My 2024 Hall of Fame Ballot

We've reached the dawn of 2024, and as die-hard-baseball fans do their best Rogers Hornsby ahead of Spring Training, we mark the passage of time with the announcement of the next class of National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees.

Baseball traditionalists and new-age analytics apologists once again lock horns in debating why "Player X" is more deserving than "Player Y." The Hall of Fame also forces us to confront our own moral conscious, as we assess players, not only on the merits of their on-field performance, but for their off-field transgressions. We are ultimately evaluating human beings and considering whether or not to bestow baseball's highest honor upon them.

Before giving you my ballot, here are the rules and requirements for Hall of Fame eligible players, outlined per the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA). To clarify, I do not belong to said organization and don't have a say in the official voting process.

May Vote for in the Future

• Manny Ramírez—Undeniable is the sentiment of Manny Ramírez as one of the best right-handed hitters who ever lived. Look no further than a career .312/.411/.585/.996 slash line over 2,302 games and parts of 19 seasons. His career 154 OPS+ sits in the company of the game's immortals; Willie Mays (155), Hank Aaron (155), Joe DiMaggio (155), and Frank Robinson (154). However, the elephant in the room with Man-Ram is flunking PED tests in 2009 and 2011. While I've been unyielding in my support for Barry Bonds belonging in Cooperstown, the presence of failed tests in conjunction with a sudden retirement following being popped a second time, I reside myself to leaving Manny off for the time being.

• Álex Rodríguez—What can be said about Manny Ramírez can be said about Álex Rodríguez in a scroll long enough to span the Great Wall of China. A-Rod was something of a baseball super villain. Normally, the fuel to the fire of hatred that surrounds these players is the transgressions that accompany their on-field brilliance, and A-Rod fits this narrative to a tee. Did you know his 344 home runs in games at shortstop trail all-time leader, Cal Ripken Jr., by just one, with A-Rod getting there in 1,033 fewer games (1,264) than Ripken (2,297)? This while winning a batting title and two Gold Gloves all before turning 29. But when you
  on multiple occasions before receiving a 211-game suspension (eventually reduced to 162 games), creating one of the sport's biggest media-frenzy scandals, I'll again allow father time to amend my bitterness.

With these in mind, I present to you my Hall of Fame ballot:

3B Adrián Beltré

JAWS: 4th among third basemen

• 93.5 career WAR | 48.7 7yr-peak WAR | 71.1 JAWS | 5.2 WAR/162
• Average HOF 3B (out of 16): 68.4 career WAR | 43.1 7yr-peak WAR | 55.8 JAWS | 5.1 WAR/162

The slam-dunk of the bunch on this year's ballot, Adrián Beltré's case is so well-defined that we won't spend too much time ruminating on the brilliance of his play. Here are just a few numbers to briefly illustrate one of baseball's most enduring characters and players. 93.5 rWAR (3rd all-time among 3B), 3,166 hits (18th all-time), 477 home runs (31st), 200 defensive runs saved (t-1st), 168 total zone fielding runs (13th), 27 dWAR (15th). Not since Derek Jeter in 2020 has a player ever felt as much a lock as Beltré does in 2024.

CF Carlos Beltrán

JAWS: 9th among center fielders

• 70.1 career WAR | 44.4 7yr-peak WAR | 57.2 JAWS | 4.4 WAR/162
• Average HOF CF (out of 19): 71.6 career WAR | 44.7 7yr-peak WAR | 58.1 JAWS | 5.4 WAR/162

Now that Beltrán got the Robert Alomar treatment for his ties to the 2017 Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal, let the numbers do the talking in rightfully enshrining him in Cooperstown. A quick bit of trivia—here are the five players in MLB history with >400 HR, >300 SB: Barry Bonds, Álex Rodríguez, Willie Mays, Andre Dawson, and Carlos Beltrán. On numbers alone, all of these names have Hall of Fame pedigrees. The separator for Beltrán, though, is his postseason pedigree. In 65 career playoff contests, Beltrán hit .307/.412/.609/1.021 with home runs and 11 stolen bases. Outside of all of this, the native of Puerto Rico ought to be elected in the context of his center field comrades, as his 70.1 rWAR ranks 8th all-time amongst players at the position, higher than the likes of Duke Snider, Dawson, and Kirby Puckett, just to name a few of already-elected players.

