JAWS and the 2024 Hall of Fame Ballot: Gary Sheffield

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 2015 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.

Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.

At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — he had 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late 30s did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out.

Bill James once referred to Sheffield as “an urban legend in his own mind.” Off the field, he found controversy before he ever reached the majors through his connection to his uncle, Dwight Gooden. He was drafted and developed by the Brewers, who had no idea how to handle such a volatile player and wound up doing far more harm than good. Small wonder then that from the time he was sent down midway through his rookie season after being accused of faking an injury, he was mistrustful of team management and wanted out. And when he wanted out — of Milwaukee, Los Angeles, or New York — he let everyone know it, and if a bridge had to burn, so be it; it was Festivus every day for Sheffield, who was always willing to air his grievances.

Later in his career, Sheffield became entangled in the BALCO performance enhancing drug scandal through his relationship with Barry Bonds — a relationship that by all accounts crumbled before he found himself in even deeper water. For all of the drama that surrounded Sheffield, and for all of his rage and outrageousness, he never burned out the way his uncle did, nor did he have trouble finding work.

Even in the context of the high-scoring era in which he played, Sheffield’s offensive numbers look to be Hall of Fame caliber, but voters have found plenty of reasons to overlook him, whether it’s his tangential connection to PEDs, his gift for finding controversy, his poor defensive metrics, or the crowd on the ballot. In his 2015 debut, he received just 11.7% of the vote, and over the next four years, he gained barely any ground. But from 2019 to ’21, he jumped from 13.6% to 30.5% to 40.6%, with the fifth-largest and third-largest gains on the ’20 and ’21 ballots. After repeating with the same percentage in 2022, he jumped to 55% in ’23, with the cycle’s fourth-largest gain. His share of the vote is now larger than any player who’s been linked to PEDs via BALCO, the Mitchell Report, or a suspension except for Bonds or Roger Clemens. Still, as he enters his final year of eligibility on the writers’ ballot, he’ll need a Larry Walker-like jump to get to 75%.

Born in Tampa on November 18, 1968, Sheffield grew up in the Belmont Heights section of town, a baseball-rich area that from 1981 to ’90 produced seven first- or second-round draft picks, including Sheffield, Derek Bell, Carl Everett, Floyd Youmans, and, most notably, Gooden. Four years older than Sheffield, Gooden was more like a sibling than an uncle, regularly dragging his six-year-old nephew out of bed to face his already-searing fastball, either with the bat or the glove.

Playing for the Belmont Heights Little League All-Stars, Sheffield (along with Bell) was part of the 1980 team that advanced all the way to the finals of the Little League World Series before falling to Taiwan. Amazingly, a partial video of the finals is online; Sheffield started at catcher, batted third and, according to the chyron, entered the game hitting .600 in the tournament. In the condensed video below, he flies out to right field around the 17:30 mark, ropes a double down the left field line at the 43:15 mark, and scores on a Bell groundout after an aggressive tour around the bases.

Sheffield missed a chance to return to the Little League World Series the following year because he was “suspended for raising a bat to his coach during a disagreement,” according to a 2004 New York Times story by Jack Curry. “It took me years to get over that,” Sheffield recounted. “I made a mistake, but I paid the biggest price you could ever pay for it.” He went on to star at Hillsborough High, where he pitched — some scouts preferred his 90-mph fastball to his bat — and played third base. In 1986, he was named the Gatorade National Player of the Year, one of many future major league stars to win the award. The Brewers chose him with the sixth pick of that year’s draft, signing him for a $142,500 bonus. In the pages of Sports Illustrated, Peter Gammons noted in a 1989 profile that Sheffield used some of the money to have his initials inlaid in gold on his front teeth and buy a gold Mercedes.

As a 17-year-old, Sheffield tore up the rookie Pioneer League in 1986 (.365/.413/.640 with 15 homers and 14 steals in 57 games) and won both the league’s Player of the Year honors and Baseball America’s Short-Season Player of the Year prize. Trouble found him that winter, however, when he was arrested along with Gooden and three others. As the group was returning home from a University of South Florida basketball game, police officers stopped their cars for driving erratically; the confrontation soon turned physical, with Gooden — who by that point had collected Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards as well as a World Series ring in his three big league seasons — “beaten to the ground with nightsticks and flashlights before being handcuffed and shackled,” according to The New York Times. Sheffield was charged with a pair of third-degree felonies for battery on a police officer and violently resisting arrest; he pleaded no contest and was given two years probation.

The incident began Gooden’s legal troubles — he would test positive for cocaine in spring training just a few months later — which spilled over to Sheffield, who was soon subjected to not-so-random drug testing. Beyond that, his baseball life returned to normal. At 18 in 1987, he earned spots on both the California League and Baseball America All-Star teams. At 19, he hit a combined .327/.395/.579 in hitter-friendly environments at Double-A El Paso and Triple-A Denver, earning a late-season call-up. He debuted on September 3, 1988 against the Tigers in a lineup that included future Hall of Famers Paul Molitor and Robin Yount, though he did not make an official plate appearance as a defensive replacement for Dale Sveum. He went 0-for-4 the next day and ran his hitless string to 0-for-11 before homering and collecting a single off Seattle’s Mark Langston on September 9.

While Sheffield opened the 1989 season as the Brewers’ starting shortstop, he struggled both at the plate and in the field, where the team accused him of “indifferent fielding.” He complained of a right foot injury, but when the team’s doctors found nothing, he was demoted to Triple-A. After initially refusing to play, he was diagnosed with a broken bone in his right foot and filed a grievance with the Players Association, saying he was unjustly demoted. His trust in the Brewers was shattered, and when he returned to the majors two months later, tensions were ratcheted even higher by a forced move to third base — one that he believed was racially motivated. “When a reporter wondered whether I thought the decision had racial overtones, I wasn’t about to lie,” wrote Sheffield in his 2007 memoir, Inside Power. “The white man was given preference, and that was that.” He finished his tumultuous season hitting just .247/.303/.337 with five homers in 95 games and was 12 runs below average defensively, according to Total Zone.

Though Sheffield became angry over what he later claimed was the revocation of a $7 million long-term contract offer from Brewers owner Bud Selig, his bat perked up the following year (.294/.350/.421 with 10 homers) as did his glove (-3 runs via Total Zone), and he finished with 3.1 WAR, a strong showing for an age-21 season. Nonetheless, he was growing unhappier in Milwaukee. In the spring of 1991, he charged general manager Harry Dalton with “ruining this team” — one that slid from 91 wins and a third-place finish in 1987 to successive seasons of 87, 81 and 74 wins. Later, he would be accused of causing Dalton’s heart attack. Between his frustration and shoulder and wrist injuries, he hit just .194/.277/.320 in 50 games. Dalton, who had refused to trade Sheffield, was fired at season’s end, so the job of sending him out of town was left to successor Sal Bando, who dealt him to the Padres in exchange for three players in late March.

Sheffield’s Milwaukee headaches (and Milwaukee’s Sheffield headaches) weren’t quite over, however. In June, he told the Los Angeles Times‘ Bob Nightengale:

“The Brewers brought out the hate in me … I was a crazy man,” Sheffield said. “I hated (Dalton) so much that I wanted to hurt the man. I hated everything about that place. I didn’t even want to come to the ballpark. If I missed a ball or something, so what?

“If the official scorer gave me an error that I didn’t think was an error, I’d say, ‘OK, here’s a real error,’ and I’d throw the next ball into the stands on purpose. I did it all.”

Sheffield recanted the statement in a follow-up with Nightengale: “What I said was out of frustration. They want to take something and run with it. Why would a player purposely make mistakes? I’d never do anything to hurt the team. You get paid to play.” Nightengale did add, “Sheffield said the only time he may have made an error purposely out of anger was when he was in the Brewers’ minor-league system.”

