MLB Raises The Bar for Hall of Fame Consideration

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Photo via National Baseball Hall of Fame - baseballhall.org

National Baseball Hall of Fame

The National Baseball Hall of Fame

The 2024 National Baseball Hall of Fame ballot is out and, for the first time in several years, members of the Baseball Writers Association of America won’t have any former Brewers among their first-time candidates.

The 2024 ballot features 26 players, and 14 are players who received between five and 75% of the vote last year. That list does include two former Brewers: 

• Gary Sheffield is on the ballot for a tenth and final time and needs about 78 more voters to change their mind if he’s going to be enshrined in Cooperstown next summer. Sheffield got 55 of the needed 75% of the vote on last year’s ballot, a significant rise from 40.6% in 2022 and 13.6% in 2019. We discussed Sheffield’s Hall of Fame candidacy in ballot previews in 2020, 2021 and 2022 and Matthew Prigge wrote an exhaustive two-part feature on his Milwaukee tenure in 2017. 
• Francisco Rodriguez will be on the ballot for a second time after 42 voters, 10.8% of the participating BBWAA members, voted for him last year. The decision on how to evaluate relievers in the Hall of Fame process remains a challenge for many voters but Rodriguez has more career innings pitched and saves than former Astro Billy Wagner, who was nearly inducted into the Hall during the last cycle. 

This cycle, however, those two players will be the only former Brewers up for consideration. That’s at least in part because the committee tasked with building the ballot appeared to raise the bar for inclusion a bit this year.

Raising the Bar

The Baseball Hall of Fame’s screening committee is tasked each year with selecting players who have gone five years since their last MLB appearance and will receive consideration for the Hall. This year they selected 12 of them, continuing a trend of having smaller ballots. From 2017-2020 the committee added an average of 19 players to the ballot per year, but from 2021-24 they’ve added just 12.5.

Perhaps more importantly, however, for the 2024 ballot they’ve significantly raised the bar for the quality of player they’re asking voters to consider. From 2017-2023 the lowest player on a Hall of Fame ballot had an average of less than 12 WAR (Wins Above Replacement, as measured by Baseball Reference). From 2018-20 there was at least one player with less than eight career WAR on each ballot. This season the lowest WAR total for a player being considered, however, is longtime Reds infielder Brandon Phillips with 28.4. There are six batters and six pitchers with at least 12 career WAR who were left off the ballot, including 2007-14 Brewer Yovani Gallardo.

Gallardo’s Brewers tenure might always be remembered for the gap between what he was and what it seemed like he could be, but his numbers are still significant in Brewers franchise history. He’s the organization’s all-time leader in career strikeouts with 1226, he’s fifth in wins and sixth in games started. From 2009-12 he had one of the most consistent runs of any Brewers pitcher in recent history, posting a sub-4.00 earned run average across an average of 196 innings for four consecutive seasons, striking out more than nine batters per nine innings and finishing in the top ten in the National League in strikeouts in each of those four years.

Fans’ memories of Gallardo as a pitcher will perhaps always be a bit tarnished by the aesthetically displeasing way he pitched at times. Gallardo was known to get ahead of batters but then nibble around the outer edges of the strike zone instead of trusting his arsenal and attacking. This likely cost Gallardo the ability to pitch deeper into games and, on a broader scale, it might have cost him an opportunity to be the kind of pitcher who gets to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot. As it was, Gallardo was done pitching in the majors at age 32. There’s also the matter of his DUI arrest in April of 2013.

Gallardo was unlikely to receive significant or perhaps any support from Hall of Fame voters on this year’s ballot, and perhaps the others left off wouldn’t have either. Nonetheless, the HOF ballot provides a good opportunity to take a final look back at the careers of some very good players, and this year’s small list of additions is an unfortunate abbreviation.