Hi Everyone —
COOPERSTOWN — I have one more day here in Cooperstown, knee deep in the hoopla and book research. But the Hall of Fame Committee ballot came out on Monday, so I obviously have to weigh in on that.
First, a quick story from the Baseball Hall of Fame:
I walked into the Hall on Sunday afternoon and was greeted by a nice young man. The conversation went like this.
Greeter: Have you been to the Hall of Fame before?
Me: Yes, many times. I love it.
Greeter: Great. So just as a reminder, our movie, Generations of the Game, will start at the top of the hour in our Grandstand Theater.
Me: That’s great. I wrote it.
Greeter (without missing a beat): That’s fine. Have a great time.
It was the “That’s fine” part I loved most of all.
Oh boy, the BIG FAN train is starting to roll! Advanced Reader Copies — in the business they’re called “galleys” — are being printed as we speak (I cannot WAIT to get them), and our publisher, Dutton, is giving away 20 galleys over at goodreads! It’s totally free to enter, and you should definitely go over there for two reasons:
You get to see that Mike’s bio is on there, but not mine. They’re writing me out of the book already!
You get to learn Michael Schur’s middle name!
Seriously, I’m SO excited for you to see this book. It’s one of my favorite ever things. And it doesn’t come out until May 19, which feels so far away.
Here are the eight players on the 2025 Hall of Fame Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot. I’ll have a bit more to say about one of them at the end.
Barry Bonds. You might have heard of him. Pretty good ballplayer. All-time leader in home runs, walks and bWAR. Seven-time MVP. Eight-time Gold Glove winner. Only player ever with 400 home runs and 400 steals … and he’s got 500 of each. All that stuff. Hmm. Wonder why he’s not already in the Hall of Fame.
Roger Clemens. You might have heard from him. Pretty good pitcher. Seven-time Cy Young Award winner. Led the league in ERA seven times. Led the league in WAR seven times. Lucky sevens! Won 350 games and struck out more than 4,500 batters. Has the highest career WAR of any pitcher in the last 100 years. All that stuff. Hmm. Wonder why he’s not already in the Hall of Fame.
Carlos Delgado. Very surprised to see him on the ballot … but Delgado was a beast. Fabulous career. Hit 473 home runs. Drove in more than 1,500 RBI. Put up similar numbers to recent Hall of Fame inductee Fred McGriff.
Jeff Kent. He feels like an early favorite to me — he was gaining support pretty quickly toward the end of his time on the BBWAA ballot, and committees like this tend to love players with that momentum (see Fred McGriff, Jack Morris, Alan Trammell, Lee Smith, etc). Kent also has the advantage of a clear case: He hit more home runs than any second baseman ever. That’s his case. I cannot quite capture the absurdity of Jeff Kent getting elected to the Hall of Fame on a ballot with Barry Bonds, but this is our world.
Don Mattingly. You know what Bill James said about him — 100% ballplayer, 0% bullshit. Mattingly was a helluva ballplayer, an MVP, a batting champ, a nine-time Gold Glove winner. You know that silly old line about how men are allowed to cry at one movie, and only one movie, and it’s “Brian’s Song.” Well, Yankee haters are allowed to like one Yankee, and it’s Don Mattingly. Donnie Ballgame got eight votes of the 12 votes he needed last time, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he came through.
Dale Murphy. I’ll have a little more to say about my pal Murph at the end of this.
Gary Sheffield. It will be interesting to see how the committee deals with Sheffield. His PED connection is a bit more tenuous than the big guys, and he was making a BIG move at the end of his BBWAA ballot run — bigger even than Kent’s — and he has the highest WAR on the ballot after Bonds-Clemens. I don’t know that there was ever a more fearsome hitter than Gary Sheffield.
Fernando Valenzuela. I’m utterly shocked that he made this ballot. Not unhappy. But shocked. I love Valenzuela; we all do. It was crushing when we lost him. I wrote then, and still believe, that he was the most joyous pitcher of them all, and he opened the game to more fans than just about anyone in the last 50 years. But that’s a nuanced case, and in my experience, committees like this are terrible at nuance. They want base numbers — hits, homers, RBIs, wins, strikeouts. Valenzuela won 173 games and has a 37 career WAR. It doesn’t make any sense at all to me for him to be here, especially with Curt Schilling out there with 3,000 K and 81 WAR and having received seven votes last time.*
*Don’t get me wrong — I would prefer Fernando to Schilling in the Hall. But I would also prefer Duane Kuiper to anyone so, you know, that’s not how this works.
The thing that’s most shocking about Valenzuela being on here — and, for that matter, Delgado, and probably even Mattingly and Murphy as much as I love those guys — is that Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker are not. I mean, we know the objections to Schilling. But what are the objections to Dewey and Lou?
I literally don’t understand. Dwight Evans appeared on the veteran’s ballot in 2020 and got FIFTY PERCENT OF THE VOTE. I mean, that’s a STATEMENT.
There are have been two Contemporary Era ballots since … and Dewey hasn’t been on either of them.
Like I say, I don’t understand it at all.
Whitaker, if possible, makes even less sense. Sweet Lou has 75 career bWAR. I mean, that’s DOUBLE Fernando’s total. It’s 30 more wins than Mattingly or Delgado, 15 more than Sheffield. He also appeared on the 2020 ballot, made a reasonable showing (37.5%), and they haven’t put him back on the ballot either. I can’t make any sense of it at all.
Color me baffled.
But I do want to say something about Dale Murphy because I saw a striking fact about him on MLB.com. I’m not saying it’s a meaningful or compelling fact — we’ll talk about that now — but it’s definitely striking.
The fact is this: Of the top 13 position players in bWAR in the 1980s, 12 are in the Hall of Fame.
The only one who is not is Dale Murphy.
Kind of interesting, right? Whenever I see a fact like that, I immediately run it through my nonsense meter. Interesting that they said top 13 — that’s not a round number, always a warning sign. Does that mean that Murphy is 13th on the list?
In this case, actually, no. He’s not. Dale Murphy is 10th … and realistically, he’s in a virtual tie for eighth. Here’s the chart:
Player | 1980s bWAR |
|---|---|
1. Rickey Henderson | 71.0 |
2. Wade Boggs | 60.2 |
3. Mike Schmidt | 56.6 |
4. Robin Yount | 55.3 |
5. Alan Trammell | 52.8 |
6. Ozzie Smith | 52.2 |
7. Cal Ripken Jr. | 50.3 |
8. George Brett | 47.6 |
9. Andre Dawson | 47.3 |
10. Dale Murphy | 47.1 |
11. Eddie Murray | 46.0 |
12. Tim Raines | 45.8 |
13. Gary Carter | 44.9 |
A little lower, you’ve got Paul Molitor, Ryne Sandberg, Dave Winfield, Kirby Puckett, etc.
So that feels a bit more legitimate. Murphy won two MVPs in the 1980s. The only other players to do that are Schmidt (who won three) and Yount. Murph won five Gold Gloves in the 1980s. That puts him in elite National League company with Ozzie Smith, Mike Schmidt, Ryne Sandberg, Andre Dawson … and Keith Hernandez (why wasn’t he on this ballot?). Only Schmidt hit more homers in the 1980s (and by only five!). Only Eddie Murray and Schmidt drove in more runs. Only Yount, Murray and Boggs had more hits. Only Rickey, Raines, Murray and Schmidt had more Win Probability Added.
I mean Murphy is tied to lots and lots of Hall of Famers.
So what’s wrong with this fact? Nothing is exactly WRONG with it — and I love writing it because I love Murph and have been making his Hall of Fame case for more than two decades now, and this feels like a sticky argument — but the problem is it conveniently overlooks the biggest issue with Dale’s Hall of Fame case.
Dale’s ENTIRE CAREER was the 1980s.
I don’t mean that in an exaggerated way. Murph got more than 1,100 plate appearances in the 1970s when he was still trying to convert from catcher to outfield and still trying to work on his plate discipline. His 1970s WAR is -0.8.
Murphy got more than 1,300 plate appearances in the 1990s, when he was in his mid-30s and worn out from all those games he played as a big man in center field (Murph played every single game from 1982-1985). His 1990s WAR is 0.2.
So, unlike every other Hall of Famer he’s been compared with, Murphy doesn’t have a great or even good season outside the 1980s. He’s got that odd career shape that builds entirely around 10 seasons that happen to break right on the decade marks.
Now, does he have a Hall of Fame case? Absolutely. His case is that he was a truly great player for seven or so — how long does someone have to be great to be a Hall of Famer anyway? — and, yes, he’s one of the great credits to the game. So much has been made about the Hall of Fame’s character clause as a justification for keeping out players. So little has been made about the Hall of Fame’s character clause as a justification for celebrating players who enriched the game with their personalities, their class, their dignity, their spirit. Great baseball players, whether they want it or not, are heroes to so many fans. Dale Murphy tried to live up to that every single day.
But that last part is the nuance I was talking about earlier, the stuff I don’t think committees deal with very well.
So if it takes something that sounds good like “Of the top 13 WAR players in the 1980s, only Dale Murphy is not in the Hall of Fame” to get some momentum behind Dale, well, I’m all for it.
I should add, Dale Murphy’s already in MY Hall of Fame. I mean, this is my current phone wallpaper.
