Chase Utley Slid His Way Into Our Hall Of Pretty Damn Good Players

Last week, we introduced what we’re calling the Hall of Pretty Damn Good Players, a repository for all of those terrific-but-underappreciated contributors who probably won’t get recognized by their sport’s official Hall of Fame. We kicked things off with Kenny Lofton, who was unceremoniously dropped from the baseball writers’ ballot in 2013 despite being one of history’s best center fielders by JAWS (an average of career and peak wins above replacement). 1 Lofton deserved far better — which happens to make him a great prototype for the HoPDGP phenomenon. In other words, the players who belong in our Hall have slim real-world chances in spite of great advanced metrics. To help quantify that, we made a model that predicts a player’s Cooperstown probability based on traditional measures of Hall-worthiness. (Lofton’s traditional Hall probability was just 28 percent.

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/chase-utley-slid-his-way-into-our-hall-of-pretty-damn-good-players/