Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2274: All Hall

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley bring on FanGraphs senior writer Jay Jaffe to break down the Hall of Fame voting results, from new honorees to one-and-done candidates to trends in support to forecasts for future ballots and much more. Audio intro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to Hill report […]

Did Richard Love Lady ever strike a Taylor T. Godin? Who had more war, Jason Kendall or Russell Martin? What if Shohia Tani's dog was also a good lawyer? What would you do if Mike Trotter showed up in your foyer? Or is it foyer? Find out on Effectively Wild. Find out on Effectively Wild. Find out on Effectively Wild today.

Hello and welcome to episode 2274 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Riley of Fangraphs and I'm joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing well because I read a report that podcast patron saint Rich Hill plans to pitch in 2025 when he will be 45 years young come March 11th. Now, I don't know who plans to employ Rich Hill to pitch for them in 2025. We will find out, but at least the desire is there. He's not ready to hang them up and this pleases me. And then, boop-a-doop-a-doop, breaking news, Rich Hill is signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Not going to go there.

No, I'm kidding. I tell these little jokes. I say my words. Everyone writes such nice emails. We move on with our lives. No, I'm kidding. CB It wouldn't be the first time that he had signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, but he is reportedly open at least to pitching for someone other than the Red Sox. So that's kind of fun. I mean, it's nice for him to have repeated homecomings, but also I want him to keep checking off boxes on that MLB bingo card. So we'll see.

He might at this stage be a minor league invite type of guy, but I'm just happy that he's willing to give it another go. And last year he did that take half a season off, which was partly so he could coach in his kids little league, which is very wholesome because he's Rich Hill. And also it was more of a Pettit Clemens take some time off and come back fresh. But now he's ready to ramp it up early, which maybe is for the better. So I hope that there's still interest out there.

At least invite him to spring training. See what he's got. Let him mentor your youths. He will always get a major league deal in our hearts. He is the most desirable free agent on the market of Effectively Wild. Do you like how I said before we got on mic, I don't want to talk about the Dodgers anymore.

People are reading banana balls in the emails and then I immediately made a joke about it. Do you feel like I did a little one, two, faint? Kicked all change. But we're not dwelling on that topic. I think we've all had enough Dodgers discourse. However you feel about the Dodgers, I think people are ready to move on and for us to move on as am I. And so we will be moving on to a less divisive subject, the Hall of Fame. It actually is a little less divisive

than the Dodgers these days and less divisive than it used to be probably because of the makeup of the ballot. But still some differences of opinion, pitching one more year in the majors would push Rich Hill's eligibility back a bit, allow more time for the electorate to see him as the Hall of Famer he is in our eyes. But no, we will not be breaking down Rich Hill's Cooperstown candidacy today. We will be talking about the players

who've actually appeared on the ballot or will sometime soon. And there's a lot to talk about, including some newly minted Hall of Famers and some guys who didn't get in. and we will talk about all of that now. Well, we are joined now by the Hall of Fame expert himself, Jay Jaffe, author of the Cooperstown Casebook, Hall of Fame expert and writer extraordinaire for fan graphs whose watches almost ended at the end of yet another Cooperstown cycle, just a couple more blurbs to file and us,

the final boss in his media gauntlet maybe. Hello, Jay. Welcome back. Thanks. Always good to be back. Often, we have you on at the start of the cycle to preview things and sometimes we do the review instead. And I guess that's good because we don't have to speculate.

We can just talk about the actual results and big picture. It's kind of cool that there are going to be five new players inducted next summer. And really whatever you think of the merits of the five, whether it's the three who were elected by the BBWAA, Etro, C.C. Subatathia, Billy Wagner, or Dick Allen and Dave Parker. Those are some really cool guys. Those are some of the coolest figures in baseball history and not too much personal baggage to feel bad about. So we can get into the stats and the standards and all of that. But these are just five guys who on a personal level, at least, I'm pretty excited to see

have their day with sadly the exception of Dick Allen, who won't be there for his day, but nice to see him honored too. AC Yeah. I think each of the BBWA honorees is somebody that I've felt a fair amount of affection for in terms of their careers and their candidacies and had no trouble checking the box next to their name. I was a long-time advocate for Dick Allen and it's a bittersweet feeling to see him elected posthumously rather than when he would have been around to enjoy it. But it does make me all the more grateful that the Phillies showed him the gratitude that they did by retiring his number before he passed away,

breaking their own precedent. And I thought that was in its own time, it was a very cool gesture. It took on added resonance, you know, once we understood that he was battling cancer and passed away a couple of months later. The Dave Parker one, I think on the other hand, is kind of tempered by, you know, my unease over where Parker fits in statistically is tempered by the fact that, yeah, he was pretty cool and he is waging a very public battle with Parkinson's disease. And if he were ever going to be honored, I would prefer that he were

honored while he's still among this and while he could still enjoy the trappings of it. I wavered when I was doing my virtual ballot over who I would choose thinking about those things, because I went into it intending to vote for Louis Tiant, who had just passed away in October and thought about that and thought about that and came away with the different conclusions. So yeah, I get it on that front. But yeah, it should be a lot of fun.

Induction weekend should be pretty special one. I imagine it's going to be very heavily attended because of the each row factor and to a lesser extent the New York factor. Anytime you get a Yankee in, you get a lot of people who are able to just drive up for the day and don't have to contend with the logistical nightmare of lodging. Legendary Yankee, Ichiro Suzuki, you mean? Excuse you.

Hey, I have very fond memories of covering Ichiro with the Yankees. I actually got to ask him a question on the occasion of his 4,000th hit. That was something that I had. You can enjoy whatever you want. Let's just be clear about some stuff on this pod is all I'm... You're right. He was a Marlins legend, man. That's true. Yes. I mean, he pitched for them for crying out loud. Yeah. He played for the Marlins longer than the Yankees. So yeah.

There you go. Well, you revealed your ballot weeks ago and people can find your full write-up at Fangrass, which we will link to, but just to sort of frame things here, set the stage. You want to reel off the candidates you supported and I guess for any of the guys who might not have been obvious slam dunk selections, a brief rationale. Yeah, it's funny, I had to do this on air yesterday with MLB Now, and I didn't even remember everybody. They fortunately, they showed it on screen so I could just read it off and try to give them the one minute tour.

But yes, obviously, Ichiro and Cece were easy choices for me, as was Billy Wagner, who I've been advocating for from the outset of his candidacy and voted for five times on my official ballots. I also had on my holdovers, Carlos Beltran, Andrew Jones, and Chase Utley, all of whom I've supported from the outset, despite, you know, some reservations about Beltran's role in the sign stealing and acknowledging that I'm not particularly comfortable with, you know, Jones's domestic violence, arrest and guilty plea. I think the more interesting choices that I made, the ones that were a little bit further

off of the reservation, I did vote for Felix Hernandez less because I am thoroughly convinced he belongs in the Hall of Fame and more because keeping him on the ballot while we have an extended discussion about starting pitcher standards is important. I did have Bobby Abreu and then I had, I guess obviously now it stands as my most outlying choices. Russell Martin and Brian McCann based on the strength of their pitch framing metrics, along with the rest of their bodies of work. When I constructed a pitch framing based version of Jaws, they come out right in the same neighborhood and in some cases ahead of guys like Pudge Rodriguez and Joe Mauer both of whom were recently elected. Yadie Molina and Buster Posey both of whom I think are widely presumed to be on their way to

Cooperstown within the next half decade. Acknowledging that there's some separation between Martin and McCann with Martin viewed more favorably than McCann based on their pre-pitch effects based framing, which the data of which I have from baseball prospectus, I included both because I think the discussion of this as a driver of candidacy, it's time for that conversation, especially if you want to talk about Molina and use actual data instead of hand-w waving and intangibles and the kind of stuff

that makes a lot of people roll their eyes, you can't do that without invoking the value of his pitch framing. So it was disappointing to see that Martin only got nine votes, one of which was mine, and that McCann only got seven. Maybe if I'd positioned my profiles of them earlier in the cycle, they would have gained a few more votes because there were already a bunch of ballots cast by then, but at the same time, I can't do everything. And their candidacy cannot solely be dependent

upon my support, that was never going to get it done. But I am bummed, especially because Martin was somebody who I watched a ton of first as a fan and then as an analyst and really saw the value of what he was doing behind the plate and I just wish more people could have appreciated it in this context because now he is in an oblivion that very few candidates even get a chance to climb out of. So we should probably address just off the top so we can move on because I implored the good people of blue sky to not reward attention seeking behavior.

