The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2016 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

Billy Wagner was the ultimate underdog. Undersized and from both a broken home and an impoverished rural background, he channeled his frustrations into throwing incredibly hard — with his left hand, despite being a natural righty, for he broke his right arm twice as a child. Scouts overlooked him because he wasn’t anywhere close to six feet tall, but they couldn’t disregard his dominance over collegiate hitters using a mid-90s fastball. The Astros made him a first-round pick, and once he was converted to a relief role, his velocity went even higher.

Thanks to outstanding lower-body strength, coordination, and extraordinary range of motion, the 5-foot-10 Wagner was able to reach 100 mph with consistency — 159 times in 2003, according to The Bill James Handbook. Using a hard slider learned from teammate Brad Lidge, he kept blowing the ball by hitters into his late 30s to such an extent that he owns the record for the highest strikeout rate of any pitcher with at least 900 innings. He was still dominant when he walked away from the game following the 2010 season, fresh off posting a career-best ERA.

Lacking the longevity of Mariano Rivera or Trevor Hoffman, Wagner never set any saves records or even led his league once, and his innings total is well below those of every enshrined reliever. Hoffman’s status as the former all-time saves leader helped him get elected in 2018, but Wagner, who created similar value in his career, has major hurdles to surmount. There are, though, fewer hurdles than before: over the past four election cycles, his share of the vote has nearly quadrupled, from 16.7% in 2019 to 68.1% in ’23, not only pushing him past the all-important 50% threshold but also within range of election during this cycle. His advantages over Hoffman (and virtually every other reliever in history when it comes to rate stats) provide a compelling reason to study his career more closely. Given how far he’s come, who wants to bet against Billy Wags? 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. Originally written for the 2019 election, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

Baseball at high altitude is weird. The air is less dense, so pitched balls break less, and batted balls carry farther — conditions that greatly favor the hitters. Meanwhile, reduced oxygen levels make breathing harder, physical exertion more costly, and recovery times longer. Ever since major league baseball arrived in Colorado in 1993, no player put up with more of this, the pros and cons of playing at a mile-high elevation, than Todd Helton.

A Knoxville native whose career path initially led to the gridiron, ahead of Peyton Manning on the University of Tennessee quarterback depth chart, Helton shifted his emphasis back to baseball in college and spent his entire 17-year career (1997–2013) playing for the Rockies. “The Toddfather” was without a doubt the greatest player in franchise history, its leader in most major offensive counting stat categories. He made five All-Star teams, won three Gold Gloves and a slash line triple crown — leading in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage in the same season — and served as a starter and a team leader for two playoff teams, including Colorado’s only pennant winner. He posted batting averages above .300 12 times, on-base percentages above .400 nine times, and slugging percentages above .500 eight times. He mashed 40 doubles or more seven times and 30 homers or more six times; twice, he topped 400 total bases, a feat that only one other player (Sammy Sosa) has repeated in the post-1960 expansion era. He drew at least 100 walks in a season five times, yet only struck out 100 times or more once; nine times, he walked more than he struck out. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were hoping for a return to larger Hall of Fame classes after a lean few years for candidates on the BBWAA ballot, this is your year. After the writers elected just two candidates in the last three cycles — nobody on the 2021 ballot, then David Ortiz and Scott Rolen in the two years since — it’s extremely likely we’ll get multiple honorees this year, a reminder of the unprecedented flood of 22 honorees in seven years from 2014–20. The list of newcomers is headed by 3,000-hit club member Adrián Beltré and six-time All-Stars Joe Mauer and Chase Utley, while the top two returnees, Todd Helton and Billy Wagner, are both within reach of the magic 75% threshold.

It’s officially ballot season, as the BBWAA unveiled its 26-candidate slate on Monday. Over the next six weeks I’ll profile all of the ones likely to wind up on voters’ ballots ahead of the December 31 deadline, with a small handful of profiles trickling into January. I’ll be examining their cases in light of my Jaffe WAR Score (JAWS) system, which I’ve used to break down Hall of Fame ballots in an annual tradition that’s almost old enough to drink. The series debuted at Baseball Prospectus (2004-12), then moved to SI.com (2013-18), which provided me an opportunity to go into greater depth on each candidate. In 2018, I brought the series to FanGraphs, where my coverage has become even more expansive.

