The Final Countdown to the 2023 Hall of Fame Announcement: How Are Things Shaping Up?

We are less than a week from learning the results of the 2023 Hall of Fame election; the official announcement is next Tuesday at 6 PM Eastern Time. Voters have continued revealing their ballots, and the Ballot Tracker team has continued tabulating the early releases, so where do we stand now, since the last time I talked about this just over two weeks ago?

Well… mostly in the same place. The candidates are basically still in the same order.Their vote percentages are generally close to where they were. And at the top, even when there is minor fluctuation, it’s stable; Scott Rolen and Todd Helton are basically +10% and +22% over where they were in 2022, moving up and down at basically the same times.

So basically, we don’t have that much more information than we did two weeks ago. Ballot reveals have kind of slowed down, and likely won’t pick up again until right before the announcement. At the moment, it’s difficult to imagine Rolen and Helton not finishing pre-release around 80%, which has historically been a good indicator for election. Except that both of them (Rolen in particular) are especially vulnerable to the whims of the remaining unknown ballots, which is why most projections have them teetering right around that 75% cutoff point for induction.

 

Year over year charts through 160 ballots for Scott Rolen (at 70.0% through 160 ballots last year, at 80.0% this year), Todd Helton (57.5% last year, 79.4% this year), and Billy Wagner (48.8% last year, 72.5% this year) pic.twitter.com/vSqzgUIqP3

— Ryan Thibodaux (@NotMrTibbs) January 16, 2023

See, for those of you who didn’t read my last breakdown, one of the ways that we can look at the Hall of Fame voting nowadays is by when we learn of their ballots. Of the 400 or so voters in the BBWAA pool each year, a little over half will reveal who they voted for at any point prior to the results. Another 30% will reveal who they voted for, but not before the official results are revealed, and the remaining just-under-20% will never say. Generally, that’s also the order for how stingy each group of voters is; players will see their overall percentage of yeses decrease from early voters to late voters to private voters.

And it’s also what’s making predicting these two so hard; they’re incredibly dependent on late and especially private voters. The late public voters are a little less of an issue; it’s not unreasonable to expect them to generally follow along with the early ones. Helton has had the two finish close together in his four years on the ballot (last year was the biggest gap, with him performing 7.1% better with early voters).

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Scott Rolen's Early Hall of Fame Results Are a Mixed Bag

We’ve finally passed the end of 2022, which conveniently also serves as the final day of Hall of Fame voting. We still won’t be seeing the results until January 24th, though, so that leaves us plenty of time to follow Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker and see if we can predict the end results.

At the time of this writing, there are just over 100 ballots that have been released, which is a little over a quarter of the final tally. Heading into the 2023 election, it seemed like Scott Rolen was poised to lead the pack; he reached 63.2% of the vote last time, and everyone ahead of him either was inducted last time (David Ortiz) or aged off the ballot (Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens). Carlos Beltrán would be joining the ballot, but he long seemed like the kind of candidate that would need to stick around for a few years and work his way up to 75%.

And, sure enough, that’s about where we are at the one-quarter mark: Rolen leads with 80.6% of the vote, Todd Helton has moved up to second at 78.6%, and Billy Wagner and Andruw Jones are also both around 70% (at 70.9% and 69.9%, respectively). Gary Sheffield (67.0%) and Beltran (57.3%) are also having strong showings, but I want to mainly focus on that bunch in the 70s and 80s, since 75% is what’s needed for Hall induction.

I was a big fan of Rolen’s growing up (he was my favorite third baseman to watch, which as you can maybe tell from the site’s name, was a big deal to young-me), so I’ve been pulling for his induction for years now (I can find articles where I referred to him as a future Hall of Famer dating all the way back to 2010, at the very least). Plus, I’ve been saying for about four years now that 2023 looks like it could be the year that he’s finally inducted, so it would be nice to see all of that pay off.

