Early in 2009, one of my favorite writers, Joe Posnanski, wrote an article for Sports Illustrated explaining his belief that Andre Dawson does not belong in the Hall of Fame.  It’s an important lesson to all you kids out there.  Even though a person may be a great writer, they can still be wrong.

In his article, entitled “Trapped by the Numbers: Andre Dawson and the Hall of Fame,” Posnanski argues that he cannot support Andre Dawson for the HOF because Dawson’s on-base percentage is too low.  Before he can condemn Dawson’s OBP, he tries to explain why OBP is so important.

“On-base percentage is not some convoluted modern statistic. On-base percentage is not something new … it goes back to the time before Ty Cobb. On-base percentage is not even about walks. On-base percentage is simply the core of baseball, the very heart of it since the first ball hit the first stick. It is about how many times a batter gets on — and, conversely, how many times he makes outs. It is what the game is all about.”

I take issue with two things Posnanski says in that paragraph.  First, of course it’s true that on-base percentage is not something new.  OBP is a mathematical formula applied to baseball.  Baseball didn’t create the formula.  So yeah, it’s not new.  But to say that “it goes back to the time before Ty Cobb” is to infer that OBP was a widely used and understood statistic from the earliest days of baseball.  In fact, it was not.  The statistic existed, but no one (or almost no one) paid attention to it. 

Heck, even now, there are some dark corners of professional baseball where OBP is still considered some kind of charlatan’s con or black magic.  The light is slowly but surely getting into those corners, but the corners still exist even all these years after OBP was first used.  So to infer that OBP is something that came over on the Mayflower and is as old as baseball itself is to badly misstate the case. 

I know Dawson’s critics bristle when they hear a pro-Dawson fan say that OBP just wasn’t that big of a deal when Dawson played.  Perhaps a better way to say it is that OBP was not stressed as much during Dawson’s playing days.  It was still important, but very few people were sitting around thinking about the stat at that time.  Today, there are hundreds of websites devoted to analyzing baseball from absolutely every angle, but in Dawson’s day, not so much. 

What Dawson and his contemporaries were most concerned with was winning baseball games.  And very few players in the history of the game did more to prepare themselves to win than Andre Dawson.* Does that mean that players today don’t care about winning?  Of course the care, but we look at the ingredients that go into winning much differently today than we did in the 1970’s and 80’s. 

*Example after example have been cited to show what Andre Dawson went through to prepare himself to play.  Teammates talk about the regimen he had to go through both before and after games of soaking his knees in ice water to reduce the swelling.  He employed workout regimens and eating habits that are somewhat commonplace today, but which were not the norm during his playing days.  Dawson also held himself to an almost impossible standard of being ready to play every day.  Remarkably, up until the last few seasons of his career, Dawson missed very few games due to injury, despite the fact that his knees had been shredded by the artificial turf during his tenure with Montreal. 

For example, there was a time when players and managers looked at sacrifice bunts and stolen bases as key components to winning baseball games.  We know today through analytical research that sac bunts and stolen bases aren’t as important as we once thought they were.  So to condemn a manager for employing a sac bunt too often before the research was available and widely understood is to hold him to too high of a standard.  It’s unfair to expect a person to know something that the vast majority of people of their time didn’t know or fully comprehend. 

As an example, let’s say that Michael Jordan missed more shots than any other player in NBA history.  I don’t know if that is true, but let’s say it is.  And let’s say that at some point in the future, researchers determine that the best way to win basketball games is to make a very high percentage of the shots your team takes.  

I mean, we already know that it is good to make a high percentage of your shots, but what if researchers could take it to another level and show us a way to play the game of basketball that gives us a distinct advantage.  Imagine if the research led to a paradigm shift in the way the game of basketball is played.  If that happened, would it be right to change our opinion of Michael Jordan from being the greatest basketball player in the history of the NBA to being the guy who missed the highest percentage of shots in NBA history and thus cost his teams even more wins and even more championships?  Of course not.  Every player, regardless of the sport, should be judged on the prevailing wisdom of the time that they played.  People inside baseball may have known about OBP at the time Andre Dawson played, but they didn’t employ it to win baseball games the way they do today.  

The second thing I take exception with is Posnanski’s statement that “It (OBP) is what the game is all about.”  No.  Joe, I think you’re great, but baseball isn’t all about OBP.  Baseball is about winning.  It’s about scoring more runs than the other team.  If the other team has a higher OBP, but your team still wins the game, then it’s a good day.  No one is going to care about which player or team had a higher OBP.

As I write those words, I begin to channel Posnanski and I can hear him say that a team with a higher OBP may lose a game here or there, but they’ll win more than they lose in the long-run.  Perhaps.  Getting on base more often and making fewer outs will certainly help the cause.  But I’m not arguing that OBP is not important.  It is important.  What I’m arguing against is Posnanski’s contention that baseball is all about OBP.  It simply isn’t. 

Pos continues:

“It isn’t about walks, it really isn’t. That’s one thing everyone seems to miss. You say OBP and everyone says, ‘Oh, walks.’ But that’s not it. Walks and hits by pitch make up a pretty small portion of on-base percentage. Most of it is hitting. True, Andre Dawson did not walk at all. But that’s not the real point: He hit .277 for his career, which is OK but certainly not stellar. If he had hit .295 or .300, his on-base percentage would be significantly higher and nobody would be talking about any of this.”

In order to have achieved a .295 batting average, Dawson would have needed an additional 155 hits (He ended his career with 2,774 hits in 9,927 at-bats).  Spread out over his 21 year career, that comes to about 7.4 additional hits per season.   Or, broken down even more, it comes to less than one-and-a-quarter additional hits per month during the season.

I don’t mean to suggest that 155 additional hits is insignificant.  In fact, that’s about an additional season’s worth of hits.  But is that really what separates a Hall of Famer from a player that doesn’t belong in the Hall, just over seven hits per season?  That’s simply drawing too fine of a line in my opinion.

If you want to look at some numbers, take a look at where Dawson ranked in various categories at the end of his career.  I borrowed these stats from Hawk4TheHall, a blog run by an uber-Dawson fan named Charley.  Thanks, Charley!

When Andre Dawson retired, this is where he stood in the entire history of baseball:

• 22^nd in homeruns
• 24^th in RBI
• 38^th in hits
• 72^nd in runs scored
• 21^st in total bases
• 125^th in stolen bases

In addition, Dawson won the following awards during his career:

• NL Rookie of the Year (1977)
• NL MVP (1987)
• NL MVP runner-up (1981, 1983)
• 8 Gold Gloves
• 8 All-Star Team selections
• 4 Silver Slugger awards

Posnanski recently wrote another article about the Hall of Fame and compared it to the Hall of Merit maintained by the folks at Baseball Think Factory.  The article is not specifically about Dawson, but Pos throws out this little tidbit in the article:

“Dawson’s case has been hammered around for a while. He is one of only three players to hit 400 homers and steal 300 bases — Dawson, Bonds, Mays.”

Wow, pretty nice company.  There’s another stat that is telling.  Dawson is the only HOF-eligible player in MLB history to have a least 2,700 hits and 400 homeruns and not be elected to the Hall of Fame.

It’s difficult for me to understand how anyone can look at those numbers and then dismiss them because Dawson’s OBP is lower than they would like.  It’s like saying that the Beatles don’t belong in the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame because they were not particularly good dancers.  I know, it’s a gross exaggeration, but the concept still works. 

Here’s the bottom line for me.  When you watched Andre Dawson play the game of baseball, you saw a guy who separated himself from his contemporaries.  He was more respected by his peers than the average ballplayer.  He was more feared at the plate.  He was more closely watched on the base paths.  In the field, his speed and arm altered decisions made by other teams.  He was a cut above.  You could see it in the way he approached the game and in the way his competition approached him. 

It kills the sabremetric crowd to hear this, but those things can’t be fully quantified.  Yet they play a huge role in how the game is played.  I don’t mean to knock statistics.  They are important and are becoming increasinglymore  important every day.  But stats don’t tell the entire story.  You have to look at the stats and look beyond the stats to see the whole picture.  And when you see the whole picture it becomes clear that Andre Dawson belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame.