FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: December 27, 2025
Hello everyone, and welcome to the final mailbag of 2025! I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season.
We are now officially in what my family refers to as the lobe of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year, when a lot of us wind down and spend time with friends and loved ones. It’s a time for relaxing and reflecting. You’ll notice that here at FanGraphs, aside from this mailbag and a few transaction reactions, we are mostly taking it slow. Instead, we’re republishing our favorite FanGraphs pieces of the year. You can check those out here, or as they populate the homepage from now through the end of next week.
In this week’s mailbag, we’ll cover the best players who never received a Hall of Fame vote, NPB posting rules, and Dillon Dingler’s breakout season. Before we do, though, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.
Matt is the associate editor of FanGraphs. Previously, he was the baseball editor at Sports Illustrated. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Men’s Health, Baseball Prospectus, and Lindy’s Sports Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @ByMattMartell and Blue Sky @mattmartell.bsky.social.
There has been a lot of hall of fame snubs which depresses me greatly. Let’s not even begin to unpack that load of baggage renting space in my head. But how does Willie Davis not even get on a ballot? I think that’s the greatest snub of all!
I know that 2017 HoF ballot was loaded – 12 guys on that ballot eventually got in, and it also had Clemens, Bonds, Shilling, Manny, Sheffield, and Sosa. But Mike Cameron was a true five tool player who had a long and excellent career with 278 HR, 297 SB, and 3 GG. He’s not a Hall of Famer, but it’s amazing to me that he didn’t get a single vote.
Also, thanks for answering my question about posting rules! I bet the next time they get negotiated, NPB tries to close that loophole. Maybe this time it was just a special set of circumstances that conspired to get this outcome, but I wouldn’t be surprised if MLB teams start trying to structure contracts to make this sort of thing more likely, now that they have seen it is possible.
Mike Cameron is one of the first players I think of when I think “guys we didn’t appreciate at the time.”
I think it was because useful defensive stats didn’t really begin until he had already been in the league a few years, and also because his standout offensive skill was drawing walks, and also because he bounced around to different teams so one single fanbase never got the chance to claim him as “theirs.” Before you know it, he’s walked over 800 times and hit over 250 homers.
Here’s a fun fact: Cameron put up 4+ fWAR seasons for five different teams in his career. And yet he’s probably most famous for (1) giving up his center field spot for Carlos Beltran and in return (2) getting into one of the ugliest outfield collisions of the decade for (3) the one team where he played meaningful innings but didn’t put up a 4+ win season, topping out at 3.8.
Probably also doesn’t help that is career overlapped with Andruw Jones, who was probably the best center field defender ever.
To this day that horrible collision with Beltran is the first thing I think of when I think of Cameron. Horrific.
I think it also didn’t help that he was a successor to Griffey in Seattle, which also cast quite the shadow.
I disagree. He was adopted by the fan base almost immediately by a superb over the wall catch, and was incredibly popular, particularly as his first two teams made the playoffs. Add in the 4 home run game, and that he was the guy whose jersey Dave Cameron’s wife for some reason was always photographed wearing, and I think of him as a Mariner.
Maybe it was the last name?
Cameron was an excellent player for the Mariners (18.4 bWAR in 4 seasons).
He won me over with a walk-off, 19th inning home run vs. the Red Sox in his first season with the club. I started watching that particular game on television, beginning in the 9th inning, and stayed up until 1 am-ish to see Cameron close it out,
[Box Score: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SEA/SEA200008010.shtml%5D
Finally, a fun fact about Cameron: He had virtually identical bWAR in each league. 23.4 (10 seasons in the AL); 23.3 (8 seasons in the NL).
I’d be really curious to see who put up the most 4+ (or 5+, or 6+) fWAR seasons for different teams. It feels like it’s more common to see this with pitchers, so maybe what I’m really interested in is position players. And since integration, because that’s the only time period that really matters.
I bet the guys who play for more teams like Cameron are more underrated. But the only players I can think of are ones who might beat Cameron on these, maybe they’re still underrated, but they also pretty clearly had Hall of Fame careers: Adrian Beltre and Gary Sheffield.
A lot of other outstanding players played for a ton of teams, but the nomadic phase of their career usually happened after their peak. I was thinking of Bobby Abreu, but nope, he was only really a big time player with the Phillies. Beltran was really only a big time player with the Royals and Mets, although he did put up 4 wins for Houston in half a season.
Sheffield had 6+-win seasons for four teams (SDP, FLA, ATL, LAD) which might be the record there. Comes 0.2 wins short of a four-win season for the Yankees so Cameron has him beat there.
Russell Martin played for four teams and had 4-win seasons for each of them, Bobby Bonds also had 4 wins for four teams (and played for some others). But I’ve checked everyone who played for at least five teams since 1948 down to just below 40 WAR, and I think Cameron is the only one with four for five. It fell just right for him (as far as this stat goes) that he was in a challenge trade for Konerko early and after one year was traded for Griffey, which let him pick up three teams before hitting free agency.
My question is about another Willie – why the hell is Willie Randolph not in the HOF?
I knew he was overlooked, but I forgot that Randolph’s BBWAA voting history was so harsh – One and done on the 1998 ballot, with a tally of 5 votes / 1.1% according to B-Ref. In good (bad?) company with all of these insane HOF snubs that Matt has tracked down; on the other side of the snub questions, Randolph was a 6-time All Star, and received 1980 MVP votes.
Yeah his case isn’t quite as egregious as with guys like Davis and Wynn, and there are some modern cases that are about as bad or worse, but it’s mostly just that I never hear anyone talking about him as a HOFer (could definitely be that I’m not looking in the right places). His career as a manager certainly didn’t help his case, but his numbers as a player clear my bar pretty easily.
Second base is a position that the HOF clearly has a hard time with.
Looking at his Fangraphs and Baseball Reference pages, I see a couple likely factors in Randolph getting so few HoF votes:
(1) Walks. His triple crown stats show a .276 career hitter with very little power (only 54 career HR’s). Randolph had a very good career .373 OBP, however, due to a 13.1% walk rate. Kind of amazing that a player with such little power had such a good BB%. That batting profile also limited Randolph’s career hit total (2,210 career hits and 1,243 career walks).
(2) Lack of defensive awards. He gets a decent boost to career fWAR from career 115 runs above average (per Total Zone), but he never won a Gold Glove.
He had very tough competition for Gold Gloves.
Frank White got most of them and is probably the 2nd or 3rd best defensive 2B ever. Add in Lou Whitaker, who was an exact contemporary, and Bobby Grich was still awesome the 1st half of Randolph’s career.
Randolph just got overshadowed.
The other thing about Randolph is he was just a consistent, quiet, above average at everything but power, but, not great. Didn’t hit .300, never scored 100 runs, stole 25-30 SB, etc. As you noted, a lot of his value was in walks & in those days, it just wasn’t considered much. The only offensive thing he ever led the league in was walks.
& he was on those Yankee teams with big personalities like Reggie Jackson, Nettles, Munson, Lou Pinella, Goose Gossage, Sparky Lyle & then Steinbrenner & Billy Martin, too. No way he could stand out with that group sucking up the media oxygen.
Add in he was the 2B on 2 WS winning teams (& another team that lost the WS), but, the 1st team Reggie got all the press by hitting 3 HR’s in the clincher & the 1978 team, Randolph got hurt & missed the ALCS/WS & his replacement Brian Doyle, almost won WS MVP by hitting .438.
Already conceding that Pete Rose is going to get into the HOF?
We’ve been living in the Twilight Zone since January of 2017, it’s to be expected at this point. Satan is winning.
I dunno – he did lose the butt baby.
“Players who were eligible for a writer’s ballot and never received a vote” should cover it.
Umm , I’m sure I’ll get some Internet hate for this, and I realize Giles and Stephens are white, but isn’t this at least partially a list of the best black players who weren’t Mays or Aaron? Just my opinion, but it seems disproportionately represented by really good black players
Obviously, I mean the Hall of Fame snubs…..
You’re not wrong. I’m not sure about other eras, but black guys who were eligible for Hall of Fame lists in the 1980s got absolutely hosed. Jimmy Wynn didn’t get a vote. Dick Allen didn’t crack 5% in 1982. Willie Davis never got put on the ballot.
I think the story is a bit more complicated than “the voters were racist” but not by much. Star black ballplayers dominated baseball pretty quickly after they came into MLB, to the point that we have to question the meaning of being a good player before it. By 1951 Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella were two of the best position players in MLB, and Larry Doby and Minnie Minoso were probably Top 10…and only something like five or six teams had been integrated by that point. Between 1954 and 1979 the best position players in baseball were disproportionately black, especially at the top with Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Frank Robinson. Joe Morgan is probably the greatest second baseman of all time, Roberto Clemente put up 80 fWAR in his career and was still putting up 4 wins at the age of 37 before dying tragically. Willie McCovey, Willie Stargell, and Dick Allen redefined what we imagined sluggers to be. And on the pitching side Bob Gibson was indisputably the greatest pitcher during his career, and Fergie Jenkins wasn’t far off during his.
It was like black baseball players had taken over the league, and you couldn’t easily deny these guys spots in the Hall of Fame (although they did with Dick Allen). But I think in retrospect it seems clear that there was one standard for white baseball players and another for black ballplayers. It’s not that surprising, it’s not like whoever was voting for the Hall of Fame in that period had grown up in eras of racial tolerance, and probably a lot of them were racist in the immediate post-civil rights era. In the 1970s fights over busing were really bad and white people were still running away from urban centers. It would be really weird if the HoF fame voters weren’t racist in the 1970s and 1980s.
Well I wouldn’t have voted for any of them except Wynn and Allen, but one reason these guys didn’t get support was that they weren’t buddies with sports writers. Those who were got undeserving support sometimes.
Davis had the misfortune of playing in Dodger Stadium in the 1960s which was a pitchers park in a dead ball era.
Plus there were many people named Willie for whatever reason. He wasn’t even the best Willie Davis of his time
Yes, although you have to ask why they weren’t buddies with the voters!
Yeah you’re unquestionably right and it goes beyond just the guys discussed here obviously. Lou Whitaker and (shocker I know) Willie Randolph being two particular cases that bother me.
Maybe. We’d have to account for Kirby Puckett and Jim Rice going in with pretty weak cases, worse even than some of the names in the article. Never discount the possibility that BBWAA voters are just really bad at their jobs.
How did Jimmy Wynn not get a single Hall of Fame vote?! Maybe it’s because “the Toy Cannon” is really memorable, but he was a legitimate star for about 10 years. He had some tough competition because he overlapped with a group of all-time great outfielders, especially in the NL (Mays, Aaron, Clemente, Stargell) but he was mostly a center fielder and that should have made him stand out a bit.
I just looked it up, he was on the ballot in 1983. That was also the year that Dick Allen got bounced from the ballot the first year he was on. Some guy named Tommy Helms got a vote that year. I looked him up and the most famous thing he did was getting traded as part of the deal for Joe Morgan that assembled the Big Red Machine. Ray Sadecki got two, and his claim to baseball history was he got traded for Orlando Cepeda (who helped the Cardinals win the world series).
Roy Face–a player I swear I have not heard of before, probably because he was a reliever got 32 votes. I kind of get it when I dig into it more deeply because he had the second most saves in MLB history at the time of his retirement. But he wasn’t that good even for his era, he pitched before Bob Gibson forced the league to change the mount and he pretty regularly ran ERAs over 3.00. And compared to the relievers who were dominating during the 1970s and leading up to the election in 1983 he barely registers. That was when Goose Gossage, Rollie Fingers, and Bruce Sutter were redefining the level of an elite reliever.
Jim Kern was awfully good too. Even beyond them, by 1982 Dan Quisenberry had become a star and had made his first all-star team. At this point in baseball history, the relievers just behind guys like Gossage / Fingers / Sutter were at least as good as Face, if not better. Here’s some numbers:
Jim Kern:
14.2 career RA9-WAR. Best five RA9-WAR years were 7.5, 3.2, 2.3, 1.5, and 1.3.
Career 86 ERA-; best five ERA- years with at least 50 innings were 38, 68, 81, 84, and 89.
Never even made it onto the Hall of Fame ballot.
Dan Quisenberry:
26 career RA9-WAR; best five RA9-WAR years were 5.2, 4.4, 3.9, 3.6, and 3.1.
Career 69 ERA-; best five ERA- years with at least 50 innings were 47, 48, 57, 62, and 63.
Got 18 Hall of Fame votes and fell off the ballot.
Roy Face:
11.5 career RA9-WAR. Best five RA9-WAR years were 2.6, 1.9, 1.8, 1.6, and 1.3.
Career 92 ERA-; best five ERA- years with at least 50 innings were 48, 70, 72, 75, and 75.
Got between 22 and 79 votes a year for fifteen years on the ballot, peaking I think around 19%.
Also, Jimmy Wynn didn’t get a vote. Hall of Fame voters used to be so much worse.
Wynn’s headline numbers were severely depressed by the Astrodome. He and Cedeño look a lot better with park adjustments
Face was quite famous for going 18-1 as a reliever once. Jim Kern was 13-5 with 6.1 bWAR, 143 IP in relief.
I’m floored you’d never heard of Roy Face. Best tonic I ever found for blind spots like this is an OOTP historical sim; if you’ve never tried it, highly recommended.
Have you maybe heard of him under the name Elroy Face, which is how I used to know him? He’s a Pirates legend at least and was a key member of the 1960 World Series champs, saving three games in a series that is remembered for something or other. Also kind of a poster boy for the ridiculousness of W-L for relievers, having gone 18-1 in 1959 partly by coming in a bunch of games where he couldn’t lose. (IMO this is overstated a bit, he was pretty damn good that year.)
Face has a big fWAR/bWAR split for reasons that are not clear to me, 21.1 bWAR, well above Kern and only a few below Quisenberry, even though his ERA is higher than his FIP.
What a renaissance of promising catchers debuted during the 2025 season! Leading the pack is the Braves’ Drake Baldwin, with Dingler, Kyle Teel, and Carlos Narvaez expecting to be well above average at, and behind, the plate.
Masquerading as catchers with interesting offensive skills are Augustin Ramirez (reverse platoon advantage and baserunnning) and Eduard Quero (switchhitter platoon vs LHP).
The Royals are encouraged by Carter Jensen’s progress and hope he can shoulder a much higher workload as Salvy transitions to DH.
Baltimore’s fan-favorite Sammy Basello made ridiculously loud contact against RHP with 6 doubles and 3 HR to pair with only 6 singles for his .170 BA.
For Diamond-Mind Baseball keeper draft league enthusiasts, if you need a catcher and don’t get one, it’s your own fault!
Ramirez appeared to have a small reverse split in 2023 in the minors, but not 2024. It is definitely interesting, but I am not sure what to make of it. (sigh)
Dillon Dingler made me think of Dirk Diggler
I find it fascinating that the SABR profile of Junior Stephens refers to him as a beloved teammate; Bill James made the exact opposite claim in The Politics of Glory as one reason why he never had much of a Hall of Fame case made for him. (He was apparently an alcoholic, which may well have been more common at the time, and certainly among pro athletes.) There’s a whole chapter comparing him positively to Phil Rizzuto.
The book is largely of the pre-WAR era, so the metrics are out of date, but it really is a treatise in objective reasoning and rational argument. It’s somewhat infamous for the stray comment about Dick Allen, but it’s a fantastic read and I cannot recommend it enough to the Fangraphs readership.
Agreed. One of the seminal books in early sabrmetrics & introduced ALOT of things we still use- HOF monitor, HOF standards, black ink, Keltner List.
That is probably my favorite article in that book- the comparison of Stephens to Rizzuto & the mob verdict that Stephens was overrated cuz the Red Sox didn’t win.
As for the Allen comment- That has gotten WAAAYYYY too much play. Yes, he said it..as part of a 3-4 page essay on Allen, where James clearly lays out his sympathies for him, how he was treated unfairly, says his #’s are good enough, but, that he basically couldn’t get around how the distractions hurt his teams (which is undoubtedly true). When James brought Allen up as a possible HOF candidate, he got mocked for even doing so, that’s how low Allen’s rep was.
Really well said. This probably has much more to do with how racism has been redefined and more comprehensively understood in our time then it does with James’ comments.
Agreed.Not even just racism, but, any unfair treatment.
BITD, racism (or sexism or ageism or any unfair treatment) happened & you were expected to “rise above it” & not let it affect your performance.
Now, it’s done a 180 & bad behavior because you’re treated unfairly is excused.
I am not sure which of those 2 schools of thought is right or wrong & the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, most likely, as you can take both sides too far.
Here is what I DO know- I have managed a team of 10-16 people for close to 10 years & the person being a distraction really does affect team performance. No one is working at top capacity when they have to spend time worrying about potential conflicts or there is someone distracting them from their job with theatrics.
Not sure if this is worth pointing out or anything and it’s not the point of any of these questions, but: those Shiny/Streamlit/Dash apps are all just wrappers on Python scripts, which it seems like a lot of baseball writers nowadays at least have some familiarity with. I’ve been surprised that so few writers have incorporated tools like this as a way to convey things like derived-stat leaderboards (as opposed to just dumping a link to a Google Spreadsheet). It’s very little effort to integrate these tools into existing Python scripts so I hope their use isn’t seen as “out of reach” by less programming-oriented writers.
I think Streamlit is supposed to be easier if you’re just throwing something together rather than deploying an enterprise-grade product. But unless you work with Python several times a week I would guess even building a dashboard with Streamlit would be a lot of work when your job involves cranking out an article a day (sometimes more).
For most writers the opportunity cost for building a dashboard is an article that doesn’t get written. I bet if they want something good they ask Sean Dolinar to do it and if they don’t then they probably just move on.
Side note: My initial reaction to your mention of Shiny was that it was for R and not Python but apparently they have a version for Python now. Shows how in the loop I am.
I mean, they already have Sean doing backend work and the extra lift to add a dashboard to existing Python code is minimal. It’s also simple to set up templates to streamline things even more. I get that the writers have deadlines and they usually have multiple articles in the hopper at once, but adding this type of capability takes very little time and doesn’t even need to be implemented by the writer themselves. Definitely not something I’d ask for like once a week, but for bigger “feature” type articles it would be awesome.