The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2018 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.

“A hard-charging third baseman” who “could have played shortstop with more range than Cal Ripken.” “A no-nonsense star.” “The perfect baseball player.” Scott Rolen did not lack for praise, particularly in the pages of Sports Illustrated at the height of his career. A masterful, athletic defender with the physical dimensions of a tight end (listed at 6-foot-4, 245 pounds), Rolen played with an all-out intensity, sacrificing his body in the name of stopping balls from getting through the left side of the infield. Many viewed him as the position’s best for his time, and he more than held his own with the bat as well, routinely accompanying his 25–30 homers a year with strong on-base percentages.

There was much to love about Rolen’s game, but particularly in Philadelphia, the city where he began his major league career and the one with a reputation for fraternal fondness, he found no shortage of critics — even in the Phillies organization. Despite winning 1997 NL Rookie of the Year honors and emerging as a foundation-type player, Rolen was blasted publicly by manager Larry Bowa and special assistant to the general manager Dallas Green. While ownership pinched pennies and waited for a new ballpark, fans booed and vilified him. Eventually, Rolen couldn’t wait to skip town, even when offered a deal that could have been worth as much as $140 million. Traded in mid-2002 to the Cardinals, he referred to St. Louis as “baseball heaven,” which only further enraged the Philly faithful.

In St. Louis, Rolen provided the missing piece of the puzzle, helping a team that hadn’t been to the World Series since 1987 make two trips in three years (2004 and ’06), with a championship in the latter. A private, introverted person who shunned endorsement deals, he didn’t have to shoulder the burden of being a franchise savior, but as the toll of his max-effort play caught up to him in the form of chronic shoulder and back woes, he clashed with manager Tony La Russa and again found himself looking for the exit. After a brief detour to Toronto, he landed in Cincinnati, where again he provided the missing piece, helping the Reds return to the postseason for the first time in 15 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you get past Aaron Judge, this offseason’s free agent outfield class gets real thin real fast. Brandon Nimmo is a very good player, but not a power threat, and after him and maybe Mitch Haniger, you get into the Michael Conforto–Cody Bellinger zone with alarming speed. “I can fix him” is as risky a conceit in baseball as it is in romance.

Andrew Benintendi sits in a bit of a no-man’s land between Nimmo and the true reclamation projects. There will be a team that misses out on Judge and Nimmo and finds itself with a hole in an outfield corner and about $15 million a year to spend to fill it; Benintendi will likely be the beneficiary of that vacancy when it emerges.

The sales pitch for Benintendi is pretty simple: At 28, he’s hitting the market fairly young and could command a deal as long as four years without including much of his decline, if any. He’s a capable defender in a corner who posted a career-high .373 OBP last year, which for what it’s worth was a hair higher than Nimmo’s, and has had a few monster seasons in the past, including a 20-20 campaign in 2017 and a nearly-5 WAR year the following season.

But there are drawbacks. When he was drafted seventh overall out of Arkansas in 2015, the question about Benintendi was, “How does such a teeny, tiny man hit so many home runs?” Twenty home runs, to be precise, in just 65 games, along with a .717 slugging percentage. That power has never showed up in the majors for Benintedi, whose career high in homers is exactly 20 in 151 games, and what moderate power he once had is going away. Read the rest of this entry »

Before we get to the 2023 ZiPS projections, there’s still some unfinished work from 2022 to do. Looking at which projections went the most wayward is definitely an exercise that makes me soul cringe a bit, but in any model, being wrong is an important component of eventually being right. Calibration is a long-term project, and while chasing greater accuracy in mean projections isn’t likely to result in any huge bounty — there’s a reason projection systems are so tightly clustered — there’s still improvement to be had in things like calibrating uncertainty and long-term data.

Let’s start with how teams performed versus their projections:

Teams have gotten a bit more polarized in how they’re run in-season. Looking at the in-season ZiPS projections, roster strength has varied much more in recent years than when I started doing this. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the mean absolute error — for an exercise like this, I want to use the simplest tool that gets the point across — creep up over time. That is the case here, as the MAE of 8.3 wins is above the ZiPS historical average of 7.5 (not including 2020). ZiPS underperformed its usual matchup vs. Vegas, only going 17-13 in over/unders as of the date of release (April 6); historically, ZiPS has averaged 19-11. Read the rest of this entry »

With the future of Twitter uncertain, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley welcome Craig Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus and Jordan Shusterman and Jake Mintz of Fox Sports and Céspedes Family BBQ to draft the best tweets and traditions from more than a decade of content on Baseball Twitter (plus a Past Blast from 1932). (Warning/preview: Prepare for somewhat saltier language than usual.)

Audio intro: The Rentals, “Elon Musk is Making Me Sad”
Audio outro: Sparks, “Here Comes Bob”

Link to list of some tweets
Link to Martino/collusion story
Link to unread Rosenthal column
Link to Rosenthal column tweet
Link to Trout emoji EW episode
Link to Chubs EW episode
Link to Chubs tweets
Link to Chubs explainer
Link to Ben on teen newsbreakers
Link to Defector on Nightengale photos
Link to “Ralph” explainer
Link to “wall of porn” post
Link to Ben on the Castellanos meme
Link to Gmail redesign
Link to 1932 story source
Link to SABR on Cardinals ownership
Link to story about Landis and Rickey
Link to story on Rickey’s farm
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter

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Last Tuesday’s 40-man roster deadline led to the usual squall of transaction activity, with teams turning over portions of their rosters in an effort to make room for the incoming crop of young rookies. Often, teams with an overflow of viable big leaguers will try to get back what they can for some of those players via trade, but because we’re talking about guys straddling the line between major league viability and Triple-A, those trades tend not to be big enough to warrant an entire post. Over the next few days, we’ll endeavor to cover and analyze the moves made by each team, division by division. Readers can view this as the start of list season, as the players covered in this miniseries tend to be prospects who will get big league time in the next year. We’ll spend more time discussing players who we think need scouting updates or who we haven’t written about in the past. If you want additional detail on some of the more famous names you find below, pop over to The Board for a more thorough report.

The Future Value grades littered throughout these posts may be different than those on the 2022 in-season prospect lists on The Board to reflect our updated opinions, and may be subject to change during the offseason. New to our thinking on this subject and wondering what the FVs mean? Here’s a quick rundown. Note that because we’re talking about close-to-the-majors prospects across this entire exercise, the time and risk component is less present here and these FVs are what we think the players are right now. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were waiting for a time when the discussion around the BBWAA’s annual Hall of Fame voting didn’t center around Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling, then I have good news: After 10 years of increasingly polarized debate, they all fell short of the 75% needed for election and have run out of eligibility on the ballot. They’re now candidates on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot — a problem for another day — but they’re not part of the 28-man slate unveiled by the Hall on Monday. That’s not to say that this ballot is devoid of controversial figures, or that debates about character are a thing of the past, but we can finally move beyond the cast that hit the 2013 ballot and spent 10 years monopolizing discussions and draining some of the fun out of the whole process.

The 2023 ballot doesn’t come without controversy, particularly in relation to the top newcomer, Carlos Beltrán. A nine-time All-Star and three-time Gold Glove winner who racked up 2,745 hits, 435 homers, and 312 steals, he’s got numbers to appease traditionalists, and likewise, he checks the advanced stat boxes by ranking eighth in WAR and ninth in JAWS among center fielders, thanks in no small part to the extra value he provided on the bases and in the field. For all of that, Beltrán is the player most closely identified with the Astros’ illegal sign stealing scandal, less because his own performance benefited (his 2017 season was below replacement level) than because The Athletic’s reporting and commissioner Rob Manfred’s subsequent report placed him at the center of the efforts to decode opposing catchers’ signs using the team’s video replay system.

Whether that is an offense grave enough to cost Beltrán a chance at Cooperstown is a matter for debate; his involvement in the matter already cost him his job as the Mets manager before he oversaw a single game. He returned to baseball this past year as a broadcaster for the YES Network, though no team has considered him for an in-uniform job since he left the Mets. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of my ongoing look at the candidates on the 2023 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been expanded and updated. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, use the tool above. An introduction to JAWS can be found here.

It took four position changes — from catcher to first base, then left field, right field, and finally center field — and parts of five major league seasons for the Braves to figure out where the 6-foot-4 Dale Murphy fit. Once they did, they had themselves a franchise centerpiece, a wholesome, milk-drinking superstar whom Sports Illustrated profiled for its July 4, 1983 cover story by proclaiming, “Murphy’s Law is Nice Guys Finish First.”

The title was a reference to the slugger helping the Braves to an NL West title the previous year, their lone playoff appearance during the 1970-90 stretch. “Here’s a guy who doesn’t drink, smoke, chew or cuss,” wrote SI’s Steve Wulf. “Here’s a guy who has time for everyone, a guy who’s slow to anger and eager to please, a guy whose agent’s name is Church. His favorite movie is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s a wonderful ballplayer.” Let the record show that Wulf did unearth some dirt on Murphy, noting that he once got a speeding ticket for doing 35 in a 25-mph zone… while running late to speak to a church group.

Murphy won the first of his back-to-back MVP awards in 1982 as well as the first of his five consecutive Gold Gloves, and made his second of seven All-Star teams. He would spend most of the 1980s as one of the game’s best players. Alas, knee problems turned him into a shadow of the player he once was while he was still in his early 30s, and he played his final game in the majors at age 37. Read the rest of this entry »