Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2026 Edition (Part 2)

Feature photo by Jeffrey Hayes. Wikimedia Creative Commons License.

We’re back with the second half of this year’s Future Hall of Fame Hitters breakdown, picking up right where we left off last time. If you missed that one (or need a refresher on the methodology), covering younger players up through age 31, you can catch up on it here! Today, we’re looking at the much more established players.

The first part of the starting pitcher piece should hopefully be coming out by the end of this week as well; once again, if you’d like to be notified right when it happens, you can subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor email list below! The only emails I send on it are when a new article gets published, so it’s a minimal load on your inbox (and if you are subscribed but aren’t seeing them in your inbox, make sure to check your spam folder).

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Age 32: 48.7 WAR Median; 79.46% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Mookie Betts (75.2 Wins Above Replacement)
Manny Machado (61.7 WAR)
José Ramírez (57.6 WAR)
Bryce Harper (54.0 WAR)

To kick things off, we finally have our first players above the overall Hall of Fame median. Mookie Betts has been here for a couple of years now, and I think that he’s far enough over the line now that even if he has a sudden and sharp, Andruw Jones-style drop-off in his play, I think he still makes it into the Hall. Well… technically, I guess that kind of collapse didn’t even stop Jones himself, given that he was finally elected to Cooperstown this year, but I think this hypothetical Collapse-Betts would make it in much more quickly than Jones, possibly even first ballot. Most of it is that he’s better overall than Jones. But I also think there’s a certain level of narrative building that needs to happen once a player hits the statistical profile of a Hall of Fame, a sort of mythologizing that helps to win over the stingier voters, and that can take a little bit of time. But I think once you reach the point where even the less plugged-into-Hall-history voters start describing a guy as “Future Hall of Famer”, it’s basically the end result of that process. I think we’re about at that point with Mookie now.

In contrast, Manny Machado might need a couple more seasons, since he just passed the median career WAR for Hall of Fame position players last year. If he had that sudden collapse in 2026, I think he’d probably have to settle for an Andruw-like crawl to the Hall. But I don’t think it will take too much longer to reach the next stage of the narrative-building. He’s already starting to reach some big milestone numbers, like passing 2000 hits and 350 home runs this past season. A couple more big seasons will speed things up even more, but even a normal drop-off and a few seasons of stat-padding at the end will probably be more than enough to solidify his first-ballot status.

Early Hall of Fame Hypothetical: Yadier Molina vs. Salvador Perez

I’m always down for Hall of Fame arguments, especially about players who are underrated, or who have non-traditional cases, or who are maybe still active and have a range of possibilities for the rest of their careers. So when I saw Mike Petriello of MLB.com posing an argument for recently-extended Royals catcher Salvador Perez, I decided to follow up on it. Especially since the unusual Hall standards for catchers is an issue that I’ve covered here before.

Petriello’s case is more of a conversation starter than anything, noting the similar OPS+ marks for both catchers through their age 30 seasons; both debuted at the same age (21), and Perez is currently at 101*, while Molina was at 99 at the same age. Yadier was already getting some Hall of Fame buzz by this point (2013 was his age-30 season), but Salvador hasn’t seen a similar outpouring of Hall support that Yadi had at that age. So why is that the case? Petriello mentions a few other similarities between the two as well, including their defense and intangibles.

*I’m going to be using stats only through the 2020 season and ignoring the first few days of 2021, since that’s when Petriello’s original comparison was made.

So let’s just start from the top. Using rate stats made me a little suspicious; that can be a good way to gloss over major playing time disparities, which might explain the difference. In this case… it’s not the full story, but it is part of the issue. Molina through 2013 had over 200 more games played than Perez does at this point, thanks to the shortened 2020 season and Perez missing all of 2019 for Tommy John surgery. And in comparing those lines, I noticed the other major issue with this comparison: Molina’s age-29 and -30 seasons were his two best ones, with the backstop finishing fourth and third in MVP voting those years, respectively. Baseball-Reference puts his combined value from those seasons at 13.4 Wins Above Replacement, while Fangraphs (thanks in part to their inclusion of catcher framing) has him at 15.5. That’s a lot of value that Perez just doesn’t have.

In fairness to Perez, his shortened 2020 was fantastic, and over a full season, it may have looked a little like Molina’s 2013 campaign. His offensive rate stats were better, with a 160 OPS+ to Molina’s 133 mark. But again, a 160 OPS+ over 37 is still no match for a 133 mark over 274 games (especially given that 37 games removes a lot of the wear and tear a catcher might face; there’s no guarantee he’d keep it that high over 240 more games, so we can’t just multiply it by six or something). If there’s a silver lining, it’s that it seems like Perez is still capable of having an MVP-caliber season like Molina’s, but the problem is still that Molina actually has two MVP-caliber seasons rather than just the potential for one.

Of course, there are other issues in this comparison that hurt Perez. For example, let’s look at their status as “catching gods” that Petriello mentions. I’m assuming he’s referring to defense, and that is an area where Perez is usually highlighted; he has five Gold Gloves, after all (Molina was at the same point by this age, and has gone on to win four more since then).

Retired Numbers Series: Kansas City Royals

The Kansas City Royals were one of the eight expansion teams to begin their lives in the 1960s, and as I’ve found while doing the Retired Numbers Series, these teams tend to run the gamut with regards to how stingy they are at retiring numbers. Some, like the Padres and (especially) Astros, have tried to recognize every stage of their history. Others, like the Mets and the Astros’ ideological opposite extreme the Rangers, have only recognized one to two players. The Royals, while not as extreme as those two, tend to fall in to the latter category. Would they turn up a similar wealth of potential honorees?