Slipped away after the Winter Warm-up for a few days, a few museums, a few pubs, and one soccer match in London, and upon my return Yadier Molina is a league champion (), Matt Carpenter is a Cardinal (again), Tommy Edman has a contract extension (of course), and a deadline is rapidly approaching.
You could argue it’s already past.
People are also reading…
This evening, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and its chosen voting body, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, will reveal the remaining members of Cooperstown’s Class of 2024. It has been my practice to host a chat or record a podcast fielding questions and criticism of my ballot each year. A wrinkle in the schedule – and a chance to, say, go “on assignment†for a weekend – did not allow for that this year. I apologize for that, and while it was tempting to just share a photo of the ballot on social media, I wanted to provide a better forum for your commentary. So, let’s see how this approach works.
I will share my votes here and some of my reasoning.
The comment section is open to your questions, concerns, and criticisms.
I will do my best to get to all of them there, prioritizing the polite ones.
But first, before the filibuster, a recap.
(Or, TL;DR, just scroll down to the player by player.)
• I treat the ballot like an article, my signature on the ballot like a byline. The same standards must apply. Any check mark I write on the ballot is like any sentence in an article – something I feel I can defend and can verify with reporting, sourcing, research, or data.
• This is the 10th time I’ve had a Hall of Fame ballot, and from No. 1 on I wanted to arrive at a standard that I could keep consistent, year by year. To do this, I rely a lot on comparisons. That’s comparison career to career, era to era, position to position, past Hall of Famers to current Hall of Fame candidates, and so on.
• I still stand by my proposal for a “binary ballot†– made way back in 2014, if you’re interested – because that gets to the truth of what the Hall is asking its voters: Is this player a Hall of Famer? As long as there is a 10-vote limit on the ballot, the Hall is asking a different question: Name the 10 most-deserving Hall of Famers listed here. That means if there are 11 players who a voter believes is worthy of the Hall, then the voter has to choose the top 10. During the crowded years of the past decade, voters have had to face that choice often.
• With that in mind, I use the sportsmanship and character clause as a tool, not a barrier. It is something I can use to reduce, whittle my ballot to the 10 permitted, not this castle wall I patrol to keep players out with the information I have. That is why there were years that I did not vote for players who had a preponderance of PED-use evidence in their career if I did not have room for them, and that means all of them (see above).
I have approached players suspended for PED use differently because they knew the rules and they were suspended, sometimes for a year or more, for violating them.
• For crying out loud, I do not have an issue with Coors Field statistics. Get over it.
• When I vote for a player, it’s to put him in the Hall, plaque, speech, and all. , maybe scatter votes for players who aren’t getting support and should, as a nod to their career, get at least the 5% to stick around. Gaming the ballot is smart. I admire that approach. Maybe there is a day I’ll take it.
• I value peak performance and appreciate longevity while respecting but not at all relying on the magic, round numbers. (See: Murphy, Dale.)
• Once I vote for a player, I do everything I can to make sure that I continue to vote for that player, regardless of the trend for his support. If I feel a player is a Hall of Famer in 2020 and he’s still on the ballot for 2024 then rarely has anything changed about his career other than my knowledge of his popularity with other voters. This is a consideration that will be tested, soon. If the ballot gets crowded again, I will be confronted with a change to this approach. I haven’t been so far.
Let’s start there.
A year ago, this was my ballot: Bobby Abreu, Carlos Beltran, Todd Helton, Andruw Jones, Jeff Kent, Scott Rolen, Gary Sheffield, and Bill Wagner. Kent has run out of time on the ballot after 10 years and should be elected by an eras committee. I had the opportunity to visit Cooperstown with Rolen and cover his speech there – a speech so good it will change how speeches are written from here on. That leaves six returning players, and they all get check marks again this year.Â
Bobby Abreu: A five-tool player overlooked for All-Star invites during his career and not exactly a robust home run total for a right fielder. Instead he had gobs of doubles (574) and created more with his steals (400). For kicks, recalculate his slugging percentage after adding 90 feet for every steal, and that career number jumps from .475 to .522. and still – from a previous explanation, “During his career, he reached base more than 3,700 times, and the only contemporaries who reached base more were Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and Chipper Jones. When (it) comes to not making outs and getting on base, Abreu ranks just ahead of Gwynn and Rock Raines, for context. Of the players ahead of Abreu, all-time, almost 90% are Hall of Famers.†He compares favorably against Sheffield, just gets to the numbers in a different way.
