Felix Hernandez joins Carlos Beltran, Andruw Jones on Laura Albanese's Hall of Fame ballot
Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners. Credit: Getty Images/Otto Greule Jr.
We all have the right to change our minds.
That’s not a universally accepted truth, by the way — at least in practice. A change in perspective sometimes can signal a lack of conviction, and beyond that, admitting you might have been wrong isn’t the most comfortable feeling.
But at least when it comes to the Baseball Hall of Fame, there’s a reason that voters get a fresh ballot every year, and there’s a reason that players who got little consideration in their first year on the ballot occasionally can manage to squeak in later in the process. Voters change, yes, but so does baseball and the lens through which we view it.
Which is part of the reason I made the changes I did this year. I have three players on my ballot: Carlos Beltran, Andruw Jones and Felix Hernandez. The two outfielders are carryovers from my ballot last year, but then there was a subtraction and an addition: I swapped out Chase Utley for Hernandez.
My case for Utley last year was tenuous. His peak was that of a Hall of Famer — at the time, I wrote that he was “an elite defender who got on base, had an uncanny feel for the game, stole bases and hit for power.” His defensive WAR was 11th among second basemen and he was one of only 21 players to have more than 100 defensive runs saved among any position, according to FanGraphs.
But with a year of hindsight, I just don’t know that it’s enough. Utley started late and his Cooperstown case is hobbled by the steep drop-off that characterized the final four years of his career. To me, he screams “very good!” but not generational — and that’s not what the Hall of Fame is about.
Could I change my mind next year? Sure. But for now, especially representing a defensive position in which we’ve seen so many greats play, Utley doesn’t quite make the cut. Advanced metrics support this: Both his career fWAR and JAWS — a quantitative tool that determines where a player ranks among the elite — are below the average for Hall of Fame second basemen, according to FanGraphs.
Which leads to another question: Why, then, King Felix, who, like Utley, is better defined by his peak than the totality of his career?
Well, because there are peaks and then there are astounding heights, and for about five years, few starting pitchers were better than Hernandez. Utley was excellent, but he was never the very best, and sometimes not even the very best on his team.
Look at Hernandez’s Baseball Reference page and you’ll see it awash in bold numbers. The six-time All-Star finished in the top eight in Cy Young Award voting for six seasons, won it once and came in second twice. He had the best ERA in baseball in 2010 (2.27) and the best in the American League in 2014. His 0.92 WHIP that year also led the AL. He led the AL in pitching WAR in 2010 and threw a perfect game in 2012.
There’s another important number, too: Hernandez pitched an MLB-best 249 2⁄3 innings in 2010 and pitched more than 200 innings in eight of his 15 seasons. He wasn’t a soft tosser by any stretch, and having begun his major-league career at the age of 19, he experienced a lot of that mileage when he was very young.
That best explains his decline: Hernandez got tired. He spent his entire career on a Mariners team that never made the playoffs and was the best player on that roster for a chunk of it, particularly after Ichiro Suzuki departed in 2012. Hernandez was their anchor, one of their few bright spots, and the onus of carrying that team weighed on that right arm of his.
A few years ago, his lack of counting stats, along with the dimming of his career, would have made him an immediate no. But baseball is changing, and the way we value pitchers is changing, too.
In an era in which so many pitchers go max effort pitch after pitch, sometimes requiring one or even more Tommy John surgeries, we’re going to have to start getting comfortable with lauding players for what they were able to do at their very best. CC Sabathia, inducted last year, is part of a dying breed, and after Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander retire, it seems unlikely that the old hallmarks of what constitutes a Hall of Fame starting pitcher will remain the same.
We’re already seeing that shift with how we view relievers: It took Billy Wagner the full 10 years to (rightfully) claim his spot in Cooperstown, but that became possible only when the electorate began to understand that a player’s value comes in context. Hard-and-fast rules about the number of, say, strikeouts a pitcher needs in order to be considered simply don’t work the way they once did.
There’s the other element, too. Anyone who watched Hernandez pitch in his prime knew they were witnessing something special. Last year, in defending my decision to put Jones on the ballot, I noted that the centerfielder “routinely made you say ‘Wow!’ ” And that’s really what it’s all about, right? A Hall of Famer is someone who makes you stop and marvel, and Hernandez certainly did that.
So for now, Hernandez has caused me to reconsider. And next year? Well, I still reserve the right to change my mind.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
