What does a Hall of Fame career look like?
Increasingly, the answer to that question has become muddled in the wake of controversial careers by players whose numbers are Cooperstown worthy, changes to the game and a data-based evolution of how we contextualize a sport that has been ingrained in our culture for 150 years.
The past couple of years in particular have been a time of great change in baseball. New rules. New schedules. New playoff format. These changes were a response to other changes that affected the style of baseball being played, the way players have been used and, most germane to the subject at hand, the numbers they put up.
This year's Hall of Fame ballots must be postmarked by the end of the year, as the electorate from the Baseball Writers' Association of America once again casts its judgment on the greats of the game -- and those who fell short of greatness. The current ballot is interesting because you can see the new dilemmas the writers face even as the dilemmas of the past have not quite yet been resolved.
Every player on the ballot, by definition, began his career at least 15 years ago -- 10 years in the majors to become eligible, with a mandatory five-year waiting period before he can appear on the ballot. Fifteen years ago was 2008, when the collective MLB batting average was .264 (it was .248 in 2023), there were 9.1 hits per game (8.4 in 2023), 6.8 strikeouts per game (8.6 in 2023) and 136 complete games (35 in 2023).
It's the same game but one that nevertheless looks very different in its output. The players on the Hall ballot bridged this era of change, one in which the roles of entire position groups have been redefined.
Specifically, we're talking about three positions -- catchers, starting pitchers and relief pitchers -- all of which are represented on the ballot. The standards for these positions have moved in ways both subtle and obvious, making it a little more work to evaluate them against the past greats.
With that in mind, let's consider the cases of three avatars of this bridge generation: Joe Mauer, the catcher, Billy Wagner, the closer, and Mark Buehrle, the starter.
The catcher: Joe Mauer
Mauer is the only catcher on this year's ballot and, at 40, he is young for a Hall candidate. His career is fascinating. Few backstops have enjoyed a peak like Mauer did during the heart of his career, but there's not much elite production outside of that pinnacle.
Catcher was Mauer's primary position through 2013. To that point, he had put up 44.6 bWAR, a total that was boosted by 41 runs above average in positional value. Over his last five seasons, when Mauer was a DH/first baseman, he had 10.6 bWAR but minus-41 runs of positional value. In the WAR framework, his post-position-change adjustment zeroed out the extra credit he got for catching. Clearly his Hall case rests mostly on his work as a catcher, though his late career phase did include solid offensive numbers.
Mauer will hopefully get in on the first ballot. According to the JAWS system, he ranks seventh among catchers, with a peak value (seven years in the JAWS framework) that ranks fifth. His career value ranks ninth, safely above the positional average for Hall of Fame catchers. He won an MVP Award, three Gold Gloves, five Silver Slugger Awards. He's a Hall of Famer.
Yet, Mauer is far from a no-brainer. In the very early results posted by Hall tracking guru Ryan Thibodaux, he's been around 80% -- over the threshold so far, but the number is tenuous as the ballots continue to roll in. The Athletic conducted a fan survey on this year's ballot and Mauer landed at just 61% among those respondents, though it should be noted that the standards of that group seem pretty rigid.
Over the years, I've employed a kind of dual-track mentality when it comes to judging Hall worthiness. While systems like JAWS seek to blend the categories of peak and career value, it's not the way I approach it. Peak value -- however you define what a peak is -- can get you in, but so, too, can career value. You only need to qualify on one track, not both, or a blend of both. Increasingly, however, as the game has evolved, it's become clear to me that a third track ought to be strongly considered -- how a player rates against his contemporaries at his position.
My version of the peak track could be called the Sandy Koufax approach, if you need a reference point. Koufax retired at 30 because of an arthritic elbow, doing so after a five-year stretch in which he went 111-34 with a 1.95 ERA and 1,444 strikeouts. He won three Cy Youngs and an MVP trophy during that span. Overall, he pitched 12 seasons in the majors, yet was elected in his first season of Hall of Fame eligibility.
Clearly, Koufax's brief but startling period of brilliance was long enough to get him to Cooperstown. Koufax's career wasn't even the shortest among Hall of Famers. Others -- Ross Youngs, Addie Joss, "Iron" Joe McGinnity, among them -- had even shorter careers. Bruce Sutter made the Hall as a relief pitcher and also appeared in just 12 seasons. Koufax suffered a career-ending injury, while Youngs and Joss died mid-career. Still, the career lengths were what they were.
