Who I’d pick for the Baseball Hall of Fame
Ichiro, of course. But then the choices get harder.
I’m gradually making my way back home after spending essentially all of the past month on the road. That should lead to an increase in newsletter volume: travel tends to produce a lot of half-finished ideas and drafts, and it’s been a long while since I’ve felt like I had an open stretch of runway without looming deadlines or commitments. Today, though, let’s close the loop on my 2-part series on the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Cooperstown is nearly certain to get at least three new members when it announces its new class next week: Ichiro Suzuki, who has been named on every publicly disclosed ballot so far; CC Sabathia, who has been listed on 92 percent; and Billy Wagner, who fell just five votes short of the 75 percent threshold for induction last season but has already picked up more than that in revealed ballots.
A fourth potential inductee, Carlos Beltran, is also currently above 75 percent in ballots tracked so far — but voters who don’t reveal their picks publicly are typically stingier with their votes. So he might have to wait another year or two.
While a 3- or 4-player class would be high by recent standards, I'd be more generous if I had a ballot. As baseball continues to expand internationally, with competition as stiff as ever, I think recent cohorts tend to be underrepresented in Cooperstown. More than 40 percent of the 28 players on this year’s ballot were born outside the 50 states, including five from Venezuela, three from the Dominican Republic, and one player each from Canada, Curacao, Japan, and Puerto Rico. And as I outlined last week, I tend to weight peak performance and postseason play more than most actual HoF voters do — and those are favorable categories for this year's nominees.
Based on the system that I outlined last week, I’ve graded candidates from 0 to 10 in eight categories that reflect a mix of WAR, landmark achievements — and yes, some degree of “intangibles.” Frankly, I think many voters are doing this implicitly — I’m not a member of the BBWAA so don’t have an actual ballot — but could stand to be more transparent about it. So I've tried to quantify my intuitions — in some cases, as I described in Part I, with assistance from Claude and ChatGPT. Obeying the limit of a 10-player maximum ballot, I have eight clear “yesses” and two borderline thumbs-ups — one of which might surprise you for not being more emphatic. And then there are a couple of other players I'm not entirely sold on but consider close calls.
I'll list candidates in seven tiers of four players each. (There's no particular significance to the groupings: it's just convenient from a charts perspective to have the same number of players in each tier.) In interpreting the overall scores, which weigh the comparatively objective categories more heavily than the “tangified” intangibles, I'd use the following numbers for guidance. It corresponds reasonably well to a temperature scale: a score of 70 is “warm,” 85 is “hot,” and anything 100 or above is scorching:
>=125 points: GOAT candidate
>=100 points: “Inner Circle” Hall of Famer
~75-801 points: Average/typical Hall of Famer
~65 points: HoF bubble. Players with 65 or more points tend to meet my spidey sense for who belongs in Cooperstown, while players with under 65 points fall just short.
>=55 points: Worthy of consideration. Think of this as “honorable mention” if you like. It doesn’t indicate a Hall of Famer, but it's the threshold where you shouldn't dismiss a player’s case out of hand.
While it would be more aesthetically pleasing to have Ichiro Suzuki listed first, I only evaluate PED use and other factors related to the Hall’s mandate to consider “integrity, sportsmanship, character” at the margin — and Alex Rodriguez was the better player by a comfortable distance. He might even almost be in my all-time top 10, a “politically incorrect” list2 that would also include Barry Bonds and probably Roger Clemens.
I said almost everything that I wanted to say about PED users in Part I. The extent to which steroids have dominated the discussion about the Hall of Fame for nearly two decades now — at least since Mark McGwire first made the ballot in 2007 — is a good example of the Streisand Effect. Instead of moving past the “steroids era” to celebrate baseball’s past and future, the annual voting process has instead just served to relitigate it. I do consider PED use; it’s why A-Rod and Manny Ramirez, the only two players on this year’s ballot to have been suspended at any point for steroids, get a 0 in the integrity, sportsmanship, and character category. I just don’t consider it to be a litmus test.
Even without steroid use, you could downgrade A-Rod on the intangibles. Splitting his career between Seattle, Arlington, and the Bronx, he was never exactly a beloved player, and he had something of a postseason monkey on his back until an exceptionally effective (.a 365/.500/.808 slash line) in winning the World Series with the Yankees in 2009. But I think people underrate how game-changing it was to have a good defensive shortstop (two Gold Gloves) who also hit 696 lifetime home runs, including 50+ on three occasions. In NBA terms, A-Rod would be dubbed a “unicorn.”
With over 3000 hits in MLB despite not reaching the US until his age-27 season, Ichiro Suzuki has more than enough to make it based on his MLB resume alone — even before considering the intangible categories, where he tends to max out. He will possibly be the second unanimous selection after Mariano Rivera.
At the risk of being the turd in the punchbowl, I’d note that WAR is not quite so keen on Ichiro as the traditional evaluations, however. The consistent theme you’ll see throughout this newsletter is that WAR doesn’t value batting average as much as the “eye test” does. In general, I think WAR is right about this. We all learned from Moneyball that OBP is the more robust stat, and Suzuki’s lifetime OBP is lower than you might guess (.355).
Could WAR and OBP be undervaluing Ichiro? I’d buy a little bit of that stock. He was always a hard player for my projection system, PECOTA, to evaluate because there were so few modern comparables.
The more significant issue, though — not for whether he deserves to be in Cooperstown but for just how high up he ranks — is what to do with Ichiro’s Japanese league statistics. Counting his seasons in Japan, Suzuki is the all-time professional baseball hit leader, with 4367.