Uh, I think a lot of people thought that Ichiro might be the second hall of fame candidate to be granted a unanimous selection to Cooper's Dahan. He missed that, uh, unanimity by one vote. And we don't need to linger on the potential identity of the person who withheld that vote. I think we all assume that that ballot will not be made public when the time comes. But I'm curious whether you think we will see another unanimous selection in our lifetime? Basically, like, if each hero can't do it, you know, what's it going to take to have someone join Mariana Rivera as a unanimous selection? Yeah, I legitimately don't know.

Thinking back for a moment, I do wonder if I started this unanimity talk with my five-year outlooks. I'd have to go back and see when I started talking about that. It probably wasn't until obviously until after Mariana was elected, but just the same. It is pretty wild that we even thought it was a possibility. When I suggested it was a possibility more recently, I figured that there would be less likely to be, let's say the equivalent of a troll out there with a strong view of a strong anti-Derek Jeter bias,

maybe someone who covers the Red Sox, perhaps, and wanted to be rewarded by that fan base, or something like that. I just, I don't know. If Ichiro can't do it, I don't know that anybody can. I mean, you think about the coming candidates who are obvious slam dunks. Albert Pujols has a very rough tenure in Anaheim,

but I think people are going to hold against him on some level. Also questions about the accuracy of his age, even though all of that should have already come out in the wash based on the post-September 11th investigations into falsified birth dates. Miguel Cabrera has a domestic violence incident. There are things like that when you look at these people

who clearly have the numbers for this stuff. I can't think of anybody offhand that I would nominate for this possibility right now. Give me a name and I'll tell you why they won't get it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I like, I just, it's, I think we, I think we really do need to let go of the idea. It's just, it's also, it's just also not that important.

And the more we, the more we invest importance in it, the more likely there is to be, you know, some kind of troll that, you know, throws something in the works. I reject the notion that it was, that this could have been caused by somebody's strategic voting. There just aren't enough down ballot votes

among the guys on the fringes of 5% that we could say, oh, yeah, this person must have voted for Ben Zobrist, Fernando Rodney, Henry Rose. It's like that didn't happen. We didn't see any ballots fitting that pattern publicly, obviously. We don't see those totals that would make that anything more than a one in a million shot. Is there any chance it was user error?

I think I actually, you know, somebody reminded me of my own near error when it came to Felix Hernandez and that brought up a story. So just to tell the story, if you didn't see it on Blue Sky, you know, I filled out my ballot on, I think a Sunday night beer in hand

as I've grown accustomed to doing. I took a photograph of it. I left it out on the coffee table. And I was like, I will look at this again in the morning and make sure it's all, you know, seal it up and walk it to the post office. Well, I looked at the next morning and I had checked nine boxes, not 10.

And the one that I hadn't checked was Felix. So obviously, I actually, in fact, actually, I looked at the picture on the phone because it was still, it was the first thing that was open when I, when I, because I used my phone as my alarm clock, it was open there and I was like, wait a second, that's not right. And so I caught the error in time.

And then I was reminded of a story that Jeff Idelson told me. This was when I went up to Cooperstown while working on the case book. I was there in like February 2016 and Jeff and I actually got to have a little bit of time together one-on-one. The former president of the Hall. Yeah, this is the former president of the Hall. When he was the VP of Communications

there in 1992, Tom Siever fell five votes short and three of them were were protest votes over the way the ineligibility of Pete Rose. One of them was the type of grump that we're railing against here that just won't ever vote for a first-year candidate. And one of them was somebody who was recovering from open heart surgery and just did not check his ballot closely enough when he filled it out. And so left him off. So I suppose that's possible. But I mean, I still think it's unlikely, though. Yeah, I wonder if the Hall would check. If someone sent in a ballot with a bunch of lesser players

checked off and then each row was unchecked, would they say, hey, did you mean to do this or not? Would they just let it stand? I don't know. I don't think they do. I think they would just let it stand. I think it's their role is to count the ballots, not to question them. Would be funny if we're just all angry at this unknown person and it's just

someone who accidentally left it off. I hope that if it is someone who just made a mistake, a regrettable one to be sure, but made a mistake that their ballot is left anonymous because that is such a benign, I mean, there's no excuse for it. You need to double check. I understand like we all appreciate the weight of this responsibility. So I don't mean to say that it would be like excusable, but it's not petty, right? It's not attention seeking.

It's not a grudge. It's just a human error. And so I hope if that is what happened, that that person's valid is going to remain anonymous because I don't know that they would be necessarily deserving of the ire that they would receive. Of course they could come out and say, oops, I didn't mean to do that. And then we could all stop railing against some unknown figure, but I'm sure that it would probably take some flack. Yeah. Yeah.

No, right. That would end the discourse in its tracks. Maybe the no on each row voter is the same as the no on Jeter voter. And someday they'll feel bad about it and do a deathbed confession. Then we'll find out. I guess even the fact that it's easily conceivable that someone could have screwed up in that way does highlight how archaic the voting process is with the paper ballots and the mailing them in, which there's something kind of quaint and charming about that and almost appropriate. It just feels very baseball

and baseball writery, but it does make me wonder if and when the process might be modernized. And so I wonder which you think we will have first online voting for the Hall of Fame or online voting in federal elections? Are we close to reform in Hall of Fame voting at least? I think we're probably less than 10 years out from changing it within the BBWAA in the Hall. That wouldn't surprise me. I think some of the archaisms that are there within the current process might at least indirectly

be linked to the current regime at the Hall of Fame and that eventually things are going to change there. It is kind of quaint. It doesn't really bother me. I don't mind the paper ballot thing as long as they give me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I don't have to go hunting for a stamp because I don't use stamps very frequently. I do know where they are. I have a supply of them that I bought back in 2020. I don't think

I've made a purchase since. Yeah, we're going to get to the point in not very long when there will be voters who have never sent a letter, who've never mailed. They don't know where to put the stamp. Good Lord. They're not that young. Relax. Yeah, that's not far off. I don't think really. It's been a while. But anyway, you do have to have been in the BBWA for a decade to qualify, but still we're getting there. Anyway, if we could talk about the next guy in terms of the voting percentage, C.C. Sepathia, who got 86.8%

support. And you have written a lot about starting pitchers and the support for them and the lack thereof. And he is the first starting pitcher to get in in six years since Roy Halliday. And I have the list here of all starting pitchers who've gotten in this century, this millennium, which is 26 Hall of Fame voting cycles. So it's Burt Blylevin in 2011, it's Glavin and Maddox in 2014, Randy Johnson, Pedro and Smoltz in 2015, Roy Halliday in 2019, Sabathia this year. So that is seven starting pitchers in 26 cycles.

