The Active-In-2016 Hall of Fame Redraft

The present is a mystery, and the recent past is only slightly less so.

Eight years ago, at Baseball Prospectus, Meg Rowley and Brendan Gawlowski conducted an “Active Player Hall of Fame Draft.” They were working off Bill James’ premise that ~25 eventual Hall of Famers are active at any given time. They were also, unspokenly, working off John Sterling’s premise that you can’t predict baseball, Suzyn, and therein lied the tension. 

I stumbled upon their draft recently while I was considering a possible angle on Joe Mauer, who’ll be inducted into the Hall of Fame this weekend. Around 2016, I remember trying to get somebody at Baseball Prospectus—I was the site’s editor at the time—to write about Mauer as one of the season’s most consequential storylines. He seemed to be frustratingly shy of Hall of Fame credentials and running out of time to fix that; who else’s season carried higher stakes than that, I argued. Rowley/Gawloski did their draft at the end of that 2016 season, and it seems they basically agreed with my assessment: Mauer got “picked” in their draft, but not until they’d picked 43 other players. He was in the “well, gotta name somebody” tier, sandwiched between Meg’s picks of Gary Sánchez and Andrew Benintendi. 

After that, Mauer played two more seasons. They were fine, but certainly not legacy-shifting ones: He hit a total of 13 homers in those two seasons, as a first baseman. No new All-Star appearances, no new bold ink, no new MVP votes—just a former star playing the outro.

And then, surprise! Five years later, he was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, totally uncontroversial, no need to persuade anybody. Voters treated him about the same as they had treated David Ortiz, who had been taken fourth in the Meg/Brendan draft. 

So in 2016, Mauer was either a) two marginal seasons away from Hall of Fame credentials, but even such modest aspirations were considered less likely than the chances of 23-year-old Gary Sanchez having an entire Hall of Fame career almost from scratch, or b) he was going to make the Hall of Fame already. He already had his ticket punched, and my sense that he needed to do more was wildly off. Either the consensus was wrong about Mauer’s future production or—as seems much, much more likely to me—the consensus was wrong about ourselves.

Even after a little more time had passed, this Mauer pessimism persisted. David Schoenfield has periodically written speculative Active Hall Of Famer pieces at ESPN. In early 2018, he ranked Mauer as the least-likely of three veteran catching candidates to make it in. (Buster Posey and Yadier Molina were the other two.) “Mauer will have a tougher road, and it might take a veterans committee that remembers how good he was at his peak,” Schoenfield wrote. Mauer produced only one more WAR after that column, and yet, to reiterate the point, he was then immediately elected as an uncontroversial, first-ballot Hall of Famer. 

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Here’s that entire 2016 draft, along with the player’s age at the time, his career WAR at the time, and his career WAR since then.

1. Albert Pujols (36), 101.4 before, 0.1 after
2. Adrián Beltré (37), 88.2 before, 5.3 after
3. Ichiro Suzuki (42), 60.8 before, -0.7 after
4. David Ortiz (40), 55.3 before, retired after 2016
5. Mike Trout (24), 47.7 before, 38.3 after
6. Miguel Cabrera (33), 69.8 before, -2.7 after
7. Carlos Beltrán (39), 70.9 before, -0.8 after
8. Robinson Canó (33), 61.6 before, 6.5 after
9. Clayton Kershaw (28), 53.9 before, 22.9 after
10. Alex Rodriguez (40), 117.6 before, retired after 2016
11. Zack Greinke (32), 51.5 before, 20.9 after
12. Chase Utley (37), 63.7 before, 0.8 after
13. Félix Hernández (30), 51.2 before, -1.4 after
14. Buster Posey (29), 33.8 before, 11 after
15. Cole Hamels (32), 48.8 before, 9.2 after
16. Andrew McCutchen (29), 37.4 before, 11.7 after
17. Justin Verlander (33), 51.5 before, 30.6 after
18. Bryce Harper (23), 21.2 before, 28.6 after
19. Manny Machado (23), 24.5 before, 21 after
20. Jose Altuvé (26), 20.6 before, 31.4 after
21. Corey Seager (22), 6.8 before, 28 after
22. Dustin Pedroia (32), 49.9 before, 2.0 after
23. Evan Longoria (30), 48.1 before, 10.6 after
24. CC Sabathia (35), 56.8 before, 5 after
25. Kris Bryant (24), 12.6 before, 15.0 after
26. Carlos Correa (21), 11.8 before, 32.4 after
27. Max Scherzer (31), 37.1 before, 37.5 after
28. Josh Donaldson (30), 29.7 before, 17 after
29. Mookie Betts (23), 17.9 before, 50.9 after
30. Anthony Rizzo (26), 22.2 before, 16.9 after
31. Nolan Arenado (25), 18.3 before, 36.9 after
32. José Fernández (23), 13 career WAR. Died in a boat accident that winter.
33. Jonathan Lucroy (30), 18.8 before, -1.1 after
34. Noah Syndergaard (23), 7.4 before, 7.1 after
35. Madison Bumgarner (26), 24.2 before, 8.3 after
36. Paul Goldschmidt (28), 28.1 before, 34 after
37. Russell Martin (33), 35.1 before, 3.7 after
38. Giancarlo Stanton (26), 27.7 before, 16.9 after
39. Chris Sale (27), 30.1 before, 20 after
40. David Wright (33), 49.2 before, 0 after
41. Gary Sánchez (23), 3 before, 11.7 after
42. Francisco Lindor (22), 9.1 before, 36.7 after
43. Ian Kinsler (34), 50.4 before, 3.7 after
44. Joe Mauer (33), 49.9 before, 5.3 after
45. Andrew Benintendi (21), 0.8 before, 13.4 after
46. Joey Votto (32), 48.1 before, 16.5 after
47. Christian Yelich (24), 13.9 before, 28.4 after
48. Dellin Betances (28), 8.4 before, 2.7 after
49. Troy Tulowitzki (31), 43.6 before, 0.9 after
50. Carlos Martinez (24), 9.5 before, 3.4 after

