Warmup Tosses: One Degree of Billy Williams

You might have to dig a bit deeper for Dan Driessen

One of the fun things about considering Hall of Fame candidates is that it gives us the chance to ponder how they stack up against greats (or otherwises) of the past. A quick way to get a list of players to stoke your imagination in this area is to look at the Similarity Scores area of the Baseball Reference page for a HOF candidate.

It’s not a perfect tool, but it at least plants the seed, for example, that Carlos Beltran’s career — as a batter, anyway — was pretty similar to those of Andre Dawson, Billy Williams, and Al Kaline. You can run with it from there.

Of course, if you’ve been around these parts long, you might recognize this sort of exercise as the first move in my Six Degrees of Dan Driessen time-waster.

It also plays a part in the fun we’ll have here in this newsletter over the next few weeks, connecting the new(ish) to the old.

Thanks for reading.

—Adam