Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat –1/14/25

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and happy new year! Welcome to my first chat of 2025

Jay Jaffe: Again it’s been awhile, as I’ve been snowed in by my Hall of Fame series, including a larger-than-usual crop of interesting one-and-done guys. Yesterday I covered Ben Zobrist (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jaws-and-the-2025-hall-of-fame-ballot-ben-…), tomorrow it’s Curtis Granderson, with Fernando Rodney and Adam Jones still to squeeze in before Tuesday’s election results.

Jay Jaffe: I’ve been doing a few Hall-related media spots lately, including a Hall of Very Good podcast and some discussions of the ballot with writers. If this kind of stuff floats your boat, check in with me at @jayjaffe.bsky.social to follow along. By the way, my Twitter account is now locked; I basically stopped posting there just before running my annual Hall of Fame ballot piece (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jay-jaffes-2025-hall-of-fame-ballot), and I don’t plan to do more than occasionally lurk there going forward.

Jay Jaffe: We’re a week away from the Hall results being announced, so I expect several questions on that subject. With that, on with the show!

wheelhouse: i’m sure this is the least fun part of HOF voting to discuss, but does stuff like beltran starting low and gaining year-over-year bother you? in a sense i get it, but on some level a voter who switches to Yes on him thought that cheating was bad a year ago but this year actually it’s in the past now. no one twenty years from now is going to care if he went in second ballot or sixth, so i dunno, either cheating is disqualifying or it isn’t

Jay Jaffe: Actually, year-over-year changes is actually one of the most interesting aspects of covering the Hall beat. Voting doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Each candidate is competing with the other candidates for one of those 10 spots on a voter’s ballot, and while not everybody goes to 10, enough people do that even some deserving candidates get left off. The voting body changes from year to year, with old voters replaced by new ones, and returning candidates that do well get more scrutiny from voters that bypassed them the last time. It’s a very interesting set of dynamics in play, one we’ve started to get a better handle on thanks to Ryan Thibodaux and his ballot tracker group

Jay Jaffe: With regards to the specifics of Beltrán, what I think voters are seeing is that it’s the sense of proportion of punishiment that voters are reconsidering. Some people believe he’s been particularly scapegoated or suffered far more punishment than, say A.J. Hinch and Alex Cora, who were suspended for a year but seamlessly returned to dugouts after that.

Matt: Hey Jay, thanks for your great work on the HOF series! Was curious about the Dodgers – specifically, how rare is it to have 4 HOF players (Ohtani, Betts, Freeman, Kershaw last season, likely for 2025) on the roster at one time?

Jay Jaffe: it’s not common but it’s not, like, that rare. There are Yankees teams from the late ’20s and early 1930s with nine! The 1961 Cubs had Richie Ashburn, Ernie Banks, Lou Brock, Ron Santo, and Billy Williams, and later Cubs teams from that decade had Banks, Santo, Williams, and Fergie Jenkins

Jay Jaffe: I should put together a list, because i get asked variants of this question a fair bit and I never have a full accounting handy.

Bighen: Do you really think McCann and Martin are HOFers or were you just advocating for keeping them on ballot

Jay Jaffe: I genuinely believe Martin is worthy based upon the framing data — which is huge because of the volume of pitches swing from balls to strikes over the course of a 14-year career — and  the way he was viewed within the industry. It wasn’t a fluke that eight of his first 11 teams made the playoffs with him as the regular backstop, or that two GMs made signing him at top offseason priority and then ended 20+ year playoff droughts with back-to-back appearances. If I have to listen to people prattle on about this or that catcher’s intangibles, i can point to some very tangible values that put Martin among the best of his era. I have McCann a bit below him in frJAWS, but I think this is a discussion worth continuing in the coming years, and it distresses me that both he and Martin may miss the 5% cut next week. If the voters aren’t going to consider the value pitch framing, what objective data is there to justify the election of Yadier Molina?

sonny: The John Jaso mention in the Zobrist HOF retrospective sent me down the ras john rabbit hole. solid player and 80 grade ‘remember some guys’ candidate.

