The 2022 MLB Hall of Fame Ballot vs. the Rockies

Since the final results of the 2022 Hall of Fame ballot were announced yesterday (or today, the day I’m writing this), I thought it would be cool to look at how all the players on the ballot performed against the Rockies throughout their careers. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of big, eye-popping numbers for the position players. Let’s get to it. The Hall of Fame ballot for 2022 was the following:

There’s some names here that should be in but won’t get in, some big character concerns, and some guys who will probably fall off the ballot very quickly, if it didn’t happen already. I separated them between pitchers and position players, for a better look. Let’s start with the position players.

Position Players

First off, the easy stuff. Here’s the career plate appearances facing COL of every hitter on the ballot:

This mostly checks out. The only one who surprised me a little is Vizquel, because I totally forgot he played for the Giants for a few years. Kent, Bonds and Sheffield and Sosa to a lesser extent are the ones who have roughly a full season worth of PAs against the Rox. Now, let’s do batting average…

… on-base percentage…

… and finally, slugging percentage…

As I’m sure you noticed, the collective batting average is extremely high, with the majority hitting over .300 and only four of the 18 (Ryan Howard, AJ Pierzynski, Scott Rolen and Mark Teixeira hitting below .275. The on-base chart is similarly bonkers, with only five guys going below .350 (Howard, Torii Hunter, Pierzynski, Rolen and Teixeira) and tons near or above .400. Ortiz, Bonds and Sheffield lead the way here.

In terms of slugging? I know y’all saw Sammy Sosa going over .700 (.714 to be specific) with Bonds in hot pursuit (.686), but how about Mark Teixeira’s .628 mark? Sheffield’s .629 ranks fourth, and he barely misses being the only player of the 18 to rank in the top 3 for all three categories, by the way, as he hit a combined .325/.463/.629. Not too shabby.

Finally, I wanted to do something a bit more rate based, so here’s the HR% of all these players. Check out Sosa and Teixeira:

Sosa homered on 8.96% of his ABs against the Rox (45 in 504 PAs), which sounds almost impossible and comes out to 58 homers per 650 plate appearances. The average HR rate for this group of 18 was 4.9%, and for reference, the HR rate across MLB in 2021 (one of the highest home run hitting seasons on record) was 3.3%, so the HOF hopeful homered at about a 150% ratio than that. Coors!

Pitchers

Now, the pitchers. As you can imagine, it’s not as spectacular here:

Now, the average between these guys is a 4.27 ERA, just so you know. Billy Wagner is the only one of the ten with an ERA below 3, with his 2.48 mark being very impressive considering the era he pitched in, and also considering that he threw 40 innings, a significant enough sample size for a closer. Joe Nathan, another closer with a similar workload (42.0 innings in his case), struggled badly, being the only one to go above 5. Speaking of innings:

Again, makes sense: Lincecum, Peavy and Schilling all pitched for division rivals, and Hudson pitched in the NL for a while. Wagner and Papelbon are the only two pitchers to K more than a batter per inning, although Schilling (174 Ks in 174.1 IP) and Lincecum (182 Ks in 183.1 IP) come very close. Here’s something fun, too:

Clemens and Buehrle had some home issues in their limited experience against the Rox, and Schilling and Wagner both stand out above the pack. Schilling gave up 24 homers against the Rox, the most of any of the ten pitchers on the ballot by far.

And finally:

I suspect quite a few of those Lincecum losses come in the period from 2012-2014, when his hips couldn’t hold up anymore. Peavy being .500 against the Rox in his career surprises me quite a bit, considering that the Padres got the best years of his career.

Do you guys have any particularly good or terrifying memories of these players from when they played against Colorado? I’d love to hear them. If you want to check out the spreadsheet I use, here is the link.

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Big Papi elected to Hall on 1st ballot | MLB.com

About what I expected. Ortiz got 77.9% of the vote and got in on his first try, and Bonds, Clemens, Schilling and Sosa all fell off the ballot. The voting is a joke, but we all knew that already.

Let’s Design a New Line Score | Fangraphs

I’m not in the boat that says the line score needs to be changed (it works perfectly fine as it is, and it just looks right), but how about these options? This piece is the continuation of Ben Clemens’ piece from last Friday, where he suggested changing the line score because errors are not very common anymore and not all hits are created equal.

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