It's always corny when a character in a movie utters the actual theme of the script, but sometimes it's acceptable. A good example is when the title character from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" says, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Yeah, it's hard to read the words and not roll your eyes. But Ferris was right. Time does move awfully fast. For one thing, if they made a chronologically sound sequel to that movie, the Ferris character would now be 51 years old. For another, Joe Mauer just retired. Are you kidding me? Mauer is done? Fifteen years have gone past since he debuted as the hotshot kid making a splash in his hometown? Yep. That's it for one of the greatest Twins, tearful farewell news conference and all.
The appropriate thing to do at times like this is to evaluate a newly retired star for his Hall of Fame worthiness. That's exactly what we're about to do, even though we have about five years before it really matters. One thing about that time gap we should address up front: The landscape of catching has changed, and what it will look like by the time Mauer hits the Hall ballot is impossible to say. This might skew the lens through which his career is perceived.
In 2004, when Mauer first entered the majors, there were 20 backstops who caught at least 100 games. This season, there were 12. Mauer's career high for games caught was 139, set in 2008. That total ranked third in the majors. In the 10 seasons since then, only three catchers have caught more games in one season -- Salvador Perez (2014, 146), Yadier Molina (2016, 146) and Matt Wieters (2013, 140). In the 10 years prior to 2008, there were 21 instances of a catcher appearing behind the plate in at least 139 games.
This season, the leader in games caught was the Dodgers' Yasmani Grandal with 135, and he came off the bench in 25 of those appearances. The leader in innings was Chicago's Willson Contreras, with 1,109⅔, the lowest league-leading total in a non-labor-dispute season since 1989. In fact, according to the FanGraphs database, which has innings going back to 1956, the only other time a league leader had fewer than Contreras' total was Yogi Berra in 1957.
What does that mean? It could mean a couple of things. For one, as teams increasingly quantify the effect of fatigue on player performance, the workloads required for starting catchers is shrinking. For another, and you hear this more and more, there just aren't as many star-level backstops as there used to be. Maybe that's cyclical, maybe it's not. But when it comes to Mauer, keep in mind that the context we see for his career today might look a little different in a few years if the days of the 1,000-inning catcher have passed us by. He might well be a part of the last wave of what we've come to think of as an everyday catcher.
Other than one (rather moving) token appearance this season behind the plate, Mauer caught his last game in 2013, which was his 10th big league season. He played out his post-concussion career as a roughly league-average first baseman. During these last few post-catching years, Mauer hit .278/.359/.388, with a .746 OPS, in a park that helped his average and depressed his power. The average American League first baseman hit .252/.327/.438, with a .765 OPS, during that span.
Mauer's contact and on-base ability always had value, and he graded out as plus-22 defensive runs saved at first base. But his final few years were clearly less than star-level. That was Joe Mauer the first baseman. It's Joe Mauer the catcher who will make the player's case for Cooperstown. And it's a good one.
I like to start this kind of analysis just by looking at the player's record in a vacuum, before we get into the context of his performance. That's pretty much what the various Bill James measures do that you can find on every player page at Baseball-Reference.com. Mauer's 1,858 games played is on the low side for a Hall of Famer, but it's not unheard of. It's more than Hall of Famers like Ernie Lombardi, Bill Dickey and Mickey Cochrane, all fellow catchers. It's also more than other big names like Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Ralph Kiner, Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson, though all of those players had shortened careers because of World War II or, in Robinson's case, because of the color line.
The low games total also means that Mauer comes up short in James' Hall of Fame Standards, which focuses on career totals. His score of 34 is well below the average of 50 for a Hall of Famer. He finishes with a solid career total of 2,123 hits, 143 of which were homers, 1,018 runs, 923 RBIs and 939 walks. The highest ranking Mauer has in any of the career leaderboards (as far as counting stats go) is the walks, which ranks 151st.
Mauer fares better when we get into the Hall of Fame Monitor, which simply counts up the Hall of Fame-type stuff a player accomplished during his career. Mauer rates a 92 in that measure, with the standard for a likely Hall of Famer being 100. He won three batting titles, led the American League in on-base percentage twice and slugging percentage once, won three Gold Gloves as a catcher, took five Silver Slugger awards and of course was the American League MVP in 2009. (Well played, Mauer.)
So far, this is looking like a fringy Hall case, probably a little short given the lack of gaudy career totals. But you knew we'd come around to WAR eventually, and to the JAWS system invented by Jay Jaffe of FanGraphs, so let's do that.
Mauer's 55.1 career bWAR (Baseball-Reference WAR) ranks 240th all time and is 151st among position players. That's still fringy. There are roughly 161 position players in the Hall because of their on-field performance. Well, a good number of those players shouldn't be there, owing to some old veterans-committee shenanigans, so Mauer would rate near the bottom of the list in terms of career WAR.
But when you home in on WAR among those who spent the bulk of their years at catcher, suddenly Mauer's Hall case springs to life. In terms of career WAR, Mauer ranks eighth among the catchers, right between Berra and Dickey. Every player ranked ahead of him is in the Hall, and so are three of the next four ranked behind him. (The exception is Ted Simmons, a topic for another day.)
Mauer comes out even better when you zero in on the JAWS definition of peak value, which is a player's seven best seasons. Mauer's 39.0 peak value ranks fifth among catchers, behind Gary Carter, Johnny Bench, Mike Piazza and Ivan Rodriguez. When you add it all up, Mauer's 47.0 JAWS score ranks seventh all-time among catchers.
If Mauer had quit after his 2013 season and never spent these past few years at first base, he would have finished with 44.7 WAR. That would make his JAWS score 41.9, which would rank 12th or 13th among catchers, depending how the decimal points would fall for Mauer and Gabby Hartnett. The only catcher ranked ahead of Mauer who isn't in the Hall would be Simmons, and he should be in.
We've got a few years to really drill down on Mauer's case, but beyond the cold numbers, he'll be an attractive candidate. He retires as a one-franchise player, and since he's from the area, it's arguable that Mauer will be remembered as the face of the Twins, or at least as one of a small circle of Minnesota's elite, along with Rod Carew, Kirby Puckett, Harmon Killebrew and Bert Blyleven.
My guess is that Mauer will be an attractive Hall candidate when his time comes. If he is making an acceptance speech in Cooperstown, New York, a few summers from now, it will be deserved.
What the numbers say
Mauer will first be eligible for the Hall ballot in the round of voting that will take place five years from now for inductees in the 2024 ceremony. It could be a very interesting ballot.
For one thing, the backlog of players who have been stigmatized by association with performance-enhancing drugs should be cleared away for the most part. Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Manny Ramirez will have all moved beyond their 10-year windows of eligibility. We'll have to deal with Alex Rodriguez at some point, but the balloting won't be as dominated by this issue.
In addition to Mauer, there are a number of players who might have played their final game in 2018 and are worthy of Hall consideration. Among the 50 or so best active players (by career value), you have Ichiro Suzuki, David Wright, Chase Utley, Adrian Beltre, Mauer, Hanley Ramirez and Victor Martinez. You might want to throw Bartolo Colon into that mix as well.
We don't know if Beltre or Colon will hang on to play in 2019, and there have been rumors that Ichiro is going to make at least a token appearance next season, when the Mariners play an early-season series in Japan. That would push the start of his eligibility clock back a year. But it's also possible that all the aforementioned players will be on the 2024 ballot.
All of them will eventually get a full treatment, but for now, I'm just going to list their key metrics, all of which can be found at Baseball-Reference.com.
Again, the standard for Hall of Fame Monitor is 100, and the average for those deemed worthy by Hall of Fame Standards is 50. The JAWS scores will be listed by the average JAWS score at that position for players in the Hall. I'm listing them in order from most likely to least likely to eventually make it to Cooperstown.
The cutoff line for eventual induction would likely fall between Mauer and Wright.
Since you asked
In case you missed it, a crack All-Star squad of MLB players just finished a tour of the Far East, where it played the Japanese national team. Impeccable sportsmanship and goodwill were on ample display. Oh, and Japan kicked the tar out of the MLB guys, winning five of six games.
"They did a nice job of battling our guys and putting the ball in play," Don Mattingly, who managed the big leaguers, told MLB.com after one game. "They had a number of hits the opposite way and they've gotten big hits. You know, there isn't any way to go around it, they did a nice job."
Clearly, times have changed. According to MLB.com, American teams visited Japan in 11 different years between 1920 and 1956. The U.S. went 156-5 in those games. The big leaguers just lost more games in Japan in a week than they did back then in 37 years.
I don't guess you'd want to make too big a deal out of this, but the results of the series do remind me of a conversation I had with a Japanese reporter during the postseason. First, let me hit you with a few numbers:
The JCL is the Japanese Central League, which is the designated-hitter league in that country, while the JPL is the Japanese Pacific League, where the pitchers bat.
Obviously, Japanese hitters are doing more in terms of getting balls into play than their MLB counterparts. However, just spot-checking a few past seasons, the trends there are similar to here -- more strikeouts, more homers, falling batting averages.
During the just-completed MLB-Japan series, the strikeout rates were roughly the same for the squads, with the MLB team getting 9.7 whiffs per 9 innings to Japan's 9.2. The Japanese pitchers had lower walk rates (2.2 to 3.5) and thus had better K-BB ratios. Still, even though Japan won most of the games, it's not like its hitters displayed some magical ability to make contact.
None of this is a big enough sample to mean anything. Still, I just want to float something, as I did to that Japanese reporter back in October. He just nodded at me, likely thinking I was just being nice, but I was serious. My thought is that if an MLB owner is looking to push back against current on-the-field trends, why not try to hire some executives and development people from Japan and try to construct some organizational philosophies that combat the surge in whiffs and the dive in balls in play?
It's just an idea. Heck, if you like bunts, they sacrificed 3.9 times more often in Japan than they did in the majors this past season. Alas, those rates are falling, too. It seems that baseball and analytics are becoming one on a global basis.