For me, my definition of peak defaults to the rule that, to be eligible for the Hall, a player has to appear in at least 10 seasons. That's the rule. It's written. Somewhere along the line, it was decided that 10 years was enough to merit Hall consideration. So if you're a Hall of Famer over a 10-year period, for me, that makes you a Hall of Famer.
The key aspect of this is, in my opinion, you can't play your way out of the Hall. Given the case of someone like Koufax, why should a player be penalized simply because he kept playing after he established a Hall of Fame level of play? What if Koufax had kept going for another 10 years, but as a league average pitcher or worse? Could he have played himself out of Cooperstown? For me, the answer is no.
Mauer's career fits this paradigm. He was a Hall of Fame catcher for a decade, then an average first baseman for a half decade. He was never particularly durable and so he ended with solid but modest career totals like 2,123 hits and 143 homers. Yet his Hall case is strong. This is because voters are considering the essential context of his career, one that rates him among the greatest catchers of all time.
Mauer's first 10 seasons ended with his age-30 season, so let's focus on that threshold. The 44.6 bWAR he compiled during that time ranks 94th in history among hitters, through age-30. He's right behind Derek Jeter on that list (44.7 bWAR).
Jeter might merit Hall consideration if he'd retired at 30, but he didn't. He was a no-brainer pick because of the other lane on my tri-track way of thinking. He played a really long time, was really good to great during most of that time and finished with career numbers that you just can't argue against.
When a player logs 3,465 hits (sixth all time) and 1,923 runs (11th) as Jeter did, you don't really need to dig in to see what his peak value was, or what his other accomplishments were, which in Jeter's case is skipping over a lot. A similar argument can be made about Adrian Beltre, who seems likely to be voted in during this cycle, his first on the ballot. Beltre rolled up 3,166 hits and 477 runs while playing elite defense at third base. Case closed. But Beltre's best 10-year stretch (57.1 bWAR from 2004 to 2013) would have merited serious Hall consideration as well.
With Mauer, that 10-year stretch as a catcher is really all you have, and that WAR total, while fantastic, does not in itself get him in. What gets him in is that he was a catcher, perhaps the best of his generation. This added context is a third track, one that puts Mauer's case over the top.
During Mauer's 10-season run as Minnesota's primary catcher, his 44.6 bWAR ranked as the ninth-best total among all position players. Among primary catchers though, it looks like this:
For a full decade, Mauer wasn't just the best catcher in baseball, but he produced 1.6 times as much value as the second best. Yet, again, that bWAR total, when lumped in with all position players in history, through age-30, ranks just 94th. Which is impressive, but you're not going to see that ranking on his Hall plaque.
Most voters seem to be doing the work of putting Mauer's record into its full context, but clearly some still have their doubts. The holdouts might be looking at his career numbers in hits, homers or RBIs and see him as wanting, but if that's the case with Mauer, it might not bode well for the game's best backstops in the years to come.
One reason for this is that full-time catchers are becoming rarer. Consider this chart, which counts the number of primary catchers per team that have qualified for a batting title, broken down by decade:
Increasingly, teams are asking less of their starting catchers. There are some relative grinders still and hopefully that will always be the case, but the point is the position is changing. Teams rotate backstops more often and they value different skill sets, with pitch framing becoming a favored tool in recent years.
One example: Austin Hedges, not a future Hall of Famer, has a .189 average and .568 OPS over nine big league seasons. He signed a $4 million deal with the Guardians earlier this month. Why? He's a good defender and pitch framer. During the 2020s, the aggregate OPS for backstops has been 94.9% of league average. That's down from 96.3% during the 2010s. The position is changing.
We can argue about the scale and veracity of framing metrics all we want, but clearly teams are valuing something beyond Mauer-like batting lines when choosing their catchers. This context is going to have to be considered someday when we evaluate Hall candidates among catchers from this era.
In this case, that context can be identified by judging Mauer against those who did his job while he did it. When we do, we see just how much he really stood out as a player -- at a Cooperstown level. That third track, player versus contemporaries at his position, when considered alongside the questions of peak value and career value, can help us keep our bearings as the game changes.
The closer: Billy Wagner
While the changes in the job requirements of catchers have been subtle, the changes to pitching staff roles have been glaringly obvious and widely covered. Yet, you rarely read about these changes in terms of Hall of Fame consideration.