There are a few things I want to observe about the ways these picks—sensible in the moment, as smart as could be expected with the incomplete information available at the time—can highlight some things we never know about the future.

1. Being close turns out to be better than having upside. Mauer was close, and didn’t seem to have much upside. But close turns out to be a lot more important, because we might be underestimating just how close. In Mauer’s case, he seemed kind of close but he was actually extremely close to the HOF standard. He was, in fact, probably already past it. That’s why I think Chris Sale is already basically a lock, though he appears to be 10 WAR short and as injury-riddled as they come. I suspect that, in a few years, under the new pitching expectations, 50 dominant WAR will replace the old 60 WAR standard for starters, and that Sale therefore clinched his election with his late-career All-Star selection this year. It’s why I don’t think Gerrit Cole has as much work left to do as it might seem.

2. There is more upside in the old ballplayer body than we usually realize in the moment. I’m about to slightly undermine what I’ve been saying about Mauer—that he didn’t do much after 2016—but his 2017 season was his best (by WAR and by plain offense) since 2013, when he had still been 30. It was only a modest contribution to his HOF case, but I’d say most of us wouldn’t have imagined it happening. For that matter, Justin Verlander and Joey Votto were really, really good in 2016, but even their pick positions reflect a real pessimism about them getting those final 15 WAR in old age. You can see why: A ton of these players (Félix, McCutchen, Kinsler, Hamels) simply could not get those final 15 WAR they needed to become sure things. There is a lot of downside to being old! But way more upside remains than we consider, too. Verlander is the third or fourth best pitcher in baseball since 2016. He actually had as much upside as any of the younger pitchers—Sale, Syndergaard, Bumgarner, etc. And Scherzer’s been even better. That’s why I still hold out a fair amount of hope for a number of players whose careers are well over half over: Nola, Wheeler, deGrom, Yelich.

3. Your peak probably reasserts itself in retirement. Obviously in 2016 we all knew Mauer’s peak had been extraordinary, but we’d been stewing in his more ordinary decline phase for so long that we probably expected that’s how we would remember him forever. In fact, when the time comes to vote, the peak stands out. This is why I’m actually pretty high on Andrew McCutchen and Felix Hernandez’ chances of making the Hall of Fame, despite both of them falling short (or likely to fall short) of the typical 60-career-WAR threshold.

4. You only have to be get to “yes” once. The Hall of Fame voting is heavily biased toward election, because one year’s yes overrules many years’ no’s. Players get 10 years on the ballot and only have to clear the threshold once; if they still don’t, then they get theoretically limitless chances with veterans committees. We know that voter opinions fluctuate a ton, such that voters could reject Scott Rolen 9-to-1 on one ballot and elect him, quite uncontroversially, just five years later; such that Ted Simmons could get elected by the veterans committee 30 years after voters rejected him 96-to-4. That’s why I don’t reject Alex Rodriguez’ chances outright; it’s also why I can see paths for players like Madison Bumgarner, Dustin Pedroia and Craig Kimbrel. 

All of this taken together adds up to one conclusion, namely that: