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.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Mets. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. That can be found here.

Other Prospects of Note
Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.

Outfield Projects
Freddy Valdez, OF
Stanley Consuegra, OF

Valdez, 17, got $1.5 million in July 2018. He’s a traditional corner outfield power prospect; physical, with a huge frame and natural feel for lift. He’s athletically limited and may end up in left field. Consuegra worked out at shortstop when he was an amateur but his footwork belonged in the outfield and he’s already out there full time. He’s a lean, projectable power bat and will be 18 next season.

Catching Depth
Ali Sanchez, C
Juan Uriarte, C
Wilfred Astudillo, C

Sanchez is an above-average defender with a plus arm and might be a backup, but his bat is so light that that’s probably his ceiling; he might just be a third catcher. Uriarte had a breakout statistical 2017 and had kept his body in check when he broke camp and headed to Brooklyn, but he fouled a ball off of his leg in his first at-bat and didn’t play the rest of the year. He’s picked up offseason reps in Mexico. Astudillo is a squat catcher who has notably low early-career strikeout rates, if you can believe it.

Relief-types
Kyle Dowdy, RHP
Daniel Zamora, LHP
Bryce Montes de Oca, RHP
Jose Butto, RHP

Dowdy was a 2018 Rule 5 selection. His full report can be found here. Zamora got some big league time last year. He’s a low-slot lefty with a pretty extreme horizontal release point who throws a ton of his above-average frisbee slider. His fastball only sits in the upper-80s, so he’s going to have to have pinpoint fastball command to profile as more than lefty specialist. Montes de Oca, 22, is a physical, fireballing reliever who touches 100 but has had injury issues, including a Tommy John in high school and nerve transposition surgery in college. Butto, 20, could be a traditional mid-90s, above-average breaking ball reliever.

Can Play Shortstop
Edgardo Fermin, SS
Luis Carpio, SS

Each of these guys can pick it at short but probably won’t hit enough to be more than a utility type at peak. Fermin has a knack for barreling balls at the top of the zone, though, which we like.

Individuals Who Didn’t Fit Into Another Group
Joe Cavallaro, RHP
Brailin Gonzalez, LHP

Cavallaro is a side-arming righty with a slider that spins at 2650 rpm. He had a good year in A-ball at age 22 and might be a reliever. Gonzalez, 19, is a semi-projectable lefty who can spin a plus slider. He sat in the upper-80s last year and needs more velo to come.

System OverviewThe Mets have been aggressive this winter under new GM Brodie Van Wagenen, dealing top 100 prospect and 2018 first round pick Jarred Kelenic and fringe top 100 prospect Justin Dunn, along with a 40+ and three 40 FV prospects. This will likely send what was an average farm system at season’s end to one somewhere in the 20s when we re-rank the farm systems later this winter. The system will produce an everyday player early in 2019 in first baseman Peter Alonso, but he’s the only prospect likely to return any real big league value next year. The exciting part of the system this year will be at Low-A Columbia, where the No. 3, 4, 5, and 7 prospects should all start the year; all show potential to be top 100 prospects in the next 12-18 months. Given the posture Van Wagenen has taken so far, these prospects will either be the potential center pieces of blockbuster deals or the wave of cost-controlled starters who will show up in about three years when the current big league group is losing its effectiveness. This new regime will carryover the same amateur scouting group but will have a new leader internationally, with Omar Minaya overseeing the effort after former director Chris Becerra left for the Red Sox.

Several league sources have told us that the Mets don’t scout beneath full-season ball, which is the opposite of what most others teams are doing as data comes to be a greater and greater part of the player evaluation process at the upper levels of the minors. The Mets haven’t acquired a player below full-season ball since Blake Taylor was the Player to be Named Later in the 2014 Ike Davis deal with Pittsburgh. As New York makes several trades, it appears they’ve mistakenly limited the talent pool from which they’re drawing by only caring about full-season prospects, something that the new regime has to live with this offseason, even if they desire to change it next year, because they simply lack reports on a lot of players.