But what exactly are his chances of making it this year? A lot of the time, the ballot tracker is pretty intuitive, but there are a lot of complicating factors here. So let me walk you through my thought process:

The Future of the 3000 Strikeout Club, 2021 Edition

Earlier this year, I published updates to some articles I did a few years ago, detailing the chances of current players reaching the 500 Homer and 3000 Hit milestones. I meant to do one for 3000 Strikeouts as well (since the last time I touched that was way back in 2015), but it slipped my mind. However, this past weekend, Max Scherzer became the nineteenth member of the club, which in turn reminded me that I had never actually gotten around to writing that piece.

So let’s fix that! I’ll be using my method and numbers from last time to keep things simple. If you haven’t read one of these pieces before, the gist isn’t too complicated: first, I looked at how many strikeouts each eventual 3000 Strikeout pitcher had at each age (so, their totals through their age 23 seasons, then through their age 24 seasons, and so on). Next, I sorted them from highest to lowest and broke them into quartiles, and compared those quartiles to the overall number of liveball pitchers who fell in those ranges at that age. So if the range of the second quartile of the 3000 strikeout club at age 25 was 500 to 750 strikeouts, I looked at how many total pitchers also fell in that range, and then found the percent that eventually reached 3000 as a fraction of that total.*

*One note here: instead of just a lowest quartile, I broke out Phil Niekro’s rate as a totally separate outlier, since he was such an anomaly in how late he started and lasted. So that’s the reason each set includes both a “Lowest” and “Second Lowest” threshold.

And to clarify, this piece (like the others that I’ve done) aren’t necessarily guarantees that all of these players will pull it off. Rather, it’s intended to give a different perspective on the future of the milestone than just eyeballing the active leaderboard. Essentially, I’m looking at where past members of the club were at each age, and looking for players that look similar. A key part of reaching any milestone is staying productive into your 30s, which is not something every player can manage. Instead, we’re looking at which players are best positioned to do that in each age bracket, and giving a perspective of how many other players could or couldn’t keep it up from that age on. So with that, let’s get started.

 

The Future of the 3000 Hit Club, 2021 Edition

Last time, I used Miguel Cabrera’s various milestone bids to investigate which younger players might one day be making their own attempts at 500 home runs. While Miggy is much closer to that mark, he’s also within spitting distance of the other big offensive milestone, 3000 hits. So today, let’s apply those methods once again to look at who might one day be approaching that other mark.

As a quick catch-up, we’re essentially looking at how many hits each member of the 3000 Hit Club had at each age, compared to how many non-3000 Hit players matched them at those ages, to determine a current player’s chance of one day joining the former group. If you want a more specific example of this, feel free to refer to the last article. Also, as mentioned last time, Baseball-Reference changed their search feature since the last time I looked at this, so for now, I’m stuck reusing my numbers from a few years ago (although the actual values likely haven’t changed much in the years since, for what it’s worth).

With that out of the way, let’s dive in!



Age 22 Median: 323 Hits, 14.16% of players go on to 3000 hits
Age 22 Third Quartile: 118 Hits, 4.01% of players go on to 3000 hits

It doesn’t necessarily mean a lot at this age, but Juan Soto is already pretty far ahead of the 3000 club median, with 361 hits to his name, and that total will only increase in the coming months. And while it’s not the most meaningful milestone, it’s also true that a 14% chance isn’t anything to sneeze at either, especially for players this young! Elsewhere in the league, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (238) and Fernando Tatis Jr. (202) are also above the third quartile mark already, and while Tatis is a bit of a stretch, Vlad could definitely still pass the median before the season is over. Dylan Carlson (66) also has a decent chance to reach the third quartile milestone this year.

The Future of the 500 Home Run Club, 2021 Edition

We are very close to some upcoming batting milestones, and both of them are from the same person. Miguel Cabrera has had a very slow start in 2021, but with 489 home runs, 2881 hits, and at least two and half years under contract on a Tigers team that doesn’t expect to be competing any time soon, it seems safe to assume he’ll be given every opportunity to become the seventh member of the 3000 hit-500 homer club. He may even reach both of them this year, although it would take a bit of a rebound to pick up 119 more hits this year.

As is the case when big milestones are imminent, I’ve seen people speculating about future members of the club, and a surprising number of them seem pessimistic about the future of both clubs. I could understand that about the 300 win club, but not either of the batting milestones. Sure, there aren’t many players on the immediate horizon, but both clubs have gone through lulls in new members before. You just have to be willing to look into the future a bit.

Which is something I’ve done before! So I figured, it’s been a few years, why not update those numbers a little and look at how active players’ paces match up to the members of the club? For those who aren’t familiar with the last article, I used a process similar to my yearly Future Hall of Famer piece. I start by looking at how many homers each member of the 500 club had at each age, and marking the median totals (as well as a few others, like the first and third quartiles, and the lowest and second-lowest totals). Then, I see how many retired players in those ranges fell short, which allows me to see the percentage of that group that went on to make 500 homers.

(To use made-up numbers for an example, say one quarter of the 500 club, or 7 players, had 100 homers by age 23, and half of the club had 50. If 10 players in history had 100 homers by that age, and 7 went on to 500 home runs overall, our odds for players with 100 homers by age 23 are 7 in 10, or 70%. And if 14 players fell between 50 and 99 homers, and 7 of those are the ones who went on to 500, then the odds for players in that quartile are 7 in 14, or 50%.)

This should be a much better way to visualize which players are actually on-pace than basic active leaderboards (take, for instance, Robinson Cano, who is fourth place among active players with 334 dingers, but is also 38 years old and has roughly zero chance to stick around for another 166). Unfortunately, I couldn’t update my figures from last time due to changes to Baseball-Reference’s search tools, but these numbers are an estimate anyway, so they should be good enough for our purposes.

A Few New Pieces

Over at The Crawfish Boxes, I have a post looking at the Astros' 2019 PECOTA projections.

At Out of Left Field, I wrote about another one of my favorite games of 2018.

Some Quick Thoughts on Predicting Active Players' Hall of Fame Chances

Since I write a lot about future Hall of Famers, especially among active players, I wanted to expand on some comments I left on William Metzger’s article on Jose Altuve’s Hall of Fame candidacy over at The Crawfish Boxes. Generally, my stance is that we can start talking about players being future Hall of Famers well before we normally do. Metzger does a good job of looking at what Altuve has to do to have Hall-caliber stats, but how likely a player is to do that is a different question.

As a simple example, I looked at every second baseman in history who was within 10 WAR of Altuve at the same age; specifically, that means anyone between 25 and 35 WAR by the end of their age-28 season. That leaves us with a group of 22 other players; two of them are the also still-active Robinson Cano and Dustin Pedroia.

Of those 20 retired examples to work from, 12 went on to the Hall of Fame. Simple enough, then, right? Altuve has something like a 60% chance to stay on a Hall-pace.

But the remaining 8 players aren’t a list of players who started strong and then broke down, like you might think. One of them is Pete Rose, who has…let’s say some mitigating factors that you might be aware of, but he put up a Hall-quality back-half to his career, if nothing else.

There are a few other weird cases as well, though. For example, Larry Doyle walked away after a 3-WAR age-33 season to go manage a minor league team in Toronto closer to his home. Maybe he could have a few more good seasons if he stuck it out, but he didn’t feel like it, so we’ll never know. And then, there’s Fred Dunlap, who broke his leg on a slide during his age-32 season in 1891. However, it wasn’t the injury that ended things; it was the ensuing dispute with the team over (essentially) disability play for the injury that got him to walk away.

That’s not to say weird, unaccountable things couldn’t still spring up for Altuve. But, at the same time, we know that at least the Dunlap scenario won’t happen today, and Rose is the only gambling-related permanent ban in over seven decades. Despite the weirdness of all of those scenarios, and the low chance of them recurring, they still make up a significant portion of our Altuve comps, because there are so few players good enough to actually use as a comparison!

Then, three of the remaining five Hall-outsiders are Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker, and Willie Randolph, all of whom had Hall-level numbers for their career but just didn’t get any electoral support. I know there are still large groups of people saying that they were snubbed, and they might still even get in via the Veterans Committee! But even if you don’t want to account for the unpredictable VC, they pretty clearly didn’t “fall apart” or anything; they held up their end of the deal and played well, the voters just didn’t see how good they were.*

*Also, there’s a question of whether Altuve can even be grouped with them anymore; he already has as many career All-Star selections as any of them, and he has as many top-ten MVP finishes as all three of them combined. If attention from fans and writers is what doomed that trio, it doesn’t seem like Altuve will be facing that issue, particularly if he plays as well as they did in their second career-halfs.

All told, that just leaves us with two stereotypical “Hall-trajectory player falls apart and plays himself out of Cooperstown” cases from the twenty players similar to Altuve, Chuck Knoblauch and Cupid Childs. There are actually more players in the “weird, unpredictable, non-injury stuff” category than there are these guys.

All of that gets me to my main point: players who are this good, this young, to the extent that someone like Altuve is, are in a class of their own. They’re more likely than not to finish out a career that gets them to Cooperstown, and even if they don’t make it to the Hall, almost all of them end up at least playing at a Hall-of-Fame-level the rest of the way. Being good but going unrecognized is about as common, or even more so, than totally falling apart. Just a thing to keep in mind when having “future Hall of Famer” discussions

Predicting the Future of the 3000 Hit Club, 2018 Edition

For the fourth year in a row, a player has reached the 3000 hit plateau. Albert Pujols, following Alex Rodriguez in 2015, Ichiro Suzuki in 2016, and Adrian Beltre last year, finally crossed the mark to become the fourth member of the 3000 Hit/600 home run club.

In honor of the occasion, I decided to update something I did back when A-Rod passed the milestone: which other active players have a shot at 3000? It’s a variation on my yearly predictions of which players have the best chances to make the Hall of Fame; I look at the median point of 3000 Hit Club members at each age throughout their careers, then look at how many players historically had that same total of hits or greater, then take a simple percentage to get rough odds of a players’ chances to hold on the rest of the way. For this one, I also did the same thing for the third quartile mark.

I took these measures from age 22 all the way to age 39 to get a full picture of the progression for an average 3000 Hit Club member. It takes an early start (28 of the 32 players to reach the mark debuted at age 22 or younger*) and some amazing peak years, but also good health and longevity; twelve players reached 3000 hits in their age 39 season, and another nine made it even later than that. That’s the type of rarified air we’re dealing with. As such, the odds of players making it are much lower than the ones I get for predicting future Hall of Famers (given that there are a couple hundred in Cooperstown already).

*Paul Waner and Honus Wagner debuted at 23, and Wade Boggs debuted at 24. Ichiro, being a freak of nature, pulled it off despite not playing in the majors until his age 27 season.

So, what does the current crop of talent look like?

Predicting the Future of the 3000 Strikeout Club

Growing up, I always thought of 3000 strikeouts and 300 wins as the pitchers equivalents of 3000 hits and 500 home runs. Now, though, I get the feeling that it’s not necessarily the case. I don’t really have any single point that proves it, just a hunch built around small things. When a player gets close, the countdown to 3000 strikeouts gets some love, but not as much as those three. No one bothers playing “what if” about Mike Mussina reaching 3000 strikeouts like they do with 300 wins, despite the fact that he was even closer to the former than the latter (2813 K’s versus only 270 W’s). Everyone freaked out when Craig Biggio became the first (clean) 3000 hit guy in forever to not waltz in to Cooperstown two years ago, but there was no similar panic about his fellow ballot debut Curt Schilling struggling despite becoming the only (again, clean) 3000 strikeout guy not in.

The funny thing is, 3000 strikeouts is the rarest of those four milestones. We’ve got twenty-four 300-win guys, twenty-six 500-homer guys, and Ichiro will be 3000 hit guy number thirty next season. But 3000 strikeouts? There have only been sixteen of those. Even when you account for the number of 300 win pitchers who were deadball guys*, it’s pretty even; since Walter Johnson (the first to 3000 strikeouts and a 300 winner himself), there have been fifteen 3000 K pitchers and fourteen 300 win pitchers.

