SEATTLE MARINERS

Drayer: The fascinating Hall of Fame case of Félix Hernández

Jan 17, 2025, 8:29 AM | Updated: 4:37 pm

Tuesday afternoon, the newest inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame will be announced with intrigue surrounding the two Seattle Mariners who are on the ballot. For Ichiro Suzuki, it is a question of whether he will join Mariano Rivera as the only players to be voted in unanimously. For Félix Hernández, there is great interest in seeing what percentage of the vote he gets. It will be far below that of Ichiro, but regardless, the number will be above the required 5% to stay on the ballot, a piece of good news as a large hurdle is cleared to perhaps eventual enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.

His reception the first time on the ballot is a somewhat surprising piece of good news coming out of ballot season, as the talk around his candidacy in his final years of playing and post-retirement has mainly revolved around what a shame it was his window of greatness was too short. Windows can be looked at differently and changed, however, as years go on and some of the talk surrounding his candidacy since his name was inked onto the official ballot has the sound of the beginnings of a strong case being formed for future induction.

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As of 2:30 p.m. Thursday, his name was on 25.8% of the ballots with 41.6% of the voting known thanks to the marvelous work of Ryan Thibodaux and crew with their ballot tracker. With nine years remaining on the ballot – assuming he continues to garner at least 5% of the vote – there is a long road ahead for Félix that may end up in Cooperstown, or perhaps stop short in Oneonta.

There is precedent for climbing out of the 20’s and eventual enshrinement. Mike Mussina received 20.3% of the vote, 15th on the ballot that year, in his first year of eligibility and eclipsed the 75% requirement five years later. New eyes on new metrics and the ability to communicate the significance of those metrics played a large part in Mussina getting in. Félix’s candidacy could follow a similar path with Gabe Lacques of USA today writing recently Félix will be a bellwether for The Baseball Hall of Fame’s future.

“The 200-inning season is on life support. The 4,000-inning career exited when Randy Johnson did. The sixth inning increasingly is deemed too treacherous for starting pitchers,” he wrote. “While Hernández’s career partly predated those trends – or touched them at the very end – his run from 2005-2019 certainly spanned a period of time when pitcher evaluation greatly changed.”

The advanced metrics now available to all are better understood for many but not all voters. The education by Félix advocates will continue. To be fair, not all numbers favor him, but there is a new battlefield he will need to prevail on if he is to earn enough votes. Many writers compare candidates to other Hall of Famers. Benchmarks are set by the accomplishments of players that played 30, 40, 50 years ago. The Athletic’s Eno Sarris, on the Hot Stove Show this week, pointed out it is high time potential Hall of Famers be compared to their peers.

“We’ve seen just in the last few years a lot of upheaval in how baseball is played,” he said. “We’ve seen bullpen games, openers. We’ve seen the rise of the super bullpen, we’ve seen velo going through the roof, we’ve seen injuries. All of these things mean that the players of different eras put up different stats and put them up in different ways.”

The game has changed. The athletes have changed. Félix should not be compared as many are to the other “borderline candidates” throughout the years – Kevin Brown, David Cone, Orel Hershiser, Bret Saberhagen to name a few – or others who did not hit the then-standard benchmarks. He should rather be compared to those in his era.

Sarris and others like to condense careers into seven-to-nine-year-best stretches, and Félix had a whopper from 2008-2014, when he posted a 2.82 ERA over 230 starts and 1,595 innings. His 1,533 strikeouts are most in baseball in that span, and his ERA and adjusted ERA (138) are second only to Clayton Kershaw (2.48, 151).

Sarris believes players should be compared to others who are born around the same time, listing Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Zack Greinke, CC Sabathia and Cole Hamels as his contemporaries.

“If you look at the players that are born around Félix Hernández, he comes into focus as what I think is a Hall of Famer, ” he said.

Some might think that is a leap when you take the full body of work into consideration. It may seem like a lot of names, but surprisingly still very “small Hall” as Sarris points out.

“We vote 1.5% of the general population into the Hall of Fame,” he said. “That is a benchmark I use. And we’re finding that pitchers are falling behind, only electing less than 1% of the pitchers. Now you know in the modern era we haven’t yet really adjusted our voting patterns to the changes in stats that we’re seeing, the players that we’re seeing.”

There has indeed been a drought of starting pitchers in recent induction classes, with the last starters being Mussina and Roy Halladay in 2019. Before that, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson and John Smoltz in 2015. In total, just eight starting pitchers inducted via the ballot (others by committee votes) in the 2000s. There’s room for more representation for starters whose primes were in the last 20 years.

Félix has been in this position once before and triumphed, winning the Cy Young award in 2010 with not just the fewest wins (13) in over 30 years but also 12 losses. Voting at the end of the season with the reasons why the record was so poor fresh in the voters minds no doubt helped, but there was a tremendous amount of campaigning and educating happening at the time to help get those votes.  It doesn’t hurt that Félix appears to be the darling of discourse this ballot season. It’s good discourse, it promotes further research and revisiting and perhaps even better appreciation for the players in question. It will be fascinating to see where this ends, but for now, a step in the right direction.

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Drayer: The fascinating Hall of Fame case of Félix Hernández