The following article is part of a series concerning the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering long-retired players, managers, executives, and umpires whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 8. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

A five-tool player whose power, ability to hit for average, and strong, accurate throwing arm all stood out – particularly in the Pirates’ seemingly endless and always eye-catching assortment of black-and-yellow uniform combinations — Dave Parker was once considered the game’s best all-around player. In his first five full seasons (1975-79), he amassed a World Series ring, regular season and All-Star MVP awards, two batting titles, two league leads in slugging percentage, and three Gold Gloves, not to mention tremendous swagger, a great nickname (“The Cobra”), and a high regard for himself.

“Take Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente and match their first five years up against mine, and they don’t compare with me,” he told Roy Blount in a 1979 Sports Illustrated cover story.

Parker, who debuted with the Pirates in July 1973, just seven months after Clemente’s death, and assumed full-time duty as the team’s right fielder a season and a half later, once appeared to be on course to join the Puerto Rican legend in Cooperstown. Unfortunately, cocaine, poor conditioning, and injuries threw him off course, and while he recovered well enough to make three All-Star teams, play a supporting role on another World Series winner, and accrue hefty career totals while playing past the age of 40, his game lost multiple dimensions along the way. Hall of Fame voters greeted his case with a yawn; he debuted with just 17.5% on the 1997 ballot and peaked at 24.5% the next year, and while he remained eligible for the full 15 seasons, only one other time did he top 20%. Since then, he’s made appearances on three other Era Committee ballots, namely the 2014 Expansion Era one as well as the ’18 and ’20 Modern Baseball ones, but even after going public with his diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease, lending an air of pathos to his situation, he hasn’t come close to election. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season gave us the most predictable pair of Rookie of the Year races in recent memory. Gunnar Henderson and Corbin Carroll were our top two prospects entering the year and the overwhelming preseason ROY favorites among our staff. At season’s end, they each earned all 30 votes on their respective ballots. It was only the second time in the 21st century that both the AL and NL ROY winners were unanimous decisions (Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger won unanimously in 2017) and the first time that the clear preseason favorites were also the undisputed victors. By comparison, the 2024 Rookie of the Year races were about as predictable as a toddler’s favorite food.

You don’t want Wyatt Langford? But you loved Wyatt Langford yesterday!

So you either like Paul Skenes or Jackson Merrill, but you won’t tell me which one and if I pick wrong you’ll throw him on the floor and scream? Got it.

AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil missed most of the 2022 and 2023 seasons recovering from Tommy John surgery. Even before he tore his UCL, a future move to the bullpen seemed possible, and if it weren’t for his strong spring training (15 2/3 IP, 2.87 ERA) and Gerrit Cole’s elbow injury, that’s likely where Gil would have begun the 2024 campaign. Runner-up Colton Cowser was a slightly more promising prospect; he graduated with a 45+ FV to Gil’s 40+. Still, like Gil, his starting role in the majors was not guaranteed until he earned it with a red-hot spring and an equally scorching start to the regular season.

Of the three finalists in the AL, only third-place finisher Austin Wells ranked among our top 100 prospects ahead of the season. And of the five players who earned votes for AL Rookie of the Year as part of our preseason staff predictions exercise (Langford, Evan Carter, Junior Caminero, Holliday, and Colt Keith), only Langford ended up earning so much as a single vote from the BBWAA. He finished seventh with one second-place vote and four third-place selections.

The NL contenders weren’t quite as surprising. All three finalists, Skenes, Merrill, and Jackson Chourio, were among our top 30 prospects entering the season. Meanwhile, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the most popular NL Rookie of the Year choice in March, only fell out of the race due to a triceps injury that cost him almost half the season. Yet, although the NL field was not so surprising, at least not like the AL field turned out to be, the final results were just as hard to predict. The voting ultimately wasn’t all that close – Skenes earned 23 first-place votes to Merrill’s seven – but those numbers might undersell what a difficult decision all 30 voters had to make. Dan Szymborski did a great job breaking down why it was such a tough choice (and why he ultimately cast his ballot for Merrill).

Merrill showed off all five tools in 2024, the most impressive of which was his center field defense, considering he was a shortstop up until this year. OAA, UZR, and Baseball Prospectus’s DRP loved him in center. Only DRS disagreed (0 DRS), but even a perfectly neutral defensive performance is admirable coming from a 21-year-old playing the position for the first time. Combine that glove with good baserunning, great contact skills, and a surprising amount of power, and you get Merrill’s 5.3 WAR, more than a full run higher than any other rookie in either league. The last rookie to produce more WAR and still lose the ROY was Kenny Lofton (5.8 WAR) in 1992. Thus, the fact that Skenes came out on top is a testament to the dominant season he put together. Over 23 starts and 133 innings, he pitched to a 1.96 ERA and 4.3 WAR. No rookie starter has thrown more innings with a lower ERA in over 50 years. If Skenes had been on the Pirates’ roster on Opening Day, it’s very likely he’d have surpassed Merrill’s 5.3 WAR, and this conversation wouldn’t have been so complicated. But that’s the debate in a nutshell. On the one hand, you can’t blame Skenes for not pitching in the majors sooner. He was clearly ready to make the Pirates’ roster out of camp. On the other hand, you can’t give him credit for innings he didn’t pitch.

Only two more rookies earned votes in the NL, and either of them very well could have won the award outright if they’d played in the opposite league. Chourio wasn’t quite as strong of a hitter as Merrill, but he excelled on both sides of the ball, finishing with 21 homers, 22 steals, 6 OAA, and 3.9 WAR. Meanwhile, fourth-place finisher Shota Imanaga was terrific in the first year of what now looks like an incredibly team-friendly four-year, $53 million deal with the Cubs. His 2.91 ERA ranked third among all qualified NL pitchers. His 3.72 FIP was significantly higher, so his 3.0 WAR ranked just 19th among NL hurlers. Still, among rookie pitchers, it was second only to Skenes.

A trio of NL infielders also deserve some recognition for their strong rookie seasons; any of them might have earned some down-ballot votes in a weaker year. Masyn Winn (3.6 WAR) and Joey Ortiz (3.1 WAR) were strong defenders with roughly league-average bats, while Tyler Fitzgerald (3.0 WAR) put up a .217 ISO and 132 wRC+ over 96 games while looking just capable enough with the glove to be an everyday shortstop.

The AL rookie class didn’t have quite as much top-end talent or mid-tier depth. Gil was a solid, mid-rotation starter who moderately outperformed his peripherals. That’s no knock on the righty, who was a valuable member of the Yankees’ AL pennant-winning roster, but he didn’t have a star-making debut season like Skenes, Imanaga, or Yamamoto. According to WAR (and 14 out of 30 voters), Cowser actually had the more impressive season. Even so, it’s hard to ignore how similar Cowser’s numbers were to those of the NL’s distant third-place finisher Chourio. And considering neither Gil nor Cowser was a slam dunk to win, one might have thought Wells would earn some first-place votes himself. He blossomed into a terrific defensive catcher by anyone’s metrics (13 FRV, 11 DRS, 14.5 DRP), which is quite the accomplishment. Unfortunately, he disappeared at the plate in September (22 wRC+) and may have cost himself the hardware in the process.

Where the AL rookie class really stood out this year was in the bullpen. Two of the top three relievers by WAR were AL rookies: Cade Smith (2.7 WAR) and Mason Miller (2.3 WAR). Miller was the bigger story because of his triple-digit fastball velocity, gaudy strikeout totals, and strong start to the season, but Smith ended up with a lower ERA and FIP in 11 1/3 additional innings. Nonetheless, narrative often prevails in awards voting, and Miller finished ever so slightly ahead of Smith. It probably didn’t help Smith’s case that he was hidden behind Cy Young finalist Emmanuel Clase in the Guardians’ bullpen, whereas Miller racked up 28 saves as the A’s closer.

The other two AL rookies receiving votes were outfielders Wilyer Abreu (3.1 WAR) and Langford (2.9 WAR). The two had similarly valuable seasons; each was above average at the plate, while Abreu was the stronger fielder and Langford the better baserunner. However, Abreu came into the season as a relatively unheralded name, and Langford’s top-prospect reputation preceded him. Thus, compared to Abreu, who looked like a blossoming star, Langford almost seemed to be a disappointment — at least relative to expectations. That could explain why Abreu earned a couple more votes, including a pair of second-place selections from outside the Boston chapter of the BBWAA.

