On Sept. 8, the Baseball Hall of Fame will hold its first induction ceremony in more than two years with a scaled-down, midweek event in Cooperstown, New York. In addition to sports labor pioneer Marvin Miller, three former players will join the ranks of the immortals: Derek Jeter, Ted Simmons and Larry Walker.
Among the players, Jeter was a no-brainer, always destined to stand with the greats of the game. The cases of the other two player inductees were more of a slow burn: Walker was on the ballot for the maximum 10 years before finally clearing the 75% threshold. Simmons retired in 1988 before being tabbed by a Hall veterans committee at the 2019 winter meetings.
When they made it, they made it. The door to the Hall of Fame swings in only one direction. But ultimately, why did Walker and Simmons finally separate themselves from other players whose careers were of similar quality? And if they are Hall of Famers now, why did they have to wait so long?
Would Walker have gotten in sooner had the riddle that is Coors Field not played such a large role in his career? Would Simmons have made it at all had the advances in analytics not arrived to revisit his place in the historical pecking order? Now it doesn't matter. They will be speechifying in Cooperstown on Sept. 8.
This not to denigrate the feats of Simmons or Walker, but how much really separates the career of Walker from, say, Minnie Minoso? Or Simmons from Jorge Posada? What about all the other players who hover on or near the same performance tier? It might really come down to what Bob Dylan called a simple twist of fate -- a thing that either did or did not happen.
These players remind us that so often, context is king. Each of these players were as good as many of those who made it to Cooperstown. And with one little narrative tweak to their story, perhaps that's where they would be today. Either way, their underlying abilities remain the same. Their Hall destiny is not determined by ability, but how we perceive that ability.
But what if those perceptions were filtered through a different lens?
1. Would Dave Kingman have made it to Cooperstown if he played his entire career with the Red Sox?
Say what you will about Dave Kingman, the lumbering slugger from the 1970s and 80s, but the man had presence. It wasn't always a welcome presence. During the prime of his career, he had a season in which he was traded three times. But he was 6-foot-6, nicknamed "Kong" and had a penchant for hitting distinctively long home runs.
Kingman wound up with 442 career homers and for a time after his retirement, that was the most homers ever hit by a non-Hall of Famer. If Kong's game had been embroidered with a good mix of secondary skills and a reputation for solid intangibles, those 442 dingers would have been enough for Hall of Fame consideration. But Kingman had no secondary skills. In "The New Bill James Historical Abstract," James listed Kong as one of the five worst percentage players of all time. As for his intangible qualities, let's just say they didn't help his case.
When he retired after the 1986 season -- in which he hit 35 homers with a sub-.700 OPS -- Kingman waited five years to get three votes on the only Hall ballot on which he would appear. But what if the circumstances of his career changed just a little?
Say he came up with the Boston Red Sox and was able to endear himself just enough to the organization to spend his entire career with Fenway Park as his home ballpark. Kingman did play at Fenway during his career as a road player. Here's what he did: 20 games including 18 starts, 1.162 OPS, .816 slugging percentage and 13 home runs in 84 plate appearances.
The thing about split statistics such as that is that they can fool you into extrapolating too much from too little. Those numbers don't really say much, if anything, about Kingman as a player. He just happened to hit well over a few games in a venue that was conducive to his swing. Had he played for the BoSox full time, he would not have averaged 93 homers per 600 plate appearances as he did during that small sample.
Still, there is little doubt that he would have hit more homers if he had played his career in Boston, likely as a career DH. He was a righty-hitting, dead-pull, flyball hitter with tremendous raw power and Boston has that tantalizing tall green fence in left field. The context conversion tool at Baseball Reference estimates that Kingman would have hit 489 home runs had he played his career for the Red Sox in a league environment equivalent to 1979. That might undersell what he would have done.
Also: Kingman played about three-quarters of his career in the National League. He was a good athlete -- he could run well enough when he wanted to, and he threw well enough that he had been a star pitcher at USC during his college days. Nevertheless, by all accounts his defense was somewhere between indifferent to abominable.
But if Kingman had been in the AL, starting in 1973 his lackluster defense could have been removed from the equation as a full-time DH. He could have remained there for years, mostly unchallenged, until Carl Yastrzemski reached his latter seasons. Still, with DH as an option, Kingman could have logged more games. Thus it seems almost certain that in this what-if scenario, Kingman would have hit more than 500 homers.
