A few days after the MLB All-Star Game next week, David Ortiz will be one of seven former players to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. He's also the answer to a trivia question related to the upcoming Midsummer Classic: Who was the last Hall of Famer to appear in an All-Star Game?
Ortiz made the last of his 10 All-Star Game appearances in 2016 at Petco Park in San Diego, going 0-for-1 with a walk before giving way to a pinch runner. He's the only player from that game so far who has been elected to the Hall of Fame.
Of course, there will be others in time, as anyone who appeared during the 2017 season has not yet been eligible to appear on an HOF ballot. But time is what it will take. Going back over the past full decade of All-Star Games, the total number of Hall of Famers who have appeared in the game is just four, with Chipper Jones, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter joining Big Papi. The 2013 game, in which Ortiz and Rivera appeared, is the most recent one to feature multiple Hall of Famers.
That brings us to another trivia question, one that we won't be able to answer for many years to come: How many Hall of Famers will appear in Tuesday's game?
The answer to our question is probably somewhere between three and 27. It's a big range. Three represents the fewest Hall of Famers selected for any All-Star Game played between 1933 and 2012. That was the total in 2005 and 2012, though both of those games were recent enough that the list could and probably will still grow.
The most Hall of Famers to appear in an All-Star Game was 27, the number who appeared in the second-ever contest in 1934 at the Polo Grounds in New York. Between 1947 -- when the Midsummer Classic ramped back up to full strength after the war years -- and 2000, the average was 18.5.
With that in mind, I decided to create some simple probabilities of the eventual Hall chances for each player who has been selected for the 2022 All-Star Game. There are 70 of those players who, as of Thursday, were selected either to the original rosters or have since been added as injury replacements.
To rate the chances of those 70 players, I kept it simple by calculating two things for each All-Star: How many players in baseball history had a career bWAR (baseball-reference WAR) total within five wins of this player's cumulative total at the same age? Then: How many of those players are in the Hall of Fame among those eligible for selection? With these two pieces of information, we can then calculate a percentage chance of each player getting to Cooperstown.
Understand that using WAR in this fashion is a very blunt method. It's not a thorough analysis of each player's building Hall résumé, which will and should consider a much more expansive set of criteria. All we're trying to do is sort this year's All-Stars into some general groups to offer a little bit of advance historical context to what we're going to see in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
One note: Some adjustments were made in the calculation of probabilities to account for players whose numbers are almost certainly Hall-worthy but as yet have not been selected because of extenuating circumstances. You know who those players are.
Tier 1: The no-doubters
The number in the right column represents the total number of statistical matches for each player. That is, the total number of players who were within five wins of this player's WAR at his current age.
One note about the career WAR total: Since we're roughly at the halfway mark of the current season, this year's figures were doubled. That's not remotely the right way to do a rest-of-season projection, but it's fine for an exercise like this and adds a few percentage points to the probabilities of players who enjoyed big first halves.
The thing about great players, which is what makes them so great, is that very few have ever been able to perform at their level. Thus, they don't have that many historical antecedents. In other words, the fewer matches a player has, the more likely that player is to wind up in Cooperstown.
Trout actually has four historical matches but two of them aren't included in his calculation. One of those who doesn't count is Pujols, who is still playing, and the other is Alex Rodriguez, who just appeared on the ballot last winter for the first time (we're waiting to see what happens with his candidacy).
The two matches that stuck for Trout are Hank Aaron, who had 80.6 WAR through his age-30 season of 1964, and Mel Ott, who was at 81.6 through the 1939 season. Ott was a great player who started very young. He was one of those Hall of Famers in the 1934 game, representing the National League in his home stadium in New York.
If I had used a larger range to create player buckets, say, to match any player within 10 wins instead of five, Trout would have gained additional matches like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. It doesn't really matter when you move into that kind of neighborhood. Trout is quite simply a no-doubt, no-brainer future Hall of Famer and is on pace to be one of the handful of best players in history.
Pujols would also be cast as a no-doubter just on the basis of his 99.1 career WAR (including his very rough rest-of-2022 projection), but he does generate three matches of 42-year-olds in his range of performance, all of them easy Hall of Famers: Rickey Henderson, Warren Spahn and Carl Yastrzemski.
Kershaw generated a longer list of matches, which makes his 100% a little deeper in narrative possibilities. We're lumping together hitters and pitchers alike in these calculations, so Kershaw's list of age-34 matches includes all-time greats such as George Brett, Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Bench, Roberto Clemente and Ken Griffey Jr.
Tier 2: The very little-doubters
Really, Verlander and, especially, Cabrera should be part of the first tier. With 3,000-plus hits and 500-plus homers, Cabrera will almost certainly be elected in his first year of eligibility. Again, WAR is a very blunt tool for something like this.
The most interesting matches for Verlander and Cabrera are players in their age/WAR group who haven't made it to Cooperstown. Kevin Brown and Dwight Evans are on both players' lists, and both players have some matches who were thrown out because of non-playing factors.
For Verlander, the remaining non-Hall match is 19th century shortstop Bill Dahlen, which probably doesn't mean much for his candidacy -- and Dahlen should be in the Hall of Fame, anyway. There are two other non-Hall matches for Miggy: Graig Nettles and Luis Tiant.
Tier 3: On the right track
For the rest of the players in this group, things are looking good. At 34, Goldschmidt is the player most under the gun to pile up some WAR to lock down his candidacy. His MVP-level season in 2022 is not hurting his case.
