The following article is part of a series concerning the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering long-retired players, managers, executives, and umpires whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 8. First written for FanGraphs in 2019, it has been updated with additional research. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

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On Monday, the National Baseball Hall of Fame officially revealed the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, an eight-man slate covering players, managers, executives, and umpires who made their greatest impact on the game before 1980. In a rare lapse, the Hall somehow managed to steal its own thunder, as an article in the Winter 2024 volume of its bimonthly Memories and Dreams magazine revealed the identities of the eight candidates in the days ahead of the announcement. Not that it had any real effect, as the slate won’t be voted upon until the 16-member committee meets on Sunday, December 8, at the Winter Meetings in Dallas.

This is the third ballot since the Hall of Fame reconfigured its Era Committee system into a triennial format in April 2022, after a bumper crop of six honorees was elected by the Early Baseball and Golden Days Era Committees the previous December. The new format splits the pool of potential candidates into two timeframes: those who made their greatest impact on the game before 1980 (Classic Baseball Era), including Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black players, and those who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present day (Contemporary Baseball Era). The Contemporary group is further split into two ballots, one for players whose eligibility on BBWAA ballots has lapsed (Fred McGriff was elected in December 2022), and one for managers, executives, and umpires (Jim Leyland was elected last December). Non-players from the Classic timeframe are lumped in with players, which doesn’t guarantee representation on the final ballot.

As with any Hall election, this one requires 75% from the voters to gain entry. In this case, the as-yet-unannounced panel will consist of Hall of Famers, executives, and media members/historians, each of whom may tab up to three candidates. Anyone elected will be inducted alongside those elected by the BBWAA (whose own ballot will be released on November 18) on July 27, 2025 in Cooperstown. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that Shohei Ohtani’s game is missing a dimension. After three straight seasons of excelling both at the plate and on the mound — a span that netted him two American League MVP awards, a runner-up spot, and a fourth-place finish in the Cy Young Award voting — the two-way phenom underwent his second ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction last September, and won’t pitch again until 2025. Even so, while moving from the Angels to the Dodgers via a record-setting 10-year, $700 million free agent deal, the now 30-year-old superstar is amid another dominant season, one that could earn him a third MVP award and bolster a unique case for the Hall of Fame.

Ohtani is a unicorn. No player in 20th- or 21st-century AL/NL history, not even Babe Ruth in his last two seasons with the Red Sox (1918–19), has sustained regular duty in both a rotation and a lineup over a full season, let alone excelled at both endeavors. From 2021 — after returning from a lost, pandemic-shortened season in which he threw just 1.2 innings — to ’23, Ohtani did just that. He hit a combined .277/.379/.585 across those three seasons, posting the majors’ second-highest slugging percentage and fourth-highest wRC+ (157) and home run total (124), as well as the fourth-highest strikeout rate (31.4%) and sixth-lowest ERA (2.84) of any pitcher with at least 300 innings. By FanGraphs’ reckoning, his 26.1 WAR for the span was 4.9 more than second-ranked Aaron Judge, while by that of Baseball Reference, the margin was 7.4 WAR (28.5 to 21.1).

While he’s not pitching every sixth or seventh day this season, Ohtani is balancing his daily presence in the Dodgers’ lineup with the typically arduous rehab from UCL surgery — he did not undergo a traditional Tommy John surgery but a hybrid procedure that involved both an artificial internal brace and the insertion of a tendon to repair the damaged ligament. Though he’s gone through streaks and slumps, you’d hardly know it from his numbers, as he’s hitting .312/.399/.635 while leading the National League in slugging percentage, homers (31), wRC+ (185), and position player WAR (5.5 fWAR, 5.7 bWAR). With six more steals, he’ll notch his first 30-homer/30-steal season, and with 0.4 more bWAR (or 1.1 more fWAR), he’ll set a career high for position player WAR. Per his rest-of-season ZiPS forecast, he’s projected to add another 2.1 WAR. (For the rest of this piece, I’ll be referring to the B-Ref version of WAR unless otherwise indicated.) Read the rest of this entry »

Francisco Lindor delivered a gut punch last night — or rather two of them, homering from both sides of the plate Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium and powering the Mets to a 12-3 rout and a four-game sweep of this year’s Subway Series. After a slow start, the 30-year-old switch-hitting shortstop has been on fire since moving into the leadoff spot in mid-May. He’s helped the Mets turn their season around, given himself a shot at replicating last year’s 30-homer, 30-stolen base combination, and burnished a resumé that will in all likelihood carry him to Cooperstown one day.

