For those who haven’t followed along with Major League Baseball Hall of Fame voting in recent years, let me tell ya: It ain’t always the most fun discussion.
You see, there are old school baseball writers (writers certified by Cooperstown are the ones who get to vote on who is inducted and who isn’t) who look at traditional, back-of-the-baseball card statistics to determine who should be in baseball’s biggest museum. They value stuff like batting average, number of hits, and pitcher wins, and they also allow personal interactions and/or biases that don’t have much to do with anything.
Take, for example, this ballot submitted by a former PR person for the Toronto Blue Jays who became the one and only person to use one of his 10 selections on Jose Bautista.
Look, Bautista was a very good player for a number of years, but there is no one who thinks he was a Hall of Famer, hence the one and only vote for him so far. This is the kind of thing that drives people crazy.
Then there are the newer-age, analytically-minded voters who value some of the peripheral data and newer metrics created to judge a player’s all-around value. Statistics like Wins Above Replacement, OPS+, ERA+ and others are most commonly used.
One such voter is Fangraphs senior writer Jay Jaffe, the inventor of a metric called JAWS that attempts to equalize players across all generations in an effort to help compare a player like, say, Chase Utley, against second basemen who are already in the Hall of Fame. The game has changed so much over the years that it’s impossible to get a fair comparison of players separated by 50 years without creating some kind of number to help.
On the latest edition of Hittin’ Season, Jaffe joined the show to discuss the candidacy of a number of former Phillies up for induction, including Chase Utley, who is appearing on ballots for the first time. Utley is doing quite well in early voting, earning around 45% of the vote thus far (being named on 75% of all submitted ballots is required for induction).
“I’ll take 45% for a start,” Jaffe said. “Most players who get to 45% at any point eventually get in, so this would be a very positive development for Chase.”
Jaffe, who has already submitted his ballot for this year, strongly advocated for Chase in a recent Fangraphs post, and checked him on his ballot. The strength of Utley’s candidacy lies in the ridiculous good peak of his career, where he was one perhaps the second-best player in baseball behind only Albert Pujols for a six-year stretch. Utley finished his career with just 1,885 hits, and would become the first player playing in the post-expansion era with less than 2,000 hits to earn induction, if and when he eventually gets in.
The case for Jimmy Rollins is not quite as strong, although it seems likely he’ll stay above the 5% needed to remain on the ballot in this, his third year of eligibility. Rollins likely won’t receive the 75% needed by the end of his 10-year run on the ballot, but Jaffe notes it’s likely he’ll get in via a separate veterans committee vote not long after his run on the ballot is done.
For more on Jaffe’s thoughts on Utley and Rollins, as well as the candidacies of Bobby Abreu and Cole Hamels, make sure to check out the latest Hittin’ Season podcast!
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