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How Keltner Begat SaberhagenIn many ways, Bill James is at his best when he’s bringing order to unruly discussions. In the 1985 Baseball Abstract he introduced The Keltner List of questions for assessing the candidacy of any player, and he made use of it again in The Politics of Glory (Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame).James explicitly stated that the list was designed primarily to be subjective: “You can't total up the score and say that everybody who is at eight or above should be in, or anything like that.” He’s right, there’s no one way to total it up and spit out a score, not with all the moving parts in a baseball career. On the other hand, many of the 15 questions can be answered objectively.?Writing in 1985 and again in 1995, James didn’t have Win Shares, VORP, WARP, or WAR. Today they are a fast, simple means to answer those questions more precisely. They’ve also shown us that for many important players in history, reputation and contemporary opinion were at odds with the player’s contribution to his team. So retrospectively, we know that Bobby Grich was an outstanding player, but in his time, he was overlooked and fell off the Hall ballot after one election. Today’s omnibus stats (WAR for example) fill in a lot of the gaps that yesteryear’s observers didn’t always see.We love the Keltner List. It asks the right kinds of questions, the ones we hear ourselves and others asking about the Hall of Fame ballot. But some of those questions feel a little rusty, some a little too loose, some a little too tight, and some simply not applicable to the HoME. So we’ve done three things with it:reworded and reframed some of the questions for our devicesremoved a few that don’t applyresequenced them so that they take us, generally, from the widest to the narrowest (and most difficult) qualifications.Oh, and with apologies to Messers James and Keltner, we renamed it the Saberhagen List: SABRmetric Heuristic for Analyzing, Grading, and Evaluating Nominees. Yes, we actually took a day or two to figure out the acronym. Yes, we’re pretty psyched about it. No, we can’t help ourselves.Without further ado, here’s the list as we’ve repurposed it:How many All-Star-type seasons did he have?How many MVP-type seasons did he have?Was he a good enough player that he could continue to play regularly after passing his prime?Are his most comparable players in the HoME?Does the player's career meet the HoME’s standards?Was he ever the best player in baseball at his position? Or in his league?Did he ever have a reasonable case for being called the best player in baseball? Or in his league?Is there any evidence to suggest that the player was significantly better or worse than is suggested by his statistics?Did he have a positive impact on pennant races and in post-season series?Is he the best eligible player at his position not in the HoME??Is he the best eligible candidate not in the HoME? ................
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