The emergence of star prospects like Skenes and Merrill, the breakouts of less-heralded rookies like Cowser and Gil, and the close ROY races in both leagues highlight what was another banner year for rookies. Overall, they combined for 138.3 WAR in 2024, surpassing the previous record of 134.8 set by last year’s rookie class:

What’s more, this past year’s rookies represented 13.8% of WAR league-wide. That figure isn’t quite record-breaking, but it is the highest percentage of WAR to come from rookies since 1947, fittingly the first season of the ROY award, created for and won by Jackie Robinson. These are the top seasons in history according to percentage of WAR produced by rookies, excluding 1871 (when everyone was a rookie):

Of course, all of this is partly because rookies have seen a steady increase in playing time since the start of the 21st century. When rookies play more, it stands to reason that they’re going to produce more value. Therefore, it’s also relevant to look at the ratio of rookie WAR to rookie playing time, which I’ve calculated by taking the percentage of league-wide WAR produced by rookies and dividing it by the percentage of league-wide plate appearances and batters faced by rookies. Rarely is that ratio going to be higher than 100% (that would mean rookies were outproducing non-rookies on a rate basis), but the closer the number is to 100%, the better rookies have performed compared to the rest of the league.

By this metric, the 2024 season isn’t quite as historic. Still, it was the strongest year for rookies since 2012 and one of the top three seasons of the last 30 years. The graph begins in 1916, when TBF data is first available:

Another metric to consider is the number of rookies who reached a certain WAR threshold. Decimal places of WAR are pretty insignificant, and any WAR threshold I pick is going to be somewhat arbitrary. Still, I think it’s interesting to identify the number of rookies who made a lasting impression in any given season. For instance, 28 players on our rookie leaderboards finished with at least 2.0 WAR this past season. The last time there were more two-win rookies was 1920, which was the first season that any of the Negro Leagues are considered major leagues, and therefore the rookie season of all-time great players like Oscar Charleston and Cristóbal Torriente. Meanwhile, the last time rookies made up such a high percentage of all two-win major leaguers was 1947:

Similarly, the last time there were more three-win rookies on our leaderboards was 1920, and the last time rookies made up a higher percentage of three-win players was 1947.

At this point, I feel compelled to note that due to MLB’s two-pronged rookie eligibility requirements, our leaderboards include a handful of players who have already exhausted rookie status. It’s easy to filter out players who have reached 130 at-bats or 50 innings pitched in the majors; it’s harder to filter out those who have accumulated 45 days on an active major league roster during the championship season (not counting days on the injured list) without reaching either of those other playing time thresholds. For the sake of consistency, the numbers I’ve cited up to this point come directly from our leaderboards. I could have manually extracted the few players who weren’t technically rookies in 2024, but it would be impossible to do that for every season on record. Moreover, I don’t think it’s a grave sin to include a player like Lawrence Butler when I’m looking at general rookie trends; if he had been called up just a week later in 2023, he’d still have been rookie eligible in 2024.

However, in case that makes you skeptical about the greatness of this year’s rookie class, let me ease your troubled mind. Even if I manually correct the 2024 data and remove players like Butler, rookies still made up a higher percentage of all two-win players in 2024 than in any season since 1920 and a higher percentage of all three-win players than in any season since 1984. And keep in mind, that’s without manually correcting the data in any other season.

Some of these rookies will become superstars in the years to come. At least one of them already is. Others may look back on 2024 as the best year of their careers. As their futures unfold in different ways, we may soon forget that all of these players crossed the major league threshold in the same season. Still, for this brief moment in time, all of these players are a unified graduating class. So, let me leave them with the distinctive, touching, and unforgettable words of my high school principal’s graduation speech: “Today is the first day of the rest of your lives.”

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to the first edition of my Tuesday chat in awhile. Between playoff coverage, election day, and a family emergency, I haven’t been able to fill this timeslot in awhile; apologies if you’ve been itching for a chat (also, please see a doctor if the itch persists).

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I took a first look at this year’s BBWAA ballot, which features Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia as the top first-year candidates and  Billy Wagner as the top holdover (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-big-questions-about-the-2025-bbwaa-hal…). Today, my Era Committee series continues with a look at the candidacy of Dave Parker

12:04

Jay Jaffe: That one will go live at 12:30 I’m told. Vic Harris will follow tomorrow.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: One more bit of adminstration before I get into the questions. Since I last chatted, Bluesky has taken off as the social media platform of choice for baseball chatter of a certain bent, and almost everybody from the FanGraphs family now has an account there. Dan Szymborski helpfully put together a starter pack of the FG-related accounts here https://bsky.app/profile/dszymborski.bsky.social/post/3layykgak222s; I’m @jayjaffe.bsky.social there

12:07

Jay Jaffe: I’m winding down my participation on Uncle Elmo’s Authoritatian Disinfo, Grift,and Harassment platform but haven’t entirely figured out the timeline for that. If you want to interact with me and my work, that’s less likely to draw a response now. Anyway, on with the show…

Read the rest of this entry »

Niko Kavadas had recently been named Boston’s Minor League Player of the Year when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in November 2022. Two years later, he’s now playing for the Los Angeles Angels, after the Red Sox traded him at this summer’s deadline as part of a five-player swap. Power and patience are his calling cards. Kavadas was slashing .281/.424/.551 with 17 home runs in Triple-A at the time he was dealt, and while he subsequently struggled after receiving his first call-up — a 77 wRC+ and 38.7% strikeout rate over 106 plate appearances — he did go deep four times.