Dave Schoenfield ranked the 28 actual members of the 500-home run club just the other day, when Miguel Cabrera joined it. With modern analytics applied to Kingman's career, he would no doubt rank last on such a list and he wouldn't be close to No. 28.
The thing is that when Kingman retired and when he first appeared on the Hall ballot, voters did not know about modern analytics. They would have seen him play and had the same misgivings about his strikeouts and low batting average as before. As a DH, his flailing and loafing in the field would have been a lesser factor than it was. And they would know that he was one of the few players ever to reach that magical 500-homer milestone. During and after Kingman's career, certain milestones like 500 homers, 3,000 hits and 300 pitching wins were considered all but an automatic punch card for Cooperstown.
So with this admittedly major tweak to his career context, it's at least possible that Kong would have gotten a lot more Hall support. Really, it's hard to imagine that he'd have gotten in under any circumstance. But if Kong had reached 500 homers, some would have made his case. Leaving out a player who hit that milestone would have then been an unprecedented omission.
Anyway, don't we now kind of have a league full of Dave Kingmans?
2. Would Dwight Evans have made it to Cooperstown if win-based value metrics had been widely available during his career?
Let's start with the old anonymous player comparison:
Player A: .854 OPS, 1,249 runs, 382 homers, 1,451 RBIs
Player B: .840 OPS, 1,470 runs, 385 homers, 1,384 RBIs
Who you got? It's not an easy call. You need more info, right? But first, keep in mind that Player A (OK, it's Jim Rice, Evans' longtime teammate) is in the Hall, and Player B -- Evans -- is not.
The difference venue context is nil, as both played for the Red Sox their whole careers, except for one season Evans spent with Baltimore to close it out. Evans played longer, giving him more chances to compile counting numbers, but from a percentage standpoint, they were close.
Neither was or is a slam-dunk Hall of Famer. Rice lingered on the ballot for 15 years when a player could stay for that long, before finally nudging past the 75% threshold in his final year of eligibility. Evans lasted three years, dropping off after slipping to 3.9% in 1999.
Rice has an edge in OPS, but it's close. It's instructive to consider the slash categories separately:
Rice: .298/.352/.502
Evans: .272/.370/.470
Rice was a more aggressive swinger who hit as many as 46 homers in a season, which he did in 1978 when he was named AL MVP. He was often referred to as "feared," meaning that the very sight of him at the plate was supposed to send opposing hurlers into a panic. And perhaps it did.
Evans never bore such a label, yet when you pick apart the above percentages, the isolated power figure for the two hitters was very close (.204 for Rice, .198 for Evans). In other words, over the course of their fine careers, these players hit for about the same amount of power, in the same ballpark, and wound up with a similar OPS. Rice got there with a higher average; Evans got there with more walks.
And therein lies the disparity between the Hall cases of Rice and Evans, which was that during the era in which they played, Rice did the things that caught the eye of those who judge the relative merits of a player. Evans did some of it, but he wasn't accomplished in some of the categories that people most prized.
An example: In 1985, Evans hit just .263 -- about league average that season -- but led the AL in walks, hit 29 homers, scored 110 runs and won his eighth Gold Glove. Rice hit .291 with 27 homers and 103 RBIs. Their OPS figures were about the same. Rice made the All-Star team. Evans did not.
What Evans could have used was some WAR. If the metric would have held sway in Evans' time, as it does now, his career would have been viewed very differently. The average Hall of Famer has about 67 bWAR. Evans finished at 67.1. Rice finished at 47.7.
This is not to say that WAR is the end-all, be-all of player evaluation. But no serious analyst would engage in a topic about big league baseball in this day and age without at least being aware of what the leading versions of WAR (Baseball Reference and Fangraphs) have to say.
If that were the case in Evans' time, his career would have been a slow burn, gaining acclaim as it went along. Unlike Rice, Evans never had that huge single season where he entered into the best-right-now discussion -- though he might have had that in 1981, his best season, which was cut short because of that year's strike.
