Baseball Hall of Fame: The 2024 Ballot

The Game Room
1

The 2024 Baseball Hall of Fame Ballot is officially out. Your candidates, my thoughts:

Bobby Abreu (5th year on ballot)

Statistically he looks pretty solid but as I think I have pointed out before, in his entire career he never finished in the top twelve in MVP moving, and I think that more or less sums him up.

Abreu did everything really well, but he was always, like, the 11the best hitter in the league. He never won a batting title, never played in a World Series. He was only in two All Star games. Analytics loves him but he gets one point, maybe even zero, on the Keltner List.

Jose Bautista (1st)

A spectacular offensive force for six seasons, which obviously is not enough. Bautista, as is well known, altered his swing late in 2009 and it completely turned his career around. The Blue Jays have had two players who did something like that; Roy Halladay changed his delivery in the minor leagues after blowing up in 2000, and became a Hall of Famer, but he did it when he was like 23, while Bautista did it at 29, and those six years of difference are why Halladay’s in the Hall of Fame and Bautista won’t be. Bautista might get one or two Keltner points, maybe three, but WAR says his career was far less than Abreu’s.

Carlos Beltran (2nd)

Beltran got 46.5% last year, which is normally indicative of a player who will end up making it. The 2017 cheating stench hangs around his head and I think he’s an outer ring candidate anyway, so I guess we will see. Beltran, like Abreu, was very good for a very long time and never quite a megastar, but his abilities were clearly better and he had postseason highlights. He’s like 1.2 Abreus.

Adrian Beltre (1st)

Beloved by everyone who ever worked him him, a solid hitter for a long time, amazing defensive player. He will be elected right away, and I am one hundred percent okay with that.
According to Baseball Reference, Beltre is the second most valuable defensive third baseman in MLB history, WAY behind Brooksie, but ahead of (in order) Buddy Bell, Clete Boyer, Graig Nettles, Scott Rolen, Nolan Arenado, Lee Tannehill, Mike Schmidt, and Robin Ventura.

Mark Buerhle (4th)

The pitching Abreu. Buehrle was a very good pitcher for a long time; he won ten to nineteen games every year for 15 years, only once having more losses than wins. He was never GREAT though.

I hope the White Sox have him on on a plaque or something. I like teams that do that. The Guardians have their history all over their ballpark – there’s monuments in center field, portraits everywhere. They honor Tris Speaker right along with Jim Thome. It’s really cool. The Blue Jays have very little of that; a handful of players have their names up on the ring of the third deck in stark white letters (why they don’t get more names up there I do not know) and Roy Halladay’s number is retired on a banner but that’s basically it. The only statue in or outside the park is of a rich white guy who owned the cable company that bought the team long after its glory days. I hate it.

Bartolo Colon (1st)

Everyone loves Big Sexy because fat guys make you think hey, maybe I could make it! Colon was, like Mark Buerhle, a very good pitcher for a long time but never really GREAT, despite the Cy Young Award he probably wasn’t a great choice for.

Adrian Gonzalez (1st)

I forgot this guy existed. He was a very good hitter, but there’s lots of guys like this. There have got to be ten first basemen better than Adrian Gonzalez who aren’t in; John Olerud, Keith Hernandez, Jason Giambi, Todd Helton…

Todd Helton (6th)

Helton is an edge case to me, but I can see why you’d vote for him. He really had two careers; until he was 30 he was an elite hitter, and then his power just vanished and his health was in and out. (See also David Wright.) He played more seasons AFTER 30 than before but it added nothing to his legacy.

Helton is a guy where if you put him in I see your point but if you don’t I am fine with that. He never won a title. He is kind of a Colorado Rockie legend, maybe that is a big deal.

Matt Holliday (1st)

Another guy who won a batting title thanks to Denver. Like other guys on this list like Jose Bautista and Adrian Gonzalez, Holliday was a good enough player to be in the Hall of Fame if he’d played a lot more games, but at that 1800-1900 game level, you need to have been very elite to make it.

There are about seventy players who played between 1900 and 1999 games in the majors. 14 of them are in the Hall of Fame, a percentage I find rather amazing. (Two are 19th century guys, one is in as a manager more than as a player, and a few are terrible Frisch selections, but still)

I still think of Holliday as a Rockie, but he played more in St. Louis, and of course he won the World Series there.

