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 »

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 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 »

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.

Tim Lincecum burned brightly but briefly. In a career that lasted just 10 major league seasons — the minimum to be included on a Hall of Fame ballot — and fewer innings than four of the eight enshrined relievers, Lincecum made four All-Star teams, pitched for three World Series winners, won two Cy Young awards, and threw two no-hitters. With his long hair, 5-foot-11, 170-pound frame, baby face, and unorthodox delivery, “The Freak” became one of the game’s most popular players, a cult hero in San Francisco and elsewhere.

Lincecum did all of this despite not pitching very well for the second half of that decade-long stretch (2007-16), though he certainly had his moments; both no-hitters and two of those World Series wins came when he was on the downslope of his brief career. What felled him wasn’t arm troubles but a degenerative condition in his hips, which compromised his range of motion and ability to generate power. Once his left hip labrum tore, he was too unstable to repeat his delivery, and his command suffered. The surprise wasn’t that his diminutive frame couldn’t withstand the physical toll of so many pitches and innings, but that he had dominated in the first place. Through it all, the Giants — and especially their fans — remained loyal to him, willing to give him a shot at recapturing the magic for just about as long as he was upright. 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.

Jake Peavy has a claim as the best player the Padres have drafted and signed since choosing Tony Gwynn in the third round in 1981, and probably the most important as well. From 2004 until he was traded in mid-’09, Peavy, a 1999 15th-round pick out of an Alabama high school, was their ace, winning two ERA titles and a Cy Young award, making two of his three All-Star appearances, and helping the team to back-to-back NL West titles in ’05 and ’06 — the franchise’s only playoff appearances between the 1998 World Series and the expanded playoffs in 2020.

Undersized at 6-foot-1, 195 pounds, and dismissed as “frail and wild” by talent evaluators, Peavy parlayed a mid-90s fastball/slider/changeup combination and a bulldog mentality into a 15-year major league career (2002–16). During that time, he made four trips to the playoffs with three different franchises and earned two World Series rings (though he struggled mightily in October), all while battling through a variety of injuries that turned him from an extraordinary pitcher into a rather ordinary one.

Through it all, Peavy’s irrepressibly competitive nature remained apparent. As Baseball Prospectus 2016 noted just before he headed into the final season of his career, “Few pitchers present a bigger contradiction between stuff and mound demeanor than Peavy, whose fiery outbursts and furious soliloquies mask a finesse approach that no longer intimidates his foes.” A tip that Peavy picked up from Roger Clemens, one of his many high-profile mentors, may have had something to do with that. According to Bleacher Report’s Scott Miller, Clemens introduced Peavy to Icy Hot Balm, telling him “to take a little and put it on no-man’s land down there.”

“So over the next 12 years, you might say, Peavy regularly pitched with his balls on fire,” wrote Miller.
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.

Content warning: This piece contains details about alleged domestic and gun violence. The content may be difficult to read and emotionally upsetting.

The new millennium hasn’t exactly been a banner one for the stolen base. Between soaring home run rates and the influence of analytics on front offices, the tactic has gone out of style, and per-game rates have fallen. As one-run strategies go, teams seem content to wait for a player to knock a ball over a wall rather than manufacture a run. During the first decade of the 2000s, as home runs kept flying, Carl Crawford stood out for his electrifying speed and skill on the basepaths.

In the first eight full seasons of his 15-year career (2002-16), Crawford led the American League in stolen bases four times, finished second once and third twice, stealing at least 46 bases in each of those seasons. He topped an 80% success rate in the first five of those seasons, and led the league in triples three times as well. Crawford’s wheels — as well as his midrange power and strong defense — helped him make four All-Star teams and win a Gold Glove while starring for the Rays’ first two playoff teams.

Alas, Crawford hit free agency, signed a massive seven-year deal with the Red Sox, and almost immediately went into the decline phase of his career due to injuries. After totaling 35.6 WAR with Tampa Bay from 2002-10, he managed just 3.5 WAR over his final six seasons spent with Boston and the Dodgers while missing substantial time due to Tommy John surgery, plus wrist, finger, oblique, and hamstring woes. He was released by Los Angeles with a year and a half still to go on his contract, and never played again. 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 the sake of diplomacy, we’ll call A.J. Pierzynski a polarizing player, even if much of that polarization tended towards the negative end of the spectrum. “If you play against him, you hate him,” said his own manager Ozzie Guillen in 2006, the year after Pierzynski served as the starting catcher for the World Series-winning White Sox. “If you play with him, you hate him a little less.”

Pierzynski spent parts of 19 seasons in the majors provoking extreme reactions among players, fans, and everyone else, that while making two All-Star teams, helping five teams to the playoffs, and catching more games than all but eight other backstops. A November 2013 article by NESN’s Ricky Doyle, at a point just a few weeks before the defending champion Red Sox signed him as a free agent, summarized the book on Pierzynski to that point:

The most obvious risk of signing Pierzynski involves his accompanying baggage. There’s a difference between having a colorful personality and having a personality that evokes disdain, and Pierzynski’s behavior seemingly strikes a chord. According to an August 2012 article on SI.com, Pierzynski has in his career been voted by his opponents as the player they would most like to see beaned (2006), baseball’s meanest player (2011) and baseball’s most hated player (2012). Men’s Journal polled 100 MLB players on various topics in 2012, and 34 percent of respondents voted Pierzynski the most hated player in the game.

“Everyone wants a villain,” Pierzynski told SI.com’s Ben Reiter in the aforementioned profile. Reiter was able to penetrate the persona to find an introspective, intelligent and hard-working player, not to mention a devoted family man. “Look at what LeBron James has gone through the past few years. My teammates get the best kick of it,” Pierzynski continued. “When we go to Oakland, Anaheim, San Francisco, Minnesota, Cleveland, I get loud boos. Guys on my team can’t wait to see that and to hear that… Now, when those polls come out, it’d be a big upset if somebody else won.” 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.

As the Phillies looked to turn the corner from pretenders to contenders in the new millennium, they signed future Hall of Fame slugger Jim Thome to provide some middle-of-the-lineup thump via a six-year, $85 million contract in December 2002. Outwardly at least, they didn’t appear to expect much from their fifth-round 2001 draft pick, a 6-foot-4, 220-pound first baseman with 80-grade raw power but notable contact issues and questions about his defense. Thome’s presence kept Ryan Howard in the minors long enough for him to hit 46 home runs across two levels in 2004, his age-24 season. But when Thome suffered a season-ending elbow injury the following year, Howard stepped in and flat out stole the first base job.

Howard won the NL Rookie of the Year award in his abbreviated 2005 season, leading the Phillies to trade Thome to the White Sox that winter, then followed up by launching 58 homers and claiming NL MVP honors in ’06. He became a cornerstone of the Phillies’ five straight NL East titles from 2007 to ’11, a run that included a World Series win over the Rays in 2008, and another NL pennant in ’09.

At a time before the lessons of Moneyball had been fully absorbed on a league-wide basis, Howard’s big home run and RBI totals led to massive paydays, while his limitations in the field and on the basepaths — which had already become significant factors as he’d filled out to a listed 250 pounds — were overlooked. Unfortunately, an Achilles tendon rupture, suffered on the final play of the 2011 Division Series agains the Cardinals, turned his biggest contract into an albatross. Midway through that deal, an ugly legal fight within his family over the handling of his finances came to light, a heartbreaking turn of events that couldn’t have made his on-field struggles any easier. Read the rest of this entry »