We’re in the midst of Hall of Fame season. The public announcement that tells us whether any of the players on the current ballot join those currently in Cooperstown is coming on January 20, and Ryan Thibodaux and friends’ ballot tracker is going strong, at 123 ballots as I write.
I do not have a Hall of Fame ballot, obviously. But I do care pretty deeply about Hall of Fame voting; those questions of where players fit historically are one of my favorite parts of fandom. Is this healthy? Probably not. A friend tells me frequently that I need to stop caring about an institution that includes Jeff Kent but not Barry Bonds.
But this is who I am. I care, and I find the discussion fascinating, so I’m going to share who I would vote for this year if I had a Hall of Fame ballot. But first, I’d like to tell you how I approach the question of who does or does not make my personal Hall of Fame. I will try to be brief.
A frequent question: big Hall or small Hall?
Well, I actually think the Hall is about the right size. Including Kent, who was elected via the Veterans Committee in December, there are 279 players inducted, roughly the top 1% of all players to have ever played in the majors.
The problem is not the size. It’s how those players are distributed. For example, between 1924 and 1935, the league averaged about 50 active Hall of Famers per season, but there were only 16 teams and about 400 active players at the time, so roughly 12.5% of the league’s active players ended up in the Hall of Fame. I think the sweet spot for the number of active players at any given time who should end up in the Hall is probably around 5%, which nowadays is about 40 players. This seems like a lot, but remember that this includes players at all phases of their careers: someone who debuted yesterday, a star player in the middle of their prime, or an aging legend who is barely hanging on. At 5%, that number from 1924-35 would be about half of what it is.
Why am I harping on this? There’s nothing I can do about the fact that the wrong 279 players are in, but Hall building is all about creating a line somewhere between players who are in and players who are out. For me, I essentially am asking myself: if I could build the Hall of Fame from scratch, would this player be in the top 275 or so? And if I answer yes, then I would vote for them.
This has been the single biggest issue for the Hall since Mark McGwire showed up on the Hall of Fame ballot in 2007. There’s never been any clear guidance from the Hall or from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (the body that votes on Hall of Fame elections), though it does seem that the Hall didn’t want any of the steroid guys in.
These waters became murkier when David Ortiz, who supposedly failed an “anonymous” drug test in 2003, was chosen as a first-ballot Hall of Famer. There are some questions around that, but it kind of seems like for Ortiz, an extraordinarily popular player and one of the faces of 21st-century baseball, everyone just happily swept any doubts under the rug. Not so for lesser-liked but far better players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, nor players whose accomplishments were deemed to be largely fabricated by steroid use, like McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
This question is still pertinent because there are three prominent players with ties to PEDs on this year’s ballot: Alex Rodríguez, Manny Ramírez, and Andy Pettitte. (PEDs are also connected to the story of one of our fanbase’s own, Ryan Braun, who debuted on the ballot this year, but he’s a tier below.)
Me personally? It’s hard. If a player was clearly a Hall of Fame-level player — like Rodríguez — I would vote for them. If I don’t see their case as particularly compelling, like for instance Sosa or Gary Sheffield, I let the drugs push them out. The tricky space is those guys in the middle, like Ramírez on this ballot: he’s an obvious Hall of Famer if you ignore the steroid use, but not an all-timer the way that Rodríguez, Bonds, or Clemens are. This is where this question is hardest.
There are different ways to measure the value of a career. Some will use WAR, straight up. Some put a premium on how many hits or homers a player had. Some just want to trust their gut.
Trusting our guts is stupid. That’s a good way to say that no amount of research-based information can sway you. Hubris.
Counting stats? Meh. Longevity certainly matters, but I’m not super interested in putting a player who was “pretty good” for 15 years in the Hall of Fame. (“Very good” for that long? Different story.)
For me, I’m most interested in how good a player was at their best, and how long they were at that level (which is different from how long they played). I have a variety of stats that I use (WAR rate, Wins Above Average, a little “stat” of my own I call Peak Score, how many times I’d have put them in the top three of MVP voting, etc.) that I use for a baseline. I move players around based on other factors, too, but I am more interested in a player who was near the best in the league for an amount of time (or at least spent several years as one of the best players at their position) than a player who stuck around picking up hits.
This is way too many words from me telling you how I’d personally get to about the 275-ish players who I believe would clear the Hall of Fame line. Agree or disagree in the comments!
I’ll do this in the order that I would choose them. I wasn’t sure I’d get to 10, but I did — barely.
Utley’s case requires you to trust defensive metrics, which not everyone does (perhaps wisely). But if you do think that Utley was — as the metrics say — an excellent defensive player, then his five-year run from 2005-09 was the best by a second baseman since Joe Morgan in the 1970s. The fact that people don’t blindly trust defensive metrics (and thus defer to the contemporary accounts, which did not consider Utley’s defense to be all that special) is why Utley is not in already.
Beltrán is very likely to be inducted this year, based on early returns; it is his fourth ballot, and he received 70.3% of the vote last season, and he’s thus far a perfect 20/20 among first-time voters. The only reason he’s not in already is his (central?) role in the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal of 2017. There is no question of his caliber as a player: 435 homers, 312 stolen bases (with the best high-volume stolen base percentage ever), and a truly legendary postseason career.
Speaking of defensive metrics, they tell us that Andruw Jones was the best defensive outfielder of all time. Combine that with the fact that he was a prodigious power hitter who had 434 career homers and once hit 51 in a season, and that’s enough for me, even if his offensive game had some holes. Consider it this way: Ozzie Smith had an 87 career OPS+ and played the best infield defense of all time. If we think Jones is the best defensive outfielder of all time, then a 111 career OPS+ should be plenty.
Here’s where stuff starts getting messy, but Rodríguez, at least, is not hard for me. Yes, steroids, bad image, etc. He is also, undoubtedly, one of the greatest baseball players ever, a high school legend who had a 9.4 WAR season when he was 20. Like Bonds, the talent was always there, and a Hall of Fame without him doesn’t make much sense to me.
This one’s harder. Ramírez is one of the best hitters ever, a “natural,” a freak who could do just about anything with a baseball bat. But where Rodríguez had other talents and played valuable defensive positions (well), Ramírez did not. He was one of the worst defensive players of all time, and he was bad on the basepaths.
In an ordinary scenario, Ramírez’s offensive prowess would easily be enough to get him in — he ranks in the top 30 in AL/NL history in OPS+, making him about an equivalent hitter as, say, Frank Robinson. This is where my views about PED users make it a bit difficult, though. Given that Ramírez was only a hitter, that hurts him. However, I’m willing to vote for him because his talent was, truly, freakish. This isn’t a guy who got into the HOF conversation because he hit homers and did nothing else. He was a career .312 hitter with a great eye in addition to whatever power boost PEDs may have given him.
Okay, now we get to the players who not everyone will agree on. Here’s why I like Wright:
Wright had nine seasons as a star-level player and was, at his best, an MVP-level player. That adds up for me.
The case for Pedroia is very similar to the one for Wright. Had Pedroia stayed healthy, I think he’d have had a first-ballot, inner-circle type career pretty easily; he was cruising toward 3,000 hits and 600 doubles when injuries effectively ended his career at age 33. Even still: 1,805 hits in just 1,512 games, 394 doubles, some pop, and excellent defense at second base for, essentially, 10 solid years: like Wright, he had his first “good” season and his last “good” season further apart than you’d think, and over those 10 years (2007-16) Pedroia averaged 5.1 WAR per season and 6.0 per 162. He also won both Gold Gloves and Silver Sluggers, and a deserved MVP in 2008.
The next three players are all very close to wherever my “line” is, but I’ve decided that in this extremely high-stakes hypothetical exercise, I’d vote for all three.
Abreu put up crazy numbers that flew way under everyone’s radar because they were mostly for bad Phillies teams in the late 90s and early 2000s. But from 1998-2004, this is what Abreu averaged per season: 156 games, 5.9 WAR, .308/.416/.525, 143 OPS+, 41 2B, 6 3B, 23 HR, 92 RBI, 29 SB, and 106 BB.
Between his 2,470 hits and 1,476 walks (20th all time!), Abreu reached base almost 4,000 times in his career, putting him in the top 50 all-time. He stole 400 bases, and hit almost 300 homers and almost 600 doubles. He played during the steroid era, so it was easy to miss a lot of these numbers, but they are wild, and he was one of the league’s most consistent players during his seven-year peak.
Hamels’ case may not be as strong if you have a preference for FanGraphs’ version of WAR over Baseball Reference’s. But this was another career, like Abreu’s, that flew under the radar. When he was just 24, Hamels won the NLCS and World Series MVP for the Phillies, a team that many forget won before they acquired Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Roy Oswalt.
Besides that, Hamels was just a reliably good pitcher for basically 14 years. Between his rookie year in 2006 and his last real season in 2019, Hamels was as solid and consistent as they come, always healthy, never bad. I recognize this is sort of against my “peak is the most important thing” model, but that’s just a preference — as I said, players who are “very good” for a long time get in, too. Throw in that magical 2008 postseason run, and it gets him a vote.
