Cooperstown Notebook: The 2023 Progress Report, Part III

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.

Back in the spring, Dan and I mused on the topic of Ohtani’s Hall of Fame case for FanGraphs Audio (start around 40:15). Dan, with projections in hand, suggested that Ohtani would look pretty good in that context, and while the math doesn’t work in the way that he suggested (we don’t add the JAWS of his hitting and pitching contributions but the WARs), it didn’t really take me long to come around to his thinking. Pondering the matter more deeply, the example I think of is that of John Montgomery “Monte” Ward, who as a pitcher, infielder, manager, pioneering labor leader, and executive left his stamp all over nineteenth-century baseball. It took until 1964, 39 years after his death, for him to get elected to the Hall of Fame because he ruffled so many feathers in his day, but even if we just consider his bifurcated playing career, his numbers are impressive.

Ward broke in as an 18-year-old rookie hurler for the Providence Grays in 1878, leading the NL with a 1.51 ERA (147 ERA+). He notched 47 wins and 239 strikeouts the next year, helping the team to a pennant. Even while piling up nearly 600 innings in 1879 and ’80 and pitching in 70 of his team’s 80-something games, he played third base, shortstop, or an outfield corner for nearly all of the ones he didn’t pitch. That’s a closer analogue to what Ohtani is doing than Ruth’s 1918–19 efforts, during which he often went weeks between starts because he was so important offensively.

For Ward, the pitching and fielding mix continued until he injured his right arm on a slide in 1884, ending his pitching career. After that, he became a regular shortstop and then second baseman and was an excellent defender if only an average-ish hitter. He earned a law degree from Columbia University in 1885 and that same year founded the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, the sport’s first players’ union. In 1891, he led a revolt against NL owners that resulted in the founding of the one-year-only co-operative Players League. He played until age 35 (1894) before deciding to focus on his legal practice.

Ward is the only Hall of Famer with at least 2,000 hits and 100 wins. For JAWS purposes, he’s neither fish nor fowl; I don’t include him in the computation of the standards (I listed him at shortstop in The Cooperstown Casebook), though when I total up his pitching and hitting WAR into a single line, he looks pretty solid for a 19th-century player, with 62.5 career WAR, 40.7 peak WAR and 51.6 JAWS. Here’s the breakdown of his annual WARs:

I didn’t count Ward in the tally of 40.0-WAR peak position players in the Hall that I highlighted in the first two installments of this series — noting that just shy of 75% of the eligible ones are enshrined, making it a good mid-career measure to reference — but in retrospect I should have.

Here’s Ohtani’s table:

Ohtani obviously doesn’t have a 17-year career to draw from, but even midway through his sixth season — one of which was solely as a DH and one of which was an injury-shortened disaster — he’s already got a 31.2-WAR peak score and 31.2 JAWS. That’s higher than two highly regarded 30-year-old Phillies, shortstop Trea Turner (30.6/29.3/30.0) and starting pitcher Aaron Nola (31.0/29.8/30.4), though admittedly neither is having a season that will do much to advance his cause.

Since the purpose of this is to fit Ohtani into my ever-expanding midseason JAWS update series, here’s his table:

All told, I like Ohtani’s chances of making it to the Hall of Fame, not because the numbers are guaranteed to make him an obvious selection, but because even if they don’t, his career has already been unique and so special that quite frankly, we have to find room to honor him. What kind of idiot wouldn’t put Ohtani in the Hall? (Don’t answer that, we’re trying to keep this clean enough for the kids.)

If Ohtani is a unicorn, then the starters and relievers progressing toward Cooperstown are more like blue whales or great white sharks, fit for the list of endangered species. Beyond the four late-career starters who could start writing their speeches today, nobody is obviously on a Hall track due to injuries and declining performances.