When it comes to relievers, Hall standards have never really been fully established because the job description is always changing. The career of Hoyt Wilhem (1952 to 1972) looked very different than that of Rich Gossage (1972 to 1994). Those careers looked very different than that of Mariano Rivera (1995 to 2013). Yet, all of these pitchers shared a common destiny: They are all Hall of Fame relief pitchers.
That Rivera is the all-time saves leader is almost beside the point. Even if the save had never been invented in all its illogical glory, Rivera would have been a clear Hall of Famer. But saves alone do not clarify this question that much because, frankly, you don't have to be a great pitcher to compile a lot of saves.
Wagner, to me, was a great pitcher and, to be sure, he did compile a lot of saves. Only two pitchers -- Rivera and Trevor Hoffman, both in Cooperstown -- have ever logged more. Yet Wagner has reached his ninth season on the Hall ballot without getting in. The saves, it seems, aren't enough.
Wagner is likely held back because of his career total of 27.7 bWAR, which ranks just behind Hoffman for 14th all time. Many of those ahead of him on the career leaderboard are clearly not Hall of Famers, but those pitchers compiled a lot of their career value as starting pitchers. Hoffman and Wagner rank 1-2 all time in bWAR among pitchers who never started a game in the majors.
We have better tools than either WAR or saves to evaluate relievers. And we need to use them, because relief pitchers now play a central role in the ever-building history of the game. For the Hall to represent the game as it exists, we need to come to grips with what a Hall of Famer reliever looks like, even as we know that the role is likely going to keep evolving.
Judging relievers against their contemporaries is the path for getting there. We can quibble about the right metrics to use but for me, win probability added (WPA) is the essential category for relievers, though even it has to be considered against other measures.
Here is where Wagner ranked in WPA among relievers during his career:
As you'd expect, Rivera stands apart, and that's not even the totality of his career. Beyond him though, Wagner is in a clear grouping of the elite players at his position during a long career. We can argue about where the line should be drawn, but it seems like it ought to be drawn after the third-best player in a position group over a 15-year career.
The starting pitcher: Mark Buehrle
We can agree that starting pitching is important, right? Teams pay the best starters more than $40 million a season nowadays, so clearly they believe they are important, even during an era when less and less is asked of them -- a fact obvious in categories like wins, innings pitched and complete games.
On the current ballot, only Buehrle and Andy Pettitte appear to have enough support to make it to next year's ballot and neither will land anywhere close to the threshold for enshrinement. Pettitte's case is complicated by his PED connection, so we can focus on Buehrle.
Is Buehrle a Hall of Fame pitcher? Honestly, it doesn't feel like it. He ranks as the 78th-best pitcher of all time in the JAWS system, landing at No. 69 in career value and No. 99 in peak value. He won 214 career games, struck out fewer than 2,000 batters, never won 20 games and only had one season when he garnered any Cy Young support. He was a fantastic player and earned $139 million over his 15 MLB years as a reward. But he's not a Hall of Famer. Right?
Well, if not Buehrle, then who? What does a Hall of Fame pitcher look like, both now and in the future? We really need to figure this out because we can't really stop putting starting pitchers into the Hall of Fame.
There are some no-brainers still in the active ranks -- Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, probably Zack Greinke. So the well hasn't run dry, but things are changing fast. When Buehrle broke into the majors in 2000, there were 88 pitchers who logged enough innings to qualify for an ERA title. Last season, there were 44.
Once again, the way to get over this hurdle is to make sure we are judging players in the context which applies to their career. Apples to apples. Oranges to oranges. So let's do that for Buehrle.
Does that change anything for you? Should it? For me, it's a case of ... probably not. Buehrle's résumé is still a little light on accolades, though sportswriters loved him because he's a nice guy who worked faster than any pitcher in the game. He was remarkably durable and largely consistent, but his meter leans a little too far over to quantity as opposed to quality. And, frankly, WAR may not be an ideal framework for measuring contemporary starting pitchers. If we'd used WPA instead, he'd rank 26th.
So Buehrle seems to be below the threshold, but we had to do a bit of work to get there. His record had to be considered as a whole -- career value, peak value, value against contemporaries, traditional measures and multiple bottom-line metrics. None of these approaches, used in isolation, is going to get us to a representative Hall of Fame. All of them together, however, can help us get there.
What does a Hall of Famer look like? In a changing game, that portrait is harder than ever to paint, especially for certain positions. Luckily we have more brushes than ever with which to create our picture. We just have to be willing to use them.