For most newcomers to the Hall of Fame ballot, it’s a tip of the cap, symbolically, on a job well done. Candidates need five percent of the vote to stay alive, and only those with an impactful 10-year career are considered. In Cooperstown, as surely as it is in Hollywood, it’s an honor just to be nominated.
The Hall announced this year’s baseball writers’ ballot on Monday, with 14 new names joining 14 holdovers. Three players collected more than half the votes last winter – Billy Wagner (73.8 percent), Andruw Jones (61.6) and Carlos Beltran (57.1) — with 75 percent needed for induction.
The worthiness of the new candidates will be debated at length until results are announced on Jan. 21. For now here’s our annual salute, through a distinctive anecdote or memory, to each one.
Carlos González
No hitter has ever started his postseason career hotter than Carlos González. In a four-game division series in 2009 and a wild-card game eight years later, González went 12 for 22 (.546) with at least two hits in every game. Only one other player has started his postseason career with five multi-hit games: Pepper Martin of the 1931 St. Louis Cardinals.
Martin, of course, was playing in the World Series. González, who spent 10 of his 12 seasons with the Colorado Rockies, never made it there. But he played for three Colorado playoff teams, and only two players have ever played more games for the franchise: Todd Helton and Charlie Blackmon.
González, who won the NL batting crown with a .336 average in 2010, stands in the middle of the nine Rockies to win a batting title, after Andres Galarraga, Larry Walker, Helton and Matt Holliday and before Michael Cuddyer, Justin Morneau, DJ LeMahieu and Blackmon.
“A talented player who could beat you in any way and help you win in any way,” Rockies manager Bud Black told the Denver Post in 2023. “He was an all-around, tremendous player. And the thing that I came to appreciate, probably as much as anything, was that he was a really good teammate — for everybody. CarGo was the guy everybody rallied around.”
Curtis Granderson
One hundred and twenty five players have come to bat for both the Mets and Yankees. Only one has hit 30 home runs in a season for both: Curtis Granderson. That’s a pretty cool legacy for Granderson, the best position player on the Mets’ last pennant-winner, in 2015, but he left his biggest mark in his native Chicago.
Granderson never played for the Cubs or White Sox, but a decade ago he gave $5 million to his alma mater, the University of Illinois-Chicago, for a stadium that bears his name. There’s artificial turf, light standards and a postcard view of the soaring skyline. And perhaps most importantly to Granderson, the field is an oasis for Chicago youth, hosting games, camps and clinics and broadening their worldview.
Granderson after winning the Roberto Clemente Award as the “player who best represents the game of baseball through extraordinary character, community involvement, philanthropy and positive contributions, both on and off the field.” (Ron Vesely/MLB via Getty Images)
“We wanted to build a place where these kids could play and get a wider view of life,” Granderson told The New York Times in 2016. “Then we take them on university tours and get a conversation going that they might not have.”
Granderson, whose parents were educators, falls a bit short of the Hall on the field. But his career included two awards for character and charity work, one named for Lou Gehrig Award, the other for Roberto Clemente Award, and that’s a powerful legacy. Even without the home runs.
Félix Hernández
For historical purposes, Seattle’s Félix Hernández was the right-handed Johan Santana: a Cy Young winner from Venezuela with a killer changeup and breathtaking seven-year peak who never appeared in the World Series. Both also authored a memorable no-hitter in 2012 — and in Hernández’s case, it was a perfect game.
Sadly, like Santana, Hernández threw his last major-league pitch at age 33 but really tried to keep going, signing with two other teams but never making it out of spring training. Hernández suited up for Atlanta (2020) and Baltimore (2021), but because his comebacks stopped short of the big leagues, he’ll always be a career Mariner.
Only five pitchers in the expansion era have more wins than Hernandez’s 169 without pitching for another team: the Baltimore Orioles’ Jim Palmer, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Bob Gibson, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Adam Wainwright and the New York Yankees’ Ron Guidry. He’s King Felix to the locals, and the nickname fits.
Adam Jones
Adam Jones was the soul of the Baltimore Orioles for 11 seasons, his tenure tracing a bell curve for the franchise: last place in his first four seasons, then a half-decade stretch (2012-2016) with the AL’s best record, then two more last-place finishes.
Jones, a Gold Glove center fielder with power, retired in 2021 after a two-year stay in Japan that inspired him to live abroad in retirement, so his children could experience other cultures. Back in Baltimore for a visit in 2023 — while living in Spain — Jones reflected on his enduring popularity among the Oriole faithful.
