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 »

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 »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 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, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Last week, we learned that for the first time since 2020, BBWAA voters elected multiple players to the Hall of Fame. In fact the trio of Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer outnumbers the total number of players elected to the Hall over the last three cycles. For as underwhelming as those recent top-line results may have been, they concealed the steady gains made by a handful of down-ballot candidates, including last year’s lone honoree, Scott Rolen, as well as Helton, each of whom was elected in his sixth year of eligibility after debuting with a share of the vote that in past eras suggested they had no hope of election via the writers. With three returning candidates for 2025 having received over 50% of the vote, and with some impressive newcomers poised to join them, it’s time to look ahead to what the next five ballots have in store.

This is the 11th time I’ve broken out my crystal ball in such a manner, dating back to the wrap-up of my 2014 election coverage at SI.com. With this edition, I’ve now done this more times at FanGraphs than SI. That first edition was so long ago that candidates still had 15 years of eligibility instead of 10, and so I could afford to project Tim Raines for election in 2018, his 11th year of eligibility. The Hall’s unilateral decision to truncate candidacies to 10 years would come just months later, though thankfully voters accelerated their acceptance of Raines, who was elected in 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 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, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

The 2024 Hall of Fame election is in the books, with three newcomers — first-year candidates Adrián Beltré and Joe Mauer, and holdover Todd Helton — crossing the 75% threshold. It was a bit of a nailbiter, as Mauer cleared the bar by just four votes while Billy Wagner missed by five, but after just two candidates were elected by the writers over the past three cycles, it’s a welcome crowd of honorees, and it should make for a raucous weekend in Cooperstown when they and their families, friends and fans join those of Contemporary Baseball Era Committee honoree Jim Leyland for induction into the Hall on July 21. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 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, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Add a few more chairs to the dais. For the first time since 2020, BBWAA voters have elected multiple players to the Hall of Fame — three, in fact. Not only was Adrián Beltré elected as expected, with a hefty 95.1% of the vote, but fellow first-year candidate Joe Mauer and holdover Todd Helton cleared the 75% bar as well, making this the largest class since 2019 and the sixth of this millennium with more than two candidates elected. Though it appeared possible that Billy Wagner could join them, producing the fourth quartet of the past decade and the seventh class of more than three since the institution’s inception in 1936, he missed by just five votes.

While Beltré’s election was a foregone conclusion given that he received 216 out of 218 votes from among those published in Ryan Thibodaux’s indispensable Ballot Tracker prior to the announcement, the outcomes for Mauer (83.5% in the Tracker), Helton (82.6%) and Wagner (78.4%) all carried varying degrees of suspense up to the point when Hall president Josh Rawitch announced the results on Tuesday evening. Mauer’s high share of votes from among the “small Hall” ballots appeared to make his election a strong likelihood, but neither Helton nor Wagner had generated the volume of flipped votes — from no to yes — from among those public ballots that would have reduced their amount of uncertainty. In a pre-election forecast delivered Tuesday afternoon on MLB Now, Jason Sardell — whose probabilistic model has been the industry’s most accurate for the past several cycles — projected Mauer with a 99.9% chance of election, Helton with “about a 90% chance” (up from 71% Monday night), and Wagner with “about a one-in-four chance” (up from 18% Monday night). Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 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, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

If the BBWAA voters are only as generous as the FanGraphs readers who participated in this year’s Hall of Fame crowdsource ballot, just two candidates will get the nod when the Hall announces the election results on Tuesday, January 23 at 6 PM Eastern — both of them newcomers. In this year’s edition of our annual polling, which drew the highest turnout of the six years in which we’ve conducted this exercise, Adrián Beltré and Joe Mauer both topped 75%, while five other candidates received at least 64% but fell short. That group includes Todd Helton and Billy Wagner, both of whom have reasonable shots at getting their tickets to Cooperstown punched this week. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 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, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

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

During the Mets’ run of relevance in the mid-2000s, José Reyes looked like a superstar in the making. Through 2008, his age-25 season, the electrifying and charismatic shortstop had already led the National League in triples and steals three times apiece while collecting at least 190 hits for four straight seasons. Before that run, however, he had also demonstrated a propensity for leg injuries that cost him significant time. Those injuries eventually soured the increasingly cost-conscious Mets ownership on him despite his All-Star level play, and to be fair, Reyes was never really the same after departing New York via free agency following the 2011 season. By the time he returned five years later, he was not only a considerably diminished player but something of a pariah, having been suspended for violating the league’s new domestic violence policy and then released by the Rockies. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 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, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Victor Martinez could rake. A professional hitter in the best sense of the term, he could hit for average, topping .300 eight times in the 11 seasons in which he qualified for a batting title, no small task given his lack of speed. He could also hit for power, bopping 246 home runs with a single-season high of 32. He had great contact skills, striking out in just 10.9% of his plate appearances, and he was dangerous from both sides of the plate. Had he been able to catch as well as he hit, he’d probably be bound for Cooperstown. As it was, Martinez swung a potent stick for 16 major league seasons, making five All-Star teams and helping five teams reach the postseason, where he hit a robust .315/.374/.503 in 163 plate appearances.

Victor Jesús Martinez was born on December 23, 1978 in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, the third of four children of Guillermo and Margot Coromoto Martinez. His younger brother, David Martinez (b. 1980) spent eight years between 1999 and 2007 pitching in the Yankees and Cleveland organizations as well as in independent leagues. Unfortunately, Guillermo died of a heart attack when he was 66 and Victor was seven, leaving Margot to work nursing jobs at two hospitals, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 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, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Though he carried himself with a decidedly modern swagger, Brandon Phillips styled himself as a throwback, so much so that he wound up at the center of a battle over old school/new school thinking within baseball’s culture war, pitted against teammate Joey Votto. If the flashy, free-swinging Phillips wasn’t everybody’s idea of the ideal second baseman of the post-Moneyball era, his combination of power and above-average baserunning and defense made him a valuable and entertaining player. In a 17-year major league career that took a while to get off the ground, Phillips won four Gold Gloves, made three All-Star teams and — along with Votto and Hall of Famer Scott Rolen — helped the Reds to three playoff appearances in a four-season span.

Brandon Emil Phillips was born on June 28, 1981 in Raleigh, North Carolina, into a very competitive family. His parents, James and Lue Phillips, were both athletes at Shaw University, a Raleigh-based historically Black university. James played football and baseball before going on to work as a sales representative for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, while his mother played basketball. Jamil Phillips (b. 1975), the oldest of James and Lue’s four children, played collegiate baseball at Johnson County (Kansas) Community College and Southern University before being drafted by the Rangers as an outfielder in the 34th round in 1993. P.J. Phillips (b. 1986) was a second-round pick by the Angels out of Redan High School in 2005 and spent five seasons in the Angels’ organization, one in the Reds’ organization, and four in independent leagues before becoming an indy-league manager. Porsha Phillips (b. 1988) played basketball at Louisiana State and the University of Georgia before spending the 2011 season with the WNBA’s San Antonio Stars. Read the rest of this entry »