This year wasn’t the year. Next year’s not looking too good either.
The 2025 induction class of the Baseball Hall of Fame was announced on Tuesday night. First-timers CC Sabathia and Ichiro Suzuki were joined by tenth-and-last-timer Billy Wagner. To no one’s surprise, another year will go by without an Orioles connection among the inductees. It’s probably going to be a while before that changes, with the 2019 induction of Mike Mussina being the last one that mattered to an O’s fan. Or at least to the Orioles fans who forgave him for signing with the Yankees after the team did not value him properly.
Great Oriole Adam Jones was eliminated from the ballot after one year, failing to reach the 5% threshold to stay on until next year. Jones received three votes, which is three more than I expected him to get. He’s a classic player who’s worth labeling “Hall of Very Good,” someone who was the face of a franchise during a short but notable era of Orioles success, with some years of star-level play but neither the elite peak nor the longevity of the typical Hall of Fame player. His age 33 season was the end of the line in MLB. It’s hard to get close to a Hall-worthy career without at least playing into your mid-30s.
Looking ahead to this time next year, it is going to be a similar story for the 2026 ballot and Orioles connections. Two great O’s, Nick Markakis and Matt Wieters, will be eligible to be placed on the ballot. They are players who will mostly always be remembered fondly in Birdland and, like Jones, are highly unlikely to get more than a handful of votes, if they even get that. Chris Davis will also be eligible to be placed on the ballot.
Is there any hope of this Oriole-less streak changing in the near future? Well, no. For fun or maybe frustration, I’m going to run down some of the coming candidates anyway.
If you are willing to consider any tenuous Orioles connection, the next former Oriole to make the Hall of Fame could well be one who was here in 2024: Craig Kimbrel. I think precedent for election is on his side now that Wagner has joined the Hall’s ranks. Kimbrel’s tenure was not particularly distinguished here and there probably won’t be any celebrating in Baltimore if he gets in some time next decade after a few years of accumulating votes.
There’s one active former Oriole who we got to see at the beginning of a great career rather than the end: Manny Machado. After debuting in his age 19 season and already showing the potential for future greatness, Machado notched his first All-Star appearance and Gold Glove win the very next year. His defensive wizardry combined with his development as a hitter marked him as a player worth keeping an eye on to see if he could remain on a Hall-level track.
Machado advancing towards free agency at the same time the Orioles franchise was getting dragged into a black hole made it apparent that this was not going to be an Orioles-only or mostly-Orioles great player, if he continued on to greatness. Not like the O’s would have paid him the big bucks even if the team had been doing well at that time. It will not be an Orioles cap if Machado gets a Cooperstown plaque.
After six years in San Diego, Machado stands at 57.8 career bWAR. That’s already higher than a couple of recent position player inductees, as both Joe Mauer and Camden Yards vandal David Ortiz were elected with around 55 career WAR. Machado struggled through the first half last year and if that had continued, he might have stalled out, but he finished with a 3.1 WAR season. He’s signed through 2033 and has a lot of time to get closer to the 70 WAR threshold that I think is automatic. That also means that if he does make it, even a first ballot induction is going to be at the end of the 2030s.
It’s also thinking about one other former Oriole, except this one isn’t a player: Manager Buck Showalter. With 1,726 career wins and four Manager of the Year awards in his 22-year managerial career, is that enough for Cooperstown? Of the 18 managers ahead of him on the career list, 13 are already in the Hall and I think three more are locks to make it. Many behind Showalter on the wins list are in the Hall as well. However, the fact is that he never managed a team that won the big one, or even triumphed in a League Championship Series.
Turning to current Orioles, the fact that Gunnar Henderson had 7.2 career WAR by the end of his Rookie of the Year-winning season and then added 9.1 WAR with an even-better 2024 campaign on top of that is a Machado-like great beginning to a career. Seeing what he’ll be able to do to follow up on that this year and the next few years afterwards is one of the exciting ongoing stories here in Birdland.
Expecting another 9 WAR from Henderson every year is too much. I do think it’s a reasonable hope that if he stays healthy, he can muster at least the 6 WAR from his 2023 rookie season across each of his mid-20s seasons. That would bring him to about 40 WAR by the time he becomes a free agent, exceeding Machado’s WAR as an Oriole by about 8. We need not dwell on the improbability of Henderson’s Orioles career extending beyond 2028, after which he is presently set to hit the open market.
With the hype that surrounded Adley Rutschman before his 2022 debut, he was one of those players where even from the first days a small part of you could wonder if he might be destined for greatness. Even though Rutschman was only able to debut in mid-May because of the spring training injury that knocked him back by about six weeks, he OPSed over .800 in his rookie campaign and had 5.4 WAR in only 113 games.
That’s the kind of thing where even a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist like me could start thinking things like, “If he already had 5+ WAR even though it took him a month to start hitting and he didn’t even get a full season of games, what could he do with 150 games?” Friends, one reason I am a pessimist is because I thought this and what has happened? Rutschman’s sophomore season, while he still OPSed over .800, only brought in 4.3 WAR because his defensive value slipped, and in 2024, his second half offensive slump meant he only added another 3.4.
Rutschman is not a bust of a player, but even for catchers, only having 13.1 WAR by the time you turn 27, which Rutschman does next month, is not a path that gets you a Hall induction for your playing career. If he can reverse the trend in order to fire off 6+ WAR each of the next three years, that would be great for a variety of reasons.
Another recent Orioles 1-1 draft pick who had massive prospect hype got his debut last year: Jackson Holliday. There is nothing to scream “Cooperstown!” in his 2024 performance. That’s doubly disappointing for anyone who got excited about him possibly contributing last year because there were two other 20-year-old rookies named Jackson in MLB who did do very well for themselves: Jackson Chourio of the Brewers (.791 OPS, 3.8 WAR) and Maryland-born Jackson Merrill of the Padres (.826 OPS, 4.4 WAR).
Although the month of April brought a brutal first ten-game taste of MLB for Holliday, his batting numbers from his July 31 recall onwards were comparable to what Chourio and Merrill had by the end of May. Those guys went on from two months of struggle to have strong rookie seasons. I’m hopeful, even though I know better than to believe in anything good, that this means Holliday should be able to hit the ground running in 2025.
It would, of course, be a long way from there to Cooperstown, even if Holliday does have a 2025 season that’s at least as good as Chourio’s 2024. And none of us are guaranteed to still be alive to see it if he plays for 15+ years and then is swiftly inducted some time in the 2040s.