Should Yuli Gurriel and José Abreu Be Hall of Famers?

Recently, my colleague Kevin Goldstein shared his experience of scouting José Abreu back in 2013 as a member of Houston’s front office. Kevin suggested that if Abreu had been able to play his entire career in the majors, I would be writing pieces about the slugger’s chances of reaching even bigger milestones. And since I probably would be, why not actually do that?

Abreu’s not the first player whose success in a foreign league and long enough career in MLB have compelled us to ask what if? Ichiro Suzuki is another such player, and in 2016, I ran his NPB translations alongside his actual major league statistics. I’ve since added his final MLB numbers to this chart:

The translations bring him tantalizingly close to Ty Cobb and Pete Rose, giving us an even better understanding of his abilities over his full career. Joining the 4,000-hit club is cool and all, but Ichiro aged so well and continued to play for so long that you don’t really need his NPB career to give him a Cooperstown case. Abreu’s a different story. Unless he proves to be as amazingly durable as Ichiro did and cranks out another six or seven years of 30-plus homers, he’s not going to hit the important thresholds for home run hitters when it comes to Hall voting. ZiPS projects a fairly normal decline path for a mid-30s slugger:

Eighty-nine additional homers (85 in those projections and four more in 2021) get Abreu to 316 MLB home runs, and I don’t think that quite does it, leaving him in the mythical Hall of Very Good along with sluggers like Joe Adcock and Torii Hunter. But what if? We have Abreu’s stats from his time in Cuba and a history of players who have gone from Cuba to other professional leagues, so we can at least estimate what his performance would have looked like in the majors:

Even with the Serie Nacional de Béisbol playing just over half the games per season as MLB when Abreu was playing there and some pretty steep adjustment factors, the translations still add another 117 homers to the tally. While this is speculative, it feels right for Abreu, given that he basically played at the level of his final Cuban two-year average in the US. His projections at that point look like a typical Abreu season:

Abreu has actually been a little better than ZiPS expected, so it’s hard to say the translations overrate him. ZiPS had him at 24.3 WAR through 2021, which is pretty darned close to the 23.1 he is at now (and ZiPS didn’t know about COVID in 2014!):

Combined, while I’m still not sure I’d vote for José Abreu for the Hall — his is a career that looks like Jim Rice’s, who also a very borderline candidate for me — it’s a case I’d have to seriously consider before not ticking the box next his name. With an excellent reputation both generally and for mentoring other Cuban players specifically, and with no suspensions for PEDs hanging over his head, I think this version of Abreu gets into the Hall of Fame.

Along those same lines, we talked a bit about Yuli Gurriel on our Twitch watch-along of last week’s Mariners-Astros game. Gurriel didn’t even get the advantage of playing his late 20s in the majors; Abreu was in his sixth season of MLB play at the same age Yuli debuted with the Astros. He’s proven to be amazingly resilient to the vagaries of aging, showing little indication of decline, and at 37, Gurriel is arguably having his best season in the majors, hitting .315/.385/.467 in 125 games for 3.3 WAR. ZiPS has regularly been low on his projection for the simple reason that the computer doesn’t understand why the fourth dimension doesn’t apply to him!

Given that we know he could play in MLB, and that he was already a legend in Cuba by the time he came to the US, it makes sense to give his Cuban numbers the same treatment. With his translations, ZiPS projects another 317 hits from Gurriel, putting him at 1,028 hits starting at age 32:

Even with the huge hit in the numbers from a translation, Gurriel still ends up with just under 2,500 hits despite never getting to a play in a 100-game season until he was in his 30s.

This kind of exercise brings up some philosophical issues with our conception of the Hall of Fame. We wouldn’t put Mark Prior in Cooperstown for projections, but projections and translations aren’t really the same thing. Translations just try to adjust for context, no different than park-adjusting or league-adjusting stats, even though the calculations are trickier. A career projection for Prior involves giving him credit for seasons he never played, but Abreu and Gurriel actually played those years of baseball; through little fault of their own, that play just happened to be in leagues that MLB does not consider to be major leagues.

But when you examine MLB’s history, what constitutes a major league is quite gray, especially in the early years. While we can say that today’s Triple-A leagues are not the majors, I’d argue that from a competitive standpoint, 19th-century baseball didn’t consist of major leagues either, a state of affairs even perhaps stretching into the 1910s and ’20s. The standard deviations of numbers for starters around the league didn’t start to resemble those of modern baseball until the mid-1920s (you expect more competitive leagues to have tighter spreads of ability than less competitive leagues do). And even if we say “No, the American League from 1901 and the National League before that are still major leagues,” MLB gives credit for stats from the Players League, the Union League, and the Federal League, all extremely uneven leagues, with the first two also being very unstable (as was the early American League).

If we have a good faith basis to believe that Yuli Gurriel and José Abreu didn’t suddenly become awesome baseball players the minute they were able to play in the US, why should the performances that pre-date their debuts here be summarily ignored when bestowing baseball’s highest honor? I’m not sure either Gurriel or Abreu have the career numbers to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but let’s make sure we’re considering all the times they played this grand game. It’s messy to estimate what could have been, but just because answering a question is difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.