ZiPS Time Warp: Andrew McCutchen

Once in a while, a player gets to walk off into the sunset at the height of his game. Ted Williams and David Ortiz are two examples of Hall of Famers who retired while still stars. But most players, even many greats, don’t see their careers end on a high note. That much larger list includes Andrew McCutchen, who was released by the Texas Rangers in late May after hitting .197/.277/.260 in 37 games as a part-time designated hitter/outfielder. There’s still a possibility that McCutchen catches on with another team this season as a spare bat off the bench, but in any case, we’re likely seeing the last throes of his career. Time always wins in the end, so this discussion was inevitable, but a decade ago, it looked like this conversation would have Cooperstown-related content.

Going back to early 2016 in the time machine, Andrew McCutchen was a very different player. Still in his 20s, he was a five-time NL All-Star coming off four consecutive Silver Slugger awards and four top-five finishes in the NL MVP balloting, including a win in 2013. It was a better time for the Pittsburgh Pirates as well, having just made the playoffs for the third straight season, winning 98 games in 2015 before being unceremoniously eliminated by the Cubs in the Wild Card game. Always at risk of losing their stars to teams more willing to pay them, the Pirates didn’t have to worry about that yet with McCutchen, who still had three more years to go in Pittsburgh, thanks to the six-year, $51 million extension (with a team option for a seventh year) that he had signed before the 2012 season.

At this stage, McCutchen appeared to be on a pretty good Hall of Fame trajectory. After seven seasons, Cutch was entering his age-29 campaign having already tallied 41 WAR with a .298/.388/.496, 144 wRC+ career line while playing center field. On a historical level, these numbers were quite competitive with some of the best young center fielders in MLB history. Look at how prominently he featured on the leaderboard through his age-28 season:

Note that Mike Trout would eventually move up to third on this list; 2015 was only his age-23 season! It’s also weird to see Rickey Henderson here, but he played mostly center field for the Yankees in 1985-1987, and so he qualified in our database.

Anyway, that’s impressive company, and the vast majority of these players are Hall of Famers or will end up there eventually. ZiPS at the time saw no reason to be particularly suspicious of McCutchen’s performance, and without any red flags, was happy to project him with a fairly typical decline phase for a star outfielder.

As it turned out, 2015 was McCutchen’s last 4-WAR season, and in only one season was he better than 2 WAR (3.6 WAR, 2017) over the next decade. While ZiPS didn’t have any illusions that McCutchen would stay a superstar for another decade, it didn’t expect him to hit a more drastic decline until the early 2020s. Sticking in center for a few more years, with a projected 2,600 hits, 72.7 WAR, and 333 home runs, when combined with his peak, I think this McCutchen would’ve made the Hall of Fame, though it probably would’ve taken him several years on the ballot to creep over the 75% line.

It’s hard to point to the obvious reason for his premature decline. The 2016 campaign was his worst season in the majors at that point, marred by a down June/July while he was playing through a severely jammed thumb. But that wasn’t thought to be a long-term problem, and his offense did bounce back to a degree for the next few seasons. His defense was already trending downward, but he was hardly slow, and, except for 2020 when he was coming back from a torn ACL that prematurely ended his 2019 campaign, he stayed above the 90th percentile in sprint speed through the 2022 season. His contact rate declined, but he still maintained his solid plate discipline and his hard-hit rate remained steady.

I don’t believe McCutchen’s going to do well when he hits the Hall of Fame ballot, but I think the version that we got might be too easily dismissed. He only ranks 30th in Jay Jaffe’s JAWS for center fielders, a place where most players do not get into the Hall. He does fare better using FanGraphs WAR, however, both in seven-year peak fWAR and in fJAWS. McCutchen ranks 13th in peak fWAR among center fielders, compared to 24th in Baseball Reference’s version.

Using FanGraphs WAR, McCutchen ranks 19th among center fielders in JAWS rather than 30th, and that ranking is strong enough that I think you at least need to have a conversation about his Hall of Fame suitability. As noted above, I’m not optimistic; the writers gave very little attention to Jimmy Wynn (19th), Kenny Lofton (12th), and Jim Edmonds (11th), while it took nine ballots to induct Andruw Jones (eighth). McCutchen had a huge peak, but the freshest memories of him will not be of that peak, but of his decade as a middling DH/corner outfielder.

If this is actually the end for Andrew McCutchen, he shouldn’t be remembered for coming up short of Cooperstown. For the better part of a decade, he was one of the very best players in baseball, the biggest name in a Pirates revival that briefly made Pittsburgh feel like a big baseball city again. The second half of his career didn’t dazzle like the first, but he did more than enough to be remembered as something greater than merely a very good player who got old quickly.