The next tier of players I would have on my ballot
For this next section, I am going to go by how high their vote has been in the past.
In my 2018 article with my mock ballot, I said that he would have been on my ballot had there not been a 10 player max. Now that the bottleneck has been cleared some, he would be on for me.
Nine seasons of 93 RBI or more (with seven of them coming while playing his home games in Candlestick Park, Pacific Bell Park (later known by about a million different names), and Dodger Stadium), a .290/.356/.500 career slash line, a career 123 OPS+ with a total of eight seasons of 123 or higher, and eight seasons of a 3.5 bWAR or higher. He also played well in the postseason.
I can see how some would leave him off the ballot but I think he’s a Hall of Famer.
He’s another player that I left off in 2018 but I would have added last year and he’d still be on this year. He very much has the “Larry Walker” complex to me. He was very underrated and he wasn’t consistently healthy so it has deterred some of his possible voters. However, he has already received a huge jump this year in Ryan Thibodaux’s HOF Tracker, much like Walker received last year.
Career bWAR of 70.2, eight seasons with an OPS+ of 125 or higher, an excellent defender (116 bDRS from 2003 to 2012), and ten seasons with a bWAR of 3.9 or higher. That defines a Hall of Famer to me.