The Mets already led 3-2 when Lindor came to bat with one on in the fifth inning. Batting from the left side against a scuffling Gerrit Cole, he smoked a 92-mph cutter on the inner edge of the strike zone, launching a towering shot into the second deck in right field to open up a 5-2 lead. With the score 8-2 in the seventh and two men on, he hit righty against lefty Caleb Ferguson and crushed a 95-mph middle-middle fastball for a 432-foot three-run homer to left center:

The homers were Lindor’s 20th and 21st of the season. Paired with his 20 steals, he’s on pace to match or top last year’s combination of 31 homers and 31 steals and join Ronald Acuña Jr. as the only active players with two 30-30 seasons under their belts; Bobby Witt Jr. (18 homers and 23 steals) and José Ramírez (24 homers and 18 steals) could join him as well. After batting just .195/.268/.362 (82 wRC+) through May 17, mainly while hitting second or third, he’s hit .306/.388/.566 (171 wRC+) with 14 homers in 268 PA out of the leadoff spot. The Mets were 20-24 when manager Carlos Mendoza made the move, but they’re 33-24 since, half a game behind the Cardinals (34-24) for the National League’s best record. They now occupy the second NL Wild Card spot, and instead of a much-anticipated sell-off ahead of the July 30 trade deadline, they’re likely to be buyers. Read the rest of this entry »

It has not been a very good year for pitchers aspiring to reach the Hall of Fame. Two of the four starters widely perceived to have sealed the deal have yet to throw a single pitch in the majors thus far — one hasn’t even signed and may in fact be done — and the starter who entered the year with the most momentum didn’t debut until June 19 due to (gulp) an elbow injury. Just one Cy Young Award winner from the past decade has pitched a full season, while four are in various stages of recovery from Tommy John surgery. Meanwhile, the three most-likely relievers have all been erratic to some degree or another; one of them isn’t even his team’s regular closer.

With the Hall of Fame Induction Weekend circus having left Cooperstown following Sunday’s festivities to honor Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, Jim Leyland, and Joe Mauer, it’s a good time to ponder which active players are on their way. But particularly since the last time I took stock about a year ago, the picture is less rosy for just about every starter except Paul Skenes, and it’s far too early to talk about him. Even at a time when pitching seems to be winning the daily battle — scoring and slugging percentage are near their lowest marks in the last decade, and batting average is in a virtual tie (with 2022) for the fourth-lowest mark since 1900 — pitchers are losing the war against longevity.

This isn’t exactly a new topic, of course, and while I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how Hall voters will adjust their standards in the coming years, and how we might differently evaluate pitchers through tools such as S-JAWS (which reduces the skewing caused by the heavy-workload pitchers of the 19th and early 20th-centuries) and rolling WAR leaders, I don’t have a clear answer. The main problem is that if we decide to lower the standards by which we judge more recent starters, we are left with literally dozens of pitchers from past eras with similarly impressive resumés, and logistical roadblocks to honor an equitable share of them. If the recently retired Adam Wainwright (45.2 career WAR/36.5 adjusted peak WAR/40.7 S-JAWS) is worthy of a spot in Cooperstown, then how do we reckon with the careers of Luis Tiant (66./41.3/53.7), David Cone (62.3/43.3/52.8), Dave Stieb (56.4/41.8/49.1), and Johan Santana (51.7/45.0/48.3) — to name just a few aces from the past half-century? Given the ability to fit just eight candidates on an Era Committee ballot, with Negro Leaguers, managers, and executives also in the pre-1980 mix, and the deck generally stacked against candidates who fell victim to the Five Percent Rule, there’s little chance of catching up anytime soon. Read the rest of this entry »

Willie Mays was already a superstar by the time the Giants moved across the country following the 1957 season, yet the denizens of San Francisco did not exactly embrace him. They took much more quickly to Orlando Cepeda, who homered against the Dodgers in his major league debut on April 15, 1958, the team’s first game at Seals Stadium, its temporary new home. The slugging 20-year-old first baseman, nicknamed “The Baby Bull” — in deference to his father Pedro “The Bull” Cepeda, a star player in his own right in their native Puerto Rico — was a perfect fit for San Francisco and its culture. He helped to infuse excitement into what had been a sixth-place team the year before, winning NL Rookie of the Year honors in 1958 and kicking off a 17-year career that included an MVP award, a World Series championship, and an induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, not to mention a statue outside Oracle Park.

Sadly, 10 days after Mays’ death at the age of 93, the 86-year-old Cepeda passed away as well. The Giants and the Cepeda family announced his death on Friday night — fittingly, during a game against the Dodgers; fans at Oracle Park stood to observe a moment of silence. “Our beloved Orlando passed away peacefully at home this evening, listening to his favorite music and surrounded by his loved ones,” said Nydia Fernandez, his second of three wives, in the statement. No cause of death was provided.

As the second Black Puerto Rican to play in the AL or NL, after Roberto Clemente, Cepeda became a hero in his homeland as well as a favorite of Giants fans. He spent nine seasons with the Giants (1958-66) before trades to the Cardinals (1966–68) and Braves (1969–72), followed by brief stints with the A’s (1972), Red Sox (1973), and Royals (1974) at the tail end of his career. The 6-foot-2, 210-pound righty was a middle-of-the-lineup force on three pennant winners, including the 1967 champion Cardinals, and was selected for an All-Star team 11 times, including two per year from 1959–62; he was the first Puerto Rican player to start an All-Star Game in the first of those seasons. He was the first player to win both the Rookie of the Year and MVP awards unanimously; Albert Pujols is the only one to replicate that feat. Cepeda finished his career with 2,351 hits, 379 homers, 142 steals, and a lifetime batting line of .297/.350/.499 (133 OPS+).

Not everything came easily for Cepeda. If not for the pitcher-friendliness of the Giants’ home ballparks — first Seals Stadium and then Candlestick Park — as well as a series of knee injuries that led to 10 surgeries, he might have hit at least 500 home runs. His path to the Hall of Fame took an extreme detour due to a conviction for smuggling marijuana, which resulted in a 10-month stint in federal prison as well as a humiliating fall from grace in Puerto Rico. Only after his release and his conversion to Buddhism was he able to rehabilitate his image and work his way back into the game’s good graces, a process that culminated with his election to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1999, 25 years after his final game. He was the second Puerto Rican player inducted, preceded only by Clemente. Read the rest of this entry »

Willie Mays was the gold standard. We can debate whether he was the greatest baseball player who ever lived or merely on the short list of those with a claim to the title. Based upon both the legend and the statistics, we’re on more solid ground declaring that Mays was the game’s greatest all-around player, accounting for his skill and achievement at the plate, on the bases, and in the field. Combining tremendous power, exceptional speed that factored on both sides of the ball, and preternatural grace afield, the man could do it all on the diamond, and he did it with an endearing, charismatic flair. “The Say Hey Kid” — a nickname bestowed upon him when he was so fresh on the scene that he didn’t know his teammates’ names — projected a youthful exuberance and an innocence that made him an icon.

Mays began his professional career while still in high school, with the Birmingham Black Barons, signing a $250-a-month contract in July 1948, when he was just 17 years old. He was supposed to return to Birmingham this week, one of three Negro Leagues alumni from the 1920-48 period — along with Bill Greason and Ron Teasley — slated to attend a major league game tonight between the Cardinals and Giants at historic Rickwood Field, the country’s oldest professional ballpark. Sadly, Mays passed away two days ago, in an assisted living facility, at the age of 93.

Willie Mays gave this statement to Dusty Baker on Monday, a day before Willie passed, to share with the city of Birmingham: pic.twitter.com/hQ0XmRKsmc

— John Shea (@JohnSheaHey) June 19, 2024

Mays was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979. At the time of his death, he was its oldest living member, a distinction he inherited when Tommy Lasorda died on January 7, 2021, and one that now belongs to 90-year-old Luis Aparicio. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Sale is a serious Cy Young contender. This was once a fairly common combination of words to put together, but after five years of injuries and/or ineffectiveness, it seems like a very weird thing to say today. That’s where we are, though, with Sale striking out 82 batters against 10 walks over his 11 starts and 67 2/3 innings. He leads all NL starters in FIP (2.48), walks per nine innings (1.33), and strikeout-to-walk ratio (8.20); he ranks fourth in strikeouts per nine (10.91), sixth in pitcher WAR (1.9), and 12th in ERA (3.06), though both his excellent FIP and xERA (2.73, third in NL) suggest his actual mark could improve as the season goes on. And for subscribers to the old school, he’s posted an 8-1 record for the Braves, a top contender who lost their ace for the season. Indeed, Atlanta’s offseason gamble to trade for Sale is paying off well so far, and his resurgence have been paramount in preventing the Braves from falling even farther behind the Phillies in the NL East standings.

