Our story so far: It is a dark time for recognizing Hall of Fame starting pitchers. While the 300-wins-or-bust barrier has fallen, starters born in 1950 or later have become significantly underrepresented in Cooperstown. The cream of the crop within that demographic has been honored, with a couple of notable exceptions whose own actions wounded their candidacies, causing them to age off the writers’ ballot. With falling workloads illustrating that the time of the 250-inning starter is behind us, it makes sense to reframe expectations for what constitutes a Hall-worthy hurler.

Enter S-JAWS, the experimental version of my Hall of Fame fitness metric, introduced during the past election cycle. As an attempt to reduce the skewing caused by the impact of 19th-century and dead-ball era pitchers, S-JAWS prorates peak WAR credit for any heavy-workload season to a maximum of 250 innings. The new metric — which is now the default at the starters’ Baseball Reference page — can help to illuminate some candidates throughout history who deserve a closer look even after being passed over so many times, though from a practical standpoint the oldest pitchers of the group could be a decade away from actual placement on an Era Committee ballot.

Before taking a breeze through those candidates — the part of this series many of you’ve been waiting for — here once again is the graphic summary of Hall of Fame representation rates for starting pitchers by birth decade, expressed as a percentage of “qualifiers” who reached 2,000 career innings. It’s a handy practical cutoff that includes every enshrined pitcher from the NL, AL, and bygone white leagues except Dizzy Dean (who fell 32.2 innings short), plus relievers Hoyt Wilhelm and Dennis Eckersley, who aren’t included in the counts of enshrined starters.

And here’s an aggregation of longer-term representation rates that I find most helpful:

Before we dive in, I’ll note that there just aren’t enough eligible pitchers of quality that we can level the representation rates entirely. That isn’t even my goal here, but I am looking to boost the rates of more recent pitchers while keeping in mind that the somewhat looser standards make it apparent that a few guys from the more ancient eras look even stronger in the light of S-JAWS than in JAWS. We shouldn’t leave them by the wayside, but the staggered Era Committee process — with Early Baseball candidates (those who made their marks before 1950) not yet eligible for reconsideration before 2032, and Golden Days candidates (1950–69) not until 2027 — already defaults to making them lower priorities anyway.

With that, I’ll break this down into the top starters for each period who are outside the Hall, identifying those who fall within the top 100 of the rankings — about 43.0 S-JAWS, which captures shorter-career guys such as Félix Hernández, who’s an electoral longshot, to Sandy Koufax, who’s enshrined despite the brevity of his career. This is not to say that all of the pitchers on the outside that I’m highlighting here are Hall-worthy or that S-JAWS should be the only consideration for anointing them. The hope is that by appreciating what their candidacies do offer, we can come up with an appropriate list of pitchers whose elections should be prioritized. Read the rest of this entry »

During the 2022 Hall of Fame election cycle, I introduced S-JAWS, an experimental version of my starting pitcher metric, in the service of evaluating candidates on the Golden Days and BBWAA ballots. I promised to return to the topic for a broader look at pitchers from other periods, but before doing so took a little detour related to the representation rates and demographics of the players elected to the Hall. This larger exploration helps to illustrate the importance of looking at the situation in a new light.

Like JAWS, S-JAWS is a Hall of Fame fitness metric based upon Baseball Reference’s version of WAR, though those shouldn’t be the only factors under consideration in a Hall of Fame case, whether we’re discussing pitchers or position players. They’re nonetheless critical to my analysis, a useful first-cut mechanism to tell me, “Is this a candidate worthy of consideration for a spot on a ballot?” but as I’ve stressed through my annual series and elsewhere, other factors such as awards, postseason play, and historical importance are germane as well. Whether we’re using JAWS or S-JAWS — both of which you can see on the Starting Pitchers page at Baseball Reference — that doesn’t change. In fact, that page now defaults to sorting by S-JAWS, though you can see rankings by JAWS or any other category you choose, whether it’s WAR or innings pitched or ERA+ or some other stat.

