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Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 8/26/25
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1:35
How do you feel abot the Tigers meeting the Brewers in the WS?
AvatarJay Jaffe
1:36
Sounds like a fun one, albeit one that would mean I don't get to cover any World Series games (like all of 2016–23). once you get a taste for it...
re: that stuff about ripken and hornsby
1:36
Should the increased potential player pool for the MLB matter for HoF voting? Put another way, should post-segregation players be given a leg up for having to play above a replacement level that includes Black players, and should modern players get a leg up for having to compete for replacement level against a group that now includes Masataka Yoshida and Eugenio Suarez and too many other foreign players to mention?
AvatarJay Jaffe
1:40
it should probably matter more than it does. The higher WARs of yesteryear, and the Herculean feats of old timers even apart from WAR, owe plenty to the fact that a good chunk of the league was guys who wouldn't have been everyday players with a larger pool. A 7-WAR player in 2025 is a massively better player than a 7-WAR player in 1925. Doesn't mean we can't celebrate those old guys but holding them up as unquestioningly superior to today's players is something that only happens in baseball; it's not like there's an argument that Sammy Baugh was a better QB than (ugh) Tom Brady.
1:41
On that subject, I really want to read this study that was mentioned recently:  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/science/baseball-statistics-babe-bo...
if anyone has access to this paper through an academic account, please reach out https://projecteuclid.org/journals/annals-of-applied-statistics/volume...
1:42
On that note, it's time for me to go. Thanks so much for stopping by. Next week is a toss-up in the wake of the long weekend but I'll hope to fit the chat in. Have a great one, folks!
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