From the time of its inaugural election in 1936, when the late Christy Mathewson (1880-1925) was chosen among the original class of five honorees, the Hall of Fame has often highlighted the stark contrast between baseball immortality and human mortality. In fact, more than one-third of the 329 members of the Hall were elected posthumously, an inevitability given that the major leagues had a 65-year head start on the institution that honors its greats. Yet Tuesday’s election of the late Roy Halladay — who died on November 7, 2017 while flying his Icon A5 light sport airplane — marked the first time since 1954 that the BBWAA elected a deceased player (Rabbit Maranville) and the first time since Mathewson that they did so in the player’s first year of eligibility.

A Denver native who spent 12 seasons with the Blue Jays (1998-2009) and four with the Phillies (2010-2013), Halladay was admired throughout the game for his tireless work ethic and his character as well as his impeccable control of his sinker. His devotion to the mental aspect of the game stood out; he rebounded from an historically dreadful 2000 season aided by the writings and counseling of sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman as much as the remaking of his mechanics and repertoire by Blue Jays pitching instructor Mel Queen. “Roy Halladay was your favorite player’s favorite player. A true ace and a wonderful person,” wrote pitcher Brandon McCarthy upon the news of his death. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Hall of Fame election results from the BBWAA’s vote broke new ground with the unanimous election of Mariano Rivera, the first candidate to run the table since the voting began 83 years ago. With the late Roy Halladay, Edgar Martinez, and Mike Mussina topping 75% as well, it also produced the institution’s fifth quartet in electoral history, and the third in five years, after these four:

In the six cycles since the 2013 shutout, the writers have elected 20 players, surpassing the 15 elected from 1951-56 for the most elected in a six-year span. With an eye toward electoral history and more recent trends, what follows here is both my rundown of the fates of all 35 candidates on the ballot (some of which will figure into my updated five-year outlook for Monday) and a clearinghouse for an assortment of relevant notes and links. One thing that stands out: all 15 holdover candidates gained ground, even if it was just by 0.2% (I’m working to confirm as to whether this is a first). None of those candidates’ share of the vote went down relative to 2018, though that doesn’t always mean that that they made real forward progress in burning a precious year off their eligibility clocks.

Mariano Rivera (1st year, 100%)

It’s still almost unbelievable that Rivera was the first candidate elected unanimously. That honor rightfully would have gone to any one of a few dozen players before him if not for the self-appointed guardians of the Cooperstown gate, but it took a perfect storm of voter accountability, transparency, a candidate who was the best ever at his speciality, and a man universally respected throughout the industry, one who lived up to the responsibility of being the last player to wear Jackie Robinson’s otherwise-retired number 42, in order for it all to come together. And oh, what a moment to behold.

Once upon a time, there was a thought that the Joe Torre-era Yankees dynasty might not produce a single Hall of Famer. Now they have three, namely Torre himself (as manager, of course), Tim Raines (admittedly, a role player by that point) and Rivera, with Derek Jeter on the way next year. Rivera is the eighth Hall of Famer to spend his entire career with the Yankees (Earle Combs, Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Whitey Ford, and Mickey Mantle are the others, and Jeter is next) and the second Hall of Famer born in Panama, after Rod Carew.

On Tuesday night, after the election results were announced, I did a spot for “The Big Sports Show” on St. Louis radio station WTRS, where hosts Ben Fredrickson and Brendan Wiese pointed out that I chose pretty well when it came to the cover subject for The Cooperstown Casebook.

Edgar Martinez (10th, 85.4%, up 15.0%)

The first modern candidate to post four straight year-to-year gains of at least 10 percentage points, Martinez took a much rougher, though no less rewarding, road to Cooperstown than Rivera. As previously noted, he’s the sixth candidate in modern electoral history (since 1966, when the writers returned to annual voting) to be elected in his final year of eligibility, after Red Ruffing(1967), Joe Medwick (1968), Ralph Kiner (1975), Jim Rice (2009), and Raines (2017). He’s the fifth Puerto Rico-born Hall of Famer, after Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, Roberto Alomar, and Ivan Rodriguez, and as La Vida Baseball’s Jose de Jesus Ortiz — a former president of the BBWAA — pointed out, his election alongside Rivera makes 2019 the first time the writers have elected two Latino inductees in the same year. Together, Rivera and Martinez run the total of Hall of Famers who spent their careers with a single team to 54.

As with the candidacy of Raines, the election of Martinez is somewhat personal. He was a favorite of mine when I was simply a fan, and I supported his candidacy from the outset in 2010. The Martinez profile I put together for Baseball Prospectus and ESPN Insider in December 2010 is the first version of a piece that was adapted for SI.com, the Casebook, and ultimately FanGraphs, reflecting the annual ups and downs of his candidacy.

There’s more to it than that. My uncle Harold Jaffe spent his retirement years as the gregarious “mayor” of the then-Safeco Field Diamond Club, but just as I was finishing the Casebook in January 2017, he passed away after a long illness. I had come to refer to that side of the family as the Edgar Martinez Wing of the Jaffes, and so Martinez’s candidacy took on an additional layer of meaning. In an appearance I did for the Mariners Hot Stove Show on Tuesday night (starting at the 13:20 mark here), I got a bit verklempt, discussing both Edgar and Harold, whom co-host Shannon Drayer called “an absolute Safeco treasure.” She had some kind words for me as well.

Roy Halladay (1st, 85.4%)

I’ve mentioned that Halladay was the first player posthumously elected by the BBWAA in a regular election since Rabbit Maranville in 1954, and the only other one elected by the writers in his first year of eligibility besides Christy Mathewson in the Hall’s inaugural election in 1936 (he died in 1925). I have more on that topic in a separate feature in the pipeline, so enough said about that angle for now.

