Once in a while, a player gets to walk off into the sunset at the height of his game. Ted Williams and David Ortiz are two examples of Hall of Famers who retired while still stars. But most players, even many greats, don’t see their careers end on a high note. That much larger list includes Andrew McCutchen, who was released by the Texas Rangers in late May after hitting .197/.277/.260 in 37 games as a part-time designated hitter/outfielder. There’s still a possibility that McCutchen catches on with another team this season as a spare bat off the bench, but in any case, we’re likely seeing the last throes of his career. Time always wins in the end, so this discussion was inevitable, but a decade ago, it looked like this conversation would have Cooperstown-related content.

Going back to early 2016 in the time machine, Andrew McCutchen was a very different player. Still in his 20s, he was a five-time NL All-Star coming off four consecutive Silver Slugger awards and four top-five finishes in the NL MVP balloting, including a win in 2013. It was a better time for the Pittsburgh Pirates as well, having just made the playoffs for the third straight season, winning 98 games in 2015 before being unceremoniously eliminated by the Cubs in the Wild Card game. Always at risk of losing their stars to teams more willing to pay them, the Pirates didn’t have to worry about that yet with McCutchen, who still had three more years to go in Pittsburgh, thanks to the six-year, $51 million extension (with a team option for a seventh year) that he had signed before the 2012 season.

At this stage, McCutchen appeared to be on a pretty good Hall of Fame trajectory. After seven seasons, Cutch was entering his age-29 campaign having already tallied 41 WAR with a .298/.388/.496, 144 wRC+ career line while playing center field. On a historical level, these numbers were quite competitive with some of the best young center fielders in MLB history. Look at how prominently he featured on the leaderboard through his age-28 season:

Note that Mike Trout would eventually move up to third on this list; 2015 was only his age-23 season! It’s also weird to see Rickey Henderson here, but he played mostly center field for the Yankees in 1985-1987, and so he qualified in our database.

Anyway, that’s impressive company, and the vast majority of these players are Hall of Famers or will end up there eventually. ZiPS at the time saw no reason to be particularly suspicious of McCutchen’s performance, and without any red flags, was happy to project him with a fairly typical decline phase for a star outfielder.

As it turned out, 2015 was McCutchen’s last 4-WAR season, and in only one season was he better than 2 WAR (3.6 WAR, 2017) over the next decade. While ZiPS didn’t have any illusions that McCutchen would stay a superstar for another decade, it didn’t expect him to hit a more drastic decline until the early 2020s. Sticking in center for a few more years, with a projected 2,600 hits, 72.7 WAR, and 333 home runs, when combined with his peak, I think this McCutchen would’ve made the Hall of Fame, though it probably would’ve taken him several years on the ballot to creep over the 75% line.

It’s hard to point to the obvious reason for his premature decline. The 2016 campaign was his worst season in the majors at that point, marred by a down June/July while he was playing through a severely jammed thumb. But that wasn’t thought to be a long-term problem, and his offense did bounce back to a degree for the next few seasons. His defense was already trending downward, but he was hardly slow, and, except for 2020 when he was coming back from a torn ACL that prematurely ended his 2019 campaign, he stayed above the 90th percentile in sprint speed through the 2022 season. His contact rate declined, but he still maintained his solid plate discipline and his hard-hit rate remained steady.

I don’t believe McCutchen’s going to do well when he hits the Hall of Fame ballot, but I think the version that we got might be too easily dismissed. He only ranks 30th in Jay Jaffe’s JAWS for center fielders, a place where most players do not get into the Hall. He does fare better using FanGraphs WAR, however, both in seven-year peak fWAR and in fJAWS. McCutchen ranks 13th in peak fWAR among center fielders, compared to 24th in Baseball Reference’s version.