Gary Sheffield: One of the most feared, ferocious right-handed hitters of his era, and it’s a shock he remains on the ballot still, going on the full 10 permitted now. He has addressed consistently and directly the reported ties to PEDs, and the strong, diligent reporting on that by other journalists has informed my vote for as long as I’ve been able to vote for Sheffield.
Andruw Jones: Spent a decade as a blend of power and defense rarely seen in center field unless it came from a Hall of Famer. Won 10 Gold Glove awards during an era when it was not specific to exact position in the outfield, and still did that with Jim Edmonds in the same league. In his first full 10 years with Atlanta, he won nine Gold Glove awards, averaged more than 100 RBIs a season, hit 337 homers, and scored 951 runs to go with production that was 17% above average in the league. From 1997 through 2006, Jones’ 57.7 WAR leads all center fielders, ahead of Edmonds (49.6), Beltran (35.7), Mike Cameron (38.2), Ken Griffey Jr. (32.0), and Kenny Lofton (31.2).
Carlos Beltran: Anecdotally, he and Albert Pujols put on a Hall of Fame-level clinic in the 2004 National League Championship Series. But peak week does not a career make. Still, Beltran was one of the best all-around players of his era, one of the best switch-hitters of all time. how the former Cardinals outfielder “ranks eighth among all center fielders in career WAR, a lot closer to fifth-ranked Ken Griffey Jr. (83.8) than Griffey is to fourth-ranked Mickey Mantle (110.2).†That’s some heady company. And, please keep in mind, that the top level at CF includes Willie Mays and Ty Cobb. He was the only player who took the brunt of Houston's sign-stealing scandal in 2017; he also was a former player by the time of the investigation.
Todd Helton: See above. He crushed. It wasn’t like he got to pick the home field of the team that drafted him and then gave him reason to stay for the entirety of his career. He made the most of it. He doesn’t have the home run totals of some contemporaries at the position (asterisk), but then you’re talking about three of the top sluggers ever in the game – Frank Thomas, Jim Thome, and David Ortiz – and being just behind them is still elite. Also, consider the at-bats at DH. Thomas had 1,310 games there, Thome 817, and Ortiz 2,027. Helton had two. In his career, 0.09% of his at-bats came at DH. Consider the SLG/OBP slash lines of that group and Helton’s .539/.953 has a home on the corner (ahem) of that slugger cul-de-sac of Thomas (.555/.974), Thome (.554/.956), and Ortiz (.552/.931). If you’re wondering, as I was, Ortiz hit .587/.994 at Fenway Park vs. Helton’s .607/1.048 at Coors.
Billy Wagner: Along with Jeff Kent, one of the top slugging second basemen of all time, Wagner is the most recent candidate to add a new lens to my voting. I did not vote for him in previous years, and to simplify it was because he never led the league in saves and threw fewer than 1,000 innings. What he did do was make the most of the opportunity his team gave him. He did his job better than any of his contemporaries, whether they were starters or closers on teams with more close games. For a long time, I saw and read about Wagner’s strikeout rate (11.9%) and how it compared to other closers, lefties, and pitchers. In MLB history, there are currently 16 pitchers with at least 900 innings and a K/9 of 10.0 or greater. Wagner leads all of them. However, that arbitrary endpoint fits snugly behind his 903 career innings. Free agent Blake Snell (11.1% K/9) has more innings. For me personally, a more illuminating stat was how that compared to other pitchers in his tax bracket, if you will. There are currently 37 players with more than 500 innings pitched and fewer than 1,000 innings that have a K/9 if 10.0% or greater. Here are the top five: Aroldis Chapman (14.8%), Craig Kimbrel (14.2%), Kenley Jansen (14.2%), Wagner, and Brad Lidge (11.9%). Wagner’s 187 ERA+, which compares him to the league average and adjusts for ballpark, is the highest of that group, besting Kimbrel’s 171. Wagner also has the most saves of that group (422), though Jansen (420) and Kimbrel (417) will surpass him. So, does voting for Wagner set the bar to remain consistent with a vote for Jansen and Kimbrel. It could. It could indeed.
That brings us to the newcomers to this year's ballot.
Adrian Beltre: Since no other position players, from Derek Jeter to Ted Williams to name your favorite great, has been elected unanimously by the writers, Beltre should be the first. But he won’t. It’s up to Ichiro a year from now. Beltre is on the short list of greatest third basemen ever. A list of top five all-around third baseman – power bat, platinum glove – likely includes Mike Schmidt, Scott Rolen, Nolan Arenado, Chipper Jones, and Beltre. What stat doesn’t he have covered? He’s got 477 career homers, 3,166 hits, and it was his hit total that Albert Pujols surpassed to lead all Dominican Republic-born players. Has the plaque been cast already?