Here’s one to ponder: who will be the next starter elected on the first ballot? Backstage at MLB Network in Secaucus, where I made a pre-announcement appearance on MLB Now, Jayson Stark (himself a Hall of Famer this year, via the 2019 Spink Award) and I pondered the question and concluded that the first pitcher to have a real shot would be Justin Verlander, since neither of us sees CC Sabathia as a slam dunk. I’m not yet sure Verlander is a slam dunk, either (let’s see how he finishes his career) and so upon further consideration, I might choose Clayton Kershaw as the next lock. We shall see…

Mike Mussina (6th, 76.7%, up 13.2%)

I didn’t catch this on Tuesday, but the 20.3% Mussina received in his 2014 ballot debut is the third-lowest percentage of any modern player elected by the BBWAA. The only ones lower? Duke Snider, with 17.0% in 1970, and Bert Blyleven, with 17.5% in 1998. It took Blyleven 14 years and a substantial grassroots campaign to gain entry; that Mussina only needed six is both a reflection of the growing impact of advanced statistics on the process and a testament to how overstuffed the ballots have been. Nonetheless, he made double-digit gains in three years out of the four since that debut, and now he has to figure out which cap to wear on his plaque (I lean Orioles – he was a perennial Cy Young contender in Baltimore, and represented the team in all five appearances). The link between Blyleven and Mussina is significant in another way. It took 20 years between the elections of non-300 win starting pitchers Fergie Jenkins in 1991 and Blyleven in 2011. We’ve had four since then: Martinez and Smoltz in 2015, and Mussina and Halladay this year. It’s about damn time.

Curt Schilling (7th, 60.7%, up 9.7%)

If not for his noxious public persona — the reprehensible things he’s said on social media and the radio, the cozying to white supremacists, the conspiracy theories — he would have beaten Mussina to Cooperstown, because he had a one-year head start on the ballot, and a 9.3% lead as of 2016 (52.3% to 43.0%). Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences, however, and the voters gave Schilling a little chin music in 2017. As it is, he’s regained his momentum, receiving his highest share of the vote to date and putting himself within striking distance next year, particularly as he’s the top returning candidate by voting percentage. Of course, his capacity for self-sabotage doesn’t guarantee a smooth path to 75%.

Roger Clemens (7th, 59.5%, up 2.2%), Barry Bonds (7, 59.1%, up 2.7%)

If you were hoping that the Gruesome Twosome would regain momentum — which certainly appeared possible, given that both were about 6.5 points ahead of last year’s pre-election results in the Ryan Thibodaux’s (@NotMrTibbs) Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker — the answer is apparently no. The pair had public-versus-private differentials of 25.5% and 25.6%, respectively, the largest in Tracker history; those have since dropped below 20 points as more ballots have been revealed, but that still doesn’t count as good news.

ESPN’s Jeff Passan reached out to 60 voters who according to the Tracker excluded both players from their ballots. He got responses from 18, 15 of whom told him that they couldn’t ever see themselves changing their minds. Whether or not that group constitutes a representative sample of the electorate is an open question, but here’s some sobering data from the Tracker: each had net gains of just three votes from returning voters, with Clemens matching last year’s total and Bonds tripling his. First-time voters went 7-for-8 on both this year, while last year, they were 12-for-13 on Clemens and 11-for-13 on Bonds. But that math doesn’t help them as much as flipping a no to a yes.

In other words, it’s probably going to take another jolt akin to the 2016 decision to sunset inactive voters, and the 2017 election of Bud Selig, commissioner of the steroid era — which together helped Bonds and Clemens climb from the mid-30s to above 50% — for a substantial bloc of voters to change their minds. How about this: in 2022, their final year on the ballot, Alex Rodriguez, who served a full year suspension for PED violations, will be eligible for the first time, as will David Ortiz, who reportedly tested positive in the 2003 survey test, a result that commissioner Rob Manfred essentially waved off during the love-fest of the latter’s retirement tour, on the grounds of “legitimate scientific questions” about at least 10 samples, “issues and ambiguities were never resolved because they didn’t matter… [because] we knew we had enough positives to trigger the testing the following year.”

Rodriguez might be an obvious no in 2022, but neither Bonds nor Clemens are known to have failed the survey test or any other steroid test administered by Major League Baseball. As with Ortiz, both were beyond the league’s ability to discipline for any infraction, and let’s face it, they’re miles beyond Ortiz in terms of their overall caliber of play. How is somebody going to justify voting for Big Papi but leaving the pair off? We’ll find out.

Larry Walker (9th, 54.6% up 20.5%)

As noted on Tuesday, Walker posted the largest year-to-year gain of anybody on this year’s ballot and the ninth-largest in modern history; he’s also in the top five for two-year and three-year gains (32.7% and 39.1%, respectively). It’s a remarkable surge, no doubt, and again, the good news is that aside from current candidates, only Gil Hodges has received at least 50% and never gained entry.

Still, Walker finishing in the mid-50s instead of the high 50s was a sobering blow given the optimism of the past couple of weeks. He had a 25-point differential between published ballots (65.9%) and private ones (40.9%), the third-largest of any candidate this year after Bonds (25.6%) and Clemens (25.5%). Thus he fell short of the 57.1% projected by Adam Dore last week, an estimate that Dore described as “conservative.” Similarly, he fell short of the 57.2% median projected by Jason Sardell, the cycle’s most accurate projectionist. Can’t win ’em all.

As for next year, Walker needs to replicate this year’s jump almost exactly in order to get to 75%. Doing that would make for the third largest leap over the finish line in modern voting history, but here’s the thing: only one candidate has done so from below 60%, and he had a four-point head start on Walker.

Like Walker, Kiner was in his final year of eligibility when he made that jump, and as we’ve seen in the cases of Raines and Martinez, voters tend to close ranks around players in their final turn — as well they should, given that all three of these candidates were robbed of five years of eligibility by the Hall’s unilateral rule change in 2014, when all three were scuffling for votes.

Omar Vizquel (2nd, 42.8%, up 5.8%)

The gain doesn’t look like much and no, he’s not a candidate that I support based upon his low JAWS ranking, but Vizquel is actually in very good shape as far as the voting goes. Only one modern candidate has polled above 40% in his second year and failed to gain entry via the writers, and — again, as the exception that seems to prove every Hall of Fame voting rule — that’s Hodges. Bet on some voters to consider him for the first time based upon their distaste for the fact that Jeter won five Gold Gloves with defensive metrics that are horrifying.

Fred McGriff (10, 39.8%, up 16.6%)

In his final year of eligibility, the Crime Dog posted the ballot’s second-biggest year-over-year gain, which enabled him to surpass 25% for the first time in his 10-year candidacy and approach 40%. It’s a showing not unlike that of Alan Trammell, who in 15 years on the ballot back in the olden days (2002-2016) didn’t break 20% until his ninth year, topped 30% for the first time in his 11th year, backslid into the low 20s but gained 15.8% in his final turn to top out at 40.9% — and then was elected by the Modern Baseball Era Committee in his first try. Between the final-year surge and the easy statistical hook of his 493 homers, McGriff seems likely to travel the same path in front of the 2022 Today’s Game Era Committee.

