Fernando Tatis Jr. Has a Clear Shot at Cooperstown

Fernando Tatis Jr. has agreed to the longest contract in baseball history, and one of the most lucrative — and yet looking at the jaw-dropping ZiPS projection for his career, his 14-year, $340 million deal might be underselling him. At the very least, Tatis’ contract and his production to date cast him as a generational talent, and his forecast suggests he’ll wind up ranking among history’s great shortstops. While it’s hard to believe that a player with only two partial years in the majors has a leg up on a berth in the Hall of Fame, the statistical history of players who’ve done what he’s done at such a young age suggests that it’s true: Tatis is already soaring towards Cooperstown.

Or if you prefer, stylishly shimmying there:

Hip-notized by @tatis_jr ? pic.twitter.com/25eBSeokFn

— San Diego Padres (@Padres) August 8, 2020

The skeptic in all of us may be saying, “Whoa, let’s pump the brakes on this kind of talk,” but it’s the Padres who have placed the bet on a Mookie Betts-like impact over the course of well over a decade, and looking at the comparisons and the company he’s keeping once we crunch the numbers, it’s tough to disagree. Nothing is guaranteed, least of all a player’s spot in the Hall of Fame a quarter-century from now, but the odds of him fulfilling that promise are substantial.

Regarding the Hall, consider first the baselines set by a player arriving in the majors at an early age. Repeating a study I did in relation to Ronald Acuña Jr. in 2018 (only this time catching a glitch in my accounting relating to 19th century players), I used Baseball-Reference’s Stathead to track the rates at which position players who made at least one plate appearance in their age-18 through 21 seasons reached the Hall:

After removing the active and not-yet-eligible players from the total, we find that nearly one out of every 12 players who made at least one PA in their age-18 seasons are enshrined; the total has increased since I last ran this study thanks to the election of Ted Simmons via the 2020 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot. Nearly one out of every 11 has made it from the age-19 group, and so on. The majority of the position players elected in the past decade debuted during this age window: Ken Griffey Jr., Tim Raines, Ivan Rodriguez, and Modern Baseball pick Alan Trammell in their age-19 seasons (though Raines didn’t get his first PA until age 20); Ron Santo and Jim Thome in their age-20 seasons; and Vladimir Guerrero, Derek Jeter, and Chipper Jones in their age-21 seasons. Meanwhile, Craig Biggio, Barry Larkin, Frank Thomas, and Larry Walker all debuted in their age-22 seasons, with Jeff Bagwell (age-23) and Edgar Martinez (age-24) the stragglers.

By raising the bar for those seasons from one PA to 100, the rates of enshrinement roughly double, and by going from one PA to 250 PA, they roughly triple:

I used 250 PA as my top cutoff because that’s the bar that Tatis has cleared in his two abbreviated seasons. Even without knowing anything of his performance other than his level of major league playing time at age 20, we can estimate that he’s got about a 25% chance of enshrinement.

Ah, but that performance is something special, with numbers that jump off the page the way the ball jumps off his bat. While Tatis was limited to 84 games in 2019 due to a stress reaction in his back, and 59 last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, his total playing time is close enough to a season’s worth that we can treat it as such for the purposes of fun and games. To date, he’s played 143 games, taken 629 PA, and hit .301/.374/.582 with 39 homers, a 154 OPS+ and 7.0 bWAR (6.5 fWAR and 150 wRC+, but as I’m heading into JAWS territory, I’ll stick with B-Ref stats except where noted). First, to reiterate a point that Ben Clemens made in his initial evaluation of Tatis’ contract, just consider the company he’s keeping with that offense through age 21:

Mercy. Those are some of the greatest hitters in history. Ten are already in the Hall of Fame and at least two more (Trout and Pujols) will be someday, leaving Tatis, Soto, and the one clear obscurity, Trosky, a slugging first baseman who still wound up with a 130 OPS+ in a substantial career (5,750 PA) that was shortened by persistent migraines.

And now, let’s bring position and defense into the equation with a look at the top 21-and-under seasons from shortstops via bWAR:

Even without accounting for the fact that his two seasons were significantly truncated, Tatis cracks the leaderboard twice, and with two of the shortest seasons on here; I extended down to number 25 in part to capture Mulliniks, both because his rookie season was shorter than that of Tatis and because I saw the guy play at Salt Lake City with some frequency in 1978 and ’79; Angels general manager Buzzie Bavasi didn’t trust anyone under 30 and was intent on trading away a boatload of talent and/or blocking it with over-the-hill veterans to avoid it (a story for another day lest I go off on a 3,000 word tangent).

Anyway, that’s eight seasons by Hall of Famers from among the top 25, which may not sound impressive at first, but consider that nine of the other seasons — two apiece by Correa, Lindor, Rodriguez, and Tatis plus one by Andrus — are from players who are either active or not yet eligible for Hall consideration; A-Rod will be on the 2022 ballot. McGraw is in the Hall of Fame too, but as a manager, though given what he’d done as a player (44.0 WAR through age 28 despite missing about a season’s worth of time at 24 and 25 due to malaria and typhoid fever), he was good enough to wind up there on his merits had he not stopped playing regularly upon jumping to the Giants in 1902, his age-29 season. So that’s eight out of 15 qualifying seasons from Hall of Famers, seven out of 14 if we don’t count Vaughan twice, and seven of the top 11 if we draw the line before Rance and pals. More to the point, if we quite reasonably scotch-tape Tatis’ two partial seasons together and consider only the upper echelons of that list, we find that only Hornsby, Rodriguez, Correa, Vaughan, Bush, and Ripken — three Hall of Famers plus a Hall-caliber player with the common sense that God gave a sack of doorknobs among them — are in the same ballpark.

