It was modern metrics that ended Ted Simmons’ long wait for Hall of Fame election
It took 31 years of waiting after his retirement, but those three decades of hoping for an announcement that failed to come, the circle of Ted Simmons’s baseball life has come to a close.
Simba is headed to the Hall of Fame.
“They say renewal is wonderful, but at 70 (years old), it’s left me scratching my head a bit,” a laughing Simmons said on Sunday night. “But there’s never too long a time to wait if you finally make the leap, and today I finally did.”
Baseball Hall of Fame President Tim Mead announced on Sunday night that Simmons was elected to the Hall by the Modern Baseball Era Committee, which focuses on the accomplishments of players in the 1970s and 80s. The committee is comprised of a selection of 16 Hall of Fame players, MLB executives, and members of the baseball media.
Their deliberations took place on Sunday at the outset of the 2019 Baseball Winter Meetings and the results were announced on the MLB Network that night.
Along with Simmons, Marvin Miller, the first executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, also was elected. Miller, who died in 2012, was instrumental in fighting for the rights of players to access free agency alongside former Cardinals center fielder Curt Flood.
Cardinals All-Star
Simmons played 13 years for the Cardinals between 1968 and 1980. He was one of the premier offensive catchers in the history of the game, performing at a rate 27% above-league average during his time with the Cardinals.
He played in six All Star Games as a Cardinal and two more with the Milwaukee Brewers and finished in the top 20 of the Most Valuable Player voting on seven occasions. He also won the National League Silver Slugger for catchers in 1980.
For many years, it was believed that Simmons’s candidacy via the Modern Era committee had been hampered by his surprisingly poor showing on ballots submitted by the members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.
In 1994, his first year of eligibility, he received only 3.7% of votes, and was consequently dropped from the ballot in subsequent years due to a rule that requires a player to receive at least 5% of votes in his first year to stay in contention.
Poor showing on the ballots
In a winter where the Cardinals have made a significant investment in upgrading their baseball operations department, it’s fitting that Simmons is, in a sense, the team’s first representative elected to the Hall of Fame as a sort of analytics darling.
Modern number crunching has created an increased focus on the value of on-base percentage and, therefore, walks. Simmons exceeded a .350 on base percentage in nine full seasons, driven in large part by his ability to take a base on balls, and credited those who focus on analytics with helping to push his candidacy.
“If it weren’t for the analytics people, my career as a potential Hall of Famer probably would’ve been shut down and forgotten about a long time ago,” Simmons said, also crediting the development of WAR — wins above replacement — as a statistic that gave coherence to some of the things observers of Simmons would vouch to via the eye test.
“It’s difficult to match up with Bench, who won the World Series year in and year out. Or Fisk, in Boston, having great, great years,” Simmons said. “So the comparisons sometimes are not as thoroughly looked into as maybe they should be.”
Simmons worked for several organizations as a talent evaluator and assistant coach. He already knew better than most the value of advanced metrics. Now he really knows, having been the beneficiary of their scrutiny.
“In the last 15 or 20 years since the analytics departments have all become so in depth, people have started talking about WAR and what’s involved with that, and people started looking at me and revitalized my candidacy for the Hall of Fame,” he said.
No. 23 on the wall at Busch Stadium?
Simmons’s number 23 has not yet been retired by the Cardinals, and a team official indicated on Sunday evening that such a decision rests in the hands of team ownership. In recent years, figures such as Whitey Herzog and Tony LaRussa have seen their numbers taken out of circulation following their own elections to the Hall of Fame, and it would stand to reason that Simmons would be strongly considered for the same honor.
Conveniently, the most recent Cardinal to wear 23 was Marcell Ozuna, who seems likely to leave the team this winter in free agency.
“On behalf of the entire St. Louis Cardinals organization, I would like to congratulate Ted on this well-deserved honor and his selection among the greats to have ever played the game,” Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt, Jr. said in a statement. “Since being drafted by the Cardinals as a teenager, Ted Simmons has remained an active contributor to Major League Baseball at many levels both on, and off the field.”
Simmons served as director of player development for the Cardinals from 1988 to 1991 and the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1992. He worked in various front office capacities for Atlanta, Cleveland, Milwaukee, San Diego, and Seattle, and was also the bench coach for both the Brewers and the Padres.
The St. Louis chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America plans to honor Simmons in January with the Red Schoendienst Medal for Meritorious Service to Baseball in honor of his distinguished career. He and Miller will be inducted into the Hall of Fame next July alongside those elected by this year’s BBWAA vote.