On MLB Now, Stark and I sat down with host Scott Braun to discuss McGriff and various other ballot matters:

Manny Ramirez (3rd, 22.8%, up 0.8%)

Manny is three ballots into his candidacy, with less than two points of variance between his high (23.8% in 2017) and low (22.0% last year). Shorter version: Two suspensions, no chance.

Jeff Kent (6, 18.1%, up 3.6%)

He’s short in my system, and I gather that his prickly personality made him less than a media favorite, but I remain shocked that the all-time home run leader among second baseman is six years into his candidacy and has yet to reach 20%. For what it’s worth, this is Kent’s best showing yet, and according to the Tracker team’s Anthony Calamis, he had 10 mentions from voters who said he would have been one of their picks if they had more than 10 slots, tied for the second-highest total. Six of those were McGriff voters, and recent history says that the conversion rate on voters using those spots is pretty good (expressing it mathematically is complicated). Like McGriff, Kent’s best chance at reaching Cooperstown is probably to build to 40-50% and then hope for better luck in front of the Today’s Game panel.

Scott Rolen (2nd, 17.2%, up 7.0%)

Rolen didn’t double the support he received in last year’s debut, but he did make some headway, and he stands to make more as the traffic thins out. Not only did he lead all candidates with 11 mentions in the “If I had space” category, but now that Martinez and Mussina are in, and Walker has only one more year, Rolen’s candidacy stands to benefit from being a focal point for attention from the statheads.

Billy Wagner (4th, 16.7%, up 5.6%)

With three relievers elected in the past two years (Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, and Lee Smith) to bring the total enshrined to eight, standards are starting to come into focus. This time around, half again as many voters included Wagner as last year, and he tied with Kent with 10 “If I had more space” mentions. He should benefit from being the ballot’s top closer, for those who swing that way, but it’s still going to be an uphill climb.

Todd Helton (1st, 16.5%)

A Hall of Fame-related conversation at the Winter Meetings with a fellow writer (one who has a ballot) led to a gentlemen’s wager over Helton’s first-time percentage. With a pint of beer at stake, we agreed to set the over/under at 30.0%, and I — who eventually included the first baseman on my virtual ballot — took the under. That’s one less brew I’ll have to pay for next December. I’m a bit surprised that Helton did not fare quite as well as Walker in his debut (20.3%), though to be fair, this year’s ballot is deeper than 2011’s.

And don’t count him out just yet. He got nine mentions from the space cases, and I suspect next year’s focus on Walker — and that particular slot on the ballot freeing up for 2021, regardless of outcome — will benefit Helton in the long run as well.

Gary Sheffield (5th, 13.6%, up 2.5%)

He picked up a few votes among holdovers, and I know that two analytically included first-time voters, ESPN’s Christina Kahrl and Keith Law — both alums of Baseball Prospectus (as am I) — included him due in part to their suspicions over the extent to which his defensive metrics are such outliers. He went 0-for-6 among the other newcomers in the Tracker, however, and appears fated to remain in down-ballot limbo.

Andy Pettitte (1st, 9.9%)

Despite his high win total and strong postseason track record as part of the Torre-era Yankees dynasty, Pettitte did not make an auspicious debut. That almost certainly had far less to do with his appearance in the Mitchell Report and subsequent admission of HGH usage than it did his presence on a ballot with four clearly Hallworthy starters (the two elected, as well as Clemens and Schilling, warts and all). Other than postseason volume, which ain’t nothing, there’s no area where he stacks up as the best of the bunch, and it’s still a 10-slot ballot. I suspect his future is as a Kent or Sheffield-type candidate who gains enough support not to be in danger of falling off the ballot but doesn’t come anywhere close to 50%, let alone 75%.

Sammy Sosa (7th, 8.5%, up 0.7%)

Between the eye test and the New York Times report that he was on the 2003 survey test positive list (see above), Sosa can’t escape the perception that his career, and particularly his 609 homers, was purely PED-driven. He hasn’t been in double digits since his 2013 debut (12.5%) but he does have enough support to stick around on the ballot and remind the baseball world of the inconsistent standards voters have applied to PED-linked players.

Andruw Jones (2nd, 7.5%, up 0.2%)

Whether it’s due to ballot crowding, the quick fadeaway in his 30s, the post-career domestic violence allegation, or the Rule of 2,000 — nobody with fewer than 2,000 hits whose career took place in the post-1960 expansion era has ever been elected — Jones didn’t gain any traction. Still, it appears that the strength of his defensive metrics and position within the Braves’ dynasty will keep him on the ballot for further consideration.

Michael Young (1st, 2.1%)

Young fell below the 5% cutoff but did receive nine votes, including two from longtime Rangers beat writers Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News and T.R. Sullivan of MLB.com. Once upon a time, when ballots were less crowded and the process less scrutinized, such gestures of respect were commonplace. Grant, who took considerable heat for giving Young a first-place vote for MVP in 2011 (when Verlander beat out Jacoby Ellsbury), was prepared to to do the same for including him here, and explained his rationale at length, summarizing, “The Hall of Fame is a state of mind more than anything else, the qualifiers the things that make a player special in each individual fan and voter’s mind. In mine, Michael Young left an indelible mark on a franchise and the game. And if you want to laugh at me for that, it’s OK.” No laughs here, and no pitchfork.

Lance Berkman (1st, 1.2%), Roy Oswalt (1st, 0.9%)

Five votes for the former, four for the latter. There’s little doubt in my mind that both had Hall of Fame-caliber talent, but their bodies didn’t hold up long enough to yield careers that could stand out alongside those who lasted longer. Berkman, with 1,905 hits, is the latest victim of the Rule of 2,000, while Oswalt’s fate resembles that of 1980s Blue Jays great Dave Stieb, just as his career did. The good news is that the Astros are creating their own team Hall of Fame, and while this pair isn’t part of the inaugural class, there’s little doubt they’ll get their due soon.

Miguel Tejada (1st, 1.2%)

Between the various allegations connecting him to PEDs — the mention in Jose Canseco’s book, the desperation of Rafael Palmeiro trying to pin his own positive test on Tejada, the Mitchell Report mention, and finally his actual suspension for using a banned stimulant in 2013 — and the fadeaway in his mid-30s, Tejada never had a real shot at election. Nonetheless, the arc of his career, from its extreme poverty and age falsifying in the Dominican Republic to the highs and lows of the Moneyball years in Oakland to the big contract and the mess he got himself into later, is fascinating and instructive. “No one player encapsulates baseball’s modern era better,” wrote Sports on Earth’s Jorge Arangure in 2013, who called him “baseball’s version of Forrest Gump, an observer and participant in some of baseball’s most defining moments of the era.”