“Baseball is the plumber’s sport,” he said. “It’s an everyday job. You’ve got to show up to it every single day; even if you feel terrible, you’ve got to show up and do your job. That’s how I approached it, especially in Baltimore. It’s a blue collar city. When I was traded to Baltimore (from Seattle in 2008) and talked to people here, they said, ‘This city, they love you if you play your ass off and just grind it out.’ And then in my career, that’s all I did. The numbers and all the accolades came from that one mindset. That’s Baltimore.”
Jones’ finest moment, perhaps, came as an Oriole but in a different city: his hometown, San Diego, at the World Baseball Classic in 2017:
Ian Kinsler
Ian Kinsler had one of the most bizarre final appearances in major-league history. In some ways, it was wholly ordinary: a Monday night game in August 2019 between two unnatural rivals, San Diego and Tampa Bay. The Padres were on their way to a last-place finish, Petco Park was about half full, and the Rays would win in a rout.
Kinsler — a four-time All-Star and two-time Gold Glove second baseman, mostly for Texas and Detroit — did not start the game. He was 37 years old and dealing with a herniated cervical disk that would end his career. But with the Padres trailing 10-2 after eight innings, Kinsler came in to pitch the top of the ninth.
In his first outing on the mound since Pony League, he hit a batter, gave up a single, got a double play, walked two and got a lineout: a scoreless inning, somehow, and a 0.00 ERA for eternity.
“My dad made me choose when I was 13, and I chose to be a position player,” Kinsler told reporters later. “Maybe I missed my calling.”
Maybe not. When Kinsler came to bat in the bottom of the ninth, he slugged a home run. It was his 1,999th hit — forever one away from a big, round number, but a heck of a way to wrap an outstanding career.
Russell Martin
Russell Martin was 24 years old in 2007, his first full major-league season, and his catching numbers reflected his youthful vigor. Martin led the majors in putouts in each of his first three seasons, squatting for more than 3,600 innings in Dodger blue.
When he was finished, he had caught more than 1,579 games, 27th all-time and the third-most of any catcher to debut in this century, after Yadier Molina and Brian McCann.
“When you’re going through it, you don’t notice it,” Martin said of the grind, in a compelling series of stories by David Waldstein of the New York Times in 2012.
“It’s when you stop for a day or two and then the aches from the foul tips and the fatigue kind of bubble to the surface and you’re like ‘Whoa, did I get hit by a train?’” Martin said. “Sometimes I’d rather just plow through and keep playing, just soldier on, because it almost feels harder when you’ve been off for a day and you come back.”
Martin played for four teams (the Dodgers, Yankees, Pittsburgh Pirates and Toronto Blue Jays) and guided them all to October, reaching the playoffs 10 times in 14 seasons. Though he never got to the World Series, Martin — like Kinsler — finished with a flourish, homering in his final at-bat for the Dodgers in the 2019 postseason.
Brian McCann
Brian McCann was the son of a coach and it showed. His father, Howie, ran the baseball program at Marshall University and later ran a baseball academy near Atlanta. Brian grew up to make seven All-Star teams for the Atlanta Braves and forge a remarkably consistent, durable career: He hit between 18 and 26 homers for a dozen seasons in a row, from 2006 to 2017, and was deeply respected by his peers.
By the end of that run he was catching for the Houston Astros, winning a title in 2017 that was later tainted by the revelation of an illegal sign-stealing scheme. This was the height of widespread sign-stealing paranoia; McCann was so concerned during the World Series that he made a staggering 12 mound visits in the first six innings of Game 7 at Dodger Stadium.
The next season, MLB put formal limits on meetings at the mound. But it’s hard to fault McCann for being careful that night, and the end result was a meaningful celebration with pitcher Charlie Morton. They’d been drafted in consecutive rounds by the Braves in 2002, and McCann had caught Morton’s major-league debut. Who knew he would catch him many years later — for the Astros — at the end of a World Series?
“There were two outs in the ninth and we’re up four runs and I’m just sitting there, like this is pretty neat,” McCann said the next spring. “It’s all come full circle.”
Dustin Pedroia
On May 4, 2010, Boston reporters asked Dustin Pedroia about his slumping Red Sox teammate, David Ortiz, who was hitting just .149.