Despite his inflammatory words, there’s no evidence to suggest that Sheffield made intentional errors during his time with the Brewers; many (including me and Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci) have explored the matter and found nothing to support the idea that he may have done so. As to the possibility that he may have done so in the minors, in a 2012 Sports on Earth profile, Sheffield told Jack Dickey of an incident that happened in Class A in 1987:

Future major leaguer Darryl Hamilton threw a ball that short-hopped Sheffield, and Sheffield took the error. He was upset. He yelled at the scorer. This made his manager, Dave Machemer, mad. The next inning, Sheffield threw a ball from short to first as hard as he could, and it sailed into the stands. Machemer walked out onto the field and pulled Sheffield from the game, accusing him of sabotage.

Sheffield says his manager apologized to him in front of the whole team later that night, but the damage had been done.

Free of Milwaukee, Sheffield broke out with the Padres in 1992, hitting .330/.385/.580; he won the National League batting title, led the league in total bases (323), and ranked second in slugging percentage and OPS+ (168), third in homers (33), fourth in WAR (6.2), and sixth in on-base percentage. He earned All-Star honors for the first time and placed third in the NL MVP voting behind Bonds and Terry Pendleton. But his stay in San Diego wasn’t long: Along with Fred McGriff, he was part of owner Tom Werner’s infamous salary purge and was dealt to the expansion Marlins in a five-player trade that brought back Trevor Hoffman.

In Florida, Sheffield’s batting line slipped to .294/.361/.476, his fielding percentage to .899 (the only time it’s truly acceptable to cite fielding percentage is when it reaches the Hobson Line). Nonetheless, the Marlins wanted to keep him around, signing the 24-year-old to a four-year, $22.45 million deal that made him the game’s highest-paid third baseman and its 10th-highest-paid player overall. As a concession to keeping him at the hot corner, the team wrote a clause into his contract allowing him to play pickup basketball (obviously, Aaron Boone didn’t take note).

Between the players’ strike, a bruised left rotator cuff suffered while diving for a ball in 1994, and torn ligaments in his left thumb that required in-season surgery in ’95, Sheffield played in just 150 games over the next two seasons. In October 1995, he sustained a minor gunshot wound to his left shoulder in a failed carjacking while en route to picking up one of his children. Nonetheless, he was healthy in 1996, playing in 161 games, hitting .314/.465/.624 and leading the league in on-base percentage and OPS+ (189); he ranked second in slugging percentage, homers (42), and walks (142, against just 66 strikeouts) and ninth in WAR (5.9), a total suppressed by terrible defense (-16 runs) in right field.

The following spring, the Marlins signed Sheffield to a six-year, $61 million contract, the largest in baseball history at the time. The move was of a piece with the team’s two-year stockpiling of high-paid free agents, a list that included Moises Alou, Bobby Bonilla, Kevin Brown, Alex Fernandez, and Devon White. Under manager Jim Leyland, Florida earned a Wild Card berth in 1997 and went on to upset Cleveland in a thrilling seven-game World Series. Sheffield, dealing with further problems in his surgically-repaired thumb, collected more walks (121) than hits (110) that year en route to a .250/.424/.446 line with 21 homers, but he hit .324/.430/.592 in September and .320/.521/.500 with 20 walks in the postseason.

The champagne had barely dried when owner Wayne Huizenga and general manager Dave Dombrowski began gutting the Fish, trading Alou, White, Jeff Conine and Robb Nen by Thanksgiving, Brown the next month, and Al Leiter in January. They saved their biggest blockbuster until six weeks into the 1998 season. On May 14, Sheffield, Bonilla, catcher Charles Johnson, and two other players were traded to the Dodgers for the face of the franchise, Mike Piazza (who was flipped to the Mets eight days later), as well as Todd Zeile.