Placido Polanco (1st, 0.5%)

Not a Hall of Famer but a better player than you probably remember. Damn, could that guy pick it.

Rick Ankiel, Jason Bay, Freddy Garcia, Jon Garland, Travis Hafner, Ted Lilly, Derek Lowe, Darren Oliver, Juan Pierre, Vernon Wells, Kevin Youkilis (1st, 0.0%)

As the great Vin Scully often reminded viewers, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” There’s no shame in being shut out on the ballot; that check box next to these players’ names is the reward for their unique, impressive careers.

Our long national nightmare is over. For 82 years, in one of the dumbest traditions in all of sports, no candidate in the history of the Baseball Hall of Fame had ever been elected unanimously. If all 226 of the BBWAA voters who participated in the Hall’s inaugural election in 1936 couldn’t completely agree on Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth, the logic went, then some voter somewhere needed to take it upon themselves to ensure that the candidacies of Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ken Griffey Jr. didn’t arrive without blemish either.

In a reflection of the universal respect that he amassed throughout the industry, as not only the greatest closer in the game’s history but also the last wearer of Jackie Robinson’s otherwise-retired jersey number 42, Mariano Rivera slammed the door shut on that dumb tradition. Per the voting results of the BBWAA’s 2019 balloting announced on Tuesday evening, Rivera ran the table, receiving all 425 votes cast in this year’s election. He’s one of four players elected this year, alongside the late Roy Halladay (85.4%), Edgar Martinez (85.4%), and Mike Mussina (76.7%).

This is the second year in a row, and the third year out of five, that the writers have elected four players in a single year. The Cooperstown-bound parade of candidates elected by the writers over the past six years now numbers 20, more than in any other six-year span; the previous record of 15 was set from 1951-1956. This year’s class of six — including Harold Baines and Lee Smith, elected by the Today’s Game Era Committee last month — will be inducted in Cooperstown on July 21.

What follows here is my best attempt to collect several scattered thoughts in a timely fashion. I’ll follow this with a full candidate-by-candidate breakdown on Wednesday.

On This We Can Agree

When the writers first voted in 1936, Cobb led the pack with 98.2%, followed by Ruth and Honus Wagner (95.1% apiece), Christy Mathewson (90.7%), and Walter Johnson (83.6%). Regardless of what the various dissenters objected to about those candidates, the fact that somebody did was enough for at least some voters to justify non-unanimity for future candidates. Ted Williams? 93.4% in 1966. Stan Musial? 93.2% in 1969. When Mays received 94.7% in 1979, his share was the highest since Cobb’s, and the same was true of Aaron, at 97.8%, three years later, but here and there, one of the old guardians of the Cooperstown gates still spit on their ballots. In 1992, Tom Seaver finally surpassed Cobb with 98.84%, and after Nolan Ryan fell short by an eyelash seven years later (98.79%), Griffey came along and set the new standard with 99.3% in 2016.

What was different about Griffey’s share was that it took place in an era of greater transparency. Interested observers could follow along in real time on social media as voters revealed their ballots, and at the point just prior to the announcement of the results, The Kid had been on every one of the 249 ballots published in Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker. In the end, three of the 440 voters left him off their ballots, none of whom ever identified themselves, but Griffey still set the record. While many believed that the BBWAA’s late-2016 resolution to publish every ballot received starting with the 2018 election might open the door for unanimity, the Hall of Fame unilaterally scuttled those plans.

Even as Rivera was named on all 232 ballots published in the Tracker pre-election, it was apparent that some voter, somewhere, might leave him off on purely philosophical grounds. After all, Rivera’s 1,283.2 innings are just over a third of those thrown by Mussina (3,562.2), for example, and 14 players on the ballot accumulated higher WAR totals in their careers (by Baseball-Reference’s version, at least). Along those lines, one voter, the Worcester Telegram’s Bill Ballou, announced in late December that he had reached a similar conclusion but was abstaining rather than be That Guy. Then, earlier on Tuesday, he admitted to reconsidering his position and casting a ballot that included Rivera.

Anyway, here’s the new leaderboard, which should remind us that while the Hall is supposed to reward the best on the basis of merit, the messy process can turn it into a popularity contest along the way. It’s the Hall of FAME, after all, and the wiry Panamanian closer, who set the all-time saves record (652) and sealed four World Series championships for the Yankees, has that in spades, too.

Last Licks

A seven-time All-Star who has a claim as the best designated hitter in the game’s history, Martinez not only helped put the Mariners on the competitive map during an 18-year career spent entirely in Seattle, he may have saved baseball for the Emerald City with “The Double,” his 1995 Division Series-winning walk-off hit against the Yankees. His candidacy followed the path of 2017 honoree Tim Raines: a modest start (36.2% in 2010 in his debut) but then a failure to make headway with the voters (25.2% in 2014, and just 27.0% a year later), the loss of five years of eligibility due to the Hall’s unilateral rule change shortening candidacies from 15 years to 10, and a late surge that carried him over the top in his final year of eligibility.

Martinez is the sixth candidate in modern electoral history (since 1966, when the writers returned to annual voting) to be elected in his final year, after Red Ruffing (1967), Joe Medwick (1968), Ralph Kiner (1975), Jim Rice (2009), and Raines. He’s the first player in modern history to gain at least 10 percentage points in four straight elections, thanks in part to the testimonials he received from his former Mariners teammates now in the Hall, Randy Johnson (2015) and Griffey, as well as a strong boost from the franchise’s PR department and a little love from the stathead crowd, which helped to convince voters that a player who spent 72% of his career plate appearances as a designated hitter could nonetheless produce enough value to match those of the average Hall of Fame third baseman.

Bittersweetness

The joy of election day was tinged with sadness when it came to Halladay, an eight-time All-Star and two-time Cy Young winner who died on November 7, 2017 at the age of 40 while flying his Icon A5 light sport airplane. He became the first player elected posthumously by the BBWAA since Roberto Clemente in 1973. The Pirates great, who himself died in a plane crash on December 31, 1972 while delivering humanitarian aid to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua, was honored via a special election conducted shortly after the announcement of that year’s voting results. The last player posthumously elected by the BBWAA in a regular election was Rabbit Maranville in 1954, while the only other one elected by the writers in his first year of eligibility was Mathewson, who died in 1925, at the age of 45, due to tuberculosis and a respiratory system compromised by exposure to poison gas during World War I.

