Hall of Fame 2022

David Ortiz’s career OBP: .380.

Barry Bonds’ career OBP if you turned all 762 of his home runs into outs: .384.

— Kendall Baker (@kendallbaker) January 25, 2022

Also this.

I'm ok with Ortiz making it. He is/was a big Packer fan.

I look at the PED part of the Hall of Fame vote this way. Is there enough information on what the player would have done without PEDs to gauge how good they were. I agree on Ortiz, Wagner, and Helton. Not sure what to do with A-Rod and Manny. Did they ever have years when they weren't juicing? I also agree on Bonds - that's a no brainer. Clemens is tougher but probably still in (see comments below. Andruw Jones is an easy yes for me (See below).

Barry Bonds. By all accounts, Bonds didn't start doping until 1998 (after being pissed off about how much love McGwire and Sosa were getting). If you look at his statistics and performance to that point, he's already a Hall of Famer. 12 years, 3 MVPs. In the last 7 years of those 12, he averaged 35 HRs and 35 SBs and his OPS was well over 1.000. One way to think about it was that pre-steroids he went 7 consecutive years doing what Christian Yelich did in 2018-19 while winning a Golden Glove every year.

Clemens. Not as cut and dried as Bonds. I lived in Boston in the early 90s. Clemens appeared done in his early 30s. His last 4 seasons in Boston (1993-96) he was 40-39 with an ERA well over 4.00. He had won 3 Cy Young Awards and had over 2500 strikeouts. I think that would have been good enough, but he started juicing right after than and his stats went nuclear like Bonds. The problem I have with Clemens is this comparison.

Player A: 13 years, 192 wins, 111 losses, 3.06 ERA, 2590 strikeouts, 1.17 WHIP, 80.8 WAR.

Player B: 11 years, 157 wins, 85 losses, 3.10 ERA, 1875 strikeouts, 1.18 WHIP, 41.6 WAR.

Player A has a lot more innings so the WAR is higher, but those two players were contemporaries and both won Cy Youngs awards. Player A is Clemens with the Red Sox. Player B is Dwight Gooden's stats on the Mets. If you are going to ignore the PED years for Clemens, I don't think he's that much better than Gooden (and I'd argue Gooden's peak 4-5 years at the start of his career was Pedro Martinez like. Gooden got 3.3% of the vote his only year on the ballot.

Andruw Jones. He fell of a cliff after 30, but his 12 years in Atlanta were first ballot stuff. 5 time all-star. 10 Gold gloves and by many statistical advanced metrics the best defensive center fielder ever. Baseballreference.com has an advanced stat called total zone runs. He's #2 all time behind Brooks Robinson (interestingly Bonds is #6). Almost all of that was in his first 12 years. One way to consider this stat was that he saved 20 runs a year for the Braves over a league average CF.

https://www.baseball-reference...otal_tf_career.shtml

When you think about his defense that way, he probably did more than any other teammate to make (especially) Glavine and Smoltz Hall of Famers than anyone else (he didn't hurt Maddux either, but Maddux was in a whole other class). The problem is do you penalize him for the years after he turned 30? If he'd have just retired after 12 years would you vote him in? I'd say yes. His WAR for those first 12 years was 61. The WAR his last 5 years was 1.7 total.

You know who needs to go into the Hall with Andruw Jones as a veterans committee addition for being a similar superstar defensive player who was also good on offense? Dwight Evans. He was criminally underrated. He lead the league in walks and OPS several times back when no one cared about walks while being the top defensive RF in the 70s and 80s. He won 8 gold gloves. He played for 20 years and had a 12-year peak where he basically hit 25 HRs every year and won a gold glove more often than not. If he have swung away more his old-time counting stats would have been better and that would have gotten him in. Overall he had 2446 hits and 1391 walks. His OPS for his career was 840 and he reached base almost 3837 times. Want a good comparison for a contemporary?  A first ballot HOFer that debuted 2 years later had an OPS of 772 and reached base 4200 times.  That's Robin Yount. Yount is one of my favorite players of all time, but if Yount's in Evans should be too.

In terms of Sosa - it's a no for me. He was a decent player with ZERO all star appearances in the 5 full and 3 partial years before he was juicing.

Sheffield - I guess a reluctant yes.