Jay Jaffe: This whole ballot series pulls some Remember Some Guys gems every time, and Jaso is certainly one of them.

sonny: Mike Trout is 32 years old and has accumulated 86 bWAR. He’s incredible, but maybe not the no doubt 100 WAR player we may have thought 5 years ago. What do you think his odds are to get–and stay above–100 WAR for his career?

Jay Jaffe: Oh, I still I think he’s got a better than 50% shot to reach 100 WAR. He’s under contract through 2030 and while I don’t expect him to play 150 games again, I also don’t expect him to keep rolling out 29-game seasons.

SP “Surge”: Lot of starting pitchers doing better in tracking than may have been expected – Sabathia (though he’s been a ‘future HoF’ for some time), Pettitte, King Felix, even Buehrle to an extent, are gaining ground or making a strong early showing. Do you think that this is evidence of a relative mindset shift by the voting body, giving the ongoing discussions on SP in the HoF? What are your thoughts here, given that you voted for Felix/have voted in the past for Pettitte & may do so again, pending future analysis?

Jay Jaffe: I was just speaking about the starters’ vote trend with The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans. I think what we’re seeing is an arrival at a crossroads. CC has the peak, the longevity, and the big postseason footpritn of a Hall starter and looks like a slam dunk compared to his ballot cohorts and those upcoming. Félix has an impressive peak but no longevity or postseason, Pettitte has longevity and the postseason but only a modest peak. I’m not entirely sold on either Félix or Andy but I’m starting to think about them and their ilk, and i know a ton of other voters are as well. Where this will go, I don’t know but we’re going to keep talking about it over the next several years.

And that’s really what I wish would would happen with Martin and McCann, in light of the upcoming candidacies of Buster Posey and Yadier Molina.

Brian Cashman: Does Marcus Stroman for Jeimer Candelario make sense?

Jay Jaffe: i think you could construct a deal around those two, but it might require cash and other players to level out since Candelario has two guaranteed years and an option versus Stroman one year and a vesting option. The Yankees do need a 3B, the Reds may have less need for a starter but Stroman’s groundball tendency would be worth more in that bandbox. I’m not sure Gavin Lux has the defense to play third base though.

Tom: do you think postseason statistics should be included in a player’s career statistics (e.g., Pujols would “have” 722 home runs instead of 703)? i know the common argument against that is that not everyone gets to play in the postseason often or at all, so it’s not fair to the Mike Trouts of the world that we might include an extra half-season’s worth of playoff games for Mookie Betts when comparing the two — but that’s true of athletic careers in general. not everyone gets to the big leagues in their early 20s or plays until they’re 40. not everyone has the same injury luck.

Jay Jaffe: I’m fine keeping regular and postseason stats separate. We can add them together if we want, it’s not that hard.

Sam: How many more batting titles would Arraez need to win to have a realistic HOF chance? And would they need to be in a row?

Jay Jaffe: Well, Bill Madlock won four batting titles but went one-and-done (4.5% in 1993) and has never made it onto another ballot. His defense was so bad (-107 via Total Zone) that he had no place to play after age 36, and finished with just 38.3 WAR. He’d be a poor choice for the Hall, and Arraez might not look like a very good one either. In winning his third batting title last year, he was worth just 1.0 bWAR, and so far he’s totaled just 16.0 through age 27. The only way he can assure himself of getting to Cooperstown is by reaching 3,000 hits; maybe if he wins three more batting titles the conversation becomes more interesting, but even a 30 year old with 26 career WAR (where he’d be at if he replicated 2022–24 from a WAR standpoint) isn’t somebody likely to get my vote.

deGoat: If deGrom can miraculously stay healthy and put up three more dominant 150IP and 5+ WAR seasons, is that enough for a ticket to Cooperstown?

Jay Jaffe: let’s see him do it and then we’ll talk. There’s no reason to get overly worked up about the hypothetical of a guy who insists upon crashing his Ferrari into a wall every time he picks it up from the dealer.

Jay Jaffe: and let’s see where the Félix candidacy goes

Mike: Why is San Francisco struggling to attract talent from the Pacific Rim? Location, community, and team’s history with Asian players would suggest they would be a more favorable destination than they are. How does Posey Fix it

Jay Jaffe: I don’t think the problem is limited to the Pacific Rim. The Giants have had a hard time landing top-level talent for the long term for a few years now — yes, they came close with Correa and Judge — because the organization is seen as being in some kind of disarray. They’ve reached the playoffs once in the past eight seasons, with six sub-.500 seasons and four 4th- or 5th-place finishes. They’re just not seen as a great landing spot until they pull out of that.

Steroid era: Shouldn’t the HOF bar be lower for pitchers who pitched during the steroid era?  I’m thinking guys like Kevin Brown, David Cone, and Bret Saberhagen should easily be in.  Do you agree?

Jay Jaffe: Those guys are at or near the top of my list of ones who at least should have gotten a longer look because they set up the conversation about starters that we’re having now.

On that subject, I wrote about all three of those guys within a 6-part series I did in 2022, most of which was before the lockout negotiations heated up. The whole thing wasn’t exactly planned out and so it didn’t get one of those fancy navigation bars like my annual ballots do, and so I’d never even gathered the links together until today. They make for some interesting reading on the subject:

drplantwrench: im a KRod truther (there are dozens of us! dozens!)… do you think closers are properly valued in the advanced stats? and in the eyes of voters?

Jay Jaffe: I think the voters mostly have it right in drawing a distinction between Wagner (elite rate stats) and K-Rod (very good rate stats). There’s over half a run of ERA separating the two of them, and gaps in WAR, WPA, and WPA/LI, the metrics that go into R-JAWS. I’ve got Wagner as the best closer outside the Hall (6th in R-JAWS) and K-Rod 13th, below Nathan and Papelbon, both of whom went one-and done.

Jay Jaffe: That Rodriguez has multiple ugly off-field incidents — one for assaulting his girlfriend’s father (and injuring himself in the process) and one for a DV allegation further hurts his candidacy.

md: Speaking of hall of very good – which candidates this year would be your picks for hall of very good?

Jay Jaffe: Pedroia, Wright, Tulowitzki, Zobrist… I don’t see any of them really as HOFers but I have great respect for all of them and wish they’d done enough to merit stronger consideration.

Johnny5Alive: I know I have brought this up pretty much every year, but would you ever come around to voting for Wright.  His career was essentially over at 31, and if he even had 3 more healthy years at a typical decline, he would pass all your marks.  He gets penalized for a debilitating injury that ended his career.  He doesn’t have the awards (altough he should have won MVP in 2007 he was the best player in the NL) or the championships (not his fault), but his career WAR is higher in fewer games than Kirby Puckett (different positions notwithstanding) and for comparison sake, he has the same WAR output per game played as everyone’s darling this year Utley (who gets the benefit of ‘starting late’).  Wright gets penalized also for defense, yet his defense metrics swing wildly from season to season, which makes them questionable at best.  The math aint mathin Jaffe

Jay Jaffe: In both of the last two years I’ve had one “reach” candidate on my ballot, a guy who’s below my analytical threshold that I choose in order to stimulate my own thinking and that of others on the larger topic; last year it was Pettite, this year was Félix. I thought about Wright both times, but he’s maybe 13th or 14th in my queue. He was on a Hall pace even with mediocre defense (-25 DRS career) but for the injuries, but if we started trying to credit every guy to whom that happened by electing them anyway we’d have to add another wing to the Hall. Dale Murphy, Nomar Garciaparra, Wright, Pedroia, Tulo — I’ve got better candidates on my wish list at each of their positions, guys with fuller careers I see as stronger HOF priorities.

Fans MLB Forever: What do you think about Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez who have raised their percentages for the HOF?

Jay Jaffe: I think their hubris cost them spots in the Hall of Fame. They knew the consequences for violating the Joint Drug Agreement, and they did so anyway. they’re not getting in via the writers’ ballots, they’ll never even approach the ~66% that Bonds and Clemens got unless you add their shares together.

Mark: Hi Jay, what would it take for Mark Buehrle to gain some significant ground in the voting and do you see that ever happening?

Jay Jaffe: Pettitte getting in would trigger a longer look at Buehrle, but he’s going to run out of eligibility before that happens. Maybe he’ll show up on Era Committee ballots but so long as Bonds, Clemens, Schilling, Sheffield, and Kent account for vote shared 3-5x what he received it’s tough to see him breaking through for election.

Phil: I wanted to thank you for your pieces on Martin and McCann. After a lot of thought, I have come to disagree with you–I think framing falls under the category of influencing the game, akin to the effect of “lineup protection” and simolar hard-to-quantify categories, and HOF voting should focus on direct effects such as hitting, catching, and throwing a ball. But your pieces were provocative, they made me think, in exactly the way one wants from writing on tricky topics.

Jay Jaffe: I’m glad you enjoyed the pieces and that they provoked some thought but I think your comparison is off base. People have searched for a “lineup protection” quantification and never found one but we’ve got a ton of objective data on the value of swinging a 2-1 count to 1-2 (for example), the volume that a starting catcher accumulates in this are, and its basis as a repeatable skill from year to year (subject to aging like other skills).

kim: do you think the dam has truly broken open on The Coors Problem in hall of fame voting?

Jay Jaffe: Well, we’ve got Walker and Helton as Hall of Famers, Tulo as a one-and-done given his career length, Arenado looking very strong in JAWS. How much of a problem is there, really?

mmddyyyy: Would Martin/McCann (or other borderline candidates) have more support if they’d played for a single team?

Jay Jaffe: A Molina effect? Maybe. But again, I think it’s telling that smart teams sought them out as acquisition targets.

Talfred: I really dislike when sportswriters refer to a player as a “future hall-of-famer”. It feels like they use the term most often when referring to a borderline candidate, and the repeated references can influence discussions in a way that’s not helpful. What are your thoughts?

Jay Jaffe: I think it’s part of human nature to try to sort these things out as they unfold. We’re not always right, and yes they can sway the discussion, but you might have better luck holding the ocean back with a broom if you think you can produce an electorate that is free of this “bias” — which, after all, has its basis in long-term coverage of the game.

Jeff in Jersey: Do you see a reckoning coming among HOF voters re: the importance of peak seasons for players with shorter careers? I keep thinking about how much extra teams are paying for elite players vs. very good ones. Obviously I’m thinking of Felix here–but also Pedroia, Wright, etc. I say this despite feeling that innings pitched are far undervalued in WAR for starters…but obviously eliteness really matters.

Jay Jaffe: I think it’s a frequent topic of discussion but aside from Utley — whose JAWS is high enough to be right near the standard — we’re not seeing much to suggest these guys are going ot get elected anytime soon.

War2d2: Quick ballot question: Car-Go is on the ballot, but Car-Go is not. Both have eerily identical career WAR numbers. Is it because Gonzalez is strongly identified with one team (Rockies) but Gomez was more of a journeyman? Or that Gonzalez got all his value from hitting and Gomez was more of an all-around player? I guess the question I really have  is: who makes the call on which player gets to be on the ballot?

Jay Jaffe: That’s a good question, one I spent a few minutes mulling but it never made it into the piece (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jaws-and-the-2025-hall-of-fame-ballot-carl…). The separator, I think, is that Gonzalez won a batting title (and finished 3rd in the MVP voting) and had a couple of Coors-driven big offensive seasons, where Gomez didn’t have big bold-faced numbers. I can’t discount the possibility that the latter may have rubbed some people the wrong way with his antics but my guess is the batting title is the biggest separator.

Idiotic Failson: Sale is a fHoF, right? I was just looking through career WAR and noticed he’s the only guy in the top 100 with >11k/9, which for a starter is…uh…ludicrous.

Jay Jaffe: I think his Cy Young-winning season puts him back on a Hall path, maybe the second-most-likely guy after Cole (excusing the trio of obvious ones who have already done enough, Kershaw, Verlander, and Scherzer). He. Has. To. Stay. Healthy. Though. And I hope he does because I think he’s got a better case than Félix already.

Jeff in Jersey: Eno Sarris noted that Molina, McCann, and Martin have the top framing seasons of all time, right around the same time. They were ahead of the curve on framing, but now they’d be essentially league-average or better. In other words, framing is important, but an average catcher can learn it–not like Rickey stealing 130 or Ruth hitting more homers than anyone in the league (a different kind of outlier). Does that factor into your thinking at all about their value?