From a statistical standpoint, Halladay, who had “only” 203 career wins and fewer than 3,000 total innings, may not have had a case quite as strong as the ballot’s other top starters, namely Mussina, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling. Nonetheless, the weight of his death lent an urgency to his candidacy. Based upon the results in the Tracker, where he received 92.7% of the pre-election votes but a more modest 76.4% from those ballots yet to be published, some voters might have been uncomfortable with anointing him so quickly, even given the circumstances. That said, his public-to-private drop-off was less than those of the more controversial Schilling (20.3%, from 69.8% to 49.5%) or Clemens (24.4%, from 71.1% to 46.7%).

The Moose Is Loose!

Aside from the question of Rivera’s potential unanimity, the major suspense around Tuesday’s announcement centered around whether Mussina, a five-time All-Star who spent his entire 18-year career in the crucible of the AL East, would sneak over the 75% line or fall just short. Based on the Tracker, he received 81.5% on the published ballots, but several projection systems still had him finishing in the low 70s based upon his falloffs in years past, and Jason Sardell’s probablistic model gave him “only” a 63% chance of reaching the threshold this year.

Both at the outset of this election, when I noted that candidates in his position (63.5% last year) generally need two years to close the deal, and in the hours before the announcement, when I told a few people I thought that he’d finish a handful of votes short, à la Bert Blyleven in 2010, even I was surprised by the results. Pleasantly so, I might add, because I’ve been stumping for Mussina ever since he became a candidate in 2014. And yet another slow starting one, at that, with 20.3% that year, and 24.6% in 2015. Mussina made double-digit gains in three years out of the four since then, and cleared the bar by a mere seven votes.

Walker’s Jump

Among the 31 candidates who did not get 75%, none made more headway than Walker, who jumped 20.5 percentage points from last year, the ninth-largest jump in modern history:

Similarly, Walker’s two-year jump of 32.7 points (from 34.1%) ranks fourth, while his three-year jump of 39.1 points (from 15.5%) ranks fifth.

That’s the good news, as is the fact that he’s crossed the 50% threshold, a virtual guarantee of future election; current candidates aside, only Gil Hodges has received at least 50% and never gained entry. The bad news is that Walker, who was polling at 65.9% in the Tracker prior to the election, will need to almost exactly replicate this year’s boost to get to 75% next year, his final year of eligibility for election via the writers. Those of us who have chewed our fingernails while sweating out every single ballot on behalf of Raines and Martinez might need to pay more regular visits to the manicurist.

Going Big Yet Again

Last year, BBWAA voters set a new modern record by averaging 8.46 names per ballot, the third time in five years they’ve set a new standard. This year, they were not quite as generous, nor did as high a percentage use all 10 spots, but the numbers from these past six cycles remain in the stratosphere:

And what of Clemens? Schilling? Barry Bonds? Scott Rolen? For now, I’ll leave you with a table of the results, and my promise that I’ll write about ’em all in my next installment.

FanGraphs readers want their Hall of Famers, and they want ’em now! That’s the take-home message from the results of our inaugural Hall of Fame Crowdsource Ballot, for which we invited registered users of our site to partake in our version of the real thing. To an even greater degree than the Baseball Writers Association of America — which over the past five years has elected 16 candidates, more than any other five-year stretch in the institution’s history, while using more slots per ballot than at any time since 1966 — our voters went deep, and they weren’t shy about honoring the ballot’s best.

A total of 1,213 users (including some of our staff) cast their electronic ballots (something the Hall of Fame currently does not yet have); they could vote for up to 10 candidates while adhering to the same December 31, 2018 deadline as the voters. Remarkably, more than three-quarters of our voters — 77.6% — used all 10 slots, well above the rate in the @NotMrTibbs Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker (55.8% of the 217 ballots as of midnight ET on Monday), and well beyond the modern BBWAA record of 51%, set in 2015. Our voters averaged a generous 9.41 votes per ballot, again ahead of both the current Tracker (8.61) and the modern BBWAA record (8.46), set last year.

Oh, you want to know who we elected? No fewer than seven of the 35 candidates received at least 75% of the vote from our crowd. Keep in mind, that’s two more than in any actual Hall of Fame class, and three more than in any class besides the 1936 inaugural one (Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, and Honus Wagner). Not only did our users anoint the three candidates who appear to be locks this year (Roy Halladay, Edgar Martinez, and Mariano Rivera) and the man on the bubble (Mike Mussina), they waved in the slate’s two most controversial candidates, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, and still had ample room to include Larry Walker as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

In the abstract, the Mets’ signing of infielder Jed Lowrie to a two-year, $20 million contract is a nice little move. The team gets a versatile, well-regarded veteran who’s coming off such a strong enough year that he might have received double that guaranteed money in a more hospitable free agent market. In the real world, the signing of Lowrie raises more questions than it answers, questions for new general manager Brodie Van Wagenen about how the Mets plan to allocate playing time throughout not just their infield but their outfield, and about how they value the futures of the promising youngsters within both groups.

The switch-hitting Lowrie, who turns 35 in April, has spent the last three seasons with the A’s and is coming off career bests in home runs (23), wRC+ (122, with a .267/.353/.448 line), and WAR (4.9). That comes on the heels of a previous career high of 3.6 WAR in 2017, accompanied by 14 homers and a 119 wRC+. Before that, he had his ups and downs — we’ll get to those — and he has a long history of playing all over the infield, but during this two-year surge, 95% of his defensive innings have come at second base.

Of course, less than six weeks ago, the Mets traded for an eight-time All-Star second baseman in Robinson Cano, and just this past summer, in the second half of an otherwise lost season, they stumbled upon a productive, homegrown second baseman in Jeff McNeil. As with their outfield of the past two seasons — a collection light on capable center fielders, and populated with more lefty-swinging corner outfield bats than any reasonably assembled roster needs — it’s not at all clear how they intend to fit all of the parts together into a coherent whole. They do intend to play Lowrie every day, according to Newsday’s Steven Marcus, but with position(s) to be determined.

I’ll attempt to sort all of that out below, but first, Lowrie is worth a closer look. Before his big 2017 and ’18 seasons, you’d have to go back to 2013 to find a similarly strong campaign on his resumé. He was below replacement level in 2016 before missing the final two months of the season due to surgery to remove a bunion and repair a ligament in his left big toe, and from 2014-2016 hit for just an 89 wRC+ with 2.2 WAR in 292 games while missing additional time due to a fractured right index finger (2014) and a torn ligament in his right thumb (2015).

Lowrie, who lists at a modest 6-foot and 180 pounds, has cited improved lower body conditioning and late-2016 surgery to repair a deviated septum — a procedure that improved the quality of his sleep and his ability to recover from workouts — as reasons for his recent improvement. He speaks like a man aware of the flood of data available to players these days. “I look back at the success I’ve had in my career hitting, and the focus has always had to be on my legs, getting the most out of my legs as I can,” Lowrie told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser last April. “Some guys are strong enough to manipulate their mechanics and get an ideal launch angle. I’m trying to maximize bat speed to maximize exit velocity.”

As he told Sports Techie’s Joe Lemire in September:

“I check [Statcast] regularly. We have our system upstairs in the clubhouse, so if you see me leaving the dugout, 99 percent of the time it’s to go up and look at either video or exit velocity and launch angle. I use that information more as a debriefing. I can figure out that if I take the swing that I wanted to mechanically on a pitch that I know I can hit hard, but the exit velocity wasn’t what I expected it to be, then maybe it’s because my legs aren’t underneath me.”

By and large, Lowrie’s 2017 and ’18 Statcast numbers are better than his 2015 and-16 ones:

He’s elevating the ball more consistently and hitting it harder, which explains why he’s been more successful at ages 33 and 34 than earlier in his 11-year major league career, which began with the Red Sox (2008-2011) and has included multiple stays with both the Astros (2012, 2015) and A’s (2013-2014, 2016-2018). That should mitigate some fears about an expected fall-off in his mid-30s.

On the defensive side, Lowrie made 132 starts at second base in 2017, and 133 in 2018; he was above average there in the latter season (6.1 UZR, 1 DRS) after three straight years in the red by both metrics (-5.5 UZR, -12 DRS). He last played shortstop in 2016, and that was for just three innings, with 16 starts in 2015; his metrics had slipped far enough into the red prior that he’s best regarded as an emergency solution at the position these days. He’s played only a smidgen of third base recently (three innings in 2017, 14 starts in 2018); his most extensive work at the hot corner came in 2015, when he played 47 games and was within a run of average via both UZR and DRS.

In terms of his recent usage, Lowrie doesn’t look like the second coming of Ben Zobrist, Kiley McDaniel’s admiration notwithstanding, but the Mets, who lost out on the real Zobrist in December 2015, when he signed with the Cubs, are planning to move him around. Not only is second base overpopulated, but third baseman Todd Frazier is under contract for one more season and $9 million. Oh, and Lowrie, like Cano and Frazier, is a former Van Wagenen client. Things could get awkward as these guys fight for playing time, and in the meantime, it’s fair to raise an eyebrow regarding this agent-turned-GM’s penchant for collecting his aging former clients.

Indeed, right now, it’s hard to make sense of how Van Wagenen and manager Mickey Callaway plan to piece this together. Not only did they trade for Cano, they just added utilityman J.D. Davis for a rather steep prospect price. They got a nice 63-game rookie season out of McNeil and a not-so-nice sophomore campaign from shortstop Amed Rosario. They have last year’s first base prospect, Dominic Smith, and next year’s first base prospect, Peter Alonso. I don’t even dare crack wise about another reunion with Jose Reyes, as his 2018 season and the Mets’ justifications for keeping him were both terrible.

Let’s put these guys in a table:

Alonso, Smith, and Davis all have minor league options; so does Rosario, but lacking a ready alternative at shortstop, we can ignore that. Worth adding to the picture is the knowledge that Smith’s stock is very low, that Davis is a bench piece for now, that McNeil didn’t seem to have any problems against southpaws as a rookie (124 wRC+, albeit in 62 PA), that Frazier suddenly struggled against lefties in 2018 (52 wRC+ in 129 PA), which may just be a fluke, and that Lowrie’s been about average versus lefties over the past two years while mashing righties. That still leaves a fierce game of musical chairs.

If the Mets go around the horn with Ye Oldest Lineup, Frazier-Rosario-Lowrie-Cano, then not only are they playing their marquee offseason acquisition at a position where he’s got just 14 games under his belt — and he’s still quite playable at second base (2.8 UZR in 2018) — but they need to figure out how to get enough playing time for McNeil, who hit .329/.381/.471 (137 wRC+); they clearly aren’t calling up Alonso (.285/.395/.579 with 36 homers split between Double-A and Triple-A) anytime soon in this scenario. If they go Lowrie-Rosario-McNeil-Cano, they’ve got two corner guys playing their lesser positions, a second baseman on whom the jury is still out defensively (0.4 UZR, -2 DRS), a bench player making $9 million, and again no clear path for Alonso. McNeil-Rosario-Lowrie-Cano trades a comparatively minor question about second base for a major one about whether McNeil can handle third, something the Mets appeared reluctant to find out in 2018. McNeil-Rosario-Cano-Lowrie? The new guy has a total of 28 major league innings at first base, all of them in Boston in 2010-2011; that’s 11 more innings than McNeil has played at first in the minors, lest you think about swapping those corners. Frazier-Rosario-Cano-Lowrie may as well be Lowrie-Rosario-Cano-Frazier; the Toddfather might be the better defender at both positions.

All of this is reminiscent of the Mets’ mismatched outfield of the past two seasons, with Jay Bruce, Curtis Granderson, Yoenis Cespedes, Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, and no true center fielder besides the oft-injured Juan Lagares. Granderson was traded to the Dodgers in late 2017, Bruce went to Seattle in the Cano trade, Cespedes may not play at all in 2019 after surgery to remove bone spurs in both heels, Nimmo has established himself as one of their top hitters, and they just acquired Keon Broxton in a 3-for-1 deal, so it’s a stretch to say they’ve got things sorted out there beyond some kind of Conforto-Lagares/Broxton-Nimmo arrangement. Reportedly, they plan to find time for McNeil in the outfield, though he has just nine minor league appearances totaling 65.1 innings out in the pasture. At whose expense will that playing time come?

I don’t know those answers, and right now, I’m not sure the Mets do, either. The fear is that they’re now overly stocked with infielders in their mid-30s who are cutting into the playing time of infielders and outfielders in their 20s, but it’s worth acknowledging that Opening Day is 2 1/2 months away (gah) and that this move probably means others are in store. Perhaps they trade Frazier in a salary dump, or deal Conforto for another young, controllable player who fits their lineup better.

For all of the above hand-wringing, the good news is that Van Wagenen continues to add useful players, and that the Mets are projected to win 85 games, which should put them in the thick of the NL East fight. Van Wagenen’s vision of a competitive 2019 squad may not be my vision or your vision, but it’s certainly more visionary than what we’ve seen in Queens in the past couple of seasons, and that counts for something.