CF Andruw Jones

JAWS: 11th among center fielders

• 62.7 career WAR | 46.4 7yr-peak WAR | 54.6 JAWS | 4.6 WAR/162
• Average HOF CF (out of 19): 71.6 career WAR | 44.7 7yr-peak WAR | 58.1 JAWS | 5.4 WAR/162

If I told you that one player saved 253 runs with his defense while also hitting 434 home runs, wouldn't you think him to already be in the Hall of Fame? Alas, this is the case for Andruw Jones, who played more 17,000 innings at one baseball's premier defensive positions, and he played it better than anyone before or after him has. Between 1997-2007, Jones hit 363 home runs while saving 238 runs on the other side of the ball, amassing 60.9 rWAR in the process. Unfortunately, for Jones and the millions he awed in that decade of brilliance, his final five seasons would see him regress to the tune of a 95 OPS+ hitter whose still-modest power (.424 SLG) wasn't enough to excuse injuries and a precipitous decline in defense. From 2008-12, Jones put together just 1.7 rWAR, and his .254 career batting average upon his retirement has led some to hold off in casting their support for him. If someone like Harmon Killebrew, a career .256 hitter, is only in Cooperstown due to his 573 home runs—a mark surpassed by 11 different players—and the guy who saved more runs than any other outfielder in history can't get in, that seems to set a bit of a double standard. And when you assess his career as a whole, Jones and the aforementioned Adrián Beltré are the only two players in baseball history with 400-plus home runs and 200-plus fielding runs, an illustrator of multi-faceted baseball mastery and longevity. And with ballot more vacant of PED-associated players, Jones, after garnering 58.1% in 2023, may finally get the call that's long eluded him.

C/1B Joe Mauer

JAWS: 7th among catchers

• 55.2 career WAR | 39.0 7yr-peak WAR | 47.1 JAWS | 4.8 WAR/162
• Average HOF C (out of 16): 53.6 career WAR | 34.7 7yr-peak WAR | 44.2 JAWS | 4.7 WAR/162

Johnny Bench is the consensus best catcher in baseball history. Mike Piazza is the best offensive catcher in baseball history. Joe Mauer was arguably the best pure hitter to don the "tools of ignorance." Among 133 catchers in baseball history to catch at least 850 games, Mauer's .889 OPS in these contests ranks third best all-time, trailing only the prior-referenced Piazza (.942) and Mickey Cochrane (.894), who took his last breath 21 years before Mauer's birth. Even if you solely credit Mauer with the 39 WAR he accrued as a catcher, he'd still sneak inside the top-30 all-time among backstops. In that span from 2004-2012, Mauer collected an AL MVP (2009), 3 consecutive Gold Gloves, and became the only catcher in MLB history to collect 3 batting titles. While his first season as a full-time first baseman in 2013 merited 5.5 wins of value, Mauer (to a much-lesser extent than Jones) regressed from being Bench-like as a catcher to James Loney over his final five seasons (105 OPS+ to Loney's career 104). Maybe a more favorable comparison to draw to Mauer is another first-year eligible player in 2024, David Wright. Like Mauer, Wright had a lot of the potential value and Hall of Fame surety taken from him due to injuries and ensuing degradation, though Mauer's torrid start to his career in conjunction with what we'll label a modest decline in performance culminated in 55.2 WAR and 2,123 hits, which feels sufficient enough for a plaque in Cooperstown.

