Hall of Fame

Hall of Fame Ballot for Millennial Fans, from the Rocket to the Bro

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The 2021 BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot was released on Monday, with candidates running the gamut from Bobby Abreu to Barry Zito. These are the players Millennials grew up watching. Joe Posnanski once wrote about a conversation he had with Theo Epstein in which Posnanski theorized that “eight is the perfect age to fall in love with baseball.”

Epstein agreed, saying, “It’s the age of complete wonderment with the game. Eight is the age when you understand enough, but there’s still the full wonder of the ballpark and the colors and the smells and everything else.” He added, “Interestingly, though, I think 12 is the age when you fully connect with your team. That’s the age when, in this weird way, you really get what baseball is, you begin to understand team dynamics, you follow the game closely and that shapes your adulthood a little bit. I think that happens at 12.”

The Millennial Generation consists of people born between 1981 and 1996. The earliest of the Millennials would have been eight years old in 1989, “the perfect age to fall in love with baseball.” Six players on the current Hall of Fame ballot were already in the major leagues by this time. This group includes Roger Clemens (played from 1984 to 2007), who had already won two AL Cy Young Awards by 1989, and Barry Bonds (1986-2007), who was just a year away from winning the first of his seven NL MVP Awards. Curt Schilling (1988-2007), Gary Sheffield (1988-2009), Sammy Sosa (1989-2007), and Omar Vizquel (1989-2007) were also in the major leagues, but had not yet made their marks on the game.

By the time the earliest Millennials were 12 years old, the age Epstein believes a young fan fully connects with their team, Clemens and Bonds were huge stars. Clemens won a third AL Cy Young Award in 1991, while also finishing in the top three in 1990 and 1992. He led the AL in ERA all three years and in strikeouts once. For his part, Bonds had caught up to Clemens in the trophy department, with three NL MVP Awards in four years from 1990-1993. His third MVP came in his first year with the Giants, after seven years with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Curt Schilling was now an established member of the Philadelphia Phillies starting rotation. In 1993, he won 16 regular season games and was MVP of the NLCS for the long-haired, mullet-wearing, tobacco-spitting team of Lenny Dykstra, John Kruk, and Darren Daulton that was reminiscent of a beer league softball squad. Clean-cut Dale Murphy was on the Phillies the previous year, which prompted Kruk to describe the team as “24 morons and one Mormon.” That was a team any 12-year-old baseball fan could fall in love with.

By this time, Gary Sheffield was a two-time All-Star and Sammy Sosa was just becoming a big-time home run hitter, as his 33 home runs in 1993 were more than twice as many as he’d hit in a season previously. Little Omar Vizquel won the first of 11 Gold Glove Awards he would earn in his career. Jeff Kent (1992-2008) had his first of 12 seasons with 20 or more home runs.

Just as those early Millennials were falling in love with the game and enjoying the exploits of these Hall of Fame caliber players, along came the strike in August of 1994 that meant no post-season or World Series for the first time since 1904. Those fans were also shortchanged with a 144-game season in 1995.

Attendance, which had peaked in 1994, plummeted in 1995. It’s likely that many young fans were turned off by the labor conflict just as they were starting to fall in love with the game. Some fans vowed they would never go to a game again. Despite these protests, attendance rebounded to early 1990s levels in 1997 and increased again in 1998, when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire had their epic home run battle, which was a memorable summer for Millennials.

While Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were crushing dingers in the summer of 1998, other players on the current Hall of Fame ballot were starting to make waves in the sport. Manny Ramirez (1993-2011) had 45 homers and 145 RBI in 1998. Over the next 11 years, he would be an 11-time All-Star while hitting .318/.417/.609, with 418 homers (101 R, 38 HR, 123 RBI per season). Jeff Kent received NL MVP votes in 1997 and 1998. Two years later, he won the NL MVP Award with a .334/.424/.596 season.

The late 1990s are well known for a high level of offense, but there were also a handful of pitchers on the current Hall of Fame ballot who rose to prominence during this time. Andy Pettitte (1995-2013) finished third behind sluggers Mo Vaughn and Albert Belle in AL Rookie of the Year voting in 1995, then finished second in AL Cy Young voting in 1996, when he led the American League in wins.

Billy Wagner (1995-2010) got a sip of coffee with the Astros in 1995. In 1998, he saved 30 games in a season for the first time, then saved 39 games and was an All-Star in 1999, when he also received NL Cy Young and NL MVP votes.

LaTroy Hawkins (1995-2015) came up as a starting pitcher for the Minnesota Twins in 1995. After starting the first 98 games of his career, Hawkins would move to the bullpen in 2000 and pitch for the next 16 years in relief, finishing his career with 943 relief outings for 11 different teams. His 1,042 career appearances is 10th on the all-time list.

Players on the 2021 Hall of Fame Ballot, by first year in the Major Leagues:

Millennials born in the midpoint of their generational era, roughly 1989, grew up watching a new set of players currently on the Hall of Fame ballot. Andruw Jones (1996-2012) burst upon the scene during the 1996 World Series, when he hit .400/.500/.750 in Atlanta’s six-game loss to the Yankees. He finished fifth in NL Rookie of the Year voting in 1997, then won the first of his 10 Gold Gloves in 1998. Jones continued to hit dingers and play good defense with the Braves through 2007, his age-30 season, at which point he had 368 career home runs. Only eight players in baseball history had more home runs than Jones through their age-30 season.

Also making their debut in 1996 were Scott Rolen (1996-2012) and Bobby Abreu (1996-2014), although neither player had enough playing time to exhaust their rookie eligibility that year, which enabled Rolen to win the NL Rookie of the Year Award in 1997. Rolen went on to be a top-notch fielder (eight Gold Gloves) and productive hitter (seven-time All-Star) and now ranks 10th among all third basemen in baseball history in Jay Jaffe’s JAWS metric, which puts him just above Hall of Famer Edgar Martinez.

Abreu doesn’t rank as highly as Rolen by JAWS, but he still ranks one spot above Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero thanks to a long career that included a .395 career on-base percentage, 288 home runs, and 400 steals. In a fun-with-numbers exercise, if you look up players who hit at least 250 homers, stole at least 300 bases, and had a career OBP of .380 or higher, you get six players: Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Willie Mays, Rickey Henderson, Joe Morgan, and Bobby Abreu. He wasn’t the caliber of those players, but he was an impressive all-around talent in his own right.

Todd Helton (1997-2013) and Torii Hunter (1997-2015) came up in the same year, with Helton hitting .280/.337/.484 in 35 games in 1997, then hitting over .300 in each of the next 10 seasons. Hunter played in one game but didn’t get an at-bat in 1997, then had just 17 at-bats in 1998. He had his first good season in 2001, when he hit 27 home runs, scored 82 runs, drove in 92, and won the first of nine Gold Glove Awards. He memorably robbed Barry Bonds of a home run in the 2002 All-Star Game, then was picked up like a rag doll by the beefy slugger.

Aramis Ramirez (1998-2015) debuted in 1998, but didn’t break out until 2001, when he hit 34 dingers and had 112 ribbies for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Two years later, he was traded to the Cubs, where he had his most successful stretch of seasons. Ramirez is unlikely to make the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, but he was recently elected to the Dominican Sports Hall of Fame.

As the earliest of Millennials were graduating from high school, a quartet of pitchers currently on the Hall of Fame ballot were making their debuts. Tim Hudson (1999-2015) was 11-2 with a 3.23 ERA for the Oakland A’s in 1999. He would go 81-37 with a 3.31 ERA for the A’s over the next five years, which included the 2002 season that was chronicled by Michael Lewis in the book Moneyball and was later made into the movie by the same name in 2011. A.J. Burnett (1999-2015) came up and retired in the same years as Hudson. By Baseball-Reference WAR, he was about half as valuable as Hudson in his career, although he did memorably pitch a no-hitter that included nine walks.

Lefties Barry Zito (2000-2013, 2015) and Mark Buehrle (2000-2015) arrived in 2000. Zito had the single best individual season that either pitcher had when he was 23-5 with a 2.75 ERA in 2002 and won the AL Cy Young Award, but Buehrle was a slow-and-steady fixture in the rotation who won at least 10 games for 15 straight seasons. Through the age of 28, they had similar value. Zito had a 3.55 ERA in 1430.3 innings (125 ERA+) and 31 WAR (per Baseball-Reference). Buehrle had a 3.80 ERA in 1629 innings (122 ERA+) and 31.6 WAR.

Their paths diverged from that point on. Zito wasn’t the same pitcher in the last half of his career, pitching 1139.3 innings with a 4.62 ERA (87 ERA+) and being worth 2.1 WAR. Buehrle, meanwhile, was still above average over his final eight season, with a 3.82 ERA in 1654.3 innings (111 ERA+) and 28.4 WAR. He’s also one of 23 pitchers to have a perfect game on their resume.

Michael Cuddyer (2001-2015) was a September call-up in 2001 who didn’t have his first season with 500 plate appearances until 2006, when he was 27 years old. That was the beginning of an eight year stretch during which Cuddyer averaged 2.8 WAR and hit .281/.349/.470. He was a two-time All-Star and down ballot MVP candidate in 2009 (21st among 26 players who received at least one vote).

In 2002, MLB players and owners agreed to a joint drug program. This included survey testing for banned steroids in 2003 that would trigger the start of testing with penalties in 2004, if more than five percent of tests were positive. The Millennial Generation was between 6 and 21 years old at this time, as Barry Bonds had four straight NL MVP seasons in which he averaged 52 homers per year with a .349/.559/.809 batting line from 2001 to 2004. He was the real-life baseball equivalent of Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl. Roger Clemens won two more Cy Young Awards during those same years and Curt Schilling and his bloody sock famously helped the 2004 Red Sox win their first World Series since 1918, with the help of World Series MVP Manny Ramirez. They swept Scott Rolen’s St. Louis Cardinals.

Another player on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, Dan Haren (2003-2015), was a teammate of Rolen on those 2004 Cardinals, but he would find more success over the ensuing five seasons with the Oakland A’s and Arizona Diamondbacks. He was a three-time All-Star from 2007 to 2009 and twice finish in the top seven in Cy Young voting in his career.

Also debuting in 2003 was outfielder Shane Victorino (2003-2015), who came up with the Padres but is best known for his time with the Phillies from 2005 to 2012. During his four-year peak, from 2008 to 2011, he was worth 4.2 WAR per season while hitting .281/.348/.452 and averaging 30 doubles, 12 triples, 15 homers, and 28 steals. He was a two time All-Star, won four Gold Gloves, and was a big part of the Phillies 2008 World Series championship squad.

The final player on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, Nick Swisher (2004-2015) reached the Major Leagues with the Oakland A’s in 2004 just as the very youngest Millennials were eight years old and the oldest were 23 or so, likely already in the work force or graduating from college. After playing 20 games in September in 2004, Swisher was a regular in 2005 and one of three Oakland players to draw AL Rookie of the Year votes. Teammate Huston Street won the award, while Swisher tied with teammate Joe Blanton for sixth in the voting.

Like many Oakland A’s players over the last 20 years, Swisher stayed with the team until he started to get somewhat expensive, then was traded to the White Sox before the 2008 season. From 2005 to 2013, with the A’s, White Sox, Yankees, and Cleveland, Swisher was worth nearly 3 WAR per year while averaging 25 homers and 81 RBI with a .255/.358/.463 batting line.

In 2013, the popular Cleveland player had a section of the Progressive Field grandstand dedicated to him with a press release touting, “Calling All Bros!” Fans were invited to sit in “Brohio” and the team gave out “Brohio” shirts with aviator sunglasses on the front and “Sup, Bro?” on the back. Swisher won’t make the Baseball Hall of Fame, but if there’s a Bro Hall of Fame, he would be first ballot.

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