This is the third post covering the Modern Era Ballot for the Hall of Fame. For a look at the pitchers, click here. For the first four hitters, click here. The introduction below might look familiar.

Last week, the Baseball Hall of Fame announced 10 candidates for consideration for the Modern Era ballot, which includes executives and players whose careers took place mainly from 1970 to 1987. This year, the candidates include one non-player, Marvin Miller, and nine players from that era: Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Don Mattingly, Jack Morris, Dale Murphy, Dave Parker, Ted Simmons, Luis Tiant and Alan Trammell. Among the player candidates, we have an interesting mix: some who make their claim with a high peak, those who have longevity on their side, and one player with both. Over the course of three posts, I’m examining all the candidates. Today, we’ll cover the two most deserving position players. I’ll also look at one player left off the ballot.

First, a brief word on the rules and procedures of this ballot, which is an updated version of the old Veteran’s Committee. Baseball has been separated into eras, with Early Baseball (1871-1949), Golden Days (1950-1969), Modern Baseball (1970-1987), and Today’s Game (1988-Present). Most players up through 1969 have had their cases considered many times. As a result, during this cycle (2016-2020), the Early Baseball and Golden Days players are scheduled to be evaluated just once, in 2020, with Modern Baseball and Today’s Game receiving consideration every other year from 2016 to -19. There are 16 voting members on the Committee for election, and players must receive 75% of the vote with voting members limited to four votes.

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One more thing about this season’s unanimous American League Rookie of the Year, and possible American League Most Valuable Player. At some point, we’re going to fully move on beyond 2017, and all the numbers will just be a part of the record, only occasionally reflected upon. I want to dedicate one more article to what Aaron Judge just did. What he did, that is, and what it means.

We all probably have our favorite Aaron Judge highlight clips. “Favorite” might be strong, if you, say, root for the Red Sox, but we all remember certain moments. I imagine a lot of people out there most greatly appreciate Judge’s hardest-hit home runs. They’re spectacular, the lot of them. Yet, maybe it’s recency bias, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a Judge double from early last month. Judge, you’ll remember, was struggling in the ALDS against the Indians, and then, in Game 4, Trevor Bauer threw him something hard, high, and tight.

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Every winter, hundreds of nondescript ballplayers become minor-league free agents. Players are granted minor-league free agency when they’re omitted from a club’s 40-man roster and have also spent at least six years in the minor leagues. In other words, they’re the ones who weren’t good enough to merit a call-up after several years in the minors, and their organizations suspect they lack the potential to be worthy of a 40-man spot.

Some of these players latch on with new organizations; some of them don’t. But regardless, the overwhelming majority never have much big-league success. Carson Cistulli found that only about 1% of minor-league free agents produce at least 0.5 WAR the following season. Minor-league free agents are the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to player transactions. But there’s an occasional gem at the bottom of that barrel. It’s not unheard of, at all, for a minor-league free agent to make a major-league impact. A few successful examples of players I highlighted in this space last year:

• Wilmer Font dominated the PCL by striking out a jaw-dropping 32% of batters as a starter, earning him a role on the deepest pitching staff in baseball. My money’s on him opening 2018 on someone’s big-league squad.
• Lane Adams recorded 122 plate appearances of above-average production with the Braves, much of that coming as a pinch-hitter.
• Jacob Turner was a serviceable swingman for the 97-win Nationals in the season’s first half (33.2 innings, 4.28 ERA through June 18th).

Using my KATOH projection system, I identified the hitters from this year’s minor-league free-agent class who showed glimmers of promise in the minors. Since none of these players have any sort of prospect pedigree anyway, I utilized the stats-only version of KATOH. Based on their minor-league numbers, there’s reason to believe they might be able to help at the big-league level sometime soon. This analysis considers only players who logged at least 200 minor-league plate appearances in either 2016 or 2017. Tomorrow, I’ll repeat this exercise for pitchers.