On Saturday, the Brewers and Mets continued to reshape their outfields, making a four-player swap headlined by dynamic outfield defender Keon Broxton. Here’s the deal:

Mets get:

Keon Broxton, CF

Brewers get:

Bobby Wahl, RHP
Adam Hill, RHP
Felix Valerio, 2B

Almost by default, Broxton tentatively slots in as the Mets’ starting center fielder, between Michael Conforto and Brandon Nimmo. There’s a stark lack of outfield depth on New York’s 40-man; Jay Bruce was traded, the org isn’t expecting much from Yoenis Cespedes next season as he recovers from surgery to remove bone spurs from both heels, and Juan Lagares provides very little on offense and is injury prone. Since 2014, he has endured a strained hamstring, an intercostal strain, several thumb injuries, an oblique strain, and a plantar plate tear. In 2018, he was shut down for the year in May due to toe surgery and has only played seven Dominican Winter League games this offseason.

As far as others on the 40-man are concerned, T.J. Rivera and Dom Smith have each played some left field, while Jeff McNeil, who turns 27 in April, has started just five pro games in the outfield. It’s debatable as to whether any of them are actually playable out there. It is not debatable that Broxton, who is an elite defender at all three outfield spots, is simply better than all of them.

Set to turn 29 in May, Broxton’s growth as a player has likely concluded. He struggled badly with strikeouts as a prospect and was traded straight up for cash before being part of a two-player package for half-year big league performer and fringe 40-man talent Jason Rogers. That deal landed him in Milwaukee, where Broxton improved enough in his late-twenties to be rostered as defensive ace and pinch runner.

The strikeout issues remain (his career strikeout rate is 36%), and Broxton’s propensity to whiff undercuts his offensive production enough to make him a bench-quality player, albeit a good one because of the defense. Ideally, he’s not your everyday center fielder, but it’s reasonable to project him as one right now because of the dearth of other outfielders on the Mets roster.

Broxton and Lagares seem, on the surface, like odd bedfellows for a platoon because they’re each right-handed. It’s possible a timeshare might help keep Lagares healthy, or that the two complement one another in harder-to-see ways. For instance, a quick examination of their heats maps on the site shows that Broxton does his damage on pitches middle-in, while Lagares thrives on pitches down-and-in. They could be platooned in accordance with where the opposing starter likes to work. That’s probably not a different enough offensive profile for this type of thinking to matter, but maybe their skill sets with mesh with each other in some other way we can’t see. Or perhaps the Mets will keep an open mind about further upgrading in center field.

From Milwaukee’s perspective, Lorenzo Cain’s defense made Broxton’s best skill redundant in a crowded outfield picture that now projects to see more action from Eric Thames, Ben Gamel, and Tyrone Taylor, who is a sleeper breakout candidate due to a recent swing change that might have altered his power output.

From the Mets, the Brewers receive another immediately relevant relief piece in Wahl, who will likely compete for an opening day bullpen spot in the spring. He was part of the two-player package Oakland sent to the Mets for Jeurys Familia last summer. Wahl, who turns 27 in March, has thrown just 12 career big league innings at this age mostly because he missed extended development time to multiple surgeries, including one in 2017 to remedy thoracic outlet syndrome.

His stuff was back last year. Wahl’s fastball sits in the mid-90s and will touch 99. He has a four-pitch mix but works primarily with the fastball and a power, mid-80s breaking ball that has bat-missing vertical action. A firm cutter and changeup are also folded in on occasion. Wahl has set-up man stuff but below average command and more significant injury risk than most pitching prospects.

The Brewers also acquired Adam Hill, the Mets’ 2018 fourth round pick out of the University of South Carolina. Hill was dominant during the first four starts of his junior year, but his control disappeared once the Gamecocks began conference play. He struggled to throw strikes for two months leading up to the draft and fell to the fourth round.

Hill does have good stuff. He’ll sit 90-94 and his big, 6-foot-6 frame and lower arm slot combine to create a unique look for hitters. His slider breaks late and has good length when located to Hill’s arm side, and his changeup has good action because of his lower arm slot. His limited command probably relegates Hill to the bullpen eventually, but he has No. 4 or 5 starter stuff if he can develop better control in his mid-20s, which sometimes happens to pitchers this size.