Like JAWS, S-JAWS uses an average of a pitcher’s career and peak WAR (best seven seasons at large) for comparisons to the averages of all Hall of Fame pitchers. The idea behind S-JAWS is to reduce the skewing caused by the impact of 19th century and dead-ball era pitchers, some of whom topped 400, 500, or even 600 innings in a season on multiple occasions. The way I’ve chosen to do this is by prorating the peak-component credit for any heavy-workload season to a maximum of 250 innings. I chose 250 because it’s a level that the current and recent BBWAA candidates rarely reached, and only one active pitcher (Justin Verlander) has, albeit by a single inning a decade ago. Over the past 22 162-game seasons — in other words, every one since 1999, save for the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign — only eight out of 44 league leaders topped 250 innings, with Hall of Famers Roy Halladay, Randy Johnson, and Mike Mussina accounting for five of those eight seasons. Only two of the past 32 league leaders topped 250 inning, Halladay in 2010 and Verlander the following year, and between them they were a grand total of five outs over the threshold. The various emphases on pitch counts, innings limits, and times through the order make it unlikely we’ll see such levels again, at least on a consistent basis, and while we can debate, lament, and discuss whether it’s worth trying to reverse that trend, that’s not my focus here. Given the current trends in the game regarding starting pitcher usage, five or 10 years from now, looking at candidates on a 200- or 225-inning basis might make more sense, but I think this is a reasonable place to start the adjustments (I’ll have a look at a 200-inning basis at some point). Read the rest of this entry »

Our story so far: At the end of every Hall of Fame election cycle, I have a set of spreadsheets that I update that help me track voting patterns and other long-term trends, as well as some demographics regarding any honorees. Because the 2021 election cycle yielded no honorees — BBWAA voters pitched a shutout, and the two Era Committee votes were postponed — I realized while going through this year’s post-election exercise that I had yet to reckon with the impact of Major League Baseball’s 2020 decision to recognize seven Negro Leagues that operated from 1920 to ’48 as major leagues. Not that I haven’t covered various angles of that decision, particularly as they pertain to the Hall; just that my tools of the trade haven’t kept pace.

I concluded my previous installment with a timeline illustrating the number of active Hall of Famers per team per season, using the Hall’s definition of one game being enough to represent one season played. It’s a display that illustrates the saturation of the immediate pre-World War II era via a very generous Veterans Committee and the extent to which voters haven’t kept pace with the later waves of expansion.

As previously noted, the above version does not include the 28 Hall of Famers elected for their playing careers in the Negro Leagues, a few of whom (Willard Brown, Monte Irvin, and Satchel Paige) had stints in the American and/or National League once they integrated, but not the 10 years needed to wind up on a BBWAA ballot. Adding those players compresses the pre-war peak, quite noticeably:

The scales are the same on the two graphs, but the broad peak in the middle is lower, with the space in the 2.5–3.0 range nearly empty. I did away with the BBWAA/committee distinction on this one, because I can’t stack the values if the denominators are different; the white Hall of Famers are coming from one player pool that for the 1920–48 period was constant at 32 teams, and the Negro Leagues Hall of Famers are coming from another that for the period in question ranged between six and 19 teams.

(Note that I’ve counted every team, even though some were very short-lived, loosely affiliated, and/or lacking in data that’s up to the Seamheads/Baseball Reference standard. I did draw the line by excluding the 1933 Cleveland Giants, who have data for just Negro National League games on B-Ref; they were apparently the replacement for the Columbus Blue Birds, who dropped out, and all 10 of their players appeared with other teams in the league during the same year, so leaving them out seems appropriate. Within the 49 Negro League-seasons now counted as majors, there might be a few other such instances of teams that shouldn’t be double-counted for the purposes of this exercise, but that will require closer study.)
Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of every Hall of Fame election cycle, I take an evening or two to sit down and perform what I call “The Ceremonial Updating of the Spreadsheets,” where I gather data from the ballot results so as to track long-term trends as well as some demographic information regarding any honorees. The dirty little secret is that there’s no ceremony involved except perhaps the cracking of a beer, but I’ve spent 20 years building these spreadsheets, which fuel my coverage and occasionally inspire new ideas, and I take satisfaction in maintaining them, even if they are messy around the margins. You have your tools of the trade, I have mine.

It struck me while preparing a post-election follow-up on S-JAWS (my experimental version of starting pitcher JAWS) that it would probably be worth sharing some of that information — bigger-picture stuff — with readers, as it has an influence on how I see the Hall of Fame and approach my coverage. While I make reference to that information during the election cycle, I don’t always find time to share it amid the crunch of candidate evaluations.

It further struck me that the last time I presented some of this data publicly, in my 2017 book The Cooperstown Casebook, Major League Baseball had not yet recognized seven Negro Leagues from 1920-48 as major leagues, and that thus my accounting and the terminology I used to describe it was due for an overhaul. Some of this remains a work in progress, specifically when it comes to JAWS; while Baseball Reference presents WAR, WAR7 (seven-year peak), and JAWS data in addition to WAR for players in the aforementioned Negro Leagues, those figures have not been incorporated into the positional standards because of the significantly shorter season lengths and the fact that several Hall of Famers have only the tail ends of their careers in the major Negro Leagues, having peaked long before 1920. Quite honestly I have not yet figured out a satisfactory way to get around this, but that’s a problem for another day. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 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. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

After last year’s shutout ended a remarkable run of 22 candidates elected over a seven-year span, this year the BBWAA got back to the business of electing players — or player, singular, given that David Ortiz was the 2022 cycle’s sole honoree. Even with Ortiz’s election, it seems clear that the upcoming years for the writers’ ballot will produce far fewer honorees than this recent stretch, which set all kinds of records even without Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Sammy Sosa gaining entry due to the controversies attached to their respective candidacies.

Even setting the issue of performance-enhancing drugs aside for the moment, the past decade has amply illustrated that the dynamics of a Hall of Fame candidacy have changed. As I noted last year, from 1966 to 2005, only three candidates recovered from debuts below 25% and eventually reached 75%, even with 15 years of eligibility: Duke Snider (17.0% in 1970, elected in 1981), Don Drysdale (21.0% in 1975, elected in ’84) and Billy Williams (23.4% in 1982, elected in ’87). Since then, we’ve seen five players elected despite such slow starts, including three from 2017-20. From the 15-year eligibility period came Bruce Sutter (23.9% in 1994, elected in 2006) and Bert Blyleven (17.5% in ’98, elected in 2011), and then once the Hall unilaterally cut eligibility to 10 years — less to clean up the ballots than to move the intractable debate over PED-related candidates out of the spotlight, and give voters less time to soften their attitudes — Tim Raines (24.3% in 2008, elected in ’17), Mike Mussina (20.3% in 2014, elected in ’19), and Larry Walker (20.3% in 2011, elected in ’20). Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 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. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

BBWAA voters avoided a second Hall of Fame ballot shutout in a row on Tuesday by electing David Ortiz in his first year of eligibility, making for the writers’ first-one-man class since 2012 (Barry Larkin). Beyond his election, four controversial 10th-year candidates — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Sammy Sosa, all of whom have non-performance-related marks against them that have dominated discussions in recent years — fell short. Further down on the ballot, Scott Rolen and a handful of other candidates made significant strides towards Cooperstown, while 11 others besides the aforementioned quartet fell off the ballot for good. Indeed, the results have left us plenty to chew on, so as promised, here’s my candidate-by-candidate breakdown of the entire slate.

Carl Crawford, Jake Peavy (1st year on the ballot, 0.0%)

I say this every year, and I’ll say it again: There is no shame in being shut out on a Hall of Fame ballot. The check boxes next to these players’ names is the reward for their unique, impressive careers, and with every year that I do this, my appreciation for the endurance, perseverance, and good luck it takes just to get to this point grows. As Vin Scully liked to remind viewers, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Prince Fielder (1st, 0.5%)

Like Crawford and Peavy, Fielder did not receive a vote from any of the 205 ballots published in the Ballot Tracker prior the announcement of the results. At this writing, we still don’t know which two writers gave him a courtesy vote, but it’s nothing to get worked up about. Once upon a time, before ballots were so overrun that even deserving candidates like Kenny Lofton (2013) and Johan Santana (2018) fell victim to the Five Percent Rule, this was a common and widely-accepted gesture. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no shutout this year — instead, there’s joy in Cooperstown. On Tuesday, the Baseball Hall of Fame announced the voting results for this year’s BBWAA ballot, and after a year in which no candidate was elected and featured a contentious election cycle in which it quickly became apparent that the four prominent 10th-year candidates wouldn’t gain entry in their final year of eligibility, David Ortiz broke through on his first try. The centerpiece of the Red Sox’s three championships from 2004-13 — the first of which broke an 86-year drought — and the record-holder among designated hitters in several key categories, Ortiz received 77.9% from among the 394 writers who cast a ballot.

Over a two-month span during which discussions of character-related issues — mainly pertaining to performance-enhancing drugs and domestic violence — at times loomed larger than those pertaining to traditional and advanced statistics and other credentials, Ortiz gained entry while Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling did not. That trio, all in the final year on the writers’ ballot, had the highest shares of the vote last year, but between Bonds’ and Clemens’ links to PEDs and Schilling’s long history of toxicity via his social media accounts, none was able to change the minds of enough voters this year. Schilling, in fact, requested to be removed from this year’s ballot after falling short last year, and while the Hall denied that request, so many voters obliged that his share of the vote dropped 12.5% from last year’s ballot-leading share of 71.1%. He ranked fifth from among the 30 candidates, while Bonds (66.0%) and Clemens (65.2%) ranked second and third respectively, with Scott Rolen (63.2%) fourth. Read the rest of this entry »

The finish line of one of the longest Hall of Fame election cycles in memory is in sight. On Tuesday, the results of this year’s BBWAA balloting will be announced by new Hall president Josh Rawich at 6 pm ET on MLB Network. With so many polarizing and at times off-putting candidates — by my count, eight have been credibly linked to performance-enhancing drugs and six to incidents of domestic violence — it’s been another particularly contentious cycle; beyond the usual back-and-forth between voters and bystanders on social media, we’ve even seen a top candidate fire back at a voter over a snub. It remains entirely possible that for the second year in a row, the writers won’t elect a single candidate, something that hasn’t happened since 1958 and ’60, a point at which the BBWAA was voting on a biennial basis.

