Where is Joe Mauer’s Benefit of Perception?

[puckstopper1]

5 hours ago, jmlease1 said:

Why does playing for a small market have anything to do with whether a player is worthy of the Hall of Fame? A player should not get extra credit just because they play for the $#^$@* Yankees or Dodgers. A player should not get any demerits because they played for the Twins or Pirates or Royals. That's a ridiculous statement packed in a group of bad takes.

 

JM:

Good takes.  I appreciate them.  My point about the small market is that it is one of the things that is working against Mauer.  Should it be?  Absolutely not.  But given that he did play in a small market, he had less national exposure.  When he did have that national exposure (in the playoffs) they Twins had little success.

These facts plus that facts that the Twin Cities media was regularly savaging him will not help his cause.

Don't get me wrong - Mauer was the total package in his prime (sans a bit of power maybe).  But the items above certainly will play against him.

[Platoon]

A lot of people don’t appreciate  Mauer as a catcher because he made it look so easy, sort of like sitting in a lawn chair! Unlike some of the catchers who have followed Mauer, a Twins pitcher could actually throw that 1-2 slider down in the dirt off the plate and have confidence that it wasn’t gonna hit the backstop.  
 

As for his abilities at first, pretend you are a Twins IF and have the choice of throwing to Mauer, or the likes of Sano, or any of the occupants of that position last year? 
 

Was he a traditional bat first IB? Probably not, but for quite a few years he was the gold standard at the catching position! 

[zoilozone]

I remember Joe's Uncle saying that when he got his "big boy" muscles he would be something special. I thought at the time that would translate to being a power hitter. The muscles didn't come I guess.

[Brock Beauchamp]

1 minute ago, zoilozone said:

I remember Joe's Uncle saying that when he got his "big boy" muscles he would be something special. I thought at the time that would translate to being a power hitter. The muscles didn't come I guess.

Out of the draft Mauer was projected to be a 15-ish homer guy by pretty much everybody, his swing was too flat to ever be a legitimate power hitter.

[nicksaviking]

57 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

Out of the draft Mauer was projected to be a 15-ish homer guy by pretty much everybody, his swing was too flat to ever be a legitimate power hitter.

Yeah, the swing held him back from the power. I suppose most of us thought it was there to stay in that one MVP season, but it was an outlier.

Seems to me the contract complaints were from a small minority of fans, who just happened to be the loudest. Most fans were in favor of the deal or at minimum understood it was necessary. It would have never kept him out of the HOF, nor would it have damaged his reputation nationally, that was purely a midwestern passive-aggressive gripe every time he stepped to the plate.

But back to the swing though, perhaps my memory is foggy, but I seem to recall that the biggest complaint, which wasn't addressed in the article, was that for how respected he was as a bat swinger, he didn't adjust his swing to keep up with the changing game. He still tried to hit through the shift instead of hitting around or as most wanted, over it. As talented as he was, I think most fans figured he could have adjusted as well or better than other hitters who thrived during that time.

Either way, he's a HOFer.

[Brock Beauchamp]

3 minutes ago, nicksaviking said:

Yeah, the swing held him back from the power. I suppose most of us thought it was there to stay in that one MVP season, but it was an outlier.

Seems to me the contract complaints were from a small minority of fans, who just happened to be the loudest. Most fans were in favor of the deal or at minimum understood it was necessary. It would have never kept him out of the HOF, nor would it have damaged his reputation nationally, that was purely a midwestern passive-aggressive gripe every time he stepped to the plate.

But back to the swing though, perhaps my memory is foggy, but I seem to recall that the biggest complaint, which wasn't addressed in the article, was that for how respected he was as a bat swinger, he didn't adjust his swing to keep up with the changing game. He still tried to hit through the shift instead of hitting around or over it. As talented as he was, I think most fans figured he could have adjusted as well or better than other hitters who thrived during that time.

Either way, he's a HOFer.

Yeah, he certainly didn't adjust but there were confounding factors in there: he stopped hitting the ball as hard as often after the concussion, full stop. That was the biggest cause of his decline.

Second, the Twins franchise at the time simply was not capable of steering anyone in the right direction, as they were as far behind the game as anyone. My god, look what they did to Hicks and then Buxton.

It feels like there was a significant portion of post-concussion Joe Mauer performance left untapped by a franchise that didn't have the coaches to identify and fix holes the modern game was exploiting.

[nicksaviking]

4 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

Yeah, he certainly didn't adjust but there were confounding factors in there: he stopped hitting the ball as hard as often after the concussion, full stop. That was the biggest cause of his decline.

Second, the Twins franchise at the time simply was not capable of steering anyone in the right direction, as they were as far behind the game as anyone. My god, look what they did to Hicks and then Buxton.

It feels like there was a significant portion of post-concussion Joe Mauer performance left untapped by a franchise that didn't have the coaches to identify and fix holes the modern game was exploiting.

Yeah, and it's not like the coaches should have had the only input, there was no front office saying 'doing X will result in more production based on the team/ballpark/defense/pitcher we're playing'.

I mean, can you imagine an NFL team today saying, 'well playing like this worked for the 1960 Cleveland Browns, should work for us too'?

[Linus]

5 minutes ago, nicksaviking said:

Yeah, and it's not like the coaches should have had the only input, there was no front office saying 'doing X will result in more production based on the team/ballpark/defense/pitcher we're playing'.

I mean, can you imagine an NFL team today saying, 'well playing like this worked for the 1960 Cleveland Browns, should work for us too'?

I think the biggest factor was Joe had been swinging like that since he was 5. Not that easy to change after all those years especially because it served him very well until analytics exposed his patterns 

[2wins87]

I have lots of thoughts on Mauer and the HOF, but citing only fWAR for catchers in Molina and Mauer's era is a little problematic due to the huge impact of framing in the first half dozen years that it was included in fWAR.

It's not that I think the framing numbers are wrong in their impact, but I don't think guys should be in the hall conversation solely on the basis of being a good framer.  Brian McCann and Russell Martin are pretty close to Mauer in fWAR but 15-20 of those wins come from framing for both of them, and most of that from 2008-2013 when a few teams were measuring framing and understood its impact but many didn't.  McCann and Martin were both good catchers, but both benefited from being on teams that understood framing early and neither belong anywhere near a Hall conversation.

Molina also gains maybe 10-15 wins from framing, but in his case his reputation is defense, working with pitchers, and other leadership aspects that are difficult if not impossible to measure.  I buy it for the most part so I think Yadi should go to the Hall.  Same for Posey.  I think it is often unappresiated how hard it is to maintain a high level of offense while catching for many years.

Mauer should have the most straightforward case of the three.  He also ticks a lot of traditionalist boxes with things like the 3 batting titles.  I do think national writers have often seemed to be more clear headed about this than many in Minnesota, so I think there's a very good shot he gets in on the first ballot.