Astros HOF Index: Where does Alex Bregman stack up?

I am admittedly walking a tight rope here. I am trying to accomplish two different things in one article without boring everyone to tears. First, I want to reintroduce the Hall of Fame Index and what it does. Secondly, we are using it as a way to evaluate what the Astros can do with Alex Bregman and how he differs from past Astros free agents like George Springer and Carlos Correa.

First of all, I should already admit that I am breaking the rules in his case. No player is eligible to be considered for the index until he has played ten seasons. Bregman will be going into his tenth season next year and that is assuming that you consider his cup of coffee in 2016 as a whole season. However, I think we are close enough to where we can get some ideas of how to treat him.

So, really I am answering two questions today. The first question is why we use the index in the first place? The second question is whether Bregman really is different from Springer and Correa? The first one is fairly easy to answer. The index is an analytical tool we use to protect ourselves from emotional decision making. It accomplishes this by allowing us to compare players with other similar players that we have no emotional connection with.

The index takes a players career baseball-reference.com’s WAR and combines it with Fangraphs.com’s WAR for a career value sum. Then, we take the top ten seasons from those two sources for a peak value sum. So, Bregman has one more season until his numbers can officially qualify him in the rankings, but we can look at where he is now and harbor a guess of where he could end up.

Alex Bregman: 39.6 BWAR, 39.7 FWAR, 39.6 BWAR10, 39.7 FWAR10 = 158.6 Index

If Bregman earned no more wins in his career, he would land between Ryan Zimmerman and Doug Decinces historically, However, we know this is not likely, so let’s pretend he does what he has done the last several seasons and adds somewhere between three and four wins in his tenth season. We could already peg him historically there according to his peak value.