Using FanGraphs WAR, McCutchen ranks 19th among center fielders in JAWS rather than 30th, and that ranking is strong enough that I think you at least need to have a conversation about his Hall of Fame suitability. As noted above, I’m not optimistic; the writers gave very little attention to Jimmy Wynn (19th), Kenny Lofton (12th), and Jim Edmonds (11th), while it took nine ballots to induct Andruw Jones (eighth). McCutchen had a huge peak, but the freshest memories of him will not be of that peak, but of his decade as a middling DH/corner outfielder.

If this is actually the end for Andrew McCutchen, he shouldn’t be remembered for coming up short of Cooperstown. For the better part of a decade, he was one of the very best players in baseball, the biggest name in a Pirates revival that briefly made Pittsburgh feel like a big baseball city again. The second half of his career didn’t dazzle like the first, but he did more than enough to be remembered as something greater than merely a very good player who got old quickly.

Every year, Byron Buxton seems to find another gear. With the exception of his abbreviated 2018 (94 plate appearances in the majors), Buxton’s OPS has increased every single season compared to the year before. In 2022, partly thanks to becoming a fastball-crushing machine since the start of last year, he’s continued this pattern, hitting .278/.342/.722 in 79 plate appearances (all stats are through Monday’s action). He’s even tied for the league lead in home runs with nine, especially impressive given that he’s missed more than a third of Minnesota’s games.

It’s that last fact that is troubling, as Buxton’s career has been hampered by an unfortunate inability to stay healthy. And it hasn’t been one, consistent problem that keeps him out of games but rather a succession of nagging ones, with each season bringing a mystery grab bag of misfortune. This year, it’s been a sore knee from a slide, a hand contusion, and a hip problem. Last year, it was a hip, a hamstring, and a broken hand. Before 2021, he missed time due to a concussion, a sore left shoulder, a sprained left foot, a torn labrum, another concussion, a hit by a pitch to the wrist, a different strain to the same wrist, a broken toe, serious migraines after an outfield wall collision, a strained groin, and a sprained knee — and that doesn’t count the myriad day-to-day issues.

The last time Buxton played even 100 games in a season was in 2017 (while there were only 60 games in 2020, he still missed a third of them). I was born in 1978; growing up, Eric Davis was the five-tool, mega-skilled exemplar of the dynamic superstar who couldn’t stay healthy, but even he still managed to get into 130 games a year during his 1986–90 peak. Buxton debuted almost seven years ago, in June 2015, and barely has three years’ worth of playing time in the majors to go along with another half-season in the minors due to Minnesota’s early proclivity for demoting him every time he fell into a slump. Read the rest of this entry »

This series of articles looks at players whose careers are cut short due to misfortune, but few of them are cases as sudden or as dramatic as that of former Astros pitcher J.R. Richard, who died one week ago at age 70. The Houston fireballer had emerged as one of the game’s hardest throwing starters and a potential ace when he suffered a stroke 41 years ago and collapsed during the team’s pregame warmups. He never pitched in the majors again.

Richard’s debut was about as brilliant as one can get: a complete-game shutout of the Giants in September 1971 in which he struck out 15 batters. This was toward the end of Willie Mays‘ illustrious career, but how many pitchers can claim to have pulled off a hat trick of whiffs against an inner-circle Hall of Famer in their debut? Those 15 strikeouts tied pitcher Karl Spooner’s debut record; incidentally, Spooner is another player with a short career that was ended by a shoulder injury a year later, but that’s a tale for another time.

As a pitcher, Richard looks more at home in 2021 than in 1970. At 6’8″ with a fastball hitting the century mark and a slider in the low 90s, there was a lot of intimidation and little in the way of pitching to contact here. The only problem was that he was raw mechanically, just two years out of high school, and coaching staffs weren’t as experienced as today at helping pitchers harness such an explosive repertoire; over his 12 remaining innings that season, including a first inning he didn’t finish, Richard walked 13 batters.

The wildness never quite went away, and Richard spent the new few years riding the Triple-A shuttle. But the Astros traded Claude Osteen in 1974 for two recent Cardinals draft picks, and Don Wilson and his son died in January 1975 from carbon monoxide poisoning, and these were the days you couldn’t just go shopping in free agency. So up to the majors came Richard for good.

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There’s a kind of depressing infamy that comes with being a player on the losing end of a lopsided trade. Players like Glenn Davis, Ernie Broglio, and Larry Andersen are more famous for the players they were traded for than anything they did in their own careers. It’s an unfair bit of notoriety, too; there’s not much cosmic justice involved when Harvey Kuenn, who played in 10 All-Star games, is remembered more for a decision to trade Rocky Colavito he didn’t make rather than being a .314/.360/.426, 23.5 WAR hitter in seven full seasons with the Detroit Tigers. Jim Fregosi is another star who’s a member of this unfortunate club.

In the case of Fregosi, his run as an elite shortstop might actually be a distant third in the ol’ memory banks. If you asked a random baseball fan in 2021 what they know about him, at least one who isn’t an Angels fan, you’d likely get one of two responses: his status as the player traded for Nolan Ryan or his 15-year post-playing career as a manager for four teams, most famously those notorious misfits, the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies. But when Mike Trout blew through the Angels record for the most career WAR for a position player, the previous holder wasn’t Tim Salmon or Brian Downing or Darin Erstad or Bobby Grich. It was Jim Fregosi. Read the rest of this entry »

By the time Dustin Pedroia officially announced his retirement early this month, it was already apparent that he’d never return to the Red Sox as a full-time player. One of the last active members of the 2007 championship team — Jon Lester is still kicking around, and I don’t believe Clay Buchholz has officially retired — his run ended prematurely thanks to the consequences of a 2017 knee injury. This was no random injury, either; it was the result of a collision at second with Manny Machado buckling Pedroia’s knee on a high-spikes slide. This wasn’t Machado’s first (or last) questionable slide as a baserunner, but the results here were worse than they looked initially. Pedroia played through pain for the rest of the 2017 season, missing most of August with continued inflammation, then had a procedure after the 2017 season to restore missing cartilage to his knee.

At the time, the belief was that Pedroia would be able to return in 2018, though not likely at the start of the season. Instead, he only totaled nine more games in what ended up being the rest of his career, with continual cycles of the knee feeling better followed by significant setbacks. More operations were required, and while he theoretically could have returned in 2020, he never got anywhere near returning to the field, and after the Red Sox agreed to pay him his full 2021 salary, he walked off into the sunset.

My colleague Brendan Gawlowski has already covered Pedroia’s retirement and what he meant to Red Sox fans and to baseball as a whole. Here, I’m using the ZiPS time machine once again to take a look at the bittersweet what-ifs.

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One thing that most baseball fans have in common is an uncanny ability to recall a massive quantity of trades, whether in admiration or with derision, and one of my favorite deals to look back on is the Bartolo Colon trade. In many ways, it was the traditional “star now for prospects later” type of transaction, but this trade also broke a lot of the common tropes of these types of swaps.

First, the backdrop of our story.

By this point in the history of the Montreal Expos, trades that involved the team adding rather than subtracting a star had become unusual. In the days before Jeff Loria strip-mined the Miami Marlins, the art dealer cut his teeth doing such as the managing partner of the Expos. For the first quarter-century of the team’s existence, they were owned by Charles Bronfman, whose money came from from the family’s liquor empire, Seagram’s. Loria had been trying to purchase a team for some time and had been bested in previous attempts to buy the Expos and the Baltimore Orioles. A group of investors led by team president Claude Brochu purchased the team instead in order to keep it in Montreal.