If it were up to FanGraphs readers, however, three candidates would be headed to Cooperstown this summer, based on the results of our fourth annual Hall of Fame crowdsource ballot. As has been the case since the 2019 ballot, registered FanGraphs users were invited to select as many as 10 candidates from this year’s slate, just as actual voters do, using the same December 31 deadline. A total of 1,018 users participated, which is down 11.6% from last year, a drop that probably owes something to a couple of lapses on my part. First, I forgot to send out a last call for votes, having last tweeted about the crowdsource ballot on December 23, and second, I plumb forgot to submit my own ballot into the system after filling out my paper one and dropping it in the mail on December 30. Though I called up the page and checked the boxes at some point that week, I was hazy on whether I’d actually completed the task until noticing that none of the individual returns matched my particular 10. None of those 1,018 ballots has Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Joe Nathan but not Alex Rodriguez or Manny Ramirez, just as none of the 178 ballots in the Ballot Tracker as of 12:01 AM ET on January 24 does. Oops. Read the rest of this entry »

On last week’s episode of FanGraphs Audio, Jay Jaffe welcomed ESPN senior writer and host of the Baseball Tonight podcast, Buster Olney, for a conversation about the upcoming Hall of Fame election and the effects of modern ballot-tracking. This transcribed conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

…

Jay Jaffe [3:03]: For FanGraphs audio, this is Jay Jaffe. It’s Hall of Fame election season, with the results set to be announced on January 25. Against the backdrop of the current lockout, it’s been a contentious election cycle, particularly with a quartet of controversial candidates — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, and Curt Schilling — in their final year of eligibility, and Alex Rodriguez and David Ortiz in their first. The topics of performance enhancing drugs and the character clause have loomed large, and at times the din of the debate has been overwhelming. Earlier this month at ESPN, Buster Olney penned a piece asking about whether this prolonged discussion and the daily drip of ballot reveals is good for the Hall and the electoral process. I took issue with a couple of Buster’s points, and after a friendly exchange on Twitter, it seemed natural for the two of us to continue our conversation on a podcast.

With me today is ESPN senior writer and host of the Baseball Tonight podcast, Buster Olney, whom I’ve been reading for longer than I’ve been writing about baseball, which is to say a long time. Buster came to my attention back when he was covering the Yankees for the New York Times, and he’s been at ESPN now for a long time. We’ve crossed paths in conversation once at a Pitch Talks in Toronto in 2016. So it’s really great to have him on the show. Welcome, Buster. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 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.

For most of the 12 years that he was in the majors, Jonathan Papelbon ranked among the game’s top closers, and its most consistent. For the first nine full seasons of his career (2006–14), he averaged 36 saves and posted a 2.35 ERA (185 ERA+), never notching fewer than 29 saves and only once turning in an ERA above 3.00.

During that time, Papelbon made six All-Star teams and helped the Red Sox to four postseason appearances. He thrived in the high-pressure ninth-inning role — sought it out, admitting that was the job he preferred when the team experimented with him as a starter in the spring of 2007. He sparkled in October, setting a major league record with 26 consecutive scoreless innings to start his career and closing out the Rockies in the 2007 World Series.

Like even the greatest of closers, Mariano Rivera, Papelbon wasn’t immune to high-profile failures; the only playoff game in which he allowed runs turned out to be a season-ender, and his tenure in Boston ended with a blown save to complete one of the most notorious collapses in recent memory. While he cashed in with a record-setting free-agent contract from the Phillies, his final years in Philadelphia and Washington were marked by two infamous incidents, one silly (his crotch-grabbing gesture to fans in 2014), the other flagrant (his choking of Bryce Harper in the Nationals’ dugout in 2015), both leading to suspensions. And by walking away from baseball at age 35 in the middle of the 2016 season, not only did he fail to undo the damage to the way he was perceived in the wake of those incidents, but from a Hall of Fame standpoint, he also left his career totals too short for many voters to give him strong consideration.
Read the rest of this entry »