As you've noted, these things have ebbed and flowed and there have been long lulls before, but why do you think Sabathia sailed in on the first ballot when a lot of pitchers who statistically at least are in the realm of being comparable to him have had a hard time garnering much support? Well, I think Sabathia has a peak there that's different, that separates him from say, you know, even Andy Pettit, who has similar top line numbers, one wins, losses, ERA, ERA plus, and even war. You know, Sabathia's got the higher seven year peak by not little, about one win a year, just about.

And then he's got, you know, while Pettit has, let's say the volume when it comes to postseason and some big performances within there, Sabathia has that three year stretch there where he wins a Siam, something Pettit never did in 2007, has that absolutely hellacious run with the Brewers in 2008 where he wills a team into his first postseason appearance in 26 years,

taking the ball every fourth day down the stretch. And then 2009, both he and Pettit helped pitch the Yankees to a championship for him it was His first year with the Yankees and it really I think kind of set a narrative and there's also the fact that Sebathia was born in 1980 and yet had through more innings than any pitcher born after Tom Clavin So born after 1966 so we're just not to see that kind of volume again. Justin Verlander is currently just about one full qualifying season behind Cici Zabathia, and he's heading into his age 42 year, if I'm not mistaken, so coming off of injuries. So I mean, if he hangs on for two years, Verlander could pass him, but that's not a guarantee.

It's just tough to envision anybody doing a full season. coming off of injuries. So I mean, if he hangs on for two years, Verlander could pass him, but that's, you know, not a guarantee. It's just tough to envision anybody doing doing it like Sebastian did. And I think that that you combine that with a compelling personal narrative that includes his very public battle with alcoholism, and his remaking himself as a finesse pick pitcher after his fastball had gone, as well as his role mentoring younger black players and being just a high visibility, high quality dude.

And I just think that there were a lot of things that made it easy for the voters to say yes to Sebastia that Pennet on the other hand makes it a little bit harder because he doesn't have that high a peak because he has the HGH and Mitchell Report connection, things like that. And then that brings us to Billy Wagner, who was elected on his 10th and final ballot. And I wonder if you can give us some context for two things. First, the guys who do what Wagner did, where they get in in their final year of eligibility, and then talk a little bit about how the Hall views relievers like Wagner and sort of what if anything his election says to you about the way that the electorate views guys who work in relief.

Because there aren't that many of them in the Hall as it turns out. Although six of them have gotten in this century compared to seven starting pitchers. Yeah, my first year of doing, when it wasn't even Jaws, was Dennis Eckersley, the third reliever getting in. Yeah, I guess he's half and half kind of, but more because of the closing. But it was, yeah, it was because of the closing. And I think, you know, we've seen the standards for relievers kind of come together on the fly. It's a, you know, I know one when I, you know, I know a hall of fame reliever when I see one type of thing.

And while Wagner never had a share of the career saves record, the way that Trevor Hoffman, Mariano Rivera and before them, Lee Smith did, you know, he had he had these rate stats of just incredible dominance. The lowest opponent batting average and highest strikeout rate of all time of any pitcher, you know, at the 900 inning level. He was striking out, you know, 30-something plus percent batters when nobody was doing that. Now it's routine for closers to do that. They do it, you know, for a few years and then their arms fall off.

He had the longevity of doing that. And we'll see if anybody can match that. It's, you look at Kenley Jansen and Craig Kimbrel, I think they're the two guys who have lower batting averages and higher strikeout rates than Wagner, but they're doing it more than a decade after Wagner left the scene. And they're sputtering as they get, you know, they're not to 900 innings yet. They're still, I think they just passed 800 innings, but they're sputtering. I mean, you know, Kimball got cut before the playoffs this year. So, you know,

it's just not a given they even get to the levels of workload that Wagner had. Back to the election in the final year of eligibility, we've now seen four candidates get in in their 10th year in the past decade, Tim Reigns, Edgar Martinez, Larry Walker, and Wagner. The first three of those guys started when they first appeared on the ballot. They thought they had 15 years. But then the Hall pulled the rug out from under them with a 2014 rule change, cutting five years off

because they didn't want to hear people talking about Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens for an extra half decade. So Wagner is the first one to get only 10 years and to get in in those 10 years. All those guys, to one one degree or another had to deal with the logjam created by the PED backlog with Bonds and Clemens and also Sammy Sosa and for a time Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza with their lesser connections to PEDs clogging the ballot and taking a significant lesser connections to PEDs, clogging the ballot and taking a significant number, significant share of votes and knocking these guys percentages down. They might have legitimately been, you know, the 15th or 16th, you know, somebody like Wagner might have legitimately been the 15th or 16th best guy on the ballot

as far as Hall of Fame votes. Eventually the traffic thinned out. He gained some support. He, I think, you know, he benefited from having pretty incredible and compelling backstory, you know, learning to throw left-handed after his right arm was broken twice when he was seven years old, emerging from extreme poverty and an unstable home situation, things like that. Being, you know, a guy who's really not much taller

than I am, but having just this incredible lower body strength and throwing a hundred miles an hour consistently when nobody was matching that. There's just a lot of things about that that I think make him an easier choice than some, despite the general resistance to relievers and I think the coming scarcity. I think it's going to be a while before

we get another reliever in the Hall of Fame. CB Yeah. All those guys who started so low in their first year of the ballot, not even just first year, but in Wagner's case, I guess, at least his first four years in the ballot, he was around 15% or lower and similar for Scott Rowan and Helton and Walker. And I think this is a good thing to an extent. It's good that people can change their minds, that they can be persuaded, that new information can come to light or at least come to voters' attention.

It maybe makes people look kind of fickle or indecisive or something. If you just look at the percentages and say, well, how could it have been 10% then 10 years later, it's 82%. But I think it is largely a function of that backlog and the fact that it was peak PD backlog when they entered the ballot. So I wonder whether that'll even be possible anymore, whether you think that that was just a moment in time where those totals were artificially depressed to begin with. And so now if someone starts that low,

we shouldn't say, oh, well, Roland did it and Wagner did it, so they could do it too. Or should we say, yeah, but that was different circumstances. And so it would be really tough to have that type of trajectory. AC Yeah, I don't know. I guess we're going to get some kind of look at that via the Felix Hernandez candidacy. I mean, 20% is not 10%, but he would fit within that table that I published in Tuesday's instant recap, somewhere around, I think, Larry Walker and Mike Messina had higher first year percentages, 20.3%.

Felix, I believe, got 20.2%. So this is a very different time. We could see Andrew Jones supersede even Scott Rowland because he was in the 7% range on his first ballot. He has two years of eligibility left, but he's now, I think, facing some headwinds here as he gets closer to the line. I say this often, voting doesn't happen in a vacuum. That, you know, these, these percentages, they are, you know, product of competition

for vote, for, for space with the other candidates. Um, so you can't just view them as completely independent of each other, but it does look weird from the outside if you didn't know anything about it. Yeah. And it's hard to watch the video of when one of these guys gets in as the Wagner video came out and he was crying, right? He was speechless. He was so happy and I was happy for him, even though I'm not really a relievers in the Hall

of Fame type of guy. And if I had voted, I kind of doubt I would have voted for Wagner as dominant as he was. And those eye-popping strikeout rates probably look a little less eye-popping now because of the guys who came after him. But at the time, he was really an outlier. And so I'm happy for him personally. It's no skin off my teeth that he got in. But I do look at some guys who fell off the ballot. And I want to ask you about Zobrist maybe a little later, but a guy like Zobrist or Tullo, for instance, those guys in my mind were better players, more valuable players than Billy Wagner. And it seems like a lot of voters have decided,

yeah, but he was better relative to the standards of his position. That's the way that we looked at things. That's the way Jaws is organized. I think that's sensible. And yet in my mind, I guess reliever is just on a different tier. It's just a more limited type of picture. That's just the way I look at these things. And so even if you're an incredible reliever relative to the baseline of relievers, it's still in my mind does not quite compute, oh, this guy should be in and those guys shouldn't. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's okay to compartmentalize what relievers do and how we view them.

