HANDICAPPING THE HALL, '24

 

               The Baseball Hall of Fame, American sports’ most-exalted shrine, has few formal requirements for admission. One is that the player, coach, etc., put in at least 10 seasons in the Major Leagues. Another is that he be retired for five years.  A third is that he pass the initial ballot muster of a sports writers’ committee whose standards are generous.

                There’s another requirement, though, and it’s just as important for being unwritten or even publicly acknowledged. The Hall’s annual major event is its new-member induction ceremony every July. With no inductees there’s no party so it’s imperative that somebody be elected each year.

               The golden door to the Hall is through the annual sports writers’ ballot for the recently retired. This requires a 75% favorable vote of an electorate that last year totaled 386, and getting that many sports writers to agree on anything is no mean feat. The wise men who run the Hall know that, so they created side or back doors to their shrine. Those have been the veterans’ committees operating with shifting labels over the years. The 75% rule also holds among those groups, but with memberships of 16 former players or other baseball lifers that amounts to 12 votes. When the scribes elected no one in 1971 and 1996, and the vets stepped up to fill the void—with eight electees in 1971. Most of the players people don’t think belong in the Hall were put there by the vets, and will continue to be.

               This year’s ceremony already has a speaker thanks to the vets. He’s Jim Leyland, a longtime coach and manager who piloted four teams—the Pittsburgh Pirates, Florida Marlins, Colorado Rockies and Detroit Tigers—to various levels of glory over 27 years (1986-2013). He’s well liked and admired in the game. His is a baseball family—Katie, his wife of 35 years, previously worked for the Pirates and their two sons had baseball careers.

               Chances are good he’ll have company on the podium because the writers could elect as many as four ex-players this time. They’re an especially interesting group because none of them won a World Series ring over a total of 69 years in the Bigs. Just two of them even got to play in one.

               The player most likely to succeed is Adrian Beltre, ex of the L.A. Dodgers, Seattle Mariners, Boston Red Sox and Texas Rangers. The native of the Dominican Republic best exemplified Woody Allen’s dictum that 80% of life is showing up. He showed up for 2,933 games over a 21-year career, the 14^th most among the 20,532 men who’ve played in the Majors since they were started in 1876.

               Third-baseman Beltre never reached baseball’s heights but piled up some sterling stats, headed by his 3,166 career hits. The 3,000-hit mark, sans steroids, is a Hall admission card, and he had an annex-full of other trophies. He won’t be a unanimous first-balloter, but he’ll be close.

               Todd Helton got 72.2% of the vote on last year’s ballot, his 6^th (of a permissible 10), and nobody’s gotten that close without winning the next year. The first baseman is unusual in two respects in the modern game—he played his entire, 17-season career with the same team (the Rockies) and ended up with a plus-.300 (.316) lifetime batting average. Rockies’ hitting stats have been looked down on by baseball mavins because of the light air at their mile-high Coors Field home, and the ballpark’s wide expanses, but his way was greased by Larry Walker’s election in 2020.

               Another first-ballot possibility is Joe Mauer, the Minnesota Twins’ catcher. No other catcher has won an American League’s batting title, but Mauer did it three times—in 2006, ’08 and ’09—and he ended his career with a .306 lifetime batting average. He was the AL MVP in ’09. Like Helton, Mauer played his whole career of 15 seasons with the same team.  Homegrown, the native of St. Paul was, probably, the most-popular Twin ever.

A model of consistency, he had only one plus-three full season earned-run average in his 16 seasons (1995-2010). Interestingly, he was a natural right-hander who taught himself to throw lefty after he broke his right arm twice by age seven.

Among the other ballot holdovers, outfielder Andruw Jones, a 58% poller in 2023, has the next- best chance, but it’s a big jump to 75. Gary Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez, big-time sluggers, have big-time drug-related problems, and Carlos Beltran was a key figure in the 2017 Houston Astros’ cheating scandal.

The rest of the first-year slate is thin, led by Chase Utley, David Wright, Bartolo Colon and Matt Holliday.  They’ll get the 5% vote needed to stay on the ballot, with maybe one or two others. Stick around and you’ll get to see Ichiro Suzuki, maybe the best hitter-of-the-baseball ever, on the 2025 ballot. He’s a possible unanimous choice, and he, too, never played in a World Series.