I’ve always been intrigued by baseball statistics. So intrigued, in fact, that I developed systems for ranking baseball players, and also predicting players’ chances of long-term success before they even set foot on a Major League baseball field.
Rampant use of performance-enhancing drugs throughout the 1980s and 1990s have made a mess of the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. Star players are finding themselves snubbed from the Hall based on mere suspicion of steroid use. Enshrinement in the baseball Hall of Fame has become more of a popularity contest and judgement of moral character than a commemoration of legendary achievements on the playing field.
A few years ago, I set out to develop an objective system for selecting players to join the baseball Hall of Fame. Instead of the current subjective system of voting amongst baseball writers, my system would look at concrete evidence of popularity and performance compared with peers. My system would not be influenced by events and judgments made after the fact.
I developed a system that I call All-Star Analysis of Players (ASAP). Each year, I select a number of players based on the number of players playing in the Major Leagues that year. The main criteria for ASAP are All-Star Games played and Wins Above Replacement (WAR). This way, the players are measured based on popularity (All-Star Games) as well as how good they were in relation to their peers.
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