For the others, time is on their side, with Betts in particular appearing to be on the fast track. Among Betts' age/WAR matches are all-time greats Bob Feller, Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez, Tom Seaver and Cal Ripken Jr.
Then there is Harper. At 22, he put up a historic 9.7 WAR, MVP season that put him at 19.7 WAR for his fledgling, four-season career. Over the next five years, when you would have expected him to build on that fast career start and create a timeless debate about whether he or Trout was the best player in the game, he recorded 14.5 WAR. (The last of those seasons was the shortened 2020 campaign.) Then Harper roared back with his second MVP showing in 2021.
By this model, that leaves Harper in a pretty good place if he can avoid too many lengthy injury absences, such as the one that's going to prevent him from playing in L.A. on Tuesday. But you can't help but realize that it would have seemed more than a little surprising in 2015 to suggest that by 2022, Harper would be a Tier 3 -- and not a Tier 1 -- All-Star Hall of Fame candidate.
Tier 4: The younger the better
Judge is an interesting case because he started so late. This is his age-30 season, but when you account for the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, this is just his fifth full season. Yet he has averaged 7.2 WAR per 162 games played and has been remarkably consistent in overall percentages, though not so much when it comes to games played per season.
The bottom line is that Judge has the same baseball age as Trout, and even if he repeats his monster first half, he's going to have well under half of Trout's career WAR. Nevertheless, there have been enough late starters to earn their way into Cooperstown that he still has a little better than a 1-in-4 chance of getting in.
That list of Hall of Fame matches for Judge includes Harmon Killebrew, Billy Williams and Dave Winfield, each of whom produced 25-plus WAR after their age-30 season. Judge will likely need to do something like that to build a Cooperstown case, which means avoiding too many more injury-shortened seasons.
Judge aside, it's the younger players on this tier who stand out. They are all just beginning in a historical context, but what beginnings they have had. Barring injury, expect Soto, Acuña, Guerrero and Devers to move up a tier or two as the years pass.
Tier 5: Work left to do
My heavy-handed doubling of this season's WAR totals got a few of our youngest All-Stars onto this tier. Really, it's kind of why I wanted to do it that way -- to give us some fodder to dream on.
Ohtani is a special case in more ways to count, and if he keeps doing his double-duty act for 10 years -- the minimum to gain Hall eligibility -- his WAR total is probably going to be way down the list of reasons he'll be considered a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
This season's lone All-Star rookie, Seattle's Rodriguez, makes his appearance on this tier. Doubling his current WAR total gets him to 6.9 for the season. That'll be easier said than done, but, then again, J-Rod has seemingly gotten better with each passing week.
During the modern era (since 1900), only seven rookie hitters have put up at least 6.9 WAR. Trout and Judge are two of them. Trout was the only one who did so at age 21 or younger. So J-Rod is just getting started, but he has really bolted out of the blocks.
One of the older players in this group is Cole, who didn't really become a consistent, big-time WAR producer until he joined the Astros for his age-27 season in 2018. Before that, during his years in Pittsburgh, Cole put up 11.0 WAR -- a respectable figure but not exactly one that put him on the train to Cooperstown.
Still, Cole has a chance if he stays healthy through most of his 30s. Don Sutton put up nearly 35 WAR after his age-30 season, and Nolan Ryan had nearly 47 -- more than half his career total. And Verlander, despite appearing in just one game during the 2020 and 2021 seasons combined because of injury, has nearly 34 WAR since his age-30 season.
Cole is 31, but you get the idea. Great pitchers are great in their 30s, and if Cole follows that path, he could well wind up in Cooperstown.
Tier 6: The longest of long shots
Hall of Fame careers have taken all manner of shapes over the game's long history, so you don't want to write off anyone who is good enough to become an All-Star. I mean, you never know, right? Which brings us to Mantiply, the lefty reliever for the Diamondbacks and Arizona's lone representative in this season's All-Star Game.
Mantiply appeared in three big league games for Detroit in 2015 at age 25. He didn't resurface in the majors again until 2019, when he got into one game for the Yankees. He finally stuck in the big leagues last season, at age 30, when he got into 57 games for Arizona. He has cemented himself this season with the best half of his career, during which he has posted a 2.31 ERA over 37 appearances and earned his first two career saves.
Mantiply was a half-win below replacement entering this season but has flipped that with his first half, which we double to bring him to the 1.7 WAR figure we assign him above, through this his age-31 season.
The probabilities are rounded, so he gets a zero percent chance, but, in fact, among his 2,559 age/WAR matches through history, there is one with a player who ended up in the Hall of Fame. That player is Dazzy Vance, a pitcher from the first half of the 20th century who had one of the most unusual career paths of any Hall of Famer.
Through his age-30 season, Vance was 0-4 as a big leaguer with a 4.91 ERA and a minus-0.4 career WAR. He won 133 games in the minors (that we know of), but he very much appeared to be a career busher.
Then, all of a sudden, Vance emerged as a star with Brooklyn in 1922 at 31, when he won 18 games and led the National League in strikeouts, which he went on to do for seven straight seasons. He won the pitching Triple Crown in 1924, when he captured the early version of the NL MVP award.
Vance pitched until he was 44 and wound up with 197 career wins in the majors -- all beginning with his age-31 season. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955.
Well, Mantiply had the jump on Vance in one regard: He entered his age-31 season with one career win, collecting that in that lone appearance for the Yankees in 2019.
So, we're saying there's a chance, in some parallel universe, for each of this year's All-Stars to wind up in Cooperstown. Those odds are quite a bit longer for some than others, but one thing is for sure: Making the All-Star roster surely helps.