Jim Alexander explains his voting Troy Percival for the Hall of Fame. The motivation for the article stems from a difficult interview for Alexander on MLB Radio. BBTF, which provides the link, comments:

I heard the interview with Stern and Bowden. It’s wasn’t flattering to any of the participants.

Alexander’s produces two lines of thought for me. The first is about the Hall voting:

And, as I also pointed out – which a lot of my critics either missed or ignored – I was perfectly willing to leave off someone who I figured would get in anyway in order to cast a vote for a player I felt strongly about, one who I felt should get at least the 5 percent of the vote to stay in the conversation for another year.

But when it comes to the Hall of Fame vote, passion trumps nuance. Which is to be expected.

He left John Smoltz and Mike Piazza off his ballot, which angered supporters of both. That is just silly. Sometimes it seems fans demand perfection from voters, but the Hall of Fame ballot is designed to allow for nuance and strategic voting. With many voters making their ballots public today, it encourages conversations about players, as happened with Bert Blyleven. It’s also designed to allow a vanity vote, one for a player that the writer simply liked. Smoltz got in to the Hall, and Piazza fell short by 24 votes, so Alexander’s vote didn’t matter. The conversation about Piazza will continue, and he probably gets in next year.

As for Percival, he seemed to believe he did merit some consideration:

He recalled a point in 2003 when he discovered just where he was in the pecking order.

“I’m at 287 saves at the time and Mariano (Rivera) had 287,” he recalled. “He had 50 blown saves, I had 51. His ERA was a point lower than mine, but my hits-to-innings pitched and strikeouts were far beyond it.

“And they had a special on TV (saying) that he was already a guaranteed first-ballot Hall of Famer. And then they had the lefty … Billy Wagner, as a probable first ballot and he had 240 or 250 at the time. I didn’t quite crack the list and I’m going, ‘Wow, OK. I see where it’s at.’”

Percival’s comments are typical of Hall of Fame arguments, cherry picking the stats that make him look good, while down playing the stats that give the opponent the advantage. Here are the two compared side by side from the start of their careers in 1995 through the end of the 2003 season. The difference in ERA was only half a run, but that’s huge. In addition, Rivera had appeared in fewer games, but pitched over 100 innings more. While Percival had a higher strikeout rate, Rivera had a much lower walk rate and a much lower home run rate.

Finally, Percival had a losing record, while Rivera had a winning record. Given that they had about the same number of blown saves, it seems the severity of the lead losses were worse for Percival than for Rivera. Bill James once said about a Goose Gossage season, that he was winning games he should have been saving, but that’s a hell of a lot better than losing them.

So it matters what metrics you choose. To Troy, the saves and blown saves matters. To most Hall of Fame voters, the other stats mattered, too.