The 26-year-old first baseman very much remains a work in progress, as evidenced by his having spent the last month-plus playing in the Arizona Fall League. And while assessing progress in an extreme hitter-friendly environment can be tricky, he nonetheless crushed the ball during his time in the desert. Kavadas was named the AFL’s Offensive Player of the Year after slashing .329/.462/.700 with 13 extra-base hits, including six home runs, over 91 plate appearances. We’ll get to why he was there in a moment.

When I caught up to Kavadas prior to a Fall League game in October, the first thing I wanted to know was how the present-day iteration compares to the hitter I’d spoken to 25 months earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s awards season is in full swing this week. Tonight, the National League Rookie of the Year award, officially known as the Jackie Robinson award since 1987, was awarded to Paul Skenes, who was impressive enough to also be a finalist in the NL Cy Young award voting. Skenes finished with 23 first-place votes to Jackson Merrill’s seven.

I’m not here to praise or criticize the results. Instead, I’m here to perform what I see as my journalistic duty. I was an NL Rookie of the Year voter this year (my sixth time voting for the award), and I have always felt that it’s important to give a detailed explanation of the reasoning behind my choice. As usual, I spent most of the final weekend of the season agonizing over my choices, because while being asked to vote for one of these awards is admittedly really cool, it’s also a weighty responsibility that demands care as well as candor. Offering a breakdown of my vote hasn’t always been fun — in 2021, my decision to vote for Trevor Rogers over Jonathan India resulted in my social media mentions being inundated with a combination of threats and insults — but I think I owe it to the fans and the players involved to explain myself. (OK, some of the brouhaha in 2021 was fun, like the suggestion that the Cincinnati Reds should fire me, a notion that still amuses me on many levels.) Read the rest of this entry »

Last year was an enjoyable one on the Hall of Fame front. After a three-cycle stretch during which BBWAA voters elected just two candidates (nobody for 2021, David Ortiz for ’22, and Scott Rolen for ’23), they tabbed three for the 2024 ballot, namely first-year candidates Adrian Beltré and Joe Mauer, and holdover Todd Helton. While some of the debates were contentious, the end result felt like a return to the good old days of the 2014–20 stretch, when the writers elected an unprecedented flood of 22 honorees in seven years, an impressive lot that did nothing to dilute the caliber of the players elected. If that’s your idea of fun, I have good news, as the 2025 BBWAA ballot — which was released on Monday — offers another excellent opportunity to elect multiple high-quality candidates, with 3,000 hit club member Ichiro Suzuki and 10th-year holdover Billy Wagner the most likely honorees.

Over the next six weeks, I’ll profile all of the ones likely to wind up on voters’ ballots ahead of the December 31 deadline, with a handful of profiles trickling into January. I’ll be examining their cases in light of my Jaffe WAR Score (JAWS) system, which I’ve used to break down Hall of Fame ballots as part of an annual tradition that by the end of this cycle will be old enough to drink (I did a 20th-anniversary retrospective in January). The series debuted at Baseball Prospectus (2004-12), then moved to SI.com (2013-18), which provided me an opportunity to go into greater depth on each candidate. In 2018, I brought the series to FanGraphs, where my coverage has become even more expansive.

Today I’ll offer a quick look at the biggest questions attached to this year’s election cycle, but first…

The Basics

To be eligible for election to the Hall of Fame via the BBWAA ballot, a candidate must have played in the majors for parts of 10 years (one game is sufficient to be counted as a year in this context), have been out of the majors for five years (the minors or foreign leagues don’t count), and then have been nominated by two members of the BBWAA’s six-member screening committee. Since the balloting is titled with respect to induction year, not the year of release, that means that this year’s newcomers last appeared in the majors in 2019; Suzuki’s eligibility was bumped back a year due to his two-game farewell with the Mariners at the Tokyo Dome. Each new candidate has 10 years of eligibility on the ballot, a reduction from the 15-year period that was in effect for several decades. The last candidate grandfathered into getting the full 15 years was Lee Smith, whose eligibility expired in 2017, while the last candidate who had his eligibility window truncated mid-candidacy was Jeff Kent, who fell off the ballot after the 2023 cycle. Read the rest of this entry »

Picture peak Kyle Hendricks. He didn’t blow hitters away, but he sure recorded a lot of outs, deceiving hitters with a flurry of cutters, sinkers, and changeups. All of those pitches traveled in a similar tunnel; hitters couldn’t help but hit the ball with the thin part of their bat. Even late-period Hendricks manages to sit atop the hard-hit rate leaderboards in spite of a 87-mph fastball. His ability to do so is a function of his arsenal, which is designed to keep hitters off balance and off barrel.

They’re the same age, but Nick Martinez just spun up a peak Hendricks season, reliably generating yucky contact on balls in play. Those results earned him a qualifying offer of $21.05 million from the Reds, which he reportedly accepted on Sunday.

When the Reds initially proffered Martinez a QO, I saw a hefty helping of both consternation and skepticism around that decision, but I think it holds up well. Sure, Martinez doesn’t strike out a ton of batters. But who needs strikeouts when you’ve got routine fly balls?

To think Martinez is unlikely to deliver $21 million of value for his club in the 2025 season, you have to believe that the ability to generate weak contact is fluky, subject to the vicissitudes of randomness. But that belief might be misplaced. Read the rest of this entry »

The best-case scenario for a sports team owner is rare, but clear: A local businessman runs the team as a community institution. Rather than an absentee landlord, the owner should be a community leader. That’s the vision new Orioles owner David Rubenstein is selling. During the playoffs, rather than sequestering himself in a luxury box, Rubenstein sat in the stands, among the people. OK, he was right by the home dugout, so he was among the richest subset of the people, but it’s good optics.

And less than a year into his tenure, Rubenstein is showing himself to be a builder of bridges. Or a tearer-down of walls. Or a mover of walls, at any rate. One of baseball’s most foolishly conceived and widely derided architectural features is on its way out. Mike Elias, the Orioles’ executive vice president and general manager, announced Friday that the left field wall at Oriole Park at Camden Yards is getting a haircut and moving toward the plate.

Glory, glory, hallelujah. Read the rest of this entry »

The team that signs Nick Pivetta this offseason will be getting a veteran starter who, as my colleague Ben Clemens stated in our 2025 Top 50 Free Agents rundown, has “long been a favorite of pitching models.” The team will also be getting someone who believes in pitching to his strengths. The 31-year-old right-hander is studious about his craft, but with a notable exception. Poring over scouting reports isn’t his cup of tea.

“I think about it not as a specific hitter, but more of, ‘Is he a lefty or a righty?,’” explained Pivetta, whose past four-plus seasons have been with the Boston Red Sox. “I have certain sequences that I do against lefties or righties. I do the same sequences against either side, no matter the hitter.”

That’s not to say he totally ignores weaknesses. As Pivetta told me in our last-weekend-of-the-season conversation, there are certain hitters who struggle with a particular pitch and/or location, so he might vary his “same game plan around a certain spot.” But for the most part, he is “doing the exact same thing over and over again, just trying to execute.”

The extent to which that is optimal is open for debate. As his 50 Free Agents blurb spells out, Pivetta’s numbers suggest that he has never reached — and perhaps not even approached — his full potential. The stuff is unquestionably plus, but the consistency has clearly been lacking.

The Victoria, British Columbia native has pitched more than 1,000 innings over eight big-league seasons, so opposing teams have a pretty good idea of what to expect when he takes the mound. Moreover, certain lineups will present, at least on paper, a greater challenge for his pitch mix and standard attack plan. Might adherence to advance reports be a meaningful advantage add? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the resolution of the Diamond Sports Group bankruptcy hearing, how declining broadcast revenue could lead to labor strife, and the Pirates’ reward offer for a baseball card that comes with a patch from Paul Skenes’s debut jersey, then (28:42) bring on Patreon supporter Craig Wingbermuehle to discuss his job and Effectively Wild origin story and then (38:25) answer listener emails about why we don’t talk more about postseason revenue, why extensions render players ineligible for Prospect Promotion Incentives, team mission statements, whether teams or the league should own home run balls, secretly promising a post-signing extension to an international free agent such as Roki Sasaki, Nick Martinez’s opt-out streak and contract progression, what constitutes a homestand and career year, and whether a player can be just 0-for-10.

Audio intro: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Austin Klewan, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Benny and a Million Shetland Ponies, “Effectively Wild Theme (Horny)”

Link to Drellich on DSG
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