I’ve waffled on Hernández. The reason he’s getting so much support this year (and looks destined for future enshrinement) is that, between 2009 and 2015, he had a legitimate claim as the best pitcher in the league. Was he? Probably not, but he was in the conversation: he won the 2010 AL Cy Young and finished second in 2009 and 2014.
The problem is that Hernández wasn’t all that consistent, and outside of those three seasons, there’s not a ton of other great stuff. Hernández’s career as a good player was over by the time he turned 30, and in the years between his first good season (2007) and his last (2015), there were a few that weren’t actually all that great, they were just “pretty good.” It wasn’t the most consistent peak.
I am going to say that he’d get my vote, but I mentioned the 275 player thing, and in my (imperfect) ranking system, Hernández comes in literally at number 274. (As an aside: Hernández’s case should start conversations about some other shorter career, high-peak pitchers from more recent times, like Roy Oswalt, Kevin Appier, David Cone, Dave Stieb, and Bret Saberhagen.)
Pettitte is a borderline case before you consider his admitted PED use (which admittedly does seem less serious, but who knows). But ignoring that issue altogether, Pettitte’s peak wasn’t great, and despite a bunch of years when he got Cy Young votes because of inflated wins totals (the benefits of playing for the Yankees), I only saw him as a real contender once.
Buehrle is the hardest cut for me: his career is like no other 21st-century pitcher, in that he had 14 straight seasons with 200-plus innings, a streak that ended in his last season when, at age 36, he threw “only” 198 2/3. But while Buehrle was fun to watch and did have signature individual and team accomplishments (a perfect game and a World Series win), most of that time was as a good, not great, pitcher.
Take Rollins’ career and stick it in the 1960s, and you’ve probably got a Hall of Famer. But Rollins played during the height of the steroid era, and his .264/.324/.418 batting line is a problem when viewed in that context. That could be made up for if you’re an excellent baserunner (and Rollins was — he stole 470 bases at 81.7% success) and fielder. Rollins was a good fielder; he won four Gold Gloves, but he wasn’t good enough to make up for a 95 OPS+. His career WAR rate and total (just 47.9) just aren’t there for me.
Let’s ignore the ugly stuff and look at Vizquel purely as a baseball player. He racked up a ton of hits over a 24-year career, but had a career OPS+ of 82, which is really bad. Andrelton Simmons and Ozzie Smith both had a career OPS+ of 87. And yes, Vizquel was an excellent defensive player … but he wasn’t Ozzie. Plus, Smith had a couple of years where he got his offense up high enough so that, when combined with his otherworldly defense, he was an MVP candidate. Vizquel had maybe one year (1999) where he could’ve gotten into the fringes of that conversation, but he finished 16th in MVP voting, which feels about right — that was the only time he got votes. Smith appeared on MVP ballots in six different seasons and finished second once.
Vizquel was a worse offensive player and a worse defensive player than The Wizard, who was a truly unique figure. Let’s stop trying to pretend like Vizquel was in that class.
Ah, the reliever question. There are nine primary relievers in the Hall, and at least three of those are probably mistakes.
I wouldn’t vote for K-Rod, but he’s probably within the top 12-15 relievers in baseball history, which at least starts a conversation. If I had my way, we’d talk about several others first, though, guys like Joe Nathan, Jonathan Papelbon, Tom Henke, and three active players: Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel, and Kenley Jansen.
Hunter’s defensive metrics do not match his reputation. He was a good defensive outfielder, but he needed to be a great one in order to make the Hall of Fame, and he just wasn’t quite that. Hunter also had a major hole in his offensive game: he didn’t walk. Good counting numbers with 2,452 hits, 498 doubles, and 353 homers, but not enough peak.
Because it’s a Brewers site, I do want to talk a little about Braun. Let’s say he never used PEDs but had exactly the same career: does he get any discussion?
I don’t think he does. He might deserve it … I have Braun in the top 50 or so players outside the Hall based on the way I look at it. That’s a serious accomplishment. At his best, he was among the best in the league. But Braun’s career after turning 30 was, unfortunately, not great. He had a couple of good years but several not-so-good ones. After appearing on MVP ballots in each of his first six seasons and winning Silver Sluggers and making the All-Star team in all but the first of those, Braun made only one All-Star Game in his last eight years and averaged under three WAR per 162 games in that time.
There you have it. Way too many words about a thing that’s not even real.