Joe Mauer: The minimum requirement for Hall of Fame induction is 10 years of service time in the majors. Like Jones, Mauer had a thunderous decade as Minnesota’s catcher. He won three batting titles, won two on-base “titles,†and led the league in average, OBP, slugging, and OPS in his MVP season of 2009. Oh yeah, he also won the Gold Glove Award and Silver Slugger at catcher three consecutive years. He was a two-way talent at the most demanding position on the field and did it for a decade. His career did not end with that decade, but it does include that decade. He heralds the arrival of Cooperstown’s catcher convention. In the coming years, Buster Posey (a batting champ, MVP, and first baseman toward the end, like Mauer) and Yadier Molina (a defensive force) will be on the ballot and likely elected.
Chase Utley: Candidly, this is the vote I spent the most time wrestling with this year, and if you’ve got the appetite for a 4,500-word explanation, here goes. I kid. I kid. Let’s distill it down. Utley has the peak. From 2005 through 2015, three of the top four players in WAR will look familiar. Pujols leads with 70.6, and if Ichiro isn’t the first unanimous position player, maybe Pujols will be. He’s followed by Miguel Cabrera (60.7) at second and Beltre (58.1) at fourth. Sandwiched in between those two first-ballot Hall of Famers is Utley (59.9), a second baseman. How does he get there? He ranks seventh in offensive WAR (46.6) and third in defensive WAR (16.8). But is that rare? As a control group, I looked a peak stretch from a comparable second baseman, Mizzou-made Ian Kinsler. From 2007-2017, Kinsler ranked eighth in the majors in WAR (50.5). Utley was ninth. Kinsler ranked 11th in oWAR (41.6) and seventh in dWAR (13.8), right ahead of Utley. From a ºüÀêÊÓƵ vantage point, Utley’s candidacy has echoes of Rolen’s (strong offense, top defense) and Molina’s (high percent of dWAR). Does he stand out similarly? I took a look through MLB history to see how many players have oWAR greater than 50 and dWAR greater than 10, and there are 39, including Utley (and Ken Boyer, for context). Then I went step by step, raising that dWAR to find there are 16 with dWAR greater than 20. Utley is not in that group. Eleven of those 16, including Rolen, are in the Hall. Beltre will make 12. And there that name is again. In the wild-card era, there have been three players with oWAR of 50.0 or higher and dWAR of 15.0. Rolen and Beltre are the only two with dWAR of 20.0 or more, and then there’s Utley as the third, at 17.3 dWAR for his career.
Comparisons continue to be how I try to maintain consistency on my ballot, and comparisons worked in Utley’s favor here and elsewhere.
But consistency can be in the eye of the beholder.
Where I see it for Players A, B, and C, others may wonder why Player Z did not get my vote.
That’s fair.
That is a rundown of nine players for 10 spots on the ballot, and leaves me with one spot open and, so far, no need to slim that group down.
I recently read some other explanations, and I have great appreciation for ºüÀêÊÓƵ baseball writer Rob Rains’ choice to use his final vote for Matt Holliday. The Cardinals Hall of Famer is an All-Star, batting champ, World Series champ, and had a season deserving of an MVP. A sportsmanship clause that can be used to trim a ballot can also be used to add to to it. Using the Ballot Tracker, it’s possible to see he needs a late push to reach the 5% to stay on the ballot. I voted for Edmonds in the past because I felt like he would slip off the ballot when compared to Griffey (his ballot classmate) and deserved a longer look when compared to Jones (who would appear on the ballot in the coming year). But something that should also be considered is whether staying on the ballot itself is a nod to a players’ career.
If being a first-ballot Hall of Famer carries weight, does being a player who stayed on the ballot also carry weight? Are the careers of Mark Buerhle or Andy Pettitte viewed differently because they received votes? Will David Wright’s stand out because he is receiving votes, or Jimmy Rollins? I have not taken that approach, as mentioned above. But I see how it means to the people who appear on the ballot.
I welcome conversation on this consideration.
There is no perfect ballot.
This is the one I signed: Abreu, Beltran, Beltre, Helton, Jones, Mauer, Sheffield, Utley, and Wagner.
I am eager to try again next year.
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