Finally, the Brewers also acquired 18-year-old Dominican second baseman Felix Valerio, who hit .319/.409/.433 in the DSL during his first pro season. Valerio is a skills-over-tools type of prospect who is more polished than most of his peers. He has promising feel for contact and is athletically viable at second base but at 5-foot-7 and 165 pounds, he’s less likely to grow into more impressive physical tools than someone with some length and room on their frame. Players like this either hit enough to play second base every day, or don’t and end up as org guys. Valerio walked more than he struck out last year, and those types of peripheral indicators can offer great evidence to support a case that a player will indeed hit enough to play every day, but not when we’re talking about DSL stats. Still, league sources indicated to me that this was not the first time Valerio’s name has come up in trade talks, so it seems that other teams besides Milwaukee have had interest in him.

All three players have been added to the Brewers prospect rankings on The Board. Wahl and Hill are in the 40 Future Value tier, while Valerio will be added to the Others of Note section of the team’s long form writeup.

Would MLB actually go so far as to ban the shift? Asked about that conjecture, David Stearns made it clear that he’s no fan of the idea. Not because he’s against change, but rather because change is already a big part of baseball. More specifically — yes, there have been exceptions to the rule — organic charge is already a big part of baseball.

“Teams have evolved,” the Brewers GM said during the Winter Meetings. “Strategies have evolved. Players adjust, and they will on this one as well. If shifts become completely deflating to certain profiles of players, we will value them accordingly. Things will balance themselves out. Look, we’ve been moving fielders around for decades. I would not be in favor of a ban on shifts.”

Ron Gardenhire feels otherwise. He favors an inorganic fix to the perceived (and arguably nonexistent) problem.

“I like two guys on each side,” the Detroit manager stated in equally-stern terms. “I’ve always said that. Or at least keep them all in the dirt rather than in the grass. Ask Victor Martinez. He might have hit .300 this year if they just had them on the infield. Yeah, I am old school in that respect.”

The veteran skipper elaborated on his viewpoint in a manner suggestive of… an organic substance? Going pure Gardy, he name-checked the man erroneously credited with inventing the game, another sport, and a comedy duo from a bygone era. Read the rest of this entry »

To whatever extent people are concerned about the slow free-agent market, it didn’t have any meaningful effect on Patrick Corbin. After his breakout 2018 season with the Diamondbacks, he signed a six-year contract with the Nationals worth $140 million. That value is more than twice as high as the next-biggest free-agent deal, and while two players will eventually blow the Corbin contract out of the water, he did well for himself, considering it wasn’t that long ago that he lost his spot in the rotation.

Think about the lessons one might learn from the Corbin experience. Very generally, one might observe that perseverance pays off. There’s also the understanding that the market pays for ceilings, even in the presence of risk. Corbin is something of a risky pitcher, but he also just pitched like an ace. Teams love that. Can’t get enough of it. And now, think about how Corbin pitched like an ace. There could be a lesson buried in there, as well. And it’s a lesson that, at least in theory, could alter the course of player development. Patrick Corbin might inspire a new trend.

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From 2012 through 2016, Jonathan Lucroy was one of the best catchers in baseball. His 19 WAR during that time was second only to Buster Posey, and that figure likely underrates Lucroy, as his framing numbers made him even more valuable; Baseball Prospectus’ catcher defensive metrics have him being worth 85.5 framing runs over that span, though his value declined precipitously beginning in 2015. Since leaving the Brewers (and turning 30 years old), Lucroy has not been the same player on offense or defense. In 2017, he put up an 81 wRC+ and had to settle for a one-year, $6.5 million contract with the A’s. Last year, Lucroy got worse at the plate, posting a 70 wRC+, and now he has had to settle for a one-year deal worth $3.35 million with the Angels.

In their deal, the Angels are paying Lucroy like a player who put up 1.1 WAR in 2017 and followed it with 0.6 WAR last season. The projections still hold out a bit more hope that the 4.6 WAR season from 2016, and the very good seasons preceding it, are not a too-distant memory. Below is a the breakdown of Lucroy in his 20s and 30s, and his projection for next season.

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Matthew Boyd appeared in a handful of FanGraphs articles in 2018. The Detroit Tigers left-hander was included in a June installment of the Learning and Developing a Pitch series. A few months later, his hockey background was highlighted in an October Sunday Notes column.

Today we’ll hear from Boyd on a more-encompassing subject: how he learned, and approaches, his chosen craft. First, some pertinent biographical information.

A 27-year-old native of the Seattle area, Boyd was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds in 2012, but rather than signing a professional contract, he returned to Oregon State University for his senior year. He was subsequently selected in the sixth round of the 2013 draft by the Toronto Blue Jays, with whom he debuted in 2015. His big-league feet barely wet — he’d made just two appearances — he was then traded to the Tigers in that summer’s trade-deadline deal involving David Price.

Boyd made a career-high 31 starts this past season, logging a 4.39 ERA and a 4.45 FIP. This interview took place in mid-August.

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Matthew Boyd on pitching: “My dad (Kurt Boyd) was my coach from nine years old to when I went to college. He was also one of my main pitching coaches. He’d pitched in high school, then went into the Navy — he needed the G.I. Bill to pay for college — and served for seven years. He’s been coaching for a long time. He has a program out in Seattle called Mudville Baseball Club.

“He was always telling me how to read swings. I’ve had lots of people — other coaches in my life — telling me that, too. But my dad wanted me to understand what the hitter was trying to do. He never called pitches in high school; I always got to call my own game. There were times I got my teeth kicked in. There are times you learn stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball finds itself in a difficult position. On the one hand, there’s a clear, increasing emphasis on bullpen usage, as starters are throwing fewer and fewer innings every year. Teams are leaning on their relievers now more than ever, and as a consequence, more relievers are getting more money. The money tends to go where it’s needed. Yet on the other hand, relievers have this nasty volatility habit. They’re tougher to predict from one year to the next one, and many of last offseason’s free-agent contracts for relievers didn’t work out very well. Teams want relievers, and teams will pay for relievers, but it’s not always easy to know which effective relievers are for real. So many end up shooting stars against the night sky.

There are your pop-up relievers, though, and there is David Robertson. It’s true that a player is only consistent until he isn’t. Every career comes with some unknown and unknowable expiration date. Perhaps Robertson is about to enter his shakier years. But over the past several seasons, few relievers have been so steady, so dependable. Few relievers would appear to come with so high a floor. In large part because of that reason, the Phillies have signed Robertson for two years and $23 million. It’s not the three years Robertson was said to be looking for, but as he’s headed into his age-34 season, I think that both sides can call this a win.

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Early last year, I wrote about the lawsuit Miami had filed against the Marlins and Jeffrey Loria, alleging that Jeffrey Loria had used “fuzzy math” to depress the value of his club and avoid paying a share of the team’s sale proceeds to Miami and Miami-Dade County. (The County is also a party to suit against the Marlins and Loria.) With the new year starting, this seems like a good time to check in on the state of the suit.

When we last looked at this case, the Marlins, under the new ownership group helmed by Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter, rather dubiously claimed British citizenship as a way of moving the lawsuit to federal court (a process called “removal”) and attempting to force arbitration. Despite the less than stellar optics and even more questionable legal basis for the argument, the team nonetheless went all-in on their position that the team was, at least in part, a foreign citizen. In response, Miami sent Laurence Leavy – the attorney better known as “Marlins Man” for his formerly ubiquitous presence at Marlins games – and radio personality Andy Slater to the British Virgin Islands office where the team’s lawyers argued that one of the companies which owned the team, Aberneu, was ostensibly located. In a revelation that surprised no one, Aberneu, it turned out, had no offices or physical presence there – just a post office box. The Marlins, however, didn’t appreciate Slater’s involvement, and responded by revoking Slater’s press pass.

At oral argument on the issue of the team’s citizenship in July, the county emphasized that the team was, in all meaningful ways, an American company that did business in Florida, and showed the judge the evidence obtained from Slater and Leavy’s investigation. At that hearing, Judge Darrin Gayles indicated that she was skeptical of the team’s claim of British citizenship.

