The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 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. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see 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 to 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 year. 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 »

On Monday morning, the Atlanta Braves made their first major move of the offseason, signing left-handed pitcher Drew Smyly to a one-year contract worth $11 million. It’s a nice little payday for Smyly, who has a long and ugly injury history and posted an ERA and FIP over six as recently as 2019. Ranked 25th among Craig Edwards’s Top 50 Free Agents, Smyly was estimated to command an AAV of $8.5 million by Edwards and just $5.0 million by the crowd. Those low salary estimates are likely directly tied to Smyly’s spotty history. But the reason why he was able to command such a surprisingly high salary boils down to one chart:

In 2020, Smyly was able to add 2.6 mph to each of his pitches in his arsenal, pushing his average fastball up to 93.8 mph. That added velocity helped him post the highest strikeout rate of his career paired with the lowest FIP of his career, though it came in just 26.1 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

A nice generic platitude is that free agency gives you a chance to completely remake your team. That’s an aspirational vision, but I mean, come on. Free agency gives you a chance to sign a really good player, or a few okay players, or even Daniel Descalso (I kid, Cubs fans, I kid).

In reality, completely remaking your identity mostly doesn’t happen. Teams don’t generally overhaul their image in free agency; they add pieces around an existing core they’ve carefully shaped. If they’re lucky enough to land a superstar, they’re at the mercy of fate as to which superstar is available; if you want to sign a 6 WAR third baseman this year, well, keep looking.

It only mostly doesn’t happen, though. This year, I think there’s a rare chance to actually change the identity of your team in free agency. More specifically, I think teams should look at turning their squad into a defensive powerhouse. That’s mostly not a one-year undertaking, but this time, I think it is.

The first key factor that makes this strategy workable is an accident of personnel. You might have heard of the best defensive shortstop on the market. Indeed, Andrelton Simmons is one of the best defensive shortstops of all time, period. His range, arm, hands, and baseball instincts are all off the charts. Whichever team signs Simmons will immediately have one of the best defenders at the position, a down 2020 notwithstanding.

Simmons is the best infield defender of the past 10 years. The best defensive second baseman over that same span isn’t quite so clear, but Kolten Wong is certainly near the top of the list. He’s been one of the very best defenders at the position in each of the last three years, including a blowout 2018 that, naturally enough, is the only year he didn’t win a Gold Glove despite outstripping his other two seasons by every metric.

With two strokes of a pen, a team could sign Simmons and Wong and have the best up-the-middle defensive infield in the game. I’m exaggerating slightly, of course: most contracts need more than one signature, and most names need more than a single pen stroke to sign. I’m certainly not exaggerating, however, when I say it would be the best defensive combination. Whatever their other shortcomings, Simmons and Wong look better than any other pairing in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Marlins announced that Kim Ng would be assuming the role of general manager. It was a historic move for a number of reasons: She’s the first woman and first Asian-American to be hired as a GM in the major leagues, and is indeed the first woman in any major American men’s pro sport to hold that role. It was also a move that was long foretold, as many pointed out, linking to various blog posts and lists of years and decades past that included Ng’s name as one to watch in the world of high-ranking baseball executives. She’s been at least an assistant GM for as long as I’ve been alive. “When I got into this business,” her statement posted to the Marlins’ social media read, “it seemed unlikely that a woman would lead a major-league team, but I am dogged in the pursuit of my goals.”

It was a celebratory day for many women in baseball, a sign of how far they have come and how far they could still go, and a testament to Ng’s individual drive and ability, which, given her history, is undeniable. It was also a celebratory day for Asian-Americans in baseball. What once seemed unlikely, and before that unimaginable, is now real, tangible, and true — not only for Ng individually, not only for the other people who have blazed trails in this industry, and not only for all the historically underrepresented people she might inspire to pursue careers in the game, but also for literally everyone, apparently, in the entire sport. All those heavy-hitters and decision-makers who for the decades upon decades prior to this day were fine with maintaining the status quo — this moment was, somehow, their achievement to celebrate as well.