One of the unintentional results of baseball’s labor-owner strife in 1994 was that it sabotaged Brochu’s master plan. The team missed out on their best chance for a World Series, and the lost revenue left Brochu in a position to have to seek additional funding from the rest of the investors, resulting in the team’s shift to a strategy of selling off its stars. This was accelerated further when Loria purchased enough of the Expos to become the new managing partner in 1999. Loria stopped pursuing the new ballpark and turned down broadcast fees for 2000. A few years later, the rest of the partners initiated a RICO lawsuit against Loria. Read the rest of this entry »

The 1960s didn’t create many new Red Sox fans. Carl Yastrzemski debuted in 1961 and ascended to superstar status two years later, but outside of Yaz’s origin story, the franchise didn’t have much going for it. Starting with Ted Williams‘ penultimate season in 1959, Boston finished below .500 in eight consecutive campaigns, being spared last place thanks only to the piles of sadness that were the Athletics and the brand-new Senators in those years. As the Red Sox started assembling the early cast of a team that would, starting in 1967, finish with a winning record for 16 straight seasons, few stars shone as brightly as Tony Conigliaro. Until, that is, one errant Jack Hamilton fastball dimmed that star.

It took Yastrzemski a few years to really get going, but as a hitter, Conigliaro arrived in the majors nearly fully formed, much in the manner of Bryce Harper. Conigliaro’s signing was back in the pre-draft days, when amateurs had more of an ability to determine their franchise, and 14 teams pursued him before he signed with Boston. Assigned to the Wellsville Red Sox of the New York-Penn League in 1963, Conigliaro led the circuit in batting average, slugged .730 (the next-best mark was .575), and finished fifth in home runs only because he missed the first six weeks with a broken thumb after getting in a fight back home.

Boston added Conigliaro to the roster in 1964, and he started in center field on Opening Day at the age of 19. He eventually moved to left field in his rookie season — he was stretched in center — but he quickly became a fixture in the lineup and was batting second by the time summer started. He made a great first impression after hitting a home run in his first Fenway at-bat, a shot over the Green Monster off White Sox pitcher Joe Horlen. Only 23 players in baseball history have tallied 400 plate appearances in a campaign before their age-20 season, and only Mel Ott had higher a wRC+ (Juan Soto passed them both in 2018). Read the rest of this entry »

As you read this, Albert Pujols is still trying to hit his 660th home run, tying him for fifth all-time with Willie Mays. This round-tripper will very likely be 40-year-old Albert’s last big career milestone. He could still catch Alex Rodriguez, next in the home run gauntlet at 696, or even get the roughly 200 RBIs needed to catch Hank Aaron’s all-time record, but at his age and advanced state of decline, these will likely need a minimum of two more full-time seasons. So why does a player like this find his way into a ZiPS Time Warp? The cruelty of time ensures that most Hall of Famers surpass milestones when they’re well into their declining years, but in the case of Albert Pujols, we have that rare all-time great who was a shadow of himself for half of his career.

The greatness of 2000s Pujols hardly needs to be restated, so we won’t dwell on it too long. Through the first decade of his career, he hit .331/.426/.624 with 408 home runs, 1230 RBIs, and a sterling 70.6 WAR. Through age 30, that comes out to sixth all-time in homers, eighth in RBIs, and eighth in WAR (Mike Trout has pushed him back to ninth in the last number). The first time he ended a season as a major leaguer and didn’t tally an MVP vote was in 2013, the 13th season of his career. That’s short of the 15-year streak of Barry Bonds, but he didn’t get his first MVP tally until age 25.

Unlike many of these all-time greats, Albert emerged in the majors fully formed with little need for adjustment. As impressive as a .329/.403/.610, 37 HR, 7.2 WAR debut was for a 21-year-old, it’s stunning how he managed having only played three games above A-ball. Even Trout, our gold standard for phenomitude, only hit .220/.281/.390 in his first 40-game cameo; after his 40th game in the majors, Pujols had a 1.150 OPS. It was this quick burst into the majors at such a young age, along with his steep decline, that fueled the rampant speculation that Pujols, originally born in the Dominican Republic before later moving to New York and then Missouri, was a few years older than his birth certificate claimed. While the actual truth of this story remains a mystery, no evidence has ever been presented that is robust enough for me to dignify with even a hyperlink. Read the rest of this entry »

