Hall of Fame Ballot: The Five Percenters
These are the players hoping to stay on the ballot for another year.
We’re now about a week away from the Hall of Fame announcement, and so let’s continue to tell the stories of the 28 players on the ballot. This year I’ve broken the ballot down into four categories:
The One-Vote Seekers: Wrote this last week.
The Five Percenters: Today’s post; these are players hoping to stay on the ballot for another year.
The Candidates: Players hoping to catch the Larry Walker/Scott Rolen wave and gain enough support for Cooperstown.
The Hall of Famers: Players who, whether this year or in the near future, will get elected.
Before continuing, I do want to pass along that Mike and I are kicking off our annual “Let’s Open Some Baseball Cards and Raise Money for ALS” PosCasts today*… and this year we’re so proud to be raising money for the amazing folks at Team Gleason, who are dedicated to improving the lives of people with ALS and those who care them. Team Gleason was started by former NFL player Steve Gleason, who most famously blocked the punt when the reopened the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. I very seriously considered listing that as the No. 1 moment in WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL. It ended up being No. 9.
*If this sounds like a wacky way to raise money, yeah, we thought so, too. But we’ve also raised $250,000 the last two years for the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig AL(C)S Center at Columbia University and Project Main Street. So what do we know?
As a reminder of how this works, Mike and I will spend the next few PosCasts opening up packs of cards, talking about what we find, and at the end, we will have a big ol’ contest where we give away giant boxes of super-fun stuff to 10 winners. The prize packages always grow as people donate incredible stuff—we already know we’ll give away the best cards we open, autographed books and other things we find. I think this year I’m going to try to write a special essay for someone about your favorite sports moment. We’ll have some fun, for sure. Let’s just say that winners will get a real treasure box.
All you have to do to enter is go to our special PosCast page at Team Gleason and donate what you can to aid them in their amazing efforts (and, it should be added, that like all of us, they are focusing a lot of their efforts today on people in need in Los Angeles)
Be sure to fill out the form as on the bottom of the second page you can tell Mike and me your favorite player/team and send us a message so that we can personalize your prize box when you definitely win.
OK, and one more thing before getting to the five percenters: I did miss a one-vote seeker last week in Part I.
Troy Tulowitzki
Played for Colorado, Toronto and the Yankees from 2006 to 2019.
While so many people my age and older have been fascinated by the Hall of Fame cases of Steve Garvey or Jim Rice or Dave Parker or Al Oliver or other 1970s stars, the player I tend to think about most is Fred Lynn. I was 8 years old when Fred Lynn came on the scene, and he was the coolest. He was the first player to win the Most Valuable Player and Rookie of the Year awards in the same year, and he did it with style, with impossible slam-into-the-fence catches and high doubles off the Green Monster and a go-for-it baserunning style that jumped the heart. Freddie was everything, and the fact that he’s not in the Hall of Fame still jolts me a little bit. He also looked like a movie star.
He’s not in the Hall of Fame, in my view, for two reasons:
He couldn’t stay healthy. Slamming into fences might be cool, but it’s not a career plan.
The Red Sox—unwilling to pay Lynn his free agency value—traded him to the California Angels.
Actually, on No. 2, the Red Sox first traded Lynn to the Dodgers, but the Dodgers would only give him a one-year deal, and Lynn insisted on something long-term. Either way, the trade moved Lynn away from Fenway Park, his perfect ballpark, and though he had some good years in California and Baltimore, he was never again the matinee idol.
I bring this up now because Troy Tulowitzki had a similar big-league ride. Lynn and Tulo were both California kids drafted high out of California colleges. They each raced through the minor leagues in about a year and made their debuts at about the same age. They each had spectacular rookie seasons—Lynn, as mentioned, won both the Rookie of the Year and MVP awards. Tulo, legitimately, could have won both himself in 2007. He didn’t win either, because people didn’t trust his inflated Coors Field numbers, but by Baseball-Reference calculations, he had more wins above replacement than the MVP that year (Jimmy Rollins) and three times as many wins as the actual Rookie of the Year (Ryan Braun).
Tulo was everything then. He was far and away the best defensive shortstop in baseball, he hit for average, he hit with power, he drove in runs, he scored runs, he completely and utterly turned around what had been a dreadful Rockies team and led them to one of the most unlikely World Series runs in baseball history. It was so very Fred Lynn.
The next year, he missed 60 games with a torn quadriceps tendon.
That, too, was so very Fred Lynn.
Tulo put up Hall of Fame-caliber seasons (5-plus WAR) in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2014. By my raw calculations, only 41 players over the last 100 years have put up six Hall of Fame-caliber seasons by age 29, and 35 of them either are in the Hall of Fame or will be someday.1 Every year that Tulo was healthy, he was great. Alas, two of those years he was not healthy.
And then, at age 29—midway through the 2015 season—he was traded to Toronto and away from his perfect ballpark. Tulo had a couple decent years with the Blue Jays, and he did help them on their way to a couple playoff runs, but he, too, was never again the matinee idol. A series of injuries essentially ended his career at 32, though he did try to pick up with the Yankees a couple years later.
OK, now for the Five Percenters—these are players who have received votes, according to the Hall of Fame Tracker, and will hope to get to five percent so they can spend another year on the ballot.
Torii Hunter
Play for Minnesota, California and Detroit from 1992 to 2015.
It occurs to me that until pretty recently, just about every baseball fan agreed on two things about the game: