In an effort to make these very long articles more readable, I decided to split up this year’s Future Hall of Fame Hitters update into two roughly equal halves. Part 2 will be picking up right where Part 1 left off, starting at Age 30. If you missed that first article (which includes an introduction and an explainer for the methodology as well as the under-30 players), you can go back catch up on it here.
The next update, focusing on starting pitchers, should start going up soon. If you would like to be notified right when that goes live, you can sign up for the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list using the box below (or in the similar box at the end of the article).
Age 30: 39.9 WAR Median; 75.00% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Francisco Lindor (49.6 WAR)
I’ve been banging the “Francisco Lindor is a Future Hall of Famer” drum for a while now; he’s made the list as a likely candidate every single year since he debuted. But last year, it felt like baseball writers who weren’t obsessed with trying to figure these things out way-too-early also started to notice. I saw a few writers before the 2024 season noting that Lindor was already in pretty historic company, the kind that tends to land you in Cooperstown, only for a number of fans on social media to push back.
In the end, those doubters wound up with egg on their face. 2024 felt like a tipping point for him, the kind that really starts to lock-in a player’s eventual ballot narrative, and in such a big way that even the less-observant start to take notice. Lindor was never winning the MVP over Ohtani’s legendary year, but he was the clear runner-up in the NL while leading the Mets to a surprise NLCS run. It’s kind of funny that this is the thing that convinced people, given that he’s finished top 10 in the MVP voting six times in nine-and-a-half seasons (the half was his late-call-up debut, where he only played in 99 games but came in second in Rookie of the Year voting); for some reason, a lot of people just hadn’t noticed how long and how good he’s been. Anyway, he should pass all of 50 WAR, 1500 hits, and 250 home runs in early April.
Alex Bregman is also almost here, just a hair shy of the median (39.6 WAR). A regular All-Star season could get him back over the mark for next year. We’ll see if that short-term deal for Boston drives him even higher than that, though; I imagine his main goal is to have a huge 2025 season with the Red Sox, then try the market for a longer contract next year (possibly one where half of the deal isn’t in deferred money). After Bregman is his former division rival, Corey Seager (36.8 WAR). It’s impressive that he’s actually made up ground on the Hall pace these last two years, despite missing a quarter of his potential games to injuries. He’s going to have to either keep that up or actually stay healthy for a few more years though, because it’s another two more years of 4+ WAR seasons before the Hall median starts to slow back down a little. Matt Olson (32.8 WAR) and Ketel Marte (31.2 WAR) are also both within 10 Wins of the median, although clearly neither is close enough to make all of that ground up in 2025. It’s going to have to be a multi-year catch-up plan for either of them; but on the other hand, they are both very talented and coming off some solid seasons, so I felt like I needed to at least mention them.
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Monday, March 17, 2025
Thursday, March 13, 2025
Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Hitters, 2025 Edition (Part 1)
A quick note: This year’s Future Hall of Fame Hitters piece wound up being nearly 10,000 words. So, in order to break things up a little bit and make it less imposing, plus to buy me more time to work on the Pitchers piece, I’m going to be splitting it up. One half this week, one early next week. If you’d like to get an email notification when that goes up, you can subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list in this box below; I only use it when there’s a new baseball piece up (even my pop culture site uses a different list), so you don’t need to worry about getting too many messages.
It’s once again that time of the spring, where I update my yearly Future Hall of Fame Series and look at which active players are on pace for an eventual Cooperstown enshrinement. But before I get into the weeds, allow me to go on a brief nostalgic tangent about the series.
We are just coming off the Baseball Writers inducting three new Hall of Famers in Billy Wagner, CC Sabathia, and Ichiro Suzuki (here’s my wrap-up on those results, if you missed them). I noted last year that Joe Mauer and Adrian Beltré marked the first two real-life Hall of Famers who had actually been covered in this series when they were active. I never got to discuss Wagner here, who retired in 2010, but Sabathia and Suzuki represent the third and fourth inductees that I’ve included in this series.*
*Technically, Ichiro only just made it, as my initial 2013 columns only covered players under 30 (although Sabathia got a specific mention despite being 31), and I kept things to 35-and-under until 2017, which wound up being his last full season.
It still feels notable, since it’s only the second time this has happened after writing this column for over a decade. But after thinking about it a little more… I guess this is just going to be the new normal? Like, Wagner was about to be aged off the ballot anyway, so we’re nearly out of the era of “guys who retired before I started”, and while it took a few years for me to start including the oldest players in the league and I missed some big names in that window, next year’s new candidates will be guys who last played in 2020, which was well after I started taking a more comprehensive approach.
At this point, it’s going to be difficult for an induction class to have not have someone who made this series at some point. Andruw Jones might go in next year and he retired after 2012, but he finished behind Carlos Beltrán (who made it onto that 2017 list with Ichiro) on this year’s ballot, and I don’t see any way the former makes it in next year while the latter misses out.
And that will be the case going forward… kind of indefinitely? Even if I just decided not to continue this series next year, the Hall will still be dealing with guys that I wrote about here for so long into the future that it’s kind of wild to think about. Like, just as an example, Manny Ramírez’s final year on the BBWAA ballot is next year, 2026, and he debuted as a 21-year-old back in 1993; using that as a reference, a 21-year-old that I cover this year could conceivably be on a hypothetical 2058 ballot, a year that only registers as “sci-fi setting” to me. The timescale that the Hall of Fame works at is just difficult to fathom, sometimes.
It’s once again that time of the spring, where I update my yearly Future Hall of Fame Series and look at which active players are on pace for an eventual Cooperstown enshrinement. But before I get into the weeds, allow me to go on a brief nostalgic tangent about the series.
We are just coming off the Baseball Writers inducting three new Hall of Famers in Billy Wagner, CC Sabathia, and Ichiro Suzuki (here’s my wrap-up on those results, if you missed them). I noted last year that Joe Mauer and Adrian Beltré marked the first two real-life Hall of Famers who had actually been covered in this series when they were active. I never got to discuss Wagner here, who retired in 2010, but Sabathia and Suzuki represent the third and fourth inductees that I’ve included in this series.*
*Technically, Ichiro only just made it, as my initial 2013 columns only covered players under 30 (although Sabathia got a specific mention despite being 31), and I kept things to 35-and-under until 2017, which wound up being his last full season.
It still feels notable, since it’s only the second time this has happened after writing this column for over a decade. But after thinking about it a little more… I guess this is just going to be the new normal? Like, Wagner was about to be aged off the ballot anyway, so we’re nearly out of the era of “guys who retired before I started”, and while it took a few years for me to start including the oldest players in the league and I missed some big names in that window, next year’s new candidates will be guys who last played in 2020, which was well after I started taking a more comprehensive approach.
At this point, it’s going to be difficult for an induction class to have not have someone who made this series at some point. Andruw Jones might go in next year and he retired after 2012, but he finished behind Carlos Beltrán (who made it onto that 2017 list with Ichiro) on this year’s ballot, and I don’t see any way the former makes it in next year while the latter misses out.
And that will be the case going forward… kind of indefinitely? Even if I just decided not to continue this series next year, the Hall will still be dealing with guys that I wrote about here for so long into the future that it’s kind of wild to think about. Like, just as an example, Manny Ramírez’s final year on the BBWAA ballot is next year, 2026, and he debuted as a 21-year-old back in 1993; using that as a reference, a 21-year-old that I cover this year could conceivably be on a hypothetical 2058 ballot, a year that only registers as “sci-fi setting” to me. The timescale that the Hall of Fame works at is just difficult to fathom, sometimes.
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Hall of Fame 2025: Ichiro, Sabathia, and Wagner Inducted, Plus a Full Ballot Breakdown
For the second year in a row, the Baseball Writers sent a three-person group to Cooperstown. Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia made it in their first election, while longtime Astro closer Billy Wagner made it on his tenth and final try. Those three, along with Veterans Committee picks Dave Parker and Dick Allen, will serve as Baseball’s Hall of Fame Class of 2025.
It’s a pretty well-rounded bunch, spearheaded by the first Japanese player in Cooperstown history. Ichiro, in his first ever ballot, fell just one vote shy of unanimity (393/394), tying him with Derek Jeter for the second-best performance in BBWAA ballot history. The right fielder finished with 3089 hits over nineteen seasons with the Mariners, Yankees, and Marlins, thanks in part to nine straight 200-hit campaigns to start his MLB career.
That total is made all the more impressive by the fact that his debut season in the US came at the age of 27, making him one of the latest-debuting Hall of Famers in history; if you count his nine seasons in Japan before that, he has a staggering 4367 professional hits in his career, which started at the age of 18 and lasted until he was 45 (stats from Baseball-Reference unless otherwise stated, by the way).
It's hard to argue against Suzuki’s case, which includes both the 2001 AL MVP and Rookie of the Year Award, plus a pair of batting titles, three Silver Sluggers, and a full ten All-Star Selections and Gold Gloves. The Mariners have already announced that they’ll be retiring his number #51 (no word yet on whether his predecessor for the number, Randy Johnson, can expect a similar honor later).
There was an outside chance that he would hit 100%, as he was still perfect through all 216 Early ballots in Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker, but alas, that was not the case. We’ll see in the coming days if the one No vote steps forward (and the tracker will continue to update as more voters reveal their ballots), but it’s worth keeping in mind that we still don’t know who the one vote against Derek Jeter was back in 2020, so we may just never learn.
It’s a pretty well-rounded bunch, spearheaded by the first Japanese player in Cooperstown history. Ichiro, in his first ever ballot, fell just one vote shy of unanimity (393/394), tying him with Derek Jeter for the second-best performance in BBWAA ballot history. The right fielder finished with 3089 hits over nineteen seasons with the Mariners, Yankees, and Marlins, thanks in part to nine straight 200-hit campaigns to start his MLB career.
That total is made all the more impressive by the fact that his debut season in the US came at the age of 27, making him one of the latest-debuting Hall of Famers in history; if you count his nine seasons in Japan before that, he has a staggering 4367 professional hits in his career, which started at the age of 18 and lasted until he was 45 (stats from Baseball-Reference unless otherwise stated, by the way).
It's hard to argue against Suzuki’s case, which includes both the 2001 AL MVP and Rookie of the Year Award, plus a pair of batting titles, three Silver Sluggers, and a full ten All-Star Selections and Gold Gloves. The Mariners have already announced that they’ll be retiring his number #51 (no word yet on whether his predecessor for the number, Randy Johnson, can expect a similar honor later).
There was an outside chance that he would hit 100%, as he was still perfect through all 216 Early ballots in Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker, but alas, that was not the case. We’ll see in the coming days if the one No vote steps forward (and the tracker will continue to update as more voters reveal their ballots), but it’s worth keeping in mind that we still don’t know who the one vote against Derek Jeter was back in 2020, so we may just never learn.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)