THE COURT: As I understand it, there is no question that the purchaser in this case is a U.S. corporation or is a U.S. entity. Right?

MR. DOYLE [attorney for the Jeter/Sherman group]: That is not correct, Your Honor. The buyer is an LLC that its citizenship is determined by its members under Supreme Court precedent and it has a non-U.S. member. So, therefore, it is the citizen of both the United States and outside the United States, foreign.

THE COURT: All right. So in situations where an LLC has dual citizenship, U.S. and foreign, can you point to me specific cases that say that in that situation it is a foreign country for purposes of the [New York] Convention [governing arbitration agreements]?

MR. DOYLE: Your Honor, we have not found such a case [.]

And later, Judge Gayles asked Doyle why the Marlins hadn’t attempted to raise the arbitration issue previously, before the state court. Doyle responded that “[t]he issue of the citizenship of the buyer was not known to me as counsel for the seller and it was in an investigation afterwards . . . that led us to discover that the buyer was, in fact, a dual citizen, foreign and domestic. So that information was discovered after the state court hearing.” That’s not entirely true, however – in fact, the team had moved to arbitrate the dispute in state court, and the state court judge, Beatrice Butchko, denied the motion on February 22, 2018, very early in the case.

So as you can probably see (and you can read the whole transcript for yourself if you’re interested), the Marlins’ attorneys weren’t really able to do a good job of articulating how a company that is both a citizen of the United States and a citizen of a foreign country somehow only qualifies as a foreign company for purposes of the law, nor were they able to explain adequately why they didn’t raise the arbitration issue before the state court when the case was first filed.

And so it was perhaps unsurprising when the Court denied the Marlins’ request to arbitrate the case in early August and sent it back to state court (a process called “remand”). Judge Gayles wrote that the team “face[s] an uphill battle in establishing the requisite citizenship to confer jurisdiction under the Convention[,]” adding that “[t]he Loria Marlins’ assignment of their rights to the Jeter Marlins likely did not . . . confer a more expansive right to arbitrate under the Convention.” In other words, the Court didn’t at all believe that the Marlins were a British citizen, and sent the case back to state court for the state judge to decide whether the case was arbitrable on the grounds that the state court had already taken the first steps towards doing just that in its February ruling (the one Doyle evidently forgot about).

Now, you might think that the Marlins and Loria, unable to arbitrate after having two courts deny their request, and stuck in a state court that had already indicated displeasure with Loria’s creative accounting techniques, would open lines of communication to resolve the case. After all, to this point, the case doesn’t appear to be going all that well for the team or Loria. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the team and Loria appealed the state court’s denial of their arbitration request even though the case wasn’t over yet. Appealing a non-final order is called an “interlocutory appeal,” and, regardless of what you see on television, it’s actually pretty extraordinary. The general rule in every state – and Florida is no exception – is that you can’t appeal until after a case is over, because appellate courts tend not to like piecemeal appeals; they want to look at everything at once.

In fact, the very first thing the team did once the case was back in state court was to file what’s called a “Notice of Appeal” – the document beginning the appeal under Florida law. The team then asked for a stay of all proceedings for the appellate court to weigh in on the arbitration issue that two courts had already looked at and denied. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, again! At this point, an evidently exasperated Judge Butchko denied the stay outright on October 2, 2018, essentially ordering the team and Loria to stop playing around with demands for arbitration and start litigating the merits of the case.

Things looked very bleak indeed for the team and then, late last year, Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal granted review (essentially accepting the case), and issued an order staying all proceedings – ordering everything to stop – until they’d looked at the case and decided the arbitration issue. That means that the whole case is essentially in limbo until a third court decides the same issue that two courts already have.

Now, as a matter of law, Butchko and Gayles largely got it right. But it’s also possible that the Appellate Court decides that it wants this case out of the judicial system; judicial economy is a virtue appellate courts adore, and it’s one of the primary reasons arbitration is so often upheld. Courts like the idea of cases being decided by someone who isn’t them, because (theoretically) it frees up judicial resources and relieves case backlogs. That being said, appellate courts tend to move pretty slowly, and it could very well be late 2019 or early 2020 before this issue is decided.

