The 2025 Hall of Fame Class

In Major League Baseball by Rice Cube86 Comments

I feel like there aren’t too many surprises on this year’s Baseball Hall of Fame announcement, but first let’s remember that the Veterans’ Committee elected Dick Allen and Dave Parker, the Ford C. Frick Award for Broadcasting went to Cleveland broadcaster Tom Hamilton, and the Career Excellence Award for Baseball Writing went to Washington columnist Thomas Boswell.

Joining them in the Class of 2025 will be Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, and Billy Wagner. Most of their exploits are known to those of us of a certain oldness, so I won’t belabor the point, but I believe they are all deserving in their own right and happy for a pretty loaded class to talk to the crowd this summer in Cooperstown. I would be amused if Ichiro did his All-Star speech, but that may be top secret eyes only stuff for the All-Stars who were in his presence.

I think the only surprise was that someone actually didn’t vote for Ichiro (vote totals here), and you can see the vote totals here. We’ll take a look at who will be on the next ballot and who has a chance next year at a later time, but for now let’s celebrate the new inductees.

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  3. berselius

    I’m assuming the Ichiro non-voter was someone who was voting strategically, giving his spot to boost someone marginal’s chance on hanging on.

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  4. berselius

    Rice Cube,

    There’s definitely a nonzero number of players who I would have guessed played in the league last year (dying laughing). Gio Gonzalez, Alex Gordon, Edwin Encarnacion to name a few.

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  7. Perkins

    Speaking of Hamels, 15 years ago everyone was talking about who would be the last 300 game winner, but now I wonder how many more 200 game winners we’ll see barring some major change that forces or incentivizes longer starts. Hamels only got 163 despite a 59 WAR career.

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  17. Author
    Rice Cube

    Perkins,

    They may have to re-evaluate how HOFers are measured with usage and analytics and what not these days, my initial feeling is that Lester is borderline but Chapman is a tier lower.

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  19. Perkins

    Rice Cube,

    Yeah, they’ll definitely need to recalibrate. Lester feels like a borderline guy whose postseason resume might help him, but hard to see him making it while Pettitte is out. Especially since his career was mostly at the tail end of an era when starters went deeper and mostly overlapped with first ballot locks like Verlander and Scherzer.

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  20. Author
    Rice Cube

    Perkins,

    Lester is one of the last breed with 200 wins, I don’t think Hamels has 200 wins, and that might mean something especially if King Felix got so much support in his first go around. He won’t get in first ballot but I think he sticks around

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  21. Perkins

    Rice Cube,

    Hamels only has ~160 wins, though he has 59 bWAR to Lester’s 43.5, and a World Series MVP. I think both of them have fairly comparable HoF cases and would like to see them make it, but would also have trouble voting for either over Andy Pettitte.

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  28. Perkins

    Sounds like David Robertson is in the mix too. If the Cubs gor him, Pressly, and Flaherty, I’d be pretty happy with this kffseason.

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  30. berselius

    Pete Carroll to the raiders huh. I guess he’s one of the few guys with the personality/clout that I could actually see managing Mark Davis well.

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  34. Author
    Rice Cube

    Ha I didn’t think D Lee stole that many since he always GIDP so much, guess you just have to pick your spots

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  39. Perkins

    Rice Cube,

    I’ve sometimes wondered what might have happened had the Cubs signed Scherzer instead of Lester before 2015. I do think Lester was a phenomenal fit for that group of players, but prime Scherzer on the Cubs would have been really fun.

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  45. Perkins

    New offseason idea:
    -trade for Pressly
    -sign Robertson
    -sign Bregman
    -trade Hoerner and whatever else is needed to Seattle for Luis Castillo
    -Shaw at 2B

    I doubt the Cubs spend like that, but it would be rad.

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  47. andcounting

    Update on Pressly from Nightengale is Tigers are out. It’s Cubs if Pressly approves or else he’s staying in Houston.

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  48. Author
    Rice Cube

    andcounting,

    Word on the street is he wants the closer job outright, which I think is reasonable given that you kind of have to squint to see any of the Cubs in that role (not that they’re incapable) while Pressly has done it before

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  50. Perkins

    Jimmy Ryan was the only name I didn’t recognize.

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  52. Author
    Rice Cube

    Alas, multiple guys were usable in different spots

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  55. Perkins

    Not that difficult today. Dempster and Zambrano were the only ones who might have overlapped.

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  65. berselius

    Rice Cube,

    WASTEAM hung in there for a while at least, just ran out of gas at the end. As it is with most teams playing Saquon.

    Chiefs-Bills pretty good so far

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  66. berselius

    I feel unreasonably/stubbornly vindicated that McCann and Martin didn’t get much support despite their elite catcher framing numbers.

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  70. BVS

    Rice Cube,

    Yeah, I saw Bello pitch a couple times. For a low A pitcher he looked good. But he wasn’t Mark Prior. And I take Berselius’s TINSTAAP warning to heart. It doesn’t seem a like an overpay for Pressly. Pressly’s salary is going up to about $14.7 M, btw, as he gets a bonus to cover the difference in taxes between Illinois (4.95%) and Texas (0.0%, I guess). Houston pays $5.5M.

    Or do baseball players pay income tax based on where they play that day? Like when Houston plays at Chicago, do the Astros players have to 3 days of taxes to Chicago? And 6 weeks of taxes to Arizona for spring training? Ugh. Are they yearround employees or only from spring training to the end of their season? In this case, if half his work days are in Texas, then I guess his assignment/tax bonus would be $350,000 instead of 700,000 (round numbers).

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  71. Perkins

    BVS,

    Typically people who travel for work pay taxes based on all the locations they’ve worked, pro-rated for time. Some states have a minimum number of days worked before taxes are owed.

    I’m not sure whether that’s counted based on percentage of season or percentage of calendar year for athletes, but it was a moderate pain when I used to have to file 3-5 state returns every year as a consultant.

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  72. berselius

    BVS,

    Iirc they do pay taxes on a per game location basis, but going from playing 81 games in Texas to Illinois would definitely be nontrivial.

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  73. berselius

    Perkins,

    Who knows how long it will apply but we got a memo at the beginning of the CY with a list of places where we cannot remote work for more than than a week in a year – Hawaii, SF, San Jose, and a few other places were on the list.

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  74. berselius

    berselius,

    Technically, they just said no remote work there at all because of the hassle. At least with the cubs accountants they can apply the same rules for 26 people at a time.

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  75. BVS

    Perkins,

    But in your case you were consulting in another state and being paid directly by your client because you are self-employed? Or still being paid through your company (assuming you aren’t your company)?

    If the latter, I should start picking sites for field research in Florida or PR, then I could pay less state income tax even though my paycheck comes from the local university regardless. My salary doesn’t change regardless of where my fieldwork is.

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  78. Perkins

    Not terrible.

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