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

It would be inaccurate to say that in the months from November through January, I spend hours a day simply refreshing and reloading the Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker. On the advice of my doctor, I’ve cut down to an hour a day, tops, and besides, I’ve got spreadsheets of my own that get jealous of how I spend my time. My voting results sheet, which has every candidate’s year-by-year progress since 1966, is a particular favorite. With my profiles of all 35 candidates on this year’s ballot complete, it’s time to think about what these two particular spreadsheets are telling us right now, particularly with regards to two candidates: Larry Walker and Mike Mussina. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Over the course of delivering a novel’s worth of words, sentences, and paragraphs about this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, including revisions to 15 candidate profiles previously published at SI.com, inevitably, I’ve let various tidbits — some more pertinent to their cases than others — slip through the cracks. Sometimes, I learned new information about the player in question after those profiles’ publication, remembered something that slipped my mind, or decided that a tangent would lengthen an already-long piece. Other times, a reader or fellow writer called my attention to a detail that I’d missed.

In the interest of Getting It Right, I’ve been keeping notes on those things, and figured I’d share them in one catch-all post, which will serve the additional purpose of prompting me to include some of these items in the candidates’ respective profiles next time around.

Working alphabetically…

Barry Bonds

As anyone who follows Hall of Fame voting knows, ever since Bonds and Roger Clemens became eligible in 2013, both players have received far less support than their accomplishments would otherwise merit due to allegations connecting them to performance-enhancing drugs. While voters have treated the pair similarly, Clemens has received more votes than Bonds on every ballot thus far, by a margin ranging from one vote (2017) to eight (2013); last year, it was four. I’ve read and heard myriad explanations for that gap, ranging from race to longstanding sportswriter grudges to the perception that the drugs had a greater effect on the slugger’s career (insofar as they aided him in breaking the single-season and all-time home run records) to Bonds’ roundabout admission under oath that he used the drugs, pitted against Clemens’ vehement denials.

A recent Twitter conversation between colleague Dan Szymborski and ESPN’s T.J. Quinn offered an additional explanation that touches upon an issue I had failed to include in my writeup. In 2007, Quinn (then at the New York Daily News) broke the story that Bonds had failed an MLB-administered test for amphetamines during the 2006 season; Bonds initially blamed it on a substance taken from the locker of teammate Mark Sweeney. While amphetamines and other banned stimulants such as Adderall are considered PEDs under MLB’s drug policy — some of them are allowed for legitimate medical reasons, so long as a player gets a therapeutic use exemption (a possibility Bonds later explored) — a player is not publicly identified and suspended for stimulant use until a second offense (à la Miguel Tejada). A player testing positive for the first time is instead referred for treatment and counseling, and is subject to additional testing. Quinn reported that Bonds subsequently passed six tests in six months.

Thus, if Quinn’s reporting is correct — and there’s no reason to believe it is not, given his stellar track record — Bonds did actually fail an MLB-administered test, where Clemens (so far as we know) did not. For voters interested in splitting hairs, well, there’s one to split.

Todd Helton

At the recent Winter Meetings in Las Vegas, two writers who covered Helton during his career with the Rockies, MLB.com’s Thomas Harding and the Denver Post’s Patrick Saunders, offered a couple of notes regarding my profile, one concerning Helton’s brief college football career at the University of Tennessee — and specifically my assertion that he had won the starting job as a junior — and the other noting a potential trade later in his career that I had long forgotten about.

Entering the 1994 season, Helton’s junior year, Jerry Colquitt was Tennessee’s starting quarterback, succeeding the NFL-bound Heath Shuler. On the seventh play of the season-opening game at UCLA, Colquitt tore his left ACL. Helton, freshmen Peyton Manning, and Branndon Stewart all played QB during that game, as coach Phillip Fulmer tried to “get a competition started.” Helton rallied the Volunteers for 23 fourth-quarter points, but Tennessee lost, 25-23. He started Tennessee’s next three games (a win over Georgia, and losses to Florida and Mississippi State) but injured a knee in the last of those games and yielded to Manning, who took over the job and went on to fame and fortune. Helton likely would have stopped playing football after the season anyway to focus on baseball; he was chosen with the eighth overall pick by the Rockies the following spring.

As for that potential trade, in January 2007, the Rockies talked to the Red Sox about a possible deal that would have sent Helton — who had waived his no-trade clause and still had $90.1 million remaining on his $141.5 million contract — to Boston, with third baseman Mike Lowell, pitcher Julian Tavarez, and prospects heading to Colorado. The Red Sox did not want to include the two relief prospects the Rockies wanted in the deal, namely Craig Hansen and Manny Delcarmen, while Colorado didn’t want to include more than $36.1 million of Helton’s remaining salary. The talks broke down. Later that year, of course, the two teams met in the World Series.

Andruw Jones

It’s no secret that the foundation of Jones’ candidacy rests upon his defense. He won 10 consecutive Gold Gloves (1998-2007) and based on the combination of Total Zone and Defensive Runs Saved used at Baseball-Reference, his 235 fielding runs ranks first among all center fielders. Thanks to that glovework, he’s 11th in JAWS at the position.

Of course, there’s room to quibble when it comes to defensive metrics, particularly at the extremes. On the one hand, it’s worth noting that UZR values Jones’ defense more highly than DRS does; for the years 2003-2012, for which we have both metrics, his 111 UZR is well beyond his 66 DRS. One system, however, takes a very different view: RED (Runs Effectively Defended), a forerunner to other batted ball data-based metrics such as DRS and UZR that was created by Chris Dial. RED is not currently published anywhere (hopefully, that will change), but it is included among the alphabet soup of metrics in the SABR Defensive Index, which has accounted for 25% of the Gold Gloves voting since 2013.