Today I’ll offer a quick look at the biggest questions attached to this year’s election cycle, but first… Read the rest of this entry »

Variously known as the “The Human Vacuum Cleaner,” “Mr. Hoover,” or “Mr. Impossible,” Brooks Robinson set the standard for defensive wizardry at third base, winning a record 16 consecutive Gold Gloves thanks to his combination of ambidexterity, supernaturally quick reflexes, and acrobatic skill. He was an 18-time All-Star, a regular season, All-Star Game, and World Series MVP, and a first-ballot Hall of Famer. More than that, he was “Mr. Oriole” for his 23 seasons spent with Baltimore, a foundational piece for four pennant winners and two champions, and a beloved icon within the community and throughout the game. In 1966, Sports Illustrated’s William Leggett wrote that Robinson “ranked second only to crab cakes in Baltimore.” He may have surpassed them since.

Robinson died on Tuesday at the age of 86. According to his agent, the cause was coronary disease. On the broadcast of the Orioles’ game on Tuesday night, longtime teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Jim Palmer fought back tears to pay tribute. “We all know he’s a great player, he won 16 Gold Gloves, but we also know how special a person he was,” said Palmer, who like Robinson debuted with the Orioles as a teenager, spent his entire career with the team, and was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. “I think as a young player you make a decision early in your life, ‘Okay, who do I want to emulate? Who do I want to be like?’ Brooks was that guy.” Read the rest of this entry »

We began this series with Craig Kimbrel striking out José Ramírez to close out the All-Star Game, and I’ll admit, my original intent was to cover all of the pitchers in Part II. But as anyone who reads (or edits) my work knows, when it comes to the Hall of Fame and its candidates, I can go on, and on… and on. In part that’s because I like to use this series as an annual clearinghouse, covering the vast majority of the active players whom readers most frequently ask me about during the course of the year. It may not be a one-stop shop, but with the added volume comes some context for comparisons (Has Freddie Freeman caught up to Paul Goldschmidt? Who has a better shot, Carlos Correa or Francisco Lindor? And what about Trea Turner?) In part, it’s also because in the 20 years (!) since I introduced it, my JAWS system has become more complicated and more nuanced, requiring a bit of additional introduction. That’s particularly true when it comes to pitching, where during the 2022 election cycle, I formalized S-JAWS for starting pitchers and R-JAWS for relievers.

I had been messing with the latter since the 2019 cycle, in the context of Billy Wagner’s candidacy. The short version of the story is that while Baseball Reference’s flavor of WAR (which I use in JAWS) features an adjustment for leverage — the quantitatively greater impact on winning and losing that a reliever has at the end of the ballgame than a starter does earlier — to help account for the degree of difficulty, it’s not the only way to measure reliever value. Win Probability Added (WPA) is a context-sensitive measure that accounts for the incremental increase (or decrease) in the chances of winning produced in each plate appearance given the inning, score, and base-out situation. WPA can be additionally adjusted using a pitcher’s average leverage index (aLI) for a stat variably called situational wins or context-neutral wins (referred to as WPA/LI). Both of those are now in the sauce; R-JAWS is the average of a reliever’s WAR (including his time as a starter and a hitter, if any), his WPA, and his WPA/LI. The rankings, which I used to have to create by hand, are now on Baseball Reference, and Wagner, who ranks sixth and is the best reliever outside the Hall, is trending towards election after receiving 68.1% on the 2023 ballot, his eighth year of eligibility. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei 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 been able to sustain regular duty in both a rotation and a lineup over a full season, let alone excel at both endeavors. At this writing, the 29-year-old superstar leads the majors in homers (34), slugging percentage (.665), and wRC+ (179), and he’s got the AL’s second-best strikeout rate (32.2%) and lowest batting average against (.191). He currently ranks among the AL’s top 10 in Baseball Reference’s position player WAR (4.0, fourth) and pitching WAR (2.5, ninth), and just over a full win ahead of Ronald Acuña Jr. for the major league lead in combined WAR. Over the past two and a half seasons, he’s been worth 25.0 WAR, 5.9 more than the top position player, Aaron Judge.

Some day, Hall of Fame voters will have to reckon with Ohtani. If he reaches the kind of career numbers that Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS system forecast for him over the winter — 1,809 hits, 404 homers, 124 OPS+, 158 wins, 2,329 strikeouts, 122 ERA+, and 72.1 WAR — the decision will be a no-brainer. I’m already of the mind that if he gets to his 10th season (2027) and is still doing double duty, he’ll have my vote when he lands on the ballot regardless of what the numbers say, because what he’s doing is so utterly remarkable. WAR and JAWS weren’t really built to handle a case like his, and not only because his ability to save his team a roster spot is probably worth some uncounted fraction of a win per year, too. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, I took the first swing for my annual roundup of active players who may or may not be building their cases for the Hall of Fame. With one exception, all of the ones I examined were in their age-30 seasons or later, but for this installment of shortstops and outfielders, I’ll take a look at some who are still in their 20s and have further to go before they reach Cooperstown.

