Hall of Stats

On December 28, 2023 I decided to shut down the Hall of Stats. I want to thank everyone for their support of the site since it launched in 2012. The Hall of Stats was an incredibly rewarding passion project, but over the past few years it has been difficult to maintain it. Plus, in a way I feel like it has served its purpose.

After the Hall of Stats launched, the 2013 BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot followed shortly thereafter. At the time, the Hall of Fame balloting process was a disaster. There was a huge backlog of statistically worthy candidates even before the ballot became inundated with PED candidates. The Hall of Stats was born out of my frustration over the process.

But things are different now. While the 2013 BBWAA election was a shutout, since then ten players from that ballot have been enshrined—and that doesn’t include Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Curt Schilling, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro still waiting on the outside for off-the-field reasons. We have seen the inductions of Hall of Stats favorites like Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina, Larry Walker, and Scott Rolen.

The revamped Era Committees have also welcomed Hall of Stats members Deacon White, Alan Trammell, Ted Simmons, and Minnie Miñoso (albeit with a few question marks along the way).

Heck, when Scott Rolen hit the ballot I wrote about how much I feared he was going to struggle. While he only debuted with 10.2% in 2018, he made huge gains every successive year and was inducted in Year 6. There is perhaps no better signal of how far the voting has come. Things are far from perfect, but they’re definitely better.

When I built the Hall of Stats, it was a hobby project. Today, I work full time on Baseball Reference, Stathead, Immaculate Grid, and the rest of the Sports Reference fleet of websites. Baseball Reference has JAWS, a Hall of Fame rating system developed by my friend Jay Jaffe that has a similar mission. While there are key differences between JAWS and Hall Rating, for the most part they agree on most candidates’ Hall-worthiness. After 20 years, Jay is still making improvements to JAWS (such as S-JAWS and R-JAWS). I encourage you to follow his work.

You can follow along with my latest personal research projects at my personal site.

You can still access an archive of the Hall of Stats site. This version of the site is up to date through the 2022 season and will not be updated any longer. The Negro League MLEs used on this version of the site are based on the 2022 version of Eric Chalek’s MLEs. These have since been replaced and some players made significant gains and drops.

I want to thank my dear friends and co-developers Jeffrey Chupp and Michael Berkowitz. They helped me execute this idea and I’m forever grateful for that. I also want to thank the readers of the site over the last twelve years. I truly appreciate it.

Thank you,
Adam Darowski
darowski.com