1B Todd Helton

JAWS: 15th among first basemen

• 61.8 career WAR | 46.6 7yr-peak WAR | 54.2 JAWS | 4.5 WAR/162
• Average HOF 1B (out of 24): 65.0 career WAR | 41.8 7yr-peak WAR | 53.4 JAWS | 4.8 WAR/162

From a player in Mauer whose status as "borderline" would feel merited given what we as viewers were deprived of, Todd Helton presents a case that further screams "Hall of Famer" the more you peruse his Baseball-Reference page. You can make a case that the election of Helton's former Colorado teammate, Larry Walker, helped break down the Coors Field bias. Since 1945, Helton's .316 career batting average is 9th best all-time among hitters with a minimum of 5,000 plate appearances. Helton never won an MVP award, but perhaps he should have? In 2000, Helton led all MLB players in doubles (59), RBI (147), average (.372), slugging percentage (.698), OPS (1.162), and joined the elusive 400-total bases club, the first of two times he'd do so. Despite also leading the league in sabermetric stats such as WAR (8.9), WPA (9.0), and Base-Out Wins Added (7.6), Helton would somehow finish just 5th in an NL MVP that ultimately went to an NL West rival and player with a strong Hall of Fame case of his own, Jeff Kent. Circling back to the Coors argument, while Helton was a noticeably inferior hitter away from the Rocky Mountains (.855 OPS on the road compared to 1.048 at home), his road OPS still sits above 113 position players already in the Hall. Falling oh-so-close to the necessary 75-percent needed to earn induction in 2023 (72.2%), 2024 should be the year that Helton finally gets the call to the Hall.

2B Chase Utley

JAWS: 12th among second basemen

• 64.5 career WAR | 49.3 7yr-peak WAR | 56.9 JAWS | 5.4 WAR/162
• Average HOF 2B (out of 20): 69.6 career WAR | 44.4 7yr-peak WAR | 57.0 JAWS | 5.1 WAR/162

If you follow along with us here at Fish On First, you'll know I recently did a profile on Utley's career, asserting why I feel he's a more-than-deserving Hall of Famer. On the merits of WAR alone, his total of 64.5 has him as the 15th best second baseman in baseball history. Among the more well-rounded players in recent memory, there simply didn't seem to be a thing that Chase Utley failed to do well. He hit the 5th-most home runs of any 2B in MLB history (252), stole bases more often than anyone in MLB history with at least 175 attempts (87.5%) and accrued the 6th most runs from fielding according to Rfield among 2B (131). Sure, the counting stats—particularly the 1,885 career hits—the fact that he never never won an MVP, and the slide that took out Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada may rub some the wrong way. However, when you have not only the best player on a Phillies club that won five consecutive division titles, two pennants and a World Series (where he had a career 1.046 OPS), there's no denying that Chase Utley's career has Hall of Fame written all over it.

RF Bobby Abreu

JAWS: 21st among right fielders

• 60.2 career WAR | 41.6 7yr-peak WAR | 50.9 JAWS | 4.0 WAR/162
• Average HOF RF (out of 28): 71.1 career WAR | 42.4 7yr-peak WAR | 56.7 JAWS | 5.1 WAR/162

After hanging on by mere threads in his first three years of eligibility, Bobby Abreu nearly doubled the 8.6% he received in 2022 when he appeared on 15.4% of ballots the following year. And though I don't expect 2024 to be the year we see him finally get in, a continued ascent would too prove encouraging. But what exactly is sparking the gradual Bobby Abreu love affair? Generally speaking, we tend to put power and speed in different buckets of premium baseball skills. Abreu had both in spades. Power-Speed, a Bill James-derived metric that sets out to find the "harmonic mean" between home runs and stolen bases, is very pro-Abreu in its applications. His 334.88 P-S has him 14th all-time, ahead of fellow Hall of Famers Reggie Jackson, Paul Molitor, Ryne Sandberg, Frank Robinson, and Larry Walker, to name a few. Even rarer air is the 275 HR/400 SB/.395 OBP club. That club only includes 3 names: Barry Bonds, Rickey Henderson, and, yep, you guessed it, Bobby Abreu. During his peak from 1998-2005, only four players, all of whom were mentioned above, were worth more than Abreu's 45.2 WAR, according to Baseball-Reference. Sure, his career WAR of 60.2 is below the mean for HOF right fielders, but given a vast majority of Abreu's competition likely played as "enhanced" version of themselves, whose to say how much more valuable he would have appeared had the playing field been more on the level. Despite this, there still sat an 8-year period where he was among the game's best all-around players, and that sustained high-level play, in conjunction with the fact that the latter half of his career still produced a .374 OBP in a 4,400 plate appearance sample, is good enough for me.

RP Billy Wagner

JAWS: 6th among relief pitchers

• 27.7 career WAR | 19.8 7yr-peak WAR | 23.7 JAWS | 24.9 R-JAWS | 2.2 WAR/162
• Average HOF RP (out of 8): 39.1 career WAR | 26.0 7yr-peak WAR | 32.5 JAWS | 29.7 R-JAWS | 2.5 WAR/162

WAR apologists will take one look at Wagner's 27.7 WAR and immediately shun the notion of him as to having a legitimate Hall of Fame case. Are there reservations about electing a guy who threw less than 1,000 innings? Sure, and the my pro-WAR leanings also make this pick a bit begrudged, but Wagner's dominance, at least to me, transcends the metric. Knowing the cumulative nature of the metric, though, and given relievers don't necessarily accrue enough volume to amass high WAR totals, Wagner's case takes shape when you assess how historically great he was at preventing runs. Among pitchers to throw at least 900 innings, only Mariano Rivera's 205 adjusted ERA+ is higher than Wagner's 187, thanks to a career 2.31 ERA. As much as fans have marveled at the likes of Ichiro Suzuki and Luis Arraez for their playing out of an older, long-lost era of baseball, Wagner ought to be celebrated for the groundbreaking nature at which he went about facing hitters. Before his debut in 1995, no reliever with at least 750 innings pitched had a K/9 higher than 9. In his 903 innings, Wagner struck out an unheard of 11.9 batters per 9. The last decade-plus has seen the likes of Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel, and Kenley Jansen, relief pitchers who put batters away doing their best Billy Wagner impersonation. These four names all share the record with 6 seasons of at least 50 innings pitched, sub-2.50 ERA, and >10 K/9, and given his 68% of support in 2023, 2024 could see Wagner further embrace trailblazer status.

OF/3B Gary Sheffield

JAWS: 24th among right fielders

• 60.5 career WAR | 38.0 7yr-peak WAR | 49.3 JAWS | 3.8 WAR/162
• Average HOF RF (out of 28): 71.1 career WAR | 42.4 7yr-peak WAR | 56.7 JAWS | 5.1 WAR/162

Given this is a Marlins-first blog, and given this is his tenth and final year of eligibility, I felt it appropriate to leave Sheffield for last. Sure, Sheffield was named in the Mitchell Report, but I can forgive a guy who ultimately opened up about his unintentional use of PEDs. Mark McGwire may not get into Cooperstown, but him admitting his transgression ultimately opened the door for him to work in baseball as a coach, so revisionist history suggests Sheffield's transparency ought to be rewarded. If you want to take him at his word, prior to using a banned substance following the 2002 season, Sheffield had already hit .296/.399/.520/.919, and smashed 340 home runs. In the seven seasons following that, he hit .284/.380/.502/.882, good enough to be 30-percent better than the league-average hitter. While his defensive metrics leave a lot to be desired—minus-195 Rfield, -27.7 dWAR—Sheffield's 80.7 oWAR is in the tier of Frank Thomas (80.4). Lost too is Sheffield's performance on the basepaths, as he swiped 253 bags and ranks 13th all-time in Power-Speed. That consistently high volume of offensive performance, as well as that famous and often-imitated bat wiggle responsible for 509 home runs, stick out most when I think of Sheffield.

The BBWAA is set to announce the inductees of the 2024 class on January 23.

Photo by Andrew Dieb/Icon Sportswire