Hall of Fame voting is out of whack
The discrepancy between David Wright and Joe Mauer doesn't make sense
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Way back in college, I wrote a column with a simple premise: baseball players who don’t quite reach the typical standards for Hall of Fame enshrinement, but who stick with one team long enough to earn the favor of an entire fanbase while also showing nothing but impeccable character and playing well enough to be near the ordinary standard for admission, deserve to get in. I offered four examples: David Wright, Joe Mauer, Jorge Posada, and Dustin Pedroia.
They’re all similar: players whose fWAR marks range from 42.7 (Posada) to 55.2 (Mauer); who played for one team throughout their careers; who became symbols of hard work and persistence; and whose numbers didn’t quite measure up to Hall of Famers, but came pretty close.
Those players, I wrote, deserved to be Hall of Famers. As I put it:
The Hall should be a repository for baseball greatness, and baseball greatness comes in many forms. It’s not just the ability to hit 600 home runs or bat .340. Rather, sometimes baseball greatness manifests itself in other ways. The unparalleled resilience of David Wright. The hardworking consistency of Dustin Pedroia. The quiet leadership of Jorge Posada. The pain and perseverance of Joe Mauer. The Hall should recognize this and induct players like these four.
Well, here we are: Wright and Mauer are making their first appearances on the ballot this year. And the results — well so far, they’ve been downright confusing.
Wright, per the public ballot tracker as of Thursday night, has earned 6.0% of the vote. And Mauer, also per the tracker, is at…79.1.%.
Now look: Wright and Mauer are obviously different players with different careers. But scrutinizing the differences between them, I just can’t see the enormous differentiator, the factor that’s giving Mauer a chance at first-ballot induction while putting Wright in danger of falling off the ballot altogether.
Wright’s and Mauer’s careers, next to each other, look like this:
Mauer: .306/.388/.439, 124 OPS+, 55.2 bWAR, 143 HR; six-time All Star, three Gold Gloves, five Silver Sluggers, 2009 AL MVP
Wright: .296/.376/.491, 133 OPS+, 49.2 bWAR, 242 HR; seven-time All Star, two Gold Gloves, two Silver Sluggers
Right off the bat, I’ll say this: catcher is different than any other position. As I’ve written before, it’s a lot harder to find good offensive catchers, because it’s a lot harder to find good catchers in general. Offensive catchers like Mauer deserve extra consideration in the voting process. To me, Mauer is a Hall of Famer without much doubt.
But if we’re talking about positions — Wright’s .867 OPS ranks fifth all-time among third basemen (sixth if you include Alex Rodriguez, who played slightly more games at shortstop than he did at third base). He’s ahead of Wade Boggs, George Brett, Scott Rolen, Adrian Beltre, and Ron Santo. His counting stats obviously don’t rate as well, because his career was completely derailed by injuries starting at age 26, but regardless, it’s not hard to make a case for David Wright as one of the top 15 or 20 third basemen of all time.
Mauer is similar. His .827 OPS ranks eighth all-time among catchers. His average and OBP are in the top five. But his counting stats? Not nearly as impressive, because of his injuries. Mauer is probably a top-10 all-time catcher, and definitely in the top 15 or so.
Again — this isn’t a complaint against Joe Mauer. At all. He is a completely deserving Hall of Famer, and he will likely get in within the next few years, if not this one. But the question is this: what’s the unseen difference, the x-factor, that has Mauer at 79.1% and Wright at 6.0%?
One differentiator is Mauer’s MVP Award — but Wright should have won an MVP in 2007, when he batted .325/.416/.546 with 30 home runs and 34 stolen bases while winning a Gold Glove. He probably would have won the award if the Mets hadn’t collapsed in September and October (over which span he batted .352/.432/.602).
The difference, it seems to me, must come down to position. But if that’s it, there’s another elephant in the room: as Mauer’s injuries added up, he basically stopped playing catcher. He didn’t catch at all after 2013, except for a ceremonial appearance in his final game. In his career, Mauer started 584 games at first base and another 304 at DH.
How many games did Wright start at DH?
Three.
Had Wright played in the AL and taken advantage of the opportunity to DH and take a rest from playing third base, who knows what his career would have looked like? Obviously, he didn’t, and we have no idea. The point is, Mauer is getting a well-deserved positional adjustment — but with the hundreds of extra games that Wright played at a premium position, that seems like an advantage he should equally enjoy.
Intuitively, Mauer’s case does seem a bit stronger than Wright’s. But it’s hard to dig in and figure out where that difference actually shows up — and it’s a lot tougher than that to find the differentiating factor that puts Mauer’s public vote total more than 70% higher than Wright’s.
In Mauer and Wright, you’ll find two players whose careers were cut short by injury, who were on pace to reach the upper echelons of their positions in careers spent entirely with one team, who demonstrated nothing but the hardest work and strongest character. Their balloting numbers don’t need to be identical — but they certainly shouldn’t be this far apart.