Starting Pitchers

In late 2021, I introduced S-JAWS (Starter JAWS), which I designed in an attempt to set more attainable standards for Hall-aspiring pitchers by reducing the skewing caused by the impact of 19th-century and Deadball-era pitchers, some of whom topped 400, 500, or even 600 innings in a season on multiple occasions. I’ve done this by prorating the peak-component credit for any heavy-workload season to a maximum of 250 innings, which gives a boost to more recent pitchers by suppressing the peak-score impact of the massive seasons by those ancient hurlers.

I chose 250 innings because it’s a level that the current and recent BBWAA candidates rarely reached; among active pitchers, only Verlander has, albeit by a single inning over a decade ago. The various emphases on pitch counts, innings limits, and times through the order make it unlikely we’ll see such workloads again; if you want a contemporary cautionary tale, note that last year’s much-lauded workhorse, NL Cy Young winner Sandy Alcantara, has doubled his ERA after throwing an MLB-high 228.2 innings. 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.

The quartet above doesn’t really need JAWS, let alone S-JAWS, to make their cases to the average fan, particularly with three of them owning three Cy Young Awards apiece (all but Greinke, who has one and should probably have won a second). None of them will win 300 games, but they all have well over 200 wins; even Kershaw, who reached the milestone earlier this year, is at 207. Three of the four (all but Scherzer) are above the original JAWS standard of 61.4, with Kershaw currently 27th, Verlander 28th, and Greinke 32nd. Scherzer is 38th, just below the standard but surrounded by Hall of Famers, and he might yet cross the plane this year. By S-JAWS, they range from 20th to 28th.

The 35-year-old Kershaw is the only one of the four having a very good season; he leads the NL in ERA (2.55) but will soon shed that title, as his stint on the injured list with a vague shoulder issue will apparently keep him out until August. It will likely also prevent him from getting the 88 strikeouts he needs to reach 3,000 this year. That at least gives him a good reason to return next year, whether to the Dodgers, the only team he’s ever known, or to embark on a new and likely final chapter closer to home with the Rangers, with whom he’s played a public game of footsie.

It’s tougher to justify a return for Greinke, who in this dumpster fire of a season for the Royals is currently 1–9 with a 5.44 ERA. He just landed on the injured list with a bout of shoulder tendinitis, which may explain why he’s been pasted for an 8.01 ERA and 6.18 FIP in 30.1 innings since the start of June. While he needs 54 Ks to reach 3,000, that’s a tall order for this year given his current 16.4% strikeout rate.

Scherzer and Verlander, both already in the 3,000-strikeout club, were supposed to anchor the rotation of the $363-million Mets, but both have missed time with injuries and have hardly been at their best; the former has a 3.99 ERA and 4.41 FIP in 94.2 innings, the latter a 3.72 ERA and 4.03 FIP in 75 innings. Verlander’s ERA is more than double last year’s 1.75 mark, and where he had 185 strikeouts in 28 starts, he’s at 63 in 13 starts thus far. With $43.3 million to play for next year, neither of these two is hanging up his spikes this winter, but whether they’ll be Mets on August 2 may be another story.

Welcome to the weeds, where this trio of pitchers’ Hall of Fame cases reside. Sale was once a perennial Cy Young candidate; he finished in the top six in seven straight seasons (2012–18) during which he averaged 198.1 innings a year, placing as high as second in the voting but never winning. Those seasons account for all seven of his All-Star appearances and the entirety of his peak score. He had decent campaigns on either side of that stretch, but since missing all of 2020 due to Tommy John surgery, he’s managed just 22 starts and 1.9 WAR. This year, he has a 4.58 ERA and 3.71 FIP in 58 innings, but he hasn’t pitched since June 1 due to a stress reaction in his scapula and only resumed throwing bullpen sessions this past Friday, so he won’t be back until sometime in August. He’s only 34 years old, but unless he can at least take on a Kershaw-sized workload, he’s got little chance of advancing his Hall of Fame case.

As I noted last year in connection to Verlander, recoveries from Tommy John surgery don’t generally go so well for pitchers in the second half of their 30s, and that’s for pitchers who have undergone just one. DeGrom, who just turned 35, underwent his second TJ about a month ago (his first was in 2010) and is now on the shelf until sometime in the middle of next season. Three years ago, I wrote about the potential for deGrom to build a Koufax-like case for Cooperstown, where a third Cy Young might offset low counting stats in such a way that he would be obvious exception for voters to accommodate. Since then, over parts of four seasons, he’s dominated via a 2.12 ERA and 1.78 FIP, albeit over just 44 starts totaling 254 innings. He has 84 wins and 1,356.1 innings to his name, and even if he doubles those numbers, his counting stats will look light relative to the Hall of Fame hurlers.

Unlike Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina, the 41-year-old Wainwright chose to return for one more season with the Cardinals, but it’s been an absolute slog. He strained his groin during spring training, didn’t return until May 6, and in 11 starts totaling 51.2 innings has been pasted for a 7.66 ERA and 5.88 FIP. He went 0-for-3 in pursuit of his 199th career win before landing on the IL again with a right shoulder strain on July 5. He has vowed to return and will soon resume throwing off a mound, so a mid-to-late August return is probably a best-case scenario.

Given Wainwright’s four top-three finishes in the Cy Young voting and his role in helping the Cardinals to eight NL Central titles and two World Series, it might be a surprise that he doesn’t look stronger in light of JAWS. He’s pitched just 2,619 innings, however, missing all of 2011 due to Tommy John surgery, all but seven appearances in ’15 due to surgery to repair a torn Achilles tendon, and all but eight appearances in ’18 due to elbow inflammation. He’s banked four seasons of at least 6.0 WAR, but the other three seasons rounding out his peak score feature WARs of 4.0, 3.5, and 3.0 (including offense); barring medical miracles, he’s simply out of time to put up better seasons.

Of the active pitchers below the tier of those who have more or less clinched berths in Cooperstown, the 32-year-old Cole probably has the best shot of any of them given that he’s still healthy and dominant. He leads the AL in WAR and started the All-Star Game this year, just his second time actually pitching in the contest, though he’s been selected six times. Though he has yet to win a Cy Young award, he has five top-five finishes, including seconds in 2019 and ’21; his 1.90 Award Shares — a career tally of the fractional support a player receives in the annual MVP or Cy Young voting — ranks second among pitchers who have never won, behind Wainwright (1.98) and ahead of Sale (1.80).

Cole is in his sixth year of ranking among the league’s top 10 in WAR, with four top-five finishes in the past five seasons (last year was the exception). He’s on track to top not only 5.0 WAR for the fourth time, but also 6.0 WAR for the second time, and within his peak score, he’s got seasons of 2.5 and 2.7 WAR that should easily be improved upon. What could very well punch his ticket would be the combination of 200 wins and 3,000 strikeouts; he has 139 of the former and 2,064 of the latter, and he’s on track to best 200 strikeouts for the sixth time.

If you’re looking past Cole for a starter who might have a chance, the 30-year-old Nola stands out in large part thanks to his 9.2-WAR 2018 season and his 1,500 strikeouts. That said, he’s made just one All-Star team, hasn’t finished higher than third in the Cy Young voting, and has been pretty ordinary in two of the past three seasons, with ERAs in the mid-4.00s. He’s totaled 10.1 WAR in that span, 5.9 of it from last year, his only other time above 4.4 WAR. We’ll see what his 30s are like.

Beyond that, I wouldn’t expect the out-of-work Madison Bumgarner (37.3/30.2/33.8) or the bullpen-bound Corey Kluber (34.0/34.9/34.4) and Johnny Cueto (36.3/29.5/32.9) to make much (if any) more progress. And it seems clear that Stephen Strasburg (32.3/28.6/30.4) is done due to severe nerve damage. Nobody else active is even at 30.0 JAWS. We’ll have to cross our fingers and hope that somebody else emerges that we can pin our hopes upon. In the final installment of the series, we’ll at least review a couple of relievers who might fit that bill.