Evans hit 50 career bWAR in 1985, his age-33 season, and in a 2021 context, that would have caught some eyes. Someone would have written, "You know what: He's never been an MVP, but Dwight Evans is kind of having a Hall of Fame career." Analysts would have dived into the strength of his secondary skills and the tremendous value he produced as one of the game's all-time great defensive right fielders.
After that, he had four more very productive seasons. By the time he called it quits, if the internet had existed in its modern form, the baseball sites would have been flooded with Evans' Hall resume.
And there is no way that he would have dropped off the ballot after three years of soft support.
3. Would Jimmy Wynn have made it to Cooperstown if the Reds never exposed him to an arcane draft?
Here we return to park factors. Jim "The Toy Cannon" Wynn was an outfielder during the 1960s and '70s who was short of stature (he was listed at 5-foot-10, 160 pounds, at Baseball Reference, though he's usually referred to as standing 5-9) and long on ability. He retired after his age-35 season in 1977 with 291 career homers and 225 stolen bases.
Only 20 players have retired with at least those totals in those categories, and Wynn was tied for the shortest, at least in terms of listed height, along with Willie Mays and Rickey Henderson. That's neither here nor there, really, but you get an idea of why he was called The Toy Cannon.
Wynn had 55.8 bWAR at the time of his retirement, though neither he nor anyone else was aware of that fact in 1977. That's below the Hall average, but there are Hall of Fame center fielders with a lower figure, including Max Carey, Earl Averill and Kirby Puckett.
When you look at Wynn's stadium splits, the Astrodome was neither his best venue, nor his worst. He hit .263/.382/.457 there over 2,843 plate appearances. During his best six-year stretch (by bWAR, from 1965 to 1970), he hit .271/.387/.475 there, while slashing at .263/.367/.488 everywhere else.
So Wynn was a bit better at home, but the cavernous Astrodome depressed his power numbers. Wynn hit 137 career homers in home venues and 154 on the road. During those prime years, only five players hit more road homers than Wynn's 93: Willie Stargell, Hank Aaron, Frank Howard, Harmon Killebrew and Willie McCovey. All five are in the Hall of Fame.
Wynn ended up with the Astros because ... well, it's a long story. He played very well in one professional season in the Reds organization. As a Cincinnati native, who grew up not far from Crosley Field, he seemed a natural fit. At the time, if a player was not placed on a team's 40-man roster after his first pro season, then he was subject to a "first-year player" draft, and this is how Houston plucked him from the Reds.
During Wynn's career, only Pittsburgh's Forbes Field and Astrodome predecessor Colt Stadium yielded lower aggregate home run rates (1.3%) than the dome that became Wynn's home. At the other end of the spectrum was the Kingdome, which hosted big league games only during Wynn's final season, and Tiger Stadium. But closer to the upper end of the range were the parks in Cincinnati: Crosley Field (2.4%) and Riverfront Stadium (2.1%).
That brings us back to Judge Roy Hofheinz, the flamboyant owner of the early Colt 45s/Astros franchise, who was the driving force behind the construction of the Astrodome and the "Eighth Wonder of the World" hype that accompanied it.
When Hofheinz and his associates were awarded the National League expansion franchise that became the Colt 45s and, then, the Astros, it was understood that a new ballpark was part of the deal. Houston's initial big league venue, Colt Stadium, was never meant to be a permanent solution. Still, the new park didn't have to be built with the league's most daunting power alleys.
Part of the problem was likely that Hofheinz was less concerned with how the park would fit his baseball team and more with how well it would fit the numerous events he planned to host there and profit from. And profit he did.
The spoils didn't filter down to his hitters, like Wynn, Joe Morgan and Rusty Staub. Worse: Because park effects were so little understood at the time, Houston's early scouting successes were later undermined by some terrible trades, as the ballpark-warped numbers of the Astros' players weren't accurately judged.
Like Morgan, Wynn's real value was probably a mystery to the Houston brass. He was a noted power hitter despite the effects of the Astrodome. Like Evans, he hit for a low-ish average and struck out quite a bit. But he was an even more prolific walker than Evans, leading the NL with 148 free passes in 1967, when he posted a robust .436 on-base percentage.
But what if Wynn had stuck with the Reds and been allowed to mature along with the likes of Pete Rose, Frank Robinson, Tony Perez, Vada Pinson and Lee May? Obviously things panned out just fine for Cincinnati, but what if Wynn would have been along for the ride with his hometown National League dynasty and in hitter-friendly venues?