*Fun fact: seven of the 300 win club, or over one quarter, reached the mark before the first World Series was played.

Even with the mismatch in appreciation, I think the 3000 strikeout milestone is important. And, since it’s much more closely tied to skill than wins, it seemed like the more sensible pitching milestone to measure like I have with hits and homers.  One thing that surprised me as I did research was the relative modernity of the club. Six members have retired in the past decade; everyone in the club except Walter Johnson and Bob Gibson started in the ‘60s or later (and Bob Gibson just misses, starting in 1959).

Predicting the Future of the 500 Home Run Club

After looking at the future of the 3000 hit club last month, I began wanting to try my method out with other milestones. The natural next step was the other big milestone for hitters, 500 home runs. Would there be any difference in how early we could predict who would make each club? The Hall of Fame induction ceremony seemed like as good an excuse as any to look at a milestone like this (even if it was three 3000 strikeout guys and a 3000 hit guy getting inducted this year).

A quick refresher on the methodology: first, I went through the 26 members of the 500 home run club and looked at how many home runs they had at each age. I sorted them by totals, then split the club into the upper half and lower half. Next, I looked at how many hitters throughout history had more home runs than the lower half at the same age. Then, I just took a simple percentage of (upper half of the club) divided by (total number of retired hitters who had more homers than the lower half of the club at the same age). I expanded on what I did for the 3000 hit article, though; rather than just do the halfway point, the lowest, and the second lowest, I threw in the quartiles (the halfway marks of the halves). That way, I could estimate the odds for players above 25% and 75% of the 500 homer club.

In each grouping, I took out the players in the quartile above, so that I'm not double counting, say, the guys in the top quartile as in the second quartile as well even though they are above the mark needed to be in that group. This is to give a more accurate sense of how likely players in that quartile specifically are to reach the 500 mark; using the player with the most homers at that age to predict someone just over the halfway point seemed a little silly. This leads to a little fluctuation in the results (sometimes, the second quartile will have fewer players eventually making 500 home runs than the third quartile, for instance), but usually, the variations aren’t too significant.

These odds aren’t going to be super-precise for a variety of reasons; this is a very rough model, the game has evolved dramatically since when some of these players played, I’m not really weighting each player by where they are individually, and so on. However, I think it gives us a pretty good rough idea; it may be off, but it gives us a tangible, easy to visualize predictor for something that’s normally pretty difficult to predict. As an aside, I’d caution against using the “Lowest” number as a hard guideline, since that player was almost always an outlier; sticking to the “Second Lowest” benchmark and above should be more indicative. So, with that in mind, which modern players are on pace for 500 home runs?

Predicting the Future of the 3000 Hit Club

As you may know, I enjoy trying to predict the future for ballplayers. So, when A-Rod got his 3000^th hit, a thought crossed my mind: could I apply my framework for predicting future Hall of Famers to milestones like 3000 hits? This is the result.

What I did was as follows: first, I went through the 29 players with 3000 hits and checked where they all stood hit-wise at each age. Then, I looked at the median mark for the group, and checked how many ballplayers in history had reached that number of hits by the same age. Then, I took a straight percentage of how many of the total number of players at that mark actually wound up over 3000 hits.

For an example, say that the 15^th most hits at age 20 among 3000-hit players was 100. I then looked at how many players in history had 100 hits through their age 20 season, and figured out the percentage of that number that went on to 3000 hits. After that, just to get another benchmark, I repeated the process with the lowest hit total in the 3000 hit club by age (and second lowest, since many of the lowest marks were by Cap Anson, who played in such a radically different time that I wasn’t sure how useful of a marker he’d be for other players).

With the percentage of players at each milestone that went on to 3000 hits, I then looked towards the game today, checking the leaders of each age bracket today against the historical marks.