When you’re a kid, you can dream of being all kinds of ridiculous, incredible things. The first person to create a cat-to-human translation system. The first person to walk on Mars. A kajillionaire, a world-peace creator, an undersea explorer — all at the same time, all existing within the same realm of possibility. You get older, of course, and with your increasing ability to understand the world around you, to grasp what is expected of someone like you, the dreams get scaled and hedged accordingly. You absorb information and adjust your ideas of what is possible. Kajillionaire becomes maybe a full-time job and your debt paid off by the time you’re 50. World-peace creator becomes maybe you survive another year of being exploited by your racist boss. The moon becomes a tiny room in a shared house for $900 a month. It’s good, after all, to have goals that are actually possible to reach. That’s what you’re taught in career planning classes and therapy sessions: achievable, real, tangible. The bounds of the imagination shrink. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley reflect on the fact that it took a former player to hire Kim Ng as MLB’s first woman general manager, follow up on the unwritten rules controversy surrounding Kyuji Fujikawa’s final out, and evaluate two recent statements by Scott Boras, then (24:07) bring on Baseball Prospectus’s Patrick Dubuque and FanGraphs’ Dan Szymborski to discuss whether baseball is “solved,” how sabermetrics has benefited and broken baseball both economically and tactically, and whether its effects were foreseeable, and preview how the shortened season has altered 2021 ZiPS projections and the 2021 Baseball Prospectus annual.

Audio intro: Lone Justice, "Soap, Soup and Salvation"
Audio interstitial: Field Music, "Choosing Numbers"
Audio outro: Neil Young, "Too Far Gone"

Link to Joe Sheehan on Kim Ng
Link to article about Fujikawa
Link to Fujikawa’s tweet
Link to source of first Boras quote
Link to source of second Boras quote
Link to Patrick on baseball being solved
Link to Patrick on transactions
Link to Ben on the Overwatch meta
Link to Ben on the Overwatch meta again
Link to Dan’s 2021 ZiPS primer
Link to preorder Baseball Prospectus 2021
Link to Meg on Hang Up and Listen

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In a welcome sign of normalcy amid the coronavirus pandemic, on Monday the Baseball Writers Association of America released its 2021 Hall of Fame ballot, featuring 25 candidates including 14 holdovers, four of whom received at least 50% last year, joined by a group of 11 newcomers headlined by Mark Buehrle, Tim Hudson, and Torii Hunter. If nobody from that trio jumps out at you as likely to join the recent flood of first-year honorees — 13 of whom have been elected on the first ballot over the past seven cycles, out of a record-setting total of 22 BBWAA-elected players in that span — you’re forgiven. This rather lean slate, the smallest since 2009, is the result of an imperfect storm, in that no obviously legendary player hung up his spikes following the 2015 season, and that after three years out of four featuring the suspense over whether a player in the final year of his eligibility would get to 75%, we don’t have that this time around. Instead, we’ve got a ballot consisting of the weakest class of first-time candidates since 2012 (sorry, guys) and a group of returnees led by three very polarizing figures, namely Curt Schilling, Roger Clemens, and Barry Bonds, all in their ninth year of eligibility.

2020 is just the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t it? I can see some of you already rolling your eyes if not scouting for the nearest exit, but I hope you’ll stick around. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the Hall of Fame’s plaque gallery. Some very good players in mid-candidacy have real opportunities to gain ground now that the spotlight is on them, even if they won’t get anywhere close to 75% this time around. And the ones with no chance at election? Their stories are worth telling, too.

Over the next seven weeks, I’ll profile all 25 candidates, either at length or in brief, examining their cases in light of my Jaffe WAR Score (JAWS) system, which I’ve used to break down Hall of Fame ballots in an annual tradition that’s now old enough to have a driver’s license. 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. Today I’ll offer a quick look at the biggest questions attached to this year’s election cycle.

First, it’s worth reviewing 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 the newcomers last appeared in the majors in 2015. 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 run was Lee Smith, whose eligibility expired in 2017; five current candidates (Bonds, Clemens, Schilling, Jeff Kent and Sammy Sosa) had their tenures reduced mid-candidacy.

To be elected, a candidate must receive at least 75% of the ballots cast, and in this case, they don’t round up; 74.9% won’t cut it. Likewise, candidates who don’t receive at least 5% of the vote fall off the ballot and can then only be considered for election by the Today’s Game Committee, an entirely separate process — but not until what would have been their 10-year run of eligibility expires.

The voters, each of whom has been an active BBWAA member for 10 years and is no more than 10 years removed from active coverage, can list as many as 10 candidates on their ballots, a number that’s become a point of contention in recent years given the high volume of qualified candidates. In 2015, the Hall tabled a BBWAA proposal to expand to 12 slots (I was on the committee that recommended the change). Last year, the fifth since the Hall purged the rolls of voters more than 10 years removed from coverage, 397 ballots were cast, 152 fewer than in 2015, the final cycle before the cutdowns. That’s a reduction of 27.7% over five years, and it represented the first time since 1985 that fewer than 400 writers voted. Read the rest of this entry »

As many readers have likely deduced from some of the early offseason transactions and the flurry of cuts made to scouting, player development, and other parts of baseball ops, owners are tightening their belts after a gate-less season and the repercussions are diffusing across the industry. If these early moves — like Brad Hand’s $10 million option being declined, and no team picking him up on waivers — are indications of how teams are going to behave this offseason, then this will, among other things, modulate some of the already-changing, pre-COVID shifts in the thinking surrounding payroll allocation and roster construction, which was already cutting deeper into the bottom of rosters.

I’d like to specifically talk about how I think the COVID-19 financial ripples will impact the way teams approach non-tendering players this offseason. It’s logical to assume that teams will be apt to non-tender players more often this year than ever before because of financial fallout from the pandemic, but based on recent trends, the game was perhaps likely to see a record number of non-tenders anyway. Here are the past 12 years of league-wide non-tender totals:

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In the 1980s, the stolen base was king. Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman were absolute terrors on the basepaths, giving pitchers no time to breathe. They each stole 100 or more bases three different times, with Henderson’s 130-steal season standing atop the single-season leaderboard, unlikely to ever be matched. They were hardly the only speedsters, either; Tim Raines stole at least 70 bases in six straight seasons, for example.

That need for speed made a delicious baserunning omelet, but it also cracked its fair share of eggs. In 1980 alone, players were caught stealing 1,602 times. That’s the cost of doing business when you’re going to steal so frequently. If you only attempt to swipe a bag in the 50 best spots to run in a given year, you’ll be successful at a higher rate than if you go 150 times.

As baseball tactics changed, the steal lost favor. First, home runs decreased the value of steals. Put one over the fence, and it doesn’t matter which base the runner was on. Second, teams started to better understand the value of avoiding outs. The exact math varies based on context, but as a rule of thumb, you need to steal three bases for every time you’re caught to provide neutral value. Succeed less than 75% of the time, and you’re costing your team runs in expectation.

These two effects led to a predictable change in behavior. Stolen bases have been in steady decline, while success rate on the attempts that remain heads inexorably higher. In 1980, the average game featured roughly 1.5 steals, and the league-wide stolen base success rate was 67%. In 2020, there was less than one steal per game for the second straight season:

On the other hand, the success rate crested 75% for the first time:

Is this a good development? It all depends on your point of view. Steals are exciting, whether they’re successful or not; they punctuate the stilted and ponderous pace of the game with a jolt of pure adrenaline. On the other hand, there’s nothing more frustrating than seeing your team run themselves out of an inning or seeing a baserunner caught directly before a home run.
Read the rest of this entry »