“By every metric available in the late 1990s – Baseball Reference Total Zone, Michael Humphries’ DRA, and RED, which is based on STATS Zone Rating batted ball data — Andruw’s defense was outstanding,” wrote Dial in a data-heavy email to me (which he gave permission to share). In Dial’s assertion, Jones came back to the pack in the early 2000s, and fell below average defensively from 2003 onward, more or less. Here’s his table comparing the various metrics:

Where the weighted SDI supports’ Jones’ claim on 10 Gold Gloves, Dial’s RED-driven view suggests he should have won only three (1997-1999). According to Dial, the other metrics, both before the arrival of batted ball data and after, aren’t sensitive to the way Jones’ fielding numbers are propped up by discretionary plays, routine ones where more than one player could have caught the ball. “Jones just took all the discretionary plays from the left fielder and continued to do so after he had lost his range. That’s not talent, it’s Kelly Leak,” referring to the ball-hogging star of the Bad News Bears. UZR and DRS “weight plays made by percentage for a position – when Andruw takes a discretionary play, he gets too much extra credit in those systems. Everything else tells us Andruw lost a step or three. His zone ratings (percentage of balls caught), his extra weight, his speed scores, his range factors. How the other metrics miss this, I cannot say.” Dial wrote. Another table:

Dial has excluded the shortened 1994 and ’95 seasons as well as Jones’ cup-of-coffee 1996 season from the table. Note the big dip in left field chances for 1997-2003, which rebounds to a number on par with the right fielders’ total because, according to Dial, the older Jones could no longer get to as many balls, and also because the team upgraded from less capable left fielders such as Ryan Klesko (alongside Jones in 1997 and ’98) and Chipper Jones (2002 and ’03).

I’m not sure I buy that last part; if the discretionary plays disappeared, why are his 2004-2007 metrics via other systems still so strong? Nonetheless, Dial has provided a compelling alternative view that at the very least is in line with the voters’ general consensus regarding Jones, who has received just 8.0% from among the 162 ballots published thus far after getting 7.3% last year.

Edgar Martinez

Between Craig Biggio (74.8% in 2014), Jeff Bagwell (71.6% in 2016), Vladimir Guerrero (71.7% in 2017), Trevor Hoffman (74.0% in 2017) and Martinez (70.4% in 2018), we’ve had an unusually large number of near-misses in recent elections — players getting between 70 and 74.9% — and that’s not even counting Mike Piazza (69.9% in 2015) or Tim Raines (69.8% in 2016). Thus, I’ve often hauled out a bit of research that, as updated for Martinez’s 2019 profile, read like this: “Since 1966, 19 out of 20 candidates who received at least 70% of the vote and had eligibility remaining were elected the following year, with Jim Bunning the lone exception; he received 70.0% in 1987 (his 11th year), then 74.2% in 1988 before slipping to 63.3% in 1989. Ultimately, he was elected by the Veterans Committee…”

Left unexplained is exactly how Bunning missed out, and what caused him to fall further. To the first point, as it turns out, in 1988, nine voters — including Bill Madden and Phil Pepe of the New York Daily News, Moss Klein of the Newark Star-Ledger, and at least four other New York-area voters submitted blank ballots as a general protest against what they believed to be the erosion of Hall of Fame standards. “Maybe my standards are higher than most people,” Pepe said. “But I think the Hall of Fame is too crowded … I think to go in alongside Ruth, DiMaggio, Williams, Aaron, Cy Young, you have to be the cream of the cream.”

Had the blank ballots — which are counted in the total, and therefore each require three “yes” votes to offset for a candidate to maintain a 75% share — not come in, Bunning would have received 317 votes out of 418 (75.8%) instead of 317 out of 427 (74.2%). As for Bunning’s support plummeting the next year, to the point that he missed election by 53 votes, it probably owed something to the flood of strong first-time candidates. Both Johnny Bench (who received 96.4% of the vote) and Carl Yastrzemski (94.6%) were slam-dunk first-ballot guys, and some voters may have simply kept their ballots short, leaving off even 314-game winner Gaylord Perry, who had the next-highest share of the vote (68.0%). In head-to-head comparisons, Perry’s win and strikeout numbers dwarf Bunning’s, as do those of Ferguson Jenkins (52.3%); by the next year, the latter overtook Bunning in the voting as well.

Alas, I uncovered one tantalizing Bunning-related lead that turned out to be a dead end. In a 2011 Baseball Prospectus interview with current FanGraphs contributor David Laurila, BBWAA secretary-treasurer Jack O’Connell suggested that the Bunning-bumping blanks were in protest of the Veterans Committee election of catcher Rick Ferrell (the lowest-ranked Hall of Famer at the position according to JAWS). But since Ferrell’s oft-mocked election was in 1984, that theory appears farfetched.

Mike Mussina

Maybe it was because I’d already included a GIF from Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) showing Mussina’s knuckle curve in action that I chose to leave this one out, but more likely, I just plumb forgot.

Mike Mussina Telling Joe Torre "No, Stay There!" when Torre was starting out of the dugout to take him out of the game. ? pic.twitter.com/9K2Xqn9dCS

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) November 25, 2017

Gotta love Joe Torre’s reaction. Given the score bug atop the GIF, a bit of Play Index sleuthing reveals that this encounter was from the ninth inning of Mussina’s May 31, 2006 start against the Tigers. Up 6-0, he allowed a two-out RBI single to Magglio Ordonez, who brought home Placido Polanco, who had reached on an Alex Rodriguez throwing error. Mussina finished the job by striking out Carlos Guillen, capping the last of his 57 career complete games.

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

At last, we’ve reached the final installment of my round-up of the 14 players on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot who are certain to fall below the 5% threshold, with most of them being shut out entirely. It’s no tragedy that they’ll miss out on plaques in Cooperstown, but their triumphs and travails are worth remembering just the same.

Jon Garland

Known mainly for his durability, Garland was the perfect embodiment of a League Average Innings Muncher (LAIM), a term coined by blogger Travis Nelson in late 2003, generally describing dogged but unspectacular sorts such as Dave Burba, Jeff Suppan, and Steve Trachsel who rarely deviated from average run prevention by more than 10%. Over a nine-year span from 2002-2010, the heavy sinker-reliant Garland never made fewer than 32 starts or threw fewer than 191.2 innings, only once finishing with an ERA+ outside of the 91-to-111 range. In 2005, he put it all together, making his lone All-Star team and helping the White Sox to their first championship in 88 years.

Born September 27, 1979 in Valencia, California, Garland grew to 6-foot-5 1/2 and 200 pounds by the time he was a senior in high school (1997), able to throw 90 mph when that was a big deal. That year, he made a variety of pre- and postseason All-America teams, and planned to go to the University of Southern California, but when he was chosen with the 10th pick of the amateur draft by the Cubs, he signed for a $1.325 million bonus and was on his way. Less than 14 months later, he was traded to the White Sox straight up for reliever Matt Karchner in a rare crosstown deal; the Cubs got all of 60.2 innings of 0.1 WAR relief work in exchange for their top pick from the previous season.

Read the rest of this entry »