For this exercise, unless otherwise indicated, I will be referencing bWAR for season and career totals, my JAWS metric, and the ZiPS rest-of-season projections, since one of the goals here is to give an idea of where these players will stand at the end of the season, having banked a full complement of WAR instead of just 80-some games worth. These future candidates are already dealing with suppressed WAR totals from the 60-game 2020 season (which hardly makes them the first to experience such scheduling limitations and career interruptions due to wars and strikes). Unlike last year, I’ll cover pitching in one installment. Note that I am by no means predicting that every player here will make it to Cooperstown or even suggesting that all are worthy; in some cases I’m particularly pessimistic, but these are the names that get tossed around

If you’re just arriving, I’d encourage you to at least read the introduction in Part 1. The important take-home point was my finding that nearly three-quarters of the position players who have reached a 40.0-WAR peak score (best seven seasons, aka WAR7) have eventually been enshrined, and so inevitably a good bit of the focus throughout this exercise has been on the math required to improve those scores. There is and will be far more to those cases, and to appreciating these players’ skills and accomplishments, but for the purposes of space I’ve had to cut to the chase. Here again is the table related to those 40.0-WAR peaks:

At every position, I’ve counted the total number of players with a peak WAR of at least 40.0; the number of Hall of Famers meeting that criterion; and the number of such players who are not yet eligible, either because they’re active, too recently retired to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot, or on the permanently ineligible list, like Pete Rose (whom JAWS classifies as a left fielder) and Shoeless Joe Jackson (right field). For catchers, I used a 32.0-WAR threshold instead of 40.0, as their values are constrained by the limits of playing time and pre-framing measures. Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t quite up to the level of Shohei Ohtani versus Mike Trout with the 2023 World Baseball Classic championship on the line, but the final plate appearance of Tuesday night’s All-Star Game did feature a memorable matchup. On the mound trying to secure a 3–2 victory — the National League’s first since 2012 — was Craig Kimbrel, he of the 408 career saves. Working to bring home the tying run from second base (or at least keep the line moving) was José Ramírez, already playing in his fifth All-Star Game at age 30. Ramírez fell into an 0–2 hole by taking a fastball and then chasing a curveball in the dirt but battled back to even the count before Kimbrel struck him out with a high fastball.

Someday we may talk about that matchup as one between two future Hall of Famers. Kimbrel has had his ups and downs in recent years, but he’s been dominant enough to earn a spot on an All-Star squad for the second year out of three and the ninth time overall. Earlier this year, he became the eighth pitcher to collect 400 saves, and he’s overtaken Kenley Jansen (who also recently reached 400) in the Reliever JAWS rankings. As for Ramírez, he’s hitting .289/.364/.506 (132 wRC+) and ranking among the AL’s top 10 in WAR for the sixth time in seven seasons (3.4 fWAR, 3.3 bWAR). While he’s only 30 years old, if all goes well during this season’s second half, he’ll reach an important milestone that strongly suggests future election to the Hall.

Thus far in his 11-year career, Ramirez has accumulated 43.7 WAR (I’m sticking with bWAR throughout the rest of this article unless otherwise indicated), which is impressive but not itself remarkable. Of more importance is that he already has tallied 38.4 WAR in his best seven seasons — his peak score (aka WAR7) for the purposes of calculating his JAWS. One of those seasons is this one:

Via Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, Ramirez is forecast to produce another 2.4 WAR this year, pushing his seven-year peak score to 40.8. While that’s still 2.3 WAR shy of the Hall standard for third basemen (43.1), he has at least one other season that shouldn’t be too hard to improve upon; indeed, his preseason three-year ZiPS projection forecasts him to produce 5.6 WAR in 2024 (which would take him to 43.3) and 4.9 WAR in ’25 (inching him to 43.4).

Even without looking that far ahead, the 40-WAR peak score is significant. For a position player, it’s a strong indicator of future election to the Hall:

At every position, I’ve counted the total number of players with a peak WAR of at least 40.0; the number of Hall of Famers meeting that criterion; and the number of such players who are not yet eligible, either because they’re active, too recently retired to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot, or on the permanently ineligible list. The last of those classifications applies to Pete Rose (whom JAWS classifies as a left fielder) and Shoeless Joe Jackson (right field). For catchers, I’ve used a 32.0-WAR threshold instead of 40.0, as their values are constrained by the limits of playing time and pre-framing measures.

As you can see, nearly three-quarters of the eligible players with at least 40.0 WAR in their seven best seasons are enshrined, a higher percentage than even I would have guessed before I dug through the numbers. That percentage would be even higher if I were also to remove the players whose PED-related allegations and suspensions have effectively blocked their elections, but let’s not dwell upon them today.

