Part of me thinks the Owings signing was insurance. As in, if we get a good enough offer, bye bye Whit.

I don’t know that they’re actively shopping him, but if someone blows them away they probably should consider it strongly. The winter meetings are usually when stuff like that goes down.

Baseball twitter is in an uproar tonight. The HOF Veterans Committee announced tonight that they are electing Lee Smith and Harold Baines to the HOF. The Harold Baines one is particularly surprising.

Let's put it this way, if you value WAR, and Baines gets in, you could make a case that Frank White and Alex Gordon could get in. They're in the same neighborhood in terms of WAR. But Baines did play for 20 years and was pretty consistent.

Lee Smith I could make a case for Baines not so much.

Agreed.

Baines had 1 season greater than 3.0 WAR. One. Jim Edmonds, who didn't see the second ballot of the writer's committee, had six straight seasons greater than 6 WAR, and eight seasons better than Baines' career year.

Hell, you can make a case for Hal McRae.

Baines - 289/.356/.465 121 OPS+
Hal McRae - .290/.351/.454 123 OPS+

Technically, Baines had 2.

1982, he had 3.4.
1984, he had 4.3.

Your point still stands though.

It's a debate over whether they should value true greatness over a short time vs prolonged consistent success. I mean there's no doubt in my mind what Baines did was an accomplishment. It's hard to be a good player for that long and a lot of guys don't do that. But I don't know where you draw the line. I don't think he's a HOF but I was almost serious about Frank White... there's a guy who played 18 years and had 2000 hits and won 8 gold gloves and had more 4 WAR seasons than Baines did. I get that Baines almost had 3000 hits though.

Yeah, I just hate that voters value guys that were above average for a long time but never great. It's one of the biggest issues with counting stats, as I'm sure you know. At least Baines was an objectively good hitter for most of his career. Craig Biggio was a good hitter, but if he had 2960 hits instead of 3060, maybe people realize that the guy was a career .280/.363/.443 guy. Chase Utley was almost just as valuable, and put up that value in far fewer years. Is Utley a HOF?

biggio playing a couple positions bla bla bla. IDGAF but I remember that being throw around why he was HOF worthy.

Dan quisenberry is not in the hall and it's a damn crime.

Yeah. Throw in that Biggio probably hurt the Astros his last few seasons while chasing 3k hits and it really leaves a bad taste.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Royals?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Royals</a> close to agreement with OF Billy Hamilton just working through bonuses and pending physical</p>&mdash; Jim Bowden (@JimBowdenGM) <a href="https://twitter.com/JimBowdenGM/status/1072157258929172480?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 10, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Great - another .205 hitter!