At long last, Tim Raines will officially be a Hall of Famer. The longtime Montreal Expos outfielder was voted into the Hall last winter in his 10th (and final) year on the ballot, after years of lobbying by media members and analysts who emphasized Raines’s advanced stats, rather than his more modest traditional ones. Raines’s induction this Sunday has been hailed as monumental in the effort to populate Cooperstown with more sabermetrically accomplished ballplayers.
It’s too bad, though, that so many qualified candidates have already been passed over — and some only lasted a year on the ballot. Take, for instance, former Cleveland Indians center fielder Kenny Lofton, a player with a comparable résumé to Raines. Out of the 569 ballots cast for the Hall in 2013, only 18 (3.2 percent) carried Lofton’s name, causing him to drop off of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s (BBWAA) ballot forever. (Players named on at least 75 percent of ballots are elected to the Hall; those named on fewer than 5 percent fall off the ballot.)
According to JAWS,26 a system that measures Hall of Fame worthiness using wins above replacement,27 Lofton is the eighth-best Hall-eligible center fielder in modern28 baseball history, checking in slightly behind HOF member Duke Snider and slightly ahead of two other members, Andre Dawson and Richie Ashburn. A regression I ran using JAWS29 thinks a player of Lofton’s caliber should make the Hall about 72 percent of the time. Instead, he fell off the ballot after just one appearance — a farcical outcome for one of the most electrifying players in the game’s history.
And Lofton isn’t even the most egregious one-and-done snub since 1979, when the policy of dropping players with fewer than 5 percent of the vote was enacted. You could build an entire All-Star team of players whose numbers seem Hall-worthy but got booted off the ballot after just one try.
There’s longtime California Angels second baseman Bobby Grich, whose JAWS numbers suggest an 89 percent Hall probability. Yet Grich somehow received only 11 votes (2.6 percent) in 1992. Then there’s recently retired center fielder Jim Edmonds (64 percent), whose career was roughly as good as Ashburn’s by JAWS, despite what all but 11 voters thought in 2016. Even the less-probable members of the All-One-and-Done Team were borderline cases, such as catcher Ted Simmons (53 percent), pitcher Rick Reuschel (52 percent) and outfielder Jimmy Wynn (45 percent).
Like Raines and Lofton, these players were overlooked because they fell well short of Cooperstown’s traditional stat benchmarks. Reuschel didn’t win 300 games.30 Edmonds didn’t hit 500 home runs.31 But through the lens of sabermetrics, each player’s Hall candidacy has taken on more legitimacy — albeit far too late. Even with advanced metrics, you can make an argument for why each player shouldn’t be in the Hall, but it’s still tough to justify how they couldn’t even stay on the ballot longer than a year.
According to my JAWS-based HOF probability metric, here’s the All-One-and-Done roster:32
The Hall of Fame’s All-One-and-Done team
For each position, the player who had the highest likelihood of making the Hall of Fame (based on JAWS) among players who dropped off the ballot after only one year (1979-2017)
| HOF LIKELIHOOD … | ACTUAL BALLOT RESULTS | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| POS. | PLAYER | JAWS* | HOF % | YEAR ON BALLOT | VOTE % |
| C | Ted Simmons | 44.2 | 53.1% | 1994 | 3.7 |
| 1B | John Olerud | 49.4 | 40.4 | 2011 | 0.7 |
| 2B | Bobby Grich | 60.4 | 88.8 | 1992 | 2.6 |
| SS | Jim Fregosi | 42.9 | 38.3 | 1984 | 1.0 |
| 3B | Dick Allen | 53.2 | 43.1 | 1983 | 3.7 |
| OF | Kenny Lofton | 56.7 | 71.7 | 2013 | 3.2 |
| OF | Jim Edmonds | 53.9 | 64.1 | 2016 | 2.5 |
| OF | Jim Wynn | 48.4 | 44.9 | 1983 | 0.0 |
| SP | Rick Reuschel | 54.8 | 52.2 | 1997 | 0.4 |
| RP | Tom Gordon | 29.3 | 13.8 | 2015 | 0.4 |
Based on the historical relationship between an MLB team’s total JAWS from its starters (at the positions listed above) and its record, our team of snubs would figure to win about 100 games in a typical season, depending on how close the players were to their primes. By comparison, the lowest-probability team of actual Hall members voted in over the same span would figure to win 96 or so games in an average season:
The Hall of Fame’s Anti-One-and-Done team
For each position, the player who had the lowest likelihood of making the Hall of Fame (based on JAWS) among players who were actually inducted (1979-2017)
| HOF LIKELIHOOD … | ACTUAL BALLOT RESULTS | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| POS. | PLAYER | JAWS* | HOF % | YRS ON BALLOT | YR ELECTED | VOTE % |
| C | Carlton Fisk | 54.0 | 80.6% | 2 | 2000 | 79.6 |
| 1B | Tony Perez | 47.2 | 30.8 | 9 | 2000 | 77.2 |
| 2B | Roberto Alomar | 53.9 | 70.4 | 2 | 2011 | 90.0 |
| SS | Luis Aparicio | 42.2 | 24.5 | 6 | 1984 | 84.6 |
| 3B | Paul Molitor | 55.9 | 38.3 | 1 | 2004 | 85.2 |
| OF | Lou Brock | 37.5 | 9.3 | 1 | 1985 | 79.7 |
| OF | Kirby Puckett | 43.3 | 23.9 | 1 | 2001 | 82.1 |
| OF | Jim Rice | 44.1 | 26.6 | 15 | 2009 | 76.4 |
| SP | Catfish Hunter | 34.5 | 5.5 | 3 | 1987 | 76.3 |
| RP | Bruce Sutter | 22.6 | 6.7 | 13 | 2006 | 76.9 |
Not every player on the team above is worse than his counterpart on the One-and-Done All-Stars. (For instance, Carlton Fisk, the “worst” catcher inducted, was far superior to Simmons.) But most were — and as a result, our team of one-and-done candidates would be favored to beat those Hall of Famers about 52 percent of the time at a neutral field.33 Based on JAWS, even the second-most unlikely team of inducted Hall of Famers34 is only roughly as good as our All-One-and-Done team, with each clocking in around 100-win talent in a typical season. (That second team is extremely star-studded, and in many cases also beloved by a single team’s fan base, which offers clues into what helps generate Hall of Fame traction — or, in the case of Lofton, who played for 11 teams in his career, helps take it away.)
Unfortunately for the Kenny Loftons of the world, there’s little precedent for a player eventually making the Hall through the Veteran’s Committee after going one-and-done in the BBWAA ballot. Longtime Cubs third baseman Ron Santo is the only player since 1979 to pull off the feat, finally receiving a posthumous election in 2011 after years of lobbying from more sabermetrically inclined analysts (and an army of Chicago fans).
Perhaps Lofton & Co. will get to tell their own redemption tales at the Hall of Fame podium someday. But for now, remember that even as Raines take his place among baseball’s greatest stars this weekend, there are plenty of other deserving players whose candidacies were dashed in the shadows of the ballot after barely getting a chance.