It's hard to quantify this. Wynn had an up-and-down career in some fairly strange ways. For instance, he was 43-for-47 in stolen bases in 1965, his age-23 season. Three years later, he was 11-for-28 on the basepaths. Later, he bracketed seasons in which he had OPS figures of .886 and .860 around his 1971 season, in which his OPS was .596.
As it was, Wynn had six seasons with five or more bWAR and three when he was over seven. Over time, he has come to be viewed as an underrated performer, but how would he have been rated in the first place as an integral member of the Big Red Machine of the 1970s?
4. Would Tommy John have made it to Cooperstown if Tommy John surgery had never been invented?
This is a chicken-and-egg proposition. The obvious fact is that when Dr. Frank Jobe performed the elbow procedure that rescued John's career in the mid-1970s -- the procedure we now know as Tommy John surgery -- John's Cooperstown hopes gained a second life.
So the question isn't about what might have happened to John if Jobe hadn't operated on him, or what baseball might look like without Jobe's pioneering efforts. It's more basic than that: What if John had never suffered the injury that led to the procedure that now bears his name, and has become more famous than the man himself?
Or to put it another way: How good was Tommy John before he got hurt, and where might he have ended up had he remained healthy?
We acknowledge that there are innumerable pitchers for whom you could ask the what-if question in regard to a career-altering injury. This, we posit, is a special case. Because it is, you know, the actual Tommy John.
John finished his career with 288 wins and has long been considered a borderline Hall of Fame case. There's no questioning the excellence of a career that began during the Kennedy administration and ended with George H.W. Bush in the White House, or his role in baseball history as the first recipient of Jobe's revolutionary technique.
The bottom line is that John is not in the Hall of Fame. He lasted the maximum 15 years on the ballot, from 1995 to 2009, but topped out at 31.7% of ballots during his final season of eligibility.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that if John had managed to eke out just 12 more career wins, he'd be kicking it in the Hall's plaque room with those freakishly lifelike sculptures of Ted Williams and Babe Ruth. This leaps back to the Kingman section of this treatise: At the time John finally hung up his spikes, 300 wins was an automatic ticket to immortality.
On the surface, this is just plain silly, even in the context of our understanding of just how much the human brain seizes upon nice, round integers. John's abilities as a big league hurler would not have been any different if he'd won, say, 12 of the 40 career starts he made in which he took a loss despite allowing two or fewer runs. That would have gotten him to 300 wins. He would have been the same pitcher.
Still, this what-if is not about that, either. It's about whether he would have gotten 12 more wins than he ended up with if he had never suffered the injury that led to the surgery that allowed his career to persist for 14 more seasons.
In reality, this is a shaky scenario. John's injury wasn't the product of a sudden, unexpected event, though it was depicted as such in some reports at the time, which suggested John had injured himself by overthrowing in an effort to prove Yogi Berra wrong for leaving him off the All-Star team. According to Jobe, it was the product of the kind of long-term abuse pitchers heap upon their elbows.
During the five seasons before the injury, John was 13-11 per 162 games with a 114 ERA+ and 1.253 WHIP. He missed the entire 1975 campaign -- when he might have been picking up those missing 12 wins -- recovering from the surgery. Then over the next five seasons, he went 18-9 per 162 games with a 121 ERA+ and 1.256 WHIP.
Those post-surgery numbers are roughly in line with what John had been doing for the Dodgers during the window of 1973 and 1974, when he had finally emerged from perceived mediocrity to become one of the NL's top starting pitchers.
We might be able to envision John extending that mid-70s success for a few years, hurling for a powerful Dodgers club. And maybe he would have still been a hot free agent during the winter of 1978, when he inked a deal to join the Yankees.
If John had kept on his 1974 pace and continued it through 1975, it's reasonable to tack on 23 more wins to his career total for that missing juncture of his career. That gets him to 311 unless you then start to consider that, perhaps, even if he had not blown out his elbow ligament in 1974, he still might not have lasted until 1989 without Jobe's deft touch in the surgical unit.
This is one where you've just got to believe what you want to believe. More importantly for anyone who might consider John's case on a future veterans committee: Are those 12 missing wins really that essential to honoring his place in the long continuum of the game's history?
5. Would Don Mattingly have made it to Cooperstown if he had missed the team bus in Milwaukee on June 4, 1987, and been late to County Stadium?
We will start this with a list of facts:
• Through the games of June 3, 1987, Don Mattingly had a healthy enough back that he was one of baseball's brightest stars.
• At some point during the pregame period before a contest in Milwaukee on June 4, 1987, he injured his back.
• There was an initial media report that stated Mattingly was hurt horsing around with pitcher Bob Shirley.
• Everybody then and since denies the horsing around story. Mattingly has maintained that he suffered the injury during infield practice.
• Shirley was released by the Yankees on June 5, 1987.
• Mattingly was a good player for a number of years after that, but his back was never the same and neither was his performance.
Thirty-four years after the fact, it doesn't really matter. Mattingly hurt his back and even if it was because of some kind of clubhouse tomfoolery, maybe his condition was such that he was going to have back problems anyway.
Let's pretend that Mattingly overslept in his comfortable room at the Pfister Hotel in downtown Milwaukee, perhaps because he'd been kept up by the ghosts who supposedly haunt the spaces of that lovely old facility and who have scared the wits out of many a professional athlete over the years.
That ghost keeps Mattingly up all night and by the time he wakes, the Yankees team bus has left for the ballpark and New York manager Sweet Lou Piniella is not feeling so sweet about it. Mattingly is ordered back to the hotel and doesn't have a chance to hurt his back.
First of all, the back injury was an aggravation of an old malady for Mattingly, who in interviews has said the problem was congenital and plagued him even as early as high school, when he played basketball and football as well as baseball. In that context, you might look at it as a situation when everything is exactly as it has to be.
Still, before the injury, Mattingly was just so freaking good. From his first full season in 1984 through that 1987 campaign, he was Donnie Baseball. He finished in the top 10 of MVP balloting all four seasons and won the award in 1985. He won the batting crown in 1984 (.343) and led the AL in RBIs the next season with 145. In 1986, he has 238 hits, leading the AL with a .967 OPS.
During those four seasons, Mattingly hit .337/.381/.560. Per 162 games, he put up 48 doubles, 31 homers, 127 RBIs and 107 runs. He piled up 25 bWAR during that time frame. Over the rest of his career, which ended after his age-34 season and lone playoff appearance in 1995, Mattingly hit .292/.347/.424 and, per 162 games, he posted 37 doubles, 15 homers, 88 RBIs and 85 runs.
Mattingly lasted the full 15 seasons on the Hall ballot, but never again approached the 28.1% he received during his first year of eligibility, a base of support that was not nearly large enough to get him into serious Hall consideration.
As with all of the players mentioned here today, Mattingly's Hall hopes aren't completely dead. If you get the right combination of people on a veterans committee, anything can happen. Beyond that, we are left to muse about what his case would have looked like with a normal decline phase instead of a sudden dive and early crash.
Mattingly's core offensive asset of being able to put the bat on the ball never left him, even as he altered his stance and his approach at the plate to accommodate his ailing back. His average dipped to .256 in 1990, when the back problems reached their nadir, but other than that, he never dropped below the high .280s. He topped out at 43 strikeouts in 686 plate appearances in 1992 and walked 144 more times than he struck out during his career.
What was missing was the power, and the power was missing because of the back. With the rest of Mattingly's skill set intact, it's not a stretch to suggest the 30 to 35 homers he put up during the pre-injury years would have continued on at least up to the time he retired. Barring a different injury, that would yield somewhere along the lines of 140 more homers than he hit, through 1995.
That gets Mattingly to 360 homers ... and counting. In that scenario, it seems far-fetched to think he would have still retired after his age-34 season. So other milestones start to float into the picture: 400 homers, 3,000 hits. Mattingly's Hall case would have moved into the no-brainer category.
Maybe Mattingly's back issues were bound to surface and a twist of fate before the game of June 4, 1987, in Milwaukee would have only staved off the inevitable. But the thing with him is that by appreciating what he lost, we can then fully appreciate what he gave.
And that will always be true for outstanding players who land just on the wrong side of the Cooperstown line. Cooperstown status or not, they deserve to be remembered even without their plaque hanging with Ruth and Williams in a corridor reserved for the immortals.