Currently, eight active position players have peak scores of at least 40.0, with two more besides Ramírez on the verge: Jose Altuve (39.8) and Aaron Judge (39.6). The former’s injuries will likely prevent him from reaching the mark this year (more on which below), but the latter has already produced one of his seven best seasons (he’s appeared in only parts of eight, including his -0.3-WAR cup of coffee from 2016) and needs just 0.4 WAR once he returns from his toe injury.

With that, it’s time to launch my more-or-less annual Hall of Fame progress report. This may not seem like an obvious time to check in on such players, but the July logjam on the baseball calendar includes the Hall’s induction weekend (July 21–24) as well as the draft, the All-Star Game and its high-profile auxiliary events (the Futures Game and the Home Run Derby), and the run-up to the August 1 trade deadline. It’s a time that I get a lot of questions about active players vying for future elections, and in the interest of providing a one-stop shop — er, in three parts, so let’s call it a department store — here we are.

For this exercise, unless otherwise indicated, I will be referencing bWAR for season and career totals, my JAWS metric, and the ZiPS rest-of-season projections, since one of the goals here is to give an idea of where these players will stand at the end of the season, having banked a full complement of WAR instead of just 80-some games worth; these future candidates are already dealing with suppressed WAR totals from the 60-game 2020 season — which hardly makes them the first to experience such scheduling limitations and career interruptions due to wars and strikes. Unlike last year, I’ll cover pitching in one installment; we’ll return to Kimbrel. Note that I am by no means predicting that every player here will make it to Cooperstown or even suggesting that all are worthy; in some cases I’m particularly pessimistic, but these are the names that get tossed around. Read the rest of this entry »

Third basemen have been underrepresented within the Hall of Fame since the institution’s inception, but one of the greats finally gained entry last week, when the BBWAA elected Scott Rolen in his sixth year of eligibility. Four days before the Hall called Rolen’s name, the baseball world lost another great third baseman when Sal Bando died at the age of 78 due to cancer. With better luck and timing, Bando might have been enshrined as well, with his passing felt far beyond Oakland and Milwaukee, the two cities where he spent his 16-year major league career.

Plenty of onlookers and even some voters had a hard time wrapping their heads around the election of Rolen, a great two-way third baseman whose all-around excellence — power, patience, elite defense, good baserunning — and stardom for two Cardinals pennant winners (one a champion) somehow wasn’t enough for those who expected him to measure up to Mike Schmidt, his predecessor in Philadelphia. Or Chipper Jones, his longer-lasting contemporary. Or… Don Mattingly or even Mark Grace because, uh, reasons. To them the notion of Bando as a Hall of Famer might seem even more unthinkable, but then they’d merely have a lot in common with the crusty scribes of four or five decades ago who helped to give Hall voting its bad name.

Bando spent 16 years in the majors (1966-81) with the A’s and Brewers, making four All-Star teams while most notably serving as the team captain and regular third baseman for an Oakland powerhouse that won five straight AL West titles from 1971-75 and three straight World Series from ’72 to ’74. An intense competitor with a high baseball IQ and a quiet lead-by-example style, he didn’t have quite the popularity or flair of teammates Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, or Vida Blue, but within the green-and-gold’s three-ring circus, he had those stars’ respect. “Sal Bando was the godfather. Capo di capo. Boss of all bosses on the Oakland A’s,” wrote Jackson in his 1984 autobiography. “We all had our roles, we all contributed, but Sal was the leader and everyone knew it.” Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 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.

For the second year in a row, BBWAA voters elected just one player to the Hall of Fame. While the results may feel underwhelming — at least, beyond the fact that Scott Rolen is a very solid addition to Cooperstown — the advances made by a handful of candidates who didn’t get to 75% this year bolster the likelihood that they will someday, whether it’s via the writers’ ballot or a small committee to be named later. Looking ahead, there’s nothing to suggest that we’re about to see another wave that brings to mind the record-setting 22 candidates the writers elected over the 2014-20 span, but the next few ballots will be more crowded than the last couple, and should make for some lively election cycles.

Underlying this is a change in the dynamics of Hall of Fame candidacies, one that I’ve been noting in this space in recent years. 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 ’81), Don Drysdale (21.0% in 1975, elected in ’84) and Billy Williams (23.4% in 1982, elected in ’87). Since then, we’ve seen six players elected despite such slow starts, including three from 2017-23. From the 15-year eligibility period came Bruce Sutter (23.9% in 1994, elected in 2006) and Bert Blyleven (17.5% in 1998, elected in 2011), and then once the Hall unilaterally decided to cut eligibility from 15 years to 10 — less to clean up the ballots than to try moving 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), Larry Walker (20.3% in ’11, elected in ’20), and now Rolen, whose 10.2% in 2018 represents the lowest debut share of any modern candidate elected by the writers. Read the rest of this entry »