicer Rosales, 135 points

Definitely HOF Worthy (100-129 HOFM)

• Shane Porter, 129 points
• Henderson Jackson, 127.5 points
• Luigi Almanzar, 124 points 
• Quinton Strickland, 122 points
• Noel Strop, 121 points
• Dixie Goforth, 119.5 points
• Tomas Cairo, 114.5 points
• Enrique Lee, 110 points
• Edward Coomer, 107 points
• Miguel Silva, 107 points

Borderline HOF Case (70-99 HOFM)

• Bruce Cosart, 96 points
• Julius Kaufman, 93 points   (got my vote last year) 
• Al James, 92 points 
• Quilvio Noesi, 88 points
• Orlando Rienzo, 87.5 points
• Jeremy Kershaw, 85 points
• Adam Maybin, 84 points 
• Lee Mouton, 80.5 points 
• Everett Stewart, 75 points 

I Have To Have Another Reason To Be Elected (50-69 HOFM)

• Charles Mitchell, 69 points 
• Renato Alvarado, 63 points
• Marlon DeJean, 62.5 points 
• Mac Zhang, 57.5 points

Not Sure How I Made It Onto The Ballot (49 or less HOFM)

• Kiki Zurbaran, 48 points 
• Freddie Daly, 35 points 
• Ronn Shannon, 27.5 points 
• Bernie Cooper, 16 points 
• Sammy Delgado, 9 points 

Season 68 Hall of Fame Voting

 As I mentioned in the World Chat, we dropped the ball a bit last season and didn't elect anyone to the Hall of Fame here in Plumpy. I take quite a bit of responsibility for that as I had stuff going on in real life and it was Year 1 of my Commissionership here so I personally dropped the ball and also wasn't able to get a blog post up on the subject. I've seen a great response in terms of activity since I made a public plea on the World Chat for HOF voting, so I just wanted to take a minute to highlight the players whose names have come up and if I have time I'll move onto the other typical categories that I look at (players closest to election previously and first-year candidates.) 

Quick reminder that the metric I have found most useful is one that I call "Importance Score," which combines WAR/year and awards (personal accomplishments) with World Series Rings (team accomplishments) to give a good, holistic picture of a player's career. Anyone who reaches double digits on the Importance Score scale is worthy of eventually getting into the HOF...I have a suspicion that we will have more than five of those guys, so we should prioritize the ones who have been on the ballot for awhile and/or have the highest scores. Let's see where things stand: 

Guys Who Have Been Mentioned in World Chat

• Antonio Frandsen- 13.7 Importance Score (and there are a couple of seasons of data missing) 
• Alex Salas* - not enough data to calculate Importance Score yet
• Randy Pose* - 12.7 Importance Score (and there are several seasons of data missing) 
• Quinton Strickland* - 3.3 Importance Score (with a bunch of seasons of data missing)
• Julius Kaufman* -12.8 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR
• Chick Prades - 21.0 Importance Score (with several seasons of data missing) 
• Gorkys Garces* - 7.2 Importance Score (with a bunch of seasons of data missing) 
• York Bonds- 8.8 Importance Score (with several seasons of data missing) 
• Kiki Zurbaran- 4.2 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR

Guys Who Have Come Closest To Election Previously

• The five names above that have asterisks* next to their names

First Year Candidates

• Frandsen (see above)
• Tomas Cairo - 3.6 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR
• Quilvio Noesi - 3.2 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR
• Everett Stewart - 6.5 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR

The Rest of the Ballot

• Renato Alvarado-no data yet
• Denny Burriss-no data yet
• Jose Cedeno- 7.4 Importance Score (a bunch of seasons missing) 
• Marlon DeJean-not enough data to calculate Importance Score yet 
• Dixie Goforth-no data yet
• Julio Gonzalez- 8.6 Importance Score (a bunch of seasons missing)
• Henderson Jackson-not enough data to calculate Importance Score yet
• Jeremy Kershaw-not enough data to calculate Importance Score yet
• Shane Porter-no data yet
• Chuck Richardson-no data yet
• Orlando Rienzo- 3.7 Importance Score (a few seasons missing) 
• Maicer Rosales-not enough data to calculate Importance Score yet
• Ronn Shannon-no data yet
• Miguel Silva-no data yet 
• Noel Strop-no data yet
• Rafael Torrez-no data yet
• Mac Zheng-no data yet 
• Luigi Almanzar- 4.2 Importance Score (several seasons missing) 
• George Bermudez- 5.6 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR
• Edward Coomer - 9.5 Importance Score (a bunch of seasons missing) 
• Bruce Cosart- 12.7 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR 
• Freddie Daly- 1.2 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR 
• Sammy Delgado- 0.4 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR
• Santos Espinosa- 2.1 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR 
• Enrique Lee- 8.7 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR
• Julian Matos- 6.6 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR
• Adam Maybin- 8.0 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR
• Riccio Oliva- 8.4 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR
• Victor Olmedo- 7.9 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR 
• Pep Wanatabe- 6.5 Importance Score w/Estimated Career WAR

This leads me to...

Based on the research above, the following guys definitely deserve votes: 1) Frandsen 2) Pose 3) Kaufman 4) Prades. There are also a handful of guys listed above that I'm sure will deserve to be elected once I have a more complete picture, but for now I'm going to stick with those four and then dig a little deeper into the rest of them. 

A MWR Clarification/Update

As I prepared to write this post, I realized it's been just over a real-life year since anything got published....so it makes a lot of sense that the goal of this post is to sort out exactly what this league has been through in the last three seasons (aka about a real life year.) We've seen a commish change, a decent amount of league turnover, we went public for a hot minute and then returned to private...and now we're here. While I type this we are down to our final opening prior to starting Season 68 and I wanted to get the MWR question sorted out before we fill and have to deal with budgets (and any potential MWR violations that may come up.) 

Before we get to crunching the numbers, here's a quick recap of events as best I remember: Season 66 was pajammies' last in charge as commish of a private Plumpy world. I then took over as commish when we rolled into Season 67, where we started out private and then went public to fill the last few spots before reverting back to being a private league to play out Season 67. Now, here we are in Season 68 with one spot left to fill...so I feel pretty good about our ability to stay private the whole time. 

Since we never had a full public season, I feel the easiest (and most logical) approach is to apply the MWR to all previous seasons. Given that we are looking at a four-year window, that would be S64-67 for our upcoming budgeting purposes. Let's take it bullet-by-bullet to see what issues may come up:

One Year MWR: 55 Wins

• The Helena Hellas (foodew) were in violation of this, but foodew did not return so this a moot point.

Two Year MWR: 120 Wins 

• The Salt Lake City Blue Lake (gnocc) tallied 119 wins in S66 and S67 combined...this is something that a decision will need to be made about. 

Three Year MWR: 185 Wins

• The Salt Lake City Blue Lake (gnocc) tallied 179 wins in S65-S67...this is something that a decision will need to be made about. 

Four Year MWR: 260 Wins 

• The Scranton Boll Weevils (zeustis01) talled 258 wins from S64-67...this is something that a decision will need to be made about. 
• The Salt Lake City Blue Lake (gnocc) tallied 227 wins from S64-67...this is something that a decision will need to be made about. 

Based on the data above, there are two potential courses of action we can take: 1) apply the MWR to all of the past four seasons and impose the $10M Prospect Payroll cap on zeustis and gnocc. 2) Re-Start the MWR clock from the moment we re-privatized, which would be the start of S67, and have everyone on fairly even footing going forward. 

I say fairly even footing because doing this would mean that the number of wins needed in this upcoming season would still be higher for those who won less often than others last season, thereby giving them a slightly higher hill to climb this year without directly imposing the prospect cap penalty right away. For full transparency's sake, this is the way I am leaning towards ruling at the moment. Here's a quick rundown of how many wins everyone would need this season to avoid violating the MWR: 

• Indianapolis (FW_K) = 59 Wins
• Salt Lake City (gnocc) = 59 Wins
• Scranton (zeustis) = 59 Wins
• Philadelphia (zyrion) = 57 Wins
• Everyone Else = 55 Wins 

After doing that math, I am even more inclined to make this our course of action.  I do, however, realize that I rule at the will of the people and want to be as transparent as possible in this process.