hall of fame, next vote...

price has broken 4 bWAR in three seasons and 5 in just one

and verlander probably should have won price's cy young

Because they have to follow through on the premise, obviously some of these are silly--they even put "likeliest" in quotation marks in the title.

https://www.mlb.com/news/every-team-s-next-hall-of-famer

Of the legitimate picks, I disagree with one: no knock on C.C., but I think Stanton's a better choice for the Yankees, assuming his current injury isn't long-term serious.

500 HR: 27 players
3,000 K: 17 pitchers
600 HR: 9 players

I guess it depends on whether you think Stanton will hit 500 or 600 HR. I'm guessing 600.

If you use the Favorite Toy, he has a 96.9 % chance of hitting 500 and a 46.9% chance of hitting 600.

Sounds reasonable. That'll drop, maybe quite a bit, going into next season, but the drop would be artificial if you assume the injury's a blip.

I would not assume the injury is a blip

I thought it was something he's coming back from 100%. If that's not true, you can throw out everything I've said--even if he got to 500 with a few average seasons, I doubt very much he'd go in.

something funky is defintely going on w Stanton, the official word on his injury (injuries?) has been shifting and vague both times on the IL.

There is something about the way he moves even when healthy, a kind of rigidity to his motions, that has me feeling he won't perform well deep into this contract.

I’m not really a fan of the way his swing works now that I’ve seen him “everyday”/not in highlights. seems like a lot of upper body jerking without any hips, if that makes sense

it's gotta be the ugliest swing in baseball

You should see mine!

I'm sure your OPS is lower but I doubt it's not a sweeter stroke

Stanton would be an interesting pick, he's had a great career but he's also periodically been the Tulo of slugging outfielders. his injury history would worry me if i had money riding on his HOF induction, and he's turning 30 in a couple of months and doesn't strike me as a guy who's going to age exceptionally well.

Freeman does have a pretty decent case though i could see him falling into the Olerud trap: great career but not given the respect due because of the types of power stats associated with first basemen.

I think if Bryant keeps up a consistent career with decent WAR numbers he could get in with a boost from the MVP and Cubs' world series title.

I think Scherzer was in already before this season, he had just been too good. But sure, this year helps.

Exactly my sentiments on Freeman. Whereas there would seem to be a ceiling on him that falls short of the HOF--always good+, never great--there isn't yet a clear ceiling on Acuna, and I'd be more inclined to go with him (or even Albies).

I can always count on you guys to extrapolate future health/performance on a player who is still shut down from all baseball activities from an injury that happened in May.

You realize I'm a licensed physician, right?

freddie has the advantage that he was a full-time player at 21, but a career .503 SLG for a first baseman isn't going to get it done

He had four seasons where his SLG was below .500 but that hasn't happened since 2015.

His high was .586 in 2017

Sabathia fully deserves to get in, btw, and would logically do it before Stanton. xpost to Clem.

He has a big jump on a timeline, agreed. They've got a disconnect at SI between the article's title--"likeliest," how I interpreted their picks--and the URL, which I just noticed says "next." The two are not necessarily the same.

Yadier, huh....well time to fire up the Jim Sundberg veterans committee case.

Stephen Strasburg: long, long way to go, but he's quietly--well, not so quietly his first couple of years--built some underlying foundation. What he doesn't have is anything close to a flashy peak phase.

he had one, it was just that brief glimpse in 2010 before he got injured. he was must-watch baseball back then

jaffe:

With 1.1 more bWAR this year, Trout will surpass Mickey Mantle's 7-year peak (WAR7) total of 64.8. With 1.7 more bWAR he'll surpass Ken Griffey Jr. for 5th among CF in JAWS (68.9).

With 1.1 more bWAR, Verlander will climb from 48th to 39th in SP JAWS, surpassing HOF Jim Palmer, Carl Hubbell, Hal Newhouser, Roy Halladay, and Juan Marichal in the process.

it’s funny how jaffe writes for fangraphs and they have their own version of JAWS but he still uses rWAR

Donaldson is going to be a fun case.
― Van Horn Street, Friday, May 25, 2018

I thought Donaldson was building a really interesting case going into this year--maybe the first viable position player who didn't get started till he was 27. (I'd have to check.) He was already close to taking care of the peak-value half of the argument--four-and-a-half seasons that match almost any third baseman this side of Schmidt. But he needed some background, and this year has really set him back. He doesn't have much margin of error.
― clemenza, Friday, May 25, 2018

Donaldson’s not gonna make it, unless he comes back with another few years like the previous few. His peak is amazing but so was Mattingly’s.
― omar little, Friday, May 25, 2018

ya, i don't think i ever thought of Donaldson as a HOF.
― Mad Piratical (The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall), Friday, May 25, 2018

Anyway, as I say, almost no margin of error. He'd have to put up another 4-5 solid seasons--All-Star caliber, if not quite MVP-caliber--to have a chance. And this year, plus the injury last year, makes that seem increasingly unlikely. (If he did pull it off, though, he'd be in a better position than Mattingly. For HOF voters, I'm pretty sure playing well through your 30s is preferable to early peak and then a sudden end, or, even worse, a long, prolonged slide.)
― clemenza, Friday, May 25, 2018 9:03 PM

Viable again? Posnanski had something funny the other day:

"Don’t look now, but Donaldson is quietly having another excellent season. It’s 'quiet' because he’s hitting .257. But he continues to do many things well (he walks, hits for power, plays good defense, etc.) and those things add up, and few people notice. Donaldson has 42 career WAR — three or four more seasons like the one he’s having now, and he will be up in the Hall of Fame range and a whole lot of people will say, 'Ugh! Hall of Very Good! I never saw him as a Hall of Famer, even when he won that MVP!' That’s how it goes."

i still don't quite see it, not bc of how he's playing now but i think he would really have to go on like this for 3-4 more years and the past couple of seasons he's been hindered by some injuries. currently his career seems to be playing out a bit like Chase Utley's with a slightly lower and brief absolute peak. It remains to be seen if he can hang around enough to accumulate a similar WAR. i think if he winds up with that level it looks better but Utley isn't a certain HOFer either (i think he should be, probably).

The most relevant comparison is probably Scott Rolen. Let's say, taking Posnanski's cue, you pro-rate Donaldson for this year, then give him another four seasons like this one (roughly--that'd be the bare minimum for him to have a chance): 35 HR, 100 RBI, and 150 hits for bulk, .250/.350/.500 for rate stats, and 5.0 for WAR. Here's where they'd sit for their careers:

Rolen: 2077 hits, 316 HR, 1,287 RBI, .281/.364/.490, 70.2 WAR
Donaldson: 1747 hits, 383 HR, 1,113 RBI, .263/.361/.505, 66.6 WAR

(Tiny bit of estimation on OBP.) So if Donaldson were to do what Posnanski laid out and then walked away immediately, he'd be in range of Rolen--better overall peak, I'd say (even though Rolen's 2004 is the best single season by WAR), but a much later start, so his hits and RBI lag. (More HR, though.) But he wouldn't walk away immediately--he'd tack some more bulk numbers on towards the end, presumably as a less effective player, and end up close to Rolen there, too, and probably very close in WAR.

A lot of ifs there, I know, but a possibly encouraging precedent. Rolen went from 10% his first year to 17% his second year--he's at least headed in the right direction, and may get in down the road.

Those HR for Donald looked high--I double-counted his 25 this year. He'd be sitting at 358 HR, not 383.

Donaldson!

He always looks like he walked in from a Squidbillies episode.

there was some discussion upthread w/r/t Kimbrel and Jansen and Chapman and all of those guys are 31 and i don't see any of them getting near. Kimbrel looks like he's toast. he had that massive 2017 w/Boston but otherwise the two seasons before and the two since don't seem exactly Rivera-like in terms of consistency and microscopic ERAs. He's a guy that i do not want to see on the hill for the Cubs in an important situation in the World Series (lol?)

Jansen seems to be trending downward (ERA creeping up, k/9 creeping down).

Chapman is holding a bit steady in some areas, but his WHIP isn't sub-1.00 these days...also maybe i have some ill will towards him mostly for being a domestic abuser and but also more shallowly for being trash at key moments for the cubs in the 2016 postseason.

I for real hate Chapman for being an asshole human, I shallowly hate Kimberly because of his dumbass hanging arms.

Jansen is super cool. Love that guy

Sorry Kimberly

in defense of kimberly, with the way these guys are maniacal about their 'routines', it can't be easy to miss spring training and several months of the season, throw 3.2 innings in triple-a and then just show up in cubs save situations. (also his HR/FB is 28.6%, which is just unreasonable, either through bad luck or juiced balls)

that said, he's not a hall of famer, is definitely trending downward, and has the dumbass hanging arm/facial hair

Kenley Jansen is also a 1-team player at least so far. He's got a decade with the Dodgers this season. It will be a big deal for him and Kershaw if the Dodgers finally win it all this year.

Two or three years ago, I thought one of the three would emerge to have a chance--with the caveat that they'd have to add some major post-season success to their credentials. Not any more. The biggest part of what I thought they had going for them--where they even eclipsed Rivera--was in their unprecedented H/9 and K/9 ratios. Year-in and year-out they were under 5.0 H/9 and up around 15.0 K/9. I figured if one of them could keep that up for another five or six seasons, he'd have a chance.

And then Hader comes along, and such numbers aren't unprecedented anymore. And probably some other reliever will come along and put up a season where he's under 4.0 H/9 and up around 18.0 K/9. I don't know where they hit the wall on that, but I'm back to thinking Rivera will be the last in a long while.

a big part of what made rivera special was his consistency and longevity. i don't think it's so much about new thresholds of reliever greatness (12 K/9, 15, 18), it's about keeping it up year after year for an insane amount of time (like rivera). even then, rivera only managed 39 WAR (which is INCREDIBLE for a full time reliever) over his career. just like DHs, relievers have to be the elite of the elite to make the HOF because they're just not affecting the game for enough innings compared to position players and SPs

hader is pretty incredible right now. he needs to keep up this pace for another 10+ seasons to have any chance

Absolutely. Until his last couple of seasons, I thought Kimbrel did have that consistency; from 2011 to 2018, he's pretty solid the whole way (couple of minor blips). He just needed to add the longevity.

But he had a lousy post-season, and this year had been a nightmare.

If part of the reason Rivera is in the hall is because of his shutdown rep in the postseason I think Kimbrel and Chapman haven’t exactly done much to stand out in that respect.

the way things are going, we'll need to weigh K/9 and HR/9 against the league environments to compare across eras

I'd love to see the progression of the K/9 record for relievers. The starter record is still held by Randy Johnson in 2001, so that's been locked in for almost 20 years. The relief record is probably a relatively steep line up for a decade or two. But I can't find anything online.

Chris Sale seems to have the starter k/9 record at present? 11.1 vs Unit's 10.6 (Scherzer coming up a little shy at 10.5). And actually Darvish is #2, Strasburg #4, Scherzer at #5 (Cole is #11 despite having only had two seasons w/more K than IP, which shows how eye-popping his K rate's been over the past couple seasons).

Career, it's Sale; Johnson's single-season mark has been surprisingly resilient through the strikeout boom, though. Johnson (6), Scherzer (3), and Sale (2) hold more than half of the 20 best seasonal marks.

Somehow missed the “2001” — RJ was insane during that era.

Can Edwin Encarnacion and Nelson Cruz pad their juiced ball counting stats enough to get some HOF support? Both are late blooming DH-types who won't stop hitting. Edwin has a reasonable shot at 500 HR/1500 RBIs (assuming his current wrist injury doesn't ruin his power stroke).

If David Ortiz is the standard bearer for the DH with a 15-year peak, and he's not considered by many as a shoo-in, then Cruz and Encarnacion don't have a chance. But who knows how this era will be viewed in 10-15 years time.

My own sense is that Ortiz is a shoo-in, and that Encarnacion and Cruz have virtually no chance, with or without 500 HR. I think Ortiz's spectacular finish and--overrated in the aggregate though they may be (his ALDS and ALCS stats aren't anything special)--post-season numbers will count for a lot when he goes on the ballot, plus his seasonal numbers are clearly better than both.

Very similar, though, in how all three basically don't get started until they're 27-28.

(I don't just mean Ortiz's last season, although that was highlight--more like his sustained bounce-back after 2009, when he looked close to finished.)