When people get excited about the Rule 5 draft at the Winter Meetings, Johan Santana is one of the biggest reasons why. Roberto Clemente is almost certainly the best player ever taken in this event, but Santana leads a healthy spoonful of All-Stars who found new teams when their old ones couldn’t find the roster spot (this list also includes names such as Bobby Bonilla, George Bell, Josh Hamilton, and Shane Victorino). It took another trade to get Santana to the club for which he’d achieve his greatest exploits, the Minnesota Twins. After receiving Cy Young votes in six consecutive seasons and winning two trophies, injuries quickly ended Santana’s career before he reached his mid-30s.

The Twins weren’t even the team that launched Santana to stardom, though they certainly received a benefit from the Rule 5 draft. Knowing the Marlins wanted Jared Camp, the Twins took him in the 1999 Rule 5, only to instantly trade him to the Marlins for Santana and $500,000. Santana certainly wasn’t a finished product at this point and struggled in a mop-up role for Minnesota in his rookie season. His 2002 campaign didn’t go much better, as he was raw and didn’t have a true out pitch to punch out batters, and he missed significant time due to an elbow injury.

Santana was never a star on the radar gun, and at this point, a less determined team may have simply been happy to move on with the half a million bucks they pocketed. But the Twins persisted, and while converting Santana to a starting pitching role in the minors in 2002, former Ranger reliever Bobby Cuellar worked with Santana on refining his changeup and making it the centerpiece of his repertoire.

Santana fiddled with a changeup before 2002, but that was when the pitch blossomed. After Minnesota sent Santana to Class AAA Edmonton to convert him from a reliever to a starter, Bobby Cuellar, the pitching coach there, preached about the significance of trusting his changeup in any situation.

During bullpen sessions, Cuellar would tell Santana to imagine the count was 2-0 or 3-0 and would instruct him to throw a changeup. During games, Cuellar sometimes had Santana toss seven straight changeups. Although Santana said it took months to be that bold, Cuellar said he saw “a little glow in Johan’s eye” as the pitch developed. By July 2003, Santana was in the Twins’ rotation. By 2004, he was a 20-game winner.

Santana’s control was yet to reach the levels it would during his prime, but his change quickly became a weapon. From an overall run value standpoint, his changeup ranked 14th in baseball in 2002 and 17th in 2003. Coincidentally, his first Cy Young vote came in 2003. Read the rest of this entry »

Ted Williams isn’t the typical beneficiary of a trip in the ZiPS time machine. After all, anyone who has the slightest interest in baseball — and many who don’t — know his name, even if they aren’t familiar with every last one of his accomplishments. Williams typified the cerebral, scientific hitter in the same way that Babe Ruth created the archetype of the larger-than-life slugger. The mercurial Ruth likely would have had considerably more trouble adapting to today’s game, but I’m of the opinion that the Splendid Splinter would actually thrive in a world where offense is looked at more as science than myth made true. Perhaps the best modern comparison for Williams is Joey Votto if the latter somehow got a hold of a genie’s lamp.

The list of Williams’ accomplishments is far too lengthy to run down in complete fashion, so we’ll settle for a sampling. He’s first all-time in on-base percentage and second in slugging percentage. He’s the most recent player to hit .400, and a two-time Triple Crown winnner. Ted finished with a .344 batting average, 521 homers, 2,654 hits, and enough black ink in his stats that he could have started his own newspaper.

But Williams’ career was also marked by long absences from the game. He was drafted after Pearl Harbor, initially receiving a deferment because he was his mother’s sole support. He played through the 1942 season, but enlisted in the Navy reserve after its conclusion and served for the next three years.

In terms of baseball, those were prime seasons of his career lost. The 1943-1945 stretch represented his age-24 through age-26 seasons, years when a lot of Hall of Famers turn in some of their most eye-popping campaigns. Taking a look at the list of Hall of Fame hitters through those ages sorted by WAR, there are some truly gigantic numbers involved:

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