In 2015, at just 22 years of age, Bryce Harper had one of the greatest offensive seasons of all-time. He hit .330/.460/.649 with 42 homers, and his 197 wRC+ was the 37th-best mark of the past 100 years and the 18th-best since integration, with only Barry Bonds posting a higher number this century. With that season, Harper delivered on whatever hype had been manufactured for him as a teen phenom and No. 1 pick overall, one who made his debut at 19 and had notched two All-Star berths before he turned 21. The best way to show the future potential for achievement is to actually do it in the first place. Harper showed he can be the best player in baseball because for one season, he was the best player in baseball.

In the three seasons since that MVP season, Harper has been more good than great, averaging 3.7 WAR per season. For the sake of a hopefully interesting exercise, let’s pretend we only know about Harper’s last three years. What if we throw out the 2015 season and ignore that Harper was actually so good that he put together All-Star caliber seasons at 19 and 20 years of age? What might that tell us, if anything, about Bryce Harper as well as his future?

To that end, I looked at outfielders who accumulated between 8 WAR and 14 WAR (Harper was at 11.2) and a wRC+ between 120 and 140 (Harper: 132) from the age of 23 through 25 from 1973 to 2008. I then eliminated those players who had below a 2.5 WAR or above a 6.0 WAR at 25 years old. This is the resulting group from age-23 through age-25, along with Harper.

What we have above isn’t a perfect match Harper, but in terms of age, position, and overall production, we have a decent set to work with. Perhaps the first question we might have is how those players performed at age-26, the age Harper will be next season.

More than half of the players had good or better seasons with another third coming in close to average, although Ellis Valentine and Lee Mazzilli came in below replacement-level. On average, the group comes in just a touch below their average performances from age-23 through age-25. As for the aging process, the group stayed roughly the same for three years, remaining pretty close to average for the late-20s and early 30s before dropping a bit more in the mid-30s.

There are a lot of different ways to take this information. One might be wariness of the aging process and forecasting deals 10 years into the future. Several players didn’t even make it to their late-20s as productive players. On the other hand, Harper’s young age means that the decline of the contract never gets too far down when it comes to expected production. Another viewpoint might focus on the individual player names and note that Harper compares pretty well to some Hall of Famers. The table below shows the production of the comps above from age-26 through age-35.

The bare-bones look might examine the average and see a projected contract of close to $200 million. There’s also, based on this group, a little bit better than a one-in-five shot at Hall of Fame-level production with a roughly 50% chance at being worth a $300 million contract over the next 10 years. Opt-outs are going to drop that value some, as a few of the top results lose a bit of their value.

The best way to look at these comps is to think of them as Bryce Harper’s floor. We’ve taken some of the very best attributes of Harper — namely his young debut and his great MVP season — and then eliminated them. Despite this elimination, he still resembles a few Hall of Famers and some Hall of Very Good-types. Here’s what the group above looks like through Age-25 with Harper as a comparison.

There are so few players like Bryce Harper in baseball history that it is tough to find a lot of good comparisons. In the past 100 years, there have only been 16 players within five WAR of Harper and also within 20% of his plate appearances. Of those 15 other players, 11 are in the Hall of Fame. Manny Machado is another player on that list, with the others being Jim Fregosi, Cesar Cedeno, and Vada Pinson. The 14 players averaged 37 WAR from age-26 through age-35, with eight of the 11 players who played since 1947 hitting that average.

There are even fewer comparable players in history who have hit free agency heading into their age-26 season. If we look at the comps from the beginning of the post where we ignore important, relevant facts, Harper is merely worth a $200 million investment. If we look at the last batch of comps or apply his five-win projection forward with aging, he might be worth $400 million to $500 million. There’s going to be considerable downside to the contract Harper requires, and any opt-outs are going to remove some of the best-case scenarios, but there is almost as much upside in Harper as there has been in any free agent we’ve ever seen, Alex Rodriguez excepted, because we don’t have to guess at what Harper is capable of. Combine those abilities with his age, and the team that nabs Harper isn’t just contending with the risk of a potential albatross; they are also adding the possibility of greatly exceeding the value of his contract.