*****

1. Christian Lopes, 2B/3B

A seventh-round pick way back in 2011, Lopes has slowly but steadily worked his way through the Blue Jays organization, finally reaching Triple-A this past season. He hit a respectable .261/.349/.402 at the highest rung of the minor leagues while also showing speed on the bases. A 25-year-old infielder who can hit a little bit and run a little bit is about as compelling as minor-league free agents come.

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There’s no player more polarizing this offseason than Miami outfielder Giancarlo Stanton. The Marlins’ new ownership group has indicated that they’d like to reduce the club’s payroll by as much as $50 million before the start of the 2018 campaign. With 10 years and $295 million remaining on his contract, Stanton is the logical place to begin with any such cuts.

The prospect of a Stanton trade isn’t particularly straightforward, though. There appears to be little consensus on the relative value of his production to the costs required to employ him. Is he overpriced and injury prone — should he be treated as a salary dump? Or is he the rare available peak-aged star who should be coveted?

What follows is a series of points in support of the latter case.

He’s not necessarily injury prone.
Much has been made of Stanton’s inability to put up 600-plus plate appearances — probably too much. It’s true that he’s only crossed that threshold four times over eight years in the bigs (yes, we can count the 636 he put up over two levels in his rookie season), but that’s not as damning as it may seem. And that’s not just because one of those four injury-shortened seasons came from a broken jaw on a hit by pitch — that is, by means of a one-time event, not a chronic problem.

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Today, I bring you more Shohei Ohtani content to satisfy your cravings.

Assuming the final hurdles are cleared and Ohtani makes his way to a major-league team this winter, he’ll almost certainly become the most fascinating story of the offseason — and then the regular season, too. Because Ohtani’s talent and situation are unique, there are all sorts of ancillary storylines attached to whatever decision he makes.

On Monday, when examining what might be the best landing spot for Ohtani and Major League Baseball, I ruled out the National League because the lack of the DH would limit the total number of plate appearances Ohtani receives. Of course, an NL team could promise Ohtani a corner-outfield or first-base job, but the DH seems like a more natural, less risky, pathway to maximize his dual talents.

But there’s a case to be made that Ohtani’s bat is actually more valuable in the NL even if he’s just limited to the plate appearances he’d earn as a starting pitcher and (between starts) pinch-hitter. It’s possible that his offensive production, relative to the average pitcher, might be more valuable than his production over the average DH performance.

Let’s investigate, shall we?

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Back before the playoffs slammed shut door after door after door, the Diamondbacks hosted the Rockies in the NL wild-card game. Those were eight and a half wild innings, and from a win-expectancy perspective, the single most important event was a triple by Archie Bradley. I wrote it up as a whole post, because I’m a sucker for the rare pitcher triple. Pitchers don’t hit triples. Bradley’s included, this year there were eight of them. Bradley hit one. Jeremy Hellickson hit one. Patrick Corbin hit one. Jake Arrieta hit one. Luis Perdomo hit four.

Four triples. Luis Perdomo, a starting pitcher for the Padres, hit four triples. He had a total of five hits, and the other one was a double. No singles in the bunch. But anyway, back to the triples. He had half of all the pitcher triples in baseball. The Blue Jays just finished with five triples. That’s the whole entire team. The last pitcher to reach four triples in a season was Robin Roberts in 1955. Dontrelle Willis hit three triples in 2007. Mike Hampton hit three triples in 1999. Three is close to four, but three isn’t equal to four. The last team with at least four pitcher triples in a season was the 1977 Pirates. The Royals have three pitcher triples in franchise history. I know they don’t usually bat anymore, but this is 2,268 plate appearances we’re talking about. The Royals have been around a long time. Perdomo just left their pitchers in the dust.

What can we learn about baseball from Luis Perdomo’s four triples? Probably not very much. But this is nevertheless a statistic crying out for exploration. You know what we have to do. We have to go through each of the triples, to see how they could’ve happened.

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Every Major League Baseball organization has players who fly below the radar. They add value — or are projected to do so in the future — yet are underappreciated, if not unnoticed, by the vast majority of fans. The same is true for coaches, and even some managers, particularly at the minor-league level. Other behind-the-scenes personnel, such as scouts, are largely invisible. Given their contributions, many of these people deserve more accolades than they get.