“He’s had 60 at-bats,” Pedroia sniffed. “A couple years ago I had 60 at-bats and I was hitting .170 and everybody was ready to kill me, too. What happened?”
Pause. “MVP,” someone mentioned.
“Laser show,” Pedroia continued. “So relax.”
Pedroia was right about Ortiz, who wound up in Cooperstown. And a new nickname was born, one that Pedroia had used to describe himself at Arizona State. He would be known as Laser Show.
Pedroia, who was generously listed at 5-foot-9, played with a cocky edge that helped him become a Rookie of the Year, the 2008 AL MVP and the engine of two World Series title teams. At the end of the 2017 season, he was a career .300 hitter. But a knee injury — sustained that April on a hard slide into second by Manny Machado — would limit Pedroia to just nine more games and freeze his lifetime average at .299.
It makes for a tricky Hall of Fame case, another high-impact, short-peak candidate. But if Pedroia does make it someday, here’s hoping “Laser Show” is emblazoned on the plaque. Big Papi would surely endorse the idea.
Hanley Ramirez
Ronald Acuña Jr. was the unanimous NL Most Valuable Player in 2023, when he reached standards in batting average, hits, homers and steals achieved in the same season by only one other player in history: Hanley Ramirez.
That season, for the Marlins, Ramirez became the first player to hit .330 with 200 hits, 25 homers and 50 steals in the same season. He finished 10th in the MVP voting. The next two seasons, Ramirez reached the .300/.400/.500 slash-line benchmarks, taking the NL batting crown in 2009.
His Hall of Fame track stalled after that; Ramirez never made an All-Star team after 2010, but he still had productive seasons for the Marlins, Dodgers and Red Sox, with a rare combination of power, speed and on-base skills.
Ramirez had 271 homers, 281 stolen bases and an .847 career OPS. Only four players in history exceed him in all three categories: Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, Alex Rodriguez and Bobby Abreu. He’s not a Hall of Famer, but he’s one of those guys who was probably better than you remember.
Fernando Rodney
Nobody embodied fun like Fernando Rodney. Every day during the World Baseball Classic, he would buy a plantain and carry it around for good luck. He wore his cap askew in honor of his father, Ulise, a fisherman in the Dominican Republic who wore his hat sideways to block the sun. And, of course, he shot arrows to distant parts of the ballpark after saves, then pointed to their landing spots with teammates.
“I watch a lot of the Animal Channel, and you see the guy get the arrow and shoot,” Rodney once explained. “When they shoot it in a good spot, they can run, but you know they’re going to be dead. So that’s how the idea got in my mind: When I shoot the arrow, the game is over.”
Rodney finished with 327 saves, 19th on the career list, and spread his joy to 11 teams in 17 seasons. He had bursts of astounding success — his 0.60 ERA in 2012, for Tampa Bay, is the lowest ever in a season of at least 70 innings — and finished as a champion with Washington in 2019.
With Rodney, though, “finished” is relative. He has never stopped pitching. This January, he was still at it, logging 18 games with the Gigantes del Cibao in the Dominican Winter League a couple of months before his 47th birthday.
“I think he’s been pitching with a torn labrum for 15 years,” Jim Leyland, who managed Rodney with Detroit, told The Athletic’s Sam Blum last winter. “I’ve had a lot of pitchers. I’ve had nobody that was any tougher than Fernando Rodney.”
Rodney holds up a replica plantain before a first-round game for the Dominican Republic in the 2017 World Baseball Classic. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
CC Sabathia
When the Yankees missed the playoffs in 2008, snapping a 14-year postseason streak, they responded by flexing their checkbook. Yet their run to a World Series title the next season went much deeper than that. In CC Sabathia, they signed not just a superstar, but the rare starting pitcher — and newcomer — who was also a team leader.
Sabathia took it upon himself to galvanize the roster of 1990s legends and younger veterans all eager to add to their ring collection. Sabathia’s track record commanded respect, anyway, but he earned it with the connections he forged in the clubhouse.
“He was someone that really found a way to bond a team,” Joe Girardi, who managed the 2009 Yankees, said at a team reunion this summer. “He was a fantastic teammate, where he just brought everybody together. He always included everyone in everything, whether it was going out on a 4th of July boat or going to a playoff basketball game and having everyone in a suite that he would buy. He was a teammate that knew the importance of being together and he really worked hard at including everyone and making sure that everyone felt they were just as important as the next guy.”
Derek Jeter, sitting at the same dais as Girardi for the question, piped in.
“Yeah,” he said with a laugh. “He’d buy it because he made a lot of money.”
Sabathia did make a lot of money — more than $260 million in his 19-year career — and produced like few others: he is one of just 15 pitchers ever to have 250 victories and 3,000 strikeouts. Only four (Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Justin Verlander and Greg Maddux) did it with a better winning percentage than Sabathia’s .609.
And while we’re not sure how those guys celebrate Halloween, we know, thanks to Andrew Keh of the New York Times, that Sabathia is Mr. October 31.
Ichiro Suzuki
Ichiro Suzuki will have a plaque at the Hall of Fame, of course, but that’s really not enough. His statistics should be displayed a mile or so up State Route 80 at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown.
For pure artistry, it’s hard to top Suzuki’s first decade with the Seattle Mariners, from 2001 to 2010. In each of those seasons, he had 200 hits and a .300 average while winning a Gold Glove and making the All-Star team. Ten seasons in a row! Along the way, he won two batting titles, set the single-season record for hits (262, in 2004) and averaged 38 steals per season.
When he finally retired, in a 2019 Mariners cameo at a season-opening series in Japan, Suzuki had 3,089 hits in the majors, plus 1,278 for the Orix Blue Wave. He started at age 18, ended at age 45 and still suits up regularly in Seattle, going through pregame drills and offering wisdom to anyone who asks.
It’s safe to say that no Hall of Famer will savor his induction more than Suzuki, whose boundless curiosity and passion for his craft has inspired at least seven trips to the museum. Soon, it will be his forever home.
“I don’t like to visit places,” he told The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal in February. “Out of anywhere in the world, besides the places I’ve lived, Cooperstown is the place I’ve visited the most.”
Troy Tulowitzki
Troy Tulowitzki was the first major leaguer signed into the 2020s, agreeing to a 10-year, $157.75 million deal with the Rockies after the 2010 season. He hoped to be a franchise cornerstone like his favorite player, Derek Jeter, another shortstop who wore No. 2. Only a select few, Tulowitzki said the following spring, had a chance to be the face of an organization.
“I always got the sense that if I was able to do that, that would be pretty cool,” he said, “that even when it’s all said and done, I could come back to Denver and they would love me.”
That was the fairy tale, and it seemed plausible at the time. The Rockies had won the NL pennant in Tulowitzki’s rookie season, and he was in the middle of a stretch as the majors’ most productive shortstop. He posted 38.2 WAR from 2007 through 2014, easily the most at his position in those years.
But the Rockies cashed out early on the bet they had made, shocking Tulowitzki with a trade to Toronto less than five years into the contract. He would help the Blue Jays reach the ALCS twice, but severely injured his ankle in June 2017.
Tulowitzki was just 32 then but would not make it to the 2020s, after all, playing in only five more games the rest of his career. In his last one, though, in April 2019, Tulowitzki got to emulate his hero: he went out as the starting shortstop for the New York Yankees.
Ben Zobrist
Certain players make such a distinctive impact that they become a Type — a best-case scenario for a player with a limited but well-defined, useful skill set. A soft-tossing, durable left-handed pitcher is a Jamie Moyer Type. A light-hitting, defense-first catcher with outstanding leadership skills is an Austin Hedges Type. A contact hitter with exceptional speed and bunting ability is a Juan Pierre Type. You get the idea.
Ben Zobrist was a Type. He had power, but never hit 30 homers. He could run, but never had 25 steals. He could field, but never won a Gold Glove. He never drove in or scored 100 runs. But Zobrist was above-average in everything, with impressive versatility — a switch-hitter, he played every position but catcher, logging more than 200 games at both middle infield spots and both outfield corners.
Naturally, it was the Rays who first understood his value. Zobrist helped them win a pennant in 2008 and finally became a regular the next season, at age 28, starting at seven different positions. After a while, the league caught on: Kansas City traded for Zobrist at the deadline in 2015 and went on to win the World Series.
Then the Cubs put a price on his Type in free agency, with a four-year, $56 million deal that paid off spectacularly. At the end of Zobrist’s first season, in Game 7 of the World Series, he slashed a go-ahead double in the 10th inning in Cleveland, capturing the series MVP award as the Cubs won their first title in 108 years.
(Top photo of CC Sabathia and Ichiro Suzuki in 2012: Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images)