Jay Jaffe: There was a huge early-adopter advantage… and it wasn’t unlike Babe Ruth figuring out the value of uppercutting the ball and knocking it out of the park when everybody else was hitting it on the ground. Being vastly better at something that not everyone understands yet has a lot of value. The new market inefficiency blah blah blah

Mr Burrito: I love Russell Martin and feel like he was grossly underrated during his career. But would you have traded Martin for, say, Jim Edmonds? Or Troy Tulowitzki? Or Felix Hernandez? In a heartbeat, yes. But all those guys are Hall of Very Good, not HOF….. Also, want to say I love your work and look forward to your insights.

Jay Jaffe: Thanks for the kind words. I always have a problem with these hypothetical Hall of Famer trades. Would I trade Martin for Edmonds? What does my roster look like? What do their contracts look like? What does my farm system look like? Am I going to be fired if I don’t win the World Series this year?  I’m not tremendously inclined to think hard about an oversimplified scenario when life puts enough ambiguity and complexity on my plate.

Beyond that, I think Edmonds is a cut above those other guys you mention besides Martin, someone whose WAR and JAWS (60.4/42.6/51.5) are much more in line with other Hall of Famers at his position.

Link: Speaking of the SP crossroads, does it look like a “rising tide lifts all ships” situation for high-peak, short-career cases with Andruw & Utley giving a boost to the Wrights and Pedroias of the world?  Historically, the HoF had made seemingly room for a number of such candidates (Dean, Kiner) though that trickled off at some point.

Jay Jaffe: Again, there’s a big difference in that Jones and Utley have WAR and JAWS similar to the average HOFers at their positions, whereas the Wrights and Pedroias are short. Not every voter thinks in terms of WAR and JAWS but when they’re considering the volume of a player’s career, those numbers obviously do carry some influence within the voting body.

Jay: Alex Bregman to yanks holdup due to losing draft picks and/or luxury tax ?

Jay Jaffe: Probably more the latter. but I can’t say anyone looking at his career has to be so confident in where it’s headed given his trend arrows. He’s not the 2017–19 guy anymore (cough) and his wRC+ has declined in each of the past two seasons.

Why_Wright: Why do you emphasize the moral component for a player (eg, see discussion on K Rod).    I get dinging a player for cheating, but who are we to assess a person’s moral stature based upon news (and/or criminal) reports?   

I don’t confuse the art with the artist.   I’m gonna go see Pablo Picasso’s work whenever I can, no matter his alleged behaviours.

Would you stand outside the met with a sandwich board protesting Picasso?   Would you tell your wife/girlfriend “I don’t think we should go to his retrospective, I’ve read he was a bad man?”

Jay Jaffe: Criminal reports tend to stick out like a sore thumb and in most cases are far worse than the on-field stuff that some voters are concerned about (PEDs and sign-stealing). Not everybody uses them as a disqualifying factor (I’ve voted for Bonds and Andruw despite their DV baggage, not that I’m 100% comfortable with that choice) but some people do, and I’m not going to tell them they shouldn’t.

Your Picasso example falls flat, for me. I have enough understanding of his place in art history to know that he’s one of the greats, but that doesn’t mean i go see every exhibit dedicated to him at MOMA or have to anoint him with my seal of approval every year under heightened scrutiny. I think K-Rod was a very good closer, but I don’t think he belongs on my ballot or the Hall based on his body of work. The ugly stuff is there but isn’t the deciding factor for me.

Key Flaw: Can HOF Plaques be changed? Like, for example, if the Orioles decide to retire Mike Mussina’s number (but let Adley use it) and welcome him back as an Oriole (I’m still bitter they didn’t pony up the money to sign him), could he change his mind and say “yeah, I’d rather have an O’s cap”?

Jay Jaffe: Almost certainly no. The Hall did recast Jackie Robinson’s plaque because the original made no mention of his role in integration, which eventually became a wrong worth righting especially when Larry Doby’s plaque mentioned his role, and when Rachel Robinson weighed in (https://www.mlb.com/news/why-jackie-robinson-hall-of-fame-plaque-was-c…).

A cap choice is pretty trivial by comparison.

Jay Jaffe: OK folks, it’s been great chatting with you all. Thanks for stopping by. Next week is kind of touch and go — it’s the day of the announcement and my fingers will be flying already but I may opt for a short chat. Until then or whenever, take care!