Sheffield scorched opponents in Los Angeles’ notorious pitchers’ park, batting .316/.444/.535 in 90 games as a Dodger before an ankle sprain shelved him. Over the next three seasons, he averaged 38 homers and annually topped the .300/.400/.500 thresholds, something that only four other Dodgers had done since Dodger Stadium opened in 1962. Inevitably, he grew disgruntled about money in light of the Dodgers committing $105 million to Brown and $55 million to the less-established Darren Dreifort; Sheffield first agitated for an extension, then for a trade (Brown dissuaded him). In December 2001, the Dodgers attempted to trade him to the A’s in a deal involving Jermaine Dye. After that fell apart, he was shipped to the Braves for Brian Jordan, Odalis Perez, and a prospect.

Sheffield put up monster numbers in two seasons with the Braves, including a .330/.419/.604, 39-homer season in 2003; his 162 OPS+ and 6.8 WAR both ranked fourth in the league, and he finished third in the MVP voting. Although he helped Atlanta continue its long-running streak of postseason appearances, he went a combined 3-for-30 in their two Division Series losses.

Reaching free agency for the first time at age 35, Sheffield signed a three-year, $39 million deal with the Yankees. Despite an early-season thumb injury, a muscle tear in his left shoulder, and the backdrop of BALCO (more on which below), he turned in another MVP-caliber season, hitting .290/.393/.534 with 36 homers, 28 of them coming in the 77 games he played in June, July, and August. Ultimately, the torrid September of the Angels’ Vladimir Guerrero — a free-agent alternative to Sheffield the previous winter — kept Sheffield from winning the MVP award; he finished second in the voting, though to be fair, his 4.2 WAR was nowhere near the league’s best. While he had another strong postseason overall (.292/.404/.500 with two homers), he slipped into a 1-for-17 funk just as the Yankees made history by blowing their 3–0 advantage to the Red Sox in the ALCS.

Sheffield put up similar numbers in 2005 (.291/.379/.512 with 34 homers), albeit with less fanfare, then was limited to 39 games in 2006 due to torn ligaments and tendons in his wrist suffered in a collision at first base. Again, he agitated for an extension, but having traded for Bobby Abreu during his absence, the Yankees simply exercised Sheffield’s $13 million option, then dealt him to the Tigers, who obliged by tacking on a two-year, $28 million extension. He started slowly in Detroit, but a three-month hot streak lifted his final line to .265/.378/.462 with 25 homers. Stung by his exile from New York, he accused Yankees manager Joe Torre of treating Black players harshly and inequitably during an HBO Real Sports segment, but stopped short of calling him racist.

Amid bilateral shoulder woes and an oblique strain, Sheffield slumped to .225/.326/.400 in 2008, his age-39 season. Had he not been under contact and one homer shy of 500, he might have retired, but after the Tigers released him in spring training, he caught on with the Mets — for whom his uncle had starred — and hit a respectable .276/.372/.451 with 10 homers in 100 games. Home run no. 500 came against the Brewers, a pinch-hit shot off reliever Mitch Stetter on April 17, 2009:

After sitting out 2010, Sheffield briefly entertained the thought of a comeback with the hometown Rays before announcing his retirement in February 2011. Later that year, he opened shop as an agent, with reliever Jason Grilli his first client.

…

On the surface, Sheffield’s stats (including 2,683 hits and 509 homers) appear Hall-worthy, particularly when accompanied by his exhaustive credentials, such as nine All-Star appearances, three top-three finishes in the MVP voting, a World Series ring, a batting title, and prominent all-time rankings in walks (21st with 1,475, against just 1,171 strikeouts), homers (27th), and RBIs (30th). Among players with at least 7,000 plate appearances, his career 140 OPS+ is tied for 49th with Alex Rodriguez, Miguel Cabrera, and Hall of Famers Guerrero, Jesse Burkett, and Duke Snider. He scores 158 (“a virtual cinch”) on the Bill James Hall of Fame Monitor. His total of 561 batting runs above average — the offensive component of Baseball-Reference’s version of WAR, adjusted for ballpark and era — ranks 28th all-time, higher than numerous no-doubt Hall of Famers such as Mike Schmidt, Rickey Henderson, Eddie Mathews, Willie McCovey, Harmon Killebrew, Reggie Jackson, and Carl Yastrzemski.

The bad news is that Sheffield’s defensive numbers — a mix between Total Zone and (from 2003 onward) Defensive Runs Saved — are all-time awful. His -195 fielding runs rank as the second-lowest total of all-time, ahead of only Derek Jeter (-243). That whopping total suppresses Sheffield’s career and peak WARs, as well as his JAWS: His 60.5 career WAR ranks 19th among right fielders, 10.6 wins below the average Hall of Famer; his 38.0 peak WAR ranks 27th, 4.4 wins below the standard; and his 49.3 JAWS is 24th, 7.4 points shy of average. His career WAR is higher than 14 of the 28 non-Negro Leagues right fielders, and his peak and JAWS are higher than 13 of 28. The shape of Sheffield’s line strongly resembles that of Hall of Famer Dave Winfield (64.2/37.9/51.0), a 12-time All-Star who put up huge counting stats (3,110 hits, 465 homers) but with defense (-91 runs) that bumps him below the bar on all three fronts.

Is that a Hall of Famer? I’m troubled by the extent to which those outlying defensive stats — largely estimates from the pre-batted-ball-type era — nuke Sheffield’s value. That goes double when they’re compared to his defensive numbers via alternative methodologies. Baseball Prospectus‘ Fielding Runs Above Average pegs him at -89 runs for his career. Michael Humphreys’s Defensive Regression Analysis, which was available at the now-bygone Baseball Gauge and has been used for Negro Leagues defensive data and incorporated into the sabermetric component of the past decade of Gold Glove voting, puts him around -108 runs. Both are bad, but neither is as extreme an outlier, and such figures push him much closer to the JAWS line for right fielders; my back-of-the-envelope estimate using DRA’s defensive numbers lifts him to 68.2/39.7/54.0, 2.7 points below the JAWS standard.

Beyond that is the PED issue. In the October 11, 2004 issue of Sports Illustrated, Verducci reported that Sheffield told the grand jury that he was introduced to BALCO by Bonds, a casual friend who invited him to train with him in San Francisco before the 2002 season. Trainer Greg Anderson gave Sheffield what the slugger believed to be a cortisone-type cream to rub on his surgical scars, but it was in fact the testosterone-based steroid known as “the cream.” He was not told it was an illegal steroid:

“I put it on my legs and thought nothing of it. I kept it in my locker. The trainer saw my cream,” he told the grand jury. Though he soon broke off ties with Bonds due to an unrelated matter, he used the cream during the season, a relatively down one in which he hit a representative .307/.404/.512 but with just 25 homers. He was shocked to find out it was a steroid.

In 2014, Verducci, whose stance on PEDs with regards to Hall of Fame candidates is much more hard line than mine, revisited Sheffield’s unique situation:

Sheffield is the only star I know who, as an active player, without provocation admitted to using steroids; he did so in a 2004 SI story I wrote. Why would he make an admission? Because, he told me, he had testified under oath that he had been duped into using them.

Sheffield said he told the BALCO grand jury the previous year that Bonds arranged for him to use “the cream,” “the clear” and “red beans,” which prosecutors identified as steroid pills from Mexico. Sheffield, however, said he was told the substances were legal arthritic balms or nutritional supplements…. When he later learned that the BALCO products were steroids, he told me, “I was mad. I want everybody to be on an even playing field.”

That’s it; we have no evidence that ties Sheffield to steroids other than those several weeks before the 2002 season when Sheffield lived at Bonds’s home. Even during 2002, when players were resisting the idea of steroid testing, Sheffield spoke out in favor of it [see here], saying, “I would like to see testing. I mean you see how much guys are using it. Unless you’ve got something to hide, you won’t mind testing, right?”

My own stance with regards to PED-linked candidates, which I spell out annually, is to distinguish between what came before the introduction of testing and suspensions in 2004 (though the initial effort was so weak that the first suspensions didn’t come until a year later) and what came afterwards. The PED problem was the result of a complete institutional failure that implicated the commissioner, the owners, the Players Association, and even reporters (don’t forget, the guy who broke the news about androstenedione in Mark McGwire’s locker was initially ostracized within the industry). If baseball couldn’t punish users during that “Wild West Era,” then voters shouldn’t apply a retroactive morality. That’s not to say that they need to rubber stamp every alleged user, but those allegations should be viewed in context.

Thus, I don’t see Sheffield’s BALCO link as disqualifying, and having investigated his throwing error issue and seen my findings corroborated by others, I’m satisfied that it’s no reason to strike him down either, though Brewers fans will never let the matter rest, and some voters have refused to do their homework. And if I haven’t ruled out candidates such as Bonds and Clemens on the grounds of their prickly natures, I’m in no position to hold Sheffield’s penchant for being an occasional pain in the ass against him; the man showed up to play and played well enough to establish himself as one of the best hitters in the game’s history. In the 2019 Bill James Handbook, James wrote of Sheffield:

“In all the years that I have been with the Red Sox, 16 years now, there has never been a player the Red Sox were more concerned about, as an opponent, than Gary Sheffield. Sheffield was a dynamite hitter and a fierce competitor… When he was in the game, you knew exactly where he was from the first pitch to the last pitch. He conceded nothing; he was looking not only to beat you, but to embarrass you. He was on the highest level.”

For years, Sheffield’s BALCO connection and the error thing made him a hard sell to voters, particularly in light of some incredibly crowded ballots:

That crowd and Sheffield’s subpar JAWS made it difficult to justify fitting him onto my own virtual ballot, but the strength of his offense, which is far easier to measure than defense, left me open to considering him, particularly once the traffic thinned out. I’ll concede that he was also a personal favorite, as my voluminous writing on the subject attests.

On the 2020 ballot, his sixth, I fit Sheffield onto my virtual ballot for the first time; meanwhile, many actual voters did the same. The 13.6% he received on the 2019 ballot had been his highest share that point, but a net gain of just 1.9% from his debut four years earlier. Faced with a less crowded slate than any since 2012, Sheffield made a net gain of 57 votes — 60 flips from no to yes, with just three going in the other direction — from among the 329 ballots published in Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker, a total exceeded among that year’s candidates only by the since-elected Scott Rolen (+64) and Walker (+55).

Sheffield built upon that by gaining 10.1% on the 2021 ballot, to 40.6%; I even included him on the first actual ballot that I cast. His progress stalled in 2022, which may well have sealed his fate on the writers’ ballot, but he did gain 14.4% last year, pushing him to 55% entering his final year of eligibility on the writers’ ballot. As I noted when the election results were announced in January, to get elected in this format, at a minimum he’ll need the fourth-largest jump to 75% of any candidate in modern voting history, though the good news is that the precedents are recent:

With the exception of Bonds, Clemens, and Curt Schilling, every candidate who has received at least 50% before falling off the writers’ ballot has eventually been elected by a small committee. The bad news for Sheffield is that all three — including the PED-linked Bonds and Clemens — fared poorly in their first appearance on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee last December. Between the institution’s ability to control who serves on such committees and the potential loss of any nuance when it comes to lumping Sheffield in with other players from BALCO, a future election for him via that route is hardly a foregone conclusion.

Like Dick Allen, who passed away three years ago and who fell just short via the 2022 Golden Days Era Committee, Sheffield ranks among the game’s greatest hitters, but his case requires some additional digging to appreciate. Both players were particularly mishandled by their original teams, and both were portrayed in ways that rarely afforded them the benefit of the doubt thereafter, which carried ramifications for how they comported themselves and how they were perceived. It’s worth reconsidering how that happened. Fortunately for Sheffield, he had a longer career than Allen, putting up numbers that more easily speak for themselves. Here’s hoping they get him to Cooperstown in a more timely fashion.