With that in mind, I asked a cross section of general managers and presidents of baseball operations if they could point to a person in their organization who stands out as being under the radar. With a nearly across-the-board caveat that it’s hard to name just one, all gave interesting answers.

———

Chaim Bloom, Tampa Bay Rays: “I’ll go with two guys who we feel strongly about that are actually no longer on the radar, because we just put them on our big-league staff. That would be Kyle Snyder and Ozzie Timmons. They were with us in Durham for a while and have played a huge role in the development of a lot of our young players. One of the reasons we’re excited about what’s coming was on display with that club. They won a Triple-A championship with a very young team.

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This is the second post covering the Modern Era Ballot for the Hall of Fame. For a look at the pitchers, click here. The introduction below might look familiar.

Last week, the Baseball Hall of Fame announced 10 candidates for consideration for the Modern Era ballot, which includes executives and players whose careers took place mainly from 1970 to 1987. This year, the candidates include one non-player, Marvin Miller, and nine players from that era: Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Don Mattingly, Jack Morris, Dale Murphy, Dave Parker, Ted Simmons, Luis Tiant and Alan Trammell. Among the player candidates, we have an interesting mix: some who make their claim with a high peak, those who have longevity on their side, and one player with both. Over the course of three posts, I’m examining all the candidates. Today, we’ll look at our first four position players.

First, a brief word on the rules and procedures of this ballot, which is an updated version of the old Veteran’s Committee. Baseball has been separated into eras, with Early Baseball (1871-1949), Golden Days (1950-1969), Modern Baseball (1970-1987), and Today’s Game (1988-Present). Most players up through 1969 have had their cases considered many times. As a result, during this cycle (2016-2020), the Early Baseball and Golden Days players are scheduled to be evaluated just once, in 2020, with Modern Baseball and Today’s Game receiving consideration every other year from 2016 to -19. There are 16 voting members on the Committee for election, and players must receive 75% of the vote with voting members limited to four votes.

In my evaluation of each player, I’ve included a collection of numbers. Besides WAR, the rest of these come from a system I devised (introduction here) that provides an escalating scale of points for all above-average seasons (HOF Points) averaged with WAR to come to a total HOF Rating. The averaged and median numbers that follow are first for all Hall of Famers at their respective positions. The BBWAA averages and medians are for those Hall of Famers voted in by the writers, who have historically had tougher standards.

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I was one of 30 people with a vote for the American League Rookie of the Year award. I voted for Aaron Judge. We all voted for Aaron Judge. Not only was Judge’s win unanimous — it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made in my entire life. When you first get voting privileges within the BBWAA, people will warn you that it can be surprisingly difficult. These awards matter, to players and families and teams and fans, and voters need to give them far more thought than an outsider might think is reasonable. When you have an actual vote, suddenly it feels so much more real, and you can think yourself in circles. It’s no longer hypothetical. It’s no longer just firing off a tweet or three. When you have a vote, there are stakes.

Yet picking Judge was easier than picking shampoo over soap. It was easier than making my coffee with water over oil. Rarely has an award had so obvious a candidate. Judge was so good a rookie he’s a finalist for the league MVP. He just led all of baseball in wins above replacement. Judge wound up at 8.2 WAR; our rookie filter on the leaderboards isn’t perfect, but, using it anyway, there have only ever been four better rookie seasons. And Judge beat the next-best rookie in either league by 4.2 WAR; there have only ever been two bigger gaps. Mike Trout was absurd in 2012. Cy Blanton was absurd in 1935. Aaron Judge was absurd in 2017. Rookies aren’t supposed to do what he did.

It’s no surprise all the voters were on the same page with regard to Aaron Judge. It would be inexcusable not to give him first place. But I was apparently the only voter to give second place to Jordan Montgomery. I didn’t think much about what the other voters would do, because first is all anyone truly cares about. But now I feel obligated to explain myself. You can even read along, if you can bring yourself to think about down-ballot rookie votes. It’s a niche interest.

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