Torii Hunter (5th)

Hunter only got 6.9% of the vote last year so he’s just barely hanging on. He has never been over ten percent, I don’t think. I wonder what the record is for staying on the ballot without hitting ten percent?
Hunter was one of many veterans the Angels started importing in the late 2000s in a treadmill effort to keep contending. This strategy has led to the dumpster fire the Angels are today, but actually Torii Hunter played great for them.

The origin of his odd name is something I cannot find any explanation of. Apparently “torii” is a word in Japanese but Hunter says it didn’t come from that.

Andruw Jones (7th)

THE polarizing candidate. I wouldn’t vote for him but he’s gonna get in soon I think. I think he’s like Todd Helton.

Victor Martinez (1st)
An odd player, a catcher for awhile but good enough to become a full time DH when he couldn’t catch anymore.

Baseball Reference says that Martinez is the 14th greatest player of all time from Venezuela. I’m not sure I buy that ranking; I think he might rank a little higher. Number one is Miguel Cabrera, of course. Number two is the guy who’s first on this list. Only one Venezuelan, Luis Aparicio, is in the hall, but that will change soon enough. Just not with Victor Martinez.

Joe Mauer (1st)

I would vote for Mauer. I know the numbers don’t seem THAT impressive but he was a catcher; as Hall of Fame catchers go he’d fit right in. Baseball Reference holds that Mauer is one of the ten greatest catchers who ever lived:

WAR: 9th all time
JAWS: 7th all time
WAR7: 5th all time

I don’t think he is quite that high, I’d knock him down 3-4 spots for A) never winning anything and B) only playing 60% of his games at catcher. But in his prime he was an absolute monster.

Andy Pettite (8th)

A similar case to Mark Buerhle except he is the winningest pitcher in playoff history. 19-11 lifetime, isn’t that something? The leaders:

Andy Pettite - 19
Justin Verlander - 17
John Smoltz - 15
Tom Glavine - 14
Clayton Kershaw - 13
Roger Clemens and Bill Foster - 12
Greg Maddux and Curt Schilling - 11
Whitey Ford, CC Sabathia, Dave Stewart, David Wells, Chris Carpenter, Gerrit Cole - 10

The two outliers are the two guys who didn’t p[lay in modern wild card play: Whitey Ford and Bill Foster. Of course Whitey’s team was in the World Series every year, so there you go, but you may not know Bill Foster, a Negro Leagues pitcher in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly with the Chicago American Giants. Chicago was like the Yankees then, winning every year, and Foster was pitching in 3-4 World Series games basically every year, so he had a chance to win a lot of games.

Foster was a great big lefthander, threw very hard, with a terrific slider. He was kind of like Steve Carlton, very similar as a pitcher and extremely great… except in regards to mental health, as Carlton is insane and Foster was a very sane standup guy. Foster is in the Hall of Fame and he deserves to be. Pettite I guess not.

Brandon Phillips (1st)

I’d forgotten, before just looking his stats up now, that Phillips started with Cleveland. He was traded to the Reds for a PTBNL whose name I have already forgotten. Phillips immediately became a very good player and the Reds got 1614 games out of him. I am not sure what Cleveland missed there. Obviously he isn’t a Hall of Famer but he was a really good player. He won four Gold Gloves.

Manny Ramirez (7th)

It is stupid that Manny isn’t in the Hall of Fame. This is silly, really.

I know, steroids, but as the years go by fans will care less about steroids, and the gap between the Hall of Fame and who the actual great players are is going to start to seem really weird.

Jose Reyes (1st)

Reyes was traded from the Jays to the Rockies in mid 2015 with a few prospects for Troy Tulowitzki. That was a really weird trade because normally teams giving expensive players away (Colorado in this case) are doing so in part to shed salary, but Reyes cost just as much, so that was odd, and by that point he was clearly a shadow of what he had once been in New York. He was a thrilling player for awhile but was never the same after he left the Mets.

Alex Rodriguez (3rd)

See Manny Ramirez. Great player but super boring on “Shark Tank.”

Rodriguez almost perfectly split his career 50-50 between shortstop and third. He played a handful more games at third but was arguably more valuable in total as a shortstop. This makes it hard to rank him on positional lists. If you think he’s a third baseman, he rivals Mike Schmidt as the greatest ever - but, he was only half a third baseman. If you think he’s a shortstop, he rivals Honus Wagner as the greatest shortstop - but he was only half shortstop.

Francisco Rodriguez (2nd)

Rodriguez, of course, saved 62 games in one season, which is the record. He is not remotely a Hall of Famer.

Excluding fringe stats, who is the most obscure player to hold a major full season record? The record for doubles is held by Earl Webb, a career journeyman minor leaguer who got to play regularly for the Red Sox at the age of 32 because the Red Sox were basically a minor league team, and somehow he hit 67 doubles in one year. I think it’s gotta be him, but Francisco is right up there. Owen “Not The Actor” Wilson is, fittingly, in third on this list with the amazingly flukey record of 36 triples.

Jimmy Rollins (4th)

A really good player but not for quite long enough. I assume he is, or will be, in the Phillies Hall of Fame.

Rollins was only 5’7”, making him one of the shortest men to win an MVP award. Bobby Shantz was only 5’6”. Joe Morgan is listed as 5’7” but might have been shorter. Jose Altuve is listed as 5’6”. Phil Rizzuto was said to be 5’6”; he won the MVP in 1950. Although Dustin Pedroia was listed as 5’9”, Pedroia himself says he’s only 5’7”.

Some credit here to Yogi Berra, who was a little taller than those guys at 5’8”, but he won THREE MVP awards.

Gary Sheffield (10th)

Sheff was at 55% last year so I doubt he’s making it in time. He could hit. As I point out every year, he had a 100-RBI season for five different franchises. If you needed a man to really hit the bejeezus out of baseballs, Gary Sheffield was the guy you called.

James Shields (1st)

Shields was called “Big Game James.” He was 3-6 in the postseason with a 5.46 ERA. Maybe he got the nickname in college.

Do you think the amount starting pitchers pitch has gotten too low? I’m looking at Shields’ lines here; 2011 he completed 11 games and pitched 249 innings. Those are, historically, not remarkable numbers, but today, just 12 years later, those figures are unthinkable. But are pitchers any healthier? More effective? Gosh, does it really seem that way?

Chase Utley (1st)

Utley was just as good a player as Andruw Jones but I bet he won’t carry the votes Jones does. Wildly underrated player, who at his peak was one of the ten best players in the game, and was the best player on a World Series champion. He is a more deserving candidate than Jones or Helton, in my opinion.

Omar Vizquel (7th)

Vizquel for awhile looked like he’d make it; his vote totals were climbing year over year. It has emerged that he’s a wife beater and sex criminal, so he’s likely done. That’s fine with me; even before it came out he was a scumbag, I didn’t think he was worthy.

Billy Wagner (9th)

A terrifying pitcher to face unless it was the playoffs, whereupon he became one of the worst playoff performers in MLB history. Wagner, inning for inning, was as good as any pitcher around, but he only pitched 903 innings. He may make it now – he was at 68% last year – which I find silly.

David Wright (1st)

Wright was huge in his 20s, one of the very best there was, then rapidly fell apart after he turned 30. That is a more common thing than I think a lot of fans appreciate. I would assume he’s in the Mets hall of fame or whatever.

In last year’s list I talked about the randomness of the baseball amateur draft, but this year’s slate of HOF candidates has a lot of first round picks, Wright being one of them. Alex Rodriguez, Joe Mauer and Adrian Gonzalez were all THE first pick in their classes. A few second rounders, too. The lowest pick was Mark Buerhle, 38th round, which seems expected to me.

2

Thank you, as always, for putting this list together, @RickJay. I find it really enlightening and useful.

I think that ARod and Ramirez make it in (and hopefully this year), as well as Beltre; I’d like to see Mauer in, as well. I also suspect that Pettite will eventually make it in, either for his postseason work, or the general Yankees Effect.

I always liked Utley, but when I look at his stats, I see that he was a stud for six straight years, a good player for another four, and then barely at replacement value for four years.

3

Also, FWIW:

  • The White Sox have, indeed, retired Mark Buehrle’s uniform number, and his name and number are on the facade at Guaranteed Rate Field, along with the other retired numbers.
  • I think that the changes in how starting pitchers are used are eventually going to make it harder for HOF voters to figure out who’s worthy of election to the Hall. It’s sort of the reverse of what happened to wide receivers for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where rules changes that opened up the passing game led to lots of good-but-not-great guys posting career stats which would have been more than enough to get into the Hall prior to the 1980s.
4

Would ARod be the first known PED user in the HOF if he’s voted in this year?

Chase Utley has the reputation of being a dirty player, mainly because of his slide into Rubén Tejada in the 2015 NLDS, in which he broke Tejada’s leg. That reputation, fair or not, will hurt his chances of getting into the HOF, especially considering that he would be a marginal selection anyway.

5

That depends on your stance on greenies.

Arod’s split career has more to do with Yankee’s fans’ deification of Derek “pasta diving” Jeter than anything he did or couldn’t do; The Captain’s stubborn refusal to move to third when that would have helped his team really should have been a debit to his Hall case. (He still would have merited induction, of course.)

6

Mauer feels like a no-brainer, but he was as much a first baseman/DH as he was a catcher: 897 games with 3943 PAs. That’s a tick under 50 percent for his career. As a comparison, Fisk, Carter and Ivan Rodriguez each caught over 2000 games. Piazza and Bench were both 1600+. He probably gets in, though.

Beltre, definitely. ARod and Manny are also definites, but both aren’t getting in anytime soon.

Helton, Abreu, Sheffield, Utley and Andruw Jones are near misses, imo.

Beltran is deserving, the blemish at the end of his career notwithstanding. Favorite Beltran stats: 86% stolen base success rate. That’s tops in the 300+ steals club. Also, the .307/.412/.609 postseason slash. Not too shabby.

7

That’s a tad overblown. First, Jeter was never asked to move to third, so he never stubbornly refused. And second, by the time ARod got to the Yankees, he was bulked up and less nimble. His days as an elite defensive shortstop were pretty much over, anyway.

8

The only one I think is a no-brainer choice is Beltre. However, assuming I could vote, there are a few I might pick after some consideration (e.g., Wagner and Helton). I’m still not ready to vote for anybody whose career stats are tainted by PED use.

Will Ichiro finally be eligible next year?

9

My chime in on these was on a separate thread when I didn’t see you’d started this one. The only thing I have to add is that in our decade long conversation about Omar, I didn’t know what a pest he was. Guy’s not making the Hall, and should probably be taken out of the Guardian’s Hall, as well.

10

So we’re entering into the part of the year known as “talking about he HoF because the big signings haven’t happened yet, the Winter Meeting hasn’t started, and what else is there to do?”

The three big new names on the list this year are Adrian Beltre, Joe Mauer, and Chase Utley. The biggest names on the holdover list are Andruw Jones, Todd Helton, Gary Sheffield and Billy Wagner.

Personally, I think we should just ignore Beltre here. He’s an obvious first ballot Hall of Famer: he’s got all the numbers, he doesn’t have personal stains that might affect his eligibility, and even though he never won a World Series, he was an efficient player in the post season and won most of the awards over a long career. He was great on offense and defense, and he’ll be one of the many HoFers that everyone agrees deserves to be in there, and would never put on their Field of Dreams team.

Mauer is an interesting guy. Huge hero for the Minnesota market, Mr. Twin for all intents and purposes for 15 years, and a one team guy. A catcher who won the AL batting title three times, the first to do so even twice, he was an amazing player to watch. He played on bad teams for most of his career, and had a lot the injury problems we associate with guys who played behind the plate too long, but in 2009, with the best team the Twins fielded in the decade before and after, he lead the team to an eventual ALDS loss to the Yankees. What more can you ask of a guy? In a stacked HoF race, I could imagine him losing enough votes to take a second year to make it, but with this year’s ballot, I think we can also call him a fairly safe pick to make it.

Chase Utley is a different beast from our first two. He had about five or six really ridiculous seasons, but he did win a World Series, despite not really hitting very well in the postseason in 2008. Anyone who watched that Series remembers his fake-out throw to get Jason Bartlett at the plate as one of the greatest moments of defensive play they’ve seen in live postseason play. Unfortunately, he tailed off pretty dramatically after that year, putting up pedestrian numbers and sitting on the DL for long periods of time for the rest of his career. I, personally, don’t think he gets a plaque this year, and wonder if he’ll ever get one. His career WAR for a 2nd baseman is very high, but it was mostly compiled in the course of five or six seasons. None of his stats stand out as far as counting stats go, mostly due to his injury concerns in the last half of his career. I think he’s a first ballot Hall of Very Good, and a chase (ahem) Hall of Famer.

Victor Martinez, David Wright and Bartolo Colon are also players to possibly be considered, but I don’t think any of them pick up more than 10%, and Colon might end up resetting his clock, because the man is determined to pitch until the mound no longer supports his weight. I love all of them, and wouldn’t vote for them on their first ballot.

Matt Holliday is also a potential fringe candidate to pick up votes, but hitting homers in Mile High Stadium is a tough case to make. Adrian Gonzales, Jose Bautista and Jose Reyes are the rest of the interesting eligible players, but no one likes Bautista, and Gonzales and Reyes just weren’t good enough to merit long consideration.

As for the remainders:

Gary Sheffield’s last year on the ballot. Huge numbers, but clouded with the steroid years.He played forever, hit 500 home runs, came as close to second in MVP voting… but the steroid cloud. I think that we’ve seen the Hall voters don’t want to put sluggers from the 90s into the hall unless there’s no doubt that there are reasons beyond their hitting stats. Gary is gone.

Andruw Jones is another guy who hit really well in the 90s, but he had real defensive chops to go along with his possibly inflated HR count. He got 58% of the vote last year, and could go up a bit, but this is a stronger year than last year. I think he ends up missing out again.

Todd Helton should go in. He would be the first guy with a Rockies cap other than Larry Walker and he was very close last year. He has all the numbers you want on a fringe HoF candidate, and slightly better than Walker.

Billy Wagner is the last guy I’m considering. An absolute killer closer with the Astros for much of the 90s and the early 2000s, he had a real career renaissance with the Mets in the late 2000s. With a career FIP of 2.73 and over 400 saves, I don’t see how you keep him out. Again, not a guy anyone is putting on their Field of Dreams team, but for left handed relievers, there have been few better.

Carlos Beltran, Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez are also returning possibilities, but I think the voters have shown their opinion on these guys. I think all of them get declining shares of the vote.

11

RickJay started another thread on the HoF ballot yesterday:

12

Of course he did. Guy’s always been one step ahead of me. And has better analysis, to boot. If he wasn’t so right, I’d really dislike him. :smiley:

13

I’ll figure out how to merge these… nice to see you back!

14

I wanted to follow up on my comment about guys with around 1900 games not usually making the Hall.

It seems to me virtually inevitably the case that games played is the most accurate predictor of Hall of Fame chances, since if you’re Willie Mays you get to play all the time and if you’re Bradley Zimmer you don’t.

Only ten players have played 3000 games or more; all are in the Hall of Fame except Pete Rose, who’d be in if he wasn’t a degenerate, and Albert Pujols, who will get 99% of the vote.

Between 2800 and 2999 are 14 players, five of whom are not yet in; Barry Bonds, Rusty Staub, Adrian Beltre, Omar Vizquel, and Rafael Palmiero. Bonds would be in were it not for scandal, and Palmiero and Vizquel likely would be.

Rusty Staub, I guess, is (by far) the most-played guy in MLB history who really is not a Hall of Famer. He was a very, very good player in his younger days, a legit MVP candidate, but after he went to the Mets he got hurt a few times, and ended up as a DH/pinch hitter most of the rest of his career, never as valuable as he once was. Harold Baines was an extremely similar player but he had friends on the Veterans Committee.

15

With Staub, his 418 pinch-hitting plate appearances count as 418 games, which skews things a bit.

16

Makes me curious who’s in the Hall with fewest games played.

17

Not including players whose careers were mostly outside of MLB (such as those who primarily played in the Negro Leagues), I’m thinking it’ll be a relief pitcher. Among the relievers in the Hall, it looks like Bruce Sutter has the fewest games played, at 661.

Edit: Upon further consideration, I think it’ll be a starting pitcher whose career was cut short by injury. Sandy Koufax only played in 397 games.

18

I was able to sort this Baseball Reference list of all HOF pitchers by games played; there are eleven pitchers who are listed as pitching in under 300 games.

  • Four played before 1910, and apparently simply didn’t have long careers
  • Six played in the Negro Leagues, from which official stats are believed to often be fragmentary
  • One is a guy named Ruth, who switched from pitching to the outfield, and did OK

Looking at pitchers who don’t fall into any of the above groups, the fewest games played by a HOF pitcher is Dizzy Dean, at 317.

19

Addie Joss. The only Hall of Famer with a career under 10 seasons. He played in 9, appearing in only 286 games. He died at age 31. Joss still managed to rack up 2,327 innings.

Dizzy Dean had a short career as well. He appeared in 317 games, tossing 1,967 innings.

ETA: Not fast enough.

20

Positional players: Hank Greenberg, 1394? It’s either someone who lost time to either war, or duhh a Negro Leaguer who made the majors at a late age (Monte Irvin 764), but they now get credit for NL time (Irvin thus is at 1044, but I am sure he played a LOT more games in the NL than that, incl. affiliated organizations, than just 280…).