Count me as one of those old school baseball fans (I’m 40, for what it’s worth) who thinks that the Baseball Hall of Fame has been watered down over the last two decades. It used to be a place where only the very best of the best were enshrined. There were some “magic number” milestones that most of those players hit (3,000 hits, 500 home runs, 300 wins, 3,000 strikeouts), and even the ones that didn’t hit those usually were very close and had something else that pushed them over the top.
With the analytics boom of the last twenty years, there have been a whole host of new statistics that aim to capture a player’s productivity beyond old-fashioned stats and the eyeball test.