But I understand the argument. I mean, somebody like Pettit, who had four times the volume of innings almost as Wagner or at least three times the volume, yeah, they were asked to do very different jobs. I reject the notion that every reliever is simply a failed starter. I mean, I think Billy Wagner could have succeeded

as a starter for a while. It just would not have, it might not have been as special as what it was. Yeah, and I don't know that Mark Burley would have been as good a closer as Billy Wagner. Yeah, a good amount of relieving is, you know, of relief pitching is the psychological makeup. It's the ability to shake off your failures quickly. I mean, I was writing about Fernando Rodney who, boy, there's a wild ride, not for the faint of heart, but one reason why Fernando

Rodney was able to pitch into his 40s and was sought out as like somebody that teams wanted their younger pitchers around is because Fernando Rodney was just this very resilient player and had the right mindset for reliever of just forgetting yesterday's failure and going forward today with his best effort. And I think that that's not everybody can shake that off as easily. So, you know, it's that the psychological aspects of it that I think make it make the job tougher. You know, we've seen guys fail at closers when we thought that they would be good, you know, and it's just it's not a job that just anybody can do. So we've talked about the three guys who

gained entry, you mentioned a couple of the one and done's, but I want to ask talked about the three guys who gained entry. You mentioned a couple of the one and done's, but I want to ask you about the guys who have made either big gains or have seen some amount of retrenchment in their vote share because as we've noted, these guys have 10 years on which to be on the ballot. Some of them are closer to the end of the line than others, but who were the big vote gainers and are there any candidates who have sort of lost ground in a way that has been surprising to you? There are three candidates who gained more than 10 percentage points, Andy Pettit, Carlos

Beltran and Chase Utley. Beltran and Utley return as two of the top three vote getters for next year. I think that both of those guys are on their way. They're still very early in their candidacies. Beltran getting to 70%, 70.3% to be exact, Utley to 39.8%. They're both positioned very well.

Beltran, I think, is somebody who's gonna get in next year. Utley is already near, I guess, what we might now call the Jeff Kent line. Jeff Kent got, after milling about on the ballot for nine years, Jeff Kent got 46 and 1 half percent in his 10th year. Utley's almost there already. He's ahead of the paces of Scott Rowland and Todd Helton

and Billy Wagner and Larry Walker, all those slow starting candidates. The thing about Kent is that everybody above that percentage, with the exception of PED guys and guys still on the ballot, has gotten in eventually via one route or another. We'll wait to see what happens with Kent. If it's not Kent, it's the Roger Maris line, which is what it was before.

Maris was at 43.1% would be the highest of any of those guys to not get in via one route or another. Utley doesn't have any PED stigma attached to his name. It doesn't have any other, you know, it doesn't have Beltran's cheating or Andrew Jones's domestic violence allegations. Just some hard sliding perhaps. Yeah, just to get the hard slide. That's the worst thing about,

oh no, he played the game too hard. So, I think that bodes well for them. I think Pettit benefits from the Sabathia election. He still does have the drag of the HGH connection to his candidacy. I tend to think, and he's also gonna be heading into his eighth year and really is only about a third of the way to 75%. the HGH connection to his candidacy. I tend to think, and he's also gonna be heading into his eighth year and really is only about a third

of the way to 75%. I think he's probably somebody who, if he's going to get in, it's going to be via an era committee type process somewhere down the road. But I think I'm ready to believe that that's probably what's going to happen with him. Because again, that volume is a lot, and I think the postseason is a lot.

I liked, Sam Miller wrote a piece back in February, last February about Championship WPA, and I bookmarked it and I intended to go back about it, and I forgot about it completely until I was, you know, until I was, I think he linked back to it in one of his more recent pieces. And I was like, oh yeah, I meant to do in one of his more recent pieces. I was like, Oh, yeah, I meant to do something about that. And by that point, it was November. And

I was like, it was all I could do to just stay afloat with the pace of the candidate profiles for the air committee and the and the writers ballot. But I want to go back and look at something there that I think might paint pettit in an interesting light. If we look at both regular season and postseason championship WPA and try to position that relative to others as the playoffs have expanded. Let's talk about Beltran because he came close. And if he gains by half as much next year as he did this year, then he'll be in.

So they have made him wait the voters for a few years here now, presumably because of sign stealing. It's funny when he was a player, I think a lot of people looked at him as a future Hall of Famer, but it seemed like he might be a guy who would have to wait anyway, just because it was sort of an all around case, sort of a sapermetric war based case. And I had the sense at least that maybe he wouldn't be like a first ballot guy regardless, that there might have to be a bit of a campaign to get him in. And then the sign stealing stuff came out and he's been punished, but he hasn't

been punished like the PD players have been punished. So why do you think that is? What was the distinction you drew? Because you've handled the PD guys, you've drawn a line and said, if it happened prior to testing and suspensions and everything, then it was the Wild West. And if it happened after that and you were caught, then you're out. And Beltran was not actually suspended, I guess, because he had been a player. He lost his managerial job with the Mets, but other than that, there was no explicit punishment. So is that part of it or do you just not see the infraction as equally serious? No, I think that's part of it. I mean, I think the commonality with my stance on PEDs and with my stance on Deltran is if

MLB couldn't discipline these guys, I don't see it as my place to. I don't consider myself to be like the administrator of extrajudicial punishment here. I joked a long time ago a certain spink award-winning writer referred to the Sabermetric Visual Anti-Brigade And I always thought that was funny. And I've joked about positioning myself as as that, but I really do not consider myself to be any kind of visual ante, especially when it comes to doing Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame's dirty work for them. So you know, I

thought that withholding a first year vote was maybe more on the scale of what I thought appropriate. I think yesterday I was listening to MLB Networks coverage. I heard Tom Verducci say something to that effect that he did that for, you know, for his one year. Tom is a notorious hard ass when it comes to the PED guys. I was interested to hear him say that with regards to Beltran. Before Beltran was viewed via this lens of the Astros science dealing. I mean, he was thought of as one of the smartest players in the game and a great team guy and obviously a future manager who got hired for the job because of what happened, that view has changed significantly.

To me, there's a disproportionality with what he's had to bear versus what, say, AJ Hinch and Alex Cora had to deal with in the wake of the commissioner's report on the sign-stealing of the Astros and Red Sox. The fact that no other players were even named in either report. We did get something about Brian McCann being one of the one of the Astros players

who did go to Beltran and ask him to stop and that Beltran did not. But it still takes far more than one person to pull the scheme off. And so to leave Beltran as the only one who should suffer any kind of extrajudicial punishment or whatever, be scapegoated for it, I think I find that notion rather distasteful as well. This goes a bit beyond the conference of this ballot, but sort of on that score, I wonder if it hints at sort of the future electability of other Astros, right? Like he's in a position where his candidacy was being considered very soon after that scandal on a relative basis.

You know, we probably have a few more years yet of Carlos Correa and Jose Altube and Alex Bregman, although he needs to sign a new contract before he can play again. But I wonder then if those guys will sort of go through this same period of, hey, we're not going to let you in on the first ballot because we do need there to be some sort of statement made about the banging scheme, but eventually, for all your mean mugging and the dugout after home runs that might have been aided by knowing what the pitch type was, like you're going to get in eventually if we view you as otherwise worthy.

I wonder what this will mean for other Astros. It's funny because on the one hand, there's some people are very adamant that, Jose Altube did not ask, did not want to know what pitch was coming. And then you've got the patently silly story of the buzzer that just won't go away. So which is it?

I don't think it can be both, but I don't put much stock in the latter story. Al Tuve is probably going to be fine. I think Carlos Correa's Hall of Fame case, on the other hand, I think is already in trouble because he simply can't stay on the field. Right, right, yeah. He got off to a great start,

but he may be the next know, the next Troy Tula-Witzke, the next Dustin Pedroia, just somebody who really just does not have much presence in his 30s, because he can't stay healthy. And we'll see. I don't hope that for him. But I do think, you know, that he could maybe suffer a little bit more than Altuvia, because I don't think anybody within the industry takes the buzzer story very seriously, whereas I think fans just love to run wild with that conspiracy. So I don't think Altuvia is going to suffer to the same degree of Bregman. It's too soon to tell.

I don't see Bregman as being on a Hall of Fame path, so I don't know that it matters very much. I do think it was interesting that there were allegations related to 2019 as well and the whistling that was going on. And I covered that series between the Yankees and Astros where I think it was Alex Cintron and Phil Nevin almost went at it, connected to the whistling. And Alex Bregman just stood there in the center of the Astros Clubhouse around the Scornful Reporters and said, he had no idea what was going on.

Subsequent reporting suggests otherwise. So that incident, I think I've felt maybe a little bit, or I could understand a little bit better why some of the reporters who feel like the PED guys lied to them bore such heavy grudges. It's the first thing I think of when I think of Alex Bregman right now. He's never been the same hitter since then, et cetera, et cetera. So I would be relieved if I didn't have to think too hard about Alex Bregman's Hall of Fame candidacy. Sorry, Alex. CB Then the only other guy who was close and has a good chance to get in as a holdover in the next couple of years is Jones, who is at 66.2 in his eighth try. And as you noted, he has the domestic

violence stain on his record. So I can't say I'm personally rooting for him really to continue to ascend here. But I kind of assumed that when you get this close, you're going to go even though there continues to be some skepticism about his statistical case, which is bolstered by total zone. And you really have to buy into those defensive ratings to believe that he's a Hall of Fame guy because the rest of his case, the longevity, it wouldn't be quite there. He would look a lot like say a Tory Hunter or some other players who were falling off or close to falling off the ballot, if not for the defense. And look, the defense was good. I saw it certainly,

whether it was as elite as the stats say it is, it's hard for me to say, but you've decided that it's good enough for you. CBer Yeah, I mean, it's hard for me to say, but you've decided that it's good enough for you. Yeah. I mean, it's not just TotalZone. It's actually more defensive run save than TotalZone at this point because it was, you know, he's got pre, you know, I think only a small fraction of it is pre 2002 when DRS came into play. I have voted for Jones. I, you know, I am, I don't love the fact that I'm voting for somebody who was guilty of domestic violence. I could certainly reverse my stance on that. I have really avoided putting stock in the character clause for reasons being that it

came from the mind of Judge Landis, who spent a quarter of a century almost upholding the color line, and therefore I can't really take anything he says about character too seriously. I went outside of my discomfort with that when I chose not to vote for Curt Schilling because I think that Curt Schilling was a particularly malignant character in that his actions had the potential to impact far more people than even within baseball, making him a real danger. I think I might feel differently about Andrew Jones if the timing of his infraction were

different and if he'd drawn a suspension from Major League Baseball, because I have generally drawn a line at what could baseball discipline him for versus what happened before that. I don't really want to equate that to being the quote-unquote Wild West, but it would be the logical extension of the way I have viewed things and just said I viewed the Beltran situation. Regardless of what I think and whether I vote for him again, however, at this point, Andrew Jones has so many former teammates who are in the error committee process that it seems like his election would be in that in inevitability via that route, if he did not get to 75%. You've got, I just saw one writer quoting Tom Glavin,

as saying that Andrew Jones belonged in the hall of fame, Glavin and Maddox and Chipper, and there's a lot of ex-braves floating around and sooner or later, one or two of them, in all likelihood will end up on a committee and telling people what a great guy Andrew Jones was despite this. So again, I think his eventual election is a likelihood. Yeah, to do a little digression into character clause, which I've done before, I think more and more that that should just be removed from the instructions. I'm fine

with you just disregarding it essentially because of how it came about and because historically it didn't carry the weight that it has until recently when people used it as a cudgel to keep the PED guys out. But it is sort of silly just the idea that we can even judge character, things come out after guys get into the Hall of Fame, whether it's Roberto Alomar or Kirby Puckett or just this week, Mr. Unanimous Mariano Rivera is being accused of covering up sex abuse at his church and home, right? And it's an accusation, it's a lawsuit right now. I don't know all the facts and the details, but this is the unanimous guy, right? So if a lot of that is born out,

then how will that look later, right? And I don't necessarily support kicking people out either. I'm just saying that just setting up writers to be the arbiter of that. And yeah, and also, you can, of course, choose to disregard it, but the instructions do say that you're supposed to, not just you may, but you shall. It says you're supposed to, but it doesn't say you have to weight all those things equally. Yeah, that's true. I think the hall has left that intentionally vague, just as the BBWAA has left the notion of most valuable player intentionally vague. It ends up being a Rorschach plot. You know that you can interpret a number of different ways and

we find examples and precedent for other people viewing them a number of different ways. It certainly causes as many problems as it solves. I mean, if we were deploying the character clause, you know, uniformly, I think we'd be seeing guys like Adam Jones and Curtis Granderson fairing well in the hall. I mean, in the hall or at least, you know, Faringwell, or, you know, Dale Murphy. I mean, there are a lot of upstanding individuals who've come through baseball and who didn't quite have the numbers for Cooperstown, but who are high character individuals who never got close to 75%. And so to pretend that the character clause has that much power, I think in either direction is kind of a misnomer. Yeah, it just, it adds to discomfort for some voters or non-voters like me.

That's part of why I haven't voted. That's not the whole reason. Part of it is I've just gotten a little less invested in all of this over time. But that is a big part of it, just that I just had kind of concerns about that because the thing is that if you put them in with a character clause and somehow it were indicated that they weren't in there for their sterling character, if there were some disclosure of that, yes, this guy got in, but he cheated. Yes, this guy got in, but this is on his record, right? I mean, it would be an interesting plaque, I know.

Yeah, a little tag. Really great. Actually a ****head, like, you know. Right. Great at baseball, not a great player. How many times have you heard, a better person than he was a player? Yeah. Right.

The opposite of that. Good guys, bad band. Yeah, way better person than he was a player? The opposite of that. Good guys, bad band. Way better player than he was a person. It's a museum. It's okay to... And a lot of these guys, they are in an exhibit or something, even if they don't have a plaque, and that's appropriate, I think. But just the idea that, well, if you have a character clause and then you put someone in, it suggests that they passed muster on a character level.

And then also they get their day in the sun and they get to make the speech and everything. And the whole thing just makes me uncomfortable. And I do kind of wish that it were handled the way that the football hall of fame does it. Either that there were some mechanism for acknowledging some of these marks on someone's record or that they just disregarded entirely and said,

this is not a referendum on who these people were. It's just that they just disregarded it entirely and said, this is not a referendum on who these people were. It's just that they were good at baseball or made some major contribution to the game. Because the football hall of fame voters are wrestling right now with the case of Jim Tyrer, who is not in the football hall of fame because he killed his wife and himself. And the football hall of fame has no character clause whatsoever. And you're explicitly instructed to disregard anything about that. And in Tyra's case, he's, he's come up again for consideration and it's sort of a sad case because he may very well have had CTE and that may have caused that.

And so, you know, is it hypocritical to keep him out if it was kind of caused by football in a way? Especially when OJ is still just hanging out in the hall, you know, is it hypocritical to keep him out if it was kind of caused by football in a way? Especially when O.J. is still just hanging out in the hall, you know? Right. But for people even to wrestle with it as a hall of fame candidate in football, you have to have killed someone, like literally. And in baseball, much less than that gets you dinged. And I think it's okay to get it dinged, but yeah, I just, I don't like how it's handled personally,

but I know people just kind of have to make the best of the system as it exists. Hall of Famer, House of Cards, my next book. Yeah, I mean, and we should move on and look ahead to future ballots here, but I will be interested to see how, Jay, to your point, how folks deal with candidates as they come up when we start to have guys who have been disciplined under the league's policy start

to emerge on ballots. And right now, a lot of those guys, by virtue of the length of their careers, the quality of the play, they're not going to be serious Hall of Fame candidates from an on-field performance perspective anyway, but that's not going to be true of all of them and unfortunately, like... I think Aroldis Chapman is probably the one that I think about because, you know, if you look past Kenley Jansen and Craig Kimbrell, it's Chapman who has the rate stats that are, you know, could potentially surpass Wagner, but he also has the suspension. He also has the ugliness at the end of his Yankees career with the infected tattoo and

the jumping the team just before the playoffs and all of that ugliness. So yeah, there's going to be plenty to unpack there. Manny, by the way, was charged with domestic violence and it was dropped. But it's almost shocking. Maybe it shouldn't be shocking, but just the number of these players and the percentage of them. At one point, there were like half a dozen of them on the ballot a couple of years ago. I mean, like Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds had alleged incidents as well and it's a high volume of them. Yeah. Before we ask about next year's ballot, I just want to ask about a couple of the down ballot guys because I am sort of surprised that Ben Zobrist didn't get a single vote given how good a player

he was and really how large he loomed in the minds of a lot of sapermetric minded people. I think that was part of some people's sapermetric awakening that he was as valuable as he was by war, let's say, and also just the way that he really made it in vogue to be a multi-position player like that. And on the one hand, I don't think he's a Hall of Famer and I don't think I would have voted for him. So in that sense, I guess I could say, well, why give him a courtesy vote? But really you compare to some players who do hang on year after year and he is someone who at least is interesting to talk about in terms of his values. So sort of surprised that he didn't get a single vote, that Ian Kinsler went one and done, who again, statistically quite a strong case, and then Russell Martin

and Brian McCann, which is a very framing dependent case, but still. And meanwhile, you have someone like Tory Hunter who was a good player, but this was his fifth time on the ballot and he barely scraped by the minimum and maybe this will be his last run. But what's the difference really between Torrey Hunter and Ian Kinsler? So I don't know. You look at people voting by war, it seems like people are taking into account jaws and war and all these things. And yet some of these guys who do well by the stats just didn't garner any support really. I think I take that to be because there are a lot of mid-ballot guys that people have you know, I think more reason to vote for whether we're talking about an old school

guy like Jimmy Rollins or a stat head favorite like Bobby Abreu. You can only have so many of those guys on your ballot. And if you're voting for Bobby Abreu that leaves you less room to vote for Ben Zobrist you know or something like that. I consider for example you know when I thought of my my ballot I consider the possibility of you know of having to triage and treating somebody like Abreu who wasn't gonna get in this year and wasn't really even a threat to gain a lot of ground, that would not be much harm in not voting for Bobby Abreu one year

so that I could throw a vote to whether it's Zobrist or I did vote for Martin and McCann. The differentiator for Torrey Hunter versus the rest versus all these sub 5% guys and McCann, the differentiator for Tory Hunter versus the rest versus all these sub 5% guys and Hunter getting, you know, eking it out by one vote is Hunter has the nine gold gloves, I think it is, to a large portion of the electorate that doesn't care anything about war or, you know, or to a segment of the electorate that doesn't care anything about war and does not question too hard beyond the fact

that the guy won the gold gloves as to what those defensive metrics said, which is that Hunter was often very good, but nowhere near as good to justify nine gold gloves. They're voting on the award rather than on the metrics. And so that's why he does well and why somebody like Ian Kinsler, who doesn't have nearly as many fancy numbers and who I think had more all-around ability and kind of the suffering

because he was not outstanding in any one area that really stood out. I mean, for Kinsler, his problem is that he was the third best second baseman on the ballot and even the best second baseman on the ballot by war is not getting 50%. So if you've got Chase Utley and Dustin Pedroia, it's tough to find room for Ian Kinsler in there. Tory Hunter suffers from the same thing in that he's the third best center fielder on the ballot. If you're looking at Carlos Beltran and Andrew Jones as being the top two. Ben Zobrist, though, I think has a greater impact on baseball history than a lot of guys that are getting by.

Compilers, many of them, multi-gold glove winners. Even the stat-head favorite like Bobby Abreu probably has had less impact on baseball history than Ben Zobrist has, for example. I think Zobrist's biggest problem, though, was just career length. Only 10 years with 250 plate appearances or more. And that's just not enough to get the kind of volume you need to really get voters'

attention. You know, it's not that much different from Troy Tulowitsky or somebody like that. If we don't have any more to say about this year's group, which is like very fun and interesting in terms of the players, but also I think in terms of the guys who ended up getting elected fairly straightforward. Maybe we can look ahead to next year, who are some of the new debutantes on that ballot? And do you want to make any early predictions that no one will hold you to about who might make up that class? Yeah, so the top, this does not look like a very strong class. We don't have a single newcomer with even a 50 jaws. The only newcomer with even 50 war is Cole Hamels. Now,

Cole Hamels to me, I think has a compelling case, especially now that we are keeping Felix around. Cole Hamels has about 10 more war, does not have the Sion award that Felix has, but was on a World Series winning team, on another World Series team, and I think a few other playoff teams. So he has some October highlights to go with what he's done, generally a pretty good postseason resume. If I'm finding room for Felix on my ballot, I probably have to find room for Hamels

because I don't see any reason not to vote for Hamels if I'm voting for Felix. The other guy who I think is an impact player, former most valuable player, Ryan Braun, has a PED suspension. And not just any PED suspension, he has a PED suspension where he went f***ing Lance Armstrong and tried to smear the people who caught him.

And I, boy, I really have a problem with that. And I kind of wrote a career kiss off for him when he retired. And I don't think I've gotten any, I don't think my IR is any less than it was then. Certainly he was an exciting player to watch and he helped define a very interesting era of Brewers baseball, but boy, that's a black mark. I don't think, you know, I can't cut him any slack for if I'm not cutting Manny Ramirez

or Alex Rodriguez any slack. I suspect most voters will see will see it similarly especially because it is a shortish career with modest totals. I mean 350 home run, 352 home runs sure that's not nothing but we're also talking about a career that's just not even 7500 plate appearances so you know I don't think he's going to do much and then below you know the next guys below him are Alex Gordon, Shinsu Chu, Edwin Encarnacion, Nick Marcaecus, not close to 3000 hits. Sorry, guys. The dumbest hypothetical I have ever had to address multiple times was the Nick Marcaecus one. It was fun once. A sec, by the second time I was, I was ready to, ready to, once. By the second time I was ready to commit a crime in order to stop somebody. Yeah, it's a pretty lean year, which I think makes it a good year for Retrenchment. And I think

it's, to the extent that anyone is disappointed Beltran missed out this year, he's got a very clear opening next year, and likewise for Jones. So I suspect that it's those two guys at most and maybe just Beltran. Potley will certainly benefit from having that opening and probably the pitchers as well, Pettit and Felix and maybe Mark Burley because he was kind of the odd man out in these starting pitcher considerations. I've included, I included Pettit last year. I included Felix in Pettit's spot this year. You know, I don't start counting votes for my own ballot until I'm midway through my process.

I try not to think too hard about it because I mostly just want to think about each candidate and you know, what I see in them and what, you know, what kind of story I want to tell with them candidate and what I see in them and what kind of story I want to tell with them first as opposed to whether, oh yes, I'm going into this with the idea that I'm going to fit this guy on my ballot. Right. Yeah. When you said there's really no reason to not vote for Hamill's if you're voting for

Felix, initially I was thinking, well, didn't Felix have a better peak? And maybe, but not by that much, really, as you define it. And Felix just, he felt more like a Hall of Famer, and so did David Wright, for that matter, and things happened. And they happened to both of those guys, different things, but things that cut short the productive part of their career. But yeah, Hamill's, cut short the productive part of their career. But yeah, Hamels, I think the statistical case is there or fairly strong, but Felix still has that aura of he was just acknowledged as the best pitcher in baseball, at least for a few years there and just felt like he was going to be that guy. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that Felix developed a cult-like following because he was so

exciting. And you know, Hamels was an excellent pitcher. He did not have that a cult-like following because he was so exciting. And, you know, Hamels was excellent pitcher. He did not have that same cult-like following, except, well, you know, he did not have that same cult-like following. Let's just put it that way. Very handsome, he had his pants, but. Very handsome, yes, exactly. I don't want to, and I don't want to pun that,

anyone who thinks that. Yeah, well, and I do wonder, and, you know, I'm sure this will be something that you sort of contemplate as you weigh them against each other. Like I do wonder if Hamels had managed one Sai Yang, like what would that have done to our understanding of them relative to each other, right? Whereas like with Felix, not only did he win one,

but there was a sense, at least among Mariners fans, where it was like, oh, maybe second place those couple of times he did, it wasn't good enough. You know, he should have had multiple set. Right. He had multiple, yes, multiple top five, two second places in a fourth place. Right. Hamels never got higher than fifth.

And I'd have to look at that closely year by year to see if he was particularly jobbed out of one off hand. I don't get the sense that he was because I don't see like him leading the league in the RA as as Felix did twice or leading in war. They do have a lot of similarities and it'll be worth unpacking those. Yeah. I think with Felix, I don't know, maybe people are gravitating more toward peak than they used to relative to career.

That's just sort of my sense of things. Like if- It's a different, it's a smaller definition of peak than I'm using, but that's not to, you know, which is not to say that my peak is, you know, that my definition of peak is the only one. You know, when I started JAWS, I was using five years. I found that seven years did a better job of explaining what I was seeing in the Hall of Fame at the time, but it's not something that I have futzed with, uh, very much, you know, since, since that inception here, just for

comparison purposes here though, let's see, Hamels is 71st in S-Jaws, the uh, workload adjusted version of Jaws and Felix is 97th. So there's a bit of daylight between the two of them, whereas you've got Burley and Pettit are 79th and 82nd, very close together. Cole Hamels is a bit above that. Cole Hamels is in fact above Chris Sale. And he's right there with Tim Hudson,

who I didn't give the time of day to when he was on the ballot. He's above Oral Hershizer, who's somebody who I've said I would vote for in a committee process. And Cole Hamels is actually 0.1 points below Johan Santana, the patron saint of lost cause, Hall of Fame candidacies among short career pitchers.

So I think there you go. To me, that's kind of where a lot of this started for me was when I was looking at the five-year outlook and starting to think, oh boy, yeah, To me, that's kind of where a lot of this started for me was when I was looking at the five-year outlook and starting to think, oh boy, yeah, Cole Hamels is probably the guy that I need to think about. And if I'm thinking about Hamels,

I probably need to think about Felix. Yeah, I was gonna say if Santana hit the ballot now, I think he would get a longer hearing and more support. Yet another guy with the battery allegations against him at one time. Yeah, but I think based on just his on-field performance, I think it's kind of incredible how quickly some things have changed. Like Kenny Lofton going one and done, that was just 12 years ago. There's no way that would happen now. And yeah, things have changed. And I guess mostly for the better when it comes to at least agreeing with the players that I would value, but there were, what percent used

it? About a quarter of the voters used all 10 slots this year, which was roughly in line with where it usually is. And the average ballot had a little fewer than seven names. And I think maybe if you adjusted for the quality of the players on the ballot, that would be up a little bit because you had a graph in one of your pieces about the number of players per year who cleared the Jaws standards. And this year was well below the last decade. So I think there's more of a contingent that's just like, I'm a big hall person and these guys are going to get in eventually and so I'm not going to stand in their way. Actually, Sam Miller, I don't know if you read his ballot for pebble hunting, but he basically took that tack, which was just, well, I'll just read a snippet of what he

said. He pointed to a lot of guys who they didn't get a lot of support at first and then eventually they did. And he said, a lot of these guys are going to get in eventually. And I'm quoting, when you accept this, there's really not much point being a hardline gatekeeper trying to maintain some restrictive standard, which for me had been 60 or 65 war. That would have meant I'd vote against Dustin Pedroia this year, but Dustin Pedroia at some point is probably going to be in the hall of fame. Of course, Pedroia will make it. Harold Baines made it. The only real question is whether I want to help him or slow him down." And Sam linked to a piece that I wrote years ago

when Baines got in about how if Baines were the standard, then there'd be like four times as many Hall of Famers as there are. And he said that he wrestled with the stance a little in the comments of his piece because he doesn't... If everyone had that stance basically like, they're all going to get in eventually, whatever Baines is in, let's let them all in. I do think it would water down the honor of getting into the hall to the point that people would care a little less about it. And people care about the hall more than the football hall of fame. I don't think that's because of the character clause difference. I think there are other reasons for that, but I think it has to maintain some standard. And so if all the BBA voters looked at the guys who committees let in long after who didn't meet

those statistical standards and we just said, sure, you're in, you're in, then it would be nice in a sense. I don't want to be mean-spirited and keep someone out who'd be happy about being in, but on the other hand, I do think you have to kind of keep it for an elite class of player or it just won't mean quite as much. So I struggle, I guess. It's kind of a nice thing about human nature that if there aren't a lot of great candidates, some people will just say, yeah, but I want someone to get in. I'll just give this vote to that guy instead. But on the other hand, I'm kind of uncomfortable with it in a weird way. Yeah, I think, you know, the rigidity of my own process has softened over time. I mean, I've done this enough times. You know, it used to be very easy to just draw the line at, you know, is this guy above

the JAWS standard or not? Would he improve the JAWS of the Hall's second basement or not? Would he improve the jaws of the halls second basement or whatever? And as we've, I think, picked off some of the outliers outside the hall, a lot of times via error committee processes or late candidacy elections that we've seen so many, we're seeing fewer of these guys hit the jaw standards.

We're also seeing, I think, shorter careers, certainly at some positions, like you're seeing Buster Posey and Joe Mauer pack it in because of their concussions and the fact that, hey, you know, they've got generational wealth and small children at home. Why are they gonna take some more foul tips and risk CTE themselves, you know, when they have kids they could be playing with

and enjoying the fine careers that they've assembled? And it's just like, yeah, there's a lot of these guys that are stepping away earlier because they made their money. They don't have to play till they're 42. It's not to begrudge anybody who does want to, but I think the incentives are different in this era of higher salaries and greater understanding of the long-term impacts of certain injuries and things like that.

And as we've learned all this, my own standards have loosened a little bit. Certainly with the pitching, I see that it's definitely something that we have to think about. I'm less career-oriented and more peak-oriented now than I was. So while I did not consider Wright or Pedroia very hard for my open slots, I did think about them. And I did think, you know, there's probably a point in time where if he's on the ballot 10 years, I'm probably going to vote for Pedroia

or something like that. And, you know, to get back to what Sam Miller said, do I want to stand in his way or not? I think the way I would put it is I have higher electoral priorities than that, but I haven't ruled out the possibility that I could support a Dustin Pedroia or something like that. Yeah. And I guess if the BBWA voters lowered their bar, then maybe the committees would lower their bar even more.

And suddenly we'd see sort of sub-banes, statistical cases. And then I'm in the hall of fame. I think it's not just lowering the standards. I think it's also just weighing things differently. I mean, I think if you weigh the postseason more heavily, you know, some of these guys who had a bigger World Series presence or whatever, like David Ortiz, I think is a good example. By Jaws, David Ortiz is like a 45 Jaws guy, not somebody I would think of voting for off the head. But when you add like that massive postseason stuff, it's impact on championships and things like that,

it's like, it's pretty obvious that David Ortiz belongs in the Hall of Fame. I've voted for him despite maybe not being so sure that I would a few years out. He was in the case book and he was potentially the only person that I profiled at length that I might not have voted for. And I was like, wait, what are you doing, Jay? I think if you weigh postseason stuff and Sam, I think made a good argument for weighing the postseason more heavily. And some of this is stuff that I mentioned with the Pettit, when we talked about Pettit.

I think that maybe we do need to think harder about that stuff. And if we do, it's going to be harder to attach these standards just to regular season totals. We'll have to think more about the postseason factor as well. And lastly, I guess, are you at all surprised that the framing case has really not resonated whatsoever? I don't know whether it'd be different if baseball reference added framing to its war, maybe.

But it's, like a lot of the guys who it might help, they don't need that really to advance their case. Like Posey, Mauer, they didn't need it. Yachty probably won't need it. And so it's like this little blip where someone like Martin or McCann, and then if framing goes away, if we get ABS or even if we get a challenge system and there's a little less value from that, maybe it'll seem like this little blip where, you know, if we didn't have that data for most of baseball history and then maybe it won't matter as much and.

Yeah, it does bother, it does bother me that I'm frustrated that some people out there still seem to think that, that, you know, framing a pitch is cheating. Do you have any understanding of how baseball is played? You know, it's like the strike zone is such a malleable thing, even under the best of circumstances. I don't think you could fault any catcher for trying to get the advantage for his picture, let alone see it as cheating. I think we've seen enough of the reporting to know that we're not getting a full ABS system anytime soon. We're getting a challenge system at most. And then even that there's technological hurdles for, which make it quite possible that even that won't satisfy people. I have somebody who once was the cheerleader for the Robot Ops Now Brigade.

I'm forced to admit that I don't think that that's even what I want. So I think, you know, I think a lot of it comes down to the public is not maybe not was and even the public and by extension also, you know, the broader electorate is maybe not as cognizant of all the stuff about pitch framing as I think it would have needed to be in order to appreciate Martin's case or McCann's case, to the extent that I would have hoped. Whatever, I can only do so much about that. I'm one person. I'm certainly not the only person valuing pitch framing. We've seen it within the industry.

It was very apparent in the path of Russell Martin's career, things like that with, I think, Travis Sajic's book about, I was reviewing that, the Big Data Baseball book about Neil Huntington pursuing him for the Pirates and making him the top priority. And then Alex Anthopoulos doing the same for the Blue Jays. The industry appreciated these guys. I'm just surprised that did not seep more into the media coverage as uniformly as I

would have hoped. Yeah. Maybe some people's discomfort with it is that we don't have the same quality of data for the whole sweep of baseball history for framing that we do in other things, which is true to some extent with all aspects of defense. And yeah, we have the retro sheet estimates and then you can go even further back and look at with or without use style studies or based on balls and strikes and you can get a sense, but there are some catchers in the early days who, you know, we just know the reputation, but not necessarily the reality

there, but we evaluate with the best information we have. So we're always updating that. Real last question. We talked about next year's BBWA ballot, but there's also the contemporary baseball players ballot, right? The era committee. Good Lord. Yeah. We're a few years away from Negro leaguers being considered again, right? In the classic baseball, that's 2028, I think. And it's unfortunate, as you and others have noted, it's hard for guys to get in via those committees because there just aren't enough votes to go around. And so there are deserving players who haven't gotten the support there, but

also we're going to get a whole mess probably with the contemporary baseball court, because the, I guess the bonds and, and his ilk and others who the BBWA passed over, this is 1980 and on, right? So we've got at the very least, if you're just if you're thinking about this just in terms of who got high percentages from the writers and therefore probably should have first track here, it's Bonds, Clemens, Schilling and Sheffield. Oh boy. I mean, welcome to the party. And then then you've got Jeff Kent right now. Those are guys who all got 46.5% upward and some of them in the 60s and 70s.

Already, it's very hard to make a case that a one and done guy, let's just say Lou Whitaker, for example, or a guy who faded after two or three years on the ballot, Dwight Evans, for example, is going to have any kind of shot in that room, you know, and then to say nothing of all the pitchers who are probably overdue for consideration.

It really comes down to, I think, seeing this over and over again, I think I have such a level of frustration with regards to the way that, you know, the one and done players are consistently bypassed for these spots. Ted Simmons is the only one to get elected. Other than Lou Whitaker, I can't even think of another one who's even gotten on another ballot. Bobby Gritch hasn't, I mean,

Johann Santana can't even be considered for it for another few years, but he's not gonna get a shot like that. Kenny Lofton had an opening. I mean, he could, in theory, be on the next ballot, this this this contemporary ballot. But boy, if you couldn't get, you know, couldn't get 5% when bonds Clemens, you know, etc. were on the writers ballot, he's not going to leapfrog those guys for election, I don't think

in an error committee format. So it's just, yeah, it's a continued frustration with that process process to some degree, even though, you know, it does occasionally produce a result that I'm happy about, like Dick Allen or, or, or whoever. So, yeah, it's going to be a real logjam and no idea where that goes and, and how, how that'll play out. I accept that if the Hall of Fame can choose the electorate, I think we can ascertain that it's not going to be a favorable jury for Bonds and Clemens to be judged by. Well, your work has been invaluable as always and your advocacy for some players. We appreciate you giving us all this time when you were probably exhausted and have done a million media hits. So we'll link to all your work.

Of course, people should get the Cooperstown Casebook if they haven't already. Thanks for doing this year in and year out. Sure thing. Always a pleasure. this year in and year out. Sure thing, always a pleasure. That'll do it for today. Thanks to Jay and thanks to you for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild

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