But what hasn’t been revived yet is any talk about Sale’s chances of making a run at Cooperstown immortality in another decade or so. That’s not surprising, given he lost a good chunk of his mid-career years and stands at only 128 wins and 1,848 1/3 innings — volume that wouldn’t get it done for even the most dominant of starters on a per-inning basis. We’ve long accepted that 300-game winners were going to be increasingly unlikely, but what if 200 becomes the new standard? If Sale truly has reemerged from five years in the injury wasteland, suddenly his Hall of Fame case looks at least plausible.

The 300-win standard never actually was a standard for Hall of Fame voting until relatively recently. Barely a quarter of Hall of Fame pitchers are 300-game winners and a quarter of them (six of 24) exclusively played in the 19th century, when baseball was as much a carnival show as professional sport. From 1917 to 1965, nearly a half-century that included baseball’s peak in the context of American culture, there were never more than three future 300-win pitchers active at any point. In most of those years, baseball had only one or two active pitchers who would eventually hit that threshold, typically a combination of Lefty Grove, Early Wynn, and Warren Spahn. It’s not as if this was an era in baseball history that lacked for Hall of Fame pitchers; slightly more than half of AL/NL Hall of Famers had the majority of their careers within that span of years.

To get a clearer picture, I took all starting pitchers (at least 50% of games as starters) and tracked how many per year got at least 10% support on the BBWAA’s Hall of Fame ballot. It’s not completely an apples-to-apples comparison because the rules have changed at times, but it’s not apples-to-grenades either, as the BBWAA rules have been more stable than the various Veterans Committee schemes.

The stinginess trend toward pitchers is clear. Without a lot of 300-win pitchers to vote on, voters didn’t simply shrug and decide that no pitchers were good enough; they were quite happy to vote for lots of pitchers who failed to get 300 wins, or even 250. From 1936 to 1975, the 10-election rolling average of pitchers with fewer than 200 wins to reach that 10% threshold was 2.5. A pitcher with fewer than 200 wins hasn’t received 10% of the vote since Don Newcombe in 1980. This is despite early voters having the deepest pools of players to vote for; even as Hall of Fame voting started in 1936 and players hung on ballots for 15 years instead of the current 10-year window, voters found room for these pitchers with less impressive win totals.

The 90s cluster of pitching greats are either in the Hall of Fame or off the ballot, so unless voting patterns become more like they were before the 1970s, we may have a real lack of pitchers inducted into the Hall of Fame in the coming years. That process has already started, with only 17 different pitchers ever getting 10% of the vote in 21st-century balloting. There are three active pitchers with 200 wins: Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Clayton Kershaw. There’s also Zack Greinke, who at age 40 has probably thrown his last big league inning, even though he has not yet officially retired and remains unsigned. It seems very likely that all four will get into the Hall of Fame. But then what? Pitcher usage has changed considerably since that quartet debuted. Right now, there are only 11 other active pitchers with 100 (!) career wins, and none between 150 and 200.

Aside from the previously mentioned quartet, only Sale and Gerrit Cole have ever really come up in future Hall of Fame conversations, though Yu Darvish has an interesting-but-tricky case if voters give consideration to his seven years pitching in Japan. For the first time in ZiPS history, ZiPS doesn’t project a single pitcher who hasn’t already eclipsed 200 wins to have at least a 50% shot of reaching the milestone. Considering this, Sale has an fascinating path to the Hall of Fame. For the most part, the writers still aren’t voting for pitchers without lofty win totals, but it has become clear that the fixation on pitcher wins has decreased in Cy Young voting. This could provide an interesting preview of where Hall of Fame voting is going to be over the next 5-10 years, because year-end voters don’t have the same 10-year requirement for BBWAA membership that Hall of Fame voting does. As a result, you tend to get a younger demographic participating in year-end awards voting, and at least some of those writers will be gaining their Hall of Fame vote between now and when Sale hits the ballot. Additionally, some of the most veteran writers aren’t as active in the year-end voting, as some of them are in a state of semi or full retirement but have maintained their Hall vote. In a contrast the younger writers, some of these senior BBWAA members will lose their vote over the next 5-10 years. Call it the Baseball Writing Circle of Life.

Considering this, let’s crank up ZiPS (Hey, you had to know I was going to do this at some point!) and look at Sale’s up-to-date projections. As discussed at the top of this post, Sale has been excellent in 2024 and, just as importantly, he’s been healthy.

Even with ZiPS projecting Sale to be only healthy-ish rather than to have a late-career renaissance like Verlander, that’s another 50 wins and 10 WAR, and with the rest of 2024 added in, 58 wins and 12 WAR. That would bring his total career projection to 186 wins and 62 WAR. Excluding the quartet of Verlander, Scherzer, Kershaw, and Greinke, that’d place Sale second among active pitchers in both wins and WAR, behind only Cole. As far 200 wins go, ZiPS projects Sale to have a 45% chance to reach that milestone, and if 200 becomes the new 300, then he’s got a 45% shot at making it to Cooperstown. Obviously, it’s not that simple, but Sale might not need to get to 200 wins to get elected. When voters look at Sale’s Hall of Fame case, they’ll consider his utter dominance during his best seasons — an eight-season peak from 2012-19 — and, should his health hold up at least to the level that ZiPS projects, he’ll likely go down as one of the very best pitchers during the two-decade era from 2010-2030. That would probably be enough to get him over the hump even if he falls short of 200. This chart tells the story.

It’s not as if Sale’s career is missing those non-statistical highlights. While his postseason performances have been short of cromulence, he does have a World Series ring, six All-Star selections so far, and is already 27th all-time in Cy Young career shares.

Will Sale actually end up in the Hall of Fame? We’ll have to wait until he finishes writing the last handful of chapters, which is sometimes a difficult task. But I think the final story may be better than many people think.

No manager defined the era of baseball marked by artificial turf and distant outfield fences as Whitey Herzog did. As the manager of the Royals (1975–79) and Cardinals (1980, ’81–90) — and for a short but impactful period, the latter club’s general manager as well — he assembled and led teams built around pitching, speed, and defense to six division titles, three pennants, and a world championship using an aggressive and exciting brand of baseball: Whiteyball. Gruff but not irascible, Herzog found ways to get the most out of players whose limitations had often prevented them from establishing themselves elsewhere.

“The three things you need to be a good manager,” he told Sports Illustrated’s Ron Fimrite in 1981, “are players, a sense of humor and, most important, a good bullpen. If I’ve got those three things, I assure you I’ll get along with the press and I guarantee you I’ll make the Hall of Fame.”

Herzog was finally elected to the Hall in 2010, an honor long overdue given that he was 20 years removed from the dugout and had never been on a ballot. He passed away on Monday in St. Louis at the age of 92. Read the rest of this entry »

Corey Kluber announced his retirement on Friday, bringing the curtain down on an exceptional career whose later years were so often curtailed by injuries. Kluber pitched in the majors for parts of 13 seasons, but topped 100 innings just seven times, six in a row from 2013–18 and again in ’22. Within that limited timeframe, he made three All-Star teams and won two Cy Youngs, with a pair of top-three finishes and a ninth-place finish as well. His 2016 postseason run came up just short of ending Cleveland’s long championship drought. His is a career worth celebrating and putting into context, as his best work stands alongside that of a handful of Hall of Fame contemporaries.

Because he spent half a decade at the front of Cleveland’s rotation, it’s easy to forget that Kluber was actually drafted by the Padres, who chose him in the fourth round out of Stetson University in 2007. He climbed to Double-A San Antonio by 2010; on July 31 of that year, he was part of a three-team trade, heading to Cleveland while Jake Westbrook was sent from Cleveland to St. Louis, Ryan Ludwick from St. Louis to San Diego, and Nick Greenwood from San Diego to St. Louis. After a cup of coffee in late 2011, Kluber spent the first two-thirds of the next season at Triple-A Columbus, then joined the big club’s rotation in August. Read the rest of this entry »