That’s a pretty small sample of players, though, so it’s helpful to approach the matter from another angle. Instead, we’ll consider the production of all position players through their age-21 seasons. Tatis’s 7.0 WAR is merely tied with Bush for 39th, but that’s a product of playing time. Using FanGraphs WAR and limiting the group to post-1960 expansion era players, Alex Chamberlain illustrated this well on Wednesday night, shortly after news of Tatis’ extension broke:

my actual face reading the tatís contract extension news ?

to celebrate, here are the 20 hitters (since 1960) to generate 6.5 fWAR through their age-21 season

take note of the plate appearances—per PA, tatís is 3rd-best behind only trout and pujols pic.twitter.com/KqUX7BR1sx

— Alex "Oxlade" Chamberlain (@DolphHauldhagen) February 18, 2021

Tatis is in the picture despite having less than half the playing time of the majority of the players above him. Yet even before accounting for that impediment, he’s in impressive company.

Turning back to bWAR, of the 40 players with at least 7.0 through age 21, 17 are enshrined, but since Tatis barely makes that cutoff, and since several of those players aren’t yet eligible, that’s not the clearest picture. Rejiggering and expanding the list, 31 out of 61 eligible players with at least 5.0 WAR through age 21 are enshrined, just over half. But since the top nine guys, all with 13.3 WAR or greater, aren’t really that similar to Tatis given their advantages in playing time — list-topper Mel Ott had 2,064 PA by that point, nearly three times as many as our bat-flipping prodigy – it would be more accurate to say that 22 out of 52 (42%) with 5.0 to 12.5 WAR through age 21 are enshrined. That group, incidentally, averaged 7.2 WAR to that point, placing Tatis closer to the center.

Trimming the list further still, among the players from that group with 1,000 PA or fewer through age 21, we get this:

That’s eight out of 17 players who wound up in the Hall, plus a ninth if you count Torre, who quite reasonably could have been elected as a player before he was feted as a manager. This time, we’re probably understating Tatis’ case, as he’s tied with Bush for the highest WAR of the group, which averages 5.8 WAR. We’re also talking about a lot of ancient guys including Anson, which is to say that we’re reaching back to the very dawn of major league history, but let’s leave that issue aside for the moment and try a different approach, prorating each player’s WAR to 650 PA:

Yowzah. Of those 32 players, 18 are enshrined, six are eligible but not enshrined, and eight, including Tatis, Trout, and Correa from among the top five, are not yet eligible. It’s true that the six outsiders tended towards the lower end of the playing time spectrum to that point, with four having 759 PA or fewer; that subgroup averaged 902 PA to the Hall of Famers’ 1,235 PA through age 21. The problem comes out in the wash to some degree if we limit the group to integration era players (1947 onward), as two of the three remaining outsiders (compared to seven enshrinees) are Jones, who may yet be elected, and Pinson, both of whom had over 1,200 PA, leaving Brunansky — another ex-Angel whom I saw at Salt Lake City before he was traded away by Bavasi — as the cautionary tale.

So, at the very least 18 of the top 24 eligible players in prorated WAR through age 21 have made the Hall of Fame. If we consider Pujols and Trout as automatic given their current JAWS standings (second among first basemen in the case of the former, fifth among center fielders in that of the latter), A-Rod as a definite no (which may be overstating the case, because never is a long time) due to his PED usage, and Heyward as a no because of his fade to league average performance over the past five seasons (8.6 WAR), that would be 20 of 28 (71%), with the jury still out on Acuña, Correa, and Machado as well as Tatis. If we instead consider only the post-integration players, that’s seven out of 10 plus Trout and Pujols on one side, and A-Rod and Heyward on the other, or nine out of 14 (64%). On this basis, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that about two-thirds of the players who have done what Tatis has done through age 21 wind up enshrined.

As noted, Tatis’ ZiPS projection separately makes the case for the player being on the path to Cooperstown. Even without reaching 600 PA in any season, and with subpar (but hardly Jeter-esque) defense, he forecasts to produce a string of half a dozen six-win seasons from ages 24 to 29, bookended by some five-win ones. If he were to live up to that projection, then through his age-35 season he’d have 73.9 career WAR, 42.5 peak WAR, and 58.2 JAWS, the last of which would place him 10th all-time among shortstops, between Ozzie Smith and Trammell. By then it’s entirely possible that some of his contemporaries — Lindor, Correa, Corey Seager, Trevor Story — will be in the picture as well, and that Tatis will still have something left in the tank to climb even higher. I hope we get to see that.

On the face of it, evaluating the Hall of Fame prospects of a player who’s not going to wind up on the dais for 20 or 25 years is a ridiculous enterprise. I can’t say that I like doing the math on how old I’ll be if and when this comes to pass; this is looking down the barrel of my own mortality, a heavy thought for any gray mid-February day, let alone one in the midst of a pandemic. The fun of it is that we actually get to watch and enjoy Tatis, as exciting a player as the game currently has, and one with an incredibly bright future ahead of him. Let’s marvel at his trajectory as he soars.