Ranking the 2013 Hall of Fame candidates: No. 12, Kenny Lofton

Our rankings and breakdowns of this year's crop of Hall-of-Fame eligibles continues with one of the most accomplished speed merchants of the contemporary era.

By Dayn Perry

Dec 17, 2012 at 12:37 pm ET • 4 min read

Speed merchant Kenny Lofton … Hall of Famer? (Getty Images)

Our countdown of all 37 players on the 2013 BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot continues, and, as the No. 12 suggests, we're in "serious contender" territory. Today's hopeful is Kenny Lofton, the top speed merchant of the post-"Rickey Henderson in his prime" era.

Baseball Hall of Fame
Related coverage
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As mentioned in Trent Rosecrans' Q&A with Jay Jaffe, the JAWS ranking system (available at God's own Baseball-Reference.com) played a prominent role in our ordering of these candidates, but there's more to it than that. Your three hopelessly devoted EOB bloggers -- Matt Snyder, Rosecrans and yours truly -- ranked each of these candidates according to a host of objective and subjective considerations, and we averaged those rankings to come up with the final order.

In addition to the obvious necessities (i.e., each player's ranking and name, positions played/role filled, teams toiled for, years played, notable traditional stats), we're also listing each player's year on the ballot (candidates fall off the BBWAA ballot after 15 years and/or if they fail to be named on five percent of ballots in any given year), the player's vote percentage from the previous year (when applicable), the player's Baseball-Reference version of WAR (bWAR) and rank among the 37 candidates and his JAWS score and rank among candidates).

And now to Lofton's case ...

12. Kenny Lofton; CF; Astros, Indians, Braves, White Sox, Giants, Pirates, Cubs, Yankees, Phillies, Dodgers, Rangers; 1991-2007
Year on ballot: 1st
Career stats: .299/.372/.423; 2,428 H; 130 HR; 781 RBI; 1,528 R, 622 SB
bWAR, rank among candidates: 64.9, 9th
JAWS, ranks among candidates: 53.5, 8th

For a very long time, Lofton got on base, stole subsequent bases and played plus defense at an up-the-middle position. On that front, Lofton ranks just outside the top 100 all-time in hits and times on base, and he ranks 15th in steals, 59th in stolen-base percentage and eighth in putouts by a center fielder. Also impressive is that Lofton is near the top 100 all-time for triples despite playing in an era in which three-baggers were vanishingly rare.

Speed, of course, was Lofton's signature tool, and his steal totals are especially notable. Take the span of time covering Lofton's career (including the 1992 season, in which he played just 20 games), and he's the easy leader in stolen bases with, as mentioned above, 622 of them. Second place over that time frame? Rickey Henderson with 470. So in terms of thefts, Lofton towered over his contemporaries. He was also successful in 79.54 percent of his attempts, which is comfortably above the break-even point.

Another consequence of Lofton's speed was that he rarely hit into double plays -- just 111 in more than 2,100 career games played. Take all the players in baseball history who logged at least 9,000 plate appearances and for whom we have complete GIDP data, and just four hit into fewer double plays than did Lofton.

There is also, of course, the matter of Lofton's defense. Lofton manned center for almost 17,000 innings in his career (his 1,988 defensive games in center field rank seventh since 1954 -- the back end of available data), and for his troubles he claimed four Gold Gloves. Baseball-Reference tabs him as 14.7 defensive wins above replacement for his career, and FanGraphs has him at roughly 11.5 wins with the glove. In a related matter, FanGraphs ranks Lofton as the seventh-best defensive center fielder of all time. Those numbers -- imprecise though they might be -- square with Lofton's reputation as an excellent fielder at a critical position.

Let it also be said that Lofton was a definite asset with the bat. For his career, Lofton authored an OPS+ (i.e., OPS adjusted to reflect park and league conditions, in which 100 is average) of 107. Over that same span, the average major-league center fielder had an OPS+ of 102. As well, Lofton's OPS is OBP-heavy, which is the more valuable of the two OPS ingredients (slugging percentage being the other). Since OPS adds them together and thus treats them as equals, OPS and OPS+ actually understate Lofton's value at the plate. In other words, he was a comfortably above-average performer even before you take into account his star-quality defense and base-running. It's no wonder, then, that WAR and JAWS each see Lofton as a worthy Hall of Famer.

The case against? Lofton played in a power era, and -- in the context of his times -- he didn't have much of it, particularly for an outfielder. You could also reasonably point to the flaws native to advanced defensive metrics (i.e., there's still much guesswork and observational bias involved) while noting that Lofton's case depends heavily on positive interpretations of his fielding.

Would we vote for him